skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ownership of big Finnish companies formed Keiretsu type arrangement until the beginning of the 80's. Finland had two big banks, SYP and KOP, and they formed two camps that cross owned large sectors of Finnish business.

Nokia was mostly in the SYP camp. SYP owned directly 20% of Nokia and even more trough it's insurance companies and other investors.
I don't think it's controversial to say that public infrastructure crowds out private investment. It's very hard to "compete" with a service that everyone is obligated to pay for anyway through their tax dollars. A good example is schools. In the U.S., private schools are allowed, but 90% (and increasing) of kids go to public schools. Is that because the public schools are better? No. It's because taxpayers are obligated to pay for public schools anyway.

Furthermore, I don't think it's controversial to say that municipal services tend to be least common denominator affairs. Again, look at schools. I might personally be willing to pay twice as much property taxes to get well-funded schools that hire well-paid teachers, but good luck getting 51% of voters to agree to such tax increases.

Look also at power, water, and sewer utilities. Why are they so badly underfunded, and in a continual state of life support? As a yuppie, I'd be happy if my sewer bill went up by 500% (from $10/month to $50/month) if that meant a high-quality sewer system that didn't dump raw sewage into the river when it rained. I'd be happy to pay a lot more for water that wasn't flowing through old leaded pipes. But good luck getting any of that through a rate setting board!

Public utilities are under political control. Depending on the industry, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. I think for telecom, it's not a good thing, in that it won't lead to an equilibrium that I think techies would be happy with. Say you wanted to build municipal fiber in San Francisco. What's the body politic that will control that system? Do you think it'll be techies? Of course not. It'll be the folks that are out there picketing Google. The discussion will shift from provisioning high speed service to figuring out how to subsidize low-income and high-cost people. Or, take Seattle, which is not very dense and is quite sprawling. Do you think the political consensus will lead to installing fiber in the high-density, high-income, low-cost areas first?

It's also interesting you use public libraries as an example. Municipalities all over the country are cutting library budgets to the bone. Why? Because people don't care about them. I think what you'll find is that municipal broadband will be in the same bucket. People won't care enough about it to appropriate the substantial funds that will be necessary to maintain and continually upgrade the network.
Microsoft on mission to save Windows, but may not succeed
I've definitely caught inappropriate communications behind my back, to the point that I've had to pursue litigation and have collected a couple of (small) tortious interference settlements.

This is much much bigger issue to any employer than any union-forming issue. An employee who sues is a giant nightmare. (Which I will say right now can be unfair, because it's hard for an outsider to distinguish between the bogus lawsuit and the legit lawsuit, and there are plenty of both in the workplace.)

Lawsuits are just about as bad as comments about how you would declare war on your employer if they cross a line you have set. I've seen you make that comment at least twice.

A union agitator would need to get a critical mass of coworkers to go along with him to cause real trouble. A guy who sues or self-describes as declaring war can cause real trouble all by himself.

EDIT: I have some specific posts I could refer to, but I don't think linking to them follow the "Please add comments that make things better" rule. I'm not 100% positive that this comment so far follows the rule, so I'm quitting before I get too far behind.
NoSQL is not a superior tech, it's a trade-off.

What you are arguing is that future people will value data security and performance less than scalability... Well, I doubt it, but my crystal ball is as useless as yours.
Ouch - maybe we should all flag this then?
Probably just expecting the usual dumb comments:

"Thanks, it's ok. It seems to be being moderated well for once. And I can take any stupid comments these days."

https://twitter.com/anna_debenham/status/459677447404138496
The most egregious example of a huge site doing things that smaller sites are not allowed to do is ...

GOOGLE!

Recently, I've seen its "survey wall" cropping up on more and more sites.

It works like this:

You do a Google search. You see a link to an article you want to read. You click through.

You're met with a message that tells you that if you want to actually read the page, you have to complete a survey.

And the whole thing is powered by Google: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/10/31/googles-latest-conten...

Remember back when Experts Exchange tried to pull the same nasty tactic -- have its cake (get indexed in Google search results) and eat it too (hide that content behind a paywall)? Remember how slimy it was, and how Google penalized it several times, as it tried various other ways to cloak its content?

