skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now.

Yes, I recall those days intimately. It was hysteria and laughable even then. Breathless magazine articles claiming Microsoft was going to dominate everything, set up toll roads on the Internet, dominate e-commerce, publishing, media, and so on. None of it was even remotely feasible or credible.

The fear that briefly surrounded Microsoft's reign was almost entirely baseless hysteria. Its preeminence and monopoly abuse era lasted for six or seven years. Facebook has been abusing US consumers with its social monopoly for longer than that already, as has Google with its search monopoly (they're at least a decade plus in now). Both Facebook and Google are not only drastically more powerful and wealthy (greater financial resources by at least a factor of 10) than Microsoft in 1995-96, their reach is far beyond anything Microsoft had at that time. World-wide PC sales in 1995 were a whopping 70 million.

Google and Facebook touch nearly all corners of the globe, in real-time, at all times. Billions upon billions of people. Microsoft's reach in 1995-96? Extremely slow in nature, and less than ~150 million people globally.

Ability to throw or bias elections and control global commerce? Microsoft had almost none of that type of power with their operating system, or IE. Extraordinary amounts of commercial activity and referral flow directly through Google and Facebook products/platforms each day. Google's algorithm changes have dramatic effects on businesses. Android is a far larger gatekeeper and toll road than Microsoft could have dreamed of in 1995. YouTube by itself is roughly worth as much as all of Microsoft was in March 1995 (and has dramatically greater influence and reach, along with a monopoly position in what it does), Instagram is worth even more.

And Netscape, Microsoft's most famous 'victim'? (although not the thing that really got them in anti-trust trouble) The notion of building a large business around charging for a consumer browser was a dead-end. Nothing that Chrome or any other free browser wouldn't have put an end to later. Netscape was always going to die, short of pulling off a magic in-flight engine change to enterprise software (which they tried and failed at).

There's no chance Microsoft killed off more competitors in those days than Amazon has. How many small and mid size retailers has Amazon put under as it has added $100+ billion to its retail sales? Given the very low consumer & economic growth of the past decade, the tally would have to be thousands of businesses across the US. There are radically more retail stores of all sizes across the US than software companies. It's impossible for Microsoft to ever compete with the business rival destruction that Amazon must inherently cause as it grows ever larger. How many physical stores will Amazon destroy as it adds its next $100 billion in retail sales? It's not detracting from Walmart's sales, that's not shrinking, so it's coming from everybody else.
What's your expectation? Blizzard released their games (the Blizzard-specific ones) only for PC for ages. Only recently, they released them on console too. Bet what? ALL their fans are pc gamers. All the 10m people that bought diablo 3 on day one are pc gamers.

You know what pc gamers don't like? Pay2win. And any business model that usually runs on mobile that is not buy once (or monthly subscription), because in any other situation, the game is focused on pulling more money for you.

That’s why people feel betrayed by a mobile game.
They created their average customer to be of a specific niche, then they create something that is completely out of that niche. What's your expectation there? Did you ever try to show a ballet instead of a soccer game at the stadium? I bet the problem would be much worse.

And to be fair, I don't care at all (and I stopped being a Blizzard fan long long time ago), I just find ridiculous that people can't understand why the fans are angry.

They created the fans, then created a game that is completely against their fanbase.
47% in 2003 according to https://books.google.com/books?id=v1x2cbHvULAC&pg=PA35&lpg=P...

The state of affairs may have improved in the interim
I don't know about the Japanese, but in Europe where this practice was common (certainly in London) one answer is simply that they tolerated more outbreaks of infectious disease.

It's possible to make it safe through composting, but that requires more time and skill than a typical compost heap. Most composting authorities recommend keeping cat and dog faeces - less dangerous than human waste, but much worse than cow manure - out of the garden compost heap.
urllib.parse.unquote() is unrelated to HTML. It undoes URL-encoding:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html#urllib.p...

In Python ≥ 3.4, you can use html.unescape() to decode HTML entities:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/html.html#html.unescape
... and there's the unhealthy relation. Task bar should look be responsible for .. the task bar, and the explorer should just be a view into the file system. There is zero sane engineering justification for the two to have any relationship whatsoever.
You always create heat but at different efficiency levels. If you create enough heat with your miner to keep your siberian home warm it’s fair to say you’re not being very efficient at computing.

I don’t know if a single system where mutually untrusting parties can find consensus in distributed ledger other than PoW or it’s energy (but not complexity) equivalent PoS. If you do - make a money out of it and be a trillionaire, nobody is stopping you.

