skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probes are given wide latitude, and they are allowed to report on any illegal activity they encounter, which is how the real estate fraud whitewater probe got into perjury over blowjobs.

It might lead to more indictments, but even on its own the immediate indictments are justified. Also, for all you USA expats our there, remember to file your FBARs.
This is a really hard question to answer. We've got everyone from scrappy one-person startups building products on Anvil, to larger startups pumping terrifying quantities of money through Anvil apps, to Seriously Large Companies We Can't Name building internal tools with our on-premises version.

Right now we're taking it all as it comes, but we never want to lose our focus on accessibility: It's way too hard to build web apps with today's traditional tools, and we want to make it easier for everyone.
Thanks for your answer! How did you get around without English, did you learn Arabic / Farsi?
It's hard when the search engines you use are actively guiding you to things that are similar to what you searched for before. Try google from a library computer some time and you'll see the bubble that's been created for you.
> This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying"

Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs.

I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%.

The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc.

Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen.

Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today.

Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web.

Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?
I use mbasic.facebook.com these days, which doesn't require JavaScript, but when I used the desktop site, I remember that even "most recent" does some kind of filtering.
This was a reprint in a pretty fascinating military website http://warisboring.com/. I just figured I'd link to the source and not the reprint. I don't disagree with much of any of your analysis, just thought the story (as it is actual history) was fascinating.
Effective Snapshot Testing
Not really. You wouldn't call Prodigy Online or AOL or the other walled networks 'the Web.'
I share this concern. I made a resolution not to tie myself to proprietary services for anything that I couldn't replace/move within a few days. I can move containers, databases and even serverless functions.

Starting from scratch seems to be the only option here, so I would hesitate to even start a small prototype. Which is a shame because I really like your model.
Canvas API allows fingerprinting precise enough to, by itself, create a unique identifier for a user.

However, fingerprinting doesn't require any kind of single magic API, but almost certainly will use a collection of techniques to narrow down users. If they know your browser version, default language, screen resolution, etc those three alone can narrow you down by many orders of magnitude.

And they are adding more APIs like Device Memory which, while not as precise as a canvas fingerprint by itself, could probably whittle it down an order of magnitude further.

Apparently turning on "Do Not Track" has long been known as a way to single you out on the web. You'll help them narrow you down by about three orders of magnitude. It was a silly idea to begin with.
> But does anyone oppose reasonable rules for time-of-day-based noise levels in an apartment or neighborhood?

Even if this were a viable solution, it does nothing for the lost sleep during the months (or in may case, full year) it takes to establish these rules and get them consistently enforced.

Also, it's not a viable solution. There are a couple huge problems.

First, evicting owners is no small thing. In fact, neither is evicting renters. In fact, neither is fining owners/renters for sums of money that would actually cause a change in behavior. These are all very expensive options of last resort that are likely to end in lawyer fees.

Second, with notable exceptions, HOAs/land lords dislike playing mediator/enforcer (and for good reason -- see below). So rules are hard to make and harder to enforce.

Third, there's a real cost imposed on any community that tries to legislate "be a normal neighbor". If you want an enumeration of the potential downsides of this approach, talk to anyone who has had a bad experience with an over-zealous HOA.

You could try to make and enforce a set of rules in a way that solves the problem but doesn't drive normal neighbors insane with pedantic/vindictive rule-violation-reporting. But it turns out that's a rather hard set of rules to come up with/fairly enforce. It's just much easier and, frankly, more effective, to ban airbnb et al.

I'm not opposed to apartment sharing on principle, and in fact my personal political philosophy should bias me toward defending the practice. But my actual experience makes me wary of buildings/neighborhoods that allow airbnb. If airbnb doesn't figure out a solution to this problem, they're going to face increasing resistance.
I agree. I used to have a similar setup, where my <firstname>@<firstname><lastname>.com address forwarded to Gmail, and even then things were sometimes slow. I've recently moved to forwarding to <firstname><lastname>@protonmail.com, and now it takes even longer for things to come through.
So I just had a quick run to my favorite sake site, it looks like I can still order sake (I ordered a Junmai Ginjo). Interestingly North Dakota (random state that can ship wine) can't get sake shipped.

I wonder if sake qualifies as something else like beer. Its brewed the same way basically, so perhaps the laws are restricted to grape wines only?
Do notation isn't about sequencing, it's syntactic sugar for the monadic 'bind' operator. Sequencing happens because of data dependencies. This is part of the confusing story about monads -- the fact that every monad is a monoid doesn't imply a straightforward linear sequencing, as something like the tardis monad illustrates.

https://wiki.haskell.org/Do_notation_considered_harmful

More constructively, it could be argued that IO just does not fall in the remit of functional programming. SPJ doesn't refer to Peter Landin much, but Landin's perspective is valuable. In 1964 he wrote "Is there some way of extending the notion of [arithmetic expressions] so as to serve some of the needs of computer users without all the elaborations of using computers?" (The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions).

