skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, Hacker News comments are not a format for this. I cant get all the sources in a short amount of time and doing this for one person in a tech forum is not really worth my time. Also if I just gave you things to read, you will have a bias starting point, I would only provide things that I think are good. So I can only advice that you start from blank and dive into it, see were your research leads you.

I can only tell you my story. I had the same opinion as you do now, and because I became intrested in economics I started reading a lot about it and these tech monopoly cases pushed my attention towards these antitrust laws and my research change my mind.

And its not even the case that these laws were put in place with good intention and then they were abused, but the other way around they were put in place to be abused.

> My point was that you can argue the negatives outweigh the benefits, but "you can choose not to use them" in the context of a monopolies debate isn't relevant.

The question really is, what is a monopoly. Its suprisingly hard to answer. Is the defintion that there are no real alternatives? Or that they have a market share of X%. Is a company that has a techniclly unique product a monoply because nobody else can produce it. If you think about it, everything is a monoply, nobody else can produce the exact thing you do. So there is a question about granularity of monopoly definition. Some might say 'over one market' but that is very vage as well. Take the car as a example, does it only compete with other cars of simular size or does it also compet with airplanes and trains? Does a car sometimes play in the same market as skype, because if I can work remotely I dont need a car.

In economics, price theory is used, when a company can push the price over some equillibrum price its a monopoly but that of course cant really be used in the case of google or the internet explorer case.

Also "you can choose not to use them" is relevant, because thats the last competition even the biggest monoply provider faces. For everything that is not a live or death question you have the option to not use it. Befor some pruduct/service X was invented you could live without X and now a monopoly provides X, you are not forced to buy X now, you can just go on with your live unchanged. This is very relevant in the economic analysis of markets and monopolys.

Im not saying monopolys are not sometimes a problem, im just saying that the issue is far more complicated then it seams.
> Is it your opinion that whenever something might happen, befor[sic] it actually happens the state should stop it?

No, it is my opinion that when a company deliberately tries to break the law, it should be prosecuted for breaking the law, even if what it was trying to do was actually futile. Just like it's still a crime to mug someone even if it turns out they don't have any money in their pockets.

> How many people, non nerds, know what FTP is? How many know that the have a FTP programm[sic] on there[sic] computer and how many would have known were[sic] and how to look for other browsers?

So you give them a friendly interface, like the browser choice screen that MS actually implemented.
Hey, it has great platform support! It's tested on both 32 AND 64-bit versions of Windows 7!

Just don't use any other platform, including earlier versions of Windows. LOL
For this and other related reasons, I specifically filter out any Sony products when I'm buying stuff.

I also remind my friends to avoid Sony for their involvement in SOPA/PIPA/rootkits
Arsenic & Mercury are elements, which also can't be neutralised by the right chemical reactions.
Pinegrow – desktop app to build websites by drag and drop and/or code
Big Data on Crowdfunding Backers
Now E-Cigarette Can Give You Malware
I've worked with teams on 48-hour film projects, in which you create a short (7 min) film in a weekend, quite comparable to a hackathon. On a team of 20 people, we charge two participants fulltime with organising catering: healthy meals, snacks, etc. It really does wonders for the motivation and preventing cranky reactions from the stressed-out director of photography on Sunday afternoon
Why distributing source code in a zip and not putting it on GitHub or any other similar service?
FORMER EMPLOYEE ALLEGES INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT BY STARTUP INCUBATOR
For me Winamp 2.9x did that already very long ago.
It certainly is, though with Amazon's token lack of finesse and personality. Could become something akin to Odesk for real-world services, and would likely suffer from the same maladies: low average quality, race-to-the-bottom pricing, and impersonal customer service
Ex-googlers come in a variety of forms, not all are suited to the startup world. I am an ex-googler but came from a startup and then went back to another startup. Many ex-googlers have only worked in large companies which I feel in early stage startups can be quite a detriment.
Great work! Very informative.

This photo may change some of your assumptions: https://www.facebook.com/AltoonaDataCenter/photos/pb.4403012...

In later photos, the ToRs appear to be Arista as well. It also appears they tend to have only 24 servers/rack, so a non-blocking ToR could be a 48x10G switch. Although I suppose 4x40 could be used as 16x10G here with the 48 port ToR.

EDIT:
Scratch that, I forgot about the OpenCompute design, it looks like they have 42-48 server per rack in some cases.
Yandex Gives Its Browser a Minimalist Makeover
Speed was one of the key factors that set Google search apart from the competition in the early days. So at that time they wanted to highlight it. Everyone thought "wow how are they searching so fast?"
This makes debugging much harder.
I was surprised the other day to street-hail a taxi in London (near Piccadilly Circus), of all places, and find the driver using a GPS to figure out where we were going and how to get there. "Knowing the city without needing a GPS" is probably a feature I would pick a product on, but it seems to me it's not reliable anywhere any more.

