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Lots of companies have been forced to do provide free services to non-customers; consider almost any industry classified as a 'utility'. The question here is 'are message platforms a thing that should be classified and regulated as if it were a utility?'

For me, the answer is clearly no; there are plenty of communication platforms that can be used freely with interoperability (e.g. email). And, as you note, there are lots of interoperable options.


Lots of companies have been forced to do provide free services to non-customers; consider almost any industry classified as a 'utility'.

Since when is any utility service free? Electricity, water, phone service. All of these require payment for service. For electricity you have to pay for both generation (from your chosen generator) and for transmission on the wires to your house. For water you have to pay for all water and sewage service to your house. For phone service you have to pay your provider. If you roam outside of their network they have to pay the other network to carry your traffic (and then it’s up to your provider to decide how to charge you for roaming).

Edit: I should add that email is an example of a service which is not a utility. Why? Email providers are free to block any message they like, preventing delivery in either direction. They typically use this discretion to filter spam but they're under no obligation to deliver. Anyone who has set up their own email server will know what I'm talking about: you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get your emails delivered to Gmail users!


> Lots of companies have been forced to do provide free services to non-customers; consider almost any industry classified as a 'utility'.

Where do you live?

Essential services or utilities are NOT free in United States. Everyone has to pay for water, heat, gas, etc. There's no free access to it.


Exactly. As an instructor who has also had to justify his assignments and outcomes using Bloom's, it's fine, but not really much beyond 'make students do new and more complicated things as you go'.

In my experience, Bloom's was more of a bureaucratic tool to justify outcomes rather than reflecting the actual learning in a course. That's an unsolvable problem, though - actual learning is individual and often not directly related to course outcomes, no matter how much a teacher tries to scaffold things.


Bloom's taxonomy is actually pretty useful for what it is meant to do, and it was rather radical at the time: their purpose is to reflect and identify how you are going to evaluate learning. The realisation is that for many topics there are different levels of expertise. You can be decent at writing small programs, but contributing to a large codebase is a whole different skill, and so is writing your own programming language, etc. Bloom's taxonomy helps narrowing the scope of the learning experience to something that is reasonable and realistic. Personally I use it to get students to design their own learning goals, and find it a very useful tool to scope the discussion on what makes a good goal.

Sadly as with many things in Academia, it is misused by management to the point where it's lost its substance. It was never meant to be used for bureaucratic control over overworked lecturers. It's not even useful for that purpose.


Well said. Bureaucracies ultimately serve their own survival and owning a sacred cow of curriculum is one way.

The rate of evolution in academia around learning frameworks has not entirely kept up with the rate of change in society. Changing a sentence in a course can take 1-3 years to approve in too many post secondaries. In that time much of the curriculum in new fields has changed.

Still, nice to see topics like this on HN and learn from other comments in this thread.


Businesses don't have one owner. Think about all of the properties that a company like Apple owns.

Now, if you're specifically referring to residential properties, maybe.... although there are lots of mixed-use properties, and ownership of land can be separate from the house that's on it, etc


Since he said "non-LLC owner", it pretty clearly is trying to tie ownership to a single (or married) real person owner.

They probably intended to limit this to residential properties.


so why do these businesses have to own their land then? Just let them only lease it...


That might "solve" the Apple scenario but it's hardly universal. Many businesses lien or deal in land. For instance, mortgages as we know them would not exist without liens.


I've had the audiobook version recommended for this exact reason - easier to listen to than to read :)


I've heard exactly this about the book, audio book > text


Context switch in this article = within a computer and processor, not about psychology


Humans are several orders of magnitude slower.


Well this is a computer technology new aggregator isn't it? Not a psychology one.


To be fair, we do frequently talk about 'context switching' in a metaphorical sense of flitting between programming and conversations/meetings, or among different projects.

If anything, I think I agree with GP that it's more unusual to see the term used in the 'real' (not metaphorical) sense on the front page.


>its become clear to me at least that a large percentage of the country simply put, is not 'getting ahead' - the anger that drove the Trump and Sanders campaigns is very real and must be solved if we are to prosper.

The key there is that they _feel_ like they're not getting ahead - a very different thing than not actually getting ahead, and much more dangerous.


A lot of them actually aren't, though, by any reasonable metric.

Health? Number of close friends? Lifespan? Addiction rate? Income? Unemployment rate? Labor participation rate?

By any of those metrics, life in a lot of rural-red communities is getting worse, and has been for years. I'm aware of the "better but it feels worse" pattern - crime rates are the prime example - but it's far too glib to say that covers everything. Inconvenient as it is, sometimes you have to actually improve things to make people feel better.

I suspect that most people will not accept any definition of 'ahead' which leaves them sicker, poorer, lonelier, and dying younger. And I don't think there's any reason that they should accept it.


On some level I feel like my country is unwinding, like somehow over time we have developed these parallel economies and social institutions, and now we don't know how to talk to ourselves anyhow.. and it scares me. The fact that one side can't see the other is struggling is an example of this.

