skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also checked Berkshire Hathaway (1889). It actually goes back to 1839. But does a series of mergers and acquisitions actually count here? The modern form came from Warren Buffett buying shares in it in 1962, and eventually buying them out years later. Buffett's version of the company has pretty much no resemblance to the company he bought out, they aren't at all in the same business, and he mentioned in 2010 that BH was more of a hindrance than a help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway#History

Notably absent from the list are behemoths of the past, like RCA, Kodak, Sears, IBM, Ford, GM, US Steel, Union Pacific, etc.
If you ask a liar if they lied... what do you do with the answer you receive?
Agree, Facebook was always in cahoots with Big Farma.
Thank you for your comments. I have toyed with the idea for years of going into business for myself, but have no ideas. I'm a sysadmin who knows *nix, macOS, Linux, and Windows very well. I can only write in "scripting" languages, as my jobs all the years required only those. I never really branched out into Python (I can read it), or C++, etc.

I have no idea what to do, what to offer, etc. It's funny, because when I'm at work, I don't really have to think too hard about solving a task. I'm generally the "smooth over" guy who fixes the things other people don't really see as issues, but having been in IT for so long, I can see the problems in the distance for a given job, as I've encountered them before. Most people just fly by the seat of their pants, but I love doing things once and well.
Maybe because you're not convincing the average person to use those services anytime soon, and that is who matters.
I might; but that’d have to mean seeing some traction from that money first. They haven’t proven that they’re able to run the sort of business they’re trying to run.
Who says this is a technology that gets used alone?

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate
> "What constructive thing can one say to such a person? This is a serious question."

Probably nothing. If you don't have something constructive to add, don't.
The data speaks for itself. Read it. As for proof that they got special permissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16669576
You can easily disable Google Play Services on ANY Android phone and that is a fact.

>You also seem to be confusing Google’s various services with Google Play Services specifically.

No I'm not. As I stated, Google Play Services can be disabled.
Perhaps there's something to try in that space.
I remember dejanews, but don't remember liking the experience. I remember being very excited when Google acquired them.

I remember being super bummed when bitrot set in. Posts I knew existed just couldn't be found.

As someone who got their first car running by way of Usenet archives (a 69 Beetle), I always loved how well it was archived compared to all the web bulletin boards that fragment so much information as they quickly rot year after year.
Facebook and Why the Walled Garden Won
You're almost right. It would work the first time though, if the military successfully kept the weapon's existence secret till then, and resisted the urge to use it too soon to save it for a pivotal battle. Militaries are well practiced at managing secrets like that.
The Chinese Typewriter: A History
This is really cool, can you explain more how you did this? :)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/best-life-advice

"All good advice is obvious". Repeating obvious things helps you remember that they're true, because there's a surprising number of obvious things we forget on a regular basis.
what issues can be had with Cody'sLab videos? They are completely educational, and in the parts that are dangerous, he clearly warns of it, and also tells you how to do it safely.
The SEC and Virtual Currency Markets
No they did not support it with the Best of Intentions...

I quote the EFF

"While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet or blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-...

I 100% agree with the EFF analysis of the motivations. This is the first battle in a bigger war over free speech, Free Speech has lost this battle, I hope we do not lose the war
> advocating that everyone stop using their services until they change their policy, then using, promoting or creating competing services that don't censor, etc.

except that due to youtube and google's near monopoly on consumers, none of this is going to happen. This is why google can choose to censor (or in fact, do whatever the fuck they want), because they know their customers (i mean products) don't have anywhere else to go to.
Restaurants post signs, "no shirt, no shoes, no service" dry cleaners say, "no ticket, no shirt". Private companies get to define their terms of service, and as a customer, you can boycott their business if you don't like their rules. You don't have freedom of speech on a privately owned streaming platform.
To piggy back on this, Devlin has an excellent free course on Coursera roughly following the textbook.
The statement made in the article:

"In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. "

is ridiculous. There are millions of voters who have never had a Facebook account, and lots more back in 2011. They are handwaving, and this is not data. You have little basis to use qualitative, exaggerative terms like "vastly more" and you also don't know what kinds of access Cambridge Analytica may have had that differs from the data limits you experienced in your own development.
In my startup days, we were working on a proof of concept with a really big bank. Because of their security rules, we couldn't have direct access to their systems - so if we wanted to do something remotely, we would have to start a webex, they would join and share their screen, and give us remote control.

