skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is enthusiast/hobbyist level fandom. If you think this is crazy, look at the market for Coca Cola or Star Wars collectibles.
I wouldn't use either as PHP comes with "batteries included".
And then go here, delete as much as you can, and turn off as many categories of data collection as you can: https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
There is substantially more value for all of us in allowing more resources to be distributed to those who are able to do more with them.

And your definition of "fair playing field" is skewed because, again, you treat economics as a zero sum game. You are making the classic mistake of conflating equality of outcome with equality of opportunity.

In any case, this class warfare inspired policy of exhaustively taxing wealth won't fix a mismanaged budget or a broken scholarly culture. You are simply punishing the people who seem to have benefited most in the context of the system while ignoring merit.

Further, it is absolutely absurd to suggest that modern people in poverty dont live "good" lives. They have refrigeration, air conditioning, entertainment, access to the internet, emergency healthcare, they live like kings once did. Once again this is a problem of looking at other peoples' lives and concluding that only in comparison you deserve more for simply existing.

Taxation will not fix what is fundamentally a cultural problem.

Aside: Look at how absurd the entire argument is! We dont question in absolute terms how our poor are living, we focus entirely on the fact that the wealth is distributed unevenly. Like children complaining that their classmates have extra candy. The whole mindset is petty.
Are you based in Canada? At any rate, feel free to get in touch. Worst case scenario I can provide some tips.
It's stopping desperate people who have never heard of homeopathy from trying it, getting the placebo effect and becoming true believers.
The incentive to keep 10% of every dollar earned over $400k, obviously.
Why is it your responsibility to find them a new vendor? Tell them when you'll stop servicing their account and offer to take reasonable steps to transfer the work to the new vendor of their choice.
My mom worked for Wells, after it aquired Wachovia, which prior acquired the other bank she worked for...

She said they were the most corrupt orgs she had worked with. Specifically, the Wachovia Construction Loan dept - then later Wells...

All corrupt.
By which you mean that Comcast will let you buy an approved device to which (I believe) they fully control by design.
> php-cli scripts normally don't have an execution time limit (or a memory limit?), which makes them ideal for upgrades/database maintenance/cron jobs/etc while being able to reuse code from the application itself

?

PHP enforces memory limits out of the box by default. What languages have execution limits on CLI?
Part of the problem in India is that land ownership is extremely fractured. You can't build infrastructure for high-output if you don't have rights to build the infrastructure. You can't achieve economies of scale if your property system is designed to prevent scaling. You can't ship price-competitive products to market if dozens of middlemen (and all their land) are all taking their cut before it ever reaches consumers.

There isn't an easy answer. Unifying property under a co-op system won't solve the problem because you can't have every decision deliberated by committee which is content to play politics as opportunity passes it by. People simply need to sell, and they simply need to accept that the land will be worth more after they sell it. People will simply have to surrender control, one way or another. People will simply have to adapt to a new economy. Creative destruction is the price and the engine of progress.

The alternative is the backwards system that exists today, and it is not sustainable, not in the face of foreign competition, not in the face of the people who suffer from starvation caused by mismanagement in poorer years, and not in the face of the persistent, rampant poverty that farmers keep themselves in as they cling to the control of what they know rather than the fear of uncertainty.
Wow, I wish them great success.
Writing a sqlite clone from scratch in C
shameless plug :

I built a small CLI app using PHP for HTTP load testing ( WIP ), check it out

https://github.com/vamsiikrishna/vex
>>99% of the world, and most of the US live their liveσ without ever having one in the bank anyway.

Sure, but if you want to have real influence, you need lots of money. We are talking about things like owning media conglomerates and shaping the way the world thinks and behaves.

That to me is a lot more interesting than having your own tiny slice of the pie and going through the motions until you die.
Which means, hosting/supporting open source would quickly become not worth it for any major company representing a large target for opportunistic lawyers. When you make millions from a product, you can afford a team of lawyers setting up contacts just right and fighting liability trolls. When you make zero profit, you cut the losses. Such law would spell very quick end to any corporate support of free and open source software, for liability reasons. There's a reason why all such software is accompanied with "NO WARRANTY" texts, and enforcing liability will make the corporate world to run from it. Nobody wants to be sued because they use OpenSSL and there was a vulnerability there, and that's exactly what would happen with any commercial vendor using OpenSSL if liability laws would be introduced. It doesn't matter the company didn't write OpenSSL - as soon as they use it, they are on the hook. IBM was sued not because they made Linux, but because they used it and had tons of money. And I do not see any business model that could allow companies to charge enough to cover such liabilities. Maybe for established powerhouses like Linux or for corporate foundational projects like Chrome and Darwin, but not for any lesser projects and surely not for any starting up open source with unclear revenue potential. It won't kill all open source, but it would severely hurt the ecosystem and turn it into two worlds - pure hobbyist geekery which nobody with money would touch, and formally open-source projects with strict corporate governance that has no ecosystem beyond the founding corporation.