Well ... Google is doing exactly the same thing.
This story is a perfect candidate for that new comment filtering feature on HN. I'm not even sure a meaningful HN discussion is possible on this sort of topic anyway.
This is probably going to come off as insensitive, but whatever

I went through a bit of this myself to a lesser degree

for whatever reason, in my experience, getting authorities involved (older siblings, parents, school authorities) not only doesn't solve these things, they seem to inflame them

ime, bullies get off on the realization that they can affect another human's behavior

ignoring it (or at least pretending to), or projecting that it doesn't affect you seems to be a much more affective strategy

which is easier advice to give than to follow, I understand
From the old standby, wikipedia:

> In 1947, after his near-fatal aircraft crash in 1946, [Howard] Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars, chicken, and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, or speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continually watching movies. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, as he had not bathed or cut his hair and nails for weeks
Yes it's called grape juice : the wine you drink because the taste is 'divine' doesn't exist in a non alcoholic form. Don't know about beer though
NYT Editorial: Creating a Two-Speed Internet
> Without taking any side here, this isn't indicative of much.

I think it does up the ante. If a Google employee (or anyone who doesn't like him really) could catch him in a lie his reputation would be damaged as he is a "public figure".

On the other hand if you caught me in a lie... well only around 5-6 people know who I am and I copied this nick off another bloke on a different forum because I thought it was cool. So it wouldn't really bother me.
Protip: Prefer alcohol-free beverages. Works all the time.
Alcohol doesn't bring anything to the table except a false sense of belonging and elation. If you need to do that ALL NIGHT to feel good around friends and people in general, then you might need to sit down and ask yourself some serious questions.
"This way I can use the cypher query language to access data relationally across all my shards while scaling writes and Big-data horizontally"

That sounds pretty powerful. Do you mind sharing more information about the data storage/querying stack you use?
I am wondering if the prolonged latencies from most of the Google services I am experiencing in the past few years are somehow related to using Spanner instead of the previously conventional "compute in advance offline"-"serve immediately" approach. The Spanner paper mentioned they sacrificed a bit of latency (from nanoseconds in DHT lookup to milliseconds). I understand it's more convenient for Google developers to have more predictable thought framework instead of making every single project a piece of art while spending most of the time fighting inconsistencies arising from eventual consistency. The question is if it was worth it? I remember time when Google services were amazingly fast - that time is unfortunately gone :-(
Two big differences:

First, I have never heard of RadiumOne or this guy, and I suspect that most other people have not, either. While most people have heard of Mozilla.

Second, most people have absolutely nothing to do with this company. I could threaten to boycott RadiumOne's products, but I don't even know what they do. While Mozilla (or DropBox) is a place I can react against.

(I didn't like Eich being forced out, FWIW. I'm just pointing out the practical distinctions.)
That they're spun off is probably a good thing. Nokian tires are basically the best winter tires around. It's gone so far that consumer tests are superfluous. Nokian winter tires and Continental summer tires are the be-all, end-all of tires. Why the hell do I know this? I don't even own a car...
Surviving UI Programming
Ask HN: Feedback on my product idea please.
Narrated programming. A product which allows programmers to narrate what they are doing as they code.

Why, you ask? Because programming could become a spectator sport. Sound ridiculous? Only a few years ago video gaming as a spectator sport seemed far fetched. Now it's big business. I think people will want to watch other programmers work and understand what they think and how they do it. I would certainly be interested in watching some of the best programmers at work - as long as the narration was effective and meaningful. That's what this product would do - help programmers to narrate and capture meaningful commentary.

Thoughts and feedback?
This might prevent you from getting drunk, but the result is going to be some terrible gas. Anyone who homebrews will know this because of those times you've drank beer that still had tons of yeast in suspension or when they accidentally drank the sediment.
"This idea (Jobs needed to be away from Apple to improve himself) gets mentioned a lot but I think it's nonsense."

That's a very sweeping statement. I take it you have first hand experience (worked for Apple in the early days) or have extensive apple reporting experience. I don't think the point being made is that he "needed" to be away from Apple to improve himself. The point is that he was a very bad manager at Apple and had considerably improved when he came back. I think I read somewhere Woz saying he had to learn a lot about being a good manager from Mike Markula and others in the early days and I think in part John Sculley was brought in to correct these deficiencies. In that sense Larry Page and Jobs are similar - they were both green managers who made some awful decisions and had to learn a lot, if grudgingly from professional managers before becoming the great business leaders we see them to be.
the name is a bit oxymoronic
Google to pay huge tax-fine in France
It's the word "cyber", which is essentially an indicator for "Please ignore me, I know nothing about this subject" to anyone other than mainstream news media. If it was called online bullying, it'd be a different story.
This reminds me of what happened to my self last year. I had a YouTube channel with Gaming Videos, they went to my channel created a fake Google+ account using my name and started posting offensive content on it.

They then went to videos with homosexual acts and posted comments with my name saying things like "I endorse this", etc..

On the Google+ page they posted Male Pornography all under my name.

I went to the Police here in Dubai and after a few weeks of no response I found out that they lost my file and that I would have to do another report to get anything done about it.