IMO this is exactly what the Haskell tradition is pursuing. Landin, quite modestly, doesn't anticipate that entire computer systems will be expressible in functional form. Implicit data structures are just one example of a mechanism that is incompatible with the idea that everything is an expression whose internal representation is managed by the language runtime (itself presumably involving mutable data).

I don't think Landin was experiencing a failure of vision--I think he saw clearly that some of the "elaborations" of computing are remote from a functional model.
The five mind-blowing technologies we had to cut from our book about the future
On a side note, can anyone explain to me how the CVV makes online checkout more secure?

Presumably, if someone were to hijack your form, they would be getting the CC number and the CVV. If you lost your card, they would have the CVV. To me it seems like just adding another 3 digits to your card number.
I'm still hoping for ubiquitous FIDO U2F support. Unfortunately, I still can't even get it to work outside Chrome, and very few sites support it.
Tell a story worth sharing
In general Ada, those are only checked at runtime, IIRC.
Same link, submitted yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581276

I don't get HN dedup anymore.
You can do your part as a developer and tell managers about the dangers of AMP. It is a stupid idea technically (we have HTML, you can build a slim sites, Google can rank them higher) and stupid business wise by giving away the control, branding, options.

I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
> But it's still a wrong usage.

There is no such thing as "correct" in language, except in Europe where one or two countries have official standards (e.g. France). For English there is only colloquial usage and maybe the Oxford English Dictionary (Which 99% of the time agree with each other). Both of them state that "Color-blindness" is the accepted term referring to all conditions related to color deficiency.

> People usually don't use both for different meanings.

And welcome to English, where we have one word that encompasses any color-deficiencies, and we call that word "color-blindness".

It is used as a blanket term for any color-deficiency, including but not exclusive to red-green, yellow-blue, and monochrome vision. I can tell you now, that as a native English speaker, if you were to talk about "color blindness" to another native speaker, they will not assume that you mean Monochromacy specifically. In fact, they are more likely to think that you mean red-green color-blindness, since that is more common than Monochromacy. In any case, it is extremely rare to find usage that matches yours.

(Literally. The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is to Protanopia, not Monochromacy: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/colour-blind)
Trump has shown time and time again that he isn’t the smartest cookie on the block, nor is he very willing to take advise from his advisors. All of this could have been avoided with a bit of caution. Collusion wouldn’t surprise me, but neither would this just being a set of very dumb choices.
The Voodoo Curse of Circular FMRI Analysis
The web thrives on competition, but the author is suggesting that the major tech companies just stopped directly competing with each other and focused on their little bubbles. That shift, as posited by the author, happened around 2014 based on certain strategic decisions by FB and Google. And as a result, the competitive forces tapered off
DSL had nothing to do with it, pervasive NATs on the other hand...
8 Ways to Use Instagram’s New Multiple-Image Posting Feature
It's a shame there's so much controversy around AMP. It's not a simple task to set up a performant website. Ignoring the search result preference and caching, but AMP is an interesting attempt to tame website development so your pages load quickly. People keep commenting you can make a website fast without AMP, but this is difficult when you're working in big teams and with management that don't put priority on performance.
AMD shares crater after Morgan Stanley downgrades
Copy of my comment from another thread: You can do your part as a developer and tell managers about the dangers of AMP. It is a stupid idea technically (we have HTML, you can build a slim sites, Google can rank them higher) and stupid business wise by giving away the control, branding, options.

I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
At least one of the NI authors whose articles I read this morning also writes for War is Boring. Not sure if it's this one and no time to double check, but I think it might be.
Redox is an entire operating system written in Rust.
Py_mina – Deployer and server automation tool in Python
Agree - Staltz seems to assume that nobody will disrupt GOOG-FB-AMZN. It does feel like it's getting harder to disrupt over time, because the incumbents are ever more powerful. But technology's lever also becomes more powerful over time.

Companies' have achilles heels. They are built into the way they think in the era when it was started, when it was agile and fit in the mind of one person, before it got big and cumbersome, impossible to steer, profit-magnetized and impossible to even think longer term than a quarter. This business cycle is inherent to our laws and culture, it happens to all companies eventually.

Startups 20 years from now will be built by today's toddlers who pinch-zoom magazines and "Alexa, play Spice Girls" an empty room. The incumbent generation can't imagine what the next generation will bring, almost definitionally. But they will have disruptive ideas too. They will probably look stupid to us old people and we won't see it coming until it's too late.

Open-data-web is a good today-generation example. There are chickens and eggs to be solved, maybe the economics are impossible. Or maybe just nobody figured out the path yet. There were a hundred crypto currencies before bitcoin that went nowhere. But if someone figures out a strategic path that gets there, we know that person won't be Facebook, because open data will wreck Facebook's core business.
This is the most out of context invocation of the 80/20 rule i've ever seen.
Hellooooo hyperbole.

Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand.

The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was they made everything easier, and people were willing to pay for that, even if it effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of unrestricted peering agreements.

There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum cleaners.

The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E. They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access to eyeballs or earholes.
Alternative periodic tables
Good lord I've been wanting/waiting for someone to do this and you've finally delivered! Huge kudos. I'll definitely be using & keeping an eye on this.

