skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, so I watched it all happen.

Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew because its stuff worked better than the competition's.

Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search algorithms are so bloody complicated. And because SEO warfare is so intense. Google can just claim that any discrimination is just collateral damage.

> Google is the gatekeeper for-- for the World Wide Web, for the internet as we know it.'

Sad but true. So other than DDG, are there any good privacy-friendly search services? Startpage seems to just repackage Google. Also, are there any search services that are less censored than Google?

> [Google] denied it was a monopoly in search or search advertising, citing many competitors including Amazon and Facebook.

That's a joke, right?
August 1, 2003, to be exact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
I forgot where I read it, but I though Moviepass's ability to geolocate and push money onto a credit card was considered a good idea and could sold.
Behemoth is actually a Hebrew word.
I don't think that's the case at all. Lincoln, Nebraska. Population 250,000. My neighbors would watch my kids if they happen to be out playing by themselves. I'd do the same for them. No police involved. :) There's even modern medical care and grocery stores here. ;)

Hillary Clinton won this county (Lancaster). She won Douglas county too (where Omaha is).

It's nice.
Tried hosting my email too. Not worth the hassle. Too much work to set it up, then to keep your domain or your IP out of blacklists, to take care of your reputation, etc.

You can host your own email just like you can generate your own electricity. It's definitely worth it for other people and we definitely need more people that self host to keep email an open standard, but personally I've got better things to do.
Well so far it's a setup where the broadcaster is an iPhone and the listeners are iPhones as well. Strictly one-way. Using the default iOS and WebRTC libraries. The critical factor is that all listeners get the same data at the same time with as little latency as possible. I have been experimenting with a one-to-many setup using Janus, but I'm not sure how well that will scale up.
It is technically true in some sense, but only if you use a very broad meaning for "relationship". In particular, Hitler and the German people were in a parasocial relationship, not any real human connection. I think it's also incorrect in anything other than a technical sense to call it a relationship when it's rooted in manipulation and deception.
Only if the MoviePass customers actually buy concessions. One of their issues with trying to leverage smaller theaters is that MoviePass customers didn't purchase sufficient concessions to justify cutting MoviePass in on any of the theaters' revenue streams.
I'm not familiar with Fastmail - do you find it comparable in terms of usability to say, Google Calendar?

I'm interested in switching away but nothing I've found beats Gsuite in terms of ease of use, and paying for Gsuite for my domain means I don't have my data pawed over like plain gmail accounts are.
my personal situation is: 45yo, just back to the corporate world after bankrupting my own consultancy company ( i shot myself on the foot with the tax and labor laws ) as a senior java developer.
I fly circles around my 20-something teammates, and also around the tech team from our current client... became the de facto tech leader without even trying. Bad thing is, now i have more responsabilities than i bargained for, and dont't have that "workdays are just payed vacations" feeling anymore.
Exactly. I really don't understand why people try and muddy the waters around Google products. I'm not forced to use Google; Google products are just damn good.

Having a monopoly in a market due to the fact that your product is just that good isn't a bad thing, and punishing companies for being successful sets an awful precedent (which is why breaking up Google isn't going to happen). From search, maps, email, YouTube, and to photos, Google products are widely used because they're completely free (aside from the data collection portion) and they're best in class.

Please don't lie to us and act like Google's monopoly position is hurting the market. I'm sure Google is doing some shady stuff on the edges, but nothing so egregious to warrant antitrust action.
Ah, good thing we’re employing statisticians as beat officers these days! /s

The point is that all of these decisions are unregulated, and complicated systems are being put into the hands of people who have very different professional backgrounds (and incentives) to Applied Machine Learning Engineers.

- Just because it’s possible to use a better or more representative data set, it doesn’t mean LE agencies can or will

- Just because a particular confidence interval is more suitable, doesn’t mean it will be used. What if there’s pressure to hit targets? What if a senior cop sits on the sys admin’s desk and tells the them that “We’ve really gotta nail this guy. He’s armed, dangerous, and on the run”.

- What if cops are radioed and told that a man who HQ are 95% sure is the armed killer is in the car/room/office ahead? How will the LEO react and behave when approaching the suspect, based on that information? What if 10k faces from CCTV were put through the system to get that match? What if there are 10 other officers drawing their pistols approaching 95% matches for the same subject at the same time?

These are all difficult questions for statisticians and ethicists to answer. We should not be forcing these decisions on LEOs to deal with in real time.

And I, personally, would prefer to live in a free country without facial recognition cameras pointing at me.

There is no democratic consent for any of this.
This unfortunately is probably the untold goal of 80% of startups around the Bay area that have unsustainable business models.

