skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's got to the point where I'm hesitant to actually update my devices for fear they'll become unusable. And that's never good.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be specific to Apple either. It has become almost the norm in many parts of the software industry, to the extent that I don't voluntarily update any software that is installed and working any more, other than essential security updates. These days, even that is only done after a search to see which supposedly essential Windows updates are actually important for security, because I no longer trust Microsoft to be honest about what their updates are for either.

My default assumption otherwise is that running any sort of updater on application software, or heaven forbid on drivers or the whole OS, has a better than even chance of breaking something I care about, and that every time a browser auto-updates there is a close to 100% chance it will break something I care about or change something in a way I don't want or need. But since almost everyone is now producing similar levels of unreliable and unstable products, there's little you can do to get away from it.

Combined with the version ratcheting problem we were discussing a week or so ago here on HN, also in connection with Apple but also a much wider problem within the industry, it's becoming almost impossible to simply choose and use software you actually want, and to upgrade if and when a better version for your needs is available. This is not a good thing.
Building Project Comet: Evolving Onboarding
there is no alternative, not a better one at least, not now. look at other possibilities - ie central planning is a major fail over longer time (I lived in one of those systems, no thank you).

IMHO what fails in all other systems is to take into account human nature, and not some ideal working guy that never actually lived. people are lazy, care more about themselves rather than company good, some are plain evil etc. very few work on themselves unless they see the carrot at the end of the stick (bonus?).

in capitalism it's cash, which can get you quite far in life, so most are chasing it (even you probably are - if your employer stopped paying you today, would you come in tomorrow?). this chase can easily ruin your life, makes people do regretful decisions but overall, it pushes mankind far beyond (and much faster) that it would achieve without this perpetual force.

I'll claim one thing, feel free to disagree - capitalism ain't often the best system for a single person, but (if all internal mechanisms work) it's probably best for the advancement of mankind. and these days, we need to advance to not destroy ourselves (for that, we already have capability)
Yeah. I make coffee at home. I'm not really sure what it costs me, to be honest!
>>Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal with.

I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.
The decline seems real to me. A shortlist of things I've noticed:

* Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred.

* iWork was gutted in '13. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and it fails for even basic publishing.

* Siri can only work with default Apple apps. And those default apps are getting worse. So Siri takes a hit with every app that declines. I used to use Mail, now I don't.

* Constant Wifi issues. I frequently have to turn off wifi, then turn on. On my home network. This never happened pre Mavericks.

* In general, all my Apple default software on my iphone is sitting in a folder titled "apple", which I never use. I don't think I use any Apple default App.

* I avoid icloud. It sends scary "do you want to delete all these files" messages if you ever unsync a device, and it's not clear which actions produce which effects. iTunes has a history of destroying files on syncs, so I can't trust iCloud. Even now, itunes will add apps to my device if they're in my library but I deleted them from my phone. It does this without asking! Any other cloud app has figured out how to handle deletions from one device.

Pages 09 hit the hardest. It was wonderful software. I used it for print publishing, and it just worked. Easy to use, incredibly powerful. Have a look at their manual for the level of care they put into their software, as recently as 2009.

Pages 13 can't do half of that. Very basic stuff like "facing pages" for books has been left out.

https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA663/en_US/Pages09...

Edit: A comment below pointed out that, I do in fact use default apps. I had taken them for granted. These ones work well and I use them:

Messages, Phone, camera, photos, clock, wallet, calendar, music (UI got worse on this one). Reminders I use occasionally because of the Siri integration.

There are some issues with some of them, but mostly they work pretty well.

On the mac, the only default apps I use frequently are textedit and Preview. Previews remains excellent. I use spotlight, but as noted above it got worse.
10.7 was a pretty low point, but OSX quality has been inconsistent throughout, with a few high points late in release cycles. And it's always panned in .0 releases (same historical issue with initial hardware revisions).
Please note that they were not able to prove that having your cell phone near your groin correlated with abnormal sperm. Rather, they found a correlation with being very chatty and being chatty while charging.

Correlations, of course, are also not causation. For example, there is no control in this study which rules out an effect like "some men have less testosterone, and this causes them to both be more glued to their phones (using while charging), more social on their phones (talking for over an hour a day), and to have a higher incidence of abnormal sperm." It's sort of like a headline: "If you're shorter, you may be a better parent: a study found an inverse correlation between height and how much time you spend with your kids." You'd be tempted to disbelieve me until I tell you that on average, women are shorter and also spend more time with their kids. If in this case we know the causes, how much more difficult is it when we don't to isolate the confounding variables?
> Unfortunately, many web apps assume the CUI bindings

With some going even beyond that. If i use ctrl-pgup/pgdn while browsing G+, the press will both swith tabs and bump the G+ page up or down.

