skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's absolutely horrible that we have come to accept that not having full control over our devices is acceptable in any way. This will sadly be the leverage to completely end general-purpose computing.

Why is a mobile device not just a small form factor? Why does it also have to remove all our rights at the same time?
As a biology student I can tell you that you are most likely correct :-)

Behavioural studies in animals are a fascinating field. I can't back it up with citations right now, but I'm pretty sure horses and dogs are not the only animals to read human facial expressions. Chimps, cats, parrots - you name it - if it's been in close contact with humans for any length of time, I wouldn't be surprised if it learnt how to read our emotions.
This doesn't make any sense. Smartphones are completely different devices than PCs. They shouldn't even be compared.

Good thing is just that we can do so much more on a smartphone that we needed a PC before, and by that, I mean sitting in a desk.

And no, smartphones aren't for media creation OR consumption. Smartphones are for interpersonal communication first.
Oh just to inform you, at least support HTTP too, your HTTPS is broken.
Really? The issues OP lists:

* For consumption but not creation - a 'dumb' mobile is even more so, you're stuck with the built-in functionality and can't install any other software.

* Not real network clients due to battery limitations - arguably true for 'dumb' phones as well but they don't have the 'powerful CPU and fast network connection' that OP bemoans wasting.

* Massive centralization / shift to "the cloud" - 'dumb' phones have limited or no online presence.

* Ruined web design - 'dumb' phones have little or no web browsing capability and web pages don't target them.

* Insecure - can't really argue that one.

* Malevolent / locked down - technically applies to 'dumb' phones but they were never advertised as general purpose software platforms.

I'd say most of his points stand.
Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this

I've seen that, but there's something even worse. It's when a manager who doesn't understand something thinks that it must be simple and/or easy.

Where I experienced it firsthand was working for a VP of Engineering who was from a hardware background. He didn't grok software and therefore believed that it should be easy to do. I didn't mind, I was one of the hardware guys. But that meant that the software guys at the company were sucking hind tit.

Hey, at least its better than working for a company run by sales and/or marketing people. They have contempt for both the hardware guys and the software guys.
I agree with most of his points.

I also hate the ergonomics. Screens are too small, and input methods are slow and error-prone.
Garbage attracts the masses. Advertising pays the bills. The unnecessary crap that we developers would blow away are, unfortunately, the only thing that the laity come online for and therefore the only reason why we have jobs/customers.

Better we explore techniques to optimise, no matter how incremental, so that we can shave as many milliseconds as possible without compromising on the nectar of content and thus challenge native app experiences on mobile devices.
What does having an ability to gain root access have to do with installing random malware apps?

You can easily have a device with disabled root access and a curated store as a default and make gaining root access an added functionality (similarly how Android Nexus phones require you to issue a fastboot oem unlock command).

Where does this idea that the only alternative to not having some non-technical people install malware is to forbid root access to EVERYONE else?!
You might be sitting too close to your monitor if you can't read across it comfortably.
Could not agree more. Production data needs to be bigger than a petabyte or three before my default response is anything other than 'let's load it into RAM.' :-)
The hardware of N95 was the pinnacle of Nokia engineering. They stuffed lots of new stuff there like A-GPS receiver, accelerometer, 3D-accelerated GPU, lots of flash storage, better camera etc but the Symbian UX was horrible (it was from the beginning but tech feature -driven engineers didn't understand that at all).

N95 had so much of features that nobody used them. They just were happy with all the stuff they never used. Been talking about the subject to lots of people who bought the phone then.

N95 was released the same year Apple demoed iPhone first time. N95 sold really well then. Nokia's old management has told afterwards they were so lulled by the success of N95 they were not worried about iPhone at all. They did N96 which was even more stuffed than N95 but with the same UX flaws.
Poka-yoke
You are saying I'm wrong because good engineering is better that writing crap. Except that's not what I said; I was saying over-engineering is bad and we should stick to engineering.
Most of these reasons can be applied to modern cars, apartment complexes, smart TVs, etc.
Title should be "why I don't like this century"
There is only one candidate that is addressing TPP.

