skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Companies over countries" on it's own might be defensible, but combined with

watching Mark Zuckerberg raise his fist with a slight smile and say, “Domination!” as a way of closing out our weekly Friday all-hands meeting

suggests a dystopian future.
What issues do you see with this architecture (DevOps)?
Let's be honest, even in the public cloud there are very few orgs that can survive regional failures and most people solve locality through CDN's for content delivery which means a private datacenter isn't really that different from public cloud for most orgs. Also, when when orgs move to the cloud they don't fire their networking team, they still have deskopts/laptops/servers/security devices/printers and large lans/wans to connect / peer already and these teams could staff up for private datacenter without really adding additional costs that aren't already incurred as part of doing business anyway. Our private datacenter is a few thousand servers leased space in a colo and we have one "datacenter dude" who handles hardware issues and our network team spends 90% of their time still on corporate infra vs actual supports with colo space. One can take some up front engineering/planning costs to scope out a private datacenter for about the same cost as it is to scope/plan VPC's and peering/connectivity/vpn services.
I referred to "any of the large cloud providers" because they're all US companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr). Not sure if the case would've been very different if it had been for data of a foreign citizen. But from what I read, the fact that Microsoft had sole control of the data was important, and that would apply to EU citizens as well. But that might change under the Cloud Act.
> " A country or federal state is just a company with a monopoly over law in a certain geographical region. Facebook's "monopoly" is at least subject to the whim of the market"

Some countries are at least subject to the "whim" of democracy.
This isn’t such an obvious decision. Running your own datacenter is difficult. Besides racking and stacking, you need to deal with power and cooling. Most likely you will outsource all of this to a collocations management services initially, which becomes your overhead just like AWS/Google. But they have economies of scale, in addition, they have expertise in managing all of this equipment with very high reliability. They also have tons of spare capacity (elastic) that are at your disposal, you’ll lose this in your own datacenter.

On top of that you need to hire specialists, and 24/7 noc teams, for making sure your site is always up. And it’s not just one, you need a minimum of two, geographically separated so that they are not effected by the same fire, earthquake, power outage from ice/wind/electrical storms.

At the end of the day, You need to beat AWS’ profit margin, and you still would have a huge amount of difficulty being able to match the uptime that you get when you’re so easily able to distribute services across regions and availability zones that are resilient to all the real world problems listed above. And all of those do happen.

Even for the largest of companies, I’m not sure it makes sense to compete with these services except in the most niche of markets (like dropbox and storage).
Everything you'd have to pay for, Amazon or Google has to pay for for you... plus profit margin. At Netflix scale, it's almost impossible for someone else's cloud to be cheaper than running your own, and hiring the necessary staff and acquiring the necessary space and hardware to do so.

I honestly have to wonder if the level of Amazon's discount for Netflix is absurd to the tune of "we lose money doing this" just to retain them. AWS may need Netflix, to make serving it's smaller clients economically viable, more than Netflix needs AWS.
Thanks for this pointer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini

"Pāṇini's work became known in 19th-century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pāṇini. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson."
>A country or federal state is just a company with a monopoly over law in a certain geographical region. Facebook's "monopoly" is at least subject to the whim of the market, as the Delete Facebook campaign shows.

Not really. In countries with representative government not only does that state have a monopoly on law/force but all people are granted an equal say in the state. The market may be good at some things but would you desire a governmental system where the rich having more power than the poor was baked into the system? [0] I think most would resist that.

>We can all opt out of Facebook. Thankfully many have. But NSA surveillance is involuntary.

Well actually we can't. We've found out recently that Facebook tracks even non-users. Besides you could go so far as to say that you can opt out of NSA surveillance by rejecting email and cell phones. Even if your work requires an email and a business phone you're certainly not required to share personal information over them. So what makes surveillance of your private emails more involuntary than surveillance of your private FB messages?

>Why are we more worried about a voluntary and foreseeable risk than an involuntary rights violation?

I think if you went around and asked regular people with Facebook accounts whether they voluntarily gave fine detail location data and browsing histories to Facebook they would reject that. Certainly they would reject foreseeability.

Further I'm not sure you can even call rule by market regime more voluntary than rule by representative government. Both require loads of coercion.

[0] I'm aware that our own representative democracies have been corroded by the effects of wealth but there is at least a path towards eliminating that influence. In a market system there isn't, it's the core feature of the market.
This is not something new. It's been an issue in international legal frameworks since countries had laws.

Here's a decent overview: https://columbialawreview.org/content/international-comity-i...

The critical thing to realize is that countries are not bound by other countries' laws, only by agreements they make with each other (or ones which are militarily forced on them).

Given that this flies in the face of the traditional US approach to extraterritoriality, and the EU is implementing GDPR, I'd be very surprised if this weren't heavily circumscribed in the future.
This is the exact reason I don't believe science should be used blindly to affect government policy. It flies in the face of democracy and is subject to falsehoods just like any other human endeavor.
It's a recurring topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Conway%27s%20Law&sort=byDate&d...
Users are the only people who will be able to set limits on Facebook's power, and the only way to do that will be to form some kind of union to organize collective action. Feel like there's a learned helplessness effect, though, that has settled into people.
I very much worry about a heavily regulated internet.

The beauty of tech is how quickly things change and move. In a mere 2 months, Ive completed the entire front end of an app, solo.

The moment a programmer deals with government regulations, you require lawyers, not hobbyists.
The report (not a paper) is actually written for a lay audience and very readable: https://www.nas.org/images/documents/irreproducibility_repor...
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Microsoft pulled out of the music space, they're still selling & renting movies/shows and content services are a core feature of azure. Netflix uses its own POPS for of its content delivery.
> Am I alone in thinking this isn't heresy? A country or federal state is just a company with a monopoly over law in a certain geographical region.

A nation state is backed by armies, monetary obligations, and the need to co-operate with other nation states in each others' best interests (optimally).

In order to protect its citizens and monetary interests and obligations most modern, well-functioning markets are regulated by these nation states.

Facebook doesn't care about users, laws, and lacks any sense of moral or ethical standards.

While I enjoy the benefits of being able to freely start a business I believe that a well-functioning market requires guidance and planning from broader, more conservative social structures in order to benefit everyone.
That's a good distinction. CoLo providers are pretty reasonably priced and most of the larger ones are good at what they do.

There's a HUGE scale difference between a CoLo and your own -- as soon as you start having to negotiate diesel supply contracts yourself things get crazy fast.
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I'm using it in Sweden and GnuCash already has a BAS-12 account template built in. It's pretty much complete and there is no reason to require BAS-17.

I recently started using it so I actually have one unanswered question. Was going to connect to their IRC to find out.

The num column seems to be manual and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a globally unique value or just a sequence for each transaction (verification) you make.

Sorry if I'm talking out of my ass but I don't know the correct business english to use in these circumstances.
This is a water is wet conclusion.

The whole point of Dodd-Frank was to reduce the overall level of risk in the lending market. There cannot but be a decrease in small and medium sized business loans and in increase in large enterprise loans. Larger enterprises have more capital and a greater market share, and thus a lower lending risk.
Facebook workers’ median pay tops $240,000
not sure what you're getting at. are you saying meta analysis is more important than individual studies? but if a large % of your studies in the meta analysis can't be reproduced, what faith do you have in the meta analysis at all?
Seaborg Technologies (LFTR) invested heavily in by Unity founder
You don't have to be Netflix to get AWS, GCP and MS to play against each on pricing. I've seen a number of my clients build a prototype on each platforms, and then use it to make final decision. Part of that final decision is having the cloud vendors compete on price.

I personally haven't seen any massive price breaks, but there definitely is room the margins.
Adolf used to be a quite common name (1%-2% of population) and it was popular in many countries e.g. Sweden including the Gustav Adolf line of kings, Netherlands, Adolphe in France, Adolfo in Spain and Portugal, etc.

Joseph has a solid anchor as a biblical name, though, and Stalin wasn't condemned nearly as much as Hitler was.
Not even that, but because Amazon has a history of not playing nice!
The government is attempting to do its function and protect the populace.

These companies have done things which violate the government's rules.

Imagine a bug where you fix it incorrectly and it spawns Two more bugs. That is what is going on here, and being discussed in this post.

How should technology companies work with governments when both:

A- deployment of their tech is most likely to violate the law, and

B- the Market Opportunity is most likely to be spoiled by a competitor deploying first

What should that company do? Break things and ask for forgiveness? Budget for lawsuits and ship first? Or adhere to the law, working with the system?
EU to force tech firms to hand over terror suspects' messages
I was probably being too snarky. I admit I haven't had Domino's in a while. I can't get delivery and I haven't bothered to seek them out given a couple of local alternatives that I like. As the article says, they did reformulate their pizza at one point.
Well, I suppose the moral of the story is that if you want to be seen as the only actor able to address a specific issue, the most effective tack is ruthlessly depict the motives of the opposing actors as corrupt and thoroughly tribalize it until you have a faction that will distrust any effort others make regardless of its merits.

Then you're the only one that can make an effort to solve the problem. Neat.

Maybe someone else besides Nixon could totally have done what he did diplomatically?

> If Obama had done this the Republicans would have thrown a total fit.

It's an interesting exercise to consider what specific hypotheses for which the conditional didn't evaluate true.
Yes it does, but a little goes a looooong way to Google.

I've also been starting to notice that having custom HTML / CSS is boosting things more than before for smaller sites.

Also, even if using JS for SPAs doesn't matter to Google there is a reasonable long tail of other web crawlers that may or may not be helpful to your ends and you'd be surprised at how many of them just use mechanize or nokogiri instead of something more robust. Basically it comes down to cost, last time I was in the custom crawler trade it was around 50x more expensive to do things with a virtual dom than it was to either straight parse the HTML or figure out the main API calls JS was making from the browser that actually had the data I needed and just run those.
Isn't it better to be in bed with your competitor so as to have a solid claim against being declared a monopoly?
Facial recognition tech catches fugitive in huge crowd in China
Easy -- U.S. citizens don't care about who their government spies on/if the spies get hacked. But the notion of some Russian/North Korean/Chinese/Choose-Your-Favorite-Bad-Guy hacker messing with your money? Unacceptable!
Hey might I ask you about the num column in the BAS account template?

Are you supposed to keep that globally unique or just for each verification you log? Because if it's only a local sequence for each verification you make then there's bound to be overlap between account views.

And if it's globally unique then I'd like GnuCash to automatically increment it.
Thanks for that link! Never seen that before.
How do you do it on the side? Isn't it a very dynamic, very competitive field, so it requires a lot to get good results?
My personal setup for tracking finances (not taxes, just expenses and incomes) is:

- Expense IQ (Android)

- Google Sheets

I'll take a look into this one, maybe I can replace GSheets with it, or get something extra from it.
Your comments includes a logical non-sequitur. You have to prove that those numbers are sufficient, large absolute numbers don't necessarily mean anything in isolation. I'm not sure how to do that, but just pointing to large numbers doesn't make an argument.
It's mostly Go/Java.
> I was one of the first U.S. journalists to report extensively on the St. Petersburg-based “troll farm,”

> I agree with my colleague Masha Gessen that the whole issue has been blown out of proportion. ... if I could do it all over again, I would have highlighted just how inept and haphazard those attempts were. That the Agency is now widely seen as a savvy, efficient manipulator of American public opinion is, in no small part, the fault of experts. They may derive their authority from perceived neutrality, but in reality they—we—have interests, just like everyone else. And, when it comes to the Trump-Russia story, those interests are often best served by fuelling the fear of Kremlin meddling.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-...
Here's the thing: there should be rioting. But there isn't.
I don't know if it really counts, but I used RNGLR for the programming language I've been working on, and have been planning on replacing it with a GLL version in a bit. RNGLR was fairly complicated, and I did find the paper a bit hard to read, which might have limited its spread somewhat. When messing with the syntax for my language, it was nice to only have to worry about if my grammar was ambiguous rather than weather it would fit into LL, LR or LALR, and made it easy to change syntax very quickly without changing any actual code.
My cell bill is about $100/mo. I'm not one of the "gotta have the hot new device every release" folks, but... that's a baseline of $1200/yr without considering device prices.
Ummm... You put your furniture on the curb or your trash, then accuse someone for stealing it? If it's private it shouldn't be on the curb. Anything on the curb is considered public. Clicking a picture of anything on your curb is also considered public. If you wanted to keep it a secret, you should have bought a box and kept it in the locker.

Edit: after few days you realize that the trash on your curb shouldn't have been there. Then you raid the trash company because your brother is a cop.
Of course, everyone but you is being manipulated.
I completely agree. I jokingly tell everyone I know using AWS to "not use us-east1" and that they need to use another region not just AZs...and they always laugh and say "you were right" with us-east goes down.

At least from my view, there's a difference in backbone versus corporate space networking, but you're right, most everyone won't ever realize any savings from that side of things.
How often is a study even repeated in the course of normal scientific research? I think most studies are focused on expanding the research and therefore knowledge about the science being studied. Accepting previous studies as fact is dangerous and could easily lead to a house of cards scenario. I think this is especially true in the very specific, niche studies that are common in today's highly competitive graduate student and publish or die research landscape.
Ha... there are def many things they've been involved in that were questionable from that perspective, but I'd still put that under the domain of business practices.

I guess my take is overall they earned high marks from the dev community despite whatever misses they may have had over the years.
Lysenkoism happens in the American and European scientific establishments as well. As an example I would suggest Ancel Keys and the cholesterol hypothesis of heart disease.
Nothing wrong with taking the bus in certain cases. I used one last time from the Ginza area. It was either being compacted in peak hours Tokyo Metro, or walking to a nearby hotel and waiting for a bus in the lobby. The choice was clear and I don't regret it.
I mean, this is still a good thing, since it charts a map of decidedly grey areas, where information may always be ambiguous, and useful information needs to be sussed out carefully.

It's better than presumptively assuming that "Science" is an infallible always black-and-white.
> (on which they already get a huge discount)

just wondering, how huge (as a percentage) that discount is?
Also, a book published in 1972, _Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters_.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59
I wouldn't say the Russian government cares a lot about its main players, like Chinese do.
Actually, they've spent millions building Sputnik — a government owned search engine that nobody used.

If they were just being protectionist, I'd be able to understand them in some way. But it's deeper.
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I think this article doesn't cover the actual problem. Majority of the people who work for the IRS are above 45 years old. We're looking at a pick around 50-55 years old. So if they change their system, they might have to get rid of a lot people at the same time. Which they can't or if they could, it would cost them way more than just electronics and electricity.

source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-age-of-people-work...
Wow. That's larger than the budget of many US states... let that sink in for a minute.
I wonder how this works in practice - would they have high-magnification cameras raster-scanning the crowds and supplying the images to a facial recognition model?
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Given that Azure and AWS now have/will have regions certified for National Security (AKA classified) workloads, absolutely. (Disclaimer- I work for a major cloud service provider). But when trying to replace a super high profile, monolithic, contentious government system like this your problems are going to be much deeper than what infrastructure/platform to pick. This is project where, fundamentally, a large part of the organizations board (in other words the further right wing representatives in congress) are basically opposed the entire mission of tax collection. The tax code (which is basically the requirements doc) is 16,845 pages long (although I don't know how much of that is individual income tax related). That's before for all the analytics, reporting, interfaces, and other add on's that the design committees take on.

I can almost assure you that's the MASSIVE requirements tome they dev team is dealing with. They'll probably try to break things up and do things in an agile way. They may even have all the trappings of Scrum up to a Scrum of Scrums organization, but my guess is that the executive teams in charge are going to have a hard time coping with
anything besides good old waterfall style implementation and can't fathom releasing the system in small parts (and with the ancient monolith in place it may be very difficult to so anyways.)

On top of all that, this system WILL be the subject of multiple lawsuits, even if it behaves exactly the same as the old system- people love suing about their tax bill. This causes all sorts of hand wringing and worry from the executive team, seemingly crazy refusal to change away "from the way we've always done it", and countless review meetings.

Finally the very existence of the IRS is treated with distaste by large number of members of congress, who will drag any flaws in the system up in front of committee and pillory everyone involved.

Given the project context, it'll be a real achievement to get it updated at all. So long as they are able to break up the monolith, it doesn't really matter what it targets at the start, at least there becomes a hope it can get moved later.
Seconded.

They run their own TLD's .design, .ink and .wiki [1] so these guys really know their stuff. Support is not 24/7, but usual office hours, but those who pick up your phone/email REALLY know what they are talking. Plus really cheap domains, they mentioned somewhere that they are aiming for $1 mark-up for all TLD's.

[1]: http://toplevel.design/
It's a position paper from a conservative think tank and needs to be treated as such.
The cloud doesn't really have economies of scale unless your workloads scale opposite of pricing - which they very rarely do. For small shops, sure, but for the example of 500 instances running - you could lease space and grow with physical servers at a better economic scale. If you only need 500 servers for 1 busy season and can drop back down to 100 then stay in the cloud. If you need 500 always running instances and your growth is 20% year over year, i can almost guarantee a good colo will be cheaper and faster if you use the same automation and configuration as code philosophies in private dc as you would in public cloud. Puppet/foreman/cobbler/ansible/chef all work great in private DC
Who is the strongest proponent of using science blindly to affect government policy? What are their main arguments, and how do you disagree?
I'm on a team that's distributed half-way around the world, and everyone is remote. It works fine. None of our problems have had anything to do with remoteness. Everyone just needs to be present and responsive during core hours.
Firstly: not very new. Hasn't Netflix been at this for a long time?

Secondly, everyone should be checking. Not only is Google doing a lot of subsidization, but their services are really really good. My current employer ended up being unable to use them but it's I acutely regret every day I'm forced to build out things Google already has or deal with Amazon's frustratingly antiquated ELB infrastructure.
If we don't use science to make decisions, what are we supposed to use? Gut instinct?

Of course science is imperfect, but it tends towards truth over time, whereas dogma and populism have no way of correcting mistakes that isn't just as likely to introduce new ones.