skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For comments: https://github.com/etcet/HNES

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"What if I got some more people to help out?"

"Five months."

"You guys are too slow. I'm going to give it to team B over there. They say they can do it in two months, no problem."

"You'll be asking us to help out that team in about a year."

It is amazing how little value most managers add.
I'm not sure that this article is that contentious. Modern smartphones are unabashedly consumer devices made for the mass market and several of the criticisms in this article are features that most people don't want/need.

What most people want/need from a smartphone is a device that lets them do things (e.g. send messages, keep up with friends, make phonecalls, browse the Internet) without getting in their way. They're not really in the market for a general purpose computing device like a PC.

If you want that kind of device in a smartphone there are less mainstream options, but I don't regard it as surprising that larger companies don't actively cater to them (it's a niche market place)

Personally I've got a range of computing devices that I use for different tasks. When I want to read a book, or surf the Internet I use my iPad. When I want to write some code or do my technical job, I use Linux.

Now there's the obvious argument that people should have the freedom to control all their computing devices, but that freedom comes at a cost, which is that freer devices are, I would suggest, harder to maintain.(i.e. you need to understand more about the operation of the device in order to manage it). If you're a technical person, you may not see this as a problem, but remember mass-market consumers aren't necessarily very technical...
The management got too rosy picture of what Windows Phone 7 was (a quick hackish MVP, nothing more, like the first iPhone few years earlier) and they were really surprised when upgrade path to Windows Phone 8 was really hard.
I think the biggest mistake in their engineering execution was skimping on the specs of their phones. For example, the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen, 433Mhz ARM11 processor, and without a GPU (they already had GPUs in some earlier models). N97 would have been a "decent" phone with modern specs, and bought them more time to innovate in software.
It's hilarious because the problem for Nokia here was that they focused too much on technology and not enough on business. The reverse of what their earlier problem was.

By the team Meego was announced, Apple and Android (Google et al) were already pouring their wealth of engineering talent into their platforms. And the strength of iOS' link with OSX and Android's access to Google services meant they were never going to compete.

The smart business strategy would've been very early on to switch to Android around the same time Samsung did.
Tutorial of Nulan – Lisp with Pattern Matching, Hygienic Macros and More
Nowadays QT is doing well with LGPL + Commercial licensing. It's really good thing Nokia didn't hug it to death.
> The one, unqualifiedly great thing the Internet has done is provide access to information. Movies, books, news, technical papers–all of that. Today, I can find out information which I would have needed to visit a library to find out in 1990. Often, I can find out information I would have need a university library to find.

This deserves more than a throwaway paragraph! Forget libraries. In an hour of Internet searching, I can get information that would have required weeks of work in 1990. Visiting libraries. Calling people, asking who might know something, tracking them down, talking them into helping me, etc, etc.

> As one of its negative side effects, the Telecom revolution enables a panopticon surveillance state which is far more intrusive than what Orwell imagined in 1984 or which the Stasi created in East Germany.

True enough. But it's not all that hard to obfuscate identity.

> Information doesn’t “want to be free” and the rise of the Internet has seen a vast tightening of copyright and patent laws, rather than a utopia of free information you are actually allowed to use.

Unjust laws are commonly ignored.
There are plenty of Scala 2.12 roadmaps to choose from:

- the original one (June 2014), linked from this article
- its Dec 2015 update [1] Of note is its prominent (Call for) Participation. Looks like the Typesafe team is feeling overstretched now.
- for those of us following the bug database, we're stuck with the outdated schedule [2]
- the GitHub counterpart to the above is [3] which seems more accurate: it updates the updated schedule eg by postponing by one month the release date for RC1 of 2.12.

So I've given up reading tea leaves from roadmaps and just wait for 2.12.0 when it becomes ready.

As to why that report in the (public) bug database is outdated, let's remember the mindset formulated in https://twitter.com/adriaanm/status/571073842434547712 (declaring JIRA bankruptcy) which wasn't put in practice.
Quoting:
@adriaanm our plan for Scala is to declare JIRA bankruptcy and run for the githubs.
Maybe take the top half of the open issues with us.

[1] http://www.scala-lang.org/news/2016-schedule/

[2] https://issues.scala-lang.org/projects/SI?selectedItem=com.a...

[3] https://github.com/scala/scala/milestones
GitHub: https://github.com/Pauan/nulan
I don't like smartphones also, but I hadn't thought of any of these reasons.
pfffft... the first line shows an extremely limited world view.

Plenty of people are creating using smartphones. Sure, no one is programming on a smartphone, but plenty of people are creating art via the cameras and on-device editing tools. And doing so much more spontaneously than when you had to awkwardly carry around a camcorder waiting for inspiration to hit.

