skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What happened to the thousands of miscellaneous services that were at one point provided ?

What I mean to say is that minitel was in an incredible position to grow and be a massive platform, worth 3 digit billions of dollars, and instead traded this potential for charging for every second.

This pushed all the random services (granted, mostly chat, and forum like things) that were cool at one point off off it, and first onto BBS'es, then the internet came with some free server space included in virtually every internet package. A lot of these were initially let on the platform, then bled dry, and died.

But minitel, without a doubt, could instead have pushed those services, and could have made it easy and cheap to host one of them, a decade before the internet arrived and it would have spread like wildfire instead of the internet, sooner, faster and with a few upgrades maybe even better. Instead, it charged by the second, made maybe 100 million euros total profit and died without any evolution at all. Because of France Telecom's business practices, everything on it was bled dry and was always losing money. And FT is a monopolist, they just bleed their services dry, and when they die, no replacement is forthcoming. At least things like Amazon have the decency to still offer the service when they destroy their supplyers. FT, however, just destroys.

And it was all for nothing. Despite forcing these charges, it has (well, had, these days) a reputation in the financial industry for being a place where sometimes interesting companies become shady, then die. All killed in the name of France Telecom's business model, and nonexistent profits, just so it could do it's charge-by-the-second thing (perhaps you can notice that I'm not a fan of telcos). Just so all the "profit" could go to France Telecom and nobody else could maintain a living on it.

Minitel is the ultimate example of France Telecom's economic sabotage : a massive monopolist that just couldn't stomach other people profiting even a bit of their platform and ending up destroying the market it had a monopoly over, all because of management incompetence, intransigence and utter indifference. It's not just that they didn't see the opportunity, as that requires looking for opportunities in the first place : they just didn't care. FT management is a reward position you get when some important politician owes you a favor, which makes it a given that high level managers are utterly incompetent, because either they are incompetent, or they're not incompetent and are aware that it's a favor : their days are numbered before they start, so they bleed the position for all it's worth and spend their time elsewhere.
> Here are some things Strava may reveal ...

These are all things I want to share and use Strava to do that. (Well maybe not "When you are away from your house" but you could not turn on the live beacon if that's a concern.)
Kiree meeting efficiency app is live on Product Hunt today
This feels like a setup for a broader push into healthcare by these companies. The sector is still growing, Amazon is already working out the pharmacy space. "[F]ree from profit-making incentives and constraints" sounds like the strategy they've used so far to dominate sections of online retail.
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It's market participants, with a huge stake, trying to fix a disastrously broken government-corporate healthcare system that has gradually failed for about a dozen big reasons over the last 20 years.
[Educational Hack] Want to explain your friend/girlfriend/mom about Ethereum?
This would all be nice ...

... if it wasn't for the hunger of Google for my personal information.
It's true that 64-bit wasn't as big a difference in terms of performance or user facing features, but it was an utter humiliation for the rest of the industry.

Nobody could pretend that Apple was not way ahead of everyone else in terms of chip design capability and design sophistication. Right up to that point Samsung and Qualcom had been telling everyone they had all the experience and Apple was a newbie at this chip design stuff that didn't know what it was doing.

All of a sudden they were faced with the reality. If they could do 64 bit a year before anyone else, they could do anything a year before anyone else. They could ship working products that other teams barely had on the drawing board, which means nobody could reasonably predict anything they could do next. How can you design a flagship phone for next year to compete with them, when you have no clue what features are even possible for them to have? That's what it brought to the table.
On Android when you select text a menu pops up. Then press three dots and the menu changes. Now click "Translate", an overlay with translation pops up.

Is WeChat somehow more convenient than this? It sounds like the same number of steps.

Edit: I think I understand now. It will translate the text inside the edit box.
So if you disagree with them they can deal with you one way or another? I've always thought that was the real reason: to dissuade dissidence.
> It wouldn't stop an attack

But it would make it less likely, right? Since an unpatched "virtual machine escape" bug would still have to be present.
> When you possess 200 units of some currency, that's strictly better than possessing only 100 units. However, 200 LOC are not strictly better than 100 LOC.

Yes, which is why I didn't say lines of code is a currency (or even a commodity), only that code is an asset. Having 200 industrial robots comprising one factory isn't strictly better than 100 different industrial robots comprising a different factory — industrial robots aren't a currency. But factories, and the industrial robots within them, are still textbook capital assets.

> The asset is not the code itself, the asset is the value that you derive from it

No, the asset is the code. As with any asset, the reason you acquire the asset is the expectation of a deriving a value from it that is greater than the cost of acquisition + maintenance of the asset.

The “code is not an asset” argument is phenomenally ignorant about what assets are, because every element of that argument is perfectly normal for non-cash assets.
I will concede that it is not completely analogous. But you are talking about something else, namely the value of the intent behind a claim.