Lyft and Uber both let me set my destination in the app and send that to the driver's phone, but regardless of service, these days I'll tend to tell the driver how to get there if it's a city I'm familiar with.
Same here, and when Cranky Geeks was still going one of the regulars was Dave Mathews; who I always thought was the inventor. (And according to http://www.crunchbase.com/person/dave-mathews, he is.) Never heard of this Hutton Pulizer guy.
If this is GPL, why not host it on Github?
> France has a 70% tax on the super rich

Things like that are about political values and being far more left-leaning than America on average, not about punishing people. I'd personally benefit from having your point of view on taxes (i.e. I'm well off), but I still support higher taxes here in the UK for higher-earning people. I'm someone who plans to start my own company some day (but don't want to yet), who still supports higher tax rates for businesses. I'm someone who has never claimed state benefits (obviously state services, but not unemployment, disability, etc.) and hopefully never will, but still supports increasing those benefits being increased not decreased.
write() is an OS system call, while printf() is a C function call.

C libraries can (and do) choose to buffer printf, while read/write are usually unbuffered.

Of course, both are mechanisms are modifying some global state (your terminal's state), and cannot be relied to be free of race-conditions.
Add to that, SEO, web design, etc.
I'm the author. I know it's quite lame, that the source code is not on Github. It will be.
Thanks, GOFAI is indeed the type of AI that I am interested in, so I will try to finally read it.
Related video, also workers at Chernobyl, but another piece of the reactor: the roof.

https://youtu.be/FfDa8tR25dk

"Military people call such places "FRONTLINE", liquidators who worked at the Chornobyl nuclear station called it "ROOF COATING". It was the most contaminated, and therefore the most dangerous, place in the zone. The remains of the roof coating of the 4th reactor. The operation on decontaminating the roof lasted more than five months. We will tell about only two days."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsEHRfsp4k
Original ranter here, thanks :)

Regarding "trusting the datacenter": it was an overstatement, but while I can risk my own data, I am double-wary with my clients' data, and triple-wary with my clients' users' data. And while I don't assume that cloud provider is necessarily evil and unreliable, I need to survive losing a provider (be it because provider went bankrupt, or because I tried out GAE and got locked out in a Google Checkout mishap, or because of whatever reason), and I cannot rule out possibility of a leak (think Dropbox: hindsight's 20/20, but I don't believe I can predict which one of cloud storages will be next Dropbox). An extra bonus of good encryption is that I can spread storage over cheaper, but less reliable providers.

Your remark about ignoring network realities is good, thanks! I work mostly with cloud or remote servers, it's been at least 10 years since lat time I in the same room as a server I manage (and back then it was an office Samba file/print server). Maybe my perspective shows here, and it may be just as limiting as older tools just phrasing everything as "tapes" and "autochangers". I am closely looking at FreeBSD/ZFS right now, and this may not fit well with `zfs send`-based backups.

I'd be definitely interested in taking a closer look at Byteback! Since it's based on btrfs' snapshots, it may also work well with zfs (and may be exactly the plumbing I am about to write soon). If you manage to publish it, please let me know. Not sure if my email is listed on my HN profile: it's maciej at pasternacki dot net. Thanks!
Everyone complains about Facebook pulling the rug out from under them, but that is nothing new at all, you should expect that from every tech company ever. What a tech company needs and what it's willing to give change dramatically as they grow from 100K to 100M users and beyond.

What's more interesting to observe is that Facebook's strategy has a fundamental in-built conflict of interest. That is the interest of selling advertising, and the interest of showing the user what they want to see. They have to toe this line very carefully because it will be so easy for them to lose users if they show them too much crap they don't want to see. But at the same time, it's always been Facebook's culture to push the envelope, and they are in desperate need to increase monetization to justify their valuation.

I don't envy the decisions facing Facebook right now.
Looking on the other side of the coin, can anyone mention any positives (personal perspective of course) from attending a hackathon?

Personally, I would rather contribute to a FOSS project rather than getting involve in hackathon.
This was a really fun read! Thanks for sharing!
One of the funniest class I had when I was a student was to rewrite malloc and replace it using LD_PRELOAD then try to run Firefox for example.
Dont you think that the prices would be lower if you were not allowed to lease out your medalion? My point was that he is partly responsible for creating a fucked up system and does not provide any value to it but just raises the prices.
Should I be flattered that two of my apps are on there?
Plenty of early node people were never keen on Joyent's grab in the first place.

Joyent funded Ryan Dahl, Isaac Schlueter and other committers since 2009 or 2010, before the majority of programmers had heard of node.js. And node.js is firmly under an MIT license. Were the developers supposed to live off kudos and instant noodles?