So far the only thing that probably works is PoW.
Some ex-colleagues were considering using this a few years ago. They were getting interesting in CQRS, got Greg Young in to give a talk, and came away filled with enthusiasm. I think they ended up doing something incremental on top of the MySQL they already had, rather than switching over to this.

Is there a particular reason this is suddenly exciting again now?
(I'm the author of the post - just woke up and saw this discussion. Hi!)

Will put together a follow-up with some more information, but in summary:
* yeah, no built-ins for graph operations in Spanner other than relational SQL for standard joins
* the key thing that make this work are the ability to easily construct global indexes that aren't sharded by the primary key and reasonably fast joins between them
* it's also helpful that Spanner does a reasonable job of parallelizing queries (e.g. a lot of times we'll get a 15x increase in speed vs. a sequential plan)
* we then do the fan-out across the graph in our Java Spanner client - each distributed SQL index read takes ~10 ms so we can do multiple round trips of graph traversal in the client
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There are (I have reason to believe) plenty of non-VC funded social media apps. Easy to make, and people think they’re going to be as big as Facebook. I think that type of app will still get made, as people who can’t sort out funding are people I don’t expect to know the law.
Minimum wage is nothing more than a privatized social safety net.
I believe I'm one of the "auditors or independent technical experts" this bill refers to (trust me, we don't need Wyden's help getting work), and for the most part the only time we talk to client legal is when we're negotiating our contract. Note also the "if reasonably possible" attached to getting external assessment.
While I get your point, the grandparent is quite correct about why the Spanish Flu doesn't provoke the anxiety that, say, WWII does.

The human psyche is easily made comfortable with bad results if they don't appear to originate in human evil. Even when, as you correctly point out, it actually does.
On the contrary, the file system is an application programming interface (hence its presence in every standard library and kernel).

File explorers, etc. are user interfaces.
Me too, but I think the public perception is that a cia analyst is a much more difficult job
I think you're right. When they bought Instagram, it had less than 20 employees because all they had to do was keep the service running.

I compare that with Twitter at the time had two thousand employees. It makes no sense to me.
That demo was really cool (had the pleasure of seeing it live), and the Kite & Lightning guys are really great at these kinds of hacks. Keep in mind while this setup suits their needs for video-game class animation, the iPhone only supports like 56 blend-shapes (facial expressions), which wouldn't cut it for film.
What if everyone contracts out the data collection to a single party? Only giving the data a larger exposure.

I'm really glad this is coming to light and I hope it passes. It will be very interesting to see how companies try to avoid it, but at first glance, it seems well thought out.
Umm, have you ever lived in USSR? Being born in the 80's doesn't count either.

There absolutely were times when being a few minutes late to work (not during the war either) would get you a long prison sentence at the very least.

Also, it never were "a normal western-sh country". Russia hasn't been, and USSR in toto had no reasons to be either.

Works of marxist "economists" shouldn't even be dignified with a discussion, but is is greatly concerning that there is such a thing as whitewashing of the soviet regime, and that it is considered to be far more acceptable that whitewashing nazis.
But that's precisely because percentages are what matter, right? The Black Death wiped out a big chunk of Europe at the time (25% plus). While the Spanish Flu killed 100M people, the world simply was much larger 600 years later. Only Samoa was as badly hit (in percentage terms) by the flu as all of Europe was by the plague.

Lots of people got sick, and it was a worldwide pandemic, but the black death was much more deadly.
> Programming languages have hardly shown one scintilla of difference from the designs made in the first few years of computing. All significant programming languages are expressively, conceptually, and aesthetically equivalent to Fortran and assembly language.

There's been a hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) war between the from first principles approach people and the hackers since we started writing software.

The from first principles approach people want to treat software as a mathematical discipline, and prove software correctness. They want to tackle problems from the top down, and rely heavily on abstraction. The family of Lisp and ML languages follow this approach.

The hacker approach is to iterate until something works. This is the prevailing method. It treats writing software as a craft or trade over a scientific discipline. Correctness is impossible to reason about, but it's quick, dirty, and gets the job done.

In the early days, from first principles lost because it was slow and time consuming. Errors in correctness were less detrimental, the world had yet to become so reliant on software. Quick and dirty meant companies could hire from a broader pool of people than just trained computer scientists. It made software a commodity.

Now we're entering into a crossing, where the from first principles approach has narrowed the gap of efficiency, and quick and dirty is starting to cost us fortunes. Bugs are now a matter of national security, or cause companies to betray the privacy of billions of people.

