skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I do however find the doom and gloom prognostications around Title II repeal to be incredibly hyperbolic and unhelpful. Fact is, Title II was only introduced in 2015. It's not like repeal in 2017 is going to end the Internet overnight.

So when you say "it was only introduced in 2015", what you really mean is "it was a heavily disputed situation for 20 years in with multiple court cases being won and lost by ISPs".

So yeah, this is the first time the regulatory framework is basically _gone_ even if it wasn't "Title II".

1996 Telecommunication Act: It was a legal gray area, particularly given dial up / dsl over telephone lines.

2002: FCC exempts NCTA by declaring it an information service, not telecommunications.

2005: NCTA wins at the Supreme Court

Open Internet Principles: 2005-2010 (i.e. Threatening to regulate)

Open Internet Order: 2010-2015 (Regulating, legally overturned)

Regulatory framework repealed today: 2015-2017
Requiring a prescription ensures that you use the products under the care of a medical professional.
Further investigation revealed that it was indeed a space rock, but.... could it be some sort of projectile sent to obliterate humanity?
My prediction: One of the first actions ISPs will take will be to block ads from specific DNS names and IP addresses. Opposition to this will be fairly limited since nobody likes ads, but after the precedent is set they'll then allow ad providers who pay a toll to the ISP, and from there it'll spread to blocking/throttling of other content.

A couple years ago there was an ISP in the Caribbean who did something similar for Google and Facebook ads: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151001/06351732404/isp-a...
They provide a useful service though at least
I'm kind of glad to hear that to be honest. It's already too far away from us and going too fast for any spacecraft that could currently be built to reach it. It would have been a very cruel joke if the first opportunity for interaction with extra terrestrial intelligence flew past us so unceremoniously.

Of course it's certainly disappointing that it isn't an alien spacecraft, but would have been doubly so if it were and we missed our window of opportunity.
Thanks for the downvote Ajit!
Tribe VR Has Launched a VR DJ Studio on Oculus Rift, with DJ Kryoman and Pyramind
That reminds me of Kapital [1] - a valuation and risk analysis system written in Smalltalk at JPMorgan, begun in the early '90s and as far as i know still going; 14,000 classes, 400,000 methods, hojillions of dollars of profit, twenty years in service, zero types:

http://www.esug.org/data/ESUG2004/ValueOfSmalltalk.pdf
> 4. Get together as much as you can on a real "team building exercise" - the whole team in another city for at least 2 days with a great party and lots of eating and drinking on company dime...

I deeply despise this trend.
No love for C#? Imagine the power of LINQ in Excel.
Sure. But does it really matter? Are we that sensitive?

I mean, the essay makes the argument that allowing disparagement of gay people might be a necessary in order to allow the investigation of novel physics (which, wtf) - why not also make the argument that being called unethical might be a necessary cost to allow the investigation of life extension?

Is the idea worth perusing? Then you can probably stand to be called a name or two. Especially when you're also proposing allowing whole groups of people to be disparaged in the name of progress.
I got rid of my TV in 2003, I'd just lost my job and thought it'd be a good idea to lose a distraction. It worked and was not particularly hard.

Now I did unleash an enormous amount of smugness towards everyone about how good it was to not have a TV. Being snobbish about the choice I made with a side of judgement to other people not having the same preference.

I think a lot of people here do something similar as soon facebook is discussed. And I feel we are missing out on having a conversation about how something as transformative as a personalised mediafeed impacts society because signalling not being part of it gives more cred.

We all know that software companies in a very short time has amassed power never seen before. It doesn't matter if you don't take part because at the end of the day it will affect you anyway.
Right but your costs are not reduced by a similar amount. When I purchase things or take out a loan for a personal expense I have to pay that off with post-tax dollars. So I have to earn more money to buy the same things.

In this regard a large tax greatly reduces purchasing power and makes it less worth the trouble.
New York AG will sue FCC over net neutrality – Axios
A little OT, but I think public perception really muddies this a lot.

