skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a weird period during things that appear truly disruptive where the established player may try to buy you. This happens when it becomes clear there's a non-zero chance that the established player may quickly become extinct because of the new player's growth, however it is still not inevitable. Lately, the most prominent examples of this have come with Facebook's successful and failed acquisitions. For example:

Instagram in Apr. 2012: Facebook is about photos, but it wasn't crushing mobile like it is today. Instagram was, but it still wasn't clear whether Instagram's growth would top out or what monetization would look like. Facebook made a $1bn offer that many thought was crazy, but Instagram is now worth (by many estimates) 30-50x that.

ON THE OTHER HAND:

Snapchat ~Nov 2013: Snapchat pioneered an entirely new way to interact with photos on a phone - another existential crisis for Facebook. Facebook offers $3bn in cash. To an extent FAR greater than when Zuck made the offer to Instagram, people were aligned in saying Evan S should take the offer. Snapchat, after all, in many people's minds was about sexting and distasteful things - take the money. Growth would top out eventually, people would get over it. Evan, however, disagreed - Snapchat wasn't mostly used for sexting, it was used for sharing moments. And it was working, and in fact it had become inevitable to him. Zuck went through the same thing getting offers from Yahoo and Microsoft at Facebook, and he was right. Evan, FWIW, I think is also right - Snapchat is going to change the game.
A couple of months ago I posted this[0]:

The Point of the Banach-Tarski Theorem
– not just a curiosity

That spawned a lot of discussion. Indeed, there are many many submissions[1], and some spawn considerable discussion, others are still-born.

The Banach-Tarski theorem is a lovely result, and I look forward to seeing what people say about this new presentation of it.

========

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674286

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=banach%20tarski&sort=byDate&pr...
Have You Been Hacked? Take This Quiz to Find Out
FTA: Wolfgang Kubicki, of the pro-business FDP party, also said he found it "disconcerting" that Range had ignored the NSA allegations while choosing to pursue the journalists. "Instead of intimidating journalists, the state prosecutor should resume the investigation proceedings into the NSA affair that he only recently abandoned," he said.

As an American, it is stunning to hear a politician make so much sense on a topic involving the NSA. Where there is lack of oversight, there is abuse, and we very clearly do not have functional oversight.
Well, in the context of the thesis that companies like Uber are allowing people to partly convert consumption assets into production ones, to an economist it strikes me as not unreasonable he'd describe it as both "amazing" and an innovation.

That's certainly a very interesting concept, and new in the modern era, I think. Closest I can think of right now is selling surplus solar power your home is generating back to the utility, a somewhat different thing.
How fast is your network link, both in terms of throughput and latency for the sites you visit? The OP is browsing over a 256 kbps connection of unknown origin. They are likely impacted by latency and throughput constraints, which will exacerbate issues with sites that require a lot of requests or are resource heavy.

Making a site fast boils down to:

1) Making sure your server responds quickly.

2) Reducing the number of requests required for a page to load.

3) Reducing the number of bytes required for a page to load.
WRT SolarCity, and solar generally, you spend something like $2,000 (haven't looked it up) to manufacture a panel that generates a kilowatt at peak, you wire it up, and you generate power (and revenue) every sunny afternoon for the next 25 years. "The thinking" -- or as I prefer to call it, "the physics" -- is that you create value over time.
This would be illegal in a public company, for any executive to bet against the company, and in the private case would probably be breaking some part of the contract signed with the investors. They get to hedge your bets, if you want to hedge yours you'll need to find some other vehicle.
Okay, so it certainly does not 'only' mean that. I am thinking a lot of the insurance industry, e.g, the wifi toothbrush (http://beamtoothbrush.com/). This is what started my train of thought.

When venture capitalists look at exit strategies, one strong possibility is to threaten to take market share, even unprofitably, from a cash-rich incumbent.
Energy transfer.

There's a big difference between absorbing reflected ambient light and having photons pumped into your retina.
It's not hard to evaluate if physically impossible things can work or not.
maybe I should rephrase that as one outbound DNS query? The answer should be cached locally, or at least at your next hop resolver, and the TTL of 300 seconds is long enough to make it effective
How well could an ocean-going ship float in freshwater lake Nicaragua?

And I doubt the lake would stay clear after ships drag in seawater.
so the polar opposite of anything google has done so far? ads pay their bills and ads and privacy don't mix.
You know about the many self thought programmers that learned on their own PC-s ... since the late 70s.
Just tried it. Looks great.

In fact, it can simulate the scenario better as compared to Chrome as the speed is shared by everything on the system and not just that Chrome tab.
I think where G+ really missed a trick was in not publishing a write-API. They were clearly trying to force people away from FB, but an open API would have allowed for a smoother migration over time. Without automation, most people simply couldn't be bothered to post the same thing twice. Third-party twitter clients, which were being shafted around the same time, would have jumped on it.

