skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Any real economist.

Any real economist can cite many monoplies that arise through market forces alone.

> Inevitably, if any industry is profitable, competition will arise.

This is not true. There are many different definitions of "profit", and there are many cases where an industry that makes a real business profit will not support a competitor that makes an economic profit. The obvious example is markets with very large economies of scale [1].

> Government regulation (often through corruption) is the only mechanism which ensures a lack of competition. This can be observed in any industry throughout the last 100 years.

I'm interpreting this to mean "only through government intervention can we ensure a lack of competition". Again, this is not true. Any party that can make a massive capital investment (which already vastly reduces the pool of competition) can enter a space and make any future entrance by a competitor completely unprofitable.

To see an example of this, lets go a century back in time to the day of Standard Oil. Standard Oil was notorious for leveraging its massive capital advantage to destroy its competitors. It would enter a new market and lower its prices (leveraging its massive war chest). Once its competitors left business, it would raise prices again to screw over consumers. After many people caught wind of this blatant market manipulation, it turned to deceptive practices and things like tying agreements [2].

What government policy led to the dominant monopoly of Standard Oil?

> You're right that companies can lock up the vast majority of a market by out-competing others, but this generally doesn't last very long (typically a decade or less).

Standard Oil was supreme for over thirty years. If only we could invent a time machine, to hear the gales of laughter from the businessmen of the day at the notion that Rockefeller became the king of oil by "out-competing" others.

He became dominant through backroom deals and anti-competitive practices. Government intervention was what finally ended the Standard Oil monopoly. It was also likely the only thing (barring the death of Rockefeller or some kind of market shift) that ever would.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_oil#Monopoly_charges_a...
Who cares. Developers need to pull legacy browser support sooner. It's pretty clear that certain people and organizations will wait until they absolutely have to change before they will make the effort. Once it becomes inconvenient enough they'll do whatever needs to get done. The effort can be justified in business terms.

IE8, for example, is going to be around for a while. However, if enough developers stop supporting it now, the conversation will begin. Otherwise, it's gonna be 2020 and ie8 will still have significant market share.
Alright, correction - you can see the pricing if you go into the control panel -> select region -> select OS (pricing changes based on linux vs. Windows) -> select flavor.
So you believe that the current British, should be paying money for crimes committed by their ancestors?

Personally, I don't think people should pay for other peoples mistakes, even if they happen to be born in the same country.
Yes, I haven't used Mercurial too extensively (I use git), but Mercurial's commands make more sense to me. The only problem I have with it is that conflicts throw me into vim, and if I exit it to try and make sense of the merges, it thinks I'm done merging and leaves me in an unreasonable state, whereas git just marks the files and lets me resolve them at my leisure.
You need to read more history – that naive dismissal doesn't work well for anything important. If someone corners the market on, say, oil, cargo transportation, etc. your choice is either to pay the monopoly tax or accept a significant loss. Do you really think “oh, it's just slightly less effective” is why the Sherman Antitrust Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act) was seen as widely needed by basically everyone other than Standard Oil? Similar stories apply to anyone who tried to make a living when the railroads had significant regional control – it wasn't a slight hit, it was “do you want to sell your goods outside of your town or not?”

(All of these are well known, well documented examples a little over a century old. For a more modern alternative, consider the many people who have a single provider for internet access – they can either pay or give up on significant participation in the modern economy.)

> Also, a private-sector monopoly, no matter how seemingly entrenched, is always vulnerable to disruption (when was the last time you used a PC manufactured by IBM? Or were forced to use IE against your will, for that matter?

Amusingly, both of your examples are cases where the monopoly was disrupted under the treat of government action. The reason those other browsers had a chance is that Microsoft couldn't lock down the PC market as much as they wanted to while the DOJ was investigating. Similarly, look at IBM's history – do you think the PC market would be as open if they hadn't had to worry about a replay of the 1969 antitrust settlement?
Well, I'll be using the EncFUSE script from this thread to provide the encryption, so it should be quite easy to work around it (just point it to the encrypted FUSE mountpoint).
That's true, of course. But while I'm no history buff the main examples I can think of regarding monopolies of these commodities have always been government-induced (war-time rations, communist food lines, etc.). Am I missing examples of when a private company in a functional capitalist system forced the population at large to buy their food from them? There might be examples with crony capitalism, but in the end that's a breed of "capitalism" in quotes that's effectively government-enforced anyway.
according to ubuntu documention you need to press alt+PrtScn simultaneously for any sysrq action
Why “Death to America” remains Iran hardliners’ slogan of choice
You'd imagine so. It wouldn't be legal though since modern.ie is for testing purposes only. Though I highly doubt anyone much would care if someone ran vitualbox and a copy of XP/Vista or something.