To expand on the siblings' example of Uber, the public seems to mostly think Uber=unethical & Lyft=ethical, but really, they engage in many of the same business practices. Uber has a worse reputation because of their sexual harassment scandals and outspoken douchebag former CEO. Lyft tries to brand themselves as the hippie-dippy summer-of-love sharing company, and has done pretty well at maintaining that image. I don't doubt that Lyft is a much better place to work (for employees, not drivers), and I just had to look up their CEO's name because he isn't the raging asshole that Kalanick seems to be and isn't in the news all the time... but that doesn't maybe Lyft the innocent darling many people think they are, especially when it's so easy to compare them favorably against Uber.

So it's easy to demonize Facebook for being "the most unethical", because they're often front-and-center not just in the news, but also in people's daily lives. But consider other companies, like Uber (and Lyft!), Palantir (fuels the surveillance state), Theranos (fraudulent claims about the efficacy of "new" medical lab test procedures), Hampton Creek (had its employees buy their product from stores to pump up sales numbers), and Zenefits (built software that allowed employees to dodge state licensing requirements).

As much as I love Silicon Valley and couldn't imagine working anywhere else, there's also a lot of corruption and unethical behavior here.
Foreigners may apply to stay under International Entrepreneur Rule – for now
> pay or fade away

Facebook in a nutshell
That's not "empirically false", it's just not empirically true. Static typing is a big boon to software development, and I use Python in my day job.
I don't read it that way. I read it as:

- Extending human lifespan harms the environment.

- Harming the environment is ethically wrong. (this is elided)

- Therefore, Extending human lifespans is ethically wrong.

This is muddy thinking and takes a great leap when it ignores the ethical _benefits_ of extending human lifespans, but I don't think it is indefensible.
We were more likely to get them before Fox was sold, since they had to make new ones or lose the license.
Elon Musk reveals his awkward dislike of mass transit
Thanks for the tldr; I hadn't realized that was possible.
They killed internet ecosystem.
I worry the average consumer's reaction to that is going to be as follows: "All the tech nerds were worried about this net neutrality thing, but since it got revoked my Comcast bill is cheaper than ever. In completely unrelated news, those bastards at Netflix have hiked their prices again!"
Hyper-V VMs to AWS with AWS Server Migration Available in the AWS GovCloud
Python is strongly typed. You still have to think about the types. Except now you have to think about them every time you work with the code, not just the first time.
But isn’t it simplistic to equate all transphobic people with murderers who commit violence against trans people?

Would you also be scared of working with men because they typically commit homicides more than women?

I think being afraid of your life simply because someone is a bigot who hasn’t exhibited any violent behavior is on you, not the bigot. A small number of bigots are violent and dangerous, that doesn’t mean all are.
Ask HN: Why is net neutrality a big deal now?
Net neutrality has only been in effect for 2 years or so. The internet was perfectly fine in the many years before it was implemented, what's the big deal with it being gone now? It doesn't seem like it changed much in the time it's been here.
Well python is pretty much already well established but it should be wary of te famous "Embrace Extend Extinguish".
Invoking the term "deregulation" carries with it the connotation that this is a policy decision. But given the active efforts to avoid engaging with the topic on a policy level made by the FCC in this case, it's obvious that it's not a policy decision at all.

They don't disagree, they just don't care.

And that's before we get to the signs of influence/interest contact points.
Ok, since you don't seem to want to use the site as intended, I've banned the account. If you change your mind you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
Not true. When you make a HTTP REQUEST, you’re not accessing a piece of private property. You are requesting information. Just because it is requested doesn’t mean it has to be served.
Thanks for the link! It's great to be able to read the reasoning behind decisions.

There is a typo in the third paragraph, first sentence, FYI. "Are not" is repeated.