I'd much rather find what I want to watch on a legitimate streaming service rather than using other ways...
To an extent. My feeling is that developers themselves, in general, don't want to learn anything more complicated than they can pick up from a three-month bootcamp and certainly don't want to take on the responsibility for their errors.
There are edge use cases, I think 99% of the time your interaction will have less friction and more security.

For the edge cases generally a pass code will work (under the table / multiple users). I'm not sure what you do with your phone unlocked in your pocket...

TouchID being quicker is your opinion, and as neither of us (I assume) have used it, we'll see if it is quicker.

I just think there were lots of negativity about TouchID when it was announced, and look how successful that is, would Apple risk that success? I don't think so...
Simply delaying clamping the umbilical cord by one minute could save lives
Please do jupyter -> webapp. that's a ready market for you.
Only if you ignore the dynamic state of the language, of associated libraries, of processor architectures, and so on - i.e. the context the compiler is working in and the mutable state of the language and development environment as a whole.

The idea of pure functions is a false friend in CS because it tries to solve the problem of state by wrapping it up and wishing it away.

It's true that state causes a lot of problems, but so many useful systems rely on mutable state - at practical application levels - that it might be interesting to design robust systems that manage state, context, and relationship instead of trying to create contrived examples of state-free systems.

There seems to be a cognitive bias against this in CS. Most developers appear to love puzzle systems made of hard little components with solid edges, and thinking in terms of context and relationships seems to be disturbingly alien. So there aren't many programming paradigms that explicitly work with contextual inference instead of trying to rigidly delimit interfaces.

But there are real prizes to be won from associative context-smart computing, and IMO the domain is wide open for innovation - because it may be possible to give up the pursuit of complete safety and predictability (which doesn't exist anyway) in return for new kinds of powerful, productive, and smart features.
Curious if there is an implementation.
It is not in Facebook or Google’s interest to have other websites disappear: they make their value and their money from those quite directly and obviously. Executive of both companies have said so, and I don’t think anyone could doubt this: both companies make money by getting their users onto other websites (well… until they have a fully integrated sales system, like YouTube Red and Facebook Marketplace). Both companies provide website creators with a lot of help, some tied into their platform, some fully open-sourced.

What the original post is showing is that a lot of heavy load of the content (videos) and actual access and control (including optimisation for fast loading on mobile clients) is now being controlled. It lowers barriers to entry and success as a YouTuber (no need to fiddle with hosting anymore, like Ze Frank had to). However, having users instinctively connect to a handful of platforms every day, rather than decide to see your content means you might have to pay for most views, pay as high as your margins would allow you to and not make a significant profit.

An equivalent (I’m not saying it’s a perfect metaphor) is if there be more taxis roaming the street but to go from an old model where you used to hail marauding cabs from the curb to a new model where all taxis, to get business, have to be affiliated to Uber and Gett. All the revenues of those taxis are now controlled by Uber and Gett. Those revenues might be shaved down to operating costs thanks to heavy-handed optimisation. Upsides of those include better control (you grope your passenger and you are out/you write that this ethnic group should be eradicated and you are out), more free rides/free articles thanks to VC-sponsored acquisition vouchers/advertising. Downsides include that you might, in the future, have to pay whatever profit VCs expect as soon as competition is kept away with deep moats -- and lack of innovation.

Being uncomfortable with the Big-Brotheresque aspect of Uber isn’t fully solved by having a single competitor, too. So if you do things in the back seat that some drivers object to (say, French kissing); or if you post something that some people find objectionable (say, show your nipples) then you might lose your ability to travel or publish anymore.

Facebook (and I’m assuming Alphabet) employees themselves will acknowledge that they can’t make perfect judgement-calls at their scale. They love (and often actively participate themselves) alternatives. If you see the other options become victims of either margin-squeezing or editorial control, that admission becomes a little too damning.
How did Trump collude with Russia again? I never quite see clear evidence for that even though it has been repeated multiple times.

And besides, wouldn't Trump collude with Ukraine since a lot of what the indictment is about?

As to why Trump hired him, it's not clear. He besides supporting and being lobbyist for various shady rules and governments he was also an adviser for Bush's and Dole's campaigns.
Making a Most Valuable Player
I realized something was wrong when many local web design/development shops started redirecting their domains to Facebook profile pages. Never thought I'd miss outdated Flash-only sites.

Of course, the saying about the cobbler's children still applies.
The Future of Work and Security: 5 Predictions for 2018
Funnily enough, we had someone build a web-app out of his Jupyter notebook just two days ago. And it only took him a couple of hours:

https://twitter.com/anvil_works/status/924352019258920960

He just copied and pasted his code from the notebook into an Anvil server function, and it ran first time! It's all just Python, at the end of the day.
I work in data centers and basically the giant is trying to leave me out of my business.
And, yet, network effects being what they are, how does anyone with an independent thought rise to visibility, outside of someone else's platform, when the "web" completely dominated by 100 web properties?
This is really, really good. Reminds me a bit of the 8 Bit Construction Set, which is some random thing I downloaded in college, and loved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsKZenP8vTE