If that's a grab, I wish more businesses would do that. We should be encouraging more investment by companies in open source, so complaining about Joyent stepping up to the plate and giving significant financial help to node.js during the early phase is a bit much.
Chernobyl 3828 [video]
I don't think tools are the problem, but rather the process is.

I think it's a false idea the dev envinronment should cater to all stakeholders and parties of the process. Maintainting the theory of the system is one of the most important things but I'm really sceptical an IDE and a tool based process can do it for us.

Yes, there should be preferably only one place and way to do a particular thing but that does not mean they have to be all bound to the same tool.

I.e. the algorithm development you described in your example used completely unnecessary gaps in the communication. If the expert and you had reserved time with a whiteboard or a google hang out and ironed out the bugs right there without this nonsense going through the formal code review process it would have been much easier for all parties.

If your boss wants to participate in the process and does not trust you enough that so he needs to doublecheck on every trivial detail I would call that micromanagement. Or, he can join in the discussion when it is going on if he can have valid input into it. Otherwise he should trust you to do the right thing, and if he wants to check up on things the revision history in the spec document (or just v1 and v2 of the spec) should be sufficient combined with the code changes.

If the boss wants to doublecheck on everything or the process requires that all communication related to code changes (including that quick discussion you had with the chief architect at the urinals) is stored then the problem is in the process that is too heavy with non-value-adding baggage and no tool can fix it.

Storage of the spec should be formalized, code review should be formalized, but not all communications and work related to data that is input into these system should and can be formalized.

I think the idea that tools will fix the process is a faulty idea - the process needs constant vigilance from human participants and tools can only facilitate it. Expert work can be incredibly value adding but it needs to be first and foremost built on trust between individuals and clear ownership of responsibilities. Final products can and need to be bound to formal constraints - the process needs rigor on an individual level but not anal-retentive overseeing over every minutiae.
I agree with the monthly payment model. For many small businesses, their margin is king. Promoted posts cut into the margin earned on each sale more so than a monthly payment.
California Lemon Law
Lemon Law claims cannot be started directly through the dealer. A lot of buyers lost their Lemon Law remedy for they had been waiting for longer than 12 months from the date of purchase.
Find us on calemonlawinfo.com
>>What's more interesting to observe is that Facebook's strategy has a fundamental in-built conflict of interest. That is the interest of selling advertising, and the interest of showing the user what they want to see.

Isn't this the same problem radio and television face?
I think a third benefit is forcing you constrain the scope of what you're doing very aggressively. It makes me way more productive.
Brisbane Devastated by Freak Supercell Storm
Can it play web radio, i.e. shoutcast streams?
> You can clone ThinApp behavior relatively in short time using hooking libraries.
You're right, I would suggest BoxedApp.
Great move. Finally an improvement on Amazon MTurk.
It's actually not really lame at all, after all this is open sourced. I guess people want the chance to contribute to the project (or to fork it).

P.S. I'm also curious as to why folks are downvoting those who are asking about Github!
Everything on the list, and from the FAQ, looks to be like distinct pieces of non-creative skilled labor - Installations, repairs, tune-ups, etc

Software and Design is probably too broad and not concretely defined enough, for what they are targeting.
But my contention is that Wikipedia should be regarded as fundamentally different from Microsoft or Google. They are not trying to compete with other encyclopedias. Why would they? They have nothing to gain by beating the competition. They are not making monetary profits. They are not paying to get themselves this advantage.

Suppose an NGO decided to provide expensive vaccines to children in Africa for free and enlisted the help of a local delivery company to ensure the vaccines reach as many people as possible, would you accuse them of trying to out-compete drug companies?

Why is Wikipedia different from this? They too are trying to provide an essential service (information) to people who could not afford it under normal circumstances. They are doing so without expectations of profit. Their tactics are in no way similar to those of Microsoft, purely because they are not competing in a market economy.
Vue.js Hacker News Clone
It makes me angry because it is a gross abuse of the
web platform. The web is not for applications, it's for
documents. I would be just as angry if I received a Word
document that contained scripts that it needed to run to
display the document (actually I would be angry if I
received any Word document).

That ship has already sailed, Pam. There are two webs now: the document-centric, platform-agnostic, user-controlled presentation of content as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and the over-specified development platform that is HTML5, that ultimately originated in Win98's Active Desktop "push technology".

The latter has gained world-wide adoption because developers and industries couldn't agree to build a standard software repository that was distributed and allowed independent re-implementations of the running engine. Java tried to be that standard, but didn't have a convenient way to deliver software to end users. App stores later are becoming a close second, but being walled gardens they'll never replace that role in full.

