skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
South African here.

There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop.

For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations.

While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented.

The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like.

TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).
I laughed at "...building the software analogs of sewer systems, utility poles, or synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats."

It derives from a Steven Wright Joke:

"All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store..."

http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt
(Disclaimer: I work at Dato.)

Dato is a venture-funded startup in Fremont (right by the canal, down the street from Google). We are on a mission to make the power of machine learning accessible to the masses, with a great team and an exciting opportunity ahead of us. We maintain and contribute to open source projects. Personally, I think it's really exciting and I am passionate about it.

https://dato.com/company/careers/
It's also probably relevant that Twitter didn't launch at SXSW. This was me writing about the company and service a month before that SXSW, and I was hardly first: https://blog.twitter.com/2007/anil-dash-twitter
> It took me a while to get used to say "thank you" in this situation.

Sort of denying it or "trying to make it less" (not sure how to say that correctly in English) is something I tend to do a lot as well. People here (in the Netherlands) are not offended at all.
I have terrible vision. One of the things that bothers me (and will cause me to sometimes hit the back button) is when websites somehow disable pinch-to-zoom on my iPhone or iPad. I found a hack (sort of) where I create a bookmark that I call "ZOOM" that runs some JavaScript that allows me to zoom most of these pages. Sometimes, though, the layout is such that menus or other items on the page seem to get in the way when I use my ZOOM bookmark.

It's for this reason that I don't use apps created by web pages that host the web page's content (e.g., the many reddit apps). I have to use a browser so I can zoom in by a variable amount (depending on the font size, etc). Anyway, just an opinion regarding web site layout/design from someone who can't see for shit.
> deliberately obstruct people from using our work as a foundation for successful entrepreneurial efforts

No, the GPL does not do this.

Obeying the requirement to share source code does not necessitate that your profits must evaporate. If your competitor picks up your (A)GPL'd source code? They too then must release their changes.

> because we can't handle the idea, even the /mere possibility/, that someone might be more successful with our own project then we are.

If by "success" you mean "rich," then no. GPL is not concerned with money, it is concerned with the user's freedom to inspect and modify the source code of the software they use.

Go ahead, get rich. Be more popular than me. But if you base your work on mine, I want to see what your software is doing in my computer, or with my information. I want to fix a bug long after you have stopped supporting your software. I want to make the software run on devices that you will never care about. I want all the value and data and time I've spent on your SaaS service to not simply evaporate when your crappy VC-funded startup gets bought and shut down by Facebook.

> People won't stop contributing just because you aren't forcing them, BSD is proof of that,

Yes, some people would still be ethical and contribute back. Many won't. Companies are notoriously sociopathic, especially companies who are legally required to maximize profit for their shareholders, especially companies whose primary goal is return on investment for the VC that funded them.

I don't trust companies to be nice. You want to avoid paying a developer to build a poor NIH mimic of my awesome work? The price is that you must give your users the source code of your changes. I don't care if you get rich in the process. But I reject the implied assertion that you're "obstructed" from doing so.
Why Can’t Computers Translate Latin?
Sun were, in many ways, the worst of the commercial Unixes, they just had a very loud fan base insisting they were the One True Unix. Consider how long it took to get a journaling filesystem, never mind volume management!
Poignant example. Life use to be much, much less easy.

Excellent link as well, thanks.
Not really. I think we can include all but Joyent one. Joyent one seems to have too many company PR stuff. Feel free to make a pull request if you wanna add something.
Linux port of signify:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slackdepot/files/signify/

Files signified on OpenBSD will verify on Linux and vice versa.
Onerous contracts have long been common in the startup industry. My impression is that one of the things that has made YC successful is striving for a reputation for providing better terms for founders, but out in the wild places where reputation doesn't count and funding is turned from competitive to a competition where investment is the prize, it's amateur hour. $5000 isn't going to provide much runway for a startup, and funding just one team isn't going to make for a valuable portfolio. The contract is just a reflection of a failure to distinguish between barbershops and startups.
Fair enough.. that was the closest to a valid concern I could find in that list of errors anyway.
> Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware.

