skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The national highway system had unintended positive economic consequences. I guess it might fail the complexity test.

(I'll concede that it depends on what you want to measure, but it's hard to argue that cheap trucking has only been a negative)
I'm not sure I believe any of this for reasons others have pointed out. But let's say it's true. Is this an argument for or against Net Neutrality?

By most accounts I read NetFlix is responsible for 30% + of evening internet traffic. Kind of staggering. If an ISP actively throttled Netflix people would leave that ISP for another one that didn't throttle Netflix Netflix is clearly a hugely popular service with enough people that it could exercise that clout. Netflix can sign agreements and tout such providers (heck, bundle in sign up offers etc) So the market can solve this problem.

Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge effectively for it. We all love the simplicity of "all you can eat" pricing. Yet Netflix essentially exploited that model to their own benefit to the point now that model is under risk.

I find it fascinating that a service that has (legally and ethically and followed standard biz practices and sensibilities) grown to gobble 30% of all resources and effectively squeezes out other traffic is seen as a victim here. I'm not trolling so would love to hear what I'm missing.
You won't BELIEVE what this vagrant philosopher said to the king of Macedon!
Treating Pain Psychologically
I don't think you've answered the question. In your response you cite a program that enjoyed the effects that were intended, but to an even greater degree than had been expected (and aside from the effects being expected, it's also not a large and complex program). Another example of a program that successfully achieved its goal, but surpassed expectations, would be the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system (which is probably the most successful large program I can think of).

What's the NASA spinoff you allude to? I expect it's, again, what had been promised. Part of the plan was to bring about technological innovations. The development of velcro, or things like it, was part of the plan.

What I actually asked for is any example of what you claimed to be a certainty: a large, complex government program having unintended positive results.

I wasn't being snarky, I was trying to demonstrate that the record here is nearly, if not entirely, on the downside. History shows us governmental programs failing in a myriad of ways, but this isn't balanced on the upside. I honestly can't think of a counterexample within my parameters (large size and complexity, and having unintended positive results).

EDIT: A better way to state my question occurred to me. What I'm looking for is not quantitatively unexpected results, but qualitatively unexpected results, because I think that's what is implied in the above back-and-forth about these qualitatively unintended bad results versus a certainty of unintended good results.
You're right. It would take a top executive paid a minimum of 7 figures before we could trust what they tell us.
Musk: 'We Hope The Big Car Companies Do Copy Tesla'
I had this exact same problem with Sonic.net in SF. It was miserable. Each time I called they would tell me everything was fine and that it wasn't on their end- ignoring all proof.

On the verizon topic, soon after they got rid of the unlimited data tier my speeds would drop significantly after I reached 200-250MB of data transfer, but when I cycled the power and updated the roaming the speed would go back to normal until it hit the 200-250MB again. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that this was done on purpose or that they're currently limiting streaming traffic.
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1 point by ratna 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

Plzzzzz accidently :'( I delet my vedio,it was accident.my lil baby was playing with computer.
I viewed the fb lookback video it wasss asesome.that was made for me but pictures... I was wondering how I could retrieve the video as I would like to share it? Thank you in advancc.plzzzzz help Me out :'(
A lot of very large-scale military and space research, which has provided a lot of the technological basis on which modern Silicon Valley is build.

Most basic research, whether in natural sciences, mathematics or the humanities.

The equation 'large-scale government endeavour = bad' is so simplistic, it is painful to hear otherwise smart people repeat it over and over. The real world is way to complex for this kind of black-and-white armchair economics.
While I agree, I have to point out that all former congressmen die in obscurity, unless they went on to a cabinet post or the Senate.
Well, take my wife (please): she was working as an employee, taking a job that could have been done by someone else (teaching orchestra at a school), and then we moved and she started a business (private violin studio). While she makes more as a private teacher, prior to the ACA she was previously unable to purchase health insurance on the private market due to a food allergy (a precondition).

We had to move for other reasons than her job, but consider that there are many people doing work that other people do, who are motivated to do things like start a business, but who are otherwise unable to do so because of the US healthcare system.

Additionally, consider my parents, who are also working not because they need the income per se-- they could retire and live well-- except for the costs and difficulties of purchasing health insurance on a private market.

So it isn't the case that people are just universally "going on the dole"... making private insurance closer to the same cost to purchase health insurance regardless of your status as an employee shouldn't affect the overall bottom line of the leeches who provide insurance.
As if science wasn't a belief system as well. As long as the source of your ideas is observation (as in all sciences) you have nothing but belief.

