skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very public battle between two companies about who should shoulder the cost of delivering video to your home.

Comcast's argument is that they have built a network at great expense for carrying content that others make a profit from, and they want to capture at least some of that value.

Netflix's argument is that they have built a CDN to deliver that content to Comcast's doorstep, and that Comcast won't accept it.

In my mind, Netflix charges money for their service and is not entitled to a free ride. The fact remains that running an ISP is not free, and you can't scale out a network faster than the cash flows (of which, yes, profits are a part) allow. But think about this: Netflix has a 36% gross profit margin, and Comcast's cable/Internet business has an 11% gross profit margin. Netflix's cost structure is lower in large part because Comcast does a lot of the expensive work for them (i.e. last-mile network maintenance and distribution.)

Netflix drives significantly increased Internet traffic usage, and Comcast's investors should not have to accept lower profit margins so that Netflix's investors can enjoy larger margins because of investments that Comcast's investors have made.

I would have a lot more sympathy for Netflix if their margins weren't so high. It just comes off as greedy when they have a 36% gross margin.
They do now, sorta. It's called Amazon Locker: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
Oh, I didn't mean that any of the comments in this thread were toxic. I meant that HN had a systemic problem with toxic comments that badly needed addressing, and this downvote change is one of the ways we addressed it.

As for this thread, the faded-out comments I'm currently seeing are not toxic, but they also don't seem like good HN comments (defined as: substantive and civil) to me either. People can reasonably disagree in these cases—that's why we're encouraging the corrective upvote as a community practice.
Where is this ISP? :)

May I suggest a link in your profile?
Awesome, thanks for the pointers! I've had difficulty finding information about this in the past. In particular, U-TDOA and TruePosition looks like exactly what I've been wanting.

http://www.trueposition.com/about-trueposition/resource-cent...

Accuracy of 50 meters is a bit disappointing, but hopefully the technology has room to improve. It's also disappointing that they're focused on the benefits for law enforcement and carriers rather than handset makers and end users.
Is it Netflix fighting for DRM, or is it the content creators demanding DRM and Netflix simply wanting to move to HTML5 while still being able to continue licensing shows from the creators.
Wow, this is the exact idea I have been thinking about!

For successful companies like Stripe, the cost of doing this program is negligible. And yet many open-source projects (OpenSSL comes to mind) can really take a huge step forward by having several professional developers working full-time on it for three months. Lots of kudos to Stripe for doing this, and hope to see more companies follow this example!
But only 2 are ever open at once.
Putting the sexy back into pubsub
So what killed (or squelched) previous outbreaks?
Just get real IP addresses even if you have to buy them. The cost should be minimal compared to the total IT cost.
SWING AWAY.....The NEW Dating App [3:41] [comedy/independent]
Instacart (chicago) just did an order for me in 3 hours. Ordered around 1pm, driver delivered around 4. Pretty amazing turn-around time.
Yeah the article talks about Medisas doing one thing, but it's hard for a successful company to continue doing one thing forever. Eventually, it's likely they will branch out.
That's untrue. Facebook pages are accessible even when you're not logged in. This loads perfectly fine from an incognito tab: https://www.facebook.com/sears
search for "filetype:pdf"

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=filetype%3Apdf
That's a reasonable request. I've added it to our list.
> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit.

The NCAA.

Ironically, it also has the same bullshit lofty wording around why this is ok. I think this combination of research + vocational school + sport is going to have this kind of problem.
I can't offer you cash (I'm in Chicago), but if you ever want free help, even with trenching, pulling fiber, long-haul wireless throws, system/network admin, email me (email in profile).

I fully support all alternatives to Comcast.
They were rural and burned themselves out once people stopped visiting the hospitals where they were transmitted through shared needles.

This is a great book that covers many early outbreaks: http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases/dp...
Dunno. My uncle has worked at UPS for decades. The job treats him well. The only bad thing that happened is once he was knocked off his feet by chemical fumes due to a mislabeled container, but he turned out alright.

