skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Call to Power came out to mediocre-at-best reviews and sank like a stone, ending Activision's dream of taking over the franchise.

Eh, it did well enough that Activision made a sequel. What really prevented them from taking over the franchise was that their license was a one-game deal: the sequel was released as simply Call to Power 2, without any reference to Civilization. Of course, they never made a third one because the second game sank (aside from the criticisms of the original, the sequel didn't even have name recognition going for it).

Activision also did something really cool and released the sequel's source when they EOL'd it, too.

> just a couple of months after the Avalon Hill settlement the company was sold to Hasbro, at which point it was more or less dismantled and became just another zombie brand.

Oddly enough, this doesn't go far enough in summarizing the insanity of the acquisitions of that time period. Hasbro actually bought both MicroProse and AH at the same time, and then they turned around and sold off their entire video game business to Infogrames (now Atari) three years later. In fact, it was actually Infogrames/Atari who killed MicroProse: Hasbro was perfectly willing to keep them around as a subsidiary.
"After the customer presses the button, they will be surprised by the machine giving them a donut."
It feels a little bit like it's being pushed. The reality I think is that it's being pushed a little and pulled a lot by the mainstream of the market.

By mainstream I mean non-tech-savvy users, non-hackers. That's most people. I can completely understand how wonderful a "managed platform" like iOS is to a non-technical user. No malware! (Or at least greatly reduced risk of it.) No OS rot! No IT! No complicated system administration! It's like replacing a hand-cranked car by one with electronic ignition and an engine that doesn't constantly need retuning.

For most people "freedom" means the freedom to get crapware and malware, spend hours that you can't spare futzing with your computer and getting nothing done, and have to reinstall your OS every year because it gets borked. Non-hackers hate platforms like that with a passion that it's difficult to understand. I often try to communicate it by comparing it to cars: how would you feel if you had to tune your engine every week, manually inspect every tank of gas for adulterants, and periodically stop your car to perform an inspection as you drive down the highway?

At the same time, the car analogy is deeply imperfect. In the computing world when you trade Windows or OS X for iOS you're giving up a lot of capability and a lot of freedom. Tech-savvy and professional users either don't want to give that up or as is the case with developers can't give it up.

But the problem is that non-tech-savvy users are most of the market, especially as computing becomes more and more mainstream, and most of the market is the market for a large company like Apple. Edges of markets don't matter. As such, I see the majority opinion of the market pulling things away from open platforms and rich capability and toward a managed, simplified, jailed, iOS-like future.

I think there's a real risk that the professional will be left with a choice between the awful UX offered by pure OSS and being forced to adapt to iOS or similar platforms.

Hey, maybe it'll prod the OSS folks into really taking UX seriously.

Yeah.

I'm not encouraged by what I see there nor by the combative/ultra-defensive attitude you get in those circles if you bring up this topic. One camp will insist that the latest Linux desktop or Ubuntu phone or whatever is great and is totally comparable to iOS and OSX and call you an idiot (and worse) for daring to think otherwise, and the other camp will just call you an idiot for "needing" UX or even a GUI at all because "real men" blah blah blah and why don't you read e-mail in emacs? I used to wade into those debates from time to time, but I stopped after I wrote a blog post (years ago) about Linux usability with some ideas about how to improve UI/UX development on Linux and the responses were full of insults I hadn't heard since Jr. High... not to mention one DDOS attack against the server.
It's second-person. The third person singular pronoun is "it".
And for Redux, the creator (Dan Abramov) recently released a bunch of tutorial videos for free on egghead.io:

https://egghead.io/lessons/javascript-redux-the-single-immut...
Three Stories
Let's not forget about the folk's from the "Show Me" state's second-person plural: "Ya'llsins"
Wow, everything I hate about "Enterprise Software" in a single if statement. Have you ever noticed there are entire businesses built on fine-grained access control like this, that are utterly pointless bullshit? Probably full of security holes, leaky abstractions, poorly tested and responsible for creating a lot of support cases and manual intervention.

Figure out what the trust modality in your application is, and normally it's a simple graph or can be managed with a straight-forward application of world/group/user UNIX-style permissions.
Wow, what a great post! This is just incredible. It makes you realize how much the world has changed and how much more change we're going to see in the near future. Props to you, Terence.
Thanks, Thomas. I really didn't mean to suggest any of your listings were scammy, that was poor wording on my part.
The Breakthrough Energy Coalition
Pretty much every great English writer uses it freely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9364411. Also, listen to how people really speak, and you'll find that everybody puts it in their sentences without noticing.

The funny thing is that in terms of actual usage, it's uncontroversial and has been for 600 years. The debate about it is a real-life version of the joke, "I can see it will work in practice, but will it work in theory?"
Winning the Driverless Car Wars
A: Business Insider is rarely a source of truth, at least when it comes to anything Apple. "Click bait" seems to be their sole goal in life.

