skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of those things necessarily constitute a monopoly - but when barriers to entry are too high to facilitate other entrants, when they have first dibs on all of the talent, deep lobbying power etc. then it can become monopolistic.

A good example is their commoditization of adjacent economies: they give Android away for free to make sure that there are few competitors who can make a dime there. Apple, the biggest company on the planet, being the only one who can hold a toe in that market.

Similarly as the default search engine on Chrome - Google definitely wants to make sure browsers are 'free' 'open source' etc so they can fuel the dominant entity and make sure the surpluses are captured in search, not elsewhere.

Microsoft would use their monopoly power in one area (OS) and leverage that into monopoly in other areas, i.e. office software.

If GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler were to merge, they would be a monopoly even though the merged entity wouldn't meet any of the criteria you've highlighted.

Google can't necessarily be described in network effects either, but generally the very fact of their market penetration almost proves that there are systematic barriers.

They make gazillions of dollars - so why aren't there gazillions of competitors and tons of choice? Because of those barriers.

And they will keep extending themselves as they see fit to use billions of dollars to either dominate - or remove all surpluses form adjacent industries, thereby leaving the surpluses in their core offer, like search.

If you take a minute to consider why in 'free trade' deals, nations that participate are forbidden from government intervention in local companies. It's not really 'free trade' if for example the government can use tax base from the broader economy to support a strategic players and enable them to 'dump' their product on the market at what would otherwise be below market value. In that context, Google could be described as 'dumping' Android and Chrome on the market in some sense.

It's definitely grey but I think it's reasonable to consider Google as a monopoly.
Similarly, I spent 8 years building research and production trading infrastructure for a trading firm. The quality of data, tools, and trading execution infrastructure produced for these purposes was so far ahead of anything I could access without building my own HFT firm that I resolved to find myself on the other end of their trades as infrequently as humanly possible.

I'm definitely the dumb money in the market, trading on stone age tools by comparison.
Nope, speculation caused it.
>To clarify: I find the UK’s knife ban stupid, and it affects me personally (I often cook at friends’ places and, if these friends have no proper knives, I bring my chef’s knife

There's nothing in UK law that prevents you from doing this. Bring along a cook book and store the knife securely (and keep it in your bag) and you're going to be fine. If you get stopped by the police mention it straightaway and move from there.

The legislation is written broad enough that discretion is possible in cases like this. Where it's going to look funny is when you're stopped with it in a pub at 9pm on a Saturday night.

So yeah I see both sides (I might go for a beer down the local after cooking on the way home with the knife for example), but really there's not much wrong with your knife laws IMO.
"Probiotic bacteria readily colonised the gut of everyone in the second group after antibiotics had cleared the way."
Just look at this graph from June 2018:

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Web_sear...
Adware Doctor is the app
The goal of society should be to maximize employment.
Catatumbo lightning
Those links only show marketing content devised to ask for nore donations. If they've indeed buillt over 1000 sand dams over the past half dozen years then they should have plenty of info demonstrating their effectiveness. However, their sites show nothing.
Yet, on my hotmail account, I'll receive messages that have a From header similar to the following:

From: VlAGRA_&_CIALIS <sale_support0oag@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Both versions are acceptable, particularly outside the US. It is a deliberate misspelling of "lead". https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...
>> Which ideas, if any, are beyond the pale? Is it a mistake to “normalize” some speakers? When?

Untruth. Lies. Total fiction mascaraing as fact. Such things should be denied the dignity of a university podium. People who want to poke holes in climate models are one thing, people who believe the earth is getting warmer due to a giant dragon hiding behind the moon are another. People who believe Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights ... such "alternative facts" deserve no place on a campus dedicated to learning.
"We need to stop making garbage, not try to clean up the flow that we make."

We need both actually. Stopping the manufacture of junk plastic will not cause the oceans to become cleaner. It will just stop them from getting worse. But in order to make the oceans cleaner, you need to actually remove the pollution that is in them.

Hence, we need to do both.
Interesting, will check it out.

Coincidentally, I had come across pyperclip, a Python clipboard module recently, and tried it out here:

pyperclip, a cool Python clipboard module:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/08/pyperclip-cool-python-cl...