What I find ethically borderline is that no founders will admit this, they will all pretend their goal is to make it a super successful sustainable company.

As you said, the issue is that founders will usually get a moderate payout (a couple Million$), while even early employees will get almost nothing.
For "orange"? Could you suggest a rhyme?
Just One More Sprint?
> How is that justified as compatible with a fair justice system

It's not. It's also not practiced exactly that way.

There is always a maximum duration for those things, and after that duration secrecy is gone.

Also, before locking somebody's account, the law enforcement people have to get in front of a judge, and make a really good case for why it should happen. Normally judges do not like people asking for unilateral actions (on most places judges are very competent lawyers, and if there is something that lawyers really love is their antagonistic system for decision making).

Money laundering laws are not like anti-terrorism ones.
OK. The linked article was about resource exhaustion, not "hazardous waste". My "100% recyclable" point was that the limiting resources in battery production can be sustainably sourced from old batteries, not that literally every atom was going into a new batter. I mean, one doesn't complain that the plastic housing or IC controllers aren't recyclable.

FWIW, though: Li isn't particularly hazardous.
You might want to try VisiData (https://visidata.org), for visual terminal-based exploration of data. Everyone loves the 'Shift+F' Frequency Table with histogram. Can also do scatter plots, filtering, transformation, and export.

[Disclaimer: I'm the creator of VisiData]
1. No experience with the Linux client but I see another reply answering your question.

2. We have used cloud-based from the beginning and never had issues. Zulip's uptime is fantastic. There may have been one or two minor issues during the five year time period that we've used them.

3. We tried out the Jitsi integration when it was first introduced and it works fine but I don't think anyone at our company uses it since we have Google Apps for Business so everyone just uses Hangouts if we need video / voice.
I'm a native (British) English speaker, and I actually can find it quite hard to communicate with non-native speakers, because they don't understand my accent. It's not particularly strong as British accents go (nothing like Glaswegian or Geordie for example), but it really caused problems when I moved to a research group which was made up of primarily English-as-a-second-language speakers. The other thing I found was that while their speaking ability was good, their written grammar was generally poor; I'm the resident proof reader in each of the places I've worked.

Many of the people spoke what is apparently described as 'Euro-English' which has many borrowed phrases from other languages, or what native English speakers would see as mistakes but which are relatively easy to understand between non-native speakers.
How does splitting Google benefit the consumer? Is the consumer being harmed right now? Are they being price gouged or forced to use inferior products?
No, English is pretty rough in both orthography and phonology: while it's nowhere near as bad as e.g. Chinese, English has a large number of vowel sounds compared to most languages, and several uncommon consonants that many people struggle with if not exposed from birth.Note how many non-native English speakers, no matter what their first language, struggle with dental fricatives ("th").
English: Diverse, comprised of many elements from many languages, lots of little quirks, ability to express the same thing multiple ways, far from perfect but totally dominant.

Javascript: ditto
Is team chat some newfangled thing, or have people just forgotten that this has always been a thing? Ten years ago Sametime and Microsoft Office Communicator had persistent chat rooms that are identical to Slack channels, and they were certainly not the first. The company I work for was founded on a persistent chat product cobbled together in the wake of a startup collapse in the first dotcom bust.
> They could introduce incentives to reduce the number of movies people saw a week?

Since I joined, they pretty much did this by limiting people from seeing a movie more than once. There just aren't that many movies, and nobody really wants to see every movie that's out.

It's pretty frustrating how they sold me a year-long subscription and then immediately started changing what I bought. I'd rather they used some of this borrowed money to refund the remainder of my year.
Suppose that your state government embarks on a program of land reform. And suppose that they institute new/raise existing taxes/restrictions, that cause the value of your Silicon Valley home to go from ~2.2m to something reasonable, like ~200k.

Most economists are in agreement that dramatically increasing the cost of owning property (And, conversely, lowering the market value of existing properties) is one of the answers to the current housing crisis. Once the rules are changed, the free market can figure things out going forward!

Are you going to cheer this process on? It will, after all, greatly improve life for people who don't have millions of dollars to pour into housing.
Racket v7.0
There's a difference between being unique and being authentic, but you are somewhat conflating those terms. People often think they are "special" individuals who are "unique", but it's far less common for people to think of themselves as being authentic. Someone can be totally average yet be exceedingly authentic in their averageness, the opposite being someone who is very unique on the inside but behaves like an average person because of things like blending in.
The sky is falling :-)

But no, we are not talking about the same degree of risk.