This worked great, except if we wanted to work over the weekend, since if we left the screen alone for more than a few minutes, the screen lock would kick in and we'd lose the session.

Our solution? We purchased a small fan with an oscillation mode, and tied a mouse to it. We then had the fan drag the mouse ever so slightly back and forth whenever we wanted to step away from the remote session. Kept it going for weeks.
You go way back into the 1980's every compiler vendor was trying to drink your milkshake[1] via licensing fees for compilers and libraries.

Two companies that didn't do that were Microsoft, Borland. AT&T was forbidden from selling products outside of Telcom. Which is why Linux and C/C++ succeeded. C succeeded because a competent grad student could port the language to a new computer in a two months.

So you could use Microsofts Basic and C/C++ compilers, Borlands Pascal and C/C++ compilers, or gcc/etc C compilers without the them sharing ownership of your compiled binaries.

[1] Per unit licensing fees. Meaning instead of just charging you a seat license, they wanted a cut of your profit as well. You pay use $20 for every license you sell. I'm not kidding about $20 either.
I drove past the scene yesterday heading northbound. Firetrucks and people were standing around. It looked like all the body panels ahead of the front doors were some distance down the road to the left of the divider. The rest of the car was to the right. Only way I can see that happening is if the car was at an extreme angle and hit sideways.
Thats how all other engineers are working, except software developers, particularly in certain big companies in the US.

It's reckless to not be careful and deeply think of your actions consequences as an engineer, because you yield so much power.
If I'm viewing learning as pointless, I'm forgetting about how learning anything is a practice in learning how to learn.

The need to learn how to learn is so important and poorly taught in society. There's a great online course on the subject here:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
My point (which I'll repeat once and then I'm done) is not that established companies never get disrupted or innovate forever, but to push back against the idea that established companies can't innovate (and that The Innovator's Dilemma contends that disruption is the only way innovation happens), which I took from "Innovation doesn't come from established corporations." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665304) I don't see anything you've added that contradicts that.
The real problem with app permissions is that developers are allowed to even REQUEST permissions that are not necessary for the functioning of their app. This is not just an issue with apps on facebook. It's also an issue with Android apps (and, I presume, iOS apps).

The fact is that the majority of users can not be expected to look out for themselves. People hit install and then hit accept to whatever permissions request pops up. It is like agreeing to the TOS that no one reads.

I tried to download an alarm clock app on Android. It wanted access to virtually everything. Why do you need so much information for a fucking alarm clock? My analog alarm clock doesn't know my name but it still wakes me up each morning.

Platforms (Facebook, Mobile OS's, Desktop OS's) need to reject apps that request unnecessary permissions.
You know what the best way is to make sure that happens? Equate the two for so long that when the gun control lobby eventually wins people fail to give credit to your arguments. My personal opinion -- the current constitutional regime is a historical oddity and unlikely to persist.

Unrestricted access to purchase battlefield weapons like the AR-15, lack of centralized records of gun owner permits, prohibitions on digitizing gun ownership records for criminal investigations, and disallowing research into understanding outbreaks in gun violence are all morally indefensible policies. I don't trust an organization who conflates defense of those policies with fighting mass gun confiscation.
I copyright all music in 12 tet.

I don't care if you make micro tonal music but otherwise..pay me.
I believe s/he was using hyperbole. Their general sentiment is at the least this is a set back for the rights and protection of sex workers.
Farha tasha tweet on Twitter:
u win
Well, not so much if the companies are really willing to.

They can block traffic coming from European IP addresses and require a legal document saying that the customer is not European.
Happy numbers led me to Fortunate numbers, which are Fortunate not because they are well off but because the guy studying them was named Fortune. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunate_number
Fortune conjectured that all Fortunate numbers are prime. I know jack about number theory but isn't that obvious from the density of primes? If there were a composite Fortunate number Fn it couldn't have any factors less than the nth prime number, which means it would have to be greater than the nth prime number squared.
The road to Authoritarian dystopia is paved with "companies taking steps to distance themselves from such a contentious issues"

>>Removing firearms videos from YouTube seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I am sure Gun Rights are also no a pressing issue for you, or you may even be Anti-Gun Ownership by private citizens...

Let me ask you then, would you feel the same if this was an Issue you cared Deeply about. Pick a Social topic the you care about, then image if You Tube censored that topic from their platform.. What is your reaction.

//Edit to add, before you Paint me as some conservative, I am Libertarian. In the words of Austin Peterson: “I want gay couples to be able to protect their marijuana fields with fully automatic rifles"
If that's your interpretation then fine, but at least let the user make their own inference based on what was actually said instead of a heavily edited version.
Email validation by inserting a record into database and rolling back from savepoint if succeeded - Salesforce does not publish their official code/regex and architects pushed it to match it perfectly with the platform. Project was done in 2017 btw.
I must be out of the loop - why exactly?
Seriously, that is pretty impressive. Unix police found you.
Had a server that was overheating badly and the numerous fans just weren’t working. Need to keep it running to transfer all the data to a newer machine. Went to Walmart and bought flexible dryer ducting and duct tape. Vented the AC directly into the case. Got everything transferred without having to pull the backup (which is slow). Never did figure out the fan thing but something must have gone wrong on the motherboard because all the fans were good.
The other suggestions provide great starting places for public speaking. Toastmasters and the like are very good. (Personally I took several college speaking classes, but I have a number of friends who attended toastmasters)

I will add a different idea: Improv Acting classes.

Toastmasters and speech classes gets you comfortable in front of an audience and how to prepare for various forms of presentational public speaking.

Improv gets you comfortable with FAILING in front of people AND recovering from that failure. You learn to think on your feet and keep going. I believe I went from a competent public speaker to a much more engaging speaker due to Improv.
Why go from hacker to hack? I'm taking a break from the corporate software job world and thinking about what to do next, but I need something interesting to keep me busy.

Many people would travel in a time of their lives like that, and I see this as much like that. Its just that this is depth over breadth, that is, exploring my beloved NYC in very fine detail excites me more than exploring the world in almost pointlessly coarse detail...

Making a few extra bucks and making myself useful rather than purely self indulgent (unlike traditional tourism) is a plus also. It's also something that comes with zero schedule commitment and no boss. It also dovetails with a longtime obsession with transportation.

That wasn't the point of my comment of course, just stating where I got this info, but I guess I piqued your curiosity.
I still remember Kottke before he blogged.

His site was hie web design portfolio and called 0sil8 or some such. It was pretty cool, instead of the usual gallery it was a sort of a demo.

One version featured horizontal scrolling. First time I saw that on the web.
I'm just going to keep posting this.

I told Mark about this exact problem in 2005.

https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/975957889767505920

And I warned him about FTC liability if he ignored it.

https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/976331044084264960

After that, we stopped talking.
but that was "megaupload". This is "MEGA". A new service.
that's rich
John Bolton has a mustache ...
What on Earth? My comment takes issue with your claim that Bing is “unlike Google.” Google’s privacy policy explicitly allows them to use queries for advertising, not “unlike Bing.” Why are you trying to paint Microsoft as exceptional here?

> We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.

https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse
Using Google Sheets instead of a proper database brings me nightmares.
Also credit card purchase records.
Oh wow. Yeah, that sort of thing seems to have been so common in ERP software.

My first professional programming job was working on a bespoke ERP and industrial process control suite (written in PowerBuilder). The program had a huge number of sub programs (dynamically loaded modules, each an MDI window accessed using a “program name”, something like a SAP transaction code).

We had a number of background services that would have to run, however writing Windows services in PowerBuilder was anything but easy. And we were reluctant to use anything else - the whole benefit of using a 4GL was a well integrated ORM and report generating functionality.

So we’d implement our background services as regular modules (with their little MDI window) within the main thick client app. Clients would have a number of workstations dedicated to running a single one of these processes. Nothing headless, each outputting it’s status or logs to he connected display. If the power, network or database ever dropped, each of these machines would have to be restarted and have its allocated sub program reopened.

For example, despatch label printing program would monitor a database queue table for new rows, bring up a report associated with the specified despatch note, print the report to the label printer then delete the row.

It seems so hackish but it worked incredibly well. Our clients were all food or paper manufacturers, running 24/7. Operations were rarely disrupted. Have a single screen per function to monitor for status changes was something operators were accustomed to.

This was over a decade ago, but I’ve never worked with a more productive team since. The constraints of the system let us focus on solving business problems. I can’t imagine writing anything of this scale in a modern environment. I’d love to see 4GLs like this make a comeback. The first class GUI, ORM, report generation were a huge productivity boost. And the simple programming language (with a very simple object model) put the focus on problem solving and not API acrobatics.

Simpler times.
Completely agree with you here, but I see it most of the time from another angle: If you're working on a project where you can't just plug in external tooling for certain things, there might be tooling that's rather subpar and slows everybody down. And yet - when you try to convince management that someone should spend a couple of hours bringing them up to snuff the reaction usually is "meh, that already works.", ignoring the manhours you throw away every week because the thing is organized so terribly. You'd think from an expenses standpoint alone it would be pretty easy to decide to "fix" things like this if you do a napkin calculation of how much of a black hole for money the whole situation is...
True. I noticed that, too. And I think that lesson is as important as the "listen to your grunts" message: beware false metrics.

It's a dense passage to be sure.
The really objectionable part is that it contains the term "University", implying it is one in any way.
Maybe that site shouldn't be so shitty that it needs you to explain it.
I thought developing weapons for maiming (which Blinding is) was considered Unethical and Bared by many international treaties...
Blog Promotion on Social Media: If You Write It…They May Not Come
You have little basis to use qualitative, exaggerative terms like "vastly more"

Obama took data from ~200 million people ("the entire US social graph" is unambiguous). The CA incident involves ~50 million profiles. I think a difference of 150 million is "vastly more". That's not exaggeration, that's math. It was wrong in either case, but one did it on a vastly larger scale.

You can sit here splitting hairs and arguing with the specific wording of my comments and the articles backing this up, or you can say "yes, it was wrong in principle" which is what any objective person would do. Democrats and Republicans alike do bad things sometimes. Are you actually trying to defend the actions of any party involved in any of this?
It does make some sense not to trust police all the time. People can not just blindly trust their governments. And the only way to retaliate an oppressive government should not be strictly controlled.
Oh but I'm sure all the shady people honoured the terms and conditions Zuck had, right? In that case, gow can there be any shady people, as Zuck said, they're strict about protecting their users' data! /s
Even if the stigma were removed, I think the years of human evolution which encourages men and women to pair-wise mate for life would make it hard on an emotional level for more people to provide sex as a service. Outside of our biological needs, the health risks would be difficult to manage as well. Perhaps if technology caught up and allowed for an immediate STD screening that would mitigate those risks significantly, and/or if every possible STD was treatable, then sure. There would still be the physical/sexual assault risks to contend with.
> soul tears poking

Ok, you got me. I have no idea what that means.
Right. You comment "i'm sorry?" can mean a lot of things, one of which is that you're not aware of what megaupload was, which is why I added my comment. Granted, you may have intended something else, but there wasn't much to work with and my intent was only to aid in possible miscommunication.

I believe they're worried that the same thing that happened to megaupload will happen to Mega, particularly as Mega is a relaunch of megaupload. I don't know details, but are there reasons to believe that can't happen? For example, differences in how Mega is structured legally or their TOS or limitations on uploads? I don't think it's an unreasonable concern, but like I said, it's not something I know a lot about. If you know more about it, please do share.
CodysLabs is an odd example. Some of the stuff is poorly set up. He's injured himself several times making videos, and it's only luck that he hasn't had a serious injury. He teaches poor habits and bad practice. But, even with all that, he is educational for people with the attention span to watch. He does a minimal amount of "blowing shit up", and even that tends to be small amounts of explosion with lots of explanation.

I think it's weird that Youtube would take that channel down because most people aren't going to have the patience to watch it, and they're not going to copy it.

Compare that to this fucking idiot, who has a huge and young audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeNgIWj8ZM0
The music for our call waiting at my first job, was an old Windows machine blasting music in our server room with a phone on speaker... You ever wonder why music on clal waiting sounds so fuzzy?
Does not matter. My point was not that all DMV or government is great. My point was some is good some is bad. The OP seemed (to me anyway) to be saying it's almost always bad, and that stereotype ("lol government is sooolo inefficient eberyone knows it lol") is in fact a common one. It was worth showing its falsehood, but that doesn't mean the polar opposite is true either.

I've also had good and bad govt agency experiences in other states. I seem to remember the Arkansas "DMV" (they don't even have a real DMV exactly, its duties are or were back then split among a few other agencies) being simple and not particularly frustrating to deal with.

Or does that not count either cause Arkansas is such a similar state to new York? /s
Sounds like a great business opportunity to me. I’m sure someone like pornhub or xvideos would love to charge 9.99 a month to store and allow private video/file sharing.
GET YOUR EX LOVER BACK URGENTLY, WITH URGENT LOVE SPELL THAT GUARANTEE DR MACK IS TRULY THE BEST ONLINE SPELL CASTER EMAIL (DR_MACK@ YAHOO. COM)..