Our languages do need to evolve to start looking at problems from a from first principles approach. Correctness is now something we can have alongside speed, and correctness has become more important than ever.

This is why I'm bullish on Rust, a language designed from a from first principles perspective, but as efficient as C++. But I think we have stop excepting the lowest common denominator languages. We have to wean ourselves off easy languages that stop us from reasoning about the correctness of our programs. It's not going to be easy, but the weekly breaches of our privacy and the ongoing cyberwarfare between nation states will push us in the right direction eventually.
I actually signed up for Standard Note yesterday and have been evaluating Todoist due to those privacy concerns.

My SO and I used Wunderlist for a number of years. After my wife noticed a very unexpected advertisement on Facebook, I read the privacy policy. At that point, I didn't feel comfortable putting even basic groceries in anymore.

https://standardnotes.org/
Hmm... I guess division by zero is sort of similar. And imaginary numbers? The wiki article has some good discussion on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...
Hire good developers. Or prove the developer is at fault. Then the developer should be jailed. Developers should be responsible for deploying good code. Software engineers act like they are professionals, want to get paid like they are professionals, want to be treated like they are professionals but don’t want to take on the ethical argument. Maybe they should be required to take ethical exams like other professions.
China is crushing Europe's electric car dreams
It's summed up well by the Joker in the 2nd Christopher Nolan batman movie:

JOKER: You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! I just do things. The mob has plans. The cops have plans. Gordon's got plans. Y'know they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So when I say that you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know I'm telling the truth. It's the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and, uh, look where that got you.

I just did what I do best. I took your little plan, and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets, hmm? You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even when the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger would get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it's all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds!
Because we live in the end stage of our civilization.
I've played around recently with a Redux inspired frontend architecture where the complex, nested reducers are replaced with a single one that simply adds every action to an immutable linked list (i.e, `(state, action) => ({state, action})`. This means all the business logic that would normally live in reducers can be moved over to memoized selectors, which fixes the awkward difference in how reducers and selectors are composed that tend to happen in a typical Redux app, and gets all the declarative benefits of selectors. It makes it easy to load code for new selectors asynchronously (for example when navigating to a new route), and because the state is a long list of every state your app has ever been in, they can "rewind" as far back as they need to sync up correctly with the rest of the app.

What I've realised recently is, this is basically event sourcing. Replace actions with events, selectors with projections, and memoization with snapshots. So this submission is certainly timely and of interest to me. Thanks!
Which makes me wonder, is deodorant something that should be advertised at all?

If your deodorant has some new unique property, etc, then it makes sense to advertise that. And I remember deodorants that did advertise they were careful on the skin, or didn't stain your shirt, were "invisible", longer-lasting, etc.

But if deodorant development has reached a point of stagnation, where no new deodorant tech is being invented and all deodorants are essentially the same, then we're in an interesting economic arrangement.

Macro-economically speaking, is this a company or industry that should keep on growing? The point of capitalism was supposed to be that there was competition in R&D (which brought about progress) and margins (which brought about availability through affordability) and eventually things like the ballpoint pen came to be: ubiquitous products that are extremely cheap and effective at what they do.

You don't see advertisements for the ballpoint pen any more: it's period of R&D and cheapening are long past. The industry is mature, it's done developing and is now producing a steady supply of ballpoint pens for a steady number of employees making a living off of it.

It's just companies today seem addicted to unbound growth and have discovered that R&D and margins aside, they can use advertising to sell more of anything by meddling with emotions.
If you care about the user experience that much, then you should do as others have suggested and just separate the output into two different text areas. If you're concerned about your UI matching the local behavior then it just shouldn't be colorized at all. Dirty hack solutions are incompatible with both goals.
It's a lot easier to toss some dirt over the land and water you polluted. With deregulatory fervor on the rise, it shouldn't be surprising that there's fewer identified sites.
Ecc does work for radiation hardening of storage. You can still get logic upsets in transit, between storage elements.

