skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1950 to 1970 is fascinating.

US foreign born is 6% at the beginning. 18% at the midpoint. Then 4% at the end.

a) what caused this rapid spike and retreat?
b) are there or why aren't there a million econ studies about immigration studying this time period?

Note: I got as far as Wikipedia's immigration to the US in the 1950s section, which is more a list of random unconnected facts, none of which seem to line up well enough to explain the tentpole. Maybe rising Mexican immigration and the Hungarian revolution, followed by a new system of immigration no one knew how to use... not really sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_...
Finding a Co-founder in College
That's exactly the type of stuff that slows down response times for legitimate calls. 911 is for emergencies, not for bad sign design.

>official things are marked very clearly and undeniably

Yes I am sure they all have timestamped PGP signed messages signed with the official german government keys.
The alternative is that I need to have 30 versions of Chrome laying around because they update every week or two.

Surely there has to be a middle ground. :)
Google maps was always very buggy for me on Android, but fine on iOS.

Hangouts is bad. Very slow and bloated everywhere. On mobile it only syncs notifications at random. Audio and video quality is total crap, and even with this new web beta thing where it's supposed to be better, it's still much worse than skype.

The most incredible thing, and I am ashamed of typing this but whatever, is that I've actually felt an improvement in my life after turning off hangouts in gmail. WTF.
I'm running on a 2012 Mac Mini Core i7 with 16GB of ram with a spinning rust hard drive.

El Capitan has sped up the OS for me compared to the previous OS X release. Yosemite was so bad that I found myself avoiding using my Mac Mini instead using my rMBP with an SSD because the Mac Mini just felt so incredibly slow. With El Capitan they feel similar to me. Certain disk operations of course are slower, but overall the usability has increased under El Capitan versus Yosemite.

Based upon informal replies on Twitter when I posted about my upgrade experience, I wasn't the only one that noticed a distinct speedup compared to Yosemite on older hardware.
They had some wifi wakeup issues for a couple releases/bug fixes and it took a long time for then to come out with a fix. They control both the hardware and the software and have no one else to blame.
True you need a VM but performance doesn't have to be crippled. My out of office/at home machine is a Dell Inspiron 5558 (Core i7, 16GB RAM). I stuck an intel 256GB SSD in it, took the free upgrade to Windows 10 and do all my dev work in a few Virtualbox VMs (leaning heavily on mRemoteNG for lots of tabbed PuTTy instances!).

Total cost (including the Intel SSD) was £726 or $1049 at today's rate (exc. VAT). So didn't cost a bomb and gives me a lightening fast machine, windows for desktop duties, debian for dev, a 1920x1080 display, easily replaceable battery/ram/disk and no issue driving multiple monitors.
I learned Haskell in school. Then I worked with it in a web startup. I've done fun hobby projects with it. I really enjoy it a lot. I'm not super smart and I don't know any advanced math. I'm not sure what the problem is at all. The language works fine, has a vibrant community, it's growing, and it's inspiring lots of programmers and language designers too.
Relaunch of a Brand
> From my perspective, their application software has always sucked.

I think the main problem is not the application software (aside from iTunes and Apple Maps) - the main problem is the OS level software.

During the "golden age" of apple, apps would just work. Didn't matter if it you were using Apple-provided software or "better" 3rd party stuff - crashing, lagging, stuttering was minimal.

Now, many users are seeing much more lag, beach balling, and kernel panicking than before, across all of their applications. [1] Combine this with some poor decision making in the UX/UI department of certain Apple apps and you get a lot of people who are unhappy with their entire software stack.