I guess you have not seen or worked really awful jobs for really awful wages before?
eranation- doh! You should have been hit with the popup when you tried to leave the page. I also have some things coming that will be a fallback, to ensure that it gets seen more.

Sorry for the initial confusion, and thanks for the second chance. Email me if you have any issues or questions Coeyman@gmail.com
Shenzhen Trip Part 1 – Hacker Camp
I've always felt there should be a conference for bug hunting.

All talks about bugs, how they were solved, dead ends attempted, tools/techniques used to diagnose, etc.

Would be really useful to see how other people approach debugging and you'd probably get to learn about lots of tools you didn't know existed.
Those are great services. Pro tip if you have a garder, order your compost bags there, they are dirt cheap & they put them in your trunk, no more hassle.
> I have found that although argparse and sisters are nice libraries they don't allow me to do many of things I like to do in my interfaces. For instance sometimes like options such as

?

This is trivial to do with argparse (or optparse for that matter):

import argparse

def a_prefixed(string):
if not string.startswith('a'):
raise argparse.ArgumentTypeError("%r does not start with 'a'" % string)
return string

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-x', '--extra', action='append', type=a_prefixed)

print parser.parse_args()

resulting in:

> python test.py -x afoo -x abar
Namespace(extra=['afoo', 'abar'])
> python test.py -x afoo -x baz
usage: test.py [-h] [-x EXTRA]
test.py: error: argument -x/--extra: 'baz' does not start with 'a'

> I also believe that you should have "fast fail" validators.

Isn't that what the callback parameter is for, especially with is_eager=True? Or ParamType if you need either something more reusable or something more extensive.

> Most of the time I deal with files, directories, and "string" parameters which these libraries don't help with.

http://click.pocoo.org/api/#click.File, argparse has something similar.
Personally I never saw what the big deal was. They allow you to put people into lists, which you could already do on Facebook and Twitter at the time. But because they called them "circles" and visualised them as such, suddenly it was a radical new idea or something.
Russia: Veto Law to Restrict Online Freedom
Neither balloons or drones are going to be fast enough to watch Netflix.
Related: There is an opportunity for a company (or even multiple companies) to build a suite of complimentary software and services from the IP and former customer bases of failed startups. The trick (aside from having the funds and clout to negotiate and keep the purchases at small dollar amounts) is to find the areas where two (or more) unsuccessful businesses could have been successful if they were run under the same house.
Apple, Google, Intel And Adobe Settle Antitrust Lawsuit Over No-Hire Agreement
Making a mini tablet is not innovation. Any Joe can look at a tablet and think, "Hey what if this was small enough to fit in my cargo pants". Making a good one with great input & user experience would be.
Warburg Pincus Buys Compensation Software Service PayScale
How did you form the belief that the public at large are the plaintiff class? I believe it's comprised of people who actually worked for the named companies between specific dates.
So, the solution to not using transaction/copy-on-write semantics in your application or filesystem is to crud up your format with a whole bunch of magic numbers, markers, and checksums to make your file have transaction/copy-on-write semantics.

Um ...
Do you consider an N-Trig digitizer to be proper? I've heard that some people prefer Wacom, but I haven't been able to discern a difference.
www. subdomain seems broken.

http://cryptol.net/ works
Why VC Firms Are Snapping Up Designers
Why the world needs to rethink touchscreen computing
Google+ has it's users, but to me it always seemed like the ultimate example of building something no one actually wanted.
I think Nginx is good with http://nginx.com/ and their Nginx Plus + Support Contracts model.

