skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reviewers seem to think the Surface Book trackpad isn't quite as good as the MacBook Pro, but it's close. (No idea if they're comparing against the new Force Touch trackpads, which I personally think are a regression):

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-surface-book-solving-...
I noticed the trend with Snow Leopard. Also the tendency towards iOS-ification of Mac OS, so I decided to switch back to Linux. I think Apple's best hour came with Tiger and Leopard. Simple applications that did one thing well and were robust. Now there's a lot of feature bloat.

A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So it's not for everyone.

Interestingly, I've experienced the same issue Apple is suffering with Ubuntu. Edgy Eft (6.10) was incredibly simple and nice. Like OS X Tiger. Now there are dozens of services running and something always gives trouble. I guess the old adage applies, make things as simple as possible but no simpler...
Jobs didn't care about Xcode. iTunes was decent or even good. He hated social and reluctantly allowed Ping to go forward. iMovie is a tiny niche.

I agree with OP. There is no way Steve would have allowed some of the current stuff to see the light of day.
Thanks for this helpful comment. The back-and-forth that is going on in the subthread below your comment illustrates the difference between "evidence-based medicine" (medicine studied through randomized, controlled trials, which by the way we don't have here) and "science-based medicine" (medicine studied not just through randomized, controlled trials but also through careful consideration of fundamental science). Science-based medicine is rare but important[1] because even clinical trials, if done with small enough sample size and enough researcher degrees of freedom, can produce spurious results, which are all the more convincing because they appear to be backed up by good methodology.

But of course here we don't even have a randomized controlled trial, but only a very poorly conducted observational study in an obscure journal that is implausible on scientific grounds. If there is any association here, likely it results from some coincidental lifestyle association between cell phone use (wherever the cell phones are put) and sperm quality. (P.S. I'm a father of four children, but three of those four were born before I became a regular cell phone user. I'm not worried about this issue for my personal life, at my current age.)

[1] https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/about-science-based-med...
I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this discussion and from the article. It feels like Apple software is getting worse from my perspective but I wonder if a change in the target market has a part to play. Perhaps the HN crowd is not a significant Apple demographic any more?

When I got my first Mac back in the PowerPC days it was definitely a step up. In the past I feel that Apple was targeting power users. Today I think they are going after casual users. Probably capitalizing on the general popularity of iOS.

I've still got a couple of old Macs but they're all running Windows now. Visual Studio still has the occasional lock-up whatever hardware it's on. At least you don't have to sign in to an app store to update it though.
Fast and flexible: Our new Kafka-DCOS service is in beta – Mesosphere
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Indirect, People carry cellphones in there pants pockets. Said pants are going to be tighter which hampers sperm production.

Posture, people that sit differently during a phone conversation which may be constricting airflow / blood flow / heating.

Direct heating, phones get fairly hot during charging which may cause other issues.

Related behaviors, people that use there phone a lot may also use-laptops in there lap which case heat issues.

PS: Sure, the study may just be random statistical noise. But, your better off investigating things that don't seem reasonable than assuming your world view covers everything.
Encapsulation in Redux: The Right Way to Write Reusable Components
+1

Anecdotally I've noticed a significant degradation of quality over the last year or so, everything from updating a new iOS device from on iCloud backup, general iOS bugs, OS X wifi connectivity issues etc etc. It's been noticeable.
I search for other, comparable positions, and see what I _could_ get if I jumped ship. At my previous job, I asked for a raise when I realized I was being paid significantly below market rates. They gave me a decent bump, but not enough for me to stay at the company when I got another (higher) offer.
Linux Lite 2.8 Screenshot Tour
>if the old people were relying on the massive indebtedness of today's college attendees, then that has been a cruel error on their part,

Oh no no... I don't want people to picture an old hag sucking the blood of infants.

To clarify, I was using "grandparents" as a single example to humanize what a "creditor" was. We have met the creditors and they are us.[0] When society complains about the unfairness of student loan debt, we tend to think of the creditors as something abstract and invisible.

