skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
France's situation: national public telecom company (France Telecom, now Orange) built the network, private competitors appeared, Orange got privatized, competitors didn't have the network to be everywhere and allow proper competition so the law forced Orange to allow other ISPs to use Orange's network for a fee (so I could be a client of, say, Bouygue Telecom, but using Orange network to join Bouygue's).

A huge and easy justification for that is that Orange's network had mostly been built using public funds since it was a public company at the time.

Since then, several competitors have built their own network, but most still use Orange's sharing for remote place, small villages etc where it's not worth it for them to deploy their own.

So your question is hard to answer. Why has the monopoly ISP built the infrastructure ? Because it was a public company, and if you wanted your house to be connected to the network they had to do it. Why have the others built their own ? Because it was much cheaper for them long term, especially since they also use it for their cellphone network.

And from what I see, it seems to be the same in a lot of Europe, the national companies made the original network, and competitors piggy backed on it until they had their own.

(I've oversimplified of course, but that's the gist of it)
"That beam is WAY more powerful than the sun per unit area. If not, we'd just use the sun."

A common misconception, but untrue.

What matters isn't power per area but cost per kilowatt-hour. To collect solar power on Earth you need a lot of expensive components (photovoltaic cells), plus you probably need to track the sun, and even so you'll have huge losses due to night-time, weather, winter sun angle, and so on. In comparison, a rectenna array is just a bunch of little bent pieces of wire. It's almost trivially inexpensive to build, and in some cases it can live side by side with other land uses. Even if the power density is only a few hundred watts m^2 (compared to over a kilowatt/m^2 from the sun at peak power) that power can be converted with upwards of 80% efficiency (compared to much less than 50% efficiency) and the full amount of that power is available 24/7 through every season. The hypothetical 1kw/m^2 at noon on a summer's day actually rounds out to only a tiny fraction of that over the entire year. Meanwhile, a rectenna converting 100 W/m^2 of RF power can end up producing the same average power as a solar installation, except that power is always available and the cost of the ground component is a teeny, tiny fraction of the ground solar installation.

That still leaves the cost of the space component, of course, which is decidedly non-trivial. But a big advantage is that the space component can have a very, very long service life and can also serve various markets (especially remote regions where power delivery is difficult) which can provide the up-front high-profit business to pay off its cost.
Heat and Violence in Chicago (Statistical Analysis)
It stopped being just an ID platform the second they started forcing "sharing" from the same account down people's throats, like photos, social, video, comments.

So here is the elephant in the room "privacy allegation": if I mess up and make a drunk post on Facebook, I can purge the entire profile and move on. Gmail, however, and a host of associated tools have been critical for my jobs and business for many years. If i make a stupid drunk post on Google+, I don't even want to think how and what parts of my job and business it might affect, so in the foreseeable future I'm staying miles away from anything "social Google".
I took a geology class at Stanford when I was an undergrad, and we went to that deposit/mine on a field trip. My professor claimed that the type of asbestos present at the mine was harmless since the mineral structure was a large fiber, and it didn't effect our lungs the way smaller fiber-ed asbestos does (different versions of serpentine, essentially). He made the argument that there was safe asbestos and unsafe asbestos. We them proceeded to walk all over it and collect some samples by hand.

But I'm not sure who to believe nowadays, especially after reading this article. Makes the whole industry sound pretty scummy and doesn't allude to there being a "safe" version of asbestos. (My professor never told us about how the asbestos industry basically funded all sorts of propaganda in favor of the stuff.)
Yet the parent's point stands quite as firmly at 35% as it did at 75%. Intuitively it doesn't seem just for systemic friction to enrich undamaged parties so thoroughly.
Human administrators are not a feature. Chargebacks and other forms of manual intervention allow a third party to diddle with the business of two transacting parties on the instruction of a single one of them and some idea/law/regulation about what is 'right'. To assume that this is a good idea is hopelessly juvenile and naive.

