skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one who thinks that this could hugely backfire from a PR perspective?

The message is
"The Verizon Network is Crowded Right Now."
not
"Verizon is Deliberately Slowing This Right Now." (or some less loaded version of that)

It's bad PR for the ISPs, but combined with the fact that most people can hardly spell ISP, and that Comcast and their FCC homies keep describing the new toll booth as a fast lane, if I were a nontechnical consumer my first response would be, "What the hell are they waiting for? Put in the fast lane! I wanna watch my damn movies!"
> "So Netflix is throwing up a 'The AT&T network is crowded right now' message. Meanwhile, Youtube is playing 1080p no problem."

Netflix should try to explain that in the error messages too.
In fact here in Colombia we lost a great Mexican Controller because the local accounting regulations did not recognized his Mexican accounting degree.

So, the poster build a team of Colombians, but I guess it's not a truly international team.
This seems very naive on VZW's part its extremely easy to show that there is congestion at the ingress of one of your peers. Even if VZW is not a direct peer its pretty easy for them to get metrics off their clients deployed at the last hop.
Ah, good questions. The site is for both readers and artists. Readers can read the story, and artists can follow the links next to the images to contribute art.

In addition to improving each other's art, artists can also improve classic illustrations, e.g. this one is by Ludwig Richter: http://bookses.img.s3.amazonaws.com/537bbdcc5222de07410000cd.... And this is by one of our artists: http://bookses.img.s3.amazonaws.com/537febd9a1a04da71c00000c...
Ask HN: Salary and equity expectations for 4th employee
Hi all,

I've recently graduated from university and have been offered a developer (web dev - rails) role at a startup. The company has a founder and 3 employees and I would be the 4th (2nd developer). I like the company a lot; I feel that they have a lot of potential. However I feel that as the 4th employee, the compensation is a little lacking.

Background: This is a Toronto start up (lower salary average) and they're about to enter their round A's
My offer: 40k + 0.5% equity (over 4 years + 6 month cliff)

I'm okay with the low salary as my living expenses are not that high, but I'm not so certain about the equity. However, I've been told that there are opportunities later on for me to get more? What do you guys think?
> However it does a worse job at providing price stability.

Isn't this only true if you measure price stability based on amount of changes in the price, but not magnitude of those changes? How can they lower the spread but simultaneously decrease stability?
I guess this is why they need the Safe Rides Fee? To make sure you don't get kidnapped and sexually assaulted?

http://support.uber.com/hc/en-us/articles/201950566-What-is-...
New service to help parents stay on top of the apps their kids are using
Actually, surprisingly good for our our marketer/designer to quickly mock up small changes to our landing page. We wouldn't share it publicly, but for internal use kinda neat.
Mary Berners-Lee: An unlikely fraud victim
Netflix isn't sending their data to customers unsolicited.

Customers are requesting that data, through a pipe which they have already paid for.

It is unfair for Verizon, or any other ISP, to ask to be paid twice for the same bits. What bits I am asking for, as a customer, shouldn't make a damn bit of difference.
If you want to play devil's advocate then let's advocate for all the devils.

If Comcast wants to offer their customers video over a traditional cable network, they pay content providers.

Why should the Internet be different? Shouldn't ISPs be paying people who provide the content their customers are buying?
How would that be anything other than a blatant lie? Are they going to mail the customer a different model of modem? Do any current cableco-provided modems not have built-in wifi?
If the blowback from your evil deeds is unpleasant, perhaps you should stop being evil instead of complaining about those who revealed them.
One thing I missed switching from Perl to Ruby was stack traces that show the function arguments.
I think we can say similar things about Google engineers working on making infinitesimally small ad targeting efficiency gains, yet this group typically has much less vitriol directed at them, though the degree to which this is the case may differ.

The counter argument to this would be that said efforts help fund more genuinely beneficial work such as their recent work in robotics and proliferation of internet availability globally, but how the net balance of talent productivity plays out is murky. The ad team is a large, multifaceted team inside Google.
Looks like some kid overreacted to a prank and took it too personally
Currently , the most practical way for secure communications looks like textSecure, which is a mobile IM app that is easy to use and install , and relatively easy to convince others to communicate in.
Apple To Abandon Headphone Jack? Beats Deal Suddenly Makes Sense
If you step back for a second.
You say: " HFT does NOT take anything from most investors most of the time."

Yet the HFT people are making tons of money. Where is it ultimately coming from?
In Germany, this would actually be a great thing! If the German Telekom (biggest provider here, formerly owned by the state) played that card, other providers could start to demand peering with them. The strange thing with German Telekom is not that peering with them would be too expensive, it is that they don't take part in the big peering points at all. As a "smaller" provider, you can connect with Telekom on by becoming a Telekom customer, but not on eye level as a peering partner.
Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?
I've been trying to get a job for the past 3 months, then I got accepted into a startup accelerator, my team promised to share the money they got with me, but backed out of that, and now I'm about to lose everything.

