skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taxpayer dollars and regulators' attention are rival commodities. There are plenty of monopolistic/oligopolistic companies and industries that merit examination and reform much, much earlier than Amazon because they currently are exploiting their market position (Chicken companies, Monsanto, etc.)

If no mono-/oligopolies existed that were abusing their power, then maybe our government could talk regulation Amazon, but still you'd have to make a strong case.

I think it's a tough sell to have an inefficient entity that does not have to compete in a corporate survival sense (the government) tell a very efficient entity that has seen many similar "monopolies" fall (e.g. microsoft) to act differently.
Except, of course, that the majority of ICOs today are not organized by airlines (as in, businesses with known market prospects), but by random groups of people with sketchy plans, many not even incorporated (as the saying goes "some even have a homepage".)
Raychat customer support and analytics - Iran-Startups
> Umm, well people lie

Yes, like the companies that turn their products into black boxes, and rely on tricked human instincts to write off the magnitude of what the "tiny chip" contains.

It's so weird when the spectre of dishonesty is used to justify more secrecy, when sunlight is the best disinfectant!

Does the checksum of the software match an official one that company has released (and not given notice of deprecation)? If not, then how did the image get into this state? That's a clear indicator of responsibility, but requires a paradigm that reifies the fact that software can be changed.

> Your fellow farmer is killed and his wife sues the tractor company

Anybody can sue anybody at any time, regardless of merit. Bringing up this one possibility is fallacious.

> You're entitled to the end product you purchased, the binary

And yet companies constantly refrain that the end user hasn't purchased the binary, but only a license. Needless to say, this is all based on commercial laws (as opposed to manifest natural laws), and are thus straightforward to change when they're no longer sensible. As far as I'm concerned, copyright should require registering the full source code - the output of a compiler is not a novel creative work!

The product the customer purchased is a tractor, part of its implementation being software. As such, the owner has the right to inspect and repair its functionality and parts. Anything less is dishonest and will hopefully not persist very long given the modern prominence of software.
They won’t have to. The larger rockets planned for mars (bfr) will make payload to orbit even cheaper as it is fully reusable, so only fuel costs.
If the Tulip mania was in fact "a Dutch financial bubble" then it seems to me the story is mostly right. Apparently some aspects like the government stepping in or the Dutch economy suffering may have been embellished a bit, but I've only ever heard those parts from people who claim the story has been embellished.
They are using the Starbucks method and playing the long game. Move into an area, lower prices till the incumbents go out of business then raise prices.
Well, most of the post, but some of the later models were designed to be forward compatible.
Sure lets trust a for profit cooperation. Their motives could be anything really?

I think destroying competition is something wrong. "Trust us completely forever while we ruin your ability to function without us" isn't something anyone should everyone should have to do. The tax breaks offered to them for their new headquarters (that could "pay for themselves" in 10-20 years and will bring "lots of jobs") are insane, and they don't come close to completely controlling all the markets they operate in. I shudder to imagine what they'll look like when they do. But are they abusing anything now? Lets look into their lobbying, their warehouse temporary workers, their deals with the USPS, and what it's like to be one of their delivery drivers. It sucks to work for Amazon.

I know when trying to bring "Amazon Fresh" to NYC, they failed because the only terms they'd offer truck drivers were crazy high risk and low pay and NYC is a big enough market they could collectively resist. That's not going to last forever.

I'm not against innovation, I'm not against your margin being my opportunity, I'm against living in an Amazon controlled world.
It will be interesting to learn about database design in a non-relational environment. I guess you can replicate a relational structure in MongoDB, but then why not use an RDBMS in the first place?

As far as I understand it, MongoDB's claim to fame is a) handling huge amounts of data and b) clustering. Neither of these apply to me, so the only reason to use Mongo would be data that does not match the relational model well. I am still looking for a use case, any use case, that might make a valid excuse to learn it, but so far I have come up empty.

I am a little worried that I am facing a situation somewhat like the one when I tried to learn Lisp. Learning Lisp was very hard for me because I had absorbed the structured programming approach so deeply that the functional part of Lisp programming seemed downright alien to me. At first, at least. So for the time being, I cannot tell with any certainty if problems that are a good match for a document store are just so rare, or if I am just incapable of modeling my data in ways other than the relational model.
An Introduction to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
On the one hand, her account is very inspirational to people who might think that learning physics is out of reach or they're too old to do it. But on the other hand, her case is very out of the ordinary -- I think a lot of us took longer than 1.5 years to get through undergraduate physics.