That post shows a way to use pyperclip to do a quick word and line count of any text you are working on, such as a blog post or article (as long as it is within the clipboard size limit).
I attended a similar industry event in 2006 called HedgeStock[1], for hedge funds and the various remora fish that feed off them. It was a very strange and quite unpleasant experience. Most of the attendees' firms were severely damaged if not destroyed in 2008.

This seems similar.

Pride does seem to come before a fall.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5059232.stm
I don’t think anti-monopoly laws were intended to prevent the physical enslavement of customers who are begging to stop using a certain project but are forced to continue.

It’s common sense. Sometimes profit-seeking companies amass an amount of power within the market that allows them to do things that are bad for their customers, bad for the market, or bad for society. Because we don’t have modern regulations in this country (sadly, Elizabeth Warren’s efforts in this direction will be thwarted by the corrupt legislators her laws would target), the cult of “delivering value to shareholders” often distorts the behavior of companies in this direction.

I’m not sure about Google, but it’s a totally reasonable to be asking these questions. Whatever term you want to use, Google could have a big enough influence on the market to create outcomes (like AMP!) that are conspicuously shitty for people who use the Internet overall. That’s really important and we should stop them if that’s happening.
Qwant is another competitor in that space, too.
I've recently been thinking of the internet in a way similar to the author...

In the past, what was most visible were a society's actions. The visibility of the thought that informed those actions was either ibscured or available to us only in very limited scope (newspapers, conversations with friends, etc).

Now, the internet makes it so that society's collective thought is more visible than anything else. Speech and conversation is what makes the internet go, but talk is cheap; when people talk on the internet they often let loose streams of consciousness fueled by idealism. Action is necessarily more sober.

Think of all the thoughts that shoot through your mind every single day. The fears, hopes, elations, frustrations... Imagine if everyone you knew had access to all of your thoughts, like when you imagine ramming your car into the asshole who just cut you off on the highway (knowing full well you would never do it), or when someone you're attracted to passes by and your mind wanders off...

This is the internet. It allows us to peer into the dark recesses of society's mind. Of course it seems unhinged. We would all seem a bit unhinged if our innermost thoughts were laid bare for all the world to see.
Well paying someone a $1 a day is a lot cheaper than expensive robot and the infrastructure to maintain that robot.

If cheap labor is available you use that. If you can't expert the work to a developing nation automation might be the next best option. There's no single boogey man to blame.
They argue about reimbursements over Twitter? That seems like a topic for private communication methods. Email bots are also a thing.
That seems better in theory than practice - Apple didn't detect the behavior (though it violates their dev TOS), I would think the users whose browsing data was exfiltrated will not feel especially secure.
Airtel did used to buy equipment indirectly, by paying dollars per capacity (erlang model) and letting the vendor figure out what that involved regarding equipment. But they moved away from this a few years ago to a more traditional model of just buying equipment, along with making some other major changes to the way they buy IT services as well.

I used to do some work at Airtel but I cross checked what I posted here against publicly available information, for example from https://www.zdnet.com/article/airtel-chops-ibm-contract-in-h...
You are free to measure companies any way you want. Investors measure the ROI, but don’t let that stop you.
> Facing competition" as in they are now taking in only 90% of the revenue as opposed to 100%? That's just healthy.

Wrong, that is a loss of 10% market share. In other markets, a drop like that would put you out of business. Valve isn't dead, they're just a bit ill and if they don't go to the doctor and get their head checked, it will kill them.

> It's supposed to be self-organizing, just like the economy in the real word, which doesn't have a "vision" either.

This only works because billions of people participate in the economy. At that scale, it's mathematically probable that someone will do something great. Valve is too small for this to work, they need focus and vision.

> Factorio and Rimworld got popular through Steam.

False. Both of these games reached popularity before they were on steam.

Valve's moat is eroding. Between these games, Fortnite, and other mobile entrants, they are slipping.
This needs to be repeated because it helps to understand the issue.

There are only four (4) search indexes of sufficient size in English, these are Bing, Google, Baidu (Chinese), and Yandex (Russian).

Everything on the internet that calls itself a "search engine" gets its search result data from one of those four indexes. Different front ends provide different features around the results, whether it is privacy enhancement, ad enhancement, Etc.

