skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique.

Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.

I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.
But we know that many different networks were created. The idea we would not have a global network without the internet is false by inspection (FidoNet was global).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
Do it for free, perhaps
You can delete old posts whenever you like. There's a tool to automate that, although I haven't tried it.

https://github.com/chander/social-network-cleaner
The next two paragraphs go into more detail:

"One answer to this question would be following: One learns a lot more when taking calculus from someone who is doing research in mathematical analysis than from someone who has never published a word on the subject. [...] But this is not the answer; some teachers who have never done any research are much better at conveying the ideas of calculus than the most brilliant mathematicians.

"What matters most is the ambiance in which the course is taught; a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students. An MIT undergraduate will be challenged by the level of proficiency that is expected of everyone at MIT, students and faculty. The expectation of high standards is unconsciously absorbed and adopted by the students, and they carry it with them for life."

I'm going to look funny at the claim of "expectation of high standards"; I suspect he's delusional.

But there is, in my experience, a considerable difference between "someone who is doing research" and "someone who has never published a word on the subject"; I've never met any "teachers who have never done any research [that] are much better at conveying the ideas." Further, the "ambiance" bit is right; being surrounded by people who are deeply interested in a topic beats the pants off people who are just there to get a grade.
Browsing vs. searching. We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume.

It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.

Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.
http://rollingjubilee.org
Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.
I'm conflicted on this. The good old-fashioned lefty in me wants to agree and say "yes - follow the money. Power has tendrils everywhere and they are annoyingly predictable and persistent".

However I do have the feeling that Russia's current behaviour is quantitatively if not qualitatively different.

In it's scale, it's cynicism and in it's deliberate single mindedness. I'm not a great believer in good vs evil on the geopolitical stage but a move this blatant needs to be resisted because if it succeeds it will become the new normal.
I used to <behaviour Y> and experience <problem Y>. But then I <solution X>. Now I <happy-life X>.

There's a bot/AI application in there somewhere. Of course, this is one of those "we spent so long thinking about whether we could, we didn't stop to ask whether we should" type projects...
Cyclotron Road: A home for hard tech innovators
Problem is, I don't want to work with repacking stuff, or managing others repacking stuff.

I want to build amazing software, and for that I need a larger company who can market my inventions and talk about it on conferences and road shows.

I will earn less, but I will be happy.
5 Tech Trends You Should Know About for 2017
A mass solution, once put into a transfer orbit, requires no further energy input and can be used again and again.

In fact, a large, heavy one can be created or moved into such an orbit, then Mars/Earth journeys only need small, light ships to dock with it at each end.
The lead character of the TV series "Doc Martin" is totally unsympathetic as the series unfolds.

Then, a few episodes in, you meet his parents.
Fair enough but on a site inhabited by intelligent, skeptical people it’s hard to follow those rules when the topic has become “was pg being disingenuous, willfully blind, or simply naive on that day, 6 years ago, when he announced partnership with his mysterious Russian money man?”
It's interesting that most people would probably not say something so xenophobic about any other country on a public forum, but Russia is fair game. Don't believe me? Substitute $country in the above and see if it sounds more or less grating.
Please do ! I'll gladly remove this comment if you give an outline to your argument.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
UN Study Warns: Growing Economic Concentration Leads to “Rentier Capitalism”
Yeah, it's really time to build another wall then.

You've opened Internet to share your point of view and so to influence their choice? Expect others to share their views and influence you too. Don't like that? See #1

You've opened your market and asking for investments? You've got them. Don't like color of their money? See #1

Do we have other options realistically speaking?
I was in the thread about "lessons from MIT", and thinking of a degree curriculum I looked at from the UK one day.

It basically expected that students (who were going to learn PL theory) start off with a higher level of math knowledge (right out of secondary school) than most American CS students have in sophomore year. AFAIK, their students don't suffer as much stress or depression as the cohort of Americans who've done "sophomore-level" math in high school.

But for another example, well, every other country seems to have an easier time running a working train system than America does, including those who are running top-of-the-line high-speed rail. Or, to take another, the French have one of the highest per-hour productivity rates on Earth, but take four to six weeks of vacation each year. Likewise, the Germans have one of the most productive economies on the planet, but work some of the shortest hours.

Again and again, we find a principle that efficient, productive, intelligently-arranged systems deliver greater results with less sturm und drang.
I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past.

