skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a really interesting book about the NTSB investigation into flight 427 called "The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation". If you like the story behind root cause analysis of engineering failures (and aren't squeamish about plane crashes) its a great read.
We Launched a Startup for $1500
Just added a browsable archive of all of the questions it has generated thus far: https://stackroboflow.com/browse/index.html
I watched the same documentary. They go beyond skepticism into the denial of evidence before their very eyes.

They made a big to-do about purchasing a highly accurate gyroscope to be able to prove their assertions about the flatness of the world.

When their experiment blew up in their faces and confirmed everything they thought to be false, they simply moved on saying [to paraphrase]: we won't stop until we find proof that we're right. Then they followed through a number of other failed experiments (failed in their parlance == proving their theories wrong).

These are not skeptics, as it were. Now a mind that explored these experiments and changed their mind based on the evidence, sure. That said—they're mostly harmless.

That's not what these books were doing, though. They were actively promoting some pretty unhealthy, potentially very dangerous, methods on helpless children.

Pretty clear line to me there.
Can't they just upload all the data somewhere and then any air authority can do as they wish with it?
> e-Voting could make it easier / cheaper to deploy polling stations, collect ballots faster, and potentially to use more complex (but more fair and accurate) voting methods like Ranked Choice or others.

In Australia we use IRV (what you call ranked-choice) and we don't have any forms of electronic voting for federal elections, and the overwhelming majority of votes cast in state elections are paper ballots (which are hand-filled). You don't need e-Voting to solve that problem.
>that don't include being strong armed by google.

What does that mean exactly?

I would think getting more competition would be welcome.
Bakeries can and do curate what cakes they bake. If they don't want to make carrot cake, or anything with fondant decorations, they are free to do so. Which part of that confuses you?
> You just can't win.

You can but it requires identifying and fixing the actual problem instead of trying to cover it in layer after layer of bandaids.

The problem with this issue, as it is with many other issues, isn't the availability of information, it's that a significant portion of the populous lacks the skills necessary to process information and reason about it. It shouldn't be surprising that limiting access to information does nothing to fix this problem, at best it just pushes it out of sight, thus out of mind.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, I had not heard of Scantegrity before and it seems like a really novel approach.
Laws can prevent coercion, at least by major businesses, but another concern is people selling their votes on a black market. Still, to me, the benefits of an open and verifiable voting system would outweigh the downsides.
Amazon sells surgery manuals: https://www.amazon.com/Washington-Manual-Surgery-Lippincott-...

If they carried a surgery manual that told its readers that the proper procedure for a tonsillectomy involved removing the spleen, it would be wrong to sell it.

Refusing to sell a book that tells its readers that autism can be cured by drinking camel milk or bathing in chlorine dioxide is not wrong, it is the correct and moral stance.

If they sold a car repair manual that told its readers the proper way to fix a clogged fuel injector was to stuff bananas into the throttle body, I would expect that Amazon would refuse to sell it once it was brought to their attention.

I don't understand the cries of "censorship!"
I also never filed the serial numbers off replacement parts that I then put into a rudder servo of a large airliner while forgetting to fill out the necessary paperwork.
Ebay offers fast and free shipping on many items with guaranteed dates, usually 2 or 3 days, without having to pay for a prime membership.

I've seen online shipping speeds get a lot faster over the past couple of years so if you have quit than you might be surprised at speed and value if you come back.
TrollTracker: Venezuelan Government-Linked Influence Campaign on Twitter
Myopia is typically genetic but is can treated or cured (to a large degree) in a number of ways. Just because something is genetic doesn't mean that there is not treatment to effectively 'cure' it. The problem with autism is that we know so little about what causes it on bio-mechanical level that medical treatment is well beyond us. That may change in the future, but for now, there is nothing we can do.
I'm a programmer. And I still don't think I'm in a position to verify if something is cryptographically secure. It's quite possible that a client has been built with an extremely subtle backdoor already in mind. One that crypto experts won't find for years.
Again, that's 10 bit but still low dynamic range.

It provides finer gradations to reduce banding, but doesn't change the tone response curve to add more highlight brightness.
> If Amazon removes books deemed to be unscientific, does this mean books have not been removed are deemed to be scientific?

An allegory: I'm currently using Craigslist to look for an apartment in San Francisco. I frequently encounter posts which are obviously scammy. I disregard them because I know that Craigslist can't possibly have the resources to police all its listings.

That said, I still appreciate it when they take the time to remove a scammy post. And I don't by any stretch of the imagination think that the listings I find on Craigslist have been endorsed by Craigslist.

Spot-checking and removing garbage posts from Craigslist (or books from Amazon) may be a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole, but it's still better than letting those platforms turn into the Wild West.
Not unethical in the least.

