skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It actually doesn't make much sense to build multiple last-mile networks. This is called an overbuild and is rather wasteful given the capex involved.

Yes, obviously. Just like roads. Which is why local governments should design and operate all residential internet networks.

Or: Yes, obviously. A house really only needs one electrified wire, which is why we should turn over internet service to the power company.

Or: Yes, obviously. We don't want an internet that's wasteful in any part of its operations, which is why it should be run entirely by the federal government. In fact, it's about communications, so let's combine it with the USPS.

Or: Yes, obviously. Given its vital role in society and its origins as a DARPA project, it should be entirely built and operated by the US Army.

On the other hand, maybe what we need is a proper market in internet connectivity, with multiple providers using different technologies and approaches to meet consumer needs, and a strong regulator that keeps large companies from driving the small ones under.

As somebody who lives in one of the few competitive ISP markets in the US and pays $50/month for my gigabit home fiber connection, I think I prefer the latter.
I put humanity in quotes because I didn't really know what else to name it when talking about some other form of intelligence. I guess I'm talking about that part of our society that craves peace and stability, that has enabled our continued development up to this point. Certainly throughout history we've seen unimaginable cruelty inflicted on "less civilised" societies by colonial and imperialist societies. Hopefully any intelligence which has reached the development of an interstellar society would have those same qualities, frankly I don't see any other way for it to sustain itself.

Imagine we came across anew form of intelligent life on Mars, would we exploit and enslave it? I'd like to think living in a global society would prevent such atrocities, at least in the modern era, and hopefully beyond. And I think any society in an interstellar context would behave the same
Perhaps you can infer that someone who thinks eating with their hands is uncivilized will have equally ignorant opinions about computing.
"and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years."

Don't assume this.

I worked at a 'big tech company' that made a very popular device.

Our IT was a disaster.

We made one of the world's most popular gadgety things - we couldn't make our email work.

Doing things the right way is extremely expensive sometimes, you have to pay zillions for consultants and they can screw it up.

If 'IT' is not a massive cost - often - the consideration is moot - move it to the cloud where things will work, and there is low overhead.

I'll bet $100 that Amazon is earning those margins easily.

Another example: why do companies use Windows instead of Linux which is free? Well, because Linux in a regular corp environment would be a huge nightmare. $50/employee to get something that works? That's dog-food heap. It's hardly a consideration, easy, just buy it. Maybe MS margins are huge. Who cares, because the value they created is monster.

Sometimes 'point and click' IT is worth a lot given all the risk factors etc. etc..
Since you mention France, what about taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower and publish it on a commercial site such as imgr/facebook/twitter?
Gill v. Whitford will be heard in the current term of the U.S. Supreme Court to look at this issue again. It has the potential to make an explosive difference in 2018.

Look at the recent Alabama election. A Democrat won most of the votes in the state, and also won most of the votes in every single urban area. And yet applying that state wide vote to the House of Represenatives district map in Alabama, would have still sent one Democrat and six Republicans to House of Representatives in Congress (had it been an election for HoR rather than Senate). Even in the case were Democrats made double digit gains in most counties from the 2016 election, it still would not affect the representation in the House. This is a massive case of voter disenfranchisement.

And while both parties gerrymander, only one party engages in the most obvious and egregiously unfair form of it while benefiting overwhelmingly and disproportionately, hence the lawsuit before the Court. And in the Alabama case, it is blatantly racist as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQ862zWUIAAxWfa.jpg
> I don't think there's any basis to say the majority voted for other things over net-neutrality

An absolute majority of voters casting ballots for the House of Representatives in 2016 voted for either Republican or Libertarian candidates, both parties opposed to the FCC regulating for net neutrality and Congress legislating in favor of net neutrality.

It's a little less clear in the Presidential election, in part because you have to go beyond the top four candidates tomget a majority on either side, and detailed information on minor (often no-party) candidate positions on the issue can be hard to find.

And the Senate requires aggregating across different election years.
Well yes, most of the US's problem stem from the fact that Corporations Are People (when it suits them to be), and can thus give unlimited amounts of money to politicians because Money Is Free Speech.

It’s been getting worse and worse over the past few decades because of this, and we may be near the point of violent revolution. Except probably not because hey, who has time for that when they gotta put in forty hours a week plus overtime, or three part time jobs, just to barely fail to make ends meet?
Python is extremely permissive and flexible, even for a dynamic language - a trait that makes it easy to learn and easy to throw something together quickly. But when building software at scale, we need restrictions. For example: static types, immutability, pure functions, total functions, algebraic laws. It is restrictions such as these that give us the power to reason about code and the ability to compose it at scale. Beginner's do not understand how one can gain power from restriction. Skilled programmers do and most would not recommend Python for large-scale general purpose programming.
What is exactly the difference between a robot and a person using a browser?