The total student debt is ~1.3 trillion[1]. If forced to picture who is owed that money, maybe college kids would think of some evil mustache twirling CEO of Goldman Sachs or Chase Bank. Sure, some fraction of a fraction of the interest payment does go to executives like them but the vast majority of the money goes to us.

That 1.3 trillion is diffused throughout the economy. The pensions of police officers, firemen, and teachers. The car insurance premiums we pay is priced a certain way based on investments that point to those college loans. Etc etc.

At the moment, the struggling college grads are "visible" and the creditors seem "invisible" but trust me, if a political movement gathers steam to ask Congress to forgive those loans, all those invisible creditors will come out of the woodwork at Congressional hearings and fight it.

Trying to convince millions of us to zero out the balance sheets for those student loans will be a huge uphill battle.

[0]riff on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)#.22We_have_...

[1]http://www.marketwatch.com/story/every-second-americans-get-...
Which mail application or webmail/browser did you switch to?
AP: "Sweden's foreign ministry says U.N. panel concluded that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's detention is 'arbitrary'"

https://twitter.com/AP/status/695260597533962241

A U.N. official says Sweden was informed last month of a U.N. panel's decision on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

While the panel hasn't officially released its decision, Sweden's foreign ministry said Thursday that the advisory group had concluded that Assange has been a victim of "arbitrary" detention at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he sought refuge in 2012.

http://bigstory.ap.org/7bb5647f6042478ab3d56d4bbe73b90b
Agreed. Everything is more complex. Web apps is each iteration harder.. Native App development too (for example, .NET xaml is far harder than winforms and it than VB/Delphi).
Another thing is the forced updates. Now you constantly get nagged about updates on iOS, almost daily, even if you have learnt your lesson and decided not to upgrade your phone's OS because Apple WILL eventually slow your phone down.
It doesn't surprise me that European countries that are all bound by the ECHR (among other things) would take extradition requests from each other more seriously than they would a request from the US. The fact that they won't render Polanski to the US cuts against Assange's argument.
Are fecal transplants the future of medicine?
> might as well use the terrible option with the highest ROI, right?

No, thanks. Does The Deck serve spammy, malicious ads? I know they're tightly targeted at the techy/designy crowd, but they're also a great example of high ROI ads that aren't terrible.
Apples and oranges. The average nurse is vastly more skilled than the average software "engineer."
Sure thing. You can say about BSD as not all major players today deploy BSD servers, but the community is strill thriving. But I bet to you FFOS is going to be a much smaller community over time and eventually so small only those people are dogfooding themselves. Code will live on but nothing else and that's why people called it dead.

There is a difference between dead in popular perception and dead eternally. Eventually you will left with maybe one person looking at the code and then nobody ever looking at the code even on a monthly basis.

Who knows.
Ask HN: Can a customers credit card be linked to their phone number?
Can you authorize a payment on the server when a customer texts you.
That's fair, poor context and insensitive to the original reply on my part.
If only in the US...if only :(...
Setting up a plain IMAP account in Apple Mail is so much harder than it should be. It used to keep the wrongly guessed settings, even if you overwrote them, so you'd have to delete the account and start over for it to actually work.

Also their usage of words like "account", "mailbox" and "folder" never ceases to confuse me...
> iTunes was decent or even good

You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.
Software Development Book Giveaway
Dnstwist- Anti Phishing software
If advances in technology teach us anything at all, it is that there can be no scarcity of physical goods. There is nothing that can not be made in abundance, at marginal cost.

The scarcity of energy is even more difficult to defend. There can not possibly be any such thing, it is a truly ridiculous perception.

The ONLY remaining value, then, is in individualism. In bringing forth a unique perspective.