Try to UML-ify a system with manual intervention. Now modify it accepting the ideas that a) people are imperfect; and b) people work on their own incentives which may not (probably won't) be aligned with the users of the system. The manual intervention bit is now a black hole of undefined behaviour with nothing but a wing and a prayer to say it might actually do something useful.

Try and get that past QA.
Serious question: has Google done anything truly right since gmail?
I've always found it odd why people say this. It's a horrible analogy, either you don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is or your don't understand what bitcoin is.
I like UNIX, vim and tmux and I agree with you. They're not 21st century tools, but for a lot of tasks, they're the best we've got.
And doing the traffic shaping they did against Netflix is not?
Sorry if I did not convey that I was not correcting, just supplementing what you said. I already upvoted your comment FWIW.
> There's some hopeful results from noninvasive variants as well

including "transcranial ultrasound stimulation",
http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/ultrasound/
I had the same reaction as well.
There's plenty of freelancers and academics who could make this work. Or people who hate their jobs and want to do something meaningful.
Multiple account use is borked. I was logged in under one account the other day, but wanted to leave a Youtube comment from another. But it just wasn't possible at the time. I gave up in the end. The UI is a disparate mess. I am not a fan of the one account rules all doctrine, especially when I can't switch to another with ease. I perceive myself as a competent web user, I've been surfing the web since Netscape on Win 3.1. Fail.
You're making strawman arguments e.g. a blockchain and a centralized database is much more similar than email and phone.
> Does that help clarify the role Cryptol might play in a cryptographer's workflow?

Yes, thank you very much. I erroneously assumed that it's intended to address implementation errors (that is to replace C or asm implementations with something easier to code). The "safety" I meant is irrelevant in case of "theorem prover" of course.

As I understand it's pretty unique tool in sense of easiness to generate VHDL specifications and such (as well as pretty DSL itself), as it's explained nicely in the presentation m0nastic reported on ( http://2012.sharcs.org/slides/hurd.pdf ). But, anyway, could you compare it somehow to the other "proving" tools that already exist, say Agda or Coq? I'm not expecting some specific information, just curious.
"Page once told a room full of Google’s first marketing employees that their profession was built on an ability to lie."

Oh come on. As owner of history's largest ad platform and someone who's made ungodly amounts of money from it, this seems like a massively hypocritical and un-self-aware thing to say.
Like I said, this is just drama. I like a lot of your comments too.
I am impressed. A yearly trip of mine is from Raleigh, NC to Long Island by way of Norfolk, VA, CBBT, Delmarva peninsula, Cape May ferry and Garden State parkway. That'll be doable by the end of the year if I'm reading the map correctly.
That's true, but what I'd really like is to be able to change the way the TV itself behaves. For instance, my Panasonic TV will automatically switch to the HDMI input if I turn on my Apple TV after turning on the TV. My Samsung TV won't - you always have to navigate the dumb "choose source" menu. That's the kind of thing I would want to be able to customise. A separate unit would be a good intermediate step (basically, something like AppleTV but with a tuner in it), but a truly hackable TV would be better.
I agree to some level, especially regarding politics and personality, but go back and look at the article we're commenting on. Does that sound like a person who should be the public face of any project?
3D charts with perspective ftw
Not really true, there's many variables including how 'full' you charge the battery, how much you discharge it, what the charge and run temps are, it's not a simple equation.

For example, if you don't charge and discharge the battery fully, you can get many many times more cycles out of them.

Charging quickly does release more heat, which can reduce the lifecycle of the battery, but there are workarounds to minimize this.

