skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies live or die by the value that they create for their customers. Films win or lose by the entertainment they provide. Musicians get rich or stay poor by the number of fans who enjoy their music etc. The post is saying that people in academia (Except those at the top institutions) are not judged by the value that they create for science and that this gets in the way of good science in many institutions. Science is not the kind of market where the most beneficial outcomes are automatically selected and the author is upset with how incentives and low odds of success are aligned to make his life in science anxious and unfulfilling. One can scold the author for complaining or one can take him seriously on his points about how society should better benefit from the money it spends on science.
Yes, that's what's missing from this article: recognizing academics as humans and not perfect idealistic beings.

To me criticisms like this need to at least suggest paths towards solutions. If the system is already as good as it can reasonably work, how can we criticize it?

It needed at least to suggest paths for researchers outside academia: will we get more research done outside? Will it fit better those idealistic goals?
I went to a university basically no one here has ever heard of but The engineering program has the same 4 month on/off schedule. I was a CS student and the CS department has a co-op/internship program that is a bit different, its a minimum 8 months and max 16 months continuous which is really nice. Actually helps you get settled in and accomplish something fairly substantial.

It also, allows you to organize it in a way that you can schedule it to start right before your last semester, so you can potentially start your co-op, complete it, do 1 semester in school then get out in the work force.
Black people get shot up by police, white people don't. What's up?
The difficulty with these claims is that nowhere is there a counter-example to any of the supposed systems of oppression that keep us in thrall. It is a purely utopian analysis that rest on the false belief that humans can be free of the structure that various discourses impose on our relations.

By focusing the analysis on the supposed binary oppositions within and between discursive identities, a great deal of practical, compassionate, utility is lost for the sake of smashing global industrial capitalism with the unrealizable dream of replacing it with some kind of utopian society.
I understand your feelings. A part of me wants to unglue from the computer and be a baker.
Can home consumers actually utilize gigabit connections to any significant degree yet? You need a sending pipe that'll accommodate you in order to actually get what you're paying for. I've got a 60mbps pipe and rarely manage to saturate it outside of things like Steam downloads.

To put it another way, Netflix 4k streams only require 20mbps throughput. I'd have to be watching 4k streaming video on 3 devices concurrently to saturate my current connection; what on earth would you need to do to actually get your milage out of a pipe that's 17 times larger?
I Survived Bedlam DL3 – Me Too (2004)
Microsoft earnings: 61 cents per share, vs. expected 51 cents
Yes. By the way this feature of Doom was allowing nice and symmetric multiplayer over slow modem or network lines. Only small client-side packets were send through the network (think keystrokes/mouse movement updates).

As a different example Quake was designed using a client/server model with hugely asymmetric packet sizes (~40 bytes for client->server packet and ~800 bytes for the opposite direction).

As a teenager at around 1996-1997 I once tried to re-factor Quake to use the same model as Doom - run server/client combo on both machines with servers synchronized using exact same random generator seeds / etc. Spend about two months on that, but it had proved to be very difficult - the sync between the servers was inevitably lost due to some indeterminism in the code that I couldn't uncover. Maximum that I was able to achieve was around two seconds running in sync. And I still don't know where the sync was getting lost ;)

Learned a lot from that experience, big thank you to John Carmack (and the Id Software team) for writing that code as good and clean as he/(they) did...
Right. New financial products/services should be, essentially, "guilty until proven innocent". Regulations should be very tight in the beginning, and then slowly relaxed - say, over 50 years.

By way of analogy, if I create a new kind of medical device, the FDA does not say, "We don't have any regulations that cover that, so it's completely unregulated until we see the need to write some." No way.

But a new financial product, while it can't kill anyone, it can still cause massive damage. (We just got a case study in this in 2008.) The default for any new financial idea should be regulated, not unregulated.

And "but it's not a bank!" doesn't cut it. Mortgage securitization wasn't a bank activity, but it still nearly destroyed the world economy. Repo isn't a bank activity, either, but it played a significant role in the crash. Both are "bank-like" enough that they needed serious regulation. Since the risks were not yet understood, any regulation in place was not nearly stringent enough.
> Even the "randomness" is deterministic.

But isn't rand() deterministic too? It's only governed by the seed.

Only /dev/random is "really" random, AFAIK. And even that is only as good as the nearby entropy.
Offendy is my favorite: http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=841700001154

Perhaps targeting the defense sector...

Plantlink on the other hand looks viable: http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=11714700372

Facebook for plant-lovers. What PG would call a "sitcom" startup idea, I think...
It's a way to say "to people not interested in reading the entire article, this is the most important information:"
Control over destiny (ie not wanting a board to report to), already have easy path to revenue, growth options other than "all in on best hockey stick bet we can find within 6 months", work/life balance, long term outlook (being for instance in a business you want to spend 20 years in, rather than 4), obvs. huge distraction of fundraising, elimination of a whole class of success outcomes for the company, not having a backstory that will secure good terms and/or good investors.