But the app is the closest piece of software to them, so instinctively it makes more sense to blame declining app quality, when it's actually more a function of OS stability.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071
The most frustrating part for me is that CMD-Tab'ing to, say, Hangouts will show me the Hangouts window. Now if I try to CMD-Tab to Chrome, it stays on the Hangouts window even though they are trying to treat them as separate applications (it's own application icon in the CMD-Tab bar, and a separate application menu from Chrome). This frustrates me on a daily basis.
In that light, read the statement of Brzezinski (the President's National Security Advisor at that time) regarding the US support of Islamism in Afghanistan since 1979 (the same year the Islamic revolution happened in neighboring Iran):

"Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

Quite consistent.
OFFICIAL BUSINESS!!! NOT A BOMB!!!
Pseudo-streaming is (and should be) less and less used, and actually loads a lot slower than the new HTTP adaptive streaming formats like HLS and DASH.
My 2009 MBP shipped with Leopard and I upgraded it to Snow Leopard within a few months. It was on there for a couple years.

My first computer was a Mac LC in 1991, and I was a die-hard Macintosh fan all throughout adolescence. I learned to program with Think Pascal on a Centris 660AV. My whole family continued to use Macs after I gave them up in 1998, so I certainly used them during that decade, I just didn't like using them.
It's not bad now. It was not great the first 2 weeks. But it's not like I expect better from anyone else now.
I had the unfortunate experience of owning an early 2011 MacBook Pro. The graphics card broke down multiple times (three, iirc) requiring a 500€ logic board replacement.
This was a widespread issue, and we, the affected users, repeatedly asked Apple to recognize it and run a repair program.

By the time (two years?) they decided to roll one out I had already bought an Asus laptop, which was comparable in most ways and costs about half of what I paid for the MBPro.

I don't think I'll be buying Apple hardware for a while. Their increasing push towards planned obsolescence troubles me deeply.
And? I use it on a daily basis and I have no problems with it whatsoever. Sure, some people had issues with it when it launched, but like anything else in tech, those issues were way overblown.
WebGL is not a massive security or stability risk. That security stuff was mostly paid FUD from fraudulent demos that faked data leaks. The stability issues have mainly been avoided by not including WebGL content on non-graphics pages.
Very broadly speaking, inflation is a spiral of wages and prices that devalues money itself while leaving the relative value of labor and goods equivalent. In this sort of inflation, the value of saving and the cost of debt are reduced. Many economists view this as encouraging investment and as an overall public good provided the rate is slow enough to inflate everything more or less evenly.

Minimum wage is by definition not a market rate, therefore when wages and prices inflate, minimum wage and other fixed benefits are left behind. This is not so much inflation hurting the poor but rather the government choosing to help them less, in a nicely passive "don't blame me" sort of way.
How to Build an App Ecosystem Using Your API
Yeah saw that you could do it at the apple store, but it is $200 to replace. And if your computer has other damage like a bit of dent or if you replaced the display etc with aftermarket one, or if there are even tiny signs of liquid damage, they straight up refuse service.
@kamaal.

You are basically proving my point, India is a 4 stage rocket stuck in stage 2. Nehru died in 1964. 52 years ago. India is still a country with 56% population in Agriculture and on top of it, literacy rate of 71% (which I honestly think is padded). And the Alphabet soup of defense establishments, and you got LCA Tejas which is third rate fighter and Indigenous Arjun is miles away from T-92 and the satellite program is not as advanced as NASA in 1960s (they landed a man on the moon).
Ground re-synchronization happens daily.

"The clock and ephemeris corrections are uploaded generally about once per day (but some times more often if needed to maintain precision). The rubidium clock’s natural drift is large and might be of the order of 10^-13 per day" (quote from an engineer that works on the system)
Basically the same price as the Air, maxes out at 8GB. I keep hoping someone will just destroy Apple's offering, especially for a product as stale as the Air. One day.

One worry: Linux still has some issues with retina screens, doesn't it? (though distros have gotten a lot better than two years ago when retina was broken everywhere)

> I can't imagine Dell released this thing with poor driver support.

I guess you didn't live through Dell (and everyone's) Netbook offerings.
There was a time during Windows XP when apple software was very well done. They were on a roll. OS X was a lot more stable, safari was introduced and was one of the best browsers at the time, etc. The 64-bit transition was flawless, the ppc to x86 was flawless. Safari was an excellent browser when it was first introduced. Mail.app used to be just as good as thunderbird (if not slicker). Itunes was THE app that everyone finally started using to organize their music in a proper database.