I am not an expert at battery chemistries, but I work with EV charging systems quite a bit.
First commit for Homebrew from five years back
Your biggest impediment as a hobbyist smartphone builder would be complying with FCC regulations on the cell antenna.
Mayor Slay says Lyft rival Uber is working with city
plus.google.com/photos/<your ID>/albums/posts

?
outstanding hiring strategy.
Pre-mining doesn't necessarily translate into more power, just more fruits thereof. Pre-mining bitcoin wouldn't mean that one can control the blockchain; it just makes one rich. One might even see that as the just reward of the creator of the technology

Interestingly, in a proof-of-burn system pre-mining would give the pre-miner increased power.
If anyone is wondering, this is Rails for OSX (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp)
exactly; in the emacs community, when somebody is chasing down a weird bug, they get asked to run emacs with the flags that disable all the startup customization as the very first thing, because 90% of the time, its a problem with some interaction in the user's (byzantine) ~/.emacs.d
I suspect the energy cost is a little higher than that because a commercial electricity customer (like Tesla) will often be subject to 'demand charges,' which are assessed based on the highest power used in a billing period. Since the point of a supercharger is to deliver a lot of power, the demand charge may be quite high.

I still agree with your conclusion though... Capital still dwarfs energy, even if they pay several times what you estimated.
> If Cogent is being paid by Netflix on the other side, then Cogent and Comcast are exactly aligned (each wanting to deliver the Netflix packets because their respective customers are paying them to) and should peer without any money changing hands.

Should Comcast cache my personal website for free so that it's super fast half way across the country? Or am I responsible for making my website faster (by using CDNs and such)? If it's the latter, why should Netflix not have the same experience I have?
Ask HN: Calls from debt collectors tied to iphone activity?
I'm getting "spammed" by barclay's bank to get me to pay off ~$200 balance.

I could easily pay it, but the reason I've left this amount unpaid was to understand a bit about how their calling technology works.

A few months ago, after I forgot to pay one month, I started getting calls from different 18xx numbers. I tried blocking the #s as they came in, but would just start getting the calls from new #s.

The call frequency has increased from about 1/day to now about 12/day. Strangely, I will get these calls as soon as I've unlocked my iphone or otherwise interacted with it. Almost never do I get a call when the phone is locked and not using it.

Even more oddly, I will often be in the midst of dialing another number when they call. I am putting together statistics, but in the meanwhile if there is some app notifying the service that makes these calls, how would you investigate?
"In any case, both of those still require having the Android device registered with a Google account."

Not exactly. They require having _an_ Android device registered. As long as you've once registered a device, it will stay associated with your account. It doesn't have to be the same device as the one onto which you want to install the downloaded APK.
That's awesome, sounds like a fantastic company culture. Thanks for the info.
Does this mean we can have our '+' back for Google searches?
Is backhaul more expensive than getting a big Cogent connection for like $1/Mbps? Or do places like Charter/etc pay even less than that for their paid peering connections?
An hagiographic piece posted on the same day that 2 set-back stories are announced (major strategic shift on "social" and no-poaching settlement)...
What you're describing doesn't sound like a good description of how peering agreements normally work.
FWIW I still get that annoying "real name" popup almost daily on YouTube. I'm going to try the fix mentioned below (blacklisting all cookies from YouTube)
This really makes it sound like Vic was essentially fired. I wonder how much Facebook's recent success in monetizing mobile is at the root of this? For a long time the conventional wisdom was that there was no money in mobile at all and it was a huge problem. Now Facebook is killing it, and Google's answer seems to have missed the mark. Although this article is all loose rumors and speculation, if you piece it together the picture feels believable: Google is seriously worried their bet on G+ is wrong. Until Facebook starting doing big numbers Vic had the benefit of the doubt, but now that it's clear in stark numerical fashion that Facebook is actually increasing it's lead over Google it's causing a serious rethink.

Personally I hope it does push Google to rethink G+. It doesn't take too much: step back a little, stop pushing it aggressively where it doesn't fit. Actively support pseudonimity - let people have their privacy AND their G+ cake and participate in multiple circles under different identities. Add APIs to let a 3rd party ecosystem develop. Encourage it. Yes Twitter wound it back but only after they were the undisputed leader. Fingers crossed.
And more importantly it works to: $totally worth it for the companies involved.