The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly.

That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
Using ice would take a lot less energy to blow it apart on reentry.
I check every couple of years and both Gopher and Usenet lumber on.
Shibumi

"Northrop bombers. American bombers."
It's always hard to follow those rules, most of all when a topic activates one, and we all get activated by something. It happens to hundreds if not thousands of HN users every day (including yours truly on a good measure of those days).

Self-restraint is required at such moments. We all need to contribute our share of this if we want HN to survive as a place for substantive discussion.
is that a new app?
>> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.

Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
Give something to your family.. it is priceless
> It's interesting that most people would probably not say something so xenophobic about any other country on a public forum

I've routinely seen the almost exact same thing, except with a much longer timeline. about the entirety of the Arab world, on public forums.
Ikea in several European countries delivers.

Britain for example, since it's in English: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/faq/dispatch-and-...
Why is it so slow with that kind of funding?
Have you looked at Overpass API?

(it provides direct access to OSM data using a DSL: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL )

For tiny purposes the public servers are sufficient and there seem to be quite a few people running private servers.
But it's not funding anything!

There is no actual income being made. This is imposing a tax on something that no one actually gets! It's an accounting procedure used by Universities so they can meet the requirements of you being a student by law.

I am a PhD student. My tuition of $30,000/year is waived by the University of California since I take no classes and am purely doing research. I need to be a student for various tax purposes for both the University and myself. If the money from my waiver was taxed, I would somehow have to come up with an extra $10,000 out of nowhere! Where do I find that money? My PhD is my job. The government is not funding anything, and I feel you're using that terminology purely to muddy the issue.

To be clear, I don't much care for your argument here. Regardless of your ideological concerns about the ideal way to tax stuff, this policy clearly hurts people who are already in a precarious financial position. It will have remarkably negative effects for students like me. I will simply have to drop out, and all of the domestic PhD students I know in STEM will as well. We can't afford to take out loans for taxes...

This policy has a clear goal. It's impact is what matters. Simply demanding that the tax code be simplified is in this case ludicrous. You're really missing the forest for the trees here - this effectively kills all STEM PhDs in the United States. It's impact would be devastating.
Geo as a whole in my observation. There are decades of research effort that have got us to where we are now, well developed study programmes worldwide, advanced proprietary and open software and data available, and geo is effectively mainstream in google maps and sat nav. Yet for some reason this contextual background is missed by many, and so I see commenters making statements about what a leap forward this or that is, when in fact it's just part of an evolving history. I'm not criticising people for not knowing what they don't know - my question is - why does it seem like geo as a whole has trouble communicating this context? I wonder whether there are any other areas of tech that suffer from this lack of awareness?
Since we are at it, I suggest reading John Perkins's "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man":

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...

Also, any book on past and current colonialism (say, current actions of the US military in Africa).

How do you like your illegitimately rich country?
Mobile changed websites into displaying less content. Are we better off? Scrolling forever vs clicking next page / last page. I think scrolling is worse if you ever want to find that piece of content again.
thesmallestcat said:

I downvoted your comment because the first two paragraphs are off topic, seems like you just wanted to talk about yourself.

They deleted it before I could post the following reply:

Other people talk about themselves all the time on HN. That usually doesn't make a thing downvote worthy. But I get a lot of flak for it, presumably because people find something inherently disturbing about me.

I don't think it is off topic. If you really want a strong role model for how to live light on the land, you could admire me and follow my advice. Instead, my many websites get no traction and I get a lot of open hostility.

That is exactly my point. People only listen to and admire the type of people who fly to Morocco. People who actually walk the talk have no influence and never will.
Keeping up with how your friend group is doing, and having an ongoing group conversation about it, without needing to maintain mailing lists and Reply All and spam people with the implied urgency of email.

Social media exists for a reason. It's not just email for stupid people.
Airline revenue from extra fees increases
Agreed. And I hope people who care about civil society are equally squeamish about Murdoch or Koch money.

