skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good article. Andre, don't pay attention to the usual HN cynicism. You posed a good thesis and defended it. The web, as we have traditionally defined it, is dying. Or dead. Yes, technically the protocols still work, but the day-to-day structure and use of the web is completely different than anybody expected or wanted it to be.

I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf the internet anymore. The internet surfs us.

And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... ) I didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning.

Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
New Technology Helps Companies Avoid Fate of Equifax
Restructor
"It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic."

The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it [1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2].

Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc. And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot.

Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA. Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc.

I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and made it easier.

In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one: lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google etc. in ease of use.

We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3] wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet.

PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? What are the words behind your downvote?

1. https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web

2. https://solid.mit.edu

3. https://qbix.com

4. https://github.com/Qbix/auth

5. https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0

6. https://qbix.com/platform
Italy's unluckiest village?
Echoing that i felt there was a change in the way they handled Android the day they announce that the Android Marketplace (later rebranded the Google Play Store) would be offering movies (musics joined them a few months later).

Soon after the storage handling in Android got that much more convoluted, making it much harder to get data out of an Android devices without there being some kind of Google daemon sitting between user and storage.
Seeding a torrent from your phone is still a good way to kill your battery life.
I think this one comes down to industry vs colloquial definitions.

In the search industry, the organic search results are what you're referring to when talking about the ranking algorithm, and of a ranking factor being given an advantage.

Having other verticals integrated like maps, news, or this carousal are seen as different elements altogether (eg. local search, shopping search).

But of course, colloquially, "search" just means any result that comes up when you search on the page. So this has created some friction when Google says that Amp pages have no impact on search.
If you use Chrome than you don't care about privacy at all so suggesting privacy extensions for chrome is ludicrous.
You should add Logodust (http://logodust.com), a fantastic resource for free logo designs that one could use in mvps and mockups.
Validation vs verification. Validation: "is this the right spec", verification: "does this meet the spec".

Turns out once you have a formal specification, you can do all sorts of things with it that you couldn't do with just the code sitting alone. You can prove properties about your specification. For example, seL4. Even the abstract specification is quite big and can be hard to reason about in complex cases. How do you know that spec is the one you want? Well, they wrote down some security properties they'd like it to have, and then proved that the abstract spec has those properties (eg, you can configure it to act like a separation kernel; it enforces isolation given an isolated initial condition; it enforces integrity).

How do you know those are the right properties? Well, that's the challenge of software validation isn't it :) Ultimately formal methods doesn't make that problem much harder. You just need to figure out a way to formally phrase the properties you want. A lot of software has very fuzzy validation criteria, and isn't necessarily suited for formal verification for that reason.
I've heard this before.

But they have big plans to provide internet access to underdeveloped countries etc.

They are not going away anytime soon.
AVFoundation documentation/API's have absolutely nothing to do with the maturity of Swift's API. So much of Apple's internal API is still written in Objective-C (a problem and discussion for a different thread). But for your exact problem here: Check out the "Getting Supported Media Types" section.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avurl...
The fungus was named after the iron oxidation (they look alike).
I don't know nearly enough about type systems to understand this. Can you explain what subtyping rules are, and how TypeScript's are wrong? And can you explain what "covariant in their input" means?
> If you've spent a significant amount of time with such proof assistants, you'd see that the proof search is rather pitiful.

Afaik, Idris' proof search was hacked together in an afternoon just to see if it would work. And it did, surprisingly well considering. Don't know how much it has been worked on since then though. But yes, still leaves a bit to be desired compared to other systems.
Linux is still certainly more "bug-ridden" than UEFI, because of size alone.
Haunted Real Estate Signs
It's true in any language that you don't have to think about implementing a data structure if there's a library that already implements it. I think that clearly misses the point of what I was saying, though. Quite often you do have to implement data structures yourself.