B: Apple never precluded Google from putting their own Maps app into the store, they simply replaced the preinstalled version with their own when (if memory serves) Google both demanded too much user information and declined to offer vector-based maps
The application it's part of (GroupServer) is based on Zope, so it's there already and everybody working on it will be familiar with it.

That said, I don't understand yet why its code should be split into 9 pages of separate repositories (see https://github.com/groupserver/)...
Security of UK net firms under scrutiny (BBC)
The author was very clear in their piece.
wasn't assembly.com using colored coins to manage "partial ownership" in a project/company years ago?
It is silly, yet Apple continues to do things that are hostile to power users.
The license is sent to the email address (says the screenshot). If you have access to that mailbox, you get the license.
Are Libertarians the New Communists?
I don't see cartoons, animes and animated graphs dying anytime soon.

Take a look at some of Adam Phillips work if you want to see some glorious flash animations.
return all(rule.canPost for rule in self.rules)
There's a range of answers to this question, but the simplest answer to "Why take N years of earnings today and give up the business?" is "Because then I get N years of earnings today and can spend my next N calendar years doing something else."

The exact setting for N comes down to a variety of factors, market conditions, and a negotiation between a particular buyer and a particular seller. As someone who happens to be long SaaS companies at the moment I would prefer N=50 but I know SaaS owners whose lives would be improved by a sale at 2. (As mentioned in sibling comments, market right now is 3ish.)
I concur.It is time we let the whole world knows some of these companies that treat potential employees shabbily.
xperf/wpr. Launch wprui, select First Level Triage and Disk I/O and File I/O, make sure logging mode is set to Memory, then click Start.

Let it run for a minute, click Stop, then open up the generated ETL in WPA.

From there it's hard to tell you what to do in WPA. Documentation isn't the greatest, but this link is close to what you're trying to do: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_pfe_blog/archive/2013/03/19/trou...

Drag in the relevant graphs into your current view, and understand how the yellow bar aggregates data. MSSQL probably has event providers - you might want to look those up and add them to wprui when you generate your ETL.
Well, in this context those who are angry and are actively opposing proliferation of new web tech. Web tech may include new front-end JS frameworks, electron apps built with HTML/CSS for desktop, node itself, es2015 features.
I decompiled the dex file, but not the Java Class file.

I suppose this is diverging a little from the original comment (which was in the context of an Android application), but surely if running `strings` on the class file found the method, class and field names then it would also find the local variable name too, if it was there.

If I specifically compile the java file with `javac -g:vars DecompilationTest.java` then the local variable name IS included in the file. It is not by default.
What would your ideal discovery process be?
Netflix shows you how to do a Linux performance analysis in 60 seconds
what bugs me is that his method means every single rule is always evaluated: no short-circuiting! So the code to sort the rules by weights, which is supposed to put stricter rules first to cut down on computing time, is completely useless.
that first sentence though...
He, she or they is an(?) agenderphobic microaggression against gender agnostic singular people who do not want to be called in plural. They is a bigot.
Great analogy. I also liked this one, by Joel Spolsky, relating to context switching and the cost of multitasking: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html
Why is it annoying?
Congrats Rob!

Are you looking for your next adventure? I have spent 9 months building a startup, at large scale (60 servers, 4 million data points a minute) My email is in my profile, I would love to chat and get your thoughts and advice :)
Hah, wow. What a great reply. Props to you, man. That's just a terrific analogy.
Does this article really not give a single example of use of singular 'they' or did I just read too fast?
I thought it was interesting given how bad some of the security practices seem to be for companies, and how the TalkTalk hack could easily have happened to almost any service provider in the country.

The point about 'passwords stored in plain text' is the most worrying one, since it's been proven time and time again how irresponsible this is, yet large companies in the tech industry are still doing it.

Perhaps there should be harsher punishments for companies (especially large ones) that don't seem to pay attention to good security practices and put their customers at risk as a result.
Haha, I find it amusing that people even think that's effective.
I see your point, but all "word of the year" awards are made up anyhow. If anybody suggests a more accurate title we can change it.
Thank you. Good points, but I think we'll have to do a full blown calculations to decide. In aerospace margins are usually thin and it's easy to have the sign error.

1) I fully agree that air-breathing engines are heavier per unit of thrust. Merlins - pretty good rocket engines by that parameter - lift, as you say, 150 times their weight; for air-breathing engines it's 5-10.

2) Aircraft engines usually don't need to be particularly thrusty; wings generate lift, so you can take off even with T/W < 1.