It's still useful to think of "the two webs" as different purposes for the HTML5 technology; it's a good question in particular to ask yourself before you start a new website and decide what of the two models you want to support. Requesting that all webs are coded assuming the "web of documents" view is not realistic anymore, though.
> I can't believe that none of the functional ninjas thought to add time travel as a benefit. Most remiss...

Ahem:
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tardis
One of the things that I've been frustrated by existing ZKP primers while educating new Bitcoin engineers on the tools in this space is that they don't form any intuition as to how the you can prove something other than some very narrow (usually seemingly toy-like) problem.

Even if the problem is NP-complete, the transformation from something you'd actually like to to be able to prove to graph colouring or SAT or cycles, is not obvious.

So, I described a novel ZKP for boolean circuits as a teaching tool:

https://people.xiph.org/~greg/simple_verifyable_execution.tx...

It's explicitly not very efficient (since I eschewed all tools from asymmetric cryptography which could have been used to make it efficient), and it may well be not very secure (it's not peer reviewed), but the people I've shown it to have found it to be pretty useful in terms of expanding their perspective and giving them some intuitive confidence that a zero-knowledge proof of the output of an arbitrary program on secret inputs is possible.

Some people here may find it interesting for the same reasons.
Hotel 22: The Dark Side of Silicon Valley
I have been using billy (http://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html).

Also fast, small. But only support FLAC, MP3, WAV, OGG and Windows. Unfortunately, the download is offline.
True, but there are many issues that might not seem obvious at first. For starters, XNU is _not_ a FreeBSD kernel. It’s a hybrid kernel, there is a Mach 3 based kernel at the very bottom with a FreeBSD kernel ontop. Mach takes care of providing, well, Mach IPC, but also virtual memory, threads, processes, scheduling and all that kind of stuff. The FreeBSD part is, in a lot of ways, only a shim down into Mach land, but also brings its own systems like the VFS and networkstack and most of the other userland facing things.

I feel like it would be very non-trivial to switch to DragonFly BSD, because then a lot of the shims have to be re-designed in order to still work, simply because of the highly different design of DragonFly BSD. Disclaimer: I haven’t studied the DragonFly BSD source code yet.
This is English version of the demo: http://en.94cb.com/
Exactly. Microsoft was a monopoly, was it? Lamest monopoly ever seeing as they lost it in about ten years flat.

Real monopolies are from government protected industries like taxicabs, which have been making monopoly profits for 50, 60, 70 years.

Anti-trust laws - and he seeming unpredictability of when they might be applied, have a very real effect on business activities. And there is very little evidence they have ever done any good - while real, government created monopolies on many markets continue to injure consumers blatantly, all with the blessing of legislators.

In my country, firms were fined for bundling fuel discounts - so we had the absurd case of a government department fining a company for selling goods cheaply to consumers.

To me, antitrust laws are just a weapon the legislators use when they come across a company they don't like. They add no protection for consumers because there isn't a way to use them against government created or controlled monopolies.
I wanted to write this for a month or so. Nice to see that I am not alone.

One point I wanted to point was, they just encourage you to remember you code and write it all at once. They are kind of memory testing.
Most London cabbies are very proud of "the knowledge", so I wonder if your driver had a GPS to tell him about traffic conditions rather than the route?
> The idea behind them is great and does not have many of the downsides indicated: just get together and work on things that require more 'bandwidth' than e-mail or IRC or sub-projects where you can quickly progress when tackling it with a couple of other people. Besides that, it's a good occasion to meet fellow project members, have a barbecue, and talk all night.

That kind of meeting is more generally referred to as a sprint, isn't it?
> I also decided to move my task planning back to local, using Task Warrior and Dropbox for sync.

Smart, did not think about using TaskWarrior within dropbox. Pretty good idea!
"are you kidding me? I'm not coding for 24 hours straight with no sleep...and then have to come into work the next day..."

Uh, I would have asked what sort of overtime they were providing. I'm sort of assuming they weren't paying.
I think you are completely misunderstanding the purpose of Wikipedia Zero if those are the use cases you're showing me. It is not meant for people to get information about movies and watch videos. It is meant to give them some basic level of information about the world around them. No other online resource has the breadth and variety of Wikipedia.

> There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.

Nobody is going to use Wikipedia to diagnose diseases. But suppose I live in a country with a cholera problem and search for 'chronic diarrhea' on the web. Wikipedia will be able to point me to a few probable causes, and will give me some primary hints about what I'm supposed to do.

If there isn't a doctor nearby to tell me this, and there isn't a public library with a medical encyclopedia nearby, and I can't afford a PC with internet access, how else am I supposed to find out?
Is there a language with Pythons beautiful syntax and the speed of C plus concurrency?