Does an ad-blocking browser counts as a bot or as a human? And what is something that concatenates all of your infinite scrolling to represent a paginated view? What is something that changes the structure of your page? What is something that concatenates different pages before displaying?
I think it's a bit sad that your relationship with your children is one of 'well, you're 18 now, I've done my job. I will no longer help you.' Almost all wealth (and almost all successful families) is created over generations by parents and children assisting each-other.
Yes, I believe that statement. There are two things that being located in SV gets you:

1. Ability to hire elite programmers that are a few percent better than those in NYC. You'll pay for that quality though. Plus the cannon fodder programmers that you'll hire if you get big cost more in SV for the same quality as NYC.

2. VC money that is a bit easier to get for tech startups compared to NYC.

Your business is not robust if it would be successful if you hired a 99th percentile programmer and had $5mm in investment in SV, but it would fail with a 95th percentile programmer and had $3mm in investment in NYC. People that don't think they could make their idea work in NYC aren't confident in their idea and just playing entrepreneur.
Every sufficiently large statically-typed application will contain an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, verbose implementation of half of a decent dynamic language.

(I too enjoy a good pseudo-Greenspun)

More seriously something I've been pondering a lot recently watching the old pendulum swing back towards an enthusiasm for explicit typing is this:

* The advantages of static type systems are obvious and easy to articulate.
* The disadvantages of static type systems are subtle and difficult to argue.

I started my career as a professional programmer when the pendulum was moving in the other direction. Essays by Paul Graham on Lisp and Python. The marvellous PJ Eby piece quoted above and Peter Norvig's "Design Patterns are artifacts of language flaws".

I just feel dynamic languages fit my brain better but maybe that's my own form of Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe I need to try a decent type system rather than the brain-damaged descendents of Java...
A relevant story many will recognize: https://www.thelocal.de/20140601/german-villagers-build-own-...

As best I can tell they are not even municipal. Merely a cooperative owned by a big chunk of the town. At least last I heard.
> If it's true that the majority wanted to keep net neutrality, then how come the majority was ignored?

Because the FCC isn't accountable to the public, majority or not. If a majority protest was directed at a congress person, you can be sure they would listen – we're the ones who vote them in/out. And that's exactly what we're going to do to get NN enacted as law.
Certainly considered it - I'm a political moderate, my political views are generally a mishmash from both parties (really all parties, I've been known to vote Libertarian and Green as well, sometimes on the same ballot).

But I'll say that my sister lives in Houston, TX, which has a basically diametrically opposite political philosophy. And it's fucked up in entirely different ways. Traffic and public transportation both suck here, but public transportation is basically nonexistent in Houston, and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage (which actually happened in my sister's neighborhood - some woman with a small child in the back seat cut off a guy in a pickup truck, so he pulled out a handgun and opened fire). Our house prices are ridiculous, but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves, while Houston's public parkland exists but is nowhere near as easy to get to or enjoy. Our Internet sucks, but PG&E is pretty reasonable and actually fixes outages fairly rapidly (even if it does have a tendency to burn down Santa Rosa), while my sister's electric bill goes through half a dozen companies, each of which tries to extract as much money from the customer while providing as little service as possible.

On balance I prefer the Californian system, though I'm open to compromise systems that combine the best of both worlds. (We're both initially from Boston, BTW, which is kinda in the middle of those two politically but fucked up in its own special charming way. At least the streets in both Silicon Valley and Houston are laid out in a grid, with more than one lane apiece and traffic lights in the appropriate places, and they can build a new public works project without the ceiling caving in.)
The next step to vertical integration and an eventual much bigger slice of the pie in the successful few. You can expect that eventually 'demo day' and A round financing by outsiders will disappear[1], that's the part where YC now loses out on a large chunk of still relatively cheap equity. I suspect it will eventually be replaced by some kind of voting mechanism where partners and alumni decide who gets to make a run of it.

Those that don't make that cut will then be forced to go outside of YC for follow on funding with the stamp 'damaged goods' on them, a similar effect will be present for those companies that do not make it into this new program they announce and the continuity program established earlier.

It will be interesting to watch what kind of unintended side effects this will generate and how the success rates of those companies in YC continuity and outside of it will compare.