3) Liquid oxygen has density about 1.1 that of water. Kerosene, in comparison, is about 0.8. Difference less than 1.5 times, but the mass ratio is more like 2.5:1, so ditching oxygen tanks - especially at the start, when the system is relatively heavy - can save quite a bit. And why engines' T/W is relevant here?
Disable javascript. Seriously.

Disabling js has given me the fastest turn-round on page-load times. It's usually not the browser, but loading 15 different un-optimized JS engines that causes the problem.
From 'samurai' to 'Hello Kitty', how the world’s view of Japan has changed
Hard to say what the true damage potential is like, because the numbers become unintuitive to work with at such small scales. The feature sizes we're talking about are smaller than most known viruses, so it wouldn't take much heat to damage them. Be interesting to go through the math.
Fantastic. I hate the MAS. More and more big products should move their stuff out of there.
Codecademy now offers a Git tutorial
Well, the problem is that CSS is a monolithic mess at this point, like many other standards... If it was made of a selection of loosely-coupled parts, everyone would be fine with a strong guiding individual streamlining each individual part, and if you don't like part of the design you can just use another solution. Eventually CSS will be replaced by something like this (but it will take many more years, and it will require some rethinking about web code versioning, sandboxing, how low level web browser reflow algos work, etc.)
They don't respond to applicants.
Wrong - Replace Google with Canonical/Apple. Doesn't seem so bad now, does it?

Lenovo does not make the OS on the machine and DEFINITELY does not provide cloud services like Google.
You could say the same about a lot of the Marxist adherents.
Its also very slow and whole UI is extremely buggy. Buttons would often be in improper state, download would start very slow, sometimes progress bar wouldn't show up even though download is happening. Resume would fail, caching would fail and almost nothing would give you any reasonable error message or something to solve the problem.

It;s probably the buggiest piece of software I have ever had to use. The backend service might be good (or not) but the basic store app feels like something written by an student.
Did anyone figure out how to zoom the slides?
>App Review continues to take at least a week

- this is one of the most frustrating things about Mac (and iOS) development. There's no good reason why this cannot be brought down to 1-2 days by hiring a ton of people to the App Review staff. App Review is not really a technical skill that should be very hard to scale up, and one that can't be outsourced to locations outside of Cupertino. Apple is the most cash-rich company in the world; they can easily throw some money at this problem if they cared about developer satisfaction. Far easier to resolve than problems like sandboxing and upgrade pricing, where there is a major cost for customer satisfaction to think about.
FB giraffeking1
Got it now
I think that you understand the problem is with you. You are looking at that experience through a lens that distorts the reality of the situation. You left that job for a reason!

If you are constantly searching for that perfect combination, you are not going to find it. You are chasing the dragon. And even if you find it, it will eventually change and become unpalatable to you.

The answer is within you. You can change the environment you are in. Expend considerable energy doing so. In the end, you might find you were right back in that happy place you were looking for.
> Singular "they" might well be the future.

As the article describes, singular they is also the past. Its usage has a long historical precedent over 650 years.
The app store has never felt slower than native apps for me. Instagram also seems to do pretty well.
You never know which installers will get hijacked so as a precaution it's a good idea to block SF globally.
Value of Earth
There are at least three different usages of singular they. The newest is where a specific person for various possible reasons has asked to be referred to in that way. The oldest usage is where the referent is unknown or generic. E.g. "The technician sent by the company isn't here yet, they may have gotten stuck in a traffic." Finally, some people use singular they even where the referent is specified and that person hasn't expressed a preference for singular they. E.g. "President Obama is on vacation, they must be tired after dealing with ISIS all last week." I find this last usage jarring.
You're addressing a line of argument about which I said "that's not what I want to get at". And you're ignoring the actual thing that I've been talking about. The thing about which I said "it makes me pretty uncomfortable when..." and "I don't have a polite term for this".

I disagree with some of what you're saying, and I agree with other bits of it. But I strongly disagree with the thing that you're doing and not even acknowledging.
> I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues

The whole point of the discovery queue is to expose you to a variety of options. If you want to search just those things you want, there are already filters you can manually use. These filters don't have all the options (please, no 'early access', I agree), but they give you the filtered lists that it sounds like you want.
I'm biased (it's my research field, in part) but I'd suggest that studies on coverage are all over the place, with this one showing lack of correlation, and other studies showing good correlation between coverage and... some kind of effectiveness (the ICSE paper mentioned above, also from 2014, and a TOSEM paper coming out this year, as well as a variety of publications over the years).

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce/onwardessays14.pdf covers the Inozemtseva et al. paper as well as some other recent work, and nothing in the time since we wrote that has modified my view that the jury is still out on coverage, depending on the situation in which you want to use it. Saying "coverage is not useful" is pretty clearly wrong, and saying "coverage is highly effective for measuring all suites in all situations" is also clearly wrong. Beyond that, it's hard to make solidly supported claims that don't depend greatly on details of what you are measuring and how.