(The Koch's are actually more complex than Murdoch. The latter is just a scumbag while the former have beliefs and values. Which probably makes them more worrying.)
I think you place the Times in an impossible position. If it's not the responsibility of traditional media organizations to report on the real problem of fake news in social media, then whose responsibility is it? Where else are people going to spread the word about something like that? Face to face? Furthermore, you must realize that the people questioning the veracity traditional media are, by and large, conspiracy theorists with very particular agendas and motives for doing so. The Times also has something that Facebook and the like don't and probably won't -- a hard-earned trust built over a period of decades.
Yes. I couldn't muddle through the other two of the series, though.
People are definitely overreacting, but other people are underreacting. The Russian state-run banks are effectively Putin’s tools. So the question really becomes why did the Russian government choose to secretly move hundreds of millions of dollars into American tech companies.

To my mind, there are two plausible answers. The first is that it was a way to offshore a bunch of wealth into what looked like a good investment. You can get into moral issues (e.g. is Russian oligarch money “dirty”), but I think it’s not very interesting or concerning from a national security perspective.

An alternative is that Putin perceives many of these technology companies as crucial pieces in the power game, and wanted some level of access to / influence over them. That would be a much more concerning situation, because it means that they may have leveraged their ownership stake against American national interests. We don’t yet have evidence of that, but we should investigate the possibility.
budgets are public, no? FOIA works pretty well, no?

people don't look, don't have time to understand it, and usually don't think, they just demand.
At least they didn't "rediscover" Fourier transforms for audio analysis, in the vein of https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
>Even when there is variance, UK with London, north and south of Spain and Italy, it is not quite so dramatic.

I'd argue otherwise. Greater London had a GVA per capita of £42,666 in 2013. Several counties had a GVA per capita of less than £19,000, with the least productive (Northumberland) having a GVA per capita of less than £15,000. Excluding Washington DC (which isn't technically a state), that's a significantly greater disparity than between the most and least productive US states.

The UK has seen a huge rise in populism in recent years, I think overwhelmingly because of this stark inequality. Just as in the US, people from less prosperous areas feel marginalised and ignored.

America has Trump, we have Brexit - a decision by the electorate that has shocked the political establishment to the core. Few commentators saw it coming, the overwhelming majority of educated people think that it's a terrible idea, but it still happened. In both cases, the most reasonable interpretation is that a large part of the electorate have rejected the status quo outright, regardless of what the experts might say and regardless of the consequences.

I think that something needs to be done urgently about inequality, or things are going to get ugly. Too many people have lost all faith in the establishment. Too many people feel that they have nothing left to lose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_in...
What if you want to quickly flick through pages? Having to wait for each page to render would be awful.
On Mac, for me, even the process of getting java was more difficult than the entire setup process for some languages.

"Ok here's the download page for Java, ok, but I need the JRE too, right? Ok here's the JRE, but it's a different version than Java, is that a problem? Also didn't I remember there being some issue with the newest Java--can I use that yet or will it screw everything up again? Now that I've downloaded everything, do I, like, need to put them somewhere so they're in my path? Ugh and now I have autoupdaters for Java bugging me every few weeks?"

Python: "Download anaconda, install done"

Rust (which I just tried for the first time this week): "Download rust, done."
"To the US government, the only difference between MLK and Kim Jong Un is that only one of those was a threat to the state in 60's while the other is a threat now."

I'm not seeing the analogy. Did MLK have some secret stash of nuclear weapons I'm not aware of? Was he threatening to attack the US or its allies with them?
I am trying to do exactly that. One establishment would not post the flyer "because it might be a pyramid scheme." So simply being free seems insufficient.

But, thank you.
Bloomberg claims Trump bought the right to lease the building for the next 60 years or so. Trump does not own the property at 40 Wall Street. He is paying something like $1.5 million per year in rent. He bought the rights to lease the building from someone who previously bought those rights for the mostly empty building for $8 million but were having trouble getting tenants. It isn't clear if Trump bought all of the same rights or if they retained some.

The people who previously had the rights to lease out the building paid $8 million, but along with that came the responsibility of paying rent to the landowner. If they hadn't been able to make progress in two years, it doesn't seem outlandish that they would be willing to sell for much less than they paid. Their big expense wasn't going to be the cost of the rights to lease the tower, but the actual cost of leasing the tower (or maybe it is better to say the land the tower sits on) over time.

Further, they may have retained some rights that they found valuable so I wouldn't assume that what they bought for $8 million was the same thing Trump says he bought for $1 million.