The advantage of science isn't that it can proof stuff (which it can't) but that it is open for change instead of being dogmatic.
Almost Everything You Have Been Told About The Minimum Wage Is False
Funny enough, it's just been reported that under Obama criminal tax prosecutions have gone up, e.g. http://news.yahoo.com/u-fighting-increase-tax-crimes-under-o...

"[...] under Obama the average annual number of tax crime prosecutions sought by the Justice Department has been 1,568, versus 1,303 under Bush."

Doesn't sound like that's going to strike fear in the hearts of many. Plus I suspect detecting small fry like in byoung2's example is rather difficult.
What's the story behind the name '37signals'? I understand '42floors' since they are in real estate, but some of these names are just ridiculous.
I thought this article was more about the fact that "some" non EU companies are making huge loads of money and evade tax.

I'm not a fan of this french government but I have to admit that it's not an heretic idea to say that a company should be taxed on its revenue.

Sorry for the tone but I'm so used to the comparison with Germany by people who seem to forget that the Euro is tailored for countries with an strong export oriented economy, like Germany.

Euro is more the core problem than France/Hollande or the fake North vs South Europe fight.
If it had been written in some other scripting language then I'd guess you would have had even more issues upgrading! Because Perl, despite all its supposed warts & bad image, remains highly backward compatible.

NB. The biggest issues I've seen in upgrading are modules that use C libraries (unfortunately things do change over time!).

As an example I'm still running a Perl web system & data munging backend that I wrote back in 2001 with only minor tweaks over the years for new/modern systems.
That _is_ money laundering. Assuming you could find a trusted third party, they'd probably have the same legal restriction, and it's anyway an offence for the Americans to enter into this transaction knowing that the money would go to Iran.
Angular, Ember and Backbone are all MVCs. They're more or less different shapes and sizes of a hammer. You'd be missing saws, which can cut through all this, ahem, object oriented crap. And don't forget the simple tools, which can be composed any number of ways and don't make everything look like a nail.
I see a lot of parallels here with the Japanese system. Similarly, the system seems to encourage conformism and rote learning over disruptive ideas and innovation. Similarly, their top universities have phenomenally competitive admissions, even though they are not ranked particularly high internationally. Similarly, many of their systems are characterized by endless paperwork and bureaucracy.

Of course, there are certainly innumerable ways in which the two countries diverge. Japan has been economically far more successful in the last few centuries, and has a very respectable number of Nobel laureates, most of whom have remained in Japan. But I do think a lot of the criticism of India leveled here is applicable there.

(Source: I lived there for a few years and am reasonably culturally/linguistically fluent)
thats a good catch! thanks man :)
I can stream my library of videos (no Netflix etc. here in Switzerland) from any of my devices to my Chromecast.
Apple faces $2 billion damages claim in Mannheim over wireless patents
Can't wait for the blog post !
This looks more like an overloaded residential gateway.
Clickable: http://OptKit.com
It's the same in my experience. It was very difficult for me to start a relationship, and much easier to keep it.

Starting one still looks rather random to me, you roll the dice until finally someone that you like likes you too, and that's most of what there's to it. Your attitude or effort can give you some small modifiers or penalties to the dice roll, but that's about it. It might sound childish but honestly, if I have to start a new relationship at some point, I'll be as lost in a sea of pure chaos as I was the last time.

On the other hand, keeping a relationship is pretty rational. Love the other person, care about her, don't be a dick, be emphatic, try to make her life as good as possible, and if you are not unusually unlucky you'll normally succeed.

Maybe it's also that as people that for one reason or other have a very hard time looking for relationships, we tend to value them more and make more effort to keep them than those who have it easier to get into one.
Most people in the US don't have a choice in their ISP.
> The basic problem is that a linear increase in bandwidth for the customer results in an exponential increase in costs for the ISP

> N * (N - 1) =~ N^2 (assuming full duplex links, which would be generally correct for the internet)

1) N^2 is not exponential, it's polynomial.

2) Expanding capacity isn't even N^2, it's just linear.

If you double each residential customer's bandwidth, you "only" have to double the capacity of your uplinks to other networks. The number of endpoints or total nodes in the network is entirely irrelevant, because you have the same 50Mbps whether you're drawing it from one AWS server or a thousand BitTorrent peers. The only way you would get the result you're assuming is if every endpoint had a fully meshed connection to every other endpoint, i.e. each customer gets 50Mbps to each Amazon server, a separate 50Mbps to each Google server and a separate 50Mbps to every single other user on the internet, for a total of several hundred billion Mbps for every customer. That's not how it works.