I suspect Laura generally agrees, though probably our guesses on what eventual answers might be differ.
It's been crossed out so I'm presuming the author saw your comment and corrected it
Yes. This is my list of what I feel are the most important factors for any idea I am evaluating. I think the list does have inherent value for others (especially as a starting point), but it's real value is as a catalyst for people to develop their own list.

Having said this I do expect that a good list should share many points with my list. The major difference I think for many is likely to be over the importance or not of an idea being able to be bootstrapped. For many people this is not important, but for me it is very important.
19th Century Marriage Manuals II: Advice for Young Wives
Very good. I didn't benchmark it myself, but the language is designed for high-performance computing, and the authors' PLDI paper [1] shows it is competitive. Given that at the lowest levels, Terra basically reimplements C, and both compile to LLVM IR, similar performance is unsurprising to me.

The main point that gives Terra an edge is that its macro system makes implementing and testing potential optimisations easier.

[1]: http://terralang.org/pldi071-devito.pdf § 6. Evaluation
They be utterly pretentious.
Germanic languages have gender.

Language change should be natural, not forced based on some nebulous social engineering goal.

Speakers of Old English considered each noun to have a grammatical gender.

If anyone has a serious citation for "he" was imposed by "meddling grammarians", please let us know.

Don't we already have a neutral pronoun: "it"?
That's a pity. I didn't get KF5 one yet since it's still in experimental in Debian[1] and I assumed it's not usable enough. Settings UI in KMail really needs some serious streamlining.

[1]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kdepim
for fractional ownership of software? I've seen lots of companies trying to manage cap tables with colored coins but not partial ownership of individual projects
> or did I just read too fast?

I must have read too fast as well. The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. Almost makes me feel like they is pranking me, to be frank.
This may be right, but it does not sound right.
wow, its just a joke lighten up
It's a contrived example since the typical use of the singular they is when the gender of the subject is unknown. You might be getting downvotes for complaining about downvotes.
I've noticed certain papers/essays posted here using "she" when referring to a hypothetical person, which I think is a nice touch—since "he" is contained within the word.
One improvement (which may or may not be related to systemd, but is in newer kernels) is that dmesg has timestamps enabled by default which makes it much easier and `dmesg -H` is really nice as well.
> probably Alpine, a CLI based client

I think that Mutt might be a better option in that I think it is still maintained.
Something I don't understand, when people start dying because of the pollution, or rain storms decimate plants down wind with acid rain, what happens then? One of the tremendous challenges of China's rapid growth is that the problems scale up way faster than the will to solve them does, and when other countries had multiple decades to get their head around pollution vs production it is happening so quickly will it surpass the ability of the government to react? I also don't know why people insist on re-experiencing the crises of the western worlds 60's (phospates, smog, Etc) for themselves, why not just skip the pain by regulating early and often?
"...they was uninformed."

I'm not a fan. If we have to go somewhere, I'd rather go with 'it'.
Oh, sure. Everyone gets it, managers included (and sometimes, it helps them be a bit more sensitive). And anyone who works in the bowels of Big Enterprise is more critical than pg on the subject. We have the scars.

That said, I think the Silicon Valley startup community is profoundly ignorant about the enterprise, and its strengths as well as its weaknesses. There's this perception that the enterprise sucks because people there are lazy and stupid. Not true! Much of the problem is just because the enterprise will tackle problems so large and overwhelming that they're just really, really hard to win, hard to make sense. The problem with enterprise projects isn't the result of laziness or stupidity. The problem is that this is the best that really smart, hardworking people can do at that scale.
How do apps like "Clozure Common Lisp" get around the sandboxing? The Mac App Store version isn't crippled in any way I can see -- it can read and write outside its directory -- for example it can use the quicklisp package manager which stores files in my home directory?
ELROB'16: Europe’s toughest and longest-running field robotics event is turning 10
Don't forget "all y'all" when referring to more than a couple people.

"Y'all" is plural, "all y'all" is more plural.
> Everything uploaded is data-mined

From the article: "Google does not use student data for targeted advertising"

So... what's the problem?

The data is uploaded for a clear and legitimate need, the ability for school's to loan out chromebooks on demand. The data is not used for advertising.

Near as I can tell the complaint is this nebulous "it's being data mined" with no elaboration or evidence.
Even if you believe that Apple as a whole doesn't have the drive to make stuff as good as they can (fair, although I believe otherwise), and even if you believe they have a captured audience (how?) — do you indeed believe that Apple is happy with 15% (US) market share for desktops and laptops?

Even accepting everything else, that seems like a huge incentive to me not to get complacent.