Competing for status is indeed a natural human tendency, that isn't going anywhere any time soon.. But it can no longer equate to competing for resources.
I have a Surface Book from work, and I hate the trackpad. It feels (just the default out of the box, no specific tweaking) that its "mushy"-it feels like there's more resistance moving my fingers around on it than my MBP.
I have an even better idea. Why not the industry just maintain a blacklist of trolls? The said troll will not get any support in the IT industry wherever he goes across the USA. From hardware to software to networking, the troll will be deprived of services. Not just that, the tech blogs in the industry can also defame the trolls, so one day that understand the consequences and think thrice before trolling.
Most websites seem not to care about the content they deliver to their visitors. When I visit xyz.com, it is xyz.com's job to ensure that it doesn't deliver to me malicious content. I have zero sympathy for xyz.com telling me that it's not their problem, they serve 3rd party ads and if these ads are malicious it's the fault of these advertisers not their.
This has been my experience after 7 years on the IT side of the financial services industry. I worked at one of the top 10 commercial banks in the US and within the last 3 years they abandoned a multi-year migration project to a real time infrastructure. Many huge banks still run Tandem systems.
There are more pc's running windows 10 than there are macs in operation, so microsoft definitely does updates at the scale of os x and beyond.

Personally, i don't feel that apple's software quality is getting worse, but then it has always been a mixed bag for me. I found the apple quality halo to be a bit of a myth across the half dozen apple devices i own. Seems comparable to windows' quality.
An embassy is usually considered sovereign territory. In other words, the Equadorian embassy is geographically located in the UK, but it isn't a part of the UK.
But do they need permission from the courts, or from the home secretary? Theresa May will do whatever the US tells her to, it's not like Assange is the cause célèbre that McKinnon was.
Rate of entrepreneurship in the US has declined, and is overwhelmingly class, race, and sex based. It's borderline sociopathic to assert that it's getting easier for the little guys to compete.
To elaborate on the spousal visa issue: this only applies to non-EU spouses. As a British citizen, if you decide to marry a non-EU person, be prepared for hell when you try to get them in. However, Germans living in Britain can get their non-EU spouse in under the German rules. These policies are a result of the governments impossible, damaging pledge to get immigration "in the tens of thousands". What happens is that they look at a categorized list of immigration categories, realize they cannot do anything at all about EU immigration so double down on non-EU migration.

Except the rules only apply to British citizens, because they are the only people they can apply these rules consistently to. Therefore we are left with the bizarre situation where it is easier for a French person in Britain to get their spouse in than a British person in Britain.

There are British people effectively exiled because they went abroad when young, got married and had a kid and cannot return with their family because they don't have a guaranteed job lined up in the UK paying 18k+. The spouses income is deemed irrelevant under the rules, so even if your non-EU spouse can earn well above that, it doesn't matter.

Ridiculous, borderline sick fiddling from the government that has severely damaged the family lives of tens of thousands of Britons.
This feels like an advertisement for Bill Marler.
I got served a "Click here to update your Windows drivers" ad on Youtube.

I clicked around for a while but couldn't find a way to report it.
I have experienced exactly this, but it was in combination with also switching from freelance to full-time employment. I used to have a new idea every day back when I was freelancing and didn't have kids. Now I'm lucky if I think of one every couple of months.

I actually think this is due to having less time to just explore the internet, read about interesting things, try out other products, etc. I spent a large amount of time doing that when I was freelancing and although it might seem like a waste of time on the surface, I believe it was what allowed me to connect certain dots about niche opportunities that weren't being exploited that I might not otherwise have noticed.
The "demo video" is one of the scourges of the web today.

Today I am interested in animation that is perceived to hide latency rather than a source of latency.

Back in the PS2 era there was definitely a thing for games that took a long time to get the world model off disk. My cousin Tony would play Mafia Taxi Driver, and it seemed like we'd wait 10 minutes for it to load, take another 10 minutes driving across town, then the event would happen, he'd get killed, and then he'd have to do it all over again.

