skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You concede that higher levels of regulation increase regulatory costs. But you assume that as long as you make all regulation equally burdensome, the market will somehow fix things. But you're ignoring the fact that capital is fluid, and will flow out of regulated industries like telecom into less regulated industries. You can't invoke the market then ignore basic aspects of how the market works.

Places in Europe are also much more willing to outright subsidize telecom investment: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/the-broadband-gap-w... ("Sweden has built one of the fastest and most widely deployed broadband networks in Europe because its government granted tax breaks for infrastructure investments, directly subsidized rural deployment, and, perhaps most significantly, required state-owned municipal utilities to create local backbone networks, reducing the cost for the local telephone company to provide service.")
DRM doesn't inherently prevent you from doing either of those things.
Yes, that makes the story more fascinating. They left home during revolution and actually, youngest daughter was still living there alone up until recently (2010-2011 I think).
I was looking at changing companies many years ago, from a large company to a small company. With the large company, I had lots of benefits that I would lose by going to the small company. Regardless, the small company was attractive. I also had the advantage I didn't need to change jobs.

When the vp of the company asked what I wanted, I gave him a figure that got his attention. He remarked it was beyond what they could do. I responded that the amount I was asking essentially covered the benefits they didn't give. When they finally made an offer, it was almost exactly what I requested.
Last year, my 8-year-old kids and their classmates designed and hand-built (eventually with dowels instead of screws) their own chairs at their amazing SF school. See http://www.sfbrightworks.org/2013/11/hawk-chairs/

Here's a quote about the lack of undo: "The consequences of careless work were immediate and unavoidable, and the amount of focus, resilience and perseverance required by these chairs was immense."
I don't have much disposable income so rarely buy movies that aren't on DVD in the bargain bin at the supermarket. However, recently I wanted [an excerpt of] a specific Disney movie - so I assumed, it's the 21st Century and all - that I could go to the Disney website, pay and download the movie and watch it (as you can skip the first two steps and do the rest elsewhere).

It was a genuine surprise to find that wasn't possible. What was more of a surprise was that I couldn't find anywhere to buy it, not Amazon, not the supermarket websites, it was almost impossible to find referenced on a Disney site.

That movie was of course available online - just not somewhere that I could directly pay for it.

It's definitely not about serving the content creators when you get to this situation.
This is highly tangential, but this bit in the beginning stood out to me:

> That summer, the 32-year-old had been hiking with two friends in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan when they were arrested by Iranian troops after straying onto the border with Iran.

I'd put "going hiking to the Iraq-Iran border-zone" to the bucket of bad ideas even in better times, and 2009 (when this seemed to happen) certainly wasn't a good time.

It is just common sense to keep away from borders, especially if behind that border is Iran which is not the friendliest of nations. Double-especially if you are an American, towards which Iran is openly hostile (for good reasons I believe).

You wouldn't go canoing Yalu River either, would you?
> I don't understand how anything on HN that discusses a more complex software architecture is immediately called J2EE/enterprisy and dismissed.

I wouldn't say that always happens. It often happens when a 500-word blog post suggests effectively re-architecting a mature, successful framework like Rails. Let's think about why such a post is problematic.

Rails has evolved over quite a few years in response to actual needs on the ground. Tremendous amounts of ink have been spilled, and tremendous amounts of brainpower have been expended to create a mature framework like Rails (or similar frameworks).

Despite the battle-tested history of the framework, so many of these architecture blog posts imply that Rails' architecture is somehow insufficient. And then propose to fix that architecture, spending, say, 500 words explaining the idea. There's hardly any discussion of the idea's wide-ranging implications, of the trade-offs, or of the conveniences that are lost. If this idea is so good, why hasn't it ever found its way into Rails, even in diluted form? Why has the Rails team built the architecture they have, instead of yours? (Hint: They probably have a good reason.) Do you have strong evidence that your proposed architecture will serve me better than the one that I've been using successfully for years?

All that being said, I have no problem with idiosyncratic Rails techniques that only step a little outside what the framework provides. For example, service objects. Used appropriately (which usually means sparingly), they can help with organization without fundamentally warping the Rails app. Using a few service objects is a departure similar in magnitude to writing your JS in TypeScript instead of CoffeeScript. It's not built into Rails, but it doesn't really change any of the core concepts either.
One could certainly try graduated adjustments.