And in practice it's even less expensive. It's sub-linear. Because just giving everybody a connection which is twice as fast doesn't mean everybody is going to immediately double their usage. A large fraction of users, given a faster connection, will do with it only what they currently do with the slower connection. Their pages will load faster but they won't load more pages, so the load they put on uplinks to other networks will remain the same.

There are no exponentially increasing costs. There are only the same costs as there ever were: Cisco et al come out with a new router that puts twice as many bits through the same piece of cable and if you want those bits you pay them a fixed cost and swap out your old model for the new one, and in another few years you do it again.
This has been asumed by different therapies for the past decades (Hellinger's Family Constelations, Transfamiliar therapies, even Transpersonal ones). It is nice to see studies that will help support this therapies against their detractors.

I remeber to have read a few years ago an article about how planarians inherited to their descendants the traumatic experience of steping on an electrified metal plate, and each coming generation of planarians would learn faster to avoid such a plate.

Has anyone got a clue of what I'm talking about? I haven't been able to find it (I read it off a photocopied article)
he might be referring to the fact that a lot of large retail outfits or fast food outfits basically pay such low wages that employees have to apply for things like food stamps (meaning the gov't is effectively subsidizing these jobs for the companies).
> people would leave that ISP for another one that didn't throttle Netflix.

Haha.
Show HN: a gem for rendering GitHub Flavored Markdown in your Rails app
The government has guns, so the companies do what they say.

And the Iranians don't have enough money to make it worthwhile for US companies to take up their cause politically.
Any evidence to support this? If anything it seems like growth is accelerating.
It's not being throttled. There is a peering dispute between netflix's CDNs and the ISPs. Netflix's CDN's don't want to pay for delivery to the ISP. Normally CDNs peer with each other for free if the balance in each direction is equal. The problem is that any CDN that delivers netflix is hugely unequal since it's a huge one way stream.

The ISPs could just eat the cost, and let it be delivered for free. Or Netflix's CDNs could just pay the peering fee. Or Netflix could use different CDNs.

The reason the VPN works is because it sends the data over a different CDN that isn't saturated because of the dispute.

At least that is how I understand it, but I'm not an expert (or even a novice).
ever have trouble recalling or typing either of those two?

basically they're branding two digits + a common word. why not.

Personally, I prefer to brand things that make slightly more sense, but to each their own. it works just as well as branding an "io" at the end of something.

it's just about repeating it a few times, until it can be recalled, and once it can it's quick to get to.
"The company is named after the 37 radio telescope signals identified by astronomer Paul Horowitz as potential messages from extraterrestrial intelligence."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/37signals
"Steve Fucking Jobs said that. He was exactly right."

Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise.

Though this is interesting

"If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%."

Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me.

I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?

Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting.

"Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world.

The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device."

Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.
Sounds logical. But, and I'm not sure if it's correlated with gender, my mother and her mother both have several baby teeth with permanent teeth above them still, so there are cases like that screwing with the data.
This is an extremely cool app! I'm impressed. Good job.
Depends on your definition of parody. I think it fits Swiftian parody just fine.
Make Visual Studio Pro free or unify Express and allow extensions. Make ASP.NET & friends as easy to deploy on Linux as it is on Windows (or put some serious energy into mono).

Not sure if they are good suggestions or not for the business but they would certainly help me out!
Yep. The Brits (I'm one, but have spent most of my career elsewhere) do a special line in cowboy technology types, and Autonomy just blagged their way into a monster deal.

It's a shame because at the same time there are genuinely great companies, but the more pure sales culture led outfits have been so slimy it's frightening, and make life much harder for the people doing great work.

And that's ignoring the defence industry, which takes it to a whole new level.
Tablespoon – easily query csv or json data in PostgreSQL or SQLite
This is a charming article. But it's somewhat sad to read. Because it operates on the nearly universal assumption that life is a game, or a battle, or a scavenger hunt—and the way to win is to maintain a high 'state' and get lots of 'achievements'. The reason this gaming terminology is so appealing to us is that it overlays nicely on the way we already think about life: you're constantly making some grade or another; you're constantly doing better or worse than your peers. A generation ago business was the most appropriate metaphor. But whether our obsession is with who's giving us a raw deal and who we're getting over on, or where we have advantages and where we have disadvantages (what am I at +1 for?), the basic sensibility doesn't change.