This mistake, coupled with a double-edged focus on privacy (as people shared with less friends, others wouldn't see much content) and their disastrous Real Name idiocy, was their undoing - G+ became a me-too.
Actually, they don't halt it. They just said the current
state of the investigation doesn't warrant a search or
taking the journalists/bloggers into custody.

The investigation still gives a legal umbrella for
extensive wiretapping and similar measures.
Everything you've said is sensible, though I question whether in a cheap money environment investors will stay away if they've been burned. People fall all over themselves to lend money to sovereigns who have defaulted fairly recently, and that at very low interest rates. I would be surprised if people with access to unlimited cheap money will really stay away.

That said, even if I agreed with you 100% (and you're certainly right in principle), I would not change my view. That's why I noted that humans live only once and have a short time frame to accumulate money. In the fullness of time, yes, this behavior is harmful. But humans don't live in the fullness of time; they live when they're born. Secure your own future and to hell with the industry's.
Link doesn't work on mobile devices. It redirects to the issue homepage.
As I said last time that link was posted:

> First thing I did, as I usually do with sites that have annoyingly small text width, was inspect element to increase contrast / width / remove the doublespacing. Then I read it. ...irony.
Err right...

> Did the physics actually work? Check

Ok I'm convinced?

> Was it safe? Well … for starters it is just an inaudible soundwave being transferred – as in the kind also used for women during pregnancy. It also happens to be how your car likely tells the distance to objects when you park or if you have a side assist whether you can change lanes safely.

Yeah just like bullets are made of the same metal you use for door knobs. Totally safe!

This is a stupid infeasible idea. One of those things that maybe initially sounds plausible, but when you look at the actual numbers it's off by orders of magnitude.
It was in Dublin a few years ago '11 or '12, I think. To me it seemed to be like there was an age threshold at which people start to wear regular clothes.

To say something nice: People were extraordinary friendly and walked up to us from 20-30m (100 feet) away to help us when we looked even remotely disoriented :)
You cannot help robot, TV, computer, or mobile phone because they are not alive. You can fix them, or throw out and buy new.
I know of no long-term successful VC that thinks this way. None. Zero. Few have billion dollar funds to begin with by the way. Only an elite group of top tier VCs command that kind of capital and you should be prepared to be thoroughly grilled in due diligence if you want to raise money from those guys.
I've been living in Panama since 2006. I've followed a lot of the articles around the Nicaraguan canal to try to get some sense of how it will affect Panama.

My conclusion is a canal in Nicaragua makes no economic sense, there must be some hidden motivation at play here, such as personal glory for Wang Jing or a ploy to secure land rights and tax exemptions. The reasoning is as follows:

1) The possible ROI from a ~$70 billion investment is very low. The same revenue can be achieved by building a third set of locks in Panama for ~$15 billion. Right away it looks like bad business. Most ways you can spend $70 billion will yield a better return with less risk.

2) The Chinese government is not involved. If it were a political thing, it could explain why someone would forge ahead despite the poor ROI, but the government is not financing it and government companies won't touch it with a stick.

3) Wang Jing is a telcom billionaire and neither he nor his company have any experience with construction or engineering.

4) A Chinese construction and engineering company has offered to finance and build a fourth set of super-sized locks in Panama for ~17 billion. This would compete directly with a hypothetical Nicaraguan Canal for the largest ships, but at a much smaller investment.

Given two nearly identical products, the company with lower costs will be able to offer lower prices while still making a profit. That will clearly be Panama. There's just no logic in the Federation's move here. Jorge Quijano, who leads the Panama Canal Authority, has come to the same conclusion.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/panama-can...

[2] http://insidecostarica.com/2015/04/14/chinese-interested-fin...

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/26/us-panama-canal-id...
Google lost the plot with G+. The reason that Google is where it is is because it made things people wanted to use, they naturally came to use these things.

Around this time Google just simply forgot this, killed reader, killed ig, killed labs, and then tried to herd people into using an inferior social network, then tried to shove all of google's other products into this terrible product nobody wanted to use.

This is different than what happened during the search engine wars, where google's product was simply better than all the others and that's why people used it.
Thanks. This seems it was prepared before the February BOF and is out of date. Even so, it is a pretty solid read for someone interested in an overview of current 3D printing models. Unfortunately, it also makes it clear that the white paper currently only supports FDM (fused deposition modeling) based processes, while stating intent to expand to broader scope.
Circles was the privacy-enhanced facebook. Surprise surprise, after a month nobody cared; in fact, as people acted all precious with their status messages, the "ghost town" meme started.