Stephen Miller, Donald Trump senior economic adviser discusses his policy here

https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-stephe...
I don't like my freedom of screen width being encroached on.
For me the only reason why I hate smartphones is that they don't offer me much, and the battery life is a huge problem. The only thing they offer is exclusive apps that I can't use on PC, and since I'm a tech guy I need to use them to be aware of the tech of today.
From the end-user perspective both Maemo and Meego phones felt really good but the Meego seemed to have a bit more innovative and more fluid UX. Liked both of them and would've gladly bought them if there would've been any promise of continuity.
Michael Geist covered many more issues with TPP here:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/tech-law-topics/tpp/
Is your comment about "contextual advertising"??

You dream about things people don't want. There is no reason to solve it with complex technical solutions, when "contextual advertising" makes sense and is relatively easy to implement - and everybody loves ads that make sense too.

If I read an article about a book (book review), please show me an ad to buy the book.
This person would be happier moving to a pre-computer environment - take a look at their pet hates: https://violations.devever.net/products - including:

* AMD x86 CPUs

* Intel x86 CPUs

...leaving, ARM CPUs, I guess? Windows ARM machines are also on the list. (And surely ARMs should be blacklisted according to his reasoning; he is unhappy with Intel's secure enclave, while ARM has similar features).

Some people will never be happy.
It is an incredibly modern advent this idea that you can never actually use the entire screen to render text for anyone except for mobile viewers.

If you cannot read across your screen, you are probably sitting too close to it. I'd rather have wider text that I have to turn my eyes slightly to see all of then narrower text that requires active scrolling.

And I don't know of a single OS that you cannot snap your browser window to half the width of your monitor on the edge, which would make this as presentable as anyone in this comment section wants without the site maintainer having to assume everyone wants narrow text.
speaking of web design - did smartphones ruin that blog's design?
>Nothing in the experience of most programmers would prepare them to point suddenly stopping working after being passed to is_origin()!

I'm not even a Rust programmer and only read three paragraphs about the borrow checker and I instantly saw that point is moved.
A large number of malware sites will walk you through side loading and bypassing your security to install their app which may be a compromised game or app like a Trojan. Not having this access is the only way to deal with this.
Getting Started with Lua
> The EFF obviously is focused on one aspect of the deal

So ? A chain is as strong as it's weakest link. If one aspect of the deal is unacceptable then there is no point in discussing the rest, you can reject the whole deal.
Would be really cool to see a fun project like this in CλaSH HDL and compare...
> Ownership is only relevant in the presence of mutability.
In a GC'ed language where most or all data is immutable, one rarely needs to think about ownership.

If mutability isn't needed, then you would declare the self parameter as a simple (non-exclusive) borrow, and you can borrow from it or parts of it freely without inteferance from the compiler.
Don’t use Go’s default HTTP client
it's because the demographic you're talking about is vanishingly small, and therefore apple does not care about it. do you notice them hurting for customers?

i installed linux when i was 12. i've been working in this field for nearly 20 years. i'm abnormal, as 'techie' as they come, and i really just don't give a shit about having root access on my iphone. in fact i pretty much use it for a handful of things, primarily messaging, and that's it. i view my phone as a fancy microwave oven.

from a business point of view, you might as well ask amazon for root access on their hypervisors, or network switches. some people give you that. others don't, because they just care about the people who want that.
I would believe (partially) in the argument of security, if locking down phones was not used for what, in my view, is a clear case of planned obsolescence.

Phones are unique devices in generally requiring you to buy new hardware after 2 or 3 years if you want up-to-date software. This is wasteful and infuriating. My 13 year old PC is still able to run the latest version of Ubuntu, and does a pretty good job at it.