I eventually took it into my own hands, contacted Google+ send pictures of my passport and they shutdown the account and removed all Google query's of the page.
Flavor-wise they range from not very good to absolutely terrible, kind of defeating the whole purpose. Even the very best non-alcoholic wines are only marginally better than the very worst alcoholic wines.
TL;DR Cryptol is an amazing tool for communicating crypto specifications with your peers, for testing crypto implementations and for doing crypto research and formal verification. It has the most amazing and practical use of a SAT solver I've ever seen.

I've touched it briefly a very long time ago, so don't believe me blindly, but this is my impression of what Cryptol is about in practice:

* If you're publishing a paper on a new cryptographic building block, lets call it AES2, you need to specify it. Instead of using the usual math-oriented pseudo-code or unreadable-to-your-peers C, you can use the Cryptol DSL, which looks familiar to your readers but can be executed and toyed with.

* If you're implementing AES2 (be it in Cryptol, C, VHDL or assembly language) you can ask the Cryptol runtime to verify it against another implementation (usually a Cryptol implementation taken from the paper on AES2, but you could write your own or use an existing implementation in another supported language). The Cryptol runtime may be able to tell you if they are mathematically identical (and I do mean mathematically: this is not unit testing but proving identity). I say "may" because not every function can be verified this way - that would solve the proven unsolvable Halting Problem. This is implemented by translating the tested implementations to logic circuits and using a SAT solver to prove that their XOR is constant 0. (Please take a moment to reflect on how awesome this is.)

* If you're researching crypto, it gives you a programming language and toolset very fit for experimenting with cryptographic building blocks and running the sorts of statistical tests that you'd want to run on them in the process of research. It also gives you tools for formal verification (mathematically proving properties of your AES2 proposal in a way that a computer can verify is error-free).

* In theory, you can compile a Cryptol specification to optimized C or VHDL and use that in your project. acfoltzer said in this thread that Cryptol 2 is a rewrite and the compiler still isn't done (it was for Cryptol 1).

In a sane world, crypto journals and standards institutes would not accept proposals of new crypto building blocks that don't come with Cryptol code, and implementations would always use the Cryptol toolset to automatically mathematically verify that their implementation is identical to the published specification, eliminating many classes of implementation bugs.

This wouldn't have prevented Heartbleed, which isn't a crypto implementation bug.
> I took the CouchDB architecture and reimplemented it with a PostgreSQL back-end

can you provide more details on this? is there a public repo?
You must write tests first, but not the kind of tests TDD people advertise to write, such as unittest.

Instead, you should write short specifications on paper, whiteboard, or as code comments. You can even use automated proof system to verify what you're trying to implement is sane.

These specification-like tests will make you think upfront. They are not tided to any language/library/implementations. I find them much valuable than other automated tests TDD promotes.

I do think automated tests are valuable, too. It's awesome to have a program that can test your program and only your program by being tightly coupled with the program being tested. It runs your program in different ways using test doubles. Generates beautiful reports with coverage analysis. It's indispensable. But I don't think you must write them before you implement your program. And, you don't have to be driven by automated tests you wrote beforehand. If you must be driven by something, get driven by rich type system, automated proof assistants, whiteboards, discussions with coworkers.. etc.
People go out of their way to block traffic from HackerNews? Why?
I see the potential of an internet mime here.
> I'd like to see someone form a well constructed argument for why that statement is inaccurate, over-stated, or otherwise unfair

Here's his statement again, rewritten without the Fox News-style editorialization:

"Test-first units lead to a graph of intermediary objects in order to avoid doing things that are outside the scope of your test. This practice isolates the piece of code you are testing, but as a side-effect means that you don't do unnecessarily slow work like hitting a database, filesystem or web browser. It has given rise to new patterns of application architecture such as a service and command layers."

Oops, I wrote all the same facts but stated them neutrally, and now it doesn't sound like a horror movie! How am I supposed to bully Rails devs into following my style?
Not the 'world's first', been plenty of bitcoin to debit card schemes. I have an ecoin.cc card Russians reload automatically whenever I send BTC/LTC
> All my sympathy for her just instantly evaporated.

Wat? Why!?
This discussion is curious to me. I've heard the sentiment “fire your employee when they show attitude”, and no doubt that an attitude coupled with mental instability (hinted at by another commenter) would make an employee troublesome in the eyes of the employer.

However, I can't see how at all this is relevant and why it's taken into account in evaluating michaelochurch's comment.