As I argued, intent has no bearing on the truth value of the claim, but it can – as you point out – be correlated with the truth value. I stand by that dismissing an argument based on intent is fallacious. You have to honestly deal with an argument – regardless of the messenger – to assess its truth value.
Interestingly, NextDoor seems to be taking off in my area. The premise is that the neighborhood has a mailing list or bulletin board for neighbors, by neighbors. A bit of the feed contains events from community organizations like the nearby police station soliciting feedback or park service having an open house.

This might be a swing at services like that.
As far as I understand the HN mod team tries to reduce politically discussions as much as possible. For my taste they are doing a great job at this because it protects the community from tearing apart. There are so many places that had once interesting discussions and now have morphed into political shouting matches - for me Twitter is a main example of that. I personally like that culture on HN and I am trying to contribute by flagging any politically charged topics no matter if they are leaning left or right.
South Korea Ends Anonymous Cryptocurrency Trading Today
I added a USB interface module and it clicks the lawyer screen's "accept" button for me, but yes that is a waste of time. Something it does that I do agree is annoying is lock out the UI when you drive more than 2 mph. For safety.
Ask HN: What do you really need from a UI kit in 2018?
I'm close to completing the first version of my project, that uses the Microsoft Fluent Design as a base for web UI.

I'm trying to get as much feedback from developers who use UI kit on daily basis and I thought that HN would be a great place to do so.

So, what are the biggest pains when it comes to using such tools in your work?

Thank you in advance for any help.
Used tech shop GEAR JUNKIE launches
"Yet again a UK court has ruled the government’s extreme mass surveillance regime unlawful. This judgement tells ministers in crystal clear terms that they are breaching the public’s human rights."

So the question then remains...where are the handcuffs?! I ask this question constantly when it comes to government wrongdoing and there is almost never anyone charged with anything. If the government has been acting in a manner that has been found in a court of law to violate human rights, then multiple people should be going to jail.

Before you drop the "well now we know for sure - we shouldn't be punitive and punish people who thought they were doing their job properly" crap, think about this. Whenever the government applies a law in a new and untested way against a civilian the case is watched very closely and if that civilian is found guilty they never get the benefit of the "well it's been settled and now we know" argument and get let off lightly. So I argue the same should apply here. The government has grossly violated the rights of citizens on a mass scale and everyone at the top of the food chain involved in these programs should be rotting in a jail cell.
It depends on whether or not you view healthcare as a basic right for citizens (in the same sense as education and law enforcement etc.)

The free market coming up with a co-op approach that may only benefit the handful of companies involved only benefits me if I’m in one of those companies.
Don't be disingenuous about what you're actually showing people here. You can claim to do just about anything in "one line" if you ignore the API wrapper and remote service doing the actual work.
I would suggest Apple has absolutely no interest in those markets. Even when Steve Jobs had been fired, Apple was focussed on products for the end-user, not components for others to assemble from.
Oh look another Google project that will last for a while and then they'll pull the plug on it.
In some cases better known as the autofail. :)

That is a curious change, yes.
These things happen, but since people seemed to be following suit I'm glad we cleared that up.
A scalable Keras and deep learning REST API
https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/

https://i.imgur.com/zxwOBMJ.png

Etc.

Discussion of 1.3-beta here:

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,115156.0.html

Discussion of preferred bitrate and point of transparency:

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,115386.0.html

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,114656.0.html

I would highly recommend that you give it a go yourself. Take a FLAC source, encode Opus files yourself. The encoder is freely available from https://opus-codec.org/downloads/ and integrates nicely into Foobar2000's converter function (Opus is already there as a profile, it will ask for the location of opusenc.exe the first time you use it).

Use the ABX Comparator plugin for Foobar2000 (both available from http://foobar2000.org) and run a few trials.

After all, public listening tests are one thing, but to be absolutely sure a format/bitrate is transparent to you, individual testing is needed.

I have run a number of tests myself (of Opus and other formats) and found general transparency at ~96kbps Opus, lower for some tracks. For those tracks that weren't transparent at that bitrate, the artifacts were generally benign and not that annoying (slightly increased noise levels, mostly).
"common knowledge that it was all slaves"

what? of course there where overseers.
If Bulletin shows hyperlocal "news" based on your actual location without the need to join anything, then there's already added value compared to WhatsApp et al.

As for moderation, could it be possible that they have an AI to weed out the stupid?
It was almost entirely to do with Corbyn (and the energy brought to the party by his leadership campaigns, in the form of new members and new organisations).
It might be worthy of mention that when it comes to operating systems, the last two Unix systems have dropped out of the Top500 and so it is now 100% Linux.
Let's see 10x faster.