Different of these things for different companies, of course.

Re: your second sentence: -.-

I like YC! But come on.
replace "automatons" with "foreign workers" and this economy is already in place in USA. It doesn't seem like pleasant to the humans at the apex.
He was summarizing the "cloud services" relevant points for those for whom the article is "too long, (won't|didn't) read"
So law is in a way programming?
Good for them. I think the grandmother space has been ripe for disruption for a while.
It's naive to expect that just because you choose academia, that you have a reasonable expectation to gain your freedom without a lot of path-blazing. It was naive before and it's definitely naive now. Just look at the numbers. How many post-docs vs how many tenured professors?

If you looked at the numbers and decided to try it anyway, you only have yourself to blame if you fail after throwing away years of your life. You didn't blaze a path, you didn't do things substantially different than your forebears.

If you naively didn't look at the numbers and kept going out of blind faith, then sorry, you wasted your twenties and got only hard experience to show for it. Don't feel too bad, 90% of your academic peers are doing the same thing. I wasted my twenties too doing stupid things. Probably most of us did. Just don't pass your thirties the same way and you should be fine.
"...What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking?..."

The same thing that is with everyone else. If you look around our societies today it seems almost a matter of course that the first argument deployed in any debate is a dismissal of the opposing view holder's ability to think critically. Not to put too fine a point on it... but you can see that argument employed a lot here on HN. It's not really a matter of STEM people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - or even Humanities people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - as much as it is a matter of ALL people being dismissive of others.

It's, kind of, the nature of discourse in our society these days.
It depends on the instructor and the way the university is set up. I had classes as an undergrad which the professor had literally been teaching for decades - these guys hadn't spent time on a lesson plan since before the Beatles broke up. And they had grad students to grade papers and tests, plus teaching assistants the students were expected to see first before bothering the professor.

The test questions were just mixtures of questions from previous years.

So three hours of class, plus two (mandated) office hours. I'm assuming there was some time spent coordinating the grad students, but still... that doesn't seem like much work.
It seems to me that you're conflating too different manifestations of fear - the fear of the crowd that watched executions and a larger societal fear of governmental or judicial violence. No one who has read primary sources from the period we're talking about would argue that the latter didn't exist; as for the former, like Muir points out, it could manifest many different ways, from howls of fear to laughter and jokes. In the end we can never say definitively what was running through the heads of everyone in a crowd 400 years ago, but it's not just Foucault making stuff up or trying to trick his audience when he writes about attitudes toward early modern executions. It really is there in the original sources. Here's just one case in point, from the dairy of Samuel Pepys:

Saturday 13 October 1660
To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.

http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/10/13/
I know of people who have been arrested. They were upper management, though, not engineers. They tried to ignore the FDA, and they got walked out in handcuffs. (This was not in relation to Therac-25.)
Go's types can be explained as some sort of templates for values (especially record types). Any CMS user knows about templates.
List of domain names of disposable mailbox providers
You can download your Google search history, but you should delete it instead
I'm getting some people to flesh out a graduate program to focus on this problem, if you want to join..
What a great question. I do think that, generally speaking, confidence that the markets are stable is good for an economy, and these sorts of events undermine that confidence.

It's important not to understate the cost of failure in these markets. A firm might go bankrupt and have to lay off real people if caught on the wrong side of such an event.

I also think that there is a direct connection between events like the Flash Crash and things like Nasdaq's mishandling of the Facebook IPO, which, again, had real costs in terms of time and money. Both emerge, I would argue, from a similar flavor of complexity.

I'm struggling for an analogy to show that it matters. Maybe it's a little like Target's website going down. It's not Quality, in a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance way, even if it's only down for a short time, and the consequences were "only lost orders." Compelling?
Yep. Google hasn't met any of my needs when I play with it. I always end up back on AWS. Lambda is a stunning system IMHO.

I do like Google's new DB. It is like an easy to use spark w/ cassandra backend, all behind the scenes. Very nice.
One Thing Well: eg, companion to man
It's hubris to say this, but we're not as far off as you might think.

If "they" can fix economics ( big if ) that alone would make a big difference. But the US only got off the gold standard in my lifetime.

There's a Churchill quote about Americans; I think it generalizes to humans - "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities."
There's probably a market for very cheap, simple silent haircuts.
> Does Google Cloud provide Machine Learning service?

Yes they do. [0]

> And this is common, as we've just seen people complain about Google Cloud 4 days ago.