Similarly, lots of people only use PCs for consumption. It is their reddit/hulu/netflix device.

Both PCs and smartphones are used for creation, just for different types of creation.
Mithril.js uses 'm()'.

Check it out: http://mithril.js.org
I liked many facts that are provided in this text. Kinda feel the same way about many of those things. But! I kinda do not have courage to leave smartphone and go for standard cheap cellphone ala 15 years ago. Because I would then have to carry an iPod with me... So music and emails, (I am still student so it is relatively rare occasion to have to respond from phone) are reasons why I am still bind to it. But time I spend on phone is low. Like really low. Especially low since I bought new MacBook, and I usually carry it with me, so those moments when I am forced to use phone for anything (besides listening to music while in transport) are extremely rare. Probable once or twice a month.

I always felt there is something wrong with all those smartphones. Mostly because I had a feeling they are time wasting devices (don't get me wrong there are still a certain percent of people who do real work and are very dependable on smartphone and that's ok, but I am not one of them, as for now at least...). When you look at all those apps people install, like 5 different IM apps, 5 social network apps, 10 games, 5 productivity apps... like what the hell? I used to "consume" phone like that, but after few years got really tired, so I introduced life rule that made me feel much better about these devices. Do not install anything that you do not need (Thinking like "Oh, this could come in handy for X situation", no!). Use one app for one task... So I use stock apps and one app for every need I have. So it makes it 5 additional apps besides default ones. And after all that decluttering I found that I simply do not use smartphone as smartphone. I use it as a phone. (Only "heavy usage" could be music where I have Spotify, SoundCloud and Music app installed). I kinda felt better, like I had few more hours packed in a day, so it would be better for me to spend them differently, sit down, order some coffee in cafe and stare through the window, better than staring at 4.7 inch screen, scrolling dozens of unimportant informations...

Those reasons are all less technical but equally important in my opinion.
The Pentagon may want to buy something they are against on ethical grounds.
Off topic (sorry): Can someone explain to me why firefox's "readable view" is randomly not available on some pages, such as this one? I had to manually add "max-width: 700px" to the html element to read this without straining my eyes.

[And funnily enough, author complains about ruining web design when his page is far more readable on a vertical-layout smartphone browser than a 1680x1050 resolution monitor...]
> "Mom I have told you thousands of times! Configure, make and make install, not configure and make install!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11086290
Show HN: DustyBooks is an app to help students make money on campus
It seems they are keeping Bada -> Tizen around just to have some leverage over Google. If some negoatiations are really tough with Google, they can say "hey, let's forget the whole thing and we'll start using Tizen instead of Android". They don't really want to do that but it's a good plan B.
I had to resize my browser window in order to read this article in my PC. I don't get this kind of "geeky" designs, is there a technical reason why they don't even add basic CSS? I'm not talking about making the articles look "good", but making them readable.
>They have ruined web design. But I should probably write a whole article on that. Suffice to say however that I am very, very tired of the epidemic of (often massive) position: fixed headers on websites nowadays.

I have a blackberry, these bars eat up a lot of screen space on small devices break the page-down functionality. Can't stand them.
But I am neither getting freedom nor security with smart phones. My 2 year old smart phone have never received a security update. It has become a piece of crap just within 2 years.
This article seems to have a personal axe to grind.

Building an OS is hard, building an SDK is hard and so is building an IDE to go with it. Nokia is not a software company. It could not have competed with Google, Apple or Microsoft on the software platform. These companies have their own OS. They have their own browsers and even programming languages they can claim their own. They have massive developer ecosystems.

The fact that Nokia failed has little to do with Nokia itself and more to do with the disruptive power of software.

It really had just two options. Get acquired or adopt a third-party platform. Google was not interested post Motorola acquisition. Microsoft had its own demons to deal with. There was little wiggle room.

Had Motorola not been acquired, it would have gone the same route, fizzled into oblivion. RIMM is going the same route.

For all their trying, these companies don't have the software DNA.
A more apt title is "I like PCs therefore smartphones suck".
"Physical dependence" with respect to addiction really is nothing. Substances that create physical withdrawal symptoms can certainly be very very unpleasant (even dangerous), but if they were at all the main factor in addiction, drug abuse treatment would be a glorious, happy, incredibly successful industry.

Think about it: Even the worst "physically addictive" substances, let's say heroin, will be completely clear from physically in 7-10 days. Two weeks tops. Anybody can put up with that and, in fact, many addicts do it all the time. If that was the differentiating factor, locking up an addict would work because they would come to their "senses" after no longer physically dependent. Obviously, that's not how it is. Real addiction is something much deeper and cognitively still mysterious. Physical withdrawal (those first two weeks of hell) is called, in the treatment community, the easy part.