I don't play many phone games but DNS66 has completely removed every ad from my phone with no hassle (no root required), assuming it reliably works on games it sound simpler than having to approve individual requests.
Would it be surprising to see Google pivot to 5G for the tech solution? I believe their business goal is still to control the access. Anyone see a realistic unit cost analyis for 5G in urban environments at maturity?

On the fiber side, I think cities need to build the infrastructure (and are often in a position to finance via low interest rate bonds etc), and then enable any party to lease/operate/compete on that infrastructure.
I really can't see this happening. I really don't want to see this happen. Wired is robust. I can spit and wireless takes a dive.
Can you guess people based on their wikipedia table of contents?
I love voting by mail, but I don't understand how that's legal since you could just coerce someone that way?

Force them to vote by mail, watch them fill out the ballot (or fill it out for them), and mail it in.
Is it true that a big part of this efficiency is due to using analog signals and not digital? I recall reading that, but it's far from my area of expertise.

Digital has many advantages: a digital Einstein could be replicated perfectly, not so for an analog Einstein.
Doesn't seem to work in Chrome Mobile.
And MrHands[0] was a Boeing engineer. Over extending rods indeed...

0) Nope.
> In many parts of the world, being able to transport fuel to where it's needed is a huge advantage

Just offhand, what % of the new car market would you say those areas represent in the current model year? In 10 years?
Teachers Should Use VR in the Classroom
Python Flask Interview Questions
Aspiration is also the first step to success.
Is there any particular two inch trenches were dug? Was it too expensive? Extra permits?
> I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up

Meanwhile, the United States continues to shut down Nuclear Reactors and prevent modern constructions out of irrational fearmongering.

At least India recognizes the benefits of Nuclear Power...
Spare us the moralizing please.
> Yeah, that's the thing. I will never (except possibly accidentally) click on an ad.

I've noticed more and more dark patterns to trick users into accidentally clicking on an ad. Showing an "x" in the top corner before the ad is allowed to be closed/skipped, for example. I'm not sure whether it's game developers or advertising agencies who are responsible but it's definitely frustrating.
Market cap is only relevant if both companies had a singular focus. Google isn't investing heavily into Google Fiber, and certainly not compared to Comcast.
While Afganistan is called the graveyard of empires, India is where emperors face their first miserable defeat.

There is a book titled "Confessions of an economic Hitman". The book is written by an ex-CIA agent to was an economist and would write a lot of fake reports claiming developing nations can grow much faster only if they invest heavily in infrastructure. Then US would generously offer loans in return of assurance that the contracts will be awarded only to American companies. Fe decades down the line those countries would be left holding the can and debt. This model failed miserably for USA in India because India' growth story after 1990s turned out of be true, India's hunger for infra actually grew. Enron who had a weird misadventure in India eventually had to file for bankruptcy.

While I am happy that India is tripling the nuclear energy capability I am unhappy that American companies are involved. It might end up badly for Indian but more than likely to Americans.
My design uses paper and pen.

Deployment requires mailing ballots out and having places where people can come in to fill them out.

10 million dollars please.
I'll take a paper ballot system with electronic counting, thus something that can be verified, over something that leaves people afraid to vote because it's no longer truly anonymous.

I've been around too many women in abusive relationships to feel comfortable with that approach.
Well, I am one of the developers :-). There is one situation where I do see brushes not being as responsive as they should be and that's on the test Mobile Studio Pro with Windows 10 we got two years ago -- but only if it's not connected to the power supply!
Does anyone have any comments about performance relating to things like load times, animation speed and response to user actions? Also, feel free to contact me directly at dnphilpot (at) gmail.com if you have any other questions, comments or ideas. Cheers David
Building stateful apps using serverless and Postgres
Fair enough, this idea came to me before 2016. Post 2016, in this world where people are ready to commit violence purely based off their judgement of your political beliefs, this is a legitimate concern.
Sloppy PPC Landing Pages Hurt Your Ad Spend. Here’s How to Fix ‘Em
Two of Mark Zuckerberg’s most important executives are leaving Facebook
Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
Regarding "data they're collecting": The list here is based on popularity of search engines in different locales, determined using publicly available data.
Rad can
>We're nowhere near it.

So?

>We don't even have a good idea what it would look like.

This should make you even more worried.
I'm sure you have a lot of interesting things to say about your experiences, and they're welcome here. But your comment upthread was not the way to do this on HN. The ratio of inflammation to information was too high in your comment.

If you'd like to post a longer, thoughtful comment about your experience, that would be fine. Such a comment should include information that people can learn from. If it contains inflammatory details, it should convey them neutrally, rather than in a way that is likely to provoke fiery reactions. That way your post will more likely lead to good conversation, which is what this site is for, rather than angry argument, which it is not.