Here's a concrete example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_connected_edge_list

This is a data structure that you're quite likely going to have to implement yourself. It is, obviously, possible to implement a DCEL in Rust. However, to do so it is necessary to make a number of decisions (unsafe pointers? indices instead of pointers?) that you don't have to make in, say, Go or Java, where you can just use ordinary pointers/references.

Again, that is not a criticism of Rust. It's just an observation about its design tradeoffs.
The Manifest Episode 6: Maven with Brian Fox
agree most people who do inline styles (or any form of "my styling is written in the react file") do this afair

we inline for the same reason

i hope someone writes a good precompiler that allows efficient using def/use for (non changed) static inlining
http://www.svgbasics.com/defs.html
Engineering a culture of psychological safety – Inside Intercom
Why Is the DOS Path Character “”? – Larry Osterman's WebLog
Great idea from the user's standpoint though. While many publishers can, technically, build slim sites, almost none do.
Basically, yes. But it's not quite that clear cut.

Tobacco growers receive farm subsidies [1], which isn't a tobacco-specific subsidy, but also isn't a "whoops didn't mean those farms" accident [2]. Tobacco products are then (heavily) taxed.

Also, it's actually that the federal government pays people to grow tobacco and the state governments tax people to consume tobacco. And the federal subsidies are much lower than the state taxes.

It's still a weird situation, and subsidies probably shouldn't be paid to farms producing tobacco. But the sort of corruption that makes this nonsense possible is totally legal in America, so.

[1] https://farm.ewg.org/top_recips.php?fips=00000&progcode=toba...

[2] http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/301645-senate-r...
React Studio 1.2: Version control, Plugin Editor and Store, 3D previews – and free
> AMP is neither of those things. It’s a library and framework for creating web pages which are then hosted on the web, openly.

In practice it's a framework for hosting web pages on Google's domain. I haven't seen any amp sites outside of the google.com domain. To call google.com "the open web" is quite a stretch. I can't control anything about google.com, and I'm bound to Google's policies and practices when hosting content there. How is this open in any meaningful sense?
Being epistemically helpless, or at least a bit modest, is a good way for an individual to avoid having false beliefs.

I don't think this advice is good for the society as a whole, though. Encouraging people to be modest, stand in line, and yield to the majority view by default is a pretty good recipe for a society to become biased toward inertia, often in a very oppressive manner. Japan is one example of such a society. They've made impressive economic and technological progress, but their culture and politics are stuck in a weird loop.

The article you linked to also acknowledges that people who are less epistemically helpless are "the only people who can figure out if something basic and unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider it." Societies need people like this, even though they share some traits with terrorists.

So although overconfidence and an experimental spirit might lead individuals to have more false beliefs and failures in the short term, encouraging them might be more beneficial in the long term on a larger scale. This is something that both authors could agree with.

I don't know whether Eliezer Yudkowsky would actually be willing to go in this direction, since he looks rather preoccupied with ensuring that each individual human (or AI) makes the best decision at any given time; but since I'm sure he wishes the best for the future of our civilization, I look forward to seeing him pay attention to the social and historical consequences of the individual strategies he's been promoting. A horde of smart robots could behave very differently from a single smart robot if they use the wrong consensus algorithm.
> one would imagine somebody running for president of the US would have been more careful picking his team.

This guy had his fingers in a lot of pies. Ukraine, Angolan rebels, Somalia. He was also advising Reagan, GW Bush and Bob Dole's campaigns.

Good thing they got him. Less corruption the better.
What is the strong evidence in support of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon?
Qualitative Probabilistic Programming
Useful! Can you set a region so it checks only that region?

