skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity

Were. When though? The founders said in their original university paper that selling advertising was wrong and would inherently corrupt a search engine. Of course once they realised how much money was being made in search, that fundamental tenet of don't be evil lapsed before the phrase was even coined.

History and Google's progress of updates seems to have borne their claim out. Google is worse than it was, in good measure as they have twisted results to push more sales. It's a shopping search first and foremost, and frankly not a very good search any more. With an obscene overreach of data gathering that is almost impossible to evade. Every opportunity to gather data they gather more. Remember the Google war driving guy who "accidentally" gathered all that extra wifi info from streetview cars? Entirely by accident. How many believe in that "accident" who isn't on Google payroll?

So no, I don't see it as anti-success, more that they became far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive - e.g. demanding everyone train the self-driving fleet to pass a captcha. Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition.

Given they have the data, and the holy trinity of search, advertising and monitoring, regulation is not enough. Split off advertising or analytics and monitoring, or break it up some other way. That's to serve the public interest, not as some anti-success crusade.
Edward Snowden: How Your Cell Phone Spies on You
TheCityOfLondonkAKATheCrownIsControlling TheWorldsMoneySupplyHumansRFree
The same issue exists in French, as well! "Écureuil" (squirrel) is somewhat difficult for English speakers to pronounce, and "squirrel" (écureuil) is somewhat difficult for French speakers to pronounce.
IAM = dynamic role based access to and among all your things, through policy-as-code.

If you just Allow: *, you might not care. If you practice least privilege, this is hard to do another way.
Some feedbacks about the product.

I made some typical searches I do in my job. They returned reasonable results. Impossible to know if they are better or worse than Google. I need some days of usage. I'll do my best to keep using it this week.

Maybe autodecting the language would help. It gave me a German page without any obvious way to change to English.

I went to the settings, changed the language and discovered that it wants to know my country. I left Germany because it looks like profiling and I don't want to help them at it.

Then I disabled every feature (news, weather, etc). I'm interested into a search engine, not into a portal from the 90s.

However I'm afraid that Cookies Autodelete and other privacy extensions will delete those settings and I'll have to do it again. I'll probably hide them with uBlock Origin. For the language a URL ending with something like ?lang=en would be great for bookmarks.

And finally, do we need more independent search engines? Yes, definitely.
Just to continue picking on Google:

Google has:

- Android OS

- Nest

- Search

- Advertising

- Chromebooks

- Pixel

- YouTube

- Google Cloud

There are clear lines where they could be broken up.

I’m not saying they should be broken up.
The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics. The obscurity and inaccessibility and weird terminology is not there to provide functionality, it's there solely to mislead, to make it appear that there's something deep and mysterious going on that only the elect and enlightened can access. (They even admit as much: "Hoon, for the most part, is weird by design...") If you actually dig into the technical details (and yes, I did) you will find that there is no there there. In point of fact, the functional parts of the system are all really written in C (pieces of code which in Urbit-speak are called Jets, again in an effort to obscure the underlying truth).

Other items of evidence:

1. Urbit was founded by Curtis Yarvin, who writes a blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He espouses an extreme right-wing Ayn-Randian political philosophy. Go look him up and read some of his writing (he's quite prolific) and see for yourself. I suggest starting with [1].

2. Urbit makes extreme and unjustified claims about itself. The very first sentence on the web site is (as I write this) "Urbit is your last computer." Well, no, it's not. It's not even a computer at all. It's software. It's a badly designed, badly written, badly documented federated social network. And that's pretty much all it is.

3. Buried deep inside Urbit is a scam to take your money. The scam is quite well hidden, but it's pretty obvious once your attention is drawn to it. Part of the Urbit design is an address space analogous to IP addresses. The Urbit people call this address space "real estate" and they call Urbit "the biggest real estate platform in the world" [2]. They claim that these addresses have value because they are scarce [3]. Except that they aren't. The Urbit address space is 128 bits wide, meaning that there are vastly more Urbit addresses than there are elementary particles in the universe. But this fact is conveniently obscured in their documentation.

If you want what Urbit claims to provide, a computer that you control, just get a Linux machine. Gnu/Linux has its own political baggage attached to it, but it's not a scam. It has its obscure bits, but that obscurity is rooted in history rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.

---

[1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-p...

[2] https://coinidol.com/urbit-data-the-next-real-estate-revolut...

[3] https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/
What percentage of serious inquiries are responded to outside the SLA? What percentage of those fail to resolve the user's problem?

Without that kind of information, reading stories after having a bad experience will turn your brain into a petri dish for confirmation bias.
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

Fair point - there are certain cases where software platforms are too valuable and complex to break up, and should be regulated like utilities with rules for fair play. Amazon shouldn't be able to use it's marketplace data to monopolize entire categories, Google Search needs to be a public platform, with regulated rates for API access (which Google itself will have to abide by).