About 1/5th the cost as a person:
http://www.johnswope.com/?p=83

And a 20% savings. looks like a 10x margin to me...
"God is no more real than your treasure, priest."

"Perhaps..."
I guess the real story is that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will use X.org by default, rather than Wayland [1]. Canonical "pretending Mir never existed" is just click bait. Personally, I found Unity not half-bad, and am not looking forward to gnome-shell from what little I know, eg. for its wasteful menu-per-window attachment rather than Mac OS style global menus alone.

[1]: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/26/bionic-beaver-18-04-l...
But is it true, though..?
Yes we know. So what? The point is not that Amazon shouldn't try and do this out of the goodness of their hearts, it's that they shouldn't be allowed to do it by federal law.
Google Account Security Checkup
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16240345
Unless the business model looks more like Amazon Prime Video than AWS. And looks exactly that way to me: fixed-rate subscription fees, upselling add-ons, heavy bespoke negotiation with suppliers, etc.

EDIT: Do downvoters care to explain their views?
Yes, the analysis proves 5.51 is impossible, and it's been confirmed that 5.57 is the best possible time through the use of an emulator with preprogrammed inputs, meaning that it plays the game perfectly. Todd Roger's response is that the analysis failed to consider the "human element" and how the console would respond to that.
Interesting point, thanks for sharing. But, anyway:

What incentives do those mirroring nodes have to store regular data blobs and process requests from clients?

Who will decide the privilege to be such a 'mirroring node'. The origin can run several such 'mirroring nodes' and rewrite history on all (some of) them: how would you know who is giving you the truth in case of conflicting information?

I bet if you solve those questions, you will be simulating a blockchain system. Do you agree?
It can work. There is a news portal related to my city. Its filled with local ads. The local news coverage is good enough to ignore ad infestation.
Power and control over enemies.
I suspect the answer is more that Apple refuses to grow its teams beyond a certain size. It's not a lack of money or talent; rather they value a certain way of working (look at all the stuff about collaboration in the new building). But the size of the company and product range has pushed those teams beyond their limits.
Deploying Kubernetes applications with Helm
Also worth pointing out the extensive writeup on Twin Galaxies (the score/records tracking site mentioned in the OP and Kotaku):

http://www.twingalaxies.com/feed_details.php/87/dragster-des...

Contains some interesting insights about the Activision's spotty history of archiving game records. The most surprising thing to me about all of this is how Dragster's creator, David Crane, feels so sure that the record is sound: "I have no doubts, then or now".
TL;DR

Because it's more fun to learn a new programming language than deliver features to users. We're VC financed so no need to get money, also spend it before people talk about profitability, then the good times are over (see Etsy). We also can add Pony to our CV and move on in one year to the next company where we will introduce the next big thing to add to our CVs. Plus 10% more salary! Kaching! #LivingTheLife
I somewhere read that the average worker in Egypt had 3 days of the whole year, which blurs the light between slavery and normal employment.
Kafka is written in Scala, though it exposes a Java interface for ease of use.
You're correct that a profit motive leads for-profit health insurance companies to push back on improper billing and negotiate prices, because whatever profit they are able to eek out goes to its shareholders.

But the same motive applies to co-ops. The member-owners of a co-op don't want their costs to be inflated by improper billing or inflated prices, because if they are able to reduce their expenses, then the member-owners benefit in the form of lower premiums.

In both cases, the shareholders want to get their money's worth, it's just that in the case of a for-profit company, those shareholders are often external investors, but in the case of a cooperative, all shareholders are also members.
Show HN: Tagz – A cross-platform software for using tags in file names
I don't disagree but I also don't see where that was suggested. The OP just pointed out the radical difference between what was preached and what was practiced. This could be seen as a dismissal but it could just as easily be seen as a call to action or just pointing out something amusing.
Exactly, they calculated the best possible time and found out that 5.51 is not even possible.

Todd Rogers however has multiple impossible scores which are still considered "records" even though they can't possibly be obtained, some of them are stupidly obvious, like games in which the score increases in steps of five, yet he has a number not evenly dividable by five and such stuff.

I guess nobody really knows why he still holds these records.
Citizens of poor countries, not necessarily very very poor people themselves[0]. Almost any country has a not-insignificant middle/upper-class that would love to compete on a level playing field with the world.

Which is most obvious with Internet entrepreneurs living in countries without good access to the US/West. Hence the Eastern European example.

[0] I do think you're underestimating smartphone ownership though
If Qualcomm sits around and does nothing. However Qualcomm are competing for the nascent ARM server market with the (incredible IMO) Amberwing, and Qualcomm would still have 50%+ of the mobile market for selling their modems and Snapdragons to fund development.
>The result: a chip powerhouse that could one day threaten the dominance of Qualcomm Inc. and even, eventually, Intel.