And over at Youtube, hitting home will set the video back to zero if it has "focus". And i have this habit of using home to get to the top of the page after scrolling down to read comments (yep, i hate myself).
This is my take as well. Complexity and the speed we get there has reached an all time high.

You can't be fast moving and have high quality. Software is like any other trade: polish takes time and you need to stop to polish things. This thread has a lot of people praising Snow Leopard. Frankly, the difference between Leopard and SL aren't the high, but that's two years of development at Apple to polish things up. Apple had a rare slow moving period to clean things up.

I suspect the mobile/cloud/whatever revolution is only recently slowing down and we'll be entering a polish period again soon. Then we'll be entering a complexity building period sometime after. Its a cycle that keeps repeating itself.
By producing energy, I meant hosting some fusion reactions, even if few of them compared to the external heating power. Sorry for the confusion.

By the way, do you know what is the estimated gain factor of W7X, even if < 1 ? I could not find that info on the web.
That said, I'm always surprised by how people are so quick to discount luck. Or consider a bad thing if they got lucky.

You can be both prepared and have an opportunity and still fail because of factors outside of your control. Likewise, you could be unprepared, flail your way through a solution, and still manage to be very successful at the very end because the stars aligned. Maybe the market was super ripe, your competitors were going through some rough patches, etc.

Success stories are often carefully crafted with a narrative fallacy. I can think of several very successful companies today that would've been sold a long time ago had it not been for the potential buyer rejecting the deal. Or entrepreneurs who have one success, and then were never able to create a majorly successful big startup after.
Yea me too. What I really want is something that looks like Trello where the first list is my Inbox, and then there are 2-3 other lists that I can make up like "This week", "Next week" etc.
weird, it felt faster than Mavericks to me. I'm pretty sure that Mavericks eats up more RAM than El Capitan but then again I could be wrong.

Still, having Apple acknowledging the problem is a win. I've tried migrating to Ubuntu and Windows 10. Didn't work. If I could justify a new Mac Pro, it would probably mitigate the problem. I just wish they had a Mac Pro lite. I don't want yet another converted laptop e.g. mini & imac
It's not ready yet. The source code will be release on GitHub as soon as it's stable :)
I was looking at it the other way: how to disincentivize selling patents to trolls by increasing value to smaller companies, but I suppose it is equally valid on the other side.

I think the biggest problem with fighting patent trolls after they've acquired the patents is that they're not really businesses. So you win... who's to say they'll pay? They have a lot of organizational options available to them that actual, functioning businesses likely do not.

Aka don't fight a battle on terrain where your opponent has greater flexibility than you

I'd be more inclined to fight the actual trolls politically. A) They don't create jobs, B) they've got relatively small financial reserves compared to a larger functioning business, and C) they probably fly flag-of-convenience corporate registration with minimal interaction with the state (not that that's probably rare)
Shkreli Was Right: Everyone's Hiking Drug Prices Business
There are hundreds of different types of tablet stands on the marketplace, some as simple as a V-shaped clip that the tablet rests on. People who fly all the time (a general excuse for sticking to the laptop form factor) could velcro or suction cup cup the tablet the seat in front of them.

It's cool to see a "working" tablet that uses a bluetooth mouse & keyboard combo that debunks the stupidity of the "convertable" machines that nobody buys which mostly seem to be an excuse to make a machine with a touchscreen to also have a trackpad.
Not of personal use for me, but they should just put the plans on github or even a blog. Couldn't find any detail on the site (http://www.ruralstudio.org/)
It's called crowdsourcing and I haven't seen it really work because ideas are a dime a dozen. Create. Don't think about it.
Report Describes Lawyers’ Advice on Moving Suspect Funds into U.S
How to Gain Periscope Followers Fast
Will an Ubuntu tablet ever be able to match an iPad as far as power consumption goes? I'm a fan of both Ubuntu and Fedora but both do pretty poorly on my laptop with respect to battery life compared to Windows (and Windows battery life is pretty bad compared to a comparable Macbook in my experience).
Are We Alone in the Universe?
Based on other comments in this thread: does such an ad network exist?

If all your options are terrible, you might as well use the terrible option with the largest ROI, right?
Future trends for the Digital Workplace
The vast majority of people are not particularly religious. This includes most members of the major religions.

Sure, they know the correct song and dance, but outside of specific settings it has little influence on behavior.