These considerations grow in importance as a topic becomes more divisive, the way nationalistic topics and especially large ideological topics (e.g. Mao) inevitably are.

In addition to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you might find these links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
Google down March 12

Facebook down March 13

Apple(iCloud) down March 14
When I interned at AT&T a few years ago, I asked a manager I respected whether they were worried about Google Fiber coming in and eating their lunch.

"No", he said. "We'll sue them for every mile of fiber they lay down".

I can understand why they would make that play. It's kind of the only play they have. AT&T and Verizon innovate enough to remain...okay...but they're not exactly Google. The only way they would win is to get dirty and turn fiber laying into Google's very own Stalingrad. And between starting a new, massive, low-margin (by advertising's standards), and capital-intensive business, and keeping salaries high and employees happy, Google chose the latter and bowed out because honestly, dying on this hill isn't a smart move.

I doubt Google wants to do this. Pulling out at this stage, when Fiber hadn't actually provided the "nudge" to internet speeds and throughput that would make Google and Internet companies more powerful, would not place Google at a place of negotiating strength. It makes Google look bad and cements the ISP monopolies' notion that Google pulled out because they physically can't bear the pain and so they remain safe, not because Google chose to, can do this whenever they want, and have the ISPs at their mercy. It probably also burned a few bridges, if there were bridges at all, and makes weighing favors in a (hopefully not long-term) post-net-neutrality world swing towards the other major power players like Amazon or Facebook.
I am not a paying WSJ customer, can anyone provide the text or a link that works?

(Note: Considering being a WSJ customer, but already a NYT customer so...)
How is that better than whatever we have now?
If I understand your question correctly, they used 2" trenches because shallower === faster. However, they were so shallow--and the surfacing material so brittle--that the fibers ended up getting damaged too often. So they corrected with slightly deeper trenches afterwards.
Voting by mail is indeed vulnerable to fraud, as we saw in North Carolina last election.
Is there any technical analysis or reports available online on why the trenches didn't work ?
I've always wondered if we could use our network of roads to bring internet to the doorstep by
laying lines just below the road surface.
1. This is called "Shadow DOM", it is only supported in the latest browsers. wasm is AFAIK slightly more widely compatible.

2. Even if calls from wasm to the browser are as fast as JS, they will still incur overhead above "internal" function calls.
Show HN: Download Instagram Posts by Username or Hashtag
Just a general note to all the former MUDers here, you folks are awesome. MUDs remain a wonderful community to join on the internet with a much higher proportion of friendly creative folk to interact with. This is a bit sappy but whether I played with you or not the time I've spent MUDing is time I'll always treasure.
Git Push to Deploy Serverless Lambdas Using CircleCI
I propose a new kind of Turing Test.

Gather equal numbers of the least intelligible questions from SO (possibly using a metric based on low views/upvotes/comments/answers over long time) and a random selection from stackroboflow.

Present human judges with both sets of questions and ask them to tell the difference.

Having read numerous SO questions from newbie developers whose grasp of English was tenuous at best, I doubt I could tell the difference.

The next step up: the same test, but with mathematics or scientific papers judged by non-experts in the field.

We may actually be there already - I'm not sure.

All of which makes me wonder when we'll reach the point where the bar has been raised so high that the comparison will need to be against the best SO questions and scientific/mathematics papers judged by subject matter experts.
Thanks for that confirmation.
Look up any given commercial airframe and you will see multiple crashes.

Literally every one would have been grounded had the FAA grounded the type after 2 accidents.
> On Monday 11 March 2019, Google SREs were alerted to a significant increase in storage resources for metadata used by the internal blob service. On Tuesday 12 March, to reduce resource usage, SREs made a configuration change which had a side effect of overloading a key part of the system for looking up the location of blob data. The increased load eventually lead to a cascading failure.

Any idea what this means? What kind of configuration change would reduce storage but overload the system? I imagine turning on compression could do that, but I'd expect it would be easy to reverse. (Edit: Maybe it was the cascading failure that made it more serious?)
> But it's worth researching.

Yet they keep pushing for half-baked insecure systems long before any of this research has been finished.
Sure, but just what is "anti-science"?

What Amazon said:

> Mr. Huseman also said in the letter that Amazon had conducted a review of anti-vaccination books and “found categorizations that were not consistent with our customers’ expectations.” The company, he said, was “actively working to resolve this.”

That is, Amazon doesn't want to piss off its customers. So basically they are in fact "indulging populist fervor and the 'wisdom of crowds'".