I think when most people use the "physical dependence" reference like you did, they are really trying to categorize and emphasize (internally or externally) that among substances and behaviors that are addictive, certain ones more often consume a persons entire being. This process is still a complete mystery and even if people can't or won't accept the amazing power and bizarre scope of cognitive function...it is certainly not 'physical dependence' and I therefore don't think there is any real need to continue with that minor classification.
Thats the only acceptable way to write code, but it doesn't mean that names can't be too expressive, for example I wouldn't accept nameing like this:

> RandomizeArrayPositionUsingFisherYatesShuffle

Since the algorithm detail is something I don't want to think about when I use it and something that the implementer should be able to change without changing the contract.
Safari should be a few weeks away (iOS 9.3 in late beta stages). Firefox already supports it just not enabled by default (except on Windows 8 mobile).

Just a bit premature on the tweet.
Yep that was one their problems. Bought an used Sony Ericsson P800 running UIQ and used it for years because it had ten times more ram than new Nokia Symbian phones in 2005-2007. Something like 10 MB vs 128. Of course the UIQ system was iPhone of the early 2000s but quite few noticed it and in Finland everybody were chanting Nokia Nokia Nokia.

EDIT: Forgot to say that few earlier Nokia models had accelerated GPU but the OS and the developers didn't use those, so they just stopped adding the GPUs later on ;D
I agree, fixed headers are terrible on mobile devices, But I think it's a little far to say that they have "ruined web design".
Well, sure. If you consider how nice an OS looks and how many "apps" there are for it the main parameter of "capability of an OS", then iOS is definitely more capable.
If you like doing this sort of thing, check out http://mithril.js.org.
Why "smartphones"? If he uses mobile phone which he does not consider "smartphone", he is hypocrite because most of the listed problems apply to them ever more than to so-called "smartphones". If he does not use any mobile phone, he just should name the article "Why I don't like mobile phones".
Introducing Espresso – LinkedIn's hot new distributed document store
The links at the bottom of the article are also excellent.

At the 2013 Dayton Hamvention, there was a tour of the facility shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHjcwIoTiY. Apparently, the engineer who first designed the transmitter was barely 21.
>With a PC, I don't have to perform some arcane operation to actually have control of the device. Moreover, it seems to be common to discriminate against people who have the gall to “root” their device, or to disable some functionality of the device if such “rooting” is performed.

Guess what? Most computers come with unfree operating systems, you need to perform an arcane operation (install Linux) to regain control, and many sites actively discriminate against Linux, including bank sites. (First result I find is http://stealcode.blogspot.com/2008/07/citibank-doesnt-like-l..., it's admittedly old but still proves a point.)

Edit: also, much of my internet commenting, including this one, is done from smartphones. Does that count as creating?
Sure, we can't all be specialists in all fields, but in this day and age, if your job is primarily to investigate, examine and digest facts, not being able to use the internet at the level that is presented in the article is going to be holding you back.

The quoted articles all went out of their way to ask the question without bothering to answer it. What happened? Did the journalists not think it was an important enough question to investigate (and if so, why even include the question)? Had they spent an hour or two they could have figured this out or found someone who could help them out with it.
nothing I do on my smartphone relies on the cloud more than what I did on my PC.

I've been told Facebook is the most popular iPhone app by time open. Facebook did not become more cloud-centric with the smartphone, it was always a web site. Its place in the cloud has nothing to do with battery life.

The only apps I can think of that used cloud computing instead of local computing are voice recognition. And that was likely driven by the desire to have a huge corpus of data for learning rather than on-device battery life.
> Now there's the obvious argument that people should have the freedom to control all their computing devices, but that freedom comes at a cost, which is that freer devices are, I would suggest, harder to maintain.(i.e. you need to understand more about the operation of the device in order to manage it). If you're a technical person, you may not see this as a problem, but remember mass-market consumers aren't necessarily very technical...

That's a common fallacy perpetuated by Apple and similar companies but it's simply not true. Having the ability to unlock your device, install apps after you enable unknown sources and hange other parts of it do not have to come at the cost for "average user" (whoever that is). You can make a secure simple default and still not waste development time and resources locking down the devices.
Reducing tariffs is not in vogue anymore. Trump is getting lots of support for his proposal to reinstate many tariffs.

>Furthermore, we can't realistically ask for the parties to go back to the negotiating table to try to improve the deal. This one was 10 years in the making, which is depressing, but does mean that it's basically this deal or nothing.

But they told us that negotiating it in secrecy does not matter as there will be a window of so many months in which it will be made public before the legislators will sign it.