Granted, they may self identify very strongly as X, but how many people view say speeding in religious terms? Your actively harming the world though increased pollution and directly risking others lives, but meh.
Futurama did it.
New app for notarizing via a smart phone
Military drones started with the CIA - I listened to the retired director that initiated the effort, on NPR. They used drones in countries who either didn't have radar or had forgotten how to connect it with weapons systems, which included "almost everywhere". They wanted a sustained (24 hour) observation platform in the field, and drones filled the bill.

I'm sure they might ultimately get to fighter-jet performance, but at a much greater cost and reduction in mission time.
QuickTime on OSX has a nice feature to quickly move forwards and backwards when watching a video--just swipe horizontally with two fingers to the left or right. It's a little flaky at times, but works for the most part.
Turbolinks 5
Hey, I'm 18 and currently work fulltime at Facebook in London. I can definently relate to some of the things you touched on, feel free to reach out if you'd like to have a chat. Email should be in my profile.
So the location is in a small town somewhere so likely not many job around. That means either you are okay with a homestead type of living or are rich enough to buy this as a second home.
I also think this is the root problem.

The thing is, we don't need a new OS every year, and most people I know don't want to update their devices either.

Where is the demand coming from?
this is it! I have to get Echo now!
How to wiretap the Cloud (without anybody noticing) [pdf]
THIS! I had already given up, but searching for random backgrounds it occured to me the right query:

http://gradient.quasi.ink/

And the query was: "gradient background preview show HN"
Apple does not push iOS updates...the user has to initiate the update.
Pricing seems high and also irrational.

I might know that I want to process 10 hours of stuff, but to know I am going to to do N hours of stuff a month that just seems an excuse for recurring billing.
{{ foo -}} does not strip white space from the output of foo. It eats up the following white space.

So "{{ foo -}} bar" renders the same as "{{ foo }}bar".
Our Conflicted Feelings for R2-D2
Did they leak it to the BBC or to Assange first?
In case anyone else wondered in light of the brexit talk, by foreigner they mean people outside the EU.
Totally forgot about Ping. I love being reminded of old "features".
> "When national security programs are hobby-level, you really have to worry that anybody else can do them."

It's not really surprising that bulk surveillance is simple, in my opinion. The act of collection/surveillance itself isn't the hard part. It's doing it on a much larger scale.

Wardriving a Starbucks as a hobby is slightly different than installing a specialized device into every downtown DC Starbucks, even if functionally both do the same thing (collect data and/or injection).
> ...look you just want something that looks like this. Square root, log, whatever. ...And he was just like, well, just don't worry about it, you are overthinking it, you can take all the square roots you want, multiply by 2 if it helps, add 5, whatever, just make things work and we can make it make sense later.

LOL. I can TOTALLY hear his voice in my head.
I'm just waiting for the day when all of the short guys join together to check women on their 'height privilege'.

I made a minor, off the cuff remark to my roommate and her friend about how my brother is a couple of inches shorter than me and they went off for at least a half hour about how they won't date a guy unless he's at least 6'2". How they don't know why short guys even bother trying to date. How they'd never, 'even if he was the last guy on earth' subject themselves to dating somebody shorter than their 'standard.'

I couldn't help but to think to myself, 'wow, I haven't seen this level of off the cuff bigotry since the last time I lived in the south and experienced real, American made, southerner racism.' Talk about hating on a class of people about characteristics that's beyond their ability to change.
The justification for allowing immigration is the shortage of skills. If you use a random process then you won't get the skills you need.

Not that I agree with this, right now we need nurses and programmers, in a couple of years the situation will be completely different.
MIT reveals hack-proof RFID chip
Yeah. The revisionist hero worship and sanctification of Steve Jobs has reached absurd levels since his death.
It's possible. Not typical for the type of person that ascends to that level though. He and Matt were perhaps the two most well known names in that group to the outside public. Both with similar departures (or semi-departures).
I've not tried it personally, but I've read good things regarding Ubuntu's battery life on phones compared with Android. My understanding is that a lot of it is down to background apps being paused, like in iOS. I think the tablet mode would do the same, while the desktop mode won't, but in that cause you could probably plug in.
I can't upvote this enough. So many products have been ruined by feature creep, it's sad to even think about it...
Thanks for sharing and clearing that up, but this actually validates my overall statement all the more. We need real christian developers and there are so many opportunities to have a huge impact for the kingdom!
Will the Government Finally End the Tyranny of Cable Boxes?
The sentiment in this thread rings true to me. Usually the techies (ie HN readers/commenters) are ahead of the curve, so it will only be so much time before the cries from the general populace become louder.

Meanwhile, last time I was on an airplane (December), every single older woman over the age of 60 had an iPhone. This means that it's not only reached critical mass (the late majority on the technology adoption curve has been achieved), but now it's no longer hip.

I'm not sure what will be next, but I'm guessing it won't be Apple's.