Fast facts: Silverstein was imprisoned for bank robbery. While in prison he was convicted for murder of another inmate, albeit on questionable evidence. Silverstein kiled and was convicted of murder for killing another inmate who was seeking revenge for the first killing he was convicted of. He led the Aryan Nation prison gang for a time. In 1983, he was convicted for a particularly brutal murder of a prison guard. Since then he has been kept in ADX (aka Supermax) custody and had no visitors. He is seen by a prison psychiatrist once a month and otherwise only sees his guards when they deliver food. Like other supermax prisoners he occupies a cell within a containment suite, so there's no chance of him communicating with other prisoners by shouting or suchlike.

Now, obviously Silverstein is all kinds of bad, but I don't buy the argument that the risk profile he presents has not changed at all in the last 31 years. It's worth bearing in mind that male criminality peaks in the late teens and then the decline steepens after age 40. Yeah, of course it's risky to grant him additional privileges, but there's a big gap between the risk that he'll attack someone in a controlled environment, and the (unacceptable) outcome of him escaping and inflicting a danger on society at large.
you'd better link it back to HN to see if there are any comments on these pages. Comments are more useful than that idea sometimes.
Yep, it's Business Insider, land of bogus lists that they never feel the need to fact check.
Advertisement wall; didn't read. Can anyone mirror it?
Test speed is not the only limiting factor in your ability to produce better software faster. Readability, comprehensibility, and approachability all matter too, and this architectural technique is bad for all of those.
Obviously it's complex.

Larry Page still failed to do a single thing to stop it (that I know of) and he is probably the single person with the most power to oppose this.
Thanks!

In all seriousness, I had the same response when I read Man's Search for Meaning the first time. The first half of the book describes, in clinical detail (Frankl was a psychiatrist) the details of daily life in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. I don't need to say that they are disturbing, but you might be surprised to hear that they're also uplifting.

The book will make you cry. Not because it's sad but because it's a reminder that although humans are capable of causing great evil, we're also capable of looking that evil in the face, even through our own powerlessness, without turning away. We dish it out but we can take it, too.
If you're paying Netflix rates for ALL your TV and movies, the content industry goes bankrupt in a year. Netflix rates are possible because there's now a very low MARGINAL cost to additional copies of a movie or TV show, but if all copies of a movie or a TV show went for that, nothing would recoup its costs.
Did you just place scientific theories and political opinions in the same epistemological category?

And here I thought postmodernism was dead.
Dockerizing a Python Web App
hal berenson is super smart and I think says it best in his reply to your comment[1].

microsoft, just like google and apple and redhat and linkedin and facebook, is a company - it is there to make money for shareholders. what they do to make money and how they do it can be very different and cause disagreements. but I think people don't always think of that when considering tech endeavors, particularly when there is any entry in a market that is free.

[1] http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...
Forums on Internet should balance things automatically. PG (or anyone) has no obligation to reply any question on any forum. Should someone ask a personal question? I don't know. Celebrities are always asked such question- I would not ask same question to someone like me.
> if Google's self-driving cars are ever widely legalized, their users may have to stick to a set of "allowed roads"

one can also imagine that to renew car registration one would have in addition to evidence of insurance to also provide evidence of updated subscription to the Google road database
I'm guessing a large part of that depends on how you define 'varmint rifle'. To a lot of people, the AR-15 is a varmint rifle, and I'm going out on a limb and just guessing that it's either very difficult or impossible to get a license to own an AR-15 in the UK.

As for the definition I grew up with (e.g., rimfire .22 and slightly higher power centerfire bolt actions,) my understanding is that, for the most part, those things are still accessible in the UK, if one jumps through the appropriate hoops.
A Look At How Docker Manages Its Open Source Project
I wonder about things like:

1. sudden road changes, like the appearance of potholes

2. avoiding puddles which can cause one side of your car to hydroplane

3. taking a 'rain line' when the road is wet. (Traffic tends to put slight ruts in the road. They're enough to make slight puddles. If you drive slightly off-center, your tires will be on the high spots and less likely to hydroplane, that's that 'rain line'.)

4. avoiding icy spots
Strong(ly Typed) Parameters
What is his reasoning on it being bad?
A Code Contribution Analysis Of OpenStack And The Trends It Uncovers
SolVPS Launches Windows VPS Hosting Service to the Public
David Byrne: "Google is Evil"
For laptops I think Apple makes fine products, but I don't really feel like dropping the money for new desktop just to get OS X
Big Data for solving congestion: Urban Engines
> simpler (because that's what your normal code looks like)

Actually, no. My code will always look like the for comprehension be it async or not, because my 'get' methods will always return an Either, Option or some other monadic context to represent the computation succeeding or not.

> performs exactly the same (as fibers basically do the same thing, only transparently),

Yes, I agree.