So then it does matter, after all.
Ask HN: Is window management on OS X broken?
How is it possible to manage windows with multiple screens and multiple spaces using just the keyboard?

(Tiling might solve this, but my main issue is productivity)

This involves a set of simple features:

* Maximize windows
(Move to another screen and it is still maximized
even though the screen is bigger, crazy right?)
* Cycle windows (on just the current screen and space)
* Focus another screen
* Move windows to another screen or space
* Optional: Move the mouse to the focused window

I tried tools like Spectactle, Amethyst or Mjolnir, but it took only a few minutes to realize that something is broken or missing.

Is this somehow possible? How do you solve this?
Firefox mobile market share is less than 1% (https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...) The title says "major mobile browsers"
reply
Does the author also not own a television? What did the author think of older cell phones since the same argument applies? The same arguments have applied long before smart phones as well. Did the author not like CD players? Perhaps he/she railed against newspapers too.

The first argument is based on a terrible premise that only exists to support authors decision to not have a cell phone.

The second argument is just as pitiful as clients have nearly always been centralized. Just because your favorite protocol isn't used often on the device doesn't make this terrible argument stand up.

The third argument... I can't even remember what it was because it was stupid, or perhaps my eyeballs rolled so far into the back of my head that I wasn't able to read anymore.
One of the things Apple changed was how the software was perceived for phones.

Nokia (or the others) didn't update that much the firmwares for the old models. They just fixed the problems and added features to the new models. They were coming from simple phones that were not flashable in the beginning and they just wanted to sell more phones instead of supporting the old ones.

It's ironic how Apple is selling amazing amounts of phones with just few models and upgrading the software and features few times a year.
Sounds like you're working in a pretty crappy place.

I don't consider my employer to be exceptionally great, but at least there's no managers stupid enough to act like that, or developers to tolerate it.
Most people don't want or need root access to their smartphone but will complain (no matter how much you tell them security is their responsibility when acting as root) when installing random software they found on the internet results in their banking details being stolen followed swiftly by all their money.

There are products you can buy in pretty much every category if you need a general purpose computing device, but most people are better off with a locked down device that reduces significantly the amount of harm they can inadvertently expose themselves too.

(As an aside, I use an iPhone and can perform - with varying degrees of hassle imposed by iOS' restrictions - many of my day to day "creation" activities, with the bigger annoyance coming from small screen size than the locked down nature of the device. In some cases, in fact, the tools available for mobile OSes are far better than those on the desktop/web due to the incentive created by app store ecosystems.)
I don't really see how some of his points support his position.

e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one and it's incredibly useful. Beyond that, it is in ways a production device. It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it's great for email, I record audio for my college classes on it etc. Sure you can hardly build software or write books on a smartphone in a practical way, but that's throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Further, smartphones are increasingly becoming production devices, too. They're becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors and bluetooth keyboards and create a reasonable windows production environment, others have interesting note-taking capabilities.

Web design is another one... Bad web designers have ruined web design, just like they were ruining web design before smartphones. Further it doesn't seem like a reason not to use a smartphone, either.

I'm in total agreement with him on centralisation... it's a slippery slope, I think. For example I'm still playing games from 15 years ago, because I actually own the software. But many of today's games, even though they have no multiplayer component, would not run if in 15 years their servers shut down... because there's calculation or storage being done in the cloud that is essential to the game running. We don't physically own copies of our software anymore, but rather we own, in a way, a sort of thin client and some login details that we have to hope will last as long as we'd like to use them.

This was always a problem, back in the day, too... but at least the software was available. Take any popular MMO, if the servers shut down, people have copies and can run their own servers. In future, this may not be possible anymore. Anyway games are just an example, but it's a trend that's a bit worrying. Although, it's not specific to or exclusively because of smartphones, it's a larger trend.
Security architecture of iOS, as far as I know, is that same as that of WP - close everything. That inherently means that it's a lot less capable than it could be.

>There simply isn't room in the marketplace for more than three platforms.

Hah! Just like there "isn't room" for more than two parties in American politics, right? You can pull out any arbitrary number to claim something cannot be otherwise just because it happens to be the case right now.
Just don't fullscreen the browser ;)
Also noteworthy is the status of those grant applications. All of them from 2013 onwards are "denied". One wonders.
If you running configure and make as root you could actually just invoke make install instead of make; make install.

Also I wouldn't make install without a local prefix, something like ./configure --prefix=/home/$USER/usr/
or something along the lines. I mean common prefix is /usr/local, but still you shouldn't install anything globally without using your package manager.
You are the CSS to my HTML
To note that in Colombia and Asia there aren't babies affected although the virus is also present in thousands of patients is a good point...
Cryonics a Theoretical Understanding (1992)