Were I gambling man, I'd have shorted Apple's stock right there after that airplane ride.
There's very little real content in this article. The author complains about a couple of things, quotes others that have as well, then goes on to hypothesize about why the quality is declining.
What's new in robotics this week? U.S. army unveils driverless tech
"easiest is to just hold down the keyboard key of the base letter"

Does this mean that you can't hold down a key to produce multiple copies of the same letter?
> But a benefit might be cross-platform compatibility seeing as some OSes don't come with, say, grep out of the box

If you have git installed on your machine you have grep ( windows users) and most of linux command tools.
Well that boondoggle they are building in California isn't light rail. Light rail systems in many cities stifle mass transit effectiveness by sucking all the money out through build out and maintenance that would be better spent on more effective busing and other alternatives.

Hyperloop is a heavy rail competition and the one planned in California is a disaster on many fronts, it is pure political in need and desire and hasn't got a viable economic case.

The only reason I would see to support a hyperloop is that if it is commercial driven and supported. We don't need more of the same, we need a real game changer that shows true potential to replace other long distance forms of transport.

With regards to rail, for all the belly aching about the US not having a large number of people traveling by that means you need to realize that the US by far makes up for this with the freight that moves this way. Also for a much longer time the US had a much cheaper and easier transport by plane than Europe has but even now that is ramped up and continuing to do so.
The Coen Brothers’ Marvellous “Hail, Caesar”
Yeah, I was in the Cloud section and like how the fuck can this compete with DO???
Yeah, 'curation' seems to be a larger trend anyway.
This is so awesome.

But the BQ Aquaris M10 still has a low resolution, compared to what most tablet users have come to expect. I deeply wish there were open source small (~10" diag.) high PPI touch displays outside of iOS or Android devices.
After School – Fake Users and Fake Compliments
No, I am referring to the delay introduced by compressed audio streams within QT container files. The issue I refer to does not seem to occur for lossless audio. In these situations, the cslg atom, among others, allow the QT format to reliably copy edited stream data without re-writing to the container file.

AAC, like MP3, introduces a padding of silence at the beginning of the stream. Because modern QT container files do not compensate for this, all audio and video streams within this type of QT file will be off sync by default. QT playback software waits for the audio stream to begin (waits for silence padding to end) before video playback begins, even though the streams themselves line up 1:1 in the container file. This is lazy engineering, not an advanced feature.
It seems that way, but it could just be increased media attention.
Why reverse-engineer? The format (known as "Apple XML property list") has always been openly documented:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

There are also many libraries available to decode and encode these files in various languages.

The reason why XML property lists look this way is that they were a direct translation of the older NeXT "property list" format, which was sort of like binary JSON. Dumping an alternating list of keys and values isn't pretty XML, but it ensured minimum translation headaches from the old format.
Show HN: Mighty Timer – brew the perfect cup of tea (iOS / Watch)
AFAIK only the state parties and members of the panel had access to the info, so most likely source of the leak is UK govt.

Leaking it to the BBC (UK state media) sort of discredits the whole process and Assanges statement, so that might be motivation enough for someone.
Go to his genius bar, ask for a refund ;)
Justinmind at ConveyUX 2016
We "switched back" to Windows 10 here. We always had to use some Windows machines, because to do cinema color grading we needed 10-bit/channel color and wide gamut monitors which Apple never supported. But Windows 10 is now so nice, and the hardware vendors have upped their quality that we even run Windows on our laptops, which we used to not do.
Any idea why paybyphone doesn't give you a list of parking locations near you?
> If the prevailing wages are low, then claims that there is a shortage are lies

That's not necessarily correct. That's only the case in a vacuum, it falls apart in reality.

For example, the US has routine shortages of farm field workers, in places like California, for picking etc. The wages are very low. It's a combination of nobody but illegal immigrants wanting to do the job for $10 / hour because it's a miserable job, and the business owner not being able to afford dramatically higher wages. It's a very persistent problem throughout California. In your theory, the wages could only be so low due to a vast over-supply of labor; there are in fact many other reasons an imbalance like that can occur.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/oct/25/decline...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-u-s-farms-fewer-hands-for-the...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/us/california-farmers-shor...
Irony? "Error establishing a database connection"
You forgot Xcode. Xcode has always been mess.
Websocket Connections and Application State with Rails and Elixir
Better check StackOverflow.
I have never got myself diagnosed to see if I have ADHD.Is ADHD a real disorder(genuinely curious here)?
When you connect a mouse and keyboard, is it running "full" Ubuntu or the sandboxed mobile version? (i.e. is it like an iPad compared to a Mac or like a Windows tablet compared to a PC?)