Privacy is like "corporate responsibility" or "environmental sustainability": the public at large simply does. Not. Care. They just want shiny sh*t for free.
Nah I actually meant amoral (just forgot the word). Amoral means ignoring the morality. Immoral means that it is definitely bad.

In other words, not all money held in Switzerland is ill-gotten - they don't care either way.
Prove you're not a robot! ;)
"During the time he was detained and searched, the man said he was asked weird questions including how many times a day he prayed? Was his family religious? And did they have a lot of money?"

Things like that make me laugh and cry. The goverments are insane (I don't mean people, I mean the system they create).

Free advice you won't take until it happens to you. The way you travel with anything that you want to keep or not have examined is to send it to yourself instead. It's inconvenient but so is having to spend 2h hours at the airport yet you're not trying to circumvent that problem and just put up with it.
The red font on dark grey background you used is off-putting.
Most people consider their gmail, drive, etc. accounts as private because their immediate acquaintances don't have access to them. Maybe a better word would be not shared?
This might be the time to drag out the old quotation "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

In general your point is correct, there is value to secrecy in some instances. And often people who really know whats going on can laugh at naysayers. But, for example, if someone said they have a perpetual motion machine, and laughed at people who questioned it, the laugh would seem more like delusion than informed confidence.
You could tell right away that Google didn't have a clear vision for how people would use the service. They could have differentiated from Facebook with an emphasis on privacy or decent features. Instead of a social experience where people could interact with each other, you got something that was you could post something on your profile and people could comment on it. There was nothing special about the experience.

I've seen this multiple times when interacting with Google employees, just a sense of removal from the real world that permeates some of their choices. Stuff like, "oh, I guess the page on accessibility should be accessible."
I was hoping HitchBOT was a robot based on Christopher Hitchens. He would have been able to fend for himself, and Hitchslap anyone who attacked him.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hitchslap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQorzOS-F6w
I don't think education is this sort of consumption or production, in fact, when did people start buying PCs more for consumption? E.g. games and telecom/the Internet?

Comparable might be buying more PC that you need, and selling the extra cycles. There have been for some time schemes that do that for non-profit uses, e.g. math (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...) and science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home), I now notice a huge list of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_... But I think I would have heard of any "make money at home!" schemes....
I have a lot of questions myself that I hope to get clarified on August 5th, but I think the goals of Unicorn Engine and QEMU are quite different.

From the sample snippet, it looks like Unicorn Engine provides an interface that will help at reverse engineering tasks and building other tools that require the translation+execution of certain functions or blocks of instructions of another architecture (it reminds me to the disassembly framework 'Capstone Engine' in that regard). In the other hand, QEMU's goal is rather the emulation of an entire system and different audio/video hardware (basically, a virtual machine).
I wouldn't pay for Reddit if others had to pay to contribute to it.

I would make it free for contributors, and paid for lurkers (i.e., monetize karma).
This video is much better than I expected. If you have 25 minutes you can see a friendly presentation of the proof.

[The connection with particle physics at the end I a little too much.]

An important detail is that this video is made by Vsauce. He usually has good videos, but sometimes the connections between the parts are too farfetched.
Google has an opportunity to trash Apples ecosystem because of how apple doesn't get software or cloud well. I'm setting my mom up with Google photos on her iPhone because she can't figure out Apple's workflow.
That or "blatantly break laws and hope you make money fast enough". Worked for Uber, didn't work so well for Sand Hill.
When you build a work environment that encourages people to spend their entire waking lives at work, this may be one of the outcomes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990221
Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990221
Usenet still runs. It's just much less traffic than it used to be.

ISPs could not necessarily tell that NNTP service made them money, it's rather arcane and binaries really were a piracy sink.

I have dozens of old Usenet contacts on Facebook, and none of them really know why they left, other than possibly their ISP dropping the service.
Damn, that is a pretty OS, will probably appeal to a lot of windows users with that start menu :)

Edit: making a live USB of it, too tempting with those visuals :)

Edit: or maybe not, since I'm not really into paying for Linux
ActiveMQ Artemis
Sorry, but this sounds a bit short-sighted. While nobody should be sentenced to suffer severe pain for the rest of his life, just because your body isn't as capable as it used to be doesn't necessarily mean that you want to end your life. Often there will be people that you will leave behind and you certainly don't want to explain them that it's your decision to do just that.

On top of that, this is also dangerous from a social perspective where people could get a feeling that they are supposed to go once there is nothing they can contribute to society anymore.

We should rather focus on allowing making "regular" dying more dignified rather than promoting euthanasia.
People really wanted Facebook the product without Facebook the company. G+ had a golden opportunity, and they blew it.
You stated what I wanted to state much better than I ever could
There doesn't need to be an "interface" for NNTP and especially not a web based one. The NNTP client in the old Mozilla products from the '90s was just fine and threaded messages well.
Sometimes things work even when they should not.