I really really wish Nokia had gone the N900/N9 route. Or now that they somehow acquire Jolla. For us, developers, phones are small computers. There's no difference. Locked down devices are simply restricting our ability to do things. We need something different.
The Linux Foundation Forms Open Source Effort to Advance IO Services
Software Licensing Models – Floating and Group – NetLicensing
Never understood why they keep on advertising to me things I have just bought. Anyone know?
I think it is far more likely that the problem is that the Pentagon doesn't want to buy enough platforms -- weaponized or not -- to make the market worth their time. Better to sell off 1/16 of the business for some free cash flow and focus on the larger consumer market. After all, iRobot began as a DARPA contractor and already experimented with weaponized remote platforms; they aren't averse to making tools for war, they just obviously don't see enough cash in it.
According to rumors Nokia had lots of discussion with MS and Google about which platform they should take. Got the impression that the proposition from MS was somehow better and at least initially gave more room to move for Nokia. Later on got the impression that lots of things didn't went as was promised.

But, Nokia is still alive and the situation seems to be a lot rosier for them after selling the mobile phone business. They got good price and got really cheap loan from Microsoft as part of the deal. Of course in PR side Nokia didn't have to kick out the phone engineers. Microsoft is handling that still and getting the negative PR from that.

One has to remember that earlier Ericsson quit the phone business as well by selling that to Sony. Actually those phones got better after that :)
I assume they do it because other people do it. Because Facebook, LinkedIn, whatsapp, twitter and instagram are supposed to make you cool. Why would you break your site usability this way just to remove the need to copy the URL when you post it somewhere else?
I have seen Kernel programmers walk around with MIPS laptops.
Carver Mead: Interview (2001)
Sorry but I entirely disagree with you. From a security perspective allowing software installations form unknown sources is absolutely a concern for average users.

It's hard enough for IT professionals to maintain the security of general purpose computing devices, let alone non-technical users achieving the same goal.

Lets take a real-world exmaple. Look at the incidence of malware on a platform that allows unrestricted software installation (e.g. Android), with one that doesn't (e.g. iOS).

The problem is that making informed choices about whether a given piece of software is "trustworthy" is extremely difficult. Delegating that to a 3rd party (e.g. Apple) is for most people, likely the best option.
We already have open source CASs (a handful in fact). So no one is "building a CAS from scratch".
Cramming a web or mobile application in eight hours is hardly "hacking".
I wonder if anyone has dumbed down Mead's thoughts on quantum physics for non-physicists?

I'd sure love to learn more. Very intriguing.
The iPhone receives plenty of security updates, and does so relatively quickly after the fix has been implemented.
the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen

I had a similar experience working with another company. It was after the iPhone was available. But they still wanted to support a resistive screen in a high end product that wouldn't debut until years later.

I just couldn't believe the cognitive dissonance. Once the iPhone screen appeared, resistive screens were deader than Kurt Cobain. People in the trenches understood it clearly. But somehow top management either didn't get the memo or managed to rationalize it away.
One obvious thing I've noticed is that whoever is serving ads to me (on YouTube for example) has an idea about my sex. A few months ago I did some research on period tracker apps (i.e. products exlusively for women) and immediately noticed a burst of advertising that assumed I was female.
The author has a couple of valid points, the one I definitely agree with the most is the one about centralization. I'm tired of hearing about some cool new app/program that sounds really great, but when I go check it out, it almost always turns out to be tied to the cloud in some way. It makes me want to say "Guys, great software, but can't I just buy it and run it on my own hardware without having to trust you with all my data?"

On the other hand, many of his points are also definitely geek-only (especially the one about not controlling one's phone). While I myself tend to agree (which is one reason I personally do not own a smart phone either), most people really don't want or need full root access to their computing platforms.
I think a lot of these issues actually could be addressed.

Right now, it's essentially a choice between iOS and Android. No serious third platform (Windows Phone, Tizen, BBX, third-