One of the worst ideas I've heard lately, and I am genuinely baffled how a person as smart and experienced as Schneier could support it.
Dumbish DOCSIS cable and dumb DSL modems exist, they're just not default because most
people aren't technically-literate enough to deploy them. However, cable ISPs often can update the firmware of DOCSIS modems, so who know what potential is there for backdoors, malware, NSA diodeing and weak security. DSL modem management may vary.
"Valgrind can tell you where non-freed heap blocks have been allocated and a fix should not be complicated."

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren't.
To me there's a giant difference between people focused on growth for the sake of growth and people trying to make a valuable product that is then rewarded with growth.

As an example, look at Google in the early days. They were mainly focused on making a great, valuable product. Growth was a consequence of that. In contrast, look at all the people that glued gamification, growth hacking, etc, onto mediocre mediocre products. As with things like MLMs, a growth-first focus can get business results, but I think it's a very different mindset than, "Let's make a product people love."

Growth is surely a useful metric for them, and from that quote, it looks like it's a goal. But a goal is different, broader thing than what one focuses on. Compare people who want to be, say, great athletes (and therefore famous) with people who just want to be famous. The former will focus on doing the hard work; the latter will be more inclined to chase self-promotion and attention directly.
With the assumption that the State is the best ward for your money. Do you fully trust the State to be willing and able to stamp out inequality?
Did many switch to Telegram in the last year?
Seconded. I don't think the parent comment to this has a strong basis in fact. The UK retail sector is one of the most competitive and dynamic in the world. I live in a small town and within 10 minutes' drive I have 3 large supermarkets open 7 days a week, stocking thousands of lines, with products ranging from budget to expensive. There are many smaller grocery shops also open 7 days a week. There is fantastic local produce if you eat in season. For range, price and convenience few other countries are close to the UK as regards mass retail. I studied this in a uni course and also speak from personal experience of living abroad.
Batteries are nice, but it's handy to have a breadboard and some wiring. For a super-simple CLI script without interaction, plain PHP's fine, but if you're making something interactive that's prompting, using color codes, logging, etc., a framework's pretty handy - especially if it's for a larger app that's got models and services to interact with.
"quality" is a subjective term. You can optimise a tomato for color, flavour, longevity, size (automated picking), and several other parameters. The Dutch tomato industry is very good at optimising for what the market demands, that's how it got to be so big. The market apparently demands the flavourless 'wasserbomben', I don't see a reason to put blame at the producers. If the market would demand something else I have no doubt the Dutch tomato industry would be able to provide it (Dutch supermarkets typically sell half a dozen varieties).
Exactly. "Law" is meaningless without a policeman to enforce it.
Everyone here is mentioning Italy, but I associate it with Greece. The first time I walked into a grocery in Rhodes I learned what good tomatoes smell like.
Nah, I want "fuck you money" so that work becomes optional. I want to work on what I want, not what someone else wants. I want to work because I want to, not because I have to.

Retirement isn't good enough. By the time you retire you are in your 60s, which is too late for me.
There's no guarantee this will favour the development of intelligence though. To take examples from nature, flighted birds are so optimised for weight that they would never develop large, heavy enough craniums to support sentient brains. Many selective criteria may turn out to favour optimisation patterns that could actualy exclude general intelligence, or at least might effectively close off evolutionary paths that could lead to it.
As long as we accept the need for people to be janitors, we must accept that becoming a janitor is not a "mistake", it's a useful thing that we all want to see happen for some people. We can't on the one hand say, that we need people to do this job and on the other hand say, "tough luck" to those that do it.
I live in Germany and this was a general statement (even though we get very much from the Netherlands).
Most of them taste like nothing. Sometimes even those who are especially marked as "something something sweet" taste like nothing most of the time.

I rarely buy the cheapest option. Most of the times we get the most expensive Bio (organic) ones. This legend needs to die. Just like the one that says that marked as "local" tomatoes (vegetables) taste better (or taste at all). For some times I thought I could smell it. Doesn't work anymore. There is no system anymore as long as you buy in a supermarket here. Unfortunately I'm asleep at local market times or they are when I'm at work but I'm sure you can get the good stuff there because my parents grow them in their garden. But this is not the problem we are talking about here. This is the 21st century. I can't believe that I can't get something as simple as tomatoes with taste for pretty hefty prices in a supermarket.