For example, there are derivative specifications ("forks") that are not are not prominently identified as copies of WHATWG standards
Why not C# ?
Not gonna fly on HN, where any "serious" programming by definition takes place in teams, where people welcome stuff like Go enforcing a brace style just so they don't have to argue with others, but alas, it's true:

> This silent consensus had informed me, both at the lyé and at the university, that one shouldn't bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like "volume", which was "obviously self-evident", "generally known", "unproblematic", etc. I'd gone over their heads, almost as a matter of course, even as Lesbesgue himself had, several decades before, gone over their heads. It is in this gesture of "going beyond", to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one - it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a matter of course.

-- Alexandre Grothendieck, "The Life of a Mathematician - Reflections and Bearing Witness" (1986)

> Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

-- C. S. Lewis
If you know your prescription you can order new glasses online without paying the optometry tax
Not to geek out, but this is basically warp drive from star trek.

By interacting with the medium the object is passing through, this could effectively change its shape or foil. I wonder if this implications for having orbiting bodies around gas giants (offsetting atmospheric drag) or a shield for a sun probe ?

Could also allow for modifications to the leading edge of a hypersonic plane or a re-entering spacecraft. Relevant research in MHD control of the plasma layer during hypersonic flight [0]

[0] http://sci-hub.la/10.1016/j.ast.2014.03.008
I’m not sure what you are referring to specifically, but WebKit aims to conform to WHATWG DOM and we check that against Web Platform Tests. We don’t even look at W3C DOM. I believe it’s th same for the other browser engines.
An overbuild in this context would be a whole separate network, which the US typically has in most places, namely the phone network and a cable provider. Nowadays people tend to exclude the phone network from discussions of broadband as ADSL speeds are inferior to cable (let alone fiber).

Phone lines had a filter on them to only pass through voice range frequencies. It's why you could hear the sounds made by a modem (or a fax for that matter). These were simply working around the filter.

xDSL was a result of removing that filter. Or, rather, moving it into the customer premises so instead of 2-3kHz, the copper line could support frequencies into the MHz range.

ADSL has a speed limit that follows an inverse square law to the distance the line travels to the exchange. Under ~1km ADSL2+ can get 20+ Mbps. At about 6km ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+ all cap out at about ~1.5Mbps and much beyond that it doesn't work at all.

4-5km is a typical average distance for a phone line, putting the max speed in the 5-8Mbps range. Pretty good for the early 2000s. Not so great now.

There are various workarounds for this, most notably reducing the copper distance. In Australia, the NBN (in part) uses FttN (fiber to the node) so Exchange -> fiber -> Node -> copper -> Customer. Limit the copper distance to 1.5km and put VDSL2 on it and you can get closer to 100Mbps.
What Happens Now That the FCC Repealed Net Neutrality
It isn't two years old. Its been a heavily disputed area of law/regulation since 1996 with various patchworks that served similar functions. From actual regulation, to threatening to regulate if there was too much backlash, to regulating again, to regulating under Title 2.

1996 Telecommunication Act: It was a legal gray area, particularly given dial up / dsl over telephone lines.

2002: FCC exempts NCTA by declaring it an information service, not telecommunications.

2005: NCTA wins at the Supreme Court

Open Internet Principles: 2005-2010 (i.e. Threatening to regulate)

Open Internet Order: 2010-2015 (Regulating, legally overturned)

Regulatory framework repealed today: 2015-2017

------------------

"If anything, I've seen a significant rise in censorship since NN was passed."

Censorship by whom? A bunch of websites that are completely separate entities from ISPs that are monopolies for all intents and purposes?
> Remember that America is a republic, not a democracy.

That's not what either of those words mean: the US is both.
This is not correct.