The perspective here is consistently egoistic. It's not even mentioned. It's just assumed that the way one goes through life is as an individual, with one's own interests solely at heart, and one's own state the only thing to be managed. You win by maximizing your own state, by grabbing as many achievements as you can before you die. And even if you're not a dick about it, your concerns are very much limited to your states, health level, and the contents of your inventory.

This is no way to go through life! It leads to suffering and a small view of things. I'm really interested to see, actually, what this community makes of that insight. It will dawn on people eventually—or at least its negative will: that everything we've been putting so much damned energy into isn't making us happy. But this community is so relentlessly introspective, communicative, articulate, well-equipped, and outright successful. And we have so many blogs like this one: so many people actively, sincerely, unabashedly interested in the science of happiness and fulfillment. So the potential there is pretty big. The potential for massive burnout and dissolution or massive reorientation.
Correction: February 4, 2014
An earlier version of a headline accompanying this article on the home page was incorrect. The health law is projected to result in a voluntary reduction in the work force equal to 2.5 million full-time workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office, not two million fewer jobs.

If true, this is a good thing. We, as a society, don't need "jobs" or hours worked. We need stuff made. Voluntary attrition of the least productive 5-billion person-hours per year won't hurt us much, but that will cause wages to rise (which will, over time, improve what is produced).

We're already producing a lot of stuff. What we need now is a qualitative focus, serious consideration of sustainability and, above all, better leadership. Taking some pressure off the lower and middle classes (i.e. peeling back the wage serfdom that gives power to feudal strongmen) is a start.

There used to be a Fordist connection between general prosperity and the well-being of businesses, rippling up to the very rich. But the consumer credit boom killed that (sort of). Instead of letting wages rise or prices fall, the poors could be pumped full of loans they couldn't afford to repay. We saw, in 2008, how well that works out, but the fundamental structure of society hasn't changed.

Obama has made many tactical mistakes with the PPACA, and I wish he had started at single-payer to make public-option the compromise, but if "Obamacare" is bringing us back toward a more cooperative, progressive society, then that's a good thing.
Isn't this just a matter of being in the best environment for what you are trying to achieve? Is it a slap in the face to Canadian arts and culture every time an actor leaves and moves to LA? There are some realities involved and doing what's best for yourself shouldn't be interpreted as some personal attack against your culture. There should be no expectation that your country of origin would get preferential treatment when weighing the options.
Setting goals and pursuing them - very well

Trying out different strategies to be more effective in reaching your goals - perfectly ok

Convinging yourself that you have complete control over what's happening to you and becoming too serious about the game - big mistake..

You should always allow a good doze of doubt and be open to the unknown, because ultimately .. we have no clue what a fuck we're doing here...
Their revenue numbers were impressive but how much of that change was from new products and customers and how much was from increasing licensing costs to existing customers?
>With the guarantees to the insurance companies built into the law the public will end up footing an even larger bill which requires increase taxes and health care costs for those working putting a bigger drag on the economy.

I don't get it. If we are footing the bill, then it will make higher taxes, but if the insurance companies foot the bill then health care costs increase. There's no reason for both to rise (unless we subsidize the insurance companies through taxes on the insurance companies...)
I am a 1987 Manipal Institute of technology graduate. MIT Manipal may not be mentioned in the same breath as the IIT's but is (or used to be) in the top 100 engineering colleges in India. It is private and is much more expensive though I believe it was much more affordable to middle class families in the 1970s and 80s than it is today.
If companies are worried about high turnover, they should try the carrot, and not only the stick
A great analogy. I love my family because they are my family, and I love my country because it is my country. That doesn't mean I should think that either is objectively the best, or turn a blind eye to their faults, or treat others unfairly to favor them.

I love my family and country because they are mine, they helped make me, and my memories are with them. Which helps me understand why Brits and Egyptians and Chinese, etc, love theirs.

I think good patriotism makes us sympathetic to outsiders rather than the opposite.
Why would they mention competiting product?
I've probably recommended earlier versions of this book to everybody who uses Django I've met in the flesh, so I may as well do so here as well.

It's been a great resource, full of years of accumulated wisdom from the authors and the wider community.
So, how does this analysis account for the fact that, in many reported cases like this, other services work just fine at high-speed? Your point 2 is that more consumers and producers are flooding the net as a whole, but that would cause widespread issues, not just premier services issues, right?