I'd like to see OpenSSH on this list simply because it is probably as widely used as OpenSSL and I don't think it has better funding...I could be wrong tho.
The German and Danish post offices offer this as an opt-in choice for postal package delivery. You indicate that you want your packages delivered to a kiosk instead of your house, and anything bigger than a regular envelope that's mailed to you will go there instead. That way the stores you order from don't even have to agree to ship to the kiosk; you can order from Amazon.co.uk, who don't know anything about Danish postal kiosks, have it addressed to your street address, and it'll go to the kiosk instead.
One strategy I've found works for me is to keep a document explaining why you designed the system the way you did. What were the alternative possibilities? Why didn't you pursue them instead? Do so without referencing projects or implementation details, and derive your reasoning from first principles.

I revisit the document as I'm working on a project, so when I go to code a new feature, I make sure I can justify the need to create it with respect to the larger design of the system it lives in.
I think Vic formerly worked on .NET at Microsoft in fact.
> It's also unacceptable to wait 2 days to get what I order.

Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
The man who invented the Internet (well, sort of)
P2P would shift the congestion from transit links to shared upstream last mile links which will probably make ISPs even more unhappy.
There are only four private universities in the UK (and I confess I'd only heard of one of them, Buckingham): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingd...
Many UPS drivers make 6 figures (with overtime).....
Case against kim dotcom crumbling, dotcom might have been framed
Does anyone, anywhere believe a "truly fair free market" is anything but an ideal that could never exist? We'll find unicorns first.
Mark Zuckerberg Immortalized by Madam Tussauds
Promisekit – A delightful Promises implementation for iOS
For me, the number one problem of Google+ was that many who were excited to try it, couldn't (for over a year, if I recall?). We were a 2nd-class-citizens with a Google Apps account, rather than a Gmail account.
Robot Film "Construct" Could Change Everything You Know About CGI
You are forgetting one central point, customers pay Comcast to receive netflix. It is their customers requesting this data, if Comcast truely has issues with the costs of this it is customers who should be paying more, not Netflix.

The truth of the matter is this has absolutely zero to do with costs, and everything to do with extracting rent via market position.
exactly! theres a ton of good ideas and good work sitting on harddrives because the original company didn't succeed, and I'm sure a lot of it has value that could be recycled or reintroduced
HN moderators: can you please rename the post, since the project has been renamed to DataScript: https://github.com/tonsky/datascript/commit/5beb53d7db03bd27...
> But before you get cocky, remember -- all these crazy features in TLS were put there for a reason. Someone wanted and demanded them.

While I guess that must be true, the OP was clever enough not to say that someone actually needed them.

And really, all we can say for sure is true is that someone wanted them. Whether they had to demand them or not depends on if there was any resistance to the feature from the standards body. Having seen some standards processes at play, it's sometimes more like "Hey, I think this is probably a good idea," "Okay, sounds good." Of course, some of those would escalate to "demands" if resistance was put up, and lack of energy for that fight is why sometimes resistance isn't.

However, I feel like the last couple years has seen such a raft of vulnerabilities that it may lead to an actually qualitative change in how people approach these things, and in the future security standards-making is going to be a lot more conservative about adding features. One can hope.

Doesn't change the main point that security is hard, and that surely the next gen of TLS, if it happens, will wind up with some vulnerabilities too.
Word Trees and Customer Insights
Google and Facebook's Fight for the Future of Tech
I don't think anyone doubts that a small slice of high-demand workers are in a favorable position to negotiate good terms. That's also why the original wave of unionization took off among occupations like coal miners and shipyard workers, not among stockbrokers or architects. Programmers don't need much government help because they, for the moment, are in high demand, so the employee has more market power than in most industries. Though even in tech, some aspects seem to still need the government to intervene: despite the shortage of programmers, employers still have enough market power to force noncompete agreements into the average worker's employment contract, unless the state bans them (as California did).

One thing I like about living in Denmark, though, is that just about all employees have reasonable working conditions and decent perks, so there's less of a social gulf between different occupations. I get 6 weeks of vacation per year, along with benefits like paternity leave, good health coverage, a safe working environment, etc.— and so does everyone else. Actually I think even in my white-collar job the benefits are a little better here, though it depends on what you care about. I don't have free lunch or a masseuse available, but the work/life balance is good: at a Valley company it would be hard to negotiate perks like 6 weeks of vacation (especially if you want a real vacation, where you disconnect for at least 2-3 weeks at a time), and people don't seem to normally take paternity leave.
Sounds good! (I was asking in general not for myself)
Resources for the global digital safety training community.
"I really need those cough meds right now."