Also, can you add Hotstar (India)?
IBM's been on this destructive kick for almost a year now. I was considering interviewing with them as my last company shut down, and then this news broke; that was in spring.
Do the current biological 'autonomous drivers' have the necessary 'snow firmware'? AKA do SA people have experience with driving through snow?
If there is a space of optimal policies for the ant, then both the ANN and real neural systems will be attracted there. There are certainly a lot of local minima, but it would be surprising to me if ANNs and real neural systems could only find totally disjoint local minima with no similarities.
Life Is a Wicked Problem
It only appears to pull data for UK/US services right now. So while it does seem to separate out the content according to region, us Canadians will have to make due without.
Simple example how to add a video to background
> nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish.

plenty does!

if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.

you could try sharing it with friends on facebook and hope for a social network effect, but just ask the journalism industry how organic reach is working out as of late

selling something online? your only hope is FBA. where the A stands for Amazon. I guess etsy might work too. so, okay...duopoloy!

and even if you don't care to be found, and aren't selling anything, it is TRIVIAL to take down any kind of not-expensive hosting (your raspi @ home, your DigitalOcean VPS, or colocated server) with a DDoS attack.

AWS, GCP, & Azure can weather most attacks, but it will cost you. And if it's large enough they'll shut you off anyway. and then send you a bill you can't pay.

so no, there is plenty stopping you from launching anything on the internet. the cost structures (be it time or money or both) greatly favor the massively entrenched incumbents. and not a little bit of favor. they favor them....bigly.
I still very much enjoy this one about Ronald Opus:
http://www.darwinawards.com/legends/legends1998-16.html
Logo Designs for MVPs and Prototypes
Page load speeds are a ranking factor.
What term would you give for how Google Search treats AMP pages from regular HTML pages?
> The biggest problem is going to be with people who have never driven.

Isn't that basically what @usrusr was refering to? People who rely on the autonomous driving so much that they basically forgot how to drive themselves?
I built all of the React codegen and component design UI for this product, among other stuff... Happy to answer any questions!

In a nutshell, it's a rapid application development tool for web apps, but you can control and customize the code output to an unseen degree.

You get a complete "create-react-app" project when exporting, and there's automatic Git integration which uses branches to make sure the generated UI code ends up neatly separated from manual code changes. There's also an advanced plugin system (including a built-in plugin editor), so you can easily take React/JS code and wrap it into modules that designers can use.
Sorry for not digging in more and asking a lazy question but how do you do frontend with Python?
The problem not a technical one, it is a social/economic/political one.

It is how the big players gets to dictate policy virtually unchecked.

Email, on the protocol level, is still decentralized. But Google and a few other big players have via their spam filters dictated how every email server on the planet is to behave, or else.

And we are seeing similar things happening with web servers and browsers, just look at the railroading the W3C DRM spec got.
How do you deal with your phone being in different states before unlocking?

For example, if you have an app open in a folder, you'll have to press the home button 3 times: once to exit the app, another to exit the folder, and a third to go home (unless the messages app is on the dock, then you can press twice to reach it).

I'd be worried about messaging the wrong person, and I also have fat fingers so that's no help :(
No, this waaaaay older than that. I'm talking 18 or so years ago.
You're just restating what TFA says. Those nuances are important, as TFA points out. In partcular:

>They do due to the AMP carousel at the top, but that’s it.

Yeah I guess that's "it". But when the entire point of search engine optimization is to appear as high as possible in the results that's a pretty massive "it".

>They are, but they’re also hosted on Google AMP Cache.

So Google AMP Cache is actually Google AMP Host?
Ask HN: Poloniex HTTP Req Errors When Verifying ID?
Trying to verify my identity on Poloniex so I can deposit USD, and happened to have the web developer console open, only to see a host of ERR_CONNECTION_RESET issues.

Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
normalize-ver-1508766804000.css Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
netverify-client-ver-1508766856000.less Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
colors$0x1_-baseColor_0b7076-messagesColor_fbf4c8-ver-1508766856000.lesstpl Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
swfobject-ver-1508766804000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
jquery-1.8.2.min-ver-1508766804000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
jquery.browserInformation-ver-1508766804000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
mediacapture-validator-ver-1508766804000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
wicket-event-jquery.min-ver-1508766790000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
wicket-ajax-jquery.min-ver-1508766790000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
form:11 Uncaught ReferenceError: Wicket is not defined
at form:11
html5-ver-1508766804000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
nv-client-ver-1508766856000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
jquery.helpPanel-ver-1508766804000.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
iframe-script.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
form:47 Uncaught ReferenceError: Wicket is not defined
at form:47

Is this a known issue with the exchange?
Foreign agents/lobbyists need to be registered, and participating in a political campaign or contributing to a foreign campaign with foreign money to a big no-no.