If by dominance being the largest Semiconductor company then yes, possibly. But not because Apple continue to grow infinitely, but both competitor are shrinking.

Apple is already close to Intel in terms of processor shipped, and is certainly larger then Intel in terms of CPU.
And when Apple decide to have its own modem, Intel will ship another ~150M less unit.

Apple has roughly 20% of world wide market share. Qualcomm, with the shrinking % of 300M unit modem to Apple, may one day lost all of that when Apple decide to make it themselves. For the other 80%, there is roughly 20% at the bottom that Qualcomm will not compete in. With less then 60% of market, 40% of those are from Samsung, Huawei, BBK, and Xiaomi. Both Samsung and Huawei are planning to use their own SoC in the high end flagship phone, BBK are thinking of making their own as well. And you have Mediatek making gains at the bottom to mid end of the market. All of a sudden Qualcomm has less then 50% of Smartphone market to work with.

If Apple do actually have an team working on Modem, I wonder when will Apple becomes the largest purchaser in Semiconductor.
I think yes, such laws change things a lot.

I have two heuristics that are related to this topic:

1. If something is physically possible and can be done economically, then it is already happening.

2. If a nation state wants you - or your people - gone, then you're done, period. This is a function of state's coordination power in general, and not of any technology or program they may or may not have.

(Heuristic 1. is, incidentally, why I was not in any way surprised by Snowden's revelations. It was obvious that this is happening. Heuristic 2. is why I don't buy the general argument saying "census is bad because the Nazis used census data to target Jews".)

Heuristic 2. tells me that if the state turns fascist, it's game over, and it has little to do with present surveillance and efforts to oppose it. Heuristic 1. tells me that no matter what the law says, militaries and intelligence agencies will keep snooping on everyone. So given all that, what's the change?

The change will be visible when you forget about doom&gloom scenarios (1) and NSA (2). It's about regular abuses of citizens in a stable state, under the rule of law. If the state sets the rules of the game and then breaks them, you have recourse. There are courts. There are media. Careers of politicians and public servants are on the line. Officials will be reluctant to break the rules out of simple fear for their own reputations and career prospects.

So this is not a perfect win. But there will never be a perfect win, there will be no end of electronic surveillance, as long as we are a technological civilization (see heuristic 1). But it's something to go on, it's a change in the direction of actually achievable balance.
With only 5.1 seconds of input, you could brute force it if you really wanted.
I've always thought this as well. They can more effectively control the population and also get "dirt" on anyone they want. There's pretty much no one on this planet who hasn't said or done something they aren't proud of, don't want public, don't want their spouse to know, is mildly illegal (but which could then be vigorously prosecuted once they are a target), etc. etc.

I think it's for the Donald Trump scenario - if an "outsider" tries to enter the political arena to gain power they can crush that person using all the available tools in their arsenal. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, he was able to combat that because he was already rich and famous. No regular human being could rise to power without the approval of the existing political elite. Mass surveillance is just one tool they use to maintain that power.
> The students were split into two groups — one was assigned to chat with Woebot over two weeks, while the other was directed to read an e-book about depression. Unlike the students in the e-book group, those using Woebot said they saw a significant reduction in their depressive symptoms.

It sounds interesting. It also reminds me of ELIZA[1] a chat bot designed in the 60s to demonstrate the superficiality of human conversation which ended up being a surprisingly effective therapist to its users.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
I think it's probably a vote-winner. From within our tech bubble it's easy to see why this is stupid, but the majority of the UK might look at a newspaper headline such as "May cracks down on terrorism on UK soil" and think Hey, she's actually doing something about all these scary terrorist events I hear about.
Dear God, NO.

Some lunatic will write some possibly underhanded-C-esque/probably just ignorant implementation of some modification which causes apoptosis after some chemical feedback loop.

At the very least, it needs to be understood and administered by licensed professionals. I'm not saying we need full blown-FDA trials spanning years (though there are very good arguments for that), but this can't be a direct to consumer market.
Waymo Launches Its Self-Driving Armada
"we wanted to give something back to the community and have therefore decided to open source it" ;-)
Yep. TalkTalk can't even keep their customers key details secure, and now they are expected to keep browser history as well? It's a joke.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/talktalk-fin...
"I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years"

Really? 40 years ago we didn't have the internet, didn't have videogames, had far far far fewer TV shows/movies/entertainment options. Worse health outcomes, though to a less significant degree I think. Far more access to education and educational content (you can effectively get the equivalent of a degree in almost anything, online, for free). More access to healthier foods.

Middle class families in the US have access to all of the above. Would most of them really go back to a time when they didn't?