Keep in mind that YC makes almost all of its returns on very few companies and that either increasing their stake in those companies or widening the pool of companies that have a shot at making it (in which case the founders goals and YCs goals are much closer aligned) are the only ways they can grow themselves unless they manage to pick more winners out of the gate, which is a super hard problem.

In a way what we are watching is YC slowly coming of age and doing what every successful start-up would do: to become more efficient at what they do. Programs like these are an important step along that way, it's a soft entry with relatively little risk into a larger role in the life cycle of the start-ups they initially funded.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity/
Wait, was the underlying message not supposed to be "everyone should conform to my world view"?
still don't regret not moving to US as a programmer.
I literally run a YIMBY blog but cool.
> they simply can't

Amazon is one of Etsy's most relevant competitors. They'd be insane not to consider them a competitor

https://www.amazon.com/Handmade
I hope they wont localise the function names like they do for cell formulas. Never have i met someone who enjoyed this.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924284 and marked it off-topic.
take me now. this world is too crazy for me. :(
That's the point; it'd be nice to have something similar to Facebook without all of the addictive trash. In my opinion, the concept of a social network in itself isn't bad - it's just the monetisation bit that they've got terribly wrong, along with the use of addictive media to bolster ad revenues.
What if intelligent life is rare because at some point some other intelligent life set up a systematic process of keeping the universe clear of it?
Also, you're not magically protected from everything that a 35-year-old faces just because you're 45 or 50.
>Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right.

I'd love a source on that, because as far as I remember most of the stuff he referenced wasn't very controversial. E.g. one of his biggest points was that men and women have statistically different five factor personality distributions.

>Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail.

Sure. The problem is I strongly disagree with you about what the "objective observable truth" is.
I'd identify with this in the past, but now I'm coming to dislike this mindset. How do you effect change without extreme, dramatic examples or tone? It's all well and good to promote moderation and cooperation until you actually want to see something done.

If you can concretely point out what is false or sensationalist, that's a different story... obviously lies should not be tolerated.
I'd like to challenge this.

If you go into a startup and say "I'm a communist," many of them are going to be pretty skeptical of your ideas. You will find yourself in a lot of awkward conversations if you make this a thing you want to talk about.

If you pitch a VC and throw in "btw, I'm a communist," or they find your online writings about being a communist, you aren't getting a check.

If you apply for upper management at Google and you say "I want to overthrow capitalism because I'm a communist," you're going to have a really, really hard time.

I don't think it's arguable that communists are actively operating in America and causing capitalists to have longer jail sentences or killing them when they wouldn't kill communists. So, no, I don't think communism is a threat whereas anti-semitism and racism are immediate threats.

I don't think that we need to jail all people who
are racist, but I think it's just fine to not talk to them or to yell at them or even to fire if they feel the need to express their beliefs in a way that gets in my business or stops me or my team from doing our work.
Revelation Space explores the concept better.
I would really like to see a business case study of building out and operating an HFC network in a single average suburb, and how that varies with how cooperative the suburb is.

Could any of the economies of scale enjoyed by the huge/evil ISPs be recaptured by using some kind of franchise-model where the locals can own an ISP like they would a McDonalds?

I think towns might be more willing to make those concessions if at least some of the competitors were local small businesses rather than giant corporations like Google.
If it's tumbling to provide artificial gravity, then the crew needs something like 8.94595e-7 g to feel comfortable.
That is true, but I don't think fair parallels can be drawn between a southern European empire in 1492 when humanity was still discovering itself and it's place within the universe to an interstellar society. Society matures in much the same way as an individual does, albeit on much longer, slower time spans. Can you seriously imagine an interstellar society (which I truly believe would be a democracy, as I see no feasible way an imperialist dictatorship would be possible with that sort of decentralization of society) having the same ambitions as a pre-enlightenment imperial society? I think the goals, desires, hopes and pursuits of that society and the individuals that compose it would be fundamentally opposed to that sort of expansion and enslavement.
My biggest issue hasn't been VBA but the poor documentation of the Excel (Office) object model and the weird way of accessing cells and cell ranges.

Would this get better in Python? I hope so.
And spamming those contacts with requests to join that looked as if they originated from your business relations when that definitely wasn't the case.
"The evidence from both experimental and naturalistic studies indicates that people apply their stereotypes when judging others approximately rationally. When individuating information is absent or ambiguous, stereotypes often influence person perception. When individuating information is clear and relevant, its effects are “massive” (Kunda & Thagard, 1996, yes, that is a direct quote, p. 292), and stereotype effects tend to be weak or nonexistent. This puts the lie to longstanding claims that “stereotypes lead people to ignore individual differences.”

http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res...