Say you have a HOA with 100 houses and you got the last mile wired with fiber. There is probably some place ( such as community center ) that is owned by HOA itself. You get 100 pairs to that building. 10G LR SFP+ are $40 a pop all day. So you need $80 per link once. 48x 10G port switches are $3k all day. So it is 24x edges with a reasonable fabric oversubscription - so you need 5 of those because you want to oversubscribe core rather than the edge as edge requires interaction with a customer while core requires simple internal upgrades. In reality we are goig to do 1Gbit/sec to every drop delivered over 10G so we only need 100Gbit/sec to the edge. Lets spend another $10K on the "core switches" - which in reality are going to be the same as the edges but we will provision them in a way where should this take off we could replace core with 40 and 100G. All of this is going to cost us very little money. Hell, lets pretend it costs us $50K just for the sake of the argument because we like buying really expensive stuff

We can ride a single fiber pair ( remember, this is a residential service, so screw redundancy ) to one of the major interconnect centers because we can drop DWDM gear on our side ( prisms are cheap as hell ) and rent a rack in that interconnect location.

Monthlies:

$10K/mo ( worst case scenario ) DF to interconnect point
$2.5K/mo ( rack at the interconnect point )

This gives us the L2 access. But that's not a problem. The problem is that 100Gbit/sec of non-congested IP transit is abou 55c per mbit/sec so that is $55K/mo.

So your cost is $67K/mo to provide 100 houses in a HOA with 1Gbit/sec of IP.

Lets say that you are in a magic place called say... NYC and it just happened that this wonderful thing is a building located right next to one of the big interconnect points and the developer who developed this highrise owns both buildings. You nuke dark fiber monthly cost. Hell, lets even pretend that the developer who owns both buildings lives in a building that we are wiring and he wants high speed internet connectivity to be able to watch NetFlix and PornTube. So there's not only no cost for dark fiber but there's no rack cost.

You are still at $55K/mo of non-congested IP to provide 1Gbit/sec access to every one of those 100 apartments.
How to open source your ideas
Traditional WANs vs. Next Gen SD-WAN – Infosecurity Magazine
I dunno I think if it were an alien spacecraft we should just keep our heads low and not draw any attention to it. Our first window of opportunity might be our last.
is there any other home network provider rather than those big players?
I wasn't thanks for the pointer!
> Yiannopoulos wanted to read out the names of students without legal immigration status on stage at Berkeley.

I don't think this was ever true, and your whole stance on this hinges on it.
Intelligence is orthogonal to the basic desires Facebook uses to addict its users
If your non-profit needs any help with any of the software side (that can be made open source) let me know and I'd be happy to see how I can help.
Does not M$ have a track record of getting everyone on board and then murdering everything in site. I mean it sounds good, but I don't trust M$. Maybe they have changed, but I'm not yet convinced.
Lets hope its not a reaper corpse that never ends well :-)
Something thought of at the spur of the moment. I'm pretty sure no such thing as profession neutrality exists. But if it did and it were being repealed it would most likely be a big deal.
> We've already got cellular data service that's much better than the first DSL line my family got. That stranglehold is weaker than you might think.

Good luck using 500GB of cellular in a month.
The problem is not NOW. They ruined the ecosystem what we've build for decades.
Very interesting article, thanks for writing it and sharing it, I forwarded it to my PM :) . I do think it could have been edited without losing your favourite bits though :)
That's why Google Fiber failed.
I can only skim these kinds of articles. Mixture of truth and sensationalism makes me upset and uneasy.
Voters != Electoral College. It's an important distinction because this particular issue is very clearly a national issue (and even a global one). And yet at a national level the one person one vote principle does not apply to U.S. presidential elections. Some people's vote counts more than others in this system even though it should not count more on this issue.

Unquestionably elections have consequences, but do not say we (voters/citizens/individuals) voted for this person or party or policy outcome. The Electoral College that did that. This president didn't get a majority of the votes, and much more relevant is he didn't even get a plurality of the votes.

This was an unpopular administration from day one by definition. It could have tried to grow its base. It hasn't. There's no national mandate for this policy change. Could the administration have supported stronger competition law while also deregulating net neutrality? Sure. But it didn't try to make this case at all.
Watsi only funds its operations via tips. 100% of your non-tip donations go to funding treatments.
The kind of advocacy he describes, I definitely hate being on the receiving end...
Just got a partial answer from a team member of donella meadows archives saying I'll have to wait a week for the person who knows best about this to come back.