To me, this is an isolated incident. On the other hand, seemingly every AWS customer of non-trivial size had to reboot a significant part of their machines in the last year because of Xen vulnerabilities (with no way to predict if you will land on a patched machine).

[0] https://cloud.google.com/prediction/docs
Hot or Cold? The 5º Celsius rule to know what to wear
> Anyone who wishes to prove otherwise is welcome to become a dog.

Saying that there's no essential dog-nature does not inherently imply that one can become a dog.

> (virtually everyone)

Yes, Plato and Aristotle were essentialists, and you can't possibly over-state their influence on Western thought. But, I would argue that your 'everyone' includes many non-philosphers, who haven't necessarily considered this problem in the depth that philosophers have. That doesn't mean that essentialism is disproven or anything! But rightfully, in my mind anyway, a number of schools of thought take issue with it, just like any other position.

That said, actually, it depends on who you're talking to.

> that's seems a strawman definition in this context

It's not! That's the problem itself: you're absolutely right that defining what is a chair and what is human is very difficult.
It would still be easy to find the project via google. Just googling "atom-shell" will probably get you this article, and from there a user would figure out that it's been renamed.
Indeed, old sport.
Worldwide, there are more people in slavery today than there was when slavery was legal. Plus all kinds of manufacturing quasi-slavery in south and south-east asia with crazy hours.
Yep - the article itself isn't terrible exciting outside of the core AWS numbers, but this now serves as the place for the HN community to talk about it - because the numbers are what's interesting.
Darkly Labs creates laser cutter with 3D printing
Sounds like you may have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome - a condition where you circadium rhythm is later. I've had this since, well, birth =). Always had difficulty sleeping at normal times and am naturally a night-owl.

Doesn't matter what I do, if I wake up before Mid-day I generally feel quite tired until the evening. Likewise I can be awake for 24 hours straight and come evening on the next i'm still raring to go.
Jesus Christ you neckbeards can't take a joke.
Yeah, this is my impression. People in the humanities spend a lot of time fielding snide comments and "do you want fries with that" jokes. Even though their critical thinking skills aren't any better than other college grads, this is at least something that sounds like a plausible benefit to having spent 4+ years at a university.

Part of the problem is the marketable skill that the humanities used to impart, that of the ability to write well, just isn't in as much demand any more.
Yes; but even less radically so, I'm thinking about Keynes' failed predictions.
He may be comparing Google's total data center capacity (search, cloud, etc.) to AWS. I do monthly scraping to track cloud marketshare for Alexa 10k and Fortune 500. From that analysis, EC2 is at 12-14% marketshare compared to < 1% for GCE and 1-2% for Azure's VM service. http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2015/03/compute-marketshare-ale...
https://cloud.google.com/prediction has been out for years.
If you make copies of immutable data collections to change state, why not just use message passing? If you're going to share memory, you're more likely to write lock free data structures than copy immutable collections around. Supposedly, the point of juggling razors is for speed.
I could recommend another two wheeled vehicle which you can safely ride in both cities and has cardiovascular benefits, too!
It may be naive today but it wasn't a generation ago, when the numbers were more favorable to a young PhD. Something has changed, which is why people write articles to say, "Hey, stuff's changed!"
It's a terrible method.
What do you mean when you say 'as you can't "allocate" anything further down the call stack'? Do you mean you can't allocate something in c to be cleaned up in 'a', in the call tree:

a(b(c()))

because just returning an object, then dropping the reference at the end of 'a' would do just that. You could also write your own context manager to wrap up a parameter.

class Shadow(object):
def __init__(self):
self.value = None
def __enter__(self):
return self
def set(self, v):
self.value = v
def __exit__(self, *args):
if self.value is not None:
self.value.cleanup()

with Newdb() as db, Shadow() as d:
a(b(c(db, d)))
I'm glad to see Electron / Atom-Shell moving forwards, but I wish they'd publish a roadmap. There are things (like copy/paste) that are lacking and I'd like to know what the plans are. As it stands it's mostly a wait-and-see kind of deal, which is a bit disconcerting on big projects.
Invalid comparison. Failure to prevent something is not the same as personally perpetrating it.
Easy! We'll just run our cloud service on AWS!
Ubuntu 15.04 review, from a Plasma user's point of view
Indeed, and I should have said "pseudorandom". What I'm trying to say is that it's fully predictable.

Yes, they could have used rand() with an appropriate srand(seed), communicated between machines. They could even have used a DRBG built with an AES cipher, except it would have been too slow. However, even a bad implementation of rand() usually uses an algorithm which is essentially just "seed = seed * m + a", which is slower than a table lookup.

