r0naa

>Remember that it's not just people in wheelchairs who benefit from accessibility though.

In addition to that, I wager there's value in extending the current infrastructure so as to not ostracize disabled people even further.

>3) It turns out that it's harder than it sounds to capture the full value of a smaller market for a bunch of reasons, and so the failure rate is much higher than expected.

What kind of reasons? Direct me to some resources if there are too many to enumerate

Why are you primarily looking for >billion dollars startups?

I would wager that if you take a look at an accurate distribution of markets according to potential you would find a magnitude more small/average markets (that are untapped) than billion dollars ones. And similarly, I suspect that the success rate for those "boring" ventures is much higher than the exciting shiny rising stars.

Question: Why not optimize for companies that are certainly not going to become Airbnbs but will capture the full value of an averagely sized market (say between 50 and 300 millions)? And if my guess is correct and they end-up eating a lot less resources than the soon-to-be-unicorns, you could even optimise for volume.

Is the pay-off (wrt. to the energy spent and success rate) for unicorns really worth it?

w3m reddit.com

The current situation in France is making me very conflicted about privacy and public liberties.

I am a strong believer of the value of privacy for a modern society. I even want to dedicate my life to help building privacy enhancing technologies and censorship-resistant networks. Because I think that an "advanced" world can only thrive if information is unrestricted, or unstoppable.

But today I face a dilemma. The dilemma of choosing between freedom and privacy, and security.

I am French, and have a lot of family in Paris. My brother lives two streets from the Bataclan and lost one of his friends. Some of my friends lost 5, sometimes 10 people that night. Imagine loosing two thirds of your group of friends in a few hours. This is frightening.

When I look at France. I see a great country, with a lot of humanity and when I look at the French, I see a freedom loving people who share a love for good food, good music and generally speaking, the good things that life has to offer.

But I also see the failure of my country in the suburbs. With entire neighborhoods that have been left uncontrolled by the government at some point, and who never went back to that state despite lots of efforts. These neighborhoods are rigged with crime and violence, and have been a fertile environment for religious lunatics to grow stronger for the last twenty years.

And I have mixed feelings. The French National Assembly has extended the state of urgency to three months. Strengthening the regalian power of the state and weakening the counter-balancing power of the Judicial branch.

Hundreds of raids have been coordinated through France, most being in those "uncontrolled areas". And it seems to work.

Which prompt me to think that this might be for the better. For the most part of my "short" life, I have thought that a people should never "trade freedom for security". But I have come to the, perhaps wrong, conclusion that there can't be "freedom without security" either.

Maybe we should give up some freedom to let the "good guys" crackdown hard on the "bad guys".

But maybe it isn't. Maybe fear is clouding my judgement.

You seem to believe that the EU is one homogeneous, federal entity. It isn't, yet.

Having the EU parliament vote a motion in favour of welcoming Snowden as a political refugee is great. As the article highlight it isn't binding to the EU commission or EU countries. But this could help document Snowden's in front of the ECHR.

The European Court for Human Rights does have supranational power over EU states.

This is a small step in the good direction, no need to be cynical.

I think that can be true. But I think that an excellent virtual course is still inferior to an excellent physical one.

I mean, 90% of the interesting stuff I am learning during my classes comes from the discussions that start at the end of the course with the professor and a few others.

I do enjoy the ability to rewind, and choose my pace when taking an online course. Too bad the quality of the interactions I have mentioned has not yet been captured by MOOCs or OCs.

I am working on an implementation of Raft and that's a gold mine of issues to look for. It's also relieving to see testing tools for DSs coming up.

DEMi is written very clearly, and it's a pleasure to read the code: https://github.com/NetSys/demi . Definitely challenges the research "spaghetti code" stereotype.

Really cool. :-)

I think it's worth taking a look, once you factor out the desperate commit messages made in the middle of the night.

I have a midterm next monday, yet here I am... procrastinating by reading CIA's director emails.

What a time to be alive.

I don't think anyone should be surprised that an intelligence agency - that has repeatedly violated its own country's law, and actively contributed to the weakening of civil rights - be guilty of this sort of negligence. That is exactly what happens when an institutions is allowed to grow unchecked, with no or little civilian oversight or consequences for the wrong-doings.

What's scary is that this kind of clueless, and technology illiterate, people are actively involved in shaping the future landscape of massive data collection.

I think we are about to witness, in the next decade, multiple "incidents" where millions, perhaps billions, of private records about innocent citizens will be leaked because of this kind of negligence.

Thanks for adding the refs, I stumbled on it before yesterday and I thought it was interesting. There are a lot of exciting research going on at UWashington.

> Team members reject Agile methodologies openly, as they do not want to be pushed out of their comfort zones.

I love how this equates critical thinking and complacency.

See? I can do it too.

I am so grateful to my parents for putting so much trust in me while I was seemingly going out of control during my teenage years.

Seriously, it took me years but I now realize how much self-control and discipline it took them to stick to their philosophy and let me explore things on my own.

I come from a very middle class background, but I had the chance to experience a lot of things. Some I regret, some I don't. But the important is that I know how it feels, and I know what I don't to be. That's also the very way I found my calling in Computer science, and what drives in life.

They have trust me, when empirical evidence was screaming them not to. That's, I believe, the most beautiful proof of love they have ever gave me.

When my turns come, I hope I will be as good as a parent, as they were to me.