In the mean time, here are the reading suggestions I got:

- http://donellameadows.org/donella-meadows-legacy/danas-writi...

- http://donellameadows.org/archives/the-club-of-rome-and-sust...

- http://donellameadows.org/archives/forty-years-later-the-rec...

I'll ping you when the news come
I'm sure you know more about the American South than I do. But the point is that you're damaging HN by taking this thread in a significantly worse direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15926503 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927904 are not helping. Please stop this now.
Because OP can order more cases of his current contacts without paying an optometrist for a "new" prescription
I am not saying dynamic languages are for novice. I am saying people who will be using office's scripting are more often than not programming novices (like they are with VBA).

You may like plain text editor but for someone who doesn't know how to program, typing a variable then dot, and having a drop down of what is available from there, with an embedded documentation and direct IDE feedback on what is correct or incorrect syntax immediately after typing every character is super useful. RTFM isn't novice friendly.
If you can write them even the cost of a ps4, they want to hear from you.

Isn't this the problematic issue, though? If you have some disposable cash, politicians will pay attention to you even if you come form outside their district. If you don't, they won't. Sure, they want people to vote for them but that's basically a function of how much money they can throw at the problem.
Service providers already have a lot of power.
Ironically, the best way to promote this would be with a viral Facebook status that says “this will be my last post until March, let’s see if I can make it! I challenge Mark, Sarah, Sam to do the same” etc.

I’m amazed at how easily people obey the challenge memes. I’m guessing a lot of them are instigated by Facebook to increase engagement.
Aaah. Then probably about the same, yea :) Maybe less of a nightmare around dependencies than the pip world...?
They disagree with me because I’m not giving them money for their reelection campaign. Same goes with Democrats. It’s a problem that needs to be fixed and one that’s really obvious to spot.
I haven't used typescript, but I have used MyPy (Or, more accurately, pytype), and its absolutely a joy to work with. I've also used closure (the JS type system that isn't TypeScript) and I prefer pytype, fwiw.

My only complaint about Pytype is that there's no `Char` type at compile time (ie `for x in "a string"` -> Iterable[Char] instead of Iterable[str] during typechecking). But alas.
> civilised countries let you order contacts online without a prescription!

> which is wow! expensive in the US! A box of 30 lenses is like £8 here!

These two points are probably related.
I always found Elliptic Curve Cryptography easier to understand than RSA. RSA just seems like a bunch of math I can't fully follow. But with ECC, you can see a curve and you can see how you're bouncing around the curve in a difficult to follow way. You can also see that calculating nG is just O(log n) but figuring out what n is from nG would take O(n).
It should have been impossible to make a decision on something like this without first solving the fundamental problem of giving users control over data consumption.

Just try visiting a web site or installing an app on your phone, while using a limited-data or pay-per-use plan (such as a typical cell phone plan or international “data roaming”): you will rack up insane costs BEFORE you have any idea how much data was going to be required for what you wanted to do! That’s insane!!

There is no practical way to find out how much data an action will take, no regulation of web sites and apps, etc. to force them to invest in minimizing their data footprint, and tools such as content blockers are fought tooth and nail in the name of “revenue” and other such crap.

Ironically, the idea of paying more for an Internet “fast lane” is exactly what companies should have done — to their own employees, investing in R&D to make their sites smaller, faster, with better experiences for everyone. Instead, those same companies will probably shovel the same money or more, except into ISPs and other entities to make their bloated experiences “fast”.
I may be a troglodyte, but I was bored senseless in my linear algebra, calculus, discrete mathematics, statistics, etc classes in college. Then they tag all the interesting stuff like AI (we didn't call it Machine Learning back in the 90s) at the end of your major where you actually use it. I had to go back and relearn it all because I didn't pay attention the first time. Note to mathematicians (or at least math professors): lead with the interesting stuff before the theory. It'll make learning easier and more fun.