It's not like it was always this way. I can remember very good the moment where we switched from big tomatoes to those cocktail ones because they did not taste like water. Then those became tasteless, I've now seen micro tomatoes. Maybe there is some taste left...
Pretty much, Cable Modem Hacking is extremely uncommon and even an owned modem is out of your control. Look at all the Intel PUMA cable modems with bufferbloat issues where the cable ISP refuses to update said modem to fix the software bug causing bufferbloat.
> But let's stop and think, is PHP the right tool for this job? :P

Let's stop and think. Do you know what the job is or are you calling it in with this comment?
Roch Bourbonnais managed to write a few detailed technical blog postings about the evolution of closed-source ZFS in the past couple of years. If you read those it will be clear that Oracle's version of ZFS continued to improve after Oracle ceased developing it in the open.

Among the more interesting topics Roch wrote about were some enormous changes to arc and l2arc, the zil, encryption, spa_sync, sequential scrub & resilver, which LBAs to choose when writing, and scalability of rw locks. OpenZFS is still reinventing several of these (e.g. sequential resilver and persistent l2arc are in github PRs now) albeit in generally very different ways.

If he is able and willing to participate in OpenZFS development, the whole project and its close relatives (e.g. ZFS on Linux, OpenZFS on OS X aka macOS) will benefit from his having explored the invention and development of similar wheels.

I do not know if he is still with Oracle. Either way, if you move quickly, the blog is likely to survive until after Labour Day.

(Someone should archive it for posterity!)

https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/
This article seems very anecdotal to me, and thus tells me nothing. Jobs come and go. Jobs once held in high regard are now common jobs. Also people nowadays have (good paying) jobs that didn't exist decades ago.
If you, by choice, never killed an animal, I absolutely respect that, but society is not ready to draw the line at the same height as you.
Whoops I did mean that!
I was asked to take a contract project that I recognized as an UI component / app lots of businesses in that industry would need. I gave them a good price in exchange for me retaining the resell rights on the code. The contract was profitable, and afterwards I invested a few days time into creating a basic landing/sales page with an email address/contact form.

I then searched on Google for forum posts from other developers posting on programming QA sites & forums, trying to create the same UI component / app & having issues. I gave them advice about their code, and also shamelessly plugged my commercial UI component / app & suggested purchasing it as another solution to their problem.

Even if no one else purchased it, I was already paid to create it once. But it did work, I sold my UI component / app 1,000 times. I would sometimes make deals where I'd promise to add some new feature in exchange for them purchasing the app. Eventually I decided to open source it & move on to bigger projects.

So basically my advice is start with consulting, so you're getting paid for your time. Then if you happen to re-sell the code you wrote a second, third or 1,000x great... or if not, at least you were already paid once.

For example you found a client who wants a "todo app". Create a simple todo app & then try to find more clients who want the same thing, over time build it up to be the most sophisticated "todo app" on the market, with rules engines or all sorts of bells & whistles & customization built in. Eventually there will be no more market for hiring consultants to build "to do" apps, instead the de factor market solution is your app. I feel this is a solid strategy for creating a b2b startup company.

Lots of great programmers can create a CMS or a wordpress clone. But until you consult for some real companies with real world problems & understand where those systems fall short, you don't understand the market needs. Eventually you get tired of hacking on permissions/access control to some open source CMS as a consulting job, and you build your own CMS, or a plugin for that open source CMS & [re]sell that to your clients instead.
> Words could not express the feelings of terror that I have right now.

have you tried the word "hyperbolic" ?
> The question seems disingenuous.

I know. And I even thought about that before I commented, but I don't know how else to ask without three paragraphs of what would basically amount to "I'm not racist, but" clarifications.

It really does seem like a weird bubble, though. Sneakers do have intrinsic value - you can always walk in your collection, which is more than you can say for Beanie Babies or MtG cards - but it's still just a handful of companies producing something whose value stems from arbitrary production restrictions.

Why sneakers? Why not hats or socks?

But I guess it's just arbitrary, like wine, or collectible angel dolls, or that weird fancy cut glass stuff I see in malls whose name escapes me, or comics.
Oh really. Water in lakes is not a scarce resource for example?

Look at what happened at Lake Baikal the largest freshwater lake in the world, and tell me how capitalism improved the use of that resource.
> instead of using a programmable repeatable, scriptable "environment as source".

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manage...