It's only since the "App-store" that apple seemed to screw things up. It's quite amazing that so did microsoft and so did linux desktops. I feel like the golden age of desktop computing ended with the dawn of the iphone.
You're making assumptions.

The blogging could have just as easily led to "I waited 1000 days, and I decided to live on for Sarah. She saved my life."
You need the compilers/toolchain from Xcode, but there are third-party build tools, such as e.g. Buck[1] that combined with an decent editor, let you pretty much avoid the Xcode GUI for a lot of the development cycle.

[1]https://buckbuild.com/
Were this Windows, there would be a 3rd party app...err application... that would let you change the default launch app. Why not on OSX?
Perhaps because your example fails to describe what happens if there is a crash, after updating the database to say "email sent", but before the email has actually been sent.
All of those look like "compatible" knock-offs, not genuine OEM parts. Looks like Dell doesn't sell any official replacement batteries for that machine.
I think you want to autoclave the glassware, since it comes in contact with the media when you're growing up a culture.
> projects that stupidly hard core path seperators

It's also stupid to assume that your application will work seamlessly between Windows and Unix-like systems just by making sure that the path separators are OS-agnostic.
>> good enough software

I dunno. I may not be on Apple any more, but I thought some iterations of their software were really damned good, like Snow Leopard, older versions of Mail, Keynote, iPhoto, iMovie (the one that no longer supported plug-ins - was that 08?), Safari, and so on.

For me, iLife (iPhoto and iMovie in particular) has always been a very compelling reason for non-techies to switch from Windows to Mac. It's probably the only thing that I miss from Mac since switching to Windows.
Really? This sounds way too empirical... And: have you ever used the first versions of OS X? Have you ever heard about MobileMe?
I'm 27 and just want my rig to work. That's why I build my own PC, demand mobile phones with replaceable batteries, and have a great 6 year old Lenovo laptop that, besides a slow-ish CPU, is spec'ed pretty well for 2016.
I'm an Apple fan, and I am unhappy with the state of software, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hate Apple software.

I am also not nearly disgruntled enough to even consider switching platforms to something else (like Linux for example).

No matter the platform people will always have gripes and issues with the software. It's amazing how much choice we all have these days, and it's simply not possible to cater to everyone's whims.

I feel like over the last couple of years the landscape has changed tremendously, and what once may have been a simple blog post that mostly got ignored the news can spread further and wider than ever before. Things that are simple complaints of "I wish this worked better" now get twisted and restated as "X hates Y".
Really? I installed iTunes on Windows in 2005 to load songs onto my first-gen iPod shuffle, and it sucked back then too, despite the fact Steve was very much alive.
obvious dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061689 using a URL param
Maybe, I'm more worried about local industry's contribution than some science nerd's overly-ambitious projects.
There is no guarantee that adaptation will respect our moral sensibilities. If we don't acquire knowledge and make the effort to adapt then nature will make the decisions for us and we might not like the results.
I've regretted each tablet I've ever bought. They aren't as powerful as laptops, they aren't as portable as phones, they don't read as nicely as a Kindle or (gasp) a library book.

They end up sitting in a pile. For the odd occasion that I might want to pull one out I barely bother to keep them charged.
When did you try doing it? Things evolved a lot in the last 3 years in terms of video streaming support in HTML5, and today everything that was doable in Flash is doable in HTML5 with MSN and EME. You have control over the playback almost up to the keyframe today.
Do you have any specific features in mind?
> progressive

How is it progressive? This is conservative (not wanting change).
Is there really no FOSS equivalent to SAP?
One of my relatives is a SAP ERP marketing professional who is quite involved in SAP servicing and installations at client offices here in India. Whilst I'm a freelance developer who works mostly in FOSS tech, so naturally our interests clash!