> c) retains context (like ThreadLocal variables).

Threadlocal variables are almost always code smell. If you find yourself using them, there is almost certainly a better way of accomplishing the same thing.

I don't see how having a Fork/Join threadpool that 'powers' the futures would be any slower than lightweight threads either.
IMHO one big challenge is missing from the list: He needs to convince the non-US world that a centralised cloud (and internet of things) is a good idea. I can see how that'll work for consumers who need to sync their contacts, but will e.g. foreign governments move from classic Microsoft to Office 365 anytime soon? Does anyone have data on this?
I'm going to guess you didn't understand my point.

Being able to create drm-free copies weakens the power content producers hope to achieve. If I can create a drm-free copy of a movie, I can stream it to any device I want, at no extra charge. I'll be able to watch the movie on my tv, phone, tablet, whatever, and they won't make a dime from it.
I think it's used widely enough: God is it ugly... You are screwing up with FPS and then you have to re-encode on top of your already encoded (i.e. not raw), captured thing , eww...
Plenty of cleaner ways, like DVD or Blu-Rays which protections are cracked and with which you get the untampered original.
This is part of the reading list of Stanford's CS PhD qualification.
http://seclab.stanford.edu/SecurityQual.html
If you are going to attempt to use this tactic, the most important thing to consider is that your offer must be within the range of reasonableness. "Shock 'em with your first offer" is a good sound-bite, but make sure not to actually shock them. If the number that you propose is outside the range of reasonableness, an experienced negotiator will "wipe it off the table" and re-anchor.

For example, if you are negotiating your salary for a first-time software engineering gig and open with $500k, the other side is likely to say something like, "There is absolutely no way we can do that. We would like to offer you $75k." If you're offer gets wiped off the table, your anchor has absolutely no power in the negotiation.

So go high (or low, if you're on the other side of the table), but don't be too extreme.
> To get your tests to run in < 5ms

In principle, the current Rails architecture can support that. Rails permits the test environment to use a different database adapter. There's nothing stopping anyone from decoupling the database at that level. I.e. you can pick a super-fast persistence strategy for the test database adapter, if you so choose. If there isn't an adapter you find fast enough, you can even create one. (Such a project would not doubt be well-received.)

Anyway, for my part, I prefer to run my tests against the same kind of DB I use in production. It gives me greater assurances. Especially when a web app can sometimes depend on the peculiarities of a certain persistence layer. E.g., your app has a search engine that runs custom SQL--you really want to test that against the DB.

Would it be nice to run some of my tests without the DB? Absolutely. Some tests just don't need to test anything DB-related. My guess is that Rails' support for that use case will grow organically over time.
Indeed. Once you realize this it doesn't take very long to get excited about statically typed languages, especially with type inference.
Wordpress databases exposed due to negligent web developers
Agree, I also had the worst Homejoy experiences. Erroneous billing, people not showing up, them promising to take care of billing issues, but then not. Given Homejoy's service, their fast expansion is not something to be proud of.
The doctors are not employed by the state, as they are in the UK.

There are as many different ways of running a health care system as there are countries. It's not the US in one bucket, everyone else in a second bucket. The set up of the Sweden system looks more like the US than it does like Canada or Taiwan, which both have single-payer.
That link doesn't talk about network regulation, rather about unions.
Ask yourself: why does Austin already have three FTTN ISP's when San Francisco doesn't? It wasn't because they had a higher level of regulation than other cities, it was because they had less.
Remember that the advertising tagline was "rip, mix, burn." Not "find a cable, connect your headphone jack to your microphone jack, painstakingly copy each track in real-time, trim and organize the audio files, encode to mp3, mix, burn."
Please explain how all other utilities and common carriers are effective in the US and able to receive sufficient capital investment to provide reliable service?

Having a near-monopoly reduces risk significantly.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/11/13/366988/over-half...
We subsidize Utilities & Telecommunications roughly equally via tax breaks.

Oh, and they get subsidies like Sweden too:
https://www.ncta.com/news-and-events/media-room/article/2338

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_broadband_plan#Sweden
Sweden didn't even put 1 billion in.

So umm, you are pretty providing all the evidence that greater intervention in the market than even I'm suggesting will improve things...?

confused
Why pictures and posts are the future of online advertising
I don't believe public funds pay for any large-scale, randomized Phase 3 trials in oncology -- the cost can rise above $100 million per trial! The overhead in terms of patient registration and follow up require the staffing, technology and expertise of a large pharmaceutical industry. And once that step is mandatory (again, in most large Phase 3 trials, exceptions made for pointed therapies like Gleevec), "the market" is necessary, functional or otherwise.