Sun's got nothing on SGI in that department :)
If your definition of "intelligence community" includes NASA or random low-level soldiers just trying to keep their planned operations out of the hands of their adversaries, then I'd submit that your definition of "intelligence community" is functionally useless. Just say "clearance holders" if that's what you mean... there's already a very precise definition of "intelligence community" as it pertains to the U.S. anyways.
He said that libraries in France are not usually open to the public. Read the article, please, before being so flip.
The existing situation is even more stupid than paying alfalfa farmers not to grow alfalfa.

If you’re forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, paying alfalfa farmers is where it’s at. Obviously better water management would be the sensible choice, but that hasn’t been on the table for decades.
Texas Repatriates Gold at Federal Reserve in New York to Texas
Because apple don't have to contribute OSx stuff back to the BSDs (nor did Microsoft when they used a BSD networking stack in windows 95) but e.g. google do have to contribute android kernel stuff back.

You've still totally missed the point. Free software is not about helping you make money. It is about user freedom and improving the lot of the whole of humanity. (NB Free software does not mind if you make money - it is just not there to help you do so.)
I'll second this. I have built a lot of ideas and prototypes over the last year or two. I used to spend a lot of time focusing on the architecture design of these things, building in microservices using the latest technology wherever possible. I figured this was the best way to go about it, until the day I realized I was spending 50% of my time trying to set up a distributed microservices environment, 40% of my time fighting with the tools I was trying to use to build my prototype, and 10% of my time actually building my prototype.

This is the biggest problem with trying to scale too early - you take the focus away from your product. The reality is that most businesses will not work out. Instead of focusing on scaling something that may never sell, you should use the tools that allow you to iterate on your product as quickly as possible - where reasonable.

As stated above, if you end up needing to grow the business, all the code will eventually be rewritten. The data, however, will likely be much more expensive to change. Put some time into thinking about your data model, but otherwise focus on building your product.
IIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500	back then. Eclipse initially wasn't better but open (for extensions) and gratis.
It's atrociously bad science. It's not worthwhile to talk about what it means. I appreciated the BBC anecdote as well as the research about the advertisement's phrasing, but trying to interpret it at all is irresponsible pop science wiring.

Briefly: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3025
>No human should be punished for crimes another human committed.

what about the crimes committed with approval, in the name and by the power vested by the other humans? When these other humans shield and harbor the committer of the crime?
Except that the TPP isn't mostly about trade.

What is most objectionable are the 2/3+ of the agreement that is about things like corporations suing states, extensions of excessive copyright and patent laws, etc.

The other problem is that the American worker took it in the shorts after NAFTA. A bunch of jobs suddenly moved to Mexico, and then to Asia.

The United States would have benefited more from automating those jobs rather than just having them leave. Had NAFTA not gone into effect, companies would have had to do more automation.
This part makes my stomach turn:

The West has been in this position before. Optimism about the prospects of transforming an ancient civilization through engagement, followed by deep disillusion, has been the pattern ever since early Jesuit missionaries sought to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Those envoys adopted the gowns of the Mandarin class, grew long beards and even couched their gospel message in Confucian terms to make it more palatable. The 17th-century German priest Adam Schall got as far as becoming the chief astronomer of the Qing dynasty. But he fell from favor, and the Jesuits were later expelled.

More like disillusioned with "the West." The lesson learned on the other side (which took a really long time with wars, revolutions, and capitalist reforms to un-learn) is to not trust 'the West' because they'll try to hook your citizens on opium while trying to convert you to their religion. And if you ban opium and deport opium dealers, they'll kidnap your emperor, start a war, and burn/loot your ancient civilization.

What the author of the article seems to forget is that there are elderly people alive today who lived through that. My grandfather was sold into indentured servitude because of his parents' opium habit.

Moreover, for a nation with China's current levels of import/export and the rate at which cargo ships get attacked by pirates (as they go around Somalia to reach the Mediterranean), what's wrong with building up a navy? That's reducing dependence on local infrastructure and has got nothing to do with the U.S.
I never said that Europe would be "Islamified", although Europe is projected to be 8% Muslim by 2030[0], and not all immigration is from Islamic countries. For reference, Israel is 21% Muslim[1]. If your suburb becomes 50% muslim, it's certainly going to have a big effect even if other parts of the country remain unaffected.