You don't have to break up many software systems to prevent the worst abuses. Facebook can keep the knowledge graph, but they can't keep WhatsApp or Instagram. Amazon can keep their store, but they can't own a FedEx competitor or AWS - those need to be broken off. Google can keep Search, but Ads, Doubleclick, Analytics, Waze, GCP, Google Home - all of that needs to be broken up.

Some of the resulting businesses may have to update their model or may not remain profitable, but historically break-ups have resulted in an increase in value for the new businesses.
Might be the Baader-Meinhof effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...
Hey, I work at Cliqz. We have an advertising model, but it does not rely on any personal data. We have also experimented with paid products and we would love for it to be a viable option. Unfortunately, experience suggests that very few people are willing to pay. So we are exploring many options; what they all have in common though is privacy by design. We do not, and do not want to collect personal data.
Hmm, cliqz.com is in the blocklists of several DNS servers I'm using, so are they the underdogs we need to cheer for against Google et al, or are they some shady spammers as determined by the community of adblock list maintainers?
You're right, instead of saying exclusive feature I should have stuck with 'primary'. I can see how those two words have different enough meanings to cause confusion.

Though it's important to remember that not everyone on here has English as their first language, and we should generally be considerate of that when reading people's comments.
This hasn't been my experience. I can recall one time where, after spending hours on the phone getting nowhere, I mentioned getting a lawyer involved. The company forwarded me to someone with a title like "solutions architect" who quickly solved the problem I was having. The other people I spoke with wouldn't even answer basic questions.

It probably helped that the company is in a highly regulated industry.
>> my comment merely argued that the implementation of the Nobel Prize in Economics is such that the prize is awarded in the exact same way as all the other Nobel Prizes; in other words, it's no less reputable than the originals.

Naw, IMO the reputability of a prize owes to whole lot more than just shared selection principles. I was just linking to some work in which others question the reputation of the prize as well.
I too have been wondering the same. Does anyone else see a need for some external service that examines resources/permissions and give a clear picture and ongoing monitoring for changes? Are there any services that already do this well?
We know. This XKCD is why this Twitter thread exists in the first place.
(Internet Regulation is an important topic. Upvotes increases the chance of getting meaningful comments on the article.)
Right now it's mainly a few shell enthusiasts and early adopters, i.e. people who want a better shell and want to influence the design of the Oil language. [1]

I've definitely seen people who want to limit themselves to either bash or POSIX shell on purpose, and that's fine.

For simple shell scripts, I might lean that way too (at least until Oil is smaller/faster).

One major reason for Oil is to give you an upgrade path after you've used and enhanced such a shell script for years. Then you will likely bump up into shell's limitations, and the extra dependency will be worth it.

For example, all Linux distros are based on thousands of lines of shell scripts [2], and I think those scripts desperately need a new language. They're big and complex, and need a better language to be correct, robust, and fast.

Here's a comment I wrote that might explain the design goals of the project more:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/ddhmj...

[1] Oil Language Design Notes #1 http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/08/22.html

[2] Success with Aboriginal, Alpine, and Debian Linux http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/01/15.html
Depends on how you look at it I guess. The history of the Chinese empire had periods of relative stability, separated by periods of rebellion, civil war, and strife, sometimes hundreds of years long. There were even periods where the empire was ruled by outsiders.

At the end of any given dynasty, it would be hard to say whether the empire is truly crumbling, or merely transitioning to a new dynasty. Who knows, maybe 1,000 years from now communism and the period of strife in the 20th century will just be seen as an unstable period preceding a dynastic transition.
> Log files.

I wonder if this would ideally also provide a rotation API. Rotating log files in the presence of multiple writers is messy, and maybe shouldn't be reimplemented at the application layer every time.

> Temporary files

Windows is not always a model of filesystem elegance, but it has a "delete on close" flag in their equivalent to open, which makes it go away on the last close (handle can still be duplicated or inherited, so you get some reference counting through that).

Actually I think you can do similar to this on Unix by unlinking after the open, but keeping an fd open for the lifetime of the temp file.
Interesting, looks like Linux users can also try out Powershell now: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/instal...

It's a beefy package, though. Packaged in a docker image on top of alpine:3.10.3 following their installation instructions for alpine: https://gist.github.com/nkashy1/643e7a263054c02e2caceb3912f8...

The image comes in at 178 MB. alpine:3.10.3 is 5.5 MB. An alpine image in which you add bash, bash-doc, and bash-completion clocks in at 13 MB.