There is another observation I have too - and some point everyone became offended at everyone - when I was younger, merely having a different opinion was never offensive, now in certain circles, it sure appears to be. (HN may be one of those circles)

In the end.. we need to remember time doesnt stop when this election is over - the morning after we're all still gonna wake up and get on with business - I fear the level of vitriol may be damaging the fabric of my country.. and that makes me nervous.


Don't just assume they only feel like they're not getting ahead.

A large majority of these folks are in actual fact falling far behind, and that fact is not easily observed in many of the metrics people often use for measurements (like 'household income', and 'unemployment')


This sounds like the type of thing that is being advocated against. Telling a large section of the country that what they feel is not true. I'm not certain from what vantage that statement could ever accurately be made.

I certainly wouldn't try this tact with your significant other.


If you haven't seen the Bloomberg version of 'What is code?', take a look.

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod...

It's much longer, but also much more detailed and in-depth.


Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold is an excellent book I have recently begun to read. It's even longer that the Bloomberg post, and also such much more detailed and in-depth (-;

In fact, I found the book very enjoyable. It gives a nice pedagogic twist on how information can processed with hardware.

It has been discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1936474


I just picked this book up as well. I've been trying to find resources that go from first principles to real-world implementation of something and this is the best example I've found so far. Enjoy!


I really liked that article and it was super fun to read, but as I read the OP, I found myself thinking, "wow, this is a much more succinct and far clearer version". I sent Paul Ford's article to my friends and family, and none of them read it because it didn't pay off with an answer to the title question for many thousands of words. This article seems like a better one to send people who really don't know what people mean when they talk about "code".



I have a colleague who flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's, and said the Soviet civilian maps were just terrible - they'd show roads in the wrong places and didn't show secret military bases, etc. He figured this out after accidentally flying over a Soviet army base in what is today eastern Ukraine... and then talked his East German military connection into getting him a copy of the military maps.


As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist, I must tell that military 1:50 000 maps are extremely accurate. What was intentionally skewed are civil 1:250 000 maps. The highest resolution and the best accuracy have been provided for so called forestry maps (1:10000).


Wow, that's fascinating. Would you happen to have a website somewhere that documents your experiences? I'm really curious.


With all respect, I have to redirect you to public libraries in Russia or for example Latvia. There was no Internet before 1991. Easy prey is 1: 2 500 000 school political atlas of 1980. There is no city of Daugavpils on the map of Latvia (2nd largest in Latvia), but smaller towns are mapped. Why? Daugavpils was military important.


I can hardly believe it. a map from 1983 atlas clearly shows it: http://samlib.ru/img/b/balxzinabalxzin_i_a/mappointstreangle..., and that's just 1 to 10,000,000 map


Well, over here at 1:20 000 000 Lithuania has small Klaipeda, but Latvia has no Daugavpils. http://goo.gl/f2ABiy . It has another explanation when relates to 1:20M (ports depicted for small republics). But in my school atlas of the 9th form my home city was absent too on a larger scale map. Also example - Lithiania has Klaipeda, Latvia has Liepaja, Russia has Velikiye Luki (rather small one), Belarus has Vitebsk, but no Daugavpils in Latvia too - http://goo.gl/VoGtvl.


Actually I keep aset of Soviet military maps for Afghanistan. If you are interested, We can make some field experiments if you are ready to get to Bagram with Trimble GPS. It is now controlled by USAF, so you can feel certainly protected.


Ah, sorry, I was more interested in your biographical experiences, not so much the topographical details. :-) It's just that I don't know many who have had a job like yours, and in USSR.


What would be the motivation for providing more accurate forestry maps?


since I made these, I can answer. You have to accurately account boundaries of forest lots in order to correctly perform operations there. Every lot had individual economic purpose and program of development. There were 10-year plans, so basically every 10 years you produce a new set of maps.


> As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist,

Well that takes the cake for the day.


"flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's" does not compute. Soviet Union had a whole branch of military dedicated to anti-aircraft warfare, meant to stop such things.

But yuh, the civilian maps were terrible - as the article describes.


Why would they show secret military bases on civilian maps for non Russian solders? Sounds reasonable to me, they are secret for a reason, no? Am I missing something?


Civilian maps were intentionally distorted. In various places the details were completely wrong - for example, smaller roads near some Baltic coast beaches (e.g. "potential conflict/landing sites") were simply drawn with no relation to reality to fill in the space with something superficially resembling the density of roads but with different angles/locations/everything; the locals knew to not rely on this and for construction/planning purposes you used different maps than the civilians.


Want to really dive into this? Read Duarte's Resonate (available free from the author here: http://resonate.duarte.com/ )

Same concepts, just much more in depth, with great examples.


I was genuinely interested in the topic and clicked on the link. I was met with an interface that was alien to me, as if someone went out of their way to make it unusable and semi-broken. Browsers have an established UI with a scroll bar, yet people constantly find new ways to break it.

Check this page out: http://resonate.duarte.com/#!page226

Using a scroll bar to fix the decision to not use the scroll bar as the main navigation tool. ( And the page is torn unless the window has the correct width. )


Totally agreed and oh so ironic that a guide to presenting had me leave 15 seconds in due to the way the information was presented.


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