Thanks for the time capsule experience though, sometimes I miss the legendary zealotry of Slashdot.
DOCSIS modems are a standard, but cable companies often get to manage them with their firmware and/or settings.
Yes, although (cache behavior notwithstanding) it's a single pointer indirection that can frequently be optimized away by the compiler.
Which is why many people use CentOS instead.
> what should be compared is "C++ standard library only" and "C standard library only"

The C++ standard library has more features though.
I'm not sure how that changes my loyalty equation. I might work harder than I would otherwise, but I'm still not loyal. If I work hard and we don't get a client, I'm still not going to stick around if they stop paying me.
Vi Hart here... someone sent me this with confusion that it was at the top of HN yet all the comments are completely irrelevant. My understanding is that HN and YC are usually about startuppy stuff and business models and investors and etc, so I guess it makes sense that everyone's in that mindset.

We're not a startup and not looking to reach a broad audience, get investors, or create a product. We even wrote a thing a while back regarding our not being a startup, because it is an unfamiliar concept to many people: http://elevr.com/were-not-a-startup/

The HARC group at Y Combinator Research has/had an ambitious vision of bringing back the basic research model that led to many fundamental innovations in the 60s, including a handful of groups in addition to ours. The kind of research that creates enormous value that cannot be captured by individual investors or companies, but that lifts the industry/people as a whole.

I think if world events had been different, the timing would have worked out well for a resurgence of this kind of research.

Ok nice chat, HN. You're a weird place.

Vi
Taxing wealth is a deeply invasive bureaucratic nightmare. Having individuals be legally required to produce a balance sheet of all their assets for the government every year seems quite problematic. This would get into issues of having people be required to re-establish the fair price of all their collectables, etc. It's also a deeply dangerous attack on retirement. Instead of being taxed on the gains from your wealth, being taxed on the wealth itself requires much larger returns to live off the income from an investment. I think it might make sense to have a higher inheritance tax with fewer loopholes to resolve the issues of intergenerational wealth. It's probably very important to protect the mechanisms of retirement.
We hear this rant on every chat-related thread. WhatsApp brought the amazing innovation of using your phone number for "login" (and later on - your native contacts as its contacts list). This enabled zero-BS onboarding, and that's why they have so many users. Thanks WA for helping humanity deprecate that horrible XMPP. I don't miss it.
1999 was the first year Tour de France cyclists managed to get 40km/h on average for the whole 3200 km and three weeks long race. According to http://bikecalculator.com/ 40 km/h requires between 260W and 450W from the rider, doing 40 km/h on avarage will be even more extreme.

I've used a good recumbent bicycle and I could actually hold 35 km/h easily in that one, in the same place I usually average 23 km/h upright with an ordinary ~$700 city bike.
No bait here. The ideological death toll of capitalism is far, far lower than communism, full stop.
To be honest, there aren't that many choices left: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Telsa are probably the only one with deep pocket for VR research...

There is no real non-profit research (unless you really want to go back to become a university research lab); peoole want the results and commericalizd them.

I would be surprised if none have reached out througout the years.
> There is substantially more value for all of us in allowing more resources to be distributed to those who are able to do more with them.

Don't you think that inheritance is a pretty bad way of achieving that? After all, traits like intelligence (which probably dominates the ability to use resources efficiently) are only about 50% heritable.
Even though it was not free until some years ago, the price was so ridicolous that people were happy to pay for the service.
This is why, if I can, get bridge mode on the ISP provided device and put in an OpenWRT router. I am still on 802.11n but who cares, most of my devices are not 802.11ac either.

I want to know what runs on my router, damnit! It's my biggest vulnerability if done wrong and one of the more important security features of the home network if done right.
Suppose you find something. Are you concerned at all that if you either get laid off or the company fails or you just want a change yourself that you may need to leave Toronto again? That's my main concern with the Toronto area, I feel the tech eco system is too small. Of course if you stick with one place for many years it may be fine. I used to live there, but I'm currently back in London, UK (where I'm originally from). The downsides of London are ridiculous housing costs that ruin everything, the upside is it's basically impossible not to find work here.
As a Brit I'd personally prefer a single international/American edition anyway. I've never really understood the value in local editions of tech websites, with Engadget being the first pointless example of this from my perspective.
Even in areas with heavy fiber penetration like Seattle, where Centurylink has 70+% of the city covered with Fiber, Comcast is still capping users to 1TB and Centurylink feels little competition. Hell, they're trying to kill off their TV service right now, and pitching DirecTV (with a much slower guide, missing multi-channel preview, and with a dish bolted to your house) as the new thing they're pushing.
I am talking about Dutch farmers. This is exactly what I mean. For example, early this year Dutch farmers had to explain themselves for something that happened in a Belgian slaughterhouse.

Do you like it when your mother blames you for bugs in her printer's Windows driver?
I suspect the inhabitants of Saeftinghe (and the hundreds of other Dutch settlements vanished beneath the waves, fascinating stuff) might disagree: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeftinghe

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_settlements_lost_to_...