Sounds really powerful for personal use, but not an ideal tool for production use (e.g. when you need to spin up a pod on a Kubernetes cluster to debug an issue in production). Will definitely try it out.
They moved it to the end of the mission statement.
> CLITZ browser

Rather unfortunate typo, that.
I agree wholeheartedly. The big question is: how to make such regulations actually work?
To the extent that we can agree that democracy works better than autocratic systems, it may be due in part to basing decisions on more input from more people. If we consider a line from consolidated, low-information (CL) decisions to distributed, high-information (DH) decisions, dictatorships' decisions mostly would fall to the CL end, and democracies would be DH-ward of them. Free interactions between individuals in a market, however, are even more DH-ward, and arguing for grocery stores or other price-driven systems to be converted to democratic systems seems like a step backward.
It's refreshing to see some knowledge of supply and demand being shown regarding the housing market in a mainstream forum: "The spiraling housing costs in West Coast tech hubs are the result of 40 years of tax and land use policy."
For the lazy among us, how much does Hetzner charge for 500TB of disk?
Prevent a global company from giving away products? So other big company can gain space?

All of the virtuals you mentioned have different stories. Cloud is profitable, and is not the top company anyhow. News is not a product it's a grouping of news stories. Youtube makes money through ads and better access and could be considered a loss-leader but shutting it down will not make the field more competitive. Android is open source.. and perhaps could be seen as dumping to prevent others. Gmail is a mail service, others exist.. and starting a new company will not cost you billions unless you plan on serving billions of people. Drive is one of many companies that didn't cost a billion to start but might be worth it now.. try dropbox or box.com or rapidgator.
Yes. A lot of pretty rare information. BBSing existed as a relatively niche mostly hobbyist community that was largely both decentralized and disjoint from the early, pre-mainstream Internet.

As a result, with a few exceptions like Jason Scott's textfiles, there was relatively little archived documentation/stories/archives about BBSs at the time and very little of that has survived. (BBSs pretty much all got shutdown at some point and there's very saved from discussions, especially outside of the relays.)
David Siegel's Chocolate Porn
Care to provide anything beyond "naw" to support your claim that the same people deciding doesn't means decisions are equally reputable?
Method with AI roots uncovers how humans make choices in groups and social media
> Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition.

That proposition failed precisely because it was regarded - rightly or wrongly, it's not clear that it matters - as a "far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive" endeavor.
Vault for the Super Rich
Thanks for doing this. Many times in my career I've had to deal with long-standing assumptions about storage performance in cloud infrastructure without having done any testing.

It's trivially easy to spin up an instance or three and run FIO.
Operating systems get copied. Would be great (but unlikely) see full copies of AWS by other datacenters. But it's possible for certain subsets of it.
Already somewhat of a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
If you're looking for an alternative, dedicated tool to search US news give https://yetigogo.com a whirl. I'm indexing the top ~150 sites in real-time.
I assume you mean metres, not kilometres? There wouldn't appear to be much atmosphere to benefit a lighter than air ship at 10000 km.
Many languages adopt words, but English does so to an unusual degree. As a consequence, it is the language that has most words today, by far.
Thanks. I did a deep dive. Fascinating how brilliant people like Yarvin can miss the boat on basics like compassion and empathy for other beings.
I disagree that humans have an ability to differentiate right from wrong in any universal sense.

> Knowing there is a risk of something incorrect that will result in an unjust,cruel and inhumane outcome, if you proceed with that action you are considered unethical.

I also disagree here. Unethical negligence is determined by a calculated risk of the bad outcome. There is a risk of bad outcomes every time a jury takes a criminal case, but that it clearly not an unethical action.

I'm generally not sure what your point is. We take calculated risks that could end up with something bad happening -- think driverless cars -- but there is a lot of variance between individuals' line between "acceptable risk" and "unacceptable risk". And sometimes the ends do justify the means, depending on your opinion on the Trolley Problem.
Has Europe’s pro-union climate led to more competitive software companies, or better pay and benefits for its software engineers?

Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits. How have the unions helped you in this regard? How have they helped your tech companies be more competitive in the global economy?
This got me wondering what's the theoretical limit to lumens per watt and I found this:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/360167/16009
Hey, I work at Cliqz. As mentioned in another thread; we have an advertising model, but it does not rely on any personal data. We have also experimented with paid products and we would love for it to be a viable option. Unfortunately, experience suggests that very few people are willing to pay (we would love to be wrong and will keep considering this possibility). So we are exploring many options; what they all have in common though is privacy by design. We do not, and do not want to collect personal data.
They should break Alphabet up into 26 different companies, each getting a different letter.
I don't want google to fall. I want it to become better. The google results have moved from good (2004) to great(2006-2009) to good (2010-2011) and are on a slope to completely useless from there on .. right now are in shitty.
Some historical context on scikit-learn:

https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/154357/1/paper.pdf (2013)

https://amueller.github.io/papers/wo_the_machine_varoquaux.p... (2015)
How do these work? I’m sure that with the angles and tinted windows involved, these cameras would need to be quite invasive to be effective…
"Traditional cuisine" is often more recent than we think. Tomatoes aren't native to Italy. Chilli peppers aren't native to India or Thailand.
Isn't "project dragonfly" the Google search engine version for China? Google was trying to comply with the law. It's a law you might not agree with, but come on. The reason all these governments want Google split up is more censorship, not less. From torrents to negative reporting on EU commissars. From everyone's interpretation of hate speech to pages pointing out that sometimes social services are the abusers in children's lives, not so much their savior. Scihub, Schwartz, Snowden, Yellow vest demonstrations, Hong Kong student injuries and disappearances, Twitter making some tax agency officer's abuse of power a big deal, ...

That's why they want Google and Facebook broken. And of course, they're unwilling to spend any money, change any law anywhere, accommodate anyone, or put in any kind of effort whatsoever.

Fundamentally they want the internet to disappear. They want the control of information out of the hands of these idiotic American nerds that refuse to control information !
I didn't read this book, I tried reading books like this though [1].

Because of my experience [1], I have an entirely different approach to learning mathematics as a developer. The "do the normal track and suck it up approach."

This should be a blog post, but I don't have a blog and don't have the time to edit a story that nicely.

1.5 years before graduation, I couldn't handle advanced math anymore and I flunked the year. The next year I transferred to an easier math curriculum and have been coasting ever since. Even in my CS degree courses they never taught us linear algebra and calculus (I did learn graph theory, that was hard).

I didn't regret this decision of not studying maths for more than a decade, until a few months ago. I am noticing that my solid fundamental progress of mathematics has stopped in high school, learning graph theory was more about passing the course.

But now I want to join the conversation in math. So time to change that.

My method:

I am using the book of Haese & Harris IB HL. It's the most advanced high school math book for international students. I am now up to chapter 6 (complex numbers).

And Wow! THIS IS AWESOME! :D

Maths is just like software engineering, or at least algebra is.

I'm having tons of fun, who knew? I really didn't. I think it's because my approach to math is really different than when I was young.

Every time when I freak out, I use my programmer instincts to treat math as a 'best practices software system for numbers' and that mentality really helps.

A couple of examples:

1. I found ways to 'debug' algebraic applications (rewrite them in R and see if the evaluated value stays correct) which means I always know at which step I went wrong with my thinking,

2. I can use variables/abstract things away for a little while (grouping math expressions to letters),

3. My understanding about looping is useful (summations).

It's insane how much programmer instincts maps to mathematics. It's not fully 1 to 1, but it helps a lot more than it harms.

---

I'm still looking for a math tutor/coach. So if someone feels bored, or if you just want to discuss math and software engineering. Hit me up (my email is in my profile)!

[1] I tried to read the no bullshit guide to linear algebra. That was not a nice experience at all. Reading an actual high school textbook is a much better experience.
DDG primarily relies on Bing for its search ads.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is the primary source of their search results either.

Developing a new search engine from scratch that can compete with Google is almost impossible unless you are at the scale of Microsoft.

It is much easier to white label an existing search engine so you can have good search results on day one.
If Google search is not funded by ads any more, they’ll suddenly have a serious problem.
Your post and post history is a great illustration of what I've talked about before here on ycombinator.

Lots of your posts I can agree with, you're a reasonable individual. so why the huge blind spot when it comes to this topic?

When they colluded to force wages down, you defended them. There is absolutely no need for you to. And yet I know you will not stop even after this comment to you.

For what purpose have you written this abolute garbage bag of neoliberal-strung-together-with-gum-and-baling wire comment?

Your post has far too many platitudes and half-ideas and gobbledeygook. "anti success rhetoric"? how bout I classify your post in 3 words too? "Corporate apologist rhetoric"

not a single. sentence. has merit. it reads like ad copy or a poorly programmed bot.

You even put air quotes on "freedom" I mean, come. ON.

I try not to make too big a habit of calling people out, because that leads to poor commenting quality on my end but you sir have put a really, really bad comment on display.

I invite others to read each sentence, one by one, and see if they even follow.

Do they?

They do not.

They read like someone who wants to defend google and just threw up a bunch of worthless words in order to confuse.

Now I already suspect your reasons, but perhaps you can enlighten me and the others here how I could possibly take your opinion seriously?
I thought it was more that the necessary licensing fell through, or was agreed and then fell apart. Added to which the Google Books interface was and is dire.
Maybe he meant that "elemental metal" is redundant?

In other words: can we call "metal" anything not in the periodic table?