"Mooooom, we're out of milk, and I want CEREAL!!!"

"Alright, so I have everything for dinner, but it looks like we're a little low on butter, so I can't make the cake like I wanted to :/"

Now add that you have kids to the scenario, and you've got to drag them along to what should be a 3 minute shopping trip.

There are a lot of situations where taking that long for something is pretty unacceptable.
The absurdity of LinkedIn
The results will be presented to the court on May 27th; I imagine they'll be kept quiet until then.

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25630192/apple-go...
I'm not so sure. Look at Heartbleed: the vulnerable reference code was committed by the person who wrote the Internet Draft.
Comcast's customers are paying Comcast to deliver Netflix's bits to them. Why does Comcast need to be paid for those bits twice?

If we're going to throw out some numbers, Netflix's net income was just $112M on $4.3B in revenue last year (2.6%). Comcast's net income was $6.82B on $64.66B in revenue (10.5%). Netflix's spend on content acquisition and production is increasing, which means that 2.6% is shrinking; they're already cash flow negative IIRC. Not much room to start doubling up on bandwidth fees they already pay.
Eagle PCB Designer - terrible UI, feels like twice the work to do anything
I think China is the perfect example of what I believe.

Do you really believe the Clean Air Act was unnecessary? I was around in the 70's in California when the air was crap. Do you really think that cleanup would have happened without regulation? Not in a million years.

And, don't say the labor market and clean air are different. They're both driven by profits.
Show HN: Mowbly Mobility Platform
“I’m also forever in debt to the Google+ team. This is a group of people who built social at Google against the skepticism of so many.”

Seems like the skeptics were right, no? And this is coming from a big fan of Google. Great company, but this didn't work out. Interesting that they give Vic credit for Circles. I thought it was someone else's idea, no? Great idea, they just didn't follow up on it.
You don't say! :)

Try googling for "the wizard book." See first result.

Marvel at the book's cover, http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

P.S. for a kinda-scientific treatment of "what if magic was real [and obeyed internally consistent laws]?", see ongoing scifi story http://qntm.org/ra
Hacker News != Humor

upvoted in an effort to fight the man.
Cryptol is REALLY cool. I followed its genesis from the Haskell community as it was primarily developed at Galois. Cryptol can be compared to Haskell somewhat neatly as similar with a significantly enhanced type system capable of representing more cryptographically important notions.

For anyone with an interest in Haskell, security, and/or dependent types it's worth taking a closer look at Cryptol.
Would you really? Do you know how much that would cost? Horvath is not a millionaire, something tells me it would just be a giant money pit for lawyers.
Microsoft Earnings Release FY14 Q3
Ironically, this debate over whether it's "crafting a narrative" or "sloppy journalism" is itself an example of crafting a narrative. The same facts can be explained many ways, with many different emotional tenors.
Probably yes. You learned a valuable lesson.

I don't know the details, so I can't be 100% sure.

From your description, he handed your spec to another employee, and now that employee is trying to implement the spec YOU WROTE FOR FREE.
IIRC freespace light based transmission has beaten a couple of Gbps.
Hiring for startups: how to recruit the un-recruitable
I am not a designer/graphic artist, I just need it for proper handwriting recognition and quick sketches of ER diagrams :)
It's not a specific "how do I..." question. I have a lot of front-end experience and have always wondered why inputs present so many styling challenges. I'm aware there are some properties you can control, but, they're inconsistent, limited, and apparently arbitrary. For instance, try indenting the text of a select box option. That seems like it should be easy with CSS, but it's not. You have to manually (pre/ap)pend characters or go with a JS replacement approach. There are a lot of those little gotchas, and I'm curious if there are general reasons why that exist in a layer below what I'm used to working with.
People do need resumption. If you were designing a new encrypted transport protocol, it's likely that your starting point would include a mechanism to persist the initial key exchange across multiple connections; that's a sensible feature. It may be less and less necessary over the next decade if we transition to faster and faster ECC handshakes, but most handshakes today use RSA.