324/4 = $81 million each (assuming they split it evenly, I have no idea how that division works).

While each employee represented in this suit got the shaft, the bigger problem (IMO) is that the punitive cost for the individual companies is small enough (relative to their sizes and how much they likely saved by engaging in this practice) that it alone is unlikely to change any future behavior.
Wow, I had no idea about the spyware. I learned about Evozi from: http://www.labnol.org/internet/download-apk-from-google-play...

That labnol site has some great tips, and is well written, so I trust things I find there.
Definition of unintended consequences: I don't instantly recognise the names Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or whoever the other guy is -- I have to look them up, and to be honest I keep mixing up Larry Page and Larry Wall. But I know Vic Gundotra, because he's the wanker who pushed the real names policy and made Google+ the laughing stock among my various communities. "I am a Google employee who likes donuts", indeed!
Yeah, I make the distinction that while the distribution of power is relatively fair (determined strictly by processing power), the distribution of wealth (in the form of x-coins) is heavily skewed.

I don't have a problem with early adopters getting their just fruits, but to claim that it's more egalitarian than what exists today is misleading. The same argument can be claimed that Godaddy and other early DNS registrars are getting their just fruits by being early adopters of the current domain name registering system.
Try having 4 emails from clients that insist you use their domain email (hosted on GApps) and switching to them or your personal email to check out your google analytics.

It's a total and absolute -sham-. I still don't understand how they can screw up such basic functionality. Hell, even YouTube has -basic things- completely wrong. For example, I leave a comment on a video. I want to see my comment three months down the line and see if I have any replies and what score it has. I can't find that - anywhere. Where can I easily find my comments? Christ.
> Charging quickly does release more heat, which can reduce the lifecycle of the battery, but there are workarounds to minimize this.

I suspect that's why the GP was warned not to quick-charge his/her Leaf too often: The Leaf battery does not have an active cooling system.
The consequences are significantly higher even if the chance of infection is low. Of course, if given the option, medical staff will use much more significant measures.

But that doesn't refute the parent.
Which other ones have you spent significant time on? : )

IntelliJ is made by the folks that create the resharper plugin that adds decent refactoring to vstudio.

Eclipse has equally good refactoring, -out of the box just as IntelliJ
> This is not true. Netflix has to pay for transit of the bits leaving their servers just like everyone else. They just pay their transit provider for this, not Comcast (well, except when it is Comcast, but that's beside the point).

Netflix doesn't have a transit provider any more. They are piping directly into Comcast and wanted to do so for free. I want my website to be delivered to all Comcast customers for free, do you support that?
This is awesome. I love this.

For what it is worth, I went through a hard time with my startup. They will start using local numbers too. And then, international numbers. The methods used are actually pretty neat and clever.
but any good one?
A note on uptime
I think your comment is affirming my statement implicitly. For the things you want to do with a centralised database they are very similar. Given the entirety of things you can do with a blockchain then are very different. You view email and phones as very different, because enough time has passed for those differences to become obvious.
Descriptions from early outbreaks included rituals of evacuating all undigested food as part of the burial process.
Ask HN: Ideal blog platform for startups?
What's the ideal blog platform for a startup? Typically you want the most possible exposure, but also to own all your content and have it associated with your company domain, while being easy to use and administer. I have a few thoughts on what it might look like, did I miss anything? Are there any platforms that meet all these criteria currently?

1. Custom domain capable, so our content will be associated with [blog].mystartup.com instead of [blogplatformname].com in search engines.

2. Automated social media integration, blog posts automatically propagated to Twitter, FB, G+, etc.

2a. Corollary: integrated Disqus comments

3. Content network (Medium.com, Tumblr, Wordpress, Svbtle.com)

4. FOSS platform you can either self-host or host via the organization's P/SAAS service (Wordpress, Ghost). Ideal would be self-hosting yet still capable of #3.

5. Own all your content, whether self-hosted or SAAS hosted.

6. Editor that's both techie and non-techie friendly. Aka, Markdown support for techies, WYSIWYG editor for non-techies. Prefer all posts' source stored as Markdown for easy data portability.

7. Bylines for posts - want to publish not just under the company name, but show author names as well

8. SEO-friendly, especially url's

9. Easily theme-able

10. ...?
Interesting, last time I did this was 1996 (and last time I wore the net admin hat) we had our own range for internal use.

Just gotta make sure OSPF, (E/I)BGP and L2/L3 drop these ranges though.
Yes, but web technologies generally forbid you from doing anything remotely innovative because of the way they are designed.

Most "web apps" work worse than most apps we had two decades earlier, both in terms of design and performance. If you want people to pay for software on the app store, it helps if you put some effort into making your app responsive and exploiting the machine you are on. The only way to do this is with native applications.
The ISP doesn't promise to make every website / service on the internet as fast as possible. It's up to every service to make themselves fast by using CDNs. In the case of Netflix, they have become big enough where they now want to be their own CDN.
Yep, the retreat in its current form definitely has some constraints. However, we hope that it'll reach a few really awesome maintainers/projects, and also serve as a starting point for future programs in this space.
false analogy. it's not like eich donated money to the mormon church who then used it to do bad things. he donated directly to the prop 8 people, which was pretty much all bathwater and no baby.
But then they would think twice before furthering "...serves too many interests, and (particularly in the TLS portion of the tree) is a grab bag of functionality" [0] of un-security-like features like heartbeats. They might think: "Do I really want to write tests and a demo for this, or can I make do with something simpler?"

If not, then this suggests a lack of clear guiding principles of what is in-scope and what is not &| insufficient questioning of adding new features.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566456
I'm also looking for a summer internship.

I've been programming for the past 4 years or so (Python, Ruby, node.js, HTML5/CSS/JS, a lot of web tech). Here's my website (http://jawerty.github.io) and Github (https://github.com/jawerty) if anyone is interested.

My email is jawerty210@gmail.com.
> I pay my ISP for my access, Netflix pays their ISP for their access, and we get to talk to each other. That's how this stuff works. Comcast charging Netflix is double-dipping, and is directly opposed to their supposed purpose of serving me, their customer.

Netflix doesn't pay an ISP. That's the whole point of the arrangement, it goes straight from Netflix to Comcast. There is no middleman. So their peering arrangement is the equivalent of "paying their ISP".

To say that Netflix should not have to pay for internet traffic is ludicrous. I want a piece of that. Comcast should hook up their network to my servers so that my personal website is fast for Comcast users. For free of course.
Public outrage can have hysteresis, not just hysteria.
Using Technology To Fix The Texting-While-Driving Problem
Yes - the fact that many/most promising OSS projects are built by professionals who would either need to leave their job or take time off from their job makes this a challenge.
In a nutshell.

They should develop Google+ for the way that people would like to use it instead of developing it for the way that they would like people to use it.

That goes for everything, Google or not.
The only thing that worries me here is Google Authorship. That seemed like a good idea, but with a dead G+ the concept needs some home
> Mozilla (and Eich) decided that this expression from the community was sufficient for Eich to step down as CEO. No one forced them to do it, much like no one forced them to make Eich CEO in the first place.

You should research the labor concept of "constructive dismissal".

As it stands it wasn't just an outcry. You had companies like OKCupid hounding Firefox users who had nothing to do with Eich's donation. It was a pitchfork-and-torch expedition through and through, despite the fact that it all falls under the letter of the law regarding freedom of speech.

But as I tried to point out when this was all going on, freedom to speak does not imply that all speech is necessarily right.

What I don't understand is how the same people who will talk about "chilling effects" from government surveillance fail to understand the same exact principle applied elsewhere.