Google's English language index is generally considered the 'best' based on the depth of the index with respect to its crawl size and that index's ability to provide both good precision and recall.

You can use any search site you want but you will likely be using Google search results. If you feel like you're results aren't quite as good as Google's, and you are in the US, you are probably using Bing. Neither Baidu nor Yandex have US data centers so latency to their indexes is pretty bad for most front end web sites.
Here is the animation explaining how it works. Its amazing how self sufficient the system is.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EAeNdTFHU
I didn't see a value judgement in GP's post, more a highlighting of the conflict between structuring corporations around maximizing shareholder value on one hand and society placing life or death value on full employment on the other.

Where you land on how that conflict should resolve is going to depend on your views.
Some additional context to the #deleteDidi online campaign and the death of 2 passengers, which was missing in the article but important in understanding Didi struggle, not just financially, but with its product and culture: the victims were using the low-cost product inside Didi (akin to UberX) that somehow allows drivers to see would-be passengers' photos and in order to "increase engagement." The driver who murdered the most recent victim has been reported by other passengers for suspicious/inappropriate behaviors before, but was not taken off the platform. This victim just happens to be an attractive flight attendant. This is all to say the product culture within Didi is not just cut-throat and competitive, but borderline amoral--driving growth and engagement at all cost, literally at the expense of their customers.
It is sandboxed from filesystem access, but as soon as it is launched, it asks the user for permission to access their home directory.

Really this is just an indictment of old-school massive deep tree file organisation, and of Unix file permission being too coarse-grained for what are effectively single-user computers.
You can just interpolate translation and orientation each individually (translation using linear interpolation, since it's an affine space, and orientation using SLERP or the matrix exponential and logarithm), and you should get the same thing as dual-quarternion interpolation.
I'm seeing the information where probiotics can significantly delay antibiotic recovery to a normal gut state, but how long does the process take without additional probiotics?

Also the probiotics are rabidly repopulating the gut... would it potentially be better for some gut repopulation to happen faster at the expense of a longer recovery otherwise?

Are these questions that require follow-up research?
Funny that we laugh at a flat-Earther who tries to shoot himself into orbit, but applaud this effort, when both are on equal scientific footing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/03/27/flat-eart...
Can you provide some supporting statements for your point 1(a)?
>Even if that were true, that's not a factor that just suddenly started to have force in the last couple of decades.

What's interesting is that actually it did just start to have force in the last few decades. Milton Friedman was the sharp end of the sword of shareholder value starting in the 70's and the idea quickly found legs of it's own and now dominates the discourse. Your comment is actually proof of it's dominance, it warps even our perception of the history of the idea. Here's a very short introduction:

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Yes I said as much in my comment. There is still opportunity cost to all of these experiments which is especially impactful to a company as small as Valve.
Say that your microbiome was in fine shape before you went on antibiotics for some completely unrelated reason, such as to address an infected finger. Yes, you would want your old microbiome back.

Well, from this study we see that probiotics aren't a way to cancel out that side effect of antibiotics. To my mind that suggests refocusing on the microbiome-disturbing effects of antibiotics.
This project is a borderline scam, as anyone in ocean conservation will tell you. It is completely unpractical and impossible for numerous reasons. It would also devastate ocean ecosystems.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/critics-say-plan-drif...
On the T here in Boston there is an ad that asks for donating your poop!

After a simple Google search, I was able to find something indeed quite similar to what you thought up: https://www.openbiome.org/ -- a "stool" bank is close enough I'd say :)
Colouring is not very universal, and so not generally a good choice. Browsers have taken different approaches to this, two popular ones are:

* Identify TLD registry operators who have a sane approach that prohibits or otherwise is effective for controlling homographs, whitelist their TLDs, default to showing punycode (the A-labels used by the DNS system which are always just ASCII). This has the effect that if your name looks "wrong" that's a problem to take up with your TLD registry. Note that com doesn't have such policies at all, it's a vast sleazy market and it remains interesting to me that huge global brands would rather be in that market, trying to shout over the crowd, than leave it to rot.

* Identify cases like you've described with "confusing" mixtures of scripts and display those as punycode.