Frankly, I'm quite surprised that how these big clients of the muggle world are willing to pay crores of rupees (that's still multiples of a hundred thousand USDs) to purchase a proprietary software. Whilst we have proven and secure stuff like linux, postgres, mysql, php, etc. just freely available in the FOSS world, who in their right minds would like to pay a fortune to buy a proprietary piece of crap which basically accomplishes the same thing?

Guy says that when a company here grows above a certain level and starts earning higher turnovers, they don't seem to mind software expenses too much, I guess it is the same as the usual Apple vs Android syndrome.

I tried to convert him a lot telling him about FOSS alternatives like SugarCRM, OpenBravo, ERPNext, etc. and suggested that he recommend these to his clients, instead. But he seems to be sold on the SAP "brand idea". Frankly, I cannot push further on this matter since I myself don't know much about a fully-integrated ERP system, as most of my freelance projects are just small Web/Android apps. But I do know that given the technology (LAMP, postgres, etc.), it shouldn't be a difficult thing to achieve. After all, SAP is just an over-bloated RDBMS that does some data-manipulation, however complex it might be, right?
Followup on the bacterial weapons tests?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862410
Faking Co-Routines, Or: Why Callback Hell Is Over
It means doing something you like to do as a startup business. It means learning new things and doing market research to see if your project ideas are feasible before working on them. It means a lot of hard work, dealing with stress and deadlines, and working with other people to achieve goals. It means building your own team of experts and leading them to greatness.
Different strokes. I've got better things to do with my time. I'd rather walk into the Apple store and replace my MBA or my iPhone when I've got a problem. That saves me time for my wife or my hobbies.

Trade money for things that save you time, to spend that time on what's important to you (if you've got the money).
Yes it needs work. Solid feedback, will yoink some ideas from your comment (if you don't mind).
No, I have not. :) Well, the Windows 7 machine under my desk at work is managed by the IT dept.
Android lets you do that as well. There are loads of third-party launchers for Android; one of my former coworkers made several million selling one of them to Yahoo.
No one's vape ever ricocheted off a wall into a child's chest cavity...

Prosecutors have full discretion on the most important cases they choose pursue. This would be an exercise of that discretion.
There are plenty alternatives to XCode. AppCode is one high quality one. Setting up your own custom llvm toolchain is also an option.
FWIW for Berlin, Apple Maps draws the transport lines and stations far better and nicer. Google draws the lines very imprecisely and doesn't show you tram lines, for example.
People don't know they need something until you tell them they do.

We didn't have a problem in the 1990s by not having a smartphones. We didn't have a problem without the internet. We didn't have a problem without electricity.
>If i'm not mistaking, you're OS X device costs you 4 times more every month then the sum of every online webservice i use.

Well.. you need something to run those things on
Well, I didn't want to go into that much detail here, because that also presents a problem in the case of locks (if the locking process crashes, the lock is never released).
I really like parts of your post, but I need to call BS on the strength of "geography as destiny". I think I support something like a "weak geography as destiny".

Like, I believe that China did have periods of peace that would have been long enough to develop liberal democracies. China was the strongest country in their region, sure they had borders to watch but they were just as protected as France or Germany during their conversions to democracy or republics. I don't think that it's peace that drives that kind of change-- it's a cultural change, and people in the country need to want it to happen. France is a great example of this-- they underwent a revolution and faced multiple challenges from their european neighbors, simply because they were choosing to rule with a republic rather than with a monarch.

If peaceful & isolated countries should develop into democracies, what about ancient Egypt?

The US fluorish, and our geographical heritage is part of that, but it's not all of it. I think that the things that helped us were: being cast off from europe (their legacy bureaucracies didn't suppress innovation), being free-market inclined, having a group identity ("American") that all migrants can share, practicing freedom of religion and inheriting the british common law framework.
Signal also has forward security, last I checked.
Many business class laptops are modular enough to replace the hard drives.