I've tried a crowdfunding campaign, and I'm willing to build a full MVP for $3k if anyone has an idea for an app. My stack is Laravel MVC, I can also help deploy it on linode, cloud, shared hosting, wherever.
it can be amazing what a non-institutional researcher can do
Pricelizer.com
Im sure most of the internet providers cap their bandwidth to services like this. I am confident that the main Swedish ISP provider Telia is capping as we speak.

I can see that ping times increases and it's always reoccurring around 9-10pm Fridays. Around 9:30 buffering speeds up, meaning most of the people giving up and switching to regular TV. One could argue that this is the time that Netflix/Youtube/Hbo/ViaPlay or any other service is used the most, but my suspicion is that capping occurs at those times, to validate the Fastlane/slowlane argument when the it arrives here in Sweden too.

I am currently collecting statistics to validate this. However, its insane that a ISP can cap and provide lesser service's on certain ports and argue that the fault is at the entertainment provider. Its also insane that when going from a "torrent way of life" to becoming a paying stream customer, I cant even watch my favourite show, when i want, on 100/100Mbit line.

ISP's are in the business of providing fast connections and high bandwidth, and that's what I'm paying for, however I want to use it. It shouldn't matter if I'm streaming from YouTube or downloaded illegal porn. Though it seems it looks like they want to sell me bad gasoline that doesn't take me anywhere, and say my engine is at fault.
If a 4 year degree could qualify me as a tech savvy guy, at this point I would be a poet and an engineer. I consider myself a genius, but, you know, when I ask around, it seems that I suck at writing theatrical masterpieces. I don't have a degree either, but I'm that friend who fixes the computer of his doctorated friends. Most of them cheap bastards with pcs.

Yeah, 300k+ is a hell of a survey, but I fail to see some rigour into it.
The Bottom Line: Bitcoin (30 minute programme, BBC Radio 4, MP3)
If it wasnt't Netflix, it would be another streaming service or a hundred. The total capacity required would still be the same.
stop it, you're giving me flashbacks
Nothing new about tech support not knowing what they're talking about. After all, it's written into the script that they're told to read for that question.

A few years ago I was setting up a new internet provider for my mother, so I called to get the info to get email: Support: "You're using Outlook, right?"
Me: "No, Thunderbird."
Support: "We only support Outlook, so I can't help you."
Me: "It's email, it won't matter if I use Thunderbird."
Support: "Our email does not work with anything other than Outlook."
Me: "Okay, I'll get rid of Thunderbird and use Outlook."
I entered the information into Thunderbird as he gave it to me and then hung up the phone.
> ...I assume Netflix can be pretty sure of where the bottleneck is happening ...

It depends on how fancy they get with their detection routines. They can certainly see which networks the traffic is flowing over, but then there are multiple devices (and networks) in play to deliver that traffic to them.

For instance, just a one-way trip showing the devices that could slow down a packet of data can give you an idea of the number of potential bottlenecks:

-> Chromecast CPU

-> Chromecast WiFi chipset

-> User's home network router (usually, but not always, provided by ISP)

-> Cable/DSL/FiOS modem

-> [[ ISP devices they directly control ]]

-> Transit provider's network

-> Netflix's network.

Netflix could certainly jump through hoops to isolate the bottleneck to the ISP network, but are they? Who knows?

I'm not sure they really need to anyway. The hockey stick graph they have showing throughput before and after payment looks like a classic mafia shakedown.
Pricelizer.com saving you money
Have you ever want to buy something but found the price to be too high with Pricelizer.com that changes.
Pricelizer is a totally free browser plugin, Whenever you find something you like just add it with one click to your watch list

You will then be the first who knows when the price drops.

Not a price comparison site but a private alert tool. That will tell you as the price drops on the products you love
Reserve a Spot NOW, Limited Number of Spaces Available
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Pricelizer.com, Saving you money
This tells an interesting story about good "looking" but not adopted software. At a cursory glance, this looks great! All these datasets online! How wonderful.

But once you start to dig a bit deeper and scratch the surface, just barely, you can see that it's actually a graveyard of an open data era gone by. Many of the datasets here look like this:

https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s...

Where they were initially placed online, perhaps with an attempt to be more transparent and open to the public, and they haven't been updated since 2012. The political points got scored by the elected officials and appointees, but either the software that the career bureaucrats is too burdensome to use, or the will to be open to the public just isn't there.

After spending 10 years in this field, That's the primary problem with these transparency efforts. They sound great to the public, and great to the politicians, but nobody bothers to sell the staff of government on why it's important. And when they don't want to do something, or when they're not sold on it, it just doesn't get done.