So was the deal "shady"? Not from any information presented in this thread nor from anything that is readily available from a quick search. It could be of course, but the actual facts that are available don't appear to support such a claim.
BuzzFeed's founder used to write Marxist theory and it explains BuzzFeed perfectly
Is that any different from spending an hour finding links on Wikipedia or HN or Reddit or Facebook or whatever you're into?
Maybe so, I haven't tried that one yet. My problem is that the UI has gotten increasingly fucked up with each of the previous "tick" releases while adding absolutely nothing I'm interested in.

Snow Leopard was a superior OS in every way, from my perspective. The only reason I upgraded was the increasing number of apps that required newer versions for no good reason.
It is normal (be it "lefty" democratic, or republican US presidents) for the US government to use its power to destroy other countries and steal its resources...

And yet here you are discussing "cynicism and [...] deliberate single mindedness".

As a lefty, you fail to put things in perspective... But I guess it's just not convenient, sometimes, is it?
>Here in Australia, IKEA does not ship (not sure if they do else where)

They definitely have a delivery service in the US.

http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/service-offer/delivery/
This is kind of meta, but I think we'd be better served if you wouldn't remove the comment even if proven wrong. It serves everyone better to see both sides of the argument. It would be more appropriate to reply conceding that your initial argument was incorrect, or to add a note on the bottom of your original comment indicating the same.
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One of the few websites I can still lose hours on: https://waitbutwhy.com/
> The situation was complex but the conclusion was ultimately pretty easy. It was obvious that Bush et al were completely making stuff up.

It seems obvious that they were motivated to make a case for invading Iraq. But that doesn't make it immediately obvious to me that they completely made it up or that they weren't acting off of other intelligence.

Since we're on the subject of speculation, if I had to put my tin foil hat on today I'd say that the invasion of Iraq had more to do with Iran (and their allies) than Hussein.
We want to explore the solar system... and there are these marvellous parcels of kinetic energy and expensive rare earth elements whizzing around the place. With built-in radiation shielding, too.

OK, at least one of the bigguns is pointing at Earth. But, you know what they say, every existential threat is an opportunity in disguise! In this case, potentially unlimited funding for the study and development of asteroid harnessing technology. That's before you sell the metals.
I used to think IKEA was insane for running such a "20th Century" business model for shipping their products. The fact that you cannot purchase anything from IKEA's website and have it delivered without incurring a $129 delivery fee is crazy when taken at face value.

However, I've come to understand why they have limited their delivery service. Their flat pack products are their profit centers and the packaging that makes them so efficient to store in their storefront warehouses is simply not suited for shipping via 3rd parties (UPS, FedEx, etc). As an extreme example, consider their cardboard honeycomb + laminate furniture (the Hemnes stuff). It takes almost nothing to punch through the flat surfaces of those products if the force is concentrated on a small area and the box offers zero protection (padding) to prevent this. Even the higher end products are packaged as tightly as possible with sensitive surfaces directly touching the box they're packed in. While it's insane to charge $129 for get a pack of their excellently priced "ancillary" products shipped (kitchen utensils, cheap LED lightbulbs), those products are priced desirably in order to get you in the store. If IKEA sold those online with a modern shipping model, they'd forgo the chance of getting you to buy something that is actually profitable. IKEA can't redesign the packaging for their flat pack products without impacting the efficiency of their in-store inventory and they can't ship their existing packages without ironclad damage-free guarantees from the big logistics companies.

Even if they get a guarantee that the logistics company eats the cost of any damaged good, it would still negatively impact customer satisfaction when, for example, the bed they ordered for their new house shows up damaged and needs to be returned/reordered. Every time I've bought IKEA furniture, it's been for an immediate need, and I'm not going to be happy when I have nowhere to sit for 2-5 days because UPS crushed my package.
$100k isn't particularly cheap for a DIY kit plane. Planes are cheap, it's everything else that's expensive.
Scientists in silico?
blood money is still money, right?

wrong.

this is, in extension, saying it's okay to take money from a currently sanctioned state actor. as long as they want to pay cash and half-ass obfuscated the state actors behind the paycheck you're so concerned about.
Ice would be ideal for a number of reasons; a shield you could then use for water, air, and fuel! To get a big enough chunk though, you'd probably need to send drones to drag some icebergs from around Saturn. That... would be something! Doable, although probably very expensive, it would share tech with asteroid mining so maybe there's hope for it.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631084.
Slouching Toward War with North Korea