Edit: Here, Amazon is arguably pulling hazardous books. But I'm reminded how the tobacco industry accused its critics of promoting "junk science" and being "anti-science". As did many firms that were polluting the environment. And those who deny anthropogenic global climate change.
So they are banning terrorists who have possible money laundering schemes. I'm OK with this.
I certainly don't take the medical establishment as infallible, and I can imagine arguing against these recommendations, but FYI the American Association of Pediatricians recommends against allowing a 20mo the sort of screen time necessary to learn ad-skipping through trial and error[0]:

>Among the AAP recommendations:

>For children younger than 18 months, avoid use of screen media other than video-chatting. Parents of children 18 to 24 months of age who want to introduce digital media should choose high-quality programming, and watch it with their children to help them understand what they're seeing.

>For children ages 2 to 5 years, limit screen use to 1 hour per day of high-quality programs. Parents should co-view media with children to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to the world around them.

[0]: https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages...
But why the insistence on taxing land at it's full value while ignoring what's on the land? High taxes on just the land force me to sell and to improve the property. High taxes on just the house can force me to not improve. Neither seems ideal. What would be ideal to me is a good balance that rewards improvements without punishing those who don't want improvements. Especially if the owner lives there.
I don't know the exact answer to that, but "not much" in comparison to the time to send the bytes over the network. The actual contents are encrypted using AES which often has built-in instructions on modern processors and is thus very fast. The vast majority of the time is uploading time here.

Tahoe does use "convergent encryption" (basically, the key is based on the contents) so that the same file encrypted by the same client results in the same ciphertext (and thus, doesn't need to be re-uploaded).

I believe that only happens at the "capability" (i.e. file) level, though, not each chunk. So, if you had a directory of 10 files each 100MB and changed one, you'd only have to upload the new directory-descriptor and the one changed file -- but if you change a few bytes of a 1GB file, you'd have to upload all the ciphertext for that file again.
They were copying a Germen technique (curb trenching) but trying to cut costs even further[0]. Google called it an experiment.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wisrs03EkDM
"And 50% of e-commerce."

That sounds like a monopoly.

Esty got the kiss of death. Basically, the products are mass produced in China.

(I'm hellbanned? Long Dong doesn't like me? I don't know I even bother to post?)
The pens in poor neighborhoods have ink.
>censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.

Friendly reminder that the definition of censorship is not limited to the government.

The books they've banned may indeed be misinformation, but lets not push even more misinformation by denying simple dictionary definitions that seem politically unacceptable.
React Component Library for Mapbox GL
I wonder what solutions there are to these liability/blame problems. I have seen a similar case in Australia, where a parking barrier was an extreme danger as it cross over a biking path, and was hard to see until the last minute. It caused a crash that took a mans leg, and the legal proceedings took years. During that time the barrier remained in place, still a danger, because removing it would have admitted fault.
> The two countries have been discussing the supply of US nuclear reactors to India, the world's third-biggest buyer of oil, for more than a decade.

I doubt that any nuclear capacity will significantly affect India's oil consumption. Nuclear typically displaces coal or gas.
Many places I have worked end up using N solutions plus atleast one from scratch BI platform.

I don't think rolling your own auth or encryption is an apples to apples comparison.

One of the new hotness in marketing is micro-funnels. You have to have customized metrics built into the product for that to work.
/wooosh
I think your definition of "early nineties" is off, and that plot doesn't show what you think it does. Let's recap your own statements.

You: There was an explosion of mobile phone use in the early nineties.

Me: no there wasn't.

You: well that's only because the tech was too expensive.

Me: glad we agree.

You: no I was right the first time, look at this graph which shows an exponential increase in use in the early 2000's.

Me: ?
I’ll bet you lunch the US replaces every GW of nuclear generation with solar, wind, and utility scale energy storage in 10 years (sooner than any nuclear generator would come online).

Disclaimer: I am an armchair energy policy enthusiast, and aggregate generator permitting, construction, turn up, operation, and decommissioning data for visualization and production siting.

Edit: Lunch bet email in my profile.
Usage data helps us make UI changes. For example, if not a ton of people are using some functionality, we might prioritize modifying or removing it. When we make a change, seeing how it affected usage is an important part of verifying we did the right thing.

So if Chrome's ever made a UI change you disagreed with, then you're in a group that would have benefitted from sending Google usage data.

In terms of the restrictions on usage data, see https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#usages... .
I'm curious what your personal thoughts on TWA 800 are.
Is there a way to guild a comment here?
Why is it Amazon's responsibility to carry a product they don't want to, then independently supplement that product with their own editorializing?

It's a bad product which they don't want to carry. They're a store. It's their prerogative to simply not sell that product.
Reading these sorts of posts Quora is already a fascinating window into the elites. Truly amazing how different their bubbles are.
Containerize Your D Server Application
Trenches _do_ work, but they must have a minimum depth (>20cm), not just 8cm ones like Google tried.