Both have problems. The former requires that you effectively police TLD registry operators. Find out what their policies are, check they actually implement those policies effectively, and take action if this changes. The latter requires you figure out how all the world's language communities use different scripts, and how that interacts with Unicode, in order to avoid penalising combinations lots of people want, while still detecting attacks.
The original study might be great, but the article's interpretation is full of FUD
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927802.
Keybase is making crypto more accessible to the common man.
The european law requires services to have tools to not just validate content format, but process and categorize the content itself.

The australian 5 eyes memo says they think they can / should be able to require services to report all of this output directly to them.
I've emailed you with 3 alternative versions based on contradictory advice I've received in the past. Please read those and tell me whether there's a specific position at LittleBits that you think I should rewrite the résumé for.

I won't answer all your objections here, because I fear that it might sound defensive and I don't want to turn a comment thread into a flame war. I do appreciate advice.
>The man was arrested for hate speech

And the hate speech he was convicted for was training his dog to do a "Bellamy salute".
Taxi rides is a 9 figures industry. Customers are willing to pay and they need an app to book their taxi. There is no question about that.

That leaves 8 figures (over $10B) to be distributed between taxi apps (at least 10% fees). It's a simple business that is very profitable.

There will undeniably be multiple competitors and they will vary per region, but that doesn't affect the viability of the market.
This would be a better article with more description of what the author is looking for in a city.
Solutions to ocean trash are well known, we just need to do them.

This absolutely will fail. There is no question about that.

edit:
https://www.kcet.org/redefine/6-reasons-that-floating-ocean-...

https://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-p...

Folks, I do quantitative work in ocean conservation. I know what I am talking about here. Everyone in ocean conservation, including marine engineers, ecologists, etc, consider the Ocean Cleanup project to be misguided at best.
Something about your post made be literally anxious, like to the point of affecting my breathing.
I’d say it’s both. The availability of purportedly cheap labor and tech make it easier for the Senate to push off a real solution. It’s also an interesting bit of bureaucratic trivia, in how the House and Senate approach this issue (and other data problems) in completely different and independent ways.
If you keep trying to start flamewars, or whatever this is, we'll ban the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks for the clarification!

When I first learned about hash tables (in Perl), the book I used said that the iteration order over a hash should never ever be relied upon, and that it could change arbitrarily from one release to the next. If the order mattered, one should use a different approach (get the keys and sort them by whatever criteria), plain and simple. I guess that has sunk in pretty deeply with me. ;-)

The .Net framework provides an OrderedDictionary and a SortedDictionary, both of which make some kind of promise regarding iteration order, but I have never used them myself.
> need random access.

I was thinking quite the opposite, I admit I don't know much about OCaml yet but I was very interested in trying ReasonML. Anyways, I would think you would use an array when you need sequential access and potentially help locality of reference when doing some number crunching? OCaml arrays are random access?
Former Grooveshark engineer here. Somehow I hadn't heard about this project until now. In case the author reads this - feel free to reach out to me if you have questions about how any GS features worked or how we solved certain problems. It's been a while but I will do my best to remember.
I agree. Some of things they have though, I just never thought they would. It can be a little creepy.
> Sending a Tesla on a rocket to Mars was a very expensive PR stunt that was 'out there' but frankly was probably worth it. It's aspirational, quirky, got tons of press coverage.

They would've used a chunk of lead to test the payload capacity, instead Musk sent his car. It didn't cost them anything it otherwise would've to prove Falcon Heavy's lift capacity. It was free PR.
I'm sure someone here would be happy to explain to me why this won't work, but what if we built a recycling center in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
>> If, for example, this year’s model sells for the same dollar price as last year’s but has more features that consumers want, its true price has, in effect, dropped. So government agencies produce statistics showing that output, adjusted for price, has risen.

This is a terrible way to view it. If we pack twice as much on a chip vs last year, did output go up? But price went down by about the same amount. Should we measure output in transistors? Printed die area? Dollar price of chips? Number of man-hours required to produce things? Labor cost?

If Intel spent a bunch of cash on a new fab, made circuits with twice as many transistors, reduced prices on the old model and sold the new ones at the old price, then sold the same number as last year, did "output" really change? If yo u think it did, then I ask if it changed in any way that is meaningful to economic measures - it didn't change GDP, it didn't change cost or amount of labor, it didn't even change the companies profits.
So much this. First-Party Isolate is an amazeballs feature and gets so little attention.