According to Susan's account, it took her 1.5 years to go from no college-level math to a full college-level physics curriculum. At the school I studied at, the Calc series (I, II, and III) takes 1.5 years. The intro physics (I and II) takes a full year, and the upper physics take at least a year (Mechanics I & II, E&M I&II, Relativity I&II, Quantum I&II, Lab I&II). (And you had to take intro physics before higher-level physics, and most courses had dependencies.)

That's approximately 45 credit hours. If you took 18 credits a semester, that would take at least 2.5 years. And those are all tough courses -- no 3 credit gen ed "filler" courses. Even at 15 credits a semester, that's still 3 years.

So, to get through all of those courses in 1.5 years would be like learning about 30 credit hours / semester. And add in the physics electives, like thermo, waves, statistical mechanics, quantum field theory, additional math courses, etc... that's a lot on top.

I guess my point is that if Susan's account is discouraging, note that a lot of people take far more than 1.5 years to get through undergraduate physics.
Street ketamine is usually from vets..
The point is that you can't always avoid scenarios with keeping something updated. List of countries is another example.
Your comment reminded me of Chesterton[0].

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11505/11505-h/11505-h.htm#TH...
The MBTI Types When They're 100% Done with You – Astroligion.com
> It's clear that network effects and big bank accounts decrease innovation and competition

Network effects almost by definition often create a better user experience. For example, Facebook has a network effect in that all your friends are there. The reason that’s so powerful is you actually want to join a network where your friends are.

It seems like it hinders competition, but it only does so because it’s a much better user experience.

Very different than, say, Standard Oil where an entire natural resource and distribution line is owned by one company to the extent that it’s literally impossible to compete, then they start screwing you because they can.
Ask HN: Cheap/fast/reliable cyber-cafe for Haiti
I've been wanting to some day set up a cyber cafe in Haiti, with the intent of providing opportunities such as internet careers and education for the people. The requirement is for the user to be able to do more-or-less anything online, but do it for very cheap in locations without stable electricity or fast bandwidth.

I'd set up thin client software such as FreeNX on Android tablets and connect them to an AWS Linux desktop. The tablets would use an OTG cable connected to a powered USB hub, and plug into that hub a physical keyboard and mouse. The hub would charge the tablet.

I've found that 7 inch tablets, when positioned about 30cm from the face, appear to the eyes to be about the same size as a full desktop monitor. Most have the same resolution as a standard monitor. They can run on solar and have internal batteries for running after the sun goes down. Can be wrapped in a bump-resistant water-resistant case with a screen protector. And if they're broken or stolen they're cheap to replace. They can be locked at night in a very small safe bolted to the ground, so security is cheap.

FreeNX reportedly uses 20-100kbps, so several users can share a single connection, and it tolerates higher latency and disconnects.

I would use two cell modems positioned near 2 different towers. A local router near the users can select which modem to use, and a wireless backhaul such as AirFiber connects modems to the router. If one tower goes down, a local admin simply flips a software switch in the router GUI to use the other tower and everyone keeps working. Downtime of less than five minutes.

The local router would lock out browsing to any website and only permit a connection via a VPN connection to the AWS server. So someone couldn't just come along, connect their smartphone to the router, and abuse the bandwidth. They would have to use one of the tablets, and access would be controlled on those.

Any obvious mistakes with this approach?
> It’s launching an airline by pre-selling miles.

If that’s the case, then where does Telegram state what and how much one token can be redeemed for?

An airline “mile” is redeemable in something physical (being flown a mile), but I haven’t seen any information on what I can redeem a Telegram ICO token for (although I may have missed that).

Unless Telegram explicitly allows people to redeem their tokens for some specific quantity of a service, then it does indeed amount to selling a service at an unspecified price.
My experience would disagree. The layout system in Android is much more intuitive to me than CSS. It might depend on how customized you want your ui?
No it is not. The water districts are extremely powerful, and the biggest usage districts are held by agricultural interests. They have staggered elections to stop water board takeovers and ensure that they can shift water costs from usage based to per-meter fees. Captive homeowners in agriculture controlled water districts can end up with $200 a month water bills for a family of four.

Source: Lived in a water district for 7 years with some of the cheapest water in the state (sub $3 a unit) yet a water bill for a family of four with fake grass and small yard of around $180 a month. If we used ZERO water, the bill would have been about $120 in flat fees. We were subsidizing the massive avocado groves and other major agricultural producers in the water district. They brushed off our complaints and the fact that we pointed to neighboring cities with $40 water bills.
With the addendum that it's Class 1 biomedical device software and no one has any real clue about how it works.
That's US street price. On the dark web you can get medical grade for $20 a gram.
jq is a better XPath/XSLT. It's been for a long time now.