I suppose in a sense it becomes a bit of a worry if you run too lightweight on the VM which after all will have to contain your banking credentials (sort of the opposite of firing up a VM when you're doing something that feels too sketchy to run on the main system).
I guess i am not the only one who checked my whole screen before trying out the web app :)
What have bar codes got to do with anything? Sorry, I don't understand your comment.
We need a few new illustrations. Some women expressed concern about having a male<>female illustration, saying it immediately seemed like a dating site. Not sure what the right answer is there.
Either your looking for a job or your giving a job :)
> Endless discussion over which server-side framework to use, which folder structure makes the most sense, which client-side package management system to use, how to bring everyones preferences together.

It sounds like the challenge is dealing with different people that have differing opinions on what to use, and with this project you're just saying "Use this, trust me!" and hoping that nobody objects? The answer to the problem is to prescribe as much as you can beforehand, so that there is effectively no room for discussion around these points?

It doesn't seem to actually solve any problems around gaining consensus, it just pushes one very opinionated view. Or perhaps I've misunderstood completely.
No, it's not needed. The cell towers provide sufficient information about your location. How long have you had a cell phone?
i think linux doesnt save the image in the clipboard after you pushed the button, in ubuntu however a dialog is displayed after pushing the button that allow you to copy the screenshot to the clipboard, but this tool is specially designed for this purpose. AFAIK this wont work out of the box in linux :(
"takes up much less space."

In the 90s I experimented with clusters using stacks of desktops and occasionally blew circuit breakers, and in the 00s I had a much smaller (but still pretty big) stack of 1U rackmount servers in the basement. I like the idea of a stack of 8 servers to experiment with fitting in a small desk drawer or shoebox. Also the sonic impact of my experimental toy clusters has decreased dramatically as size has shrunk.

The most useful thing I ever did with my toy home clusters was when .mp3 started getting big but a typical desktop took 20 minutes to encode just one song, I ripped my whole CD collection quickly using my cluster. It would have been just as fast to split by CD with 10 CDs on 10 machines, but it was a much more cluster-y learning experience to rip a single CD in parallel. From memory it took a typical drive about as long to read a cdrom to wav files as it took any other machine to convert one song from wav to mp3 so I set up a pipeline with unfortunately pretty high latency. The point of this industrial archeology anecdote is it would be interesting to find a "real world" app like this for a rasp-pi cluster. I suppose the tried and true povray raytracing or mandelbrot rendering is still cool, it would be interesting to learn of new toy cluster apps.

A couple times over the past decades I've applied my home toy cluster experience to real work jobs. Its all the same software after all, although the "real" stuff at work ran an order or two magnitude faster than what I had at home.
Perfect - this is very helpful. Thanks jc4p, really appreciate it
This deserves a post of its own - but what you're saying has been a major focus for our product teams. I can say that reliability, performance, build times, etc have been greatly improved. Let me check with the team to see what I can discuss externally. Drop me a line: jesse.noller@rackspace.com if you have additional feedback
Okay thanks for clarifying!
Ask HN: Was your YC application worthwhile?
I am very far from applying to YC, but it is always interesting to watch the application process play out. I will probably never apply to YC, but I have used the application to help think through my own projects.

I have been wondering, for people who were not granted an interview, do you feel better able to move forward on your project because you took the time to apply?

What clarifications did you have about your project by completing the application?
Automating Development with Grunt
Hmm, I'm not seeing it on that page either. Tried Chrome and Curl, source code seems clean.
Protip: the M7 is a sensor, not a storage device.
I would love to see this support http://tent.io. I still need to look more deeply into the architecture of Tent, but from my cursory examination, it seems like a really ideal solution to the lack of cloud services that let users own their own data.
Love how an off-topic discussion can become very in-depth. Thank you for this, I will have to consume it outside of work hours :)
This is only true because of government action to break up the most egregious of monopolies, however. Furthermore, -all- monopolies are vulnerable to disruption regardless of public/private status so this characteristic of private monopolies isn't relevant.
I think you could be clearer that 'Save' uploads the screenshot to your site, and does not (as I assumed) open a Save-as prompt.
I had a similar thought. It seems that CrunchBase has bigger plans and will be expanding its offerings to become competitive with other startups that are relying on their platform.
I'm glad that the shelve extension (which is like stash in git) is included by default now. Even though that extension has been around for a while, it feels like it's considered a core function now, rather than an "extra." (Especially for git users, who are accustomed to having `git stash` out of the box. So now there's a little less friction when trying to do the same things in Mercurial.)
You can choose plans that adhere to the government standards. That is a lot different than you can choose your plan, period.