If you look at newer games they have a load of tricks they use to hide latency.
What Is “Economic Freedom,” and Who Is It For?
Well, with nursing it's not so hard to know since they created the shortage.
I suspect this reflects a wider trend which is most probably a consequence of the ease to ship software nowadays (no need to manufacture physical medium anymore, just ship a hotfix), which incites software companies to skip QA and let early adopters find the bugs themselves...
Version numbers and menu placement have nothing to do with being "nannyish" or data collection.

Can you name three good plugins? Removing an insecure legacy tech is not a big problem when the extension API is right there.
Like I said, a carefully designed study can eliminate many biases. I didn't claim it could eliminate hidden factors.

Anyway the problem with finding something in an epi study then trying to reproduce it in a minimal environment (isolated cells exposed directly to radiation) is unlikely to uncover any complex mechanism. Cells on their own don't behave like tissue, and tissue on its own doesn't behave like an organism.
What about the people who put their money in the bank, the money that was used to give those loans? People who are relying on their pension plans? Life savings?

What you're saying is that we should _just take money from people_, without expectations to give them back anything directly.
After we got engaged, my wife was told by Swiss missionaries living in France that it would be wrong marry me because I'm Roman Catholic. Furthermore they assumed that she would have to become a practicing Catholic as, after all, the husband is the head of the household and it would be immoral for the wife to persist in different beliefs and practices.

Granted, the percentage of people in the US that would agree with all of the above is much higher than in Europe, but it's not like conservative Protestantism (or Roman Catholicism for that matter) doesn't exist there.
It's a done deal:

https://twitter.com/AP/status/695260597533962241

UN says Sweden's foreign ministry was informed last month.
Wi-Fi issues is a big one. I had a MacBook that stopped connecting when on OSX, even over reboots.

I had to reboot the access point in the end so perhaps it wasn't an Apple problem. Yet no other devices were having issues and I've not had a problem with it since it's been running Windows.
"De gustibus non est disputandum." ("Everybody has their own opinions." / "There's no accounting for taste.")

Some people enjoy the game. Those who do not enjoy it should not be forced to pay for the stadium. I would even oppose using eminent domain to acquire a contiguous area of land large enough to build one, with the sole possible exception of Green Bay, Wisconsin, where the Packers are very nearly a municipal corporation due to their "ownership" structure (non-voting, non-dividend-paying, restricted-resale stocks don't count as ownership, in my opinion).

Selling the naming rights to the stadium to the highest bidder is just twisting the knife in the back, really.

This article is similar in character to economic retrospectives of cities that hosted Olympics competitions. The IOC always promises an instant boost to prosperity, but that never seems to materialize. I have been to Turner Field (formerly the primary 1996 Olympic stadium), and the surrounding area does not look very boosted (although other parts of Atlanta are admittedly much worse). The stadium is coming down in 2017, as a 20-year-old building is apparently no longer good enough for the Braves to play baseball in it. Their previous home at Atlanta-Fulton Cty Stadium only lasted 30 years.

For reference purposes, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are both more than 100 years old and still in use. Stadiums in Kansas City, LA, and Anaheim are pentagenarians. Milwaukee County Stadium made it to 50 before the Brewers traded up. Yankee Stadium retired at 85. Tiger Stadium lasted 87 years. Candlestick Park retired at 53. Memorial Stadium (Baltimore, 2nd) lasted 53 years.

From a cursory examination of history, a city is much better off building its own smaller stadium, sized for basketball, hockey, and rock concerts, than one that can only reasonably be filled by MLB baseball, NFL football, Olympic track and field, club soccer (in Europe), and musical superstars. Offering public subsidy to a privately owned single-sport stadium strikes me as brain-damaged beyond all reasonable measure, especially when the sports franchise seeking to build it is currently leasing a publicly-owned facility.
I got the same feeling as the author when I read Mossberg's comments. If someone who is that big of an Apple fan is seeing the cracks in the stucco, it is something Tim Cook really needs to pay attention too. Marco Arment kicked off a similar storm last year at this time[1].