(Fair discloure: I'm a jq maintainer.)
It's not, technically.
XHTML was a formally defined HTML subset of XML but it died.
Sqreen wants to become the IFTTT of web app security
> the controversy arising

Could you be more specific? Are you talking about a Hacker News thread or something else?
jq has a community wiki. We really should rewrite the docs at some point and/or add lots of examples, as the language has grown quite a lot.
Fair enough, my point stands though.
I'll correct what I said above; either purpose or effect can be a decisive component of harassment; effect is more commonly used because it is easier to demonstrate, and the chararcterization of Damore’s memo as harassment has consistently been based on the claimed effect of contributing to an “intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment”, not a characterization of purpose.

The regulatory definition is at 29 CFR § 1604.11(a), reading, in relevant part: “(a) Harassment on the basis of sex is a violation of section 703 of title VII. Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when [...] such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.” (Note that while the first sentence refers to harassment on the basis of sex, the second only directly refers to sexual harassment; the same principles, though, are consistently applied to sex/gender-based harassment—and to harassment based on any other characteristic protected against discrimination by Title VII.)

> Otherwise, I can claim that socks and sandals are offending me, and it becomes your problem to modify your attire, not my problem to tolerate it.

That's not the case because the standard applied for job as tile environment harassment is a hybrid objective/subjective standard in which it must be shown both that the victim was actually offended and that a reasonable person in their position would be offended.
Is there demand for a formal spec for jq? Would that lead to additional implementations? Serious question.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. The salary indeed is as a distribution question, and with localized inequality on the rise, this is getting worse every year since around 1973, probably. Beyond that, however, these companies are exchanging humane jobs with rich human interaction for sweatshop/factory/gig jobs.

So as you say, hopefully automation will make all these jobs superfluous in the future. After which, then, the question becomes: So how will those having lost those already shitty jobs fare then? I have my doubts the answer will be "better..."

So yes, I am all for less regulation and state interference overall - if in exchange the world can become a nicer place for the "average Joe" to live in. To reply with your own class of questions: How much more is the landlord's work worth in comparison to his underlings?
Not from Watsi, but I’m curious about this. Is there a link to learn more?
Amazon is a convenience not a monopoly, not even close. They have 4% of the retail market share.
Ummm, in many places in the US, absolutely does the jail charge inmates to stay there.

Find yourself locked up in Macomb Co, MI? You will receive a bill for $60/day for your incarceration as you are released.

Florida State Prison? Be prepared for a "cost of incarceration lien" to be levied by the state at the rate of $50/day for often multi-year sentences.

Such fees are authorized (though not always enforced) in 43 states.

So the analogy is not at all broken.

1. http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/18/news/economy/prison-fees-inm...

2. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34705968

3. https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/paying-your-time-how-...
This is something I've been interested in as well. I have dyscalculia and struggled in school with math and formal notation but have never really had a problem when it comes to understanding code. I wish someone smarter than me would teach stuff like algebra, calculus and statistics in something like javascript.
Do you think we should elect doctors?

Surely doctors should be experts in medicene, and judges should be experts on law. If you're elected you are an expert in being elected.
You don’t need to honor the “premise” of the OS, nor do I think the developers of the OS care which software I prefer to run. Run whatever you’re comfortable with.

If it was such an issue for them, I’m sure they’d remove the GNU packages they pre-build and host for you. The premise of BSD is you don’t have to use the GNU tools. But they give you the choice.
You’re not “trusting” them, you’re just not going against them because they have the potential to do something. Those are quite different. I could murder someone quite easily. Do you put me in jail just in case?

On top of that, I can’t see any power Amazon has that doesn’t evaporate as soon as it’s abused. They have competition from every angle. The only reason they win is because they’re better.
I disagree. Here are a few things about OCaml's ecosystem that are strictly worse than Go's, and which I find to be particularly frustrating:

1. Documentation. It's lacking or spread thinly across the Internet, and it's mostly low quality in my experience.
2. Windows support was dodgy last I checked.
3. Build tooling is byzantine and fragmented
4. Standard libraries
- The official standard library is limited and frustrating
- Other standard libraries are limited and frustrating
- There is more than one standard library
5. Devs seem more interested in adding language features than making it useful to people who want to write real applications

> At least Ocaml has such a great package manager

As long as I'm consuming packages, it's great. Making packages is a nuisance. Go's dependency and distribution tooling isn't pretty, but at least it gets out of my way--`dep` does what I need it to do and I haven't had any problems. Still, both Go and OCaml's package management story is a far cry from Rust's Cargo.

> better compiler

What does this mean? Certainly not "faster" or "produces faster code" or "works better across platforms".

> repl

Granted, but I program in Python professionally and rarely touch the repl. I use it more often as a command line calculator than anything. If I were doing data science, I might feel differently, but for application development I don't miss it.