I don't see how your argument about geography works. Not everyone in a neighboring country is going to try to claim refugee status. Netanyahu was referring to 60,000 refugees but this was a total over many years, while Sweden, a country of similar population size to Israel, accepted 31,000 refugees in 2014 [2] and will accept even more in 2015.

[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/15/5-facts-abou...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel

[2] http://www.migrationsverket.se/English/About-the-Migration-A...
Suck on that ad slingers.
What do you call a thousand unemployed ad firm staff?
A good start!
> It distorted the economy, encouraging people to build unsustainable industries and communities in the middle of the desert.

The central valley in California is not a desert. It has never been a desert. You seem to be confusing it with Southern California. Central California naturally contained one of the largest groundwater basins in the US, large rivers and lakes. For a couple million years, the whole thing was a giant lake for goodness sakes.

It is an agricultural area whose output and scale dwarfs anything else on Earth because it has both ideal growing weather, exceptional soil and normally more than enough water and because we have a drought once every 50 to 100 years, it all of a sudden unsustainable?

Where do you think we should grow crops? Eden?
Anecdotes? Sure. My wife loves to trade options. I generally avoid them, except for buy-writes. Across investments, she enjoys taking higher risk positions than I.

I can't say that gender doesn't play a role, and it would make sense if gender were a factor, but I don't see how it could be anything close to a dominant factor.
If s/he is a really good friend, just go for the one-handed hug. Fairly safe option while less distant than a handshake. S/he's not going to drop you as a friend over that so if you are looking for something less distant, you could try that.
This actually happened back in the day. The US was originally an agrarian society and farmers held a lot of political power. Today farming makes up 1-2% of the economy. However, back then the farmers faced a problem: If you make too much food, prices fall, and you go bankrupt. Farmers would then control the supply of food by not farming to keep prices up. Certain elements within the government were sympathetic and would pay farmers not to plant to help control the problem the market put them in.

This developed a problem as people were paid to not produce and when droughts happened, there was not enough food to go around - a critical failure for a civilization. A problem that is a relevant lesson today as politicians had used faulty economics to try to fix the problem.

Modern farm policy is wasteful, and deserves criticism, but it turned the problem on its head by subsidizing farmers to produce as much as possible. We've gone from occasionally starving to death to having medical problems from eating too much. A good problem to have.
Would this count - https://bvckup2.com/wip ?
Oculus VR, architect of its own downfall
Really awesome.

No register, no account, no login? That is the best thing of the internet.

Here's a bug with the timestamp: http://i.imgur.com/NiI6yF5.png
Can China be contained? No, because China has finally figured out how to make their country work.

Russia never worked very well. It didn't work under the tsars, it made some progress under communism but never caught up, it regressed when the USSR broke up and Russia tried capitalism (deaths and poverty rose a lot), the oligarch era didn't help, and it's not doing that great as a semi-dictatorship. Containing the USSR worked because nobody wanted the USSR in charge.

China, on the other hand, has a system which is moving forward rapidly. It took them a long time to find something that worked. They had their disasters, such as the "Great Leap Forward", under Mao. Now, though, the country is doing a lot of things right. The government is unapologetically authoritarian, but not stupid. As long as the government can keep the standard of living going up, it can stay in power.

China's foreign policy is another matter. The government would like to dominate Asia. Taiwan remains an annoyance, but it's more like Cuba being an annoyance to the US, not a real problem for China. The countries in the area spend a lot of time and effort fussing over minor islands, but that's not likely to lead to a major war.

China is gradually building up a blue-water navy. With the amount of shipping China has, that makes sense for them. China has a lot of economic interests outside China now, and wants to be able to protect them. Economic power, not military power, leads the way.

It all depends on whether China can maintain its growth rate.
It's weird to see so many of these "Go is a cleaned up/incremental step up from C" when

1) There have been plenty of natively compiled, garbage collected languages without much more fuzz than that before.

2) It seems more popular with people with a Python, Ruby etc. background rather than a C++ background (which was originally suspected would be a decent audience) or a C background.
I, too, am a member of the ebook master race. As a passionate and frequent reader, I'm awed by the revolution in portability, quality, availability provided by ebooks.