You can either design your cells around it (high power ) or you can use a variety of redundant logic and monitors.
I’ll be honest about the call option. That doesn’t work for me 99% of the time.
You also pay upfront for subscriptions, although there’s usually a trial which is also a thing with non-subscription apps.
why does curl used stderr over say stdout? (and happy to read any links you have, trying to learn)
Gee,how did women make music before this awful makeup kitshaped audio interface?
You're referring to that specific provision, but again you aren't considering the fact that any business interested in complying will have to have an attorney review the law, and then review all aspects of their business, software implementation, and policies/procedures in order to ensure they are compliant. That's not a requirement of the law, but how else can they ensure that they are compliant?
I mean, if you have a kid because society tells you to have a kid, I'd say the kid is the victim and that the adult made a poor decision under pressure. That's not victimhood, that's a mistake.
Wow, this is very perceptive and could possibly be mitigated. For instance, a lot of the recommendation engines I've looked at use basic actions (like clicks) to determine whether something is worth surfacing.

But if you could to not just clicks but something more material (like time on a page, a purchase or social share) into the mix, I think recommendations would get better. Tying into feedback further removed from the initial action, if it could scale, would help the model as well.
factor #4 in my article: https://medium.com/@jdxcode/12-factor-cli-apps-dd3c227a0e46
"Well, magnetic core memory is the only data storage format that is robust enough to withstand high-radiation environments. Jeri is clearly interested in magnetic logic and memory because it is the only computing platform that will be able to survive the first wave of nuclear blasts that will unavoidably come from the beginning of the third great world war. "

Erm, this premise is factually untrue though. A lot of next generation resistive RAM devices, especially OxRAMs, have been demonstrated to be rather rad hard, making them good candidates for future space electronics platforms or.. all the other attendant apocalyptic scenarios.
For those of you who don't want to store their files on the cloud, try Texts ( http://texts.io ) which natively stores its files in Markdown. It's really awesome and has beaten Sublime as my primary .md editor. Even image embed works in the way you would expect, and the keyboard shortcuts map closely to markdown syntax (for example, Typing "## " will automatically switch formatting to a 2nd level header).
Software projects that can keep the implementation details (and bugs) of their security secret, can make themselves seem much more secure than other, similarly large projects.
Does that really happen? Both CLI and GUI utils help find the correct file name (using Tab and by sorting, respectively). Can someone raise a hand if that happens to them?
Designing people’s Instagram Stories is now a million-dollar business
I know the majority of people I know have at least 2 fb accounts. And then considering bots and other things. I'd imagine then that at least double your quoted amount per real human.

Which is bonkers to me personally considering how little I use it.
Statuscheck: Open-source CLI tool to check cloud services statuses
> Semantically `flatMap` is equivalent to `(comp flatten map)`

With the caveat that `flatten` is recursive and can handle a mix of collections and non-collections, while `mapcat` is non-recursive and every value returned by the mapcatted function must be a collection or nil.

(Identity returns its argument.)

(flatten [1 [2 3] [[4 5 6]]])
> [1 2 3 4 5 6]

(mapcat identity [1 [2 3] [[4 5 6]]])
> IllegalArgumentException Don't know how to create ISeq from: java.lang.Long

(mapcat identity [[1] [2 3] [[4 5 6]]])
> (1 2 3 [4 5 6])

(flatten [nil [1 2 3]])
> (nil 1 2 3)

(mapcat identity [nil [1 2 3]])
> (1 2 3)
Because stdout is used for the output of the program, ie. the stuff downloaded from the URL.
Flatten is a steam-roller and should be used wisely: it recursively flatten a sequential collection. Most of the time this is not what you want. Most of the rest of the time when you think that’s what you want it’s a code smell telling you that the shape of your items has gone out of control. And there’s the rare occurrence where you can really use it.
> I would argue that most scientists in general pursue their field of study in the pursuit of sexy knowledge itself. If there's no wonder to motivate, what are people working towards?

I disagree. My opinion on whether you might get the impression is that you need to argue with "sexy knowledge" in research proposals.
I assume that "gentry" was a typo there, but in fact the massive plush caskets are precisely because of the gentry being lowered into the ground. Once nice caskets became a status symbol, it was considered crass to put your dead relatives in an ecologically-responsible plain wooden box.
1. There is a time value of money so if those costs are high enough, the meager returns can be less than they can get elsewhere and thus they shouldn't do it.

2. There are other ongoing costs to comply with gdpr outside of the server fees such as manpower to comply with gdpr requests, lawyer fees if they get sued and obviously fines if they lose any lawsuit related to it.
Advertising at children should be banned. Parents should consider it no less than predatory, and act accordingly.

Children can't consent to all the psycho-behavioral research and artfully composed subliminal content a modern advertisement delivers. It's creepy that we accept there are adults in offices with whiteboards and Adobe products thinking hard about how to influence and manipulate children.