[1] https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-grou...
> * There's the upcoming "all your plugins are going to break, many permanently" when XUL gets thrown out and the new hotness won't have feature parity at release (in other words, Firefox plugins will be as limited as Chrome plugins)

As a long time firefox user this is the one that hurts the most. I honestly hope someone forks firefox to preserve this functionality. I know it is a losing proposition in the long run, but right now my only option is to not upgrade firefox (which isn't an option for very long). I post this here to vent and with the hopes that there already exists a project to preserve XUL functionality and I am simply unaware.

P.S. I use tab groups, a native feature, and have been dreading this ominous warning that appears whenever I open them: "Heads up! Tab Groups will be removed from Firefox soon." I can't even disable the warning.
Bayes Theorem for Computer Scientists
Will membership in a patent co-op protect against a patent troll?

- A patent troll has no products, which could infringe on a co-op's patents - So they can still sue you without risk of retaliation.

- A patent troll often has a financial structure designed to protect any assets that it wins through lawsuits (For instance, maybe if they win a lawsuit they could immediately pay a dividend to shareholders). So even if you win a lawsuit against them the main assets they hold are dodgy patents.
I see the processor to be MT8163A. Is this an ARM chip or Intel? If ARM, does that mean only apps compiled for ARM can run on this?
Honestly, I just don't see it. Not because the problems aren't real, but because it's always been like this.

What has changed is the importance of the Apple's software. When it was a minority player that offered advantages over the status quo, we overlooked the issues.

Now that it is the status quo, we are no longer comparing it to anything else, but to an ideal - as we should be.

I think the idea that there is a decline is false, but the increasing criticism and demand for quality is absolutely appropriate, since it is absolutely Apple's responsibility to improve our experience of their products.
Aral Balkan: “Free Is a Lie” (2014)
Yes. To date, Android has generated $31 billion in revenue and $22 billion in net profit.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-a...
Even without any bezels at all, the 5"+ screens that seem to be the cost of entry to high-end Android devices would still be too large for many to use comfortably with a single hand.

Though the 6s and Z5 Compact actually have very similar ratios of screen coverage: 65.6% on the 6s[1] vs 68.9% on the Z5C[2], according to GSMArena.

1: http://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_6s-7242.php

2: http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_z5_compact-7535.php
If we believe what SV CEOs are saying about the scarcity of software developers and the difficulty of hiring, that they are limited by supply and not demand, then I'd expect that Apple is dedicating more of the limited resources to iOS, and OS X will continue to suffer. I think iOS is responsible for much more of their business and I don't see that changing.
Khaled Ipsum: Generate Major Keys to Success
Why is immoral to make sure people earn enough to support a spouse and a child that they will bring with them or have come over?

Is England obligated to take care of non citizens?

US has same rules.
WPS Office – MS Office Alternative for Windows, iOS, Android and Linux
From a fellow vegan/vegetarian, big hug ! I don't get emotional much, but animals always make me tear up - just seeing them joyfully playing or giving companionship to a human. Sometimes it all seems hopeless, but enough of that thinking. We have work to do :)
IIRC, Snow Leopard was actually the best release -- essentially Leopard but with a focus on stability and performance, plus the code signing stuff.

It's the last OS X release that felt like an improvement to me, and one of the last OS X releases that I trusted. Every one since has actually had feature regressions (let's make a formerly visible folder invisible!) or stability issues.

I still have a 2008 Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard and it's more stable than a 2012 MBP running Mavericks and performs about as well.
> Constant Wifi issues. I frequently have to turn off wifi, then turn on. On my home network. This never happened pre Mavericks.

FWIW updating to El Capitan fixed this for me.
I'd hope he's passionate about his business. I think you may have thought that I meant passion project as in "small, unimportant thing he's passionate about". I meant "thing he's passionate about". I think YC is probably sama's passion project.