We had a teacher in University that proved to us how bees could not fly, making the assumption of laminar flow of course, that is what we use for flying airplanes.

Ever flying over terrain or water at small heights the physics are completely different than general flight (ground effect).

So If a guy is fool and young enough to actually make a prototype(stay foolish, stay hungry) he could discover specific "special cases" that could make this invention useful enough for something.

For example, probably when you put your telephone over a small 1 millimeter distance of the charger you could get some time of resonance and you could increase the frequency, making the amplitude necessary smaller. I don't know, some times our assumptions(generalizations) are just wrong.
> Secure your own future and the hell with the industry's

This is just not something I can agree with, regardless how it's twisted. Accumulating a sustainable amount of money isn't as easy as raising a few rounds on a weak idea. It takes a real idea, perseverance, and thinking really long term. The mindset quoted above isn't likely to support any of these requirements.

So, really what you'll end up with is a nice house, a pretty car, and a few fake friends while it's all running smoothly. The second you can no longer deliver it all goes away. I might be in the minority here, but I plan to leave my children an empire. Not a house of cards.
These are lovely anecdotes and he's obviously an interesting and capable story-teller, but he worked very hard to make his nominal epiphany true. The trick of writing in a foreign language as a way of discovering his own voice is fascinating, but it also must have been very difficult.

So a better title might be: "How I was motivated to be dedicated enough to become a novelist." And this is actually a more interesting story, at least for other artists, because the thing everyone faces at the outset is failure and lack of belief in our own work. We have to have something to keep us going. He had that single moment at a baseball game. Others have other things, but having a weird little talisman like that can be very useful in solving the ongoing problem of motivation.

In my own life, at the age of 13 I ate at a Chinese restaurant for the first time (on a school trip to the 'big city' a couple of hours distant from the town I grew up in) and got a fortune cookie that read, in its entirety, "An ambition far beyond your reach".

I've achieved a good deal in the forty years since then, and at times when the going has been particularly tough I've thought back to that and told myself, "Yeah, well, you were told what to expect and went ahead anyway. So don't complain, just get back to work."

Would I have accomplished as much without being able to do that? Maybe, maybe not. But being able to do it made the journey easier at times. It's a silly thing--I don't believe in fate or fortunes--but sometimes silly things can be made to work for us.

So I could say that was "the moment I became X", where X is any major achievement since, but "One weird trick to stay motivated and focused on your goals" would be at least as accurate.
Does that mean copyright infringement?
The future of health care
It is 3:00am you need to get up for work in 4 hours. Your toddler is running a fever. You think it is probably just the flu that your other 2 children just got over. But what if you are wrong. How many times have you dealt with this situation. Experts claim that 70% of hospital visits can be done over the phone. That is the Future of medicine. $29.95 a month covers your whole family and your prescriptions are delivered right to your door. Save up to 70% of subscriptions, Lab work and X-rays.
Development Teams and Operations
8 Lessons I Learned Building My First SaaS Business in a Third World Country
GetAwesomeness – retrieve all amazing awesomeness from GitHub
No, I stand by my assertion. You might have a "statistically significant" result, but the sample size is just too small to know if it represents a real result or not. At best you can say they've discovered something worth investigating with a larger study. But you can't take the conclusions at face value.

http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html
Non-text sites of old weren't as slow as the current ones. Progressive rendering and not bringing in a MB of JavaScript and fonts and other shit is what makes it fast. HN could easily add images and still stay fast.

That this is even a question is just sad. It means the slow web is just accepted. Most web pages aren't particularly more functional than they were 15 years ago. Sure, maybe search boxes have auto-complete. But taking a screenshot to compare output? You could achieve much the same stuff, pixel-per-pixel, back with table-based layout. Yet even though we're running machines over 10x more powerful, things are laggy.

It's embarrassing, annoying, and dumb.
You know, after 20 years of www, one'd think browsers would be able to competently format text files already. The fact that we need that small amount of css (instead of it just being available) means the web is still broken.
Show HN: Hey Python Django boys and girls, what do you think about my project?
Google tried something like that. The whole circle idea was about control for the user of who he shares stuff what content with.

Facebook cannot be killed with something so similar to Facebook like Google+, much like Google cannot be killed with something like Bing. They are at a local maximum amassing lock-in and buying up every improvement on the status quo.

What might ultimately kill them is either EU regulation, a big Chinese domestic market or some jump in technology or business model. The end result might again look very similar to what we have now. I think in the beginning it would start out as something like Whatsapp or Siri. It could be something that takes over or kills advertisement completely like Amazons various tries to create a platform for all online commerce.
A Lot of HUF