Software designers and "civic hackers" need to grok that to be successful their first customer isn't the public or the politician, it's usually the career civil servant.
Reset the Net Is Promoting US Government Funded Software
Reset the Net is promoting software that is funded by the US government including Tor, ChatSecure, TextSecure, and RedPhone.
How do we get ISPs classified as common carriers?

Sue their pants off for the copyright infringement of their customers (and all the other illegal things customers can do). This why common carriers exist. They trade ultimate control over the transfer of content and treat it equally for the protections of being indemnified from the content itself. This is why the U.S. Postal Service can't be prosecuted for transporting a death threat letter. Make it about money and they'll jump on the common carrier bandwagon before you can blink.
When you convert an object from language X to JSON, validate it using a schema validation before deserializing, then is it not the same as JSON. Also now with JSON you have the opportunity to have human readable data which is great when debugging issues. I am not seeing the advantage of protocol buffers. It would be great if you can compare payload sizes and see if there is a significant savings from that perspective.
>Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for their efforts.

That's an odd way to phrase that. There are plenty of people who are born with this aptitude who take different actions in life and plenty who never have the opportunity to use it for reasons other than aptitude.
Re: comments, I didn't believe you, now I wish I had.

> NetFlix will lose huge. Obama is protecting the Taliban now. That's the only reason Silicon Valley soared. Democrats (from Jan 2007) and Obama 'til his Taliban kiss.
"Lots of people share the perspective that Snowden is doing more harm than good, but people on HN seem to have a hard time believing that."

These are people that I would describe:

1) are in favor of establishment of totalitarian power
2) favor blaming the messenger over blaming the NSA's dogmatic and psychopathic overreach
Verizon FIOS customer here (with a "business" link, I wanted a static IP, which is not offered with "residential").

I've seen no change in download/upload performance myself.

So I suspect they prioritize the "business class" customers above the "residential" customers.

[EDIT]: fix a spelling typo.
Apollo Moon rocks hint at other planet that hit young Earth
Python doesn't have enumerations, per se. Here's how I'd represent that:

if 'edit' in structure['access']:
# can edit

In which case it really doesn't matter if there's junk in access. If I really felt the need to validate the structure, I could do so with:

if not set(structure['access']).issubset(all_access_privs):
raise ValueError('invalid access types passed in')

but more realistically, I'd rely on the ORM object to validate against the authoritative source - the database - and key off the errors there.
Academ.io – Accomodation search made easy  by students for students
Tizen: The OS of Things has Arrived in a Ripe Market
Congratulations on realizing that. Too many sites and services throw all kinds of barriers and trip hazards in front of you before you can even take a look at whether you would want to stick around. It makes no sense. People should be motivated to sign up because they want additional functionality that is an addition to what they love your product for in the first place or to overcome a limitation.
For a simple reason. Netflix has to pay for enough bandwidth outbound to supply their customers, regardless of anything else. Their customers are also paying for a certain amount of bandwidth.

ISPs typically possess less total bandwidth then they sell. The problem is that the typical users usage is rising faster than the ISPs are willing to handle. If I pay for 50Mb/s, and the other end of my communication has enough bandwidth to provide it, then I should be able to get to that speed.

As far as I am aware, there has been no accusations that Netflix does not have enough bandwidth to supply their customers, but that the intermediaries have oversold their networks to the point where they cannot deliver on their promises.
Any changes in the lovely JavaScript/Objective-C bridging stuff on iOS8? Does it work with the new stuff WebKit? Is it any better documented or have more features?

MacOS since 10.3 has the handy WebScriptObject / JSContext stuff, which made it into iOS 7, but wasn't very well documented, and took some tricks to use. You have to fish a JSContext out of the WebView with [webView valueForKeyPath: @"documentView.webView.mainFrame.javaScriptContext"] ...

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

http://blog.impathic.com/post/64171814244/true-javascript-ui...

http://asciiwwdc.com/2013/sessions/615

http://www.steamclock.com/blog/2013/05/apple-objective-c-jav...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2254372/calling-javascrip...

http://will.thimbleby.net/script/

Here is the header file, the best documentation available:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS7.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Headers/JSContext.h
An ISP's job is to provide internet access to last mile users, such as ourselves.

If they choose to reduce that speed for any reason, or throttle any kind of connection they are entitled to do that but they can't complain when someone else says that is what they are doing.

Personally, I think given how much public money has gone into infrastructure and the amount of money I pay in taxes it seems insane for me to first pay for the ISP's infrastructure with taxes then have to pay them again. So while they have a right to throttle, they don't have a right to throttle my connection on infrastructure that they did not pay 100% for. Which probably accounts for the majority of their infrastructure.
Yes, whenever I miss the payment on my TalkTalk bill, the whole local network goes down, not just Internet access. I've been meaning to get a cheapo router to remedy.