I'm still confused about why the government needed to create any sort of web site since they are just marketing private insurance plans (which meet the ACA standards) and these companies have been and continue to market their insurance plans on their own web sites. And hasn't anyone in the federal government heard about 'independent insurance agents'? I guess not since they had to dream up a new job title of 'navigator'.

I do support some of the policy goals of ACA, but it seems like almost any other implementation would have been better than the convoluted-rube-goldbergish mechanisms created by the ACA.
You're half right: governments should prefer to dictate outcomes rather than mechanisms. Telling banks how to code their databases is a losing game but making them liable for losses due to weak security works quite effectively.
> US billionaire Sheldon Adelson - a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a big donor to the Republican party - who said dropping an atom bomb in the middle of Iran's desert would ensure that they get the message.

I can't recall any of Iran's upper crust publicly stating that they should nuke America. America's hardliners appear to be more insane than Iran's hardliners.
Introducing the Platypus HTML5 Game Engine
Didn't work for me. Mac + Chrome.
Is anyone using this for application deployment?
thanks! appreciate the shout-out, glad you're enjoying it. Ideas for future topics are always welcome. Trying to be completely transparent in this series, so it's all fair game!
I'm saying in order to come up with new types of programming, you need to already know about how programming works currently, which limits your thinking.
What's the most important thing on your to do list today?
ISO8601 for negative years in Ruby and Javascript
Sounds like someone needs to educate Koreans on using VirtualBox and Modern.ie images... both are free.

http://www.modern.ie/en-us
Show HN: Searchjoy, search analytics made easy
Ignore me. PEBKAC.
Difference is, there is no one behind bitcoin. No one to arrest.
The only "real people" "behind" it are the Exchanges.
However, they(usually) hold proper documentation for transactions and comply with the law fully.
If you lived in S. Korea and had to be limited to using IE on Windows with ActiveX controls for each site you wanted to transact with, you'd care. Did you read the piece? The current system is the law.
I think the article author confused Boot Camp for Parallels Desktop.
Mercurial is great at many things, but surprisingly, it seems quite awkward to set up a shared repository on your network for multiple users. It doesn't come as standard with a simple, self-contained server, and they recommend against using a shared directory on a network drive directly, presumably because of the wicked data loss bugs they've had (or may still have, I haven't checked this recently).

Compare the Mercurial guidance on publishing repositories[1], which comes in at about 15 screens on my system, with the equivalents for say Git[2] or Bzr[3] that fit in a couple of screens, and you can see how striking the difference is.

[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/PublishingRepositories
[2] http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-on-the-Server-Setting-Up-the-...
[3] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr-0.11/server.htm

[Edit: Rephrase to avoid sounding unintentionally trollish. I'm trying to answer the question, not start a flame war.]
Well I guess that's expected behavior. So you may need to explicitly state that the feature works if you save an image on your clipboard -- not just pressing printscreen ;-)

nice work for a weekend app!
"... completely re-engineered from the ground up to deliver..." has to be one of the most overused marketing phrases in technology. As if redoing everything is always a good thing.

That aside, I'll have to give them a test run. I was happy with rackspace cloud servers before I switched to linode and now digital ocean. The only thing that has had me switching is pricing, but if these perform well, I may use them for certain applications. I'd love for a 3rd party to benchmark these vs digital ocean so we can compare price and performance.
Select Region, OS, Flavor and then it pops up!
Nice i'll attempt something similar in a month to play/learn with clusters on linux. Btw is the server handling php or any other language. Are you hosting this like in your house? how much bandwith do you have?
This is a great little MVP, nice work. very useful
I was halfway creating a progress bar when I thought the design sucked so I kept it simple, but yes coming weekend a progress bar will be made.
> Difference is, there is no one behind bitcoin. No one to arrest. The only "real people" "behind" it are the Exchanges.

No, the real people behind it are the miners. You know, the people that create bitcoins and validate every bitcoin transaction?
I've been involved in the indie game dev community for a while now, and I was an active member on the TIGSource forums when Markus first presented Minecraft there[0] (he still posted, at the time!)

I remember from day one thinking it would be pretty cool if he could make infiminer with gameplay (at the time, he was talking of a capture the flag mode, and a "defend the castle you built from zombies" mode).

Then he started charging $10 for preorders, which I thought was insane- who would pay money for a prototype that he'd probably abandon within 6 months anyway? (most indie game debs abandon their project- finishing a game puts you in the 0.0001%)

But it actually worked, which surprised me. I finally preordered myself, because everyone was doing it to support him- I think I was order ~11 000 or so. I thought it was insane that he managed to get 10k+ preorders for his small project, and a little something clicked in my head then. Of course, now of over 12 million people have bought the game :) [1]

[0] http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0

[1] https://minecraft.net/stats
Yes, because why use existing tools that end users are familiar with when you can be a pretentious jerk about it?
> He became dominant through backroom deals and anti-competitive practices.