The fact that he did this and was in a campaign leadership role implies more to come. These are amateur hour mistakes -- the counsel for that campaign was incredibly bad or ignored by the candidate.
Assuming this does nothing to change the trend of whatever executive decided this was how to turn around some metric. Most likely profit, we can start calling it officially a leading indicator of a march towards irrelevance. See Yahoo! I've always wondered if IBMs largely touted shift to consulting to maintain profits was just putting off the inevitable. Does anyone see IBM as cutting edge technologists?
Many of the problems you talk about are off topic.

---

The trust problem still applies to HTTP. We still download viruses on the web, and we still lose our credit card numbers to con artists. The only reason there's more malware on current P2P network is because those networks are disproportionately used to infringe copyright. The risk doesn't come from the distributed nature of the network, but from the lack of legality of the content.

Securing peer to peer communications to current web levels is trivially easy: just sign the damn data, and have a certificate authority ascertain the identity of the signer. For static content such as YouTube videos, you can also use a content addressable system.

While that would require some level of centralisation, it woulndn't exceed that of DNS, and would definitely solve the bandwidth issue.

> What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give?

I won't happen, because we enjoy symmetric bandwidth, thanks to our regulators being sensible, competent people. (At least that's the case in my rainbows & unicorns world). Seriously, though, symmetric bandwidth is the ultimate and only solution to many problems: it ensures total upload keeps up with total download, so we get the equilibrium we want.
Sure, that link is broken, which isn't ideal, but the media formats supported are documented:

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Mu...

In the same document there is a section titled "Playback using the AVAudioPlayer Class".
Sure, this is in the Core Audio programming guide, but AVFoundation is just a ObjC layer on top of Core Audio that provides high level functions.
Streaming Now: Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Forum on Opioid Epidemic
Money laundering, Income tax evasion, Unregistered Foreign Agent Lobbying, and that catchall favorite, False Statements to the government.

Now, this is an indictment, and it's essentially un-rebutted statements from the prosecutor. They could probably indict a ham sandwich if they tried hard enough. OTOH, there are a lot of specific wires listed there, so I'm not sure I'd be calling the prosecutor's bluff.

Speculation:

* This is in no way the end of the investigation. It may be all for Manafort/Gates, but there are more targets out there.

* Most of this is (potentially) pretty clear cut and supported by documentary evidence. There's probably tens of millions in forfeiture and fines, and potentially jail time there.

* This is the opening salvo in negotiations with Manafort/Gates. They probably know things that would be useful to the investigation. They can either help the investigation or face this indictment.
11 Holiday Marketing Campaigns That Nailed It and Why They Work
In what way is HOL bizarre?
Alcohol has existed outside the Commerce Clause since Prohibition, as outlawing its sale was done via Constitutional amendment, rather than legislation. Same with repeal. Amendments supersede reserved Congressional authority. The result of this is that regulations on the sale and distribution of alcohol operate entirely differently than any other American industry (and is particularly vulnerable to regulatory capture). For example, try buying a Texas beer (in a store or bar) outside of Texas not called Shiner or Lone Star. It's very difficult, as Texas laws make it difficult to impossible for craft brewers to export across state lines. The biggest fans of those laws? Shiner and Lone Star.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14367304
We use the Skulpt Python-to-Javascript compiler (I'm a maintainer): http://skulpt.org

You might be interested in my talk from PyCon US this summer, where I talked about the compiler, and how we turn blocking Python code into non-blocking Javascript code:

https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk
Could you explain it like I'm five (or really like I'm a software geek and don't know this stuff) how the signals in the multiple lanes are synchronized? Is there some centralized clock that everyone is using?