Anyway - the interesting thing is that a 256 entry table is sufficient for game purposes (not obvious to players), is fast, and makes the synchronous multiplayer setup work.
I admit Apple Photos and family sharing looks pretty slick. Unfortunately, while we use iPhones, iPads, an Apple TV, and several Airport Expresses (home audio), the home computer is still a Windows machine, and I use a Surface Pro 3 daily for work. I'm also wary of doubling down on Apple. Our next family machine may very well be an iMac, but I guess there's something attractive to me about keeping our data separate. I want to be able to pay Dropbox for a premium service that "just works" on every machine, no matter the OS. That way I can fluidly move to the next big thing without all the hooks (I struggled with a messy Google+ exit a year ago). Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but I'm one of those guys who think the Dropbox team is on to something. They need to work quick though. Google's move to decouple photos (and provide for auto desktop download) threatens to shake things up -- at least in our little household. My wife will love another transition . . .
What are New Yorkers pretending?
No, it's definitely a separate observation. The Entscheidungsproblem describes a problem space that we cannot build a machine to solve.

What Kawai is saying is a more physical thing - even for problems we can build a machine to solve, the machine will eventually stop working under normal use, and it's unlikely even to produce consistently correct results.
What you're talking about already exists.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a separate corporation wholly owned by Amazon.com Inc
Ask HN: Turnkey forum software?
I'm running a SaaS but I notice that people ask the same questions or have similar problems. I want to publish these questions and solutions so that other customers can just refer to that.
The problem with having a monetization strategy is then people can see how much money you make. If you aren't making any money and not even trying to make money, the cash investors and buyers throw at you is Monopoly money printed on valuations and total active users.

Most startups would drop in valuation significantly if they made even one penny.
The difference is that branding is important. Ease of learning and remembering a name.

Very different to passwords, which should be computer-generated and computer-stored, you should never know your passwords.
My favourite work of Foucault is Il faut défendre la société where he discusses the history of historical intelligibility.
Does anyone have insight into AWS revenue per service? Does EC2 generate the bulk of the revenue? Is Lambda the fastest growth area? How is Redshift doing?
Thanks for the technical link. You gotta love Wired, paraphrasing down to get gems like: “The first TCP packet will be the ‘inserted’ one while the other is from the real server, but will be ignored by the [browser]”.

Oh my browser deals with TCP packets??
"sbahra" here for those of you who do not know is the author of CK.
I'd quit if I had to carry around an ugly ID like that one.
Red Hat gives developers more programming goodies
Probably. Imagine having children. Streaming (up and down), videochatting, gaming, torrenting, downloading patches and so on. They will not hit 1Gbit/s all the time but when everyone is on the net at once it will be nice to have some "room".
Reading this reminds me of "A Very Peculiar Practice"[1][2] which foreshadowed this by nearly 20 years

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Peculiar_Practice

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&list=PLJ4mcFE1FY...
There's many reasons why that analogy doesn't work, and "network effect" isn't one.

Appropriate tool, appropriate job.
Humanities major spotted.
"When an archeology professor is talking about critical thought they mean an argument capable of convincing people."

No, they don't.
Wow! Yes, I am interested in that kind of thing.

Also a coincidence: me and my brother used to do cooperative 2-player speeed-runs of Doom/Doom2 as part of a thing called "H2HMud". We had a setup which consisted of a fast 486, and a really slow 386. It ran really slowly - about 1/4 normal rate when you woke up a room full of entities. The 486, however, rendered every frame, which meant the person on the fast machine could happily pick every off pixel-perfect, while the slower machine player would do "support" stuff (flip switches).

I wondered what the "limit" would be if you could slow it down arbitrarily, and re-stitch, and I guess that's what it looks like in the video you posted. Thanks!
Grand Theft Auto V is running in VR
Beautiful Frog [hypertext frog simulator]
It's honestly one of the main reasons I got so late into the "my own web project" game. PHP and Perl to me are a ghetto. I refuse to touch them, learn them, look at them, know about them. And combine that with MySQL which is still worse IMO than Postgresql and "open source" web programming with the LAMP stack was just.................ugly.

I sound like a bad person. I can't help it.
They'll spin it off one day, for the same reason Walmart sold off its massive trucking business.

AWS is eventually going to be a $30 billion sales business, capable of generating $3+ billion in net income. It'll legitimately be a nearly $100 billion market cap company unto itself in ten years. If Amazon is smart, they'll wait until it achieves a much larger scale before spinning it off, it's obviously a huge pot of gold in the equity value.
Types exist to help you organize your code. Const (for classes) just promotes the misguided idea that you should design objects with mutable and immutable parts at the same time. The main objection to this is that your objects should be either value objects (therefore immutable) or reference objects. There is no need for const if you design your classes in this way. On the other hand, the const idea requires you to spread "const" everywhere you might want immutability, otherwise the compiler will fight you at each line of your code. Either way, it is a loss-loss proposition.