I swapped the DVD player out on an elitebook for a second 500 GB SSD.
There might be something to this if there was a protocol for delivering secure data over diffuse particulate matter...
I expect this means that if you're a security firm with a decent track record, they'll provide you with source code for review purposes.
When was this golden age?

I've been a Mac user for about 10 years and it was never better than now, probably the opposite. Every edition had bunch of bugs I hated. Before then I regularly tested Mac for local computer magazine and it didn't look better either. I even managed to freeze Mac OSX 10.1 with first mouse click when it arrived in our lab.

Before then we had lots of fun looking at ways you could hang by that time absurdly obsolete old Mac OS....
My thoughts after reading through this thread from 5 days ago on Apple's declining software quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071

I had actually never heard of MobileMe before reading that thread...somehow I was busy/oblivious enough not to have ever used it.
That sounds great until you read Russian laws on the matter: "foreigners may not own agricultural land"

Any opportunities you conjure for the poor is already accessible to the wealthy and powerful.
This feels more like "I read the Wikipedia article about CANDU and wrote a story from it."
Since I'm getting downloaded into oblivion over this, where is the latest audit?
I think the Hangouts development team is dead or something.
Same on Linux. Google really needs to get a grip on that.
Free Basics and Facebook's Waterloo
Well, Chrome tends to be ahead of the curve on a lot of things. For example, you need to upgrade to El Capitan to get true flexbox support in Safari (or iOS9 on iOS devices). This coupled with the fact that Chrome users don't need to do an OS upgrade to get the latest version means that you don't need to do as much heavy testing on various versions of Chrome (in my experience... though it's not in a locked-down corporate environment).
To whomever would hear it:

I want and need a deluxe Linux OS for which I would pay $200/year, which would do things well. This includes:

- Porting bugfixes forward (I dropped Ubuntu because they didn't port a bugfix from 12.x to 13.04 - After 2 days trying to recover my network auth, I asked a Mac to my boss).

- Designed for me, not for monkeys with big fingers who bring up Amazon results for every search (That's not why I dropped Ubuntu, but desktop developers aren't within the targets of Canonical),

- Who would hire and pay UX designers. I want the Mac OS X experience. I don't want to recompile my kernel. I want few features in the OS, but well-designed. I want people working days over days to fine-tune the mouse controls in the OS (the first warning that made me upset about Ubuntu). I want to hear the rumble of developers integrating Webkit with nice developer tools into an open-source chromium.

- I, developer, using IntelliJ IDEA, using apt-get/brew, I want to be the paying customer of that OS. I don't want my data be sold. I might want some cloud sync, but I don't want share buttons, especially when I watch porn (I'm absolutely serious). And I want the cloud parts of my OS to be under APL-Affero.

- Obviously those bugfixes must be sent back upstream to the OSS community. Ideally there would be half the money left to pay back, but let's start pessimistic.

- As a bonus, in that OS, all apps would be webkit/js-based. But I'm dreaming.

It is totally possible to charge for open-source, even the GPL says it. You can't prevent people from re-sharing the OS online, but you can offer upgrades to subscribed users only.

I wanted the Apple experience, but that's not coming back. Look what Nest did: They're selling a working thermostat for 3x the price. Tesla is selling electric cars for deluxe customers. I want to pay $200 per year, recurring, for a stable env with little novelty and many bugfixes, and I want to "deluxe". I want to purchase the feeling of being superior with my OS.

And I say that as a peson who earns €32.000 gross per year (France).
When I started using Android I subscribed to Google Play Music. It allowed me to upload my music collection, including songs that we're on Google Play. It's not matching, like Apple. It's literally just taking my music and allowing me to store it in the cloud and download it onto mobile devices. It's really handy so far and makes much more sense compared to iTunes. Plus there's no "sync" concept once you're there. You just download music out of your collection or you don't.
Note that iOS and OS X are very different systems. On OS X, you can replace everything with your preferred software just as easily as you could in Windows or Linux.