People just don't know that you can have wifi for free, especially when you've got adverts from O2 and such that 2gb 3G and " unlimited wifi".

I dunno if it's the same in the US but apparently it's some typically restricted resource that many providers in the UK are lifting the limits off.
Which is why it's so important they used the ISP's name there. Instead of saying "congestion", they say "(ISP)'s congestion".

Considering that customer satisfaction with the average telecom company is somewhere between that of the DMV and a crooked tax collector, it plays into the confirmation bias people have that they don't love their ISP, they tolerate their stupidity because its the only way to get online.
Here is one of a very few people who decides which company gets funded and which doesn't. If he believes that Snowden is a traitor to American interests, then I am inclined to believe he knows what he's talking about. If he believes that what's bad for the NSA is bad for Silicon Valley, I am inclined to believe him as well. Also if Hitler back in the day called Schindler a traitor to Nazi Germany interests.. that would be true as well.

We like to pretend that we don't live in a corporate fascism because we are moral individuals who want nice things for all mankind and that our government should represent us. But let's face it, neither the government nor the corporate elite, of which Andreessen is a part of, gives a shit what the cogs think. The mission of this system hasn't been to represent "the people" in a long time. So shuttup, eat your cereal, work, spend and die when you're done.
If I had to guess, I would say that Comcast had a huge proportion of 'users paying Netflix money and which live in an area where there is no broadband competition'.

If the problem with Comcast is that their network is congested and users can't switch to another provider then it doesn't matter whose fault it is, those people are going to leave regardless.

Note that Netflix is only showing these notices in areas where Verizon has competition to which their customers can switch, which lends a lot of credence to the idea that 'ISP switchability' is a key factor guiding Netflix's behaviour.
Interesting that they count Mormons as Christians: I would guess that many non-Mormon Christians would not agree with that.
This is going under the false assumption that when I bought bandwidth from my ISP they didn't _really_ need to provide me with that bandwidth for realzies. This isn't netflix driving network upgrades this is Verizon customers driving network upgrades. If VZ didn't promise the customers the bandwidth they wouldn't need to upgrade their backhaul to provide it. I mean it would be like Verizon wireless charging apple to connect iPhones to their network because "I phones drive up the amount of data customers consume"

How is that viewpoint even remotely considered valid ?
The heat is on!
Thanks for that. I think the US tech worker visa cap is just a nasty form of nationalistic protectionism. I am a US born citizen, but that does not mean that I shouldn't have to compete with someone born internationally. Morally that just seems wrong, and there is evidence to prove it could be economically harmful.

People are concerned with inequality between nations, but policies like this prevent opportunity worldwide and hurt US workers and consumers for the sake of "protecting US workers".
Meh. Monetary policy alone can't save the economies of the floundering European nations. If it's economic growth they want, they'll need to do something about actually reforming the stagnant, over-regulated business environment. Or streamlining government spending so they can lower taxes without crushing austerity measures. Or cultural changes, encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.

Good luck with that.
as a banker, before i had to buy government bonds using cheap government money and profit on that difference, and now i have only to borrow and do nothing... It's good to be a banker.
GOG Galaxy promises no online activation needed for gaming
It's more likely that the executives are telling their (in-house) lawyers 'you need to shut this down' and leaving it at that.
Behavior analytics in just a few clicks
Hey cool website but it is open to XSS. I see someone added an alert that says "hello world"
That's actually a really good point.

Ideally, you're right -- if netflix (and internet video in general) drives growth in internet traffic, maybe it isn't fair to require service providers to upgrade their service out of hand.

But then I think that rule primarily applies for a free market. I'd argue that internet providers are not currently participating in a free market and it causes real problems. Without a free market... companies need more supervision.

I'll put it this way: 2 competing providers. Average internet usage keeps rising exponentially. People want faster internet. The providers either lower prices or upgrade infrastructure. Netflix is not forcing them to do anything. But then it's probably reasonable for Netflix to say "Your connection is crappy because of your internet bandwidth, it's not us..." But hey, consumers can choose.

Problem here is... what are their choices? Even just one other company participating in the market that can make a similar offering (eg cable speeds) would change the whole conversation I think. Suddenly they'd be working harder to keep your business (or take you from the competitor) and they'd stop talking about more and more ways of screwing their customer and taking advantage of de facto monopoly status.

The incentives are all messed up and it encourages gouging instead of innovation.
> Do any current cableco-provided modems not have built-in wifi?

No, but all of their features can be enabled/disabled by the ISP remotely.
I think they should be a point on the graph, rather than a line, it's quite confusing.
I can't tell if people are naive or clueless.

They fucking just turn it off dude.
I've been using it for micro-bets and got one refund for a bet made too late. Didn't win any, so I can't say with any certainty.
You can run git blame to get the information pertaining to that particular line of code. That's a really good way to document what a particular piece of code is doing and why at the time it was written.