At this point I risk conflating not just two but three arms of the government: the NIH (funding), FDA (approval), and Medicare (payment).

> Why not just cut out the middleman?

Medicare has hinted at doing this, using its purchasing power to drive down the cost of drugs and refusing to pay for treatments approved to work but who have a low cost-to-efficacy ratio. A recent example is the fight over Hepatitis C medication[0]

[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/05/12/307747798/boomers...
Ask HN: Any app+API combinations to deliver push notifications to your iPhone?
I'm looking for an iOS app to deliver basic text push notifications to my phone (e.g. website downtime alerts or things like that) using its API programmatically. Any recommendations or similar work you know of?

Maybe anything I can plug to IFTTT?
Having played with a Tango device, if the phone is a part of the plan, they're playing the game like 5+ years out. Tango is a long way from a device that could somehow help map things as described.
The actual notice of proposed rulemaking (or "NPRM," as ad-law nerds call it): http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-14-61A...

I haven't read it in full yet, but I've read the introduction, and the press coverage (surprise!) does not seem quite right to me.
It's pretty hard to evaluate how much you're worth and how much you would be to a company and job you know little about. You can ask questions and get the gist of the business, but until you're in and truly know how the system and company runs, it's very hard.
Visual Studio Online API
There is zero evidence of this claim in this article.

DRM is, in fact, to prevent unauthorized usage and copies. In fact, even some of the examples in this article are exactly that.

What is more important is that DRM doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to make unauthorized usage very inconvenient - enough that a few dollars is worth the cost for most people.
Functional Programming Principles in Scala with Martin Odersky
Error Leads IBM Researchers to New Family of Materials
The link to the actual paper in the post 404s - found this version that works for now:

http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/87/02/25/PDF/RR-8347.pdf
> who insist that certain commonly and successfully used design patterns have no place in the world.

I don't think the architecture skeptics claim as much. I believe you're restating the claim in a more extreme way that it's commonly expressed, thus making it clearly indefensible.

The claim isn't that certain architecture patterns have no place in the world. Rather, the claim is that those patterns aren't a good fit for most Rails apps.

Pretty much any pattern (that's not a commonly-accepted antipattern) has some good use case, somewhere.
You've got a good concern, just backwards: the virus is cleared from the patient, but the body becomes immune to the virus. Thus, it can only be used one time, which may limit the therapy's effectiveness.
Nothing makes me want to turn pirate quite like being forced to sit through unskippable anti-piracy ads preceding a movie I've paid for.
There is a crazy abundance of things to do and content to consume, and life is short. I don't avoid DRM free books because I don't like them, I avoid them because there are other books that I'll have a great time with.
A formal request for retraction of a Cancer article
This could be a special case, since Disney has an official, named policy to make titles available for only limited periods of time, then they're put on moratorium for some years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault

They're also the content creator, so....
Unfortunately, these companies are often quite subtle and make the initial product much better than predecessors. For example, my experience with the early DVDs was that they had no unskippable content. Then, years later after I had tossed my VCR every new DVD seemed to have all kinds of crap front loaded that I couldn't skip. So, DRM done right from the content owner's perspective makes the early experience quite better than what it displaces. Once everyone is locked into the format, then the DRM switches start to tighten and its too late for consumers to move on.

Of course there are counter examples, like you mention, but what scares me about DRM is how if it's done right, nobody will mind DRM at first because it's better than the old way of doing things. Then one day, we all wake up and realize that we've been tricked because we are locked in and can't change.

Today, we all love Netflix, but I wonder what the experience will be once disks have vanished and their growth slows. At that point will we experience FBI warnings, forced ads & trailers?
My dog likes to lay in front of a mirror and stare at himself, as with most of his behaviour I have no idea why.
> using it for more complex applications than you are

Are you sure? How complex do you mean? How complex do you presume the parent commenter's apps to be? Could you give an example of one of those more complex apps? I'm wondering if I'm currently building apps of the "simple" or "complex" variety, according to your terminology.
All those numbers would of been much smaller if he had only raised $10k though. Still about $2k, which ruins his original budget as well.
I think that conflates two things. The Maps Front End, and the Point of Interest database. Both the classic front end and new front end probably use the same DB. So if the query failed on the new UI, it probably failed on the old one, he just never noticed. Is there any proof that "Sambisa Forest" actually ever worked? Otherwise, it is not a regression.

Google apparently has a "Sambisa Forest Reserve" in it's database, but no "Sambisa Forest"