Similarly: renegotiation, an armpit feature of TLS, has a sensible use case: a server doesn't necessarily know whether a TLS client certificate is required until it can see the HTTP URL requested. But that doesn't happen until after the handshake completes. I'm not sure renegotiation is the best solution to that problem (as opposed to an HTTP 4xx status code response), but it's not as if the feature was crazy.
Please tell me you're building in the Houston area. I'd jump ship from AT&T in a heartbeat.
If you disagree, make an argument. These sort of obstinate replies add nothing to the conversation.
I think that's what defines them "bad guys".
What's the end game for a YC non-profit? Besides corporate social responsibility, how does a non-profit founded at YC benefit the business ecosystem at large?
That's a really good point. I always reference them as a company that seems great, despite never having used their service or known anybody who has worked there. They have really great developer PR which, given their market, is also just really great PR.
It was in the invite-only stage for less than 3 months.
Microsoft used language construction "available at zero cost" instead of "free". They also said that they have plans to make "Windows for Internet of Things" as a special version of Windows for enthusiasts who want to create experimental devices, also "available at zero cost".
Einstein on The Essential Feature of Productive Thought
Bitcoin by analogy
Ask HN: Multiplayer games between iOS and Android
I am trying to get a better understanding of how do the - turn based asynchronous games - like Words with friends etc. work?

Can any one please recommend a site or documentation that can help me understand them better? the design part not the how-to-play part :)

I want to learn more about how to design (and maybe develop) a game but am having a tough time trying to get started and to find information. Googling information comes up with a whole lot of cheats and how to play the games but that's not what I want. I want to learn and understand the design and technical aspects of how it is done.

Any pointers or help is really appreciated. Anything that can help me get started will be useful :)
I agree. I can't stand the low contrast gray typefaces, the new zoom buttons that replace the slider, the obnoxious, hyperactive search bar and the inability to rotate the map view (which should be trivial).
Llama on Android also has a simpler UI and is Free opposed to Tasker.

I believe between Llama & IFTTT you should be able to do pretty much everything that Tasker can do.
Did you see the last part on setuptools?

It actually shows you how to set it up so you don't even use a #!, but rely on setuptools to make an executable for you, that'll work in a vitualenv or on windows. And the script name doesn't have .py at the end in his example, though he doesn't call that out specifically.
I think the creation of a group by decorating an empty function seems awkward. Why not just have the group be an ordinary class, i.e. something like "cli = click.group()"?
Funny Snippet:

Mr. Jobs was notorious for throwing his weight around however he could. One person on the iPhone design team was also named Steve, which caused some confusion in meetings. Mr. Jobs sought to change this.

“At some point Steve Jobs got really frustrated with this and said ‘Guess what, you’re Margaret from now on,’” Mr. Tolmasky said. From there on, members of the team would always address the designer Steve as Margaret.
Retainer, not such a bad idea. After getting stiffed on a short project that went nowhere, I should start using that one.
In this case, Comcast has two choices: raise prices on all their customers, or raise prices on Netflix's customers by charging Netflix for their increased usage. Prior to paying Comcast for transit, if Netflix decided to push 4k streams, that decision carried no repercussions for Netflix. Now they have to do a business case to see if the increased cost is worth it.

I know it's not a popular opinion on HN, but I don't think it's unreasonable for Comcast to ask Netflix to shoulder some of the cost. It also has the added benefit of incentivizing Comcast to provide faster service. If they can charge Netflix more for pushing more data, then it directly leads to more profit if their users consume more data.