Oh that's the case for pretty much anyone on HN I am sure. I was explicitly referring to the rest of the population that is largely illiterate when it comes to technology (they just consume).

There are similar warnings on products like food, drugs etc...

Sounds like my PMATH assignment for this week :-)

I do have a Facebook account, primarily because I am studying abroad and I need to keep in touch with my family and close friends and Facebook is, thus far, the best way to share what is going on in my life. It kind of allow me to "broadcast" my life events.

Now, I really dislike what I just read.

I wonder if tech companies have a moral obligation to disclose to the user what are the terms of the contracts.

While ToS and Privacy Policy are public documents, I don't think they are close to anything readable for the layman. They are mostly pile of legal garbage and it is virtually impossible to go through them everytime you sign-up for a service.

That is why I would like to put the emphasis on clarity here. What if?

What if technology companies were forced to disclose clearly what signing-up for their product entails with respect to user privacy. I am thinking of something alongside this:

""" Hello r0naa,

Welcome on Facebook, we hope that you will have a great experience here.

Facebook will allow you to: - easily communicate with your friends

- share photos, videos and play games with your friends

- keep in touch with distant relatives

On the other hand, we will:

- keep a record of the messages you send to your friends

- keep a permanent record of the photos you have shared on Facebook

- keep a log of all the websites you have visited that contain a "like" button.

Moreover, you should be aware that we will disclose all your personal data to the US government if we are issued a NS letter.

Hope you have a great day,

"""

To be clear, I am not saying that this is the right solution. Only, I believe it is pretty obvious that there is a problem and that a lot of people who are not technically literate are not able to make a informed choice about whether or not they want to give up their privacy, even partially.

I hope it will spawn an interesting discussion, feel free to share your ideas and suggestions.

Isn't quota and affirmative action the very definition of making it easier for a certain group to get access to a particular institution?

Do you realize that your reasoning can be extended ad nauseam to everything, all the time? So much that you will find yourself spending more time on finding a name that actually building anything.

Should Coq - the proof assistant - be renamed to something else, because it is pronounced like "cock"?

Yes? Even though it is a project of the INRIA (One of France's Computer Science research institute) and means "rooster" in French.

This overly fixated attitude toward "respecting other people's boundaries" is very much begging for mockery. Perhaps as much as it is intellectually dishonest because it leaves so many questions, and unknowns unanswered.

How do you know what are the others' personal boundaries? Is there group whose boundaries does not matter> Does this rule extend to any creative work? Should existing projects be renamed? Are boundaries dynamics? Can someone be offended by this rule? Or are there rules about things that you can be offended about, or not?

There are so many issues with this paradigm of thinking.

Let me suggest an alternative: common sense.

If I understand correctly. I think that the parent comment is concerned about NASA favoring the research of technologies that have a potential for marketization rather than others, more "moonshot"-like projects.

Commercialization is good, as long as it does not leak everywhere.

Well, I hope you are taking interns

And they can get away with it only because their unions have created precedents where they create avoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time.

This is sickening really. I am always dumb-founded when I read people who would like this kind of dystopia for their countries. Don't you see how fucked up this is for everyone?

What a terrible example to support a very valid point.

What those union workers have done was unacceptable, and made me sick to my stomach. Also, I felt greatly ashamed - like many other french citizens - by the french government's weak response to this public humiliation.

Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore, France is a modern democracy and allowing Unions to grow unchecked was a histoical mistake.

There are a balance to strike between workers' rights and corporations' prerogatives. France is the very situation you want to avoid, one where an actor has such tremendous power that any attack to the status quo is impossible regardless of its benefit for society as a whole.

Perhaps the mods have been asleep lately? Glad that I am not the only who has noticed how clickbait-ish, or nondescript, some titles are.

This is a bit early for #ThrowbackThursday!

More seriously, if the topic is of interest to you, I recommend Tanenbaum's book on Distributed Systems. In particular, the chapter 4 explains the rationale behind vector, or logical, clocks using very down-to-earth examples. I did not realize how time synchronization could be such a pain before reading it.

More generally, Tanenbaum's books are always of really high quality. There are maybe slightly outdated, but if you are looking to learn about the fundamentals - it is a safe bet.

> So 2015 is the year of mySQL, postgrSQL *SQL, .NET. Get ready to port all your Mosaic/Netscape apps over to the Windows Phone because 2015 is the year of the apps.

I lost it there. Bravo!

I have a profound distaste for brutalism. To me, it is the antithesis of what architecture should be about: the design, and invention of timeless places where humans can blossom, and prosper.

I insist on the notion of timelessness. The Louvre for example, is almost 400 years old and yet; there are few monuments in the world that can rival with its beauty.

Here is the power of the classicism, and even the baroque movements: creating masterpieces that are not only useful for the people living in them but also inspire and please their eyes. They survive time.

Afaik, yes considerably easier than in the US. Same goes for citizenship or permanent residency.

I have a couple friends who arrived in their high-school years and just became citizens.

(IANAL though)

Come! :-)

Seriously, the region is booming; there are constructions everywhere, and the community is truly fantastic. I moved from Europe over a year ago, and it was one of the best decision of my life.

How's that a "dirty little secret"? Raft not supporting asymmetric partitions is somewhere on the third line of the original paper.

Besides that, I genuinely wonder how often does this happen in the real world? I see a typical case where parts of your cluster is behind a NAT. Otherwise, what could cause an asymmetric partition?