For example, one of his statements is:

> The Valley is fucking terrified of unions. So terrified that if you even seem like you might be leaning that way, executive-level people in major companies will go out of their way to fuck up your career. A lot of the back-channel reference checking that goes on in the Valley is to avoid taking on a potential unionist. No one cares if you were a mediocre performer 3 jobs ago.

We surely could question the anecdotal nature of OP's experience and call for more evidence, yet commenters start implying that the person is writing this out of mental instability or evil agenda.

> you appear to have an anti-Google agenda in your comments

IMHO it seems natural that pro-Google comments from other employees of the company, which you mention as answering to OP elsewhere, too might likely have an agenda of their own.
The Best Startups Are Expensive
Is that a MiG-21 in the last photo?
Just browsing her portfolio on that website, this looks pretty interesting:

http://speakr.co.uk/
This is repulsive. Promoting waste and destruction when there are many better ways to deal with a phone you don't want or need anymore.

http://www.phones4charity.org/

http://www.ncadv.org/takeaction/DonateaPhone.php

http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/
Sucks that the class members don't have a say.

Class members can opt out of the settlement, and if enough do it (IANAL but one would probably know the magic number) the settlement doesn't hold.

There is heavy social pressure not to opt out, though. It would be very public. And actively participating in a lawsuit against an employer puts a black mark on your resume for any future employers. (Which as I pointed out elsewhere can be unfair: sometimes employees sue for bullshit reasons, and sometimes employees sue for incredibly legitimate reasons.)
It's not for me; I like externally-imposed structure and hate doing my own accounting specifically enough to track all the taxes self-employment demands I track. But it is a third option, and I tip my hat to those who find it fulfilling.
But Nokia was a company that was already starting to falter when Elop came on board. What else could the company have done to survive? Their options seem limited from what we know about the marketplace. They could have release an android phone, but then they just would have been fighting for a piece of the pie that Samsung, Moto, and other phone makers are eating. They could have stayed with their phone OS and probably would have had just about the same fate as picking up Windows Mobile.

Maybe they would have had more sales with an Android phone, but I'm not sure it would have made a bit enough difference to prevent this buyout. Elop set Nokia up to be bought out by being a major windows phone maker. It may have been a better long-term bet than Android.
You're correct under the definition in WP.

Note that often (e.g. when comparing bus factor of projects of different sizes) it makes sense to normalize by dividing by the size of the team in which case the answer to asogi's question is "Yes, normalized bus factor is 1/n"
I thought it meant that their entire company is taking a retreat to work on an OSS project.

This version is cool too though.
If people don't want something to be linked to by people who find it interesting, they shouldn't post it on the public internet.

Harsh but true.
Weird - I have never seen this, and I don't have an adblocker installed, javascript disabled, etc. I wonder if this is geolocation- or browser-specific?
There is a well-meaning but equally short-sighted view that every bully is themselves hurt in some way and the bullying is a projection of that hurt on others, a coping mechanism. While I think it's important to understand that that can be the case, it's equally important to understand that it's not always the case.

Yes, some bullying is acting out to get attention, deflecting the bully's own insecurity on others. That is the kind of bullying that "ignore it" works on. But when bullying extends to larger groups of antagonists than just one person and their immediate clique of friends, is likely to be a sadistic game of oneupmanship. And I think cyber-bullying can only happen effectively under such a scenario.

Sadistic games continue to go on because the players get more pleasure than pain out of the act. Suspending them will fuel their cause, make them martyrs in the eyes of their cohorts. They have identified that nothing serious will happen to them and they can continue on.

Sadistic bullying is as much the fault of the school administration for not maintaining discipline as it is for the children who engage in it. It doesn't come out of nowhere. It doesn't just happen once. The ring-leaders are probably well known for their behavior problems. Weak leadership at the school is what allows things to get so out of hand.

The only way to stop it is to demonstrate clear, harmful consequences to anyone involved, even tangentially. But given the scenario in which it is allowed to get so bad, it probably won't be corrected because of weak leadership on behalf of the local authorities. So perhaps you can see how some people will conclude that taking matters into their own hands is the only answer.
Not recalling all the details of my physiology here, but there is an additional ethanol metabolism pathway that is not engaged or not fully engaged until someone is very very drunk or is chronically pretty damn drunk. IIRC, the enzyme involved does not put out the same toxins through oxidation that affect the nervous system and give that drunk look. Instead you get the 'functional alcoholic'.

Based on what other people are saying here, my guess is, that's what we've got going on here. My common sense says there is probably a measurable, but insignificant effect by the enzyme in the yeast.

Edit: also, the theory is just that the stomach is a mixing bowl, so the poor man's field test is here is pretty trivial, maybe I'll have some fun tonight with a blender, some yeast, and a bottle of cheap hooch.
Tomorrow is too late