> allocation profiler

Go has had an (excellent) allocation profiler built into the toolchain for years. Besides, it's much easier to intuit about (and control) allocations in Go than it is in OCaml.

If I could borrow anything into Go from OCaml, it would be generics and sum types. The rest (syntax, runtime, tooling, libraries, etc) I'll leave be.
I didn't like it. It lacked any sort of body or coffee taste. It had a taste as if it was the lightest blonde roast that I'd ever had, but it was supposed to be a medium roast, IIRC. And I love light roasts; My go-to daily consumption is a blonde roast from a local roaster. I couldn't tell you exactly when I had it, I left Santa Barbara a few years ago.
Hmm, still nothing.
Apple made a questionable design decision and people didn't want to play ball. Now they're trying to keep their customers happy (who paid $1k for a phone) by forcing everyone to design for it. Sounds like Apple.
Looking at this makes me want to dig in and find out what locales in the US actually license exotic dancers, because (if cheap enough) it would amuse me to be able to say I was a licensed exotic dancer during Meetups and meet-and-greets.

I also think that such might be amusing to MIT students who pursue the Pirate Certificate.
>does that create a negative outcome despite clearly delivering a better product for customers in the short run

Yes. Nearly by definition the consumer generally benefits in the short run, which frequently contributes to the establishment of the monopoly in the first place.

The crux of antitrust law is concerned with the negative long-term effects, which frequently do lead to customer harm: lack of choice, price gouging, stifled innovation, etc.
What do you mean, leaked? He sent it to the company. Whether or not it was released outside of the company has no bearing on whether it created a hostile environment. In fact, it was "leaked" precisely because it was so offensive.

And what misrepresentation? You're deluding yourself. The memo as written is what created the hostile work environment, not any "misrepresentation".
... and don't forget the OS. It's a deep rabbit hole.
What are the masses switching to?
If social networks weren't walled gardens but had interoperability, it wouldn't matter where your friends were.

Regulation could enforce this, improving user experience while curtailing potential for corporate abuse.
There's no operator because composition and direct sum are implicit in the order of your program words.
In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster
Occam's razor applies. I think there is a much simpler explanation of why your examples are able to "disrupt" the industries you cite -- those founders felt "with the advances made by mankind, this kind of business idea should exist" then they go out to build such a business and with some luck, they manage to succeed.

For every successful Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, there are several competitors (e.g Jean-Louis Gassée/BeOS, Jonathan Bulkeley/B&N and Shai Agassi/Better Place respectively) who failed.

Building a successful business like Apple, Amazon or Tesla is much much harder than you are admitting. Programming ability will only get you so far before the unavoidable laws of economics strikes home.
Ketamine was used to sedate my then two-year-old daughter in the ER when she needed stitches near her lip. The doc didn't want to foul up her face if she thrashed. It was definitely odd. She was awake, but no reaction AT ALL.
I think a good criterium for antitrust applicability (which the article implicitly mentions) is potential for damage: Even if a company doesn't hike prices, cut quality or blocks customers right now, how easy could they do this and how large would the damage to society be?

I think by that metric, Amazon (and others) should ring some alarm bells: If Jeff Bezos woke up tomorrow with an irrational hatred of redheads, he could immediately decide that his company should stop doing business with any redhead and denand that any partner company does the same - or they, too, will be kicked off Amazon. That would probably put redheads at a severe disadvantage in day-to-day activities pretty quickly.

Another thing I haven't seen discussed so far is creating sub-markets within your product. E.g., in the market for smartphone apps, Google and Apple are not large competitors or even monopolists, they are the government. They have full information about each market participant, can subject all participants to arbitrary regulations and instantly sanction players who don't confirm. Except, unlike an elected government, they are not required to justify the regulations, make them fair or even make them completely public.

Im kind of surprised such "sub-markets" seem to be completely unrelated so far.
Doesn't matter, that bright future is an Utopia, as you already correctly derived. So the question becomes, how to avoid the opposite, the dark future of extreme inequality that our world is steering into. Which brings us back on track: Taxing corporations by revenue, not gains, thereby allowing for a better distribution of wealth.
> I live in a small town north of Kansas City, MO that pays for ambulance rides if you can't.

Eh, as a EMS provider, there's a very different logic in play there. In my County's Medic One system, the transport is free, the rationale being that it's already been paid for by property taxes levied specifically to have these services available, and that people believed then being charged for use of the service would be "double-dipping".

While I wouldn't discount the importance of said service, I would dispute that it forms any meaningful form of "public healthcare" (even the private ambulances in the county charge $600+$16/mile, not cheap, but dwarfed the minute you cross the threshold into that ER).
iOS Developers have well known that in order to develop apps for Apple, you play by their rules. Why is this a surprise to anyone?