Backroom deals AKA corruption. Corruption and regulation are two sides of the same coin. Had the market been perfectly competitive (ie. state governments not succumbing to corruption) the monopoly likely would not have formed and lasted.

Your only example merely proves my point.

Try to find a monopoly that has arisen in an open market, free from government 'intervention' (either regulation OR corruption).
Federal Agencies Succeed at Teleworking, Where Yahoo Failed
Mozilla added SEED support to Gecko many years ago. Nothing has been done since then (on the Korean side) to implement support beyond that.
If you're just calculating the overall crime rate, yes. If you want to calculate the murder rate, the penny candy stealing rate, and other rates of individual crimes separately, of course you can do that too. (Though you might find it difficult to find numbers for penny candy stealing.)
Without source it just can't be trusted.
Aha! Thanks guys! Yeah something like Price: <please select a distro first> would have solved it for me.
#! shebang i assume?
I'm also in NYC and would love to meet up with some HN'ers to talk shop and nerd out.
You can tell pretty quickly whether it's manipulation or a kind gesture.

Manipulation: gift + nothing meaningful to share

Kind gesture: gift + something really meaningful to network about
Haha, there's no monitoring setup, infact there's no backend at all :)
> Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.

A few years ago, when I first quit my job, I was originally going to start another magazine, but a previous experience in publishing had convinced me that I needed a version control system my writers, editors and advertising sales/production people could use. There wasn't anything available, so I started building something similar.

When I tried to validate it as an actual business, the biggest problem I ran into was that the vast majority of the (magazine publishing) business is in a shambles, nobody knows if they will have jobs in five years and everyone is understandably a little paranoid. Successful publishers could (hopefully) afford to pay me, but they were generally extremely bureaucratic, difficult to penetrate, and averse to change what was (sort of) working for them. New or floundering publishers were interested (and they were seeking something easy to solve this problem), but the most common feedback I received was that they'd love a free tier, but couldn't afford to pay for it.

The most interesting thing I saw during the whole process was an editor's version control system. This person edits a shocking volume using this system:

/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/from-author.doc

or

/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/my-edits-to-author.doc

You've definitely got a great idea and I can vouch that it's needed. Best of luck!!
Having worked in corporate at Walmart, I don't find this weird at all. Especially coming from early employees (from whom I presume these came), many of whom probably made a decent chunk of change from the performance of the company's stock since the early days.

Sam Walton, the late founder of Walmart, is revered as something of a demigod by the early Walmart employees (many of whom are still around). This is especially true of early administrative, distribution, and store-level employees. These folks had limited prospects and came for stable employment -- but they were rewarded beyond their wildest expectations when the company grew from a regional general store into a $100B+ business in a little over a decade. Early Walmart employees speak of "Mr. Sam" (as they call him) the way we speak of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.

I wouldn't be surprised if early Amazon employees have a similar reverence for Jeff Bezos.
The instructions you linked for git would basically work as stated for Mercurial, but without all the mucking about with making a bare repository.

Note that on the Mercurial wiki page you linked, it does mention ssh setup, although perhaps not as prominently as you'd like.

Also, hg /does/ come with a simple, self-contained server: hg serve. It doesn't support authentication, because there's a bunch of http servers that can do that for you better and with less bugs than we'd inevitably have.
I've been using this combination for years and it has been copacetic. Xfce is somewhat similar to Gnome 2 (its peak IMHO) or Windows XP, but delightfully lightweight and free from most of the annoyances of those.

Aspects I particularly like include:

(a) can be configured for text labels, not only icons

(b) a menu with logical access to everything

(c) relative lack of the kind of gimmicky features which get in the way for those who don't want them

(d) the UI is not especially esthetic, but is unobtrusive and prefers function over decoration

(e) utilities for configuring the system are included, so newbies don't have to spend as many hours web-searching to find out how to perform common tasks

(f) fast/responsive

Anyway, if you prefer something else, IIRC you can choose Xfce, LXDE, KDE or Gnome in the installer.
Oh yes, I absolutely love Chris Crawford's work as well- thank you!

An up and coming dev I really like is Andy Hull (from the Spelunky remake fame). He gave an amazing talk at GDC about drawing inspiration from children's toys in game design, and I see much promise in him. :)
go buy bitcoins ;-)
How long will existing customers be able to get the previous low end VPS (+-16/month)?

Are they grandfathered at that pricing? And for how long?

Can new customers even get that low end server today?

The blog post says "eventually" but some others have pointed out that the pricing is missing today.