...but I can also afford them. When I was a kid, I spent every day in the local bookstore sitting on the floor, reading everything I could get my hands on. (Ironically, this was only possible at the larger bookstores and chains; the smaller indie types for which everyone waxes nostalgic would never allow it, though I hardly blame them.) My mom shares my love of literature, and bought every book I ever requested, but she could never have afforded a tenth of the in-store books I devoured.

Starbucks and ebooks are huge improvements from paper warehouses, but I wonder what would happen if I were born today and paper book stores vanished from the world. Libraries don't necessarily fill the same niche, in terms of the quality of both the branches and their clientele. The public library where I grew up was in a dangerous area, filled with junkies and surrounded by gangsters, and I just wouldn't have had the same opportunities to read unmolested as I did at bookstores.

Though now that I'm re-investigating public libraries, I've been nothing but impressed by their quality. Outside of rough neighborhoods and the constant threat of closure, public libraries may be the best possible opportunities for modern kids.
Germans don't? I live next to Germany (even our language is mistaken for German a lot of times, it's pretty close) and here everyone does that. It seems weird to me that a few kilometers east people wouldn't anymore... I'm going to ask some friends from there!
It's even worse than that. The u.s. has been in constant warfare for the last 25 years and have killed ~600,000 people in that time.

What countries have the Chinese been bombing, killing in that time?

The u.s. is fighting an ideological war while the Chinese are fighting an economic war. The u.s. doesn't care if they wipe out a population as long as they defeat their ideas, while the chinese want to develop economic ties.

I don't know what more to say. The u.s. will lose if they don't change their thoughts.
You can't be serious either; an authoritarian government is no way the same as a democracy. There are forced disapperances [1], outright censorship [2], state enrichment vs individuals [3], and on and on. US has courts and 3 separate branches of government and elections and debates. You can be cynical, sure, if the democracy isn't working well, but we still have a democracy. Do you honestly think a government controlled by a small secretive group of old men is better than elected government?

[1] https://news.vice.com/article/forced-disappearances-brutalit...
[2] http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4707107
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_State-owned_enterprise...
So, if we tread the same well worn steps as Google, drink from the same fountains we see their guilded staff drink from, we will be ok, but anything off the beaten path, we will be fucked? And good luck getting anything else as go is basically what Google say (see versioning and generics for examples).
California's problem with regulating water for farmers is that they have always used the stick instead of the carrot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot_and_stick

In other words if I invest in drip irrigation and cut my water use say 80% I not only don't receive help for doing it but I have the same water cut back percentage as my neighbor who is using water less efficiently.
NomadWiki-Know your options in a big world of possibilities
I think that no-one will argue that an imperative, transient data-structure will be faster than a functional, persistent data-structure if you use it imperatively.

If you use persistent data-structures the way they are meant to be used, they can and will be faster than a simple array.

Both have valid use-cases, but they are often distinct.
I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my point was that Eclipse was a game-changer that triggered great change in Borland.
Cool, I found two LFLs in my neighborhood. Thanks!
I brought Rust into my job for some non-essential stuff and so far it obliterated my usual tools (Scala, Python to be more specific) in shear speed and low memory consumption. I've written no more than a thousand LOC of it and most of it is still clumsy bearing it mind the fact that I'm new to it, but the potential that it has cannot be denied. To me it's a missing link I was waiting for - a low level language that feels like a high level one.
Not just that, but how do these disparate government agencies verify that so-and-so checking into the local agency office is actually cleared for SECRET or TS or whatever?

They have to look it up somehow. That lookup will likely involve a computer database, and the pathway to reach that database will likely involve the Internet.

Practically all the rest of this sad story follows immediately, because the whole strategy of how the government handles computerized records in general is all screwed up.

Even after this I'm not sure it will get better... the trend in government is for inexorable centralization of related information. At the same time there's incredible demand to have those work-related systems available online and all the time, so that people can work while on duty travel, or from home.

Obviously there are technical things that can be done to mostly have our cake and eat it too (VPNs, redacted mirrors/views of the sensitive central database to be made available across the public Internet, etc.). But no one gets promoted in the government for doing that, and much of the talent is at Google or Facebook or Silicon Valley anyways :P.
Chrome Should Soon Be Easier on Your Mac’s Battery
Not sure what I was thinking. I'll have to update that.