You're comparing car rides with BASE jumping.
Atlas Obscura Readers' Favorite Landmark Signs
It can be quite difficult though; we had a Chinese PhD student in our research group and while his coding ability was amazing and everything 'just worked', decoding what he actually meant in many cases was very difficult.
> The police are only supposed to be using this system to narrow down choices, and then have a human sorting out possible matches, which this should do very well.

I'd rephrase that Amazon recommends (Rekomends?) using a CI of 99% for law enforcement, and that it only be one factor in policing.

---

We're getting to a brave new world here, but there is a lot of parallels with the current one. A common trick for reducing speeding tickets is to request things like when the last time the radar was calibrated, and the date of certification of it's operator.

Soon, your lawyer can challenge ML based convictions by requesting the coefficients of the model.

Also, the police will use every trick in the book to get an arrest, so unless it's clearly illegal (and in some cases that's not enough to stop the police), you can't say the "police should..." do anything.
Military and economic domination sounds fair to me. Certainly better than chosen by unelected committee for example.
Thank you for number two. Enduring the (perceived, not necessarily objective) idiocy of cargo culting and reinventing shinier but crappier wheels can be tiring.

On the other hand, there are always amazing new ways to think about code, new languages, new perspectives.

It’s an exciting field.

P.S. if you’re over 40 you owe it to yourself to read Dan Lyon’s Disrupted. He’s also the guy behind Fake Steve Jobs blog.
> AMC doesn’t show 12 different movies in a month

At my local AMC, they currently have 18 movies showing, and pre-sales already running for 10 new movies opening between now and Aug 15th. I think you're either vastly underestimating the number of movies out there, or you haven't been to a theater in a while.
I see the same issue inverted when it comes to abortion; millions of people protesting to make sure you don't kill your child before it's born, but hardly anybody there to help you to raise the child after it's born.
Not if they are providing a better customer experience along the way as well as drawing new customers to the market. "Rent-seeking" implies a desire to simply extract cash without providing any value to anyone.
This is what's left unmentioned in most articles excoriating the rise of English -- the benefits of a lingua franca far outweigh the detriments of English intrusion on other languages and cultures.

Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.
You could say the same about shipping companies, airlines or car companies. Yet, competition is everywhere despite high capital costs. Even space exploration has competition. High capital costs aren’t anti-competitive.
Yes, we use Google Apps to login.
Okay so twitter has been in a "valued based on anticipated growth" state. And other companies can matriculate to a "valued based on reliable dividends" state? This I can understand. Thanks.
I was surprised that such an in-depth article about linguistic dominance had so little to say about Latin. Historically, Latin in Europe seems to have filled a very similar role to that of English today, though not at the same scale perhaps. Even languages that weren't full-on adaptations of Latin have adapted Latin alphabets and words. The modern English we speak today has funny little relics of Latin grammar norms that had been adopted for no apparent reason other than to improve the "status" of English by making it more latinized (things like, not ending sentences in prepositions).

Also, it's interesting that the author proposed
> What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools?

Because I recall actually reading an article about how some schools in France were just now allowing the local language "Occitan" to be taught in some schools again, but historically they were very harsh on not allowing it. The fear back then was that if schools were allowed to teach in languages besides French, that the students would never bother learning French and would not be able to function as citizens. I think they've eased up, but I've seen that China has many of the same concerns about Mandarin adoption, especially in the far west portion.

I'm all for learning weird languages for the heck of it though. It's not like most people can actually recall and use the Spanish or French they learned in high school, so might as well teach something interesting to examine linguistic principles in general. I'm a fan of Esperanto for this because it's so easy, but every language has interesting differences (often with cultural implications) that learners can enjoy. But again, this is coming from a perspective of living in a country with the privilege of having English as the most common native tongue.
"It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave"

Thank you for saying this. It can't be said enough that the Twitter platform is not a public accomodation, and that Twitter needs to make a choice between banning troll and/or abusive accounts and convincing more valuable people to stay on their platform. We seem to be having a collective problem telling the guy with the chemtrail stories that he's the a-hole even though he strongly believes otherwise.

I came across this: http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/self-inflicted-wounds-drag-faceb... and he also said it well:

"But the bottom line is this: once you welcome holocaust deniers onto to your property, because, Hey! Its just their opinion! you have crossed a certain line. Other people — moral, rational, intelligent human beings who prefer reality to the fake ideological insanity these folks live in — they begin to say good-bye, and in increasingly larger numbers. People like Alex Jones who say Sandy Hook never happened, the birthers 9/11 truthers — thats a dinner party I won’t be attending."
Use some of the funding to start their own theater chains?
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/politics/president-donald-tru...

Yes, of saying they "tortured" him, not that they beat him. Like I said, is that totally unreasonable to say? What else would have caused a severe cardiopulmonary event to an otherwise healthy person? There isn't any solid evidence of a suicide attempt. North Korea's official explanation is almost certainly a lie and I don't know what else one can conclude besides coming to a tortured conclusion that North Korea somehow didn't directly cause this man's death under duress in order to assert that Trump must have known this and it was all an elaborate political game of showmanship he was playing.

edit: not trying to be snarky.
Well, I disagree. Partial knowledge and technology can be bad and extremely dangerous.

In the 19th- early 20th century they were treating radioactive substances like they were chew toys (making toys etc). The worst nuclear accident happened near lake Karachay, because they had the technology to create nuclear weapons, but did not understand, or knew the danger and how to manage the waste. (Russians were trying to catch up and create their own arsenal, had acquired fragmented knowledge that were piecing together.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/20/graveyard-ear...
Here's a dumb idea:

Could you drill a tunnel that's basically a chord (line between two points on a circle) that runs through the Earth between two surface locations, put a fully evacuated Hyperloop type system into it, and fire objects into space with maglev acceleration? It would be a full vacuum until the object neared the exit end at which point it would open. Air would rush in of course, but the object would need a heat shield anyway and would have to be traveling many times faster than escape velocity.

I guess it's a variation on gun launch.
"Ethnic cleansing" doesn't mean the same thing as "genocide".

If, say, Poland decided next week to deport everyone with a German surname from the country, that would qualify as ethnic cleansing, even though it is clearly not genocide because no one was killed.
Bell Labs was not a monopoly: it did not prevent operation of other research labs. E.g. the highly successful Xeroc PARC co-existed with them for a decade or two.

Bell the telecom company was a monopoly that financed Bell Labs. Bell Labs did not go down in flames when Bell was partitioned in 1982, and continued providing the world with great achievements.
I feel like that's bordering on anecdote.
It's mildly interesting how you (and the article) use 'Lingua franca' (Latin) and not it's English meaning of 'common language'.

Edit: s/Italian/Latin/
If I am going to search for a business near me, I always prefer a Google maps based solution right there on the search results page, rather than having to navigate to yet another page (say, Yelp's) which is going to nag me to download their app and going to provide a shitty experience otherwise. Continuing along the same example, Yelp is not even going to provide me with all the useful service I might need (like driving directions to that business) and I will have to again navigate back to Google maps.

Google's practice of showing me data from other products (eg. Maps) right there on the search pages is definitely a win for me as a consumer.
> Those are just about the only circumstances in which a third party could bring it offline.

This sounds like a challenge. Does the winner get a bottle of scotch?
s/parents/mothers/ and the answer is yes. My wife gets constant flak about her parenting, but men are graded on a curve: you didn't skip town before your child was born? Awesome!
Random topics are no big deal in Zulip either. You can either a) edit the name of the topic at any time if needed or b) create a new topic as topics are cheap
I wonder what the charge rate is. On one hand is sounds like extortion and a breach of at least human decency if not human rights, but it's possible it's used to reduce congestion to a limited number of terminals and censors and so prevent individuals from monopolizing the termials. Although I would prefer they gave at least X free messages per week.

The extortion of prisoners makes me sick.
The Canary Dies
I think that Google's dominance has almost nothing to do with technology and almost everything to do with customer lock-in.

For me, duckduckgo.com is as good as Google but I still use Google because it's the default search engine for Chrome's address bar - And that's where I do all my searches from these days. If Duckduckgo made their own browser which was of the same quality as Chrome then I would definitely consider using it and switching to Duckduckgo for search as well.
You get the satisfaction of neatly organized maintainable code and teaching many by example :)
I'm not so sure the city was selling them for that much, although I don't know the list price. The artificially limited supply was causing the secondary market to skyrocket. So the stories of $1m medallions were usually rich guys or corporations that already owned a bunch of medallions.

Most of the drivers out there don't own their own medallion, they just pay a lease fee to the medallion owner.
yes, I agree British colonialism is not a sufficient condition for making English the dominant language. that does not invalidate my original statement.
Market share does not equal monopoly. Why aren’t Europeans building better search? It isn’t because of Google, it’s because of the risk-adverse tendencies of investors in Europe. If you pitched a search engine to a Euro-VC, you wouldn’t even get asked for a deck. Europe isn’t very innovation driven: they prefer the 2x rather than the 200x. The proof is simple: just look at the flow of European investment money: rarely do they invest in high-risk, high-reward ventures. While in the US, you can raise money for almost anything.
How about...Nokia? Seimens? SAP?