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." -- Albert Einstein
<link rel="humour" type="text/hyperbole" href="w3cHumour.hss" />
> The voters elected a Republican government.

FALSE. The voters were sidelined by both old (electoral college) and new (mechanically-assisted gerrymandering) methods. Just look at Texas:

"The redistricting had a revolutionary effect. Today, the Texas delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives includes twenty-five Republicans and eleven Democrats—a far more conservative profile than the political demography of the state. The Austin metropolitan area, the heart of the Texas left, was divvied up into six congressional districts, with city residents a minority in each. All but one of these districts are now held by Republicans. I’m currently represented by Roger Williams, a conservative automobile dealer from Weatherford, two hundred miles north of Austin."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-futur...

Republicans have used these tools to cook up an unprecedented constitutional challenge to our republic. MULTIPLE suits are presently being heard by the Supreme Court regarding their shenanigans.
Before you get all sad on me do you actually have teenage children of your own?

I have watched my much younger sisters-in-law go through something like this with strung out dependency on Mom. At some point you actually have to cut the cord. It is safer the younger they are. You hope they go to college, graduate, and get a great independent job. This doesn't always happen. Like with everything else life is much easier when expectations are set early.
so who's gonna do "real news" now?
No, you are not. This sounds crappy.
> Maybe in the past, as specialized workers?

My grandmother had some interesting encounters with Roma when she was younger. Apparently, the only time people locked their doors in town was when the Roma caravans rolled through (otherwise, you'd risk them entering your house uninvited, etc, etc, which did happen to her at least once). However, they were apparently also quite good at certain kinds of labor, such a replating (industrial?) mixing bowls with tin, a job she hired a "gypsy king" for, who assembled some of the younger Roma in his group for the task.

I.e., mobility is not mutually exclusive with having so-called marketable skills or providing services.
> And most employees, including me, don't really want to start off a new job haggling over the contract. It really doesn't make a good first impression.

Important to note that this is not true. If you, say, have a side project and want to ensure that it remains your property after you join the company, and that you can keep working on it and keep having it belong exclusively to you, having a lawyer review the draft contract a potential employer sends with your offer is not going to piss off anyone you would ever want to work for.

Companies that hire quality engineers are used to potential employees having lawyers, and do not get ruffled when those lawyers do their jobs. If they do, it's a major red flag.
I think they realize this though. Just milking the cow now. Anyone smart enough realizes social media itself is relatively new and volatile. They have to be fluid / versatile in their investments and services other wise people just simply move to the latest and greatest platform. That's what happened in the early days with Myspace / Facebook. A business built upon this kind of product is a business built upon sand. It moves and shifts. There is no one size fits all. At least I don't think so anyways.
If they did this to Apple and Google, what prevents them from doing it to smaller companies that make similar products? How is this not anticompetitive?
> not everywhere will naturally have competition.

Many rural areas have only one grocery store.
>>My rent consumes nearly half my income

When I was younger... I had 4 roommates in Astoria.. This allowed me to save a lot of money. Why do people insist on living alone and then bitching about rent being high??
I don't think there is a relationship between your personal experience and the OP's claim that diseases, broadly, are typically mediated by the gut microbiome.
Which is also why it is surprising that Microsoft has spent so little time on office in 20 years. Outside of changing the colors regularly, there has been very few new significant functionalities between Office 2003 and Office 2016. And opening the VBA IDE is a nasty reminder.

I'd argue large companies are still running Windows because of Office. The cost of retraining people, redesigning all of these user processes and converting all those documents would be massive. Whereas most new corporate applications in the last 5 years have been mostly web based.

So I am surprised Microsoft under-invest in what is they main strategic lock-in in the juicy enterprise market.
It wasn't the strongest possible argument for his case IMO. There are other better studies and statistics I would have referenced. But it was good enough and the points were solid,. That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
You've been playing too much Mass Effect 2 :^)
What are your specific complaints about healthcare.gov? I was out of the country when it initially rolled out, but have had no problems with it the past 2 years since I've moved back and needed to get it.
One reason to be in the doom and gloom camp is that we now have an administration and an FCC that is openly hostile to net neutrality. The previous FCC was engaged in multiple rulings (against Comcast and others) in favour of neutrality, long before the Title II classification. There's every indication that, if presented with similar complaints in the future, the current FCC will not make similar rulings.
Well, it is HuffPo
"Flui-dynamic"? How best to generalize from air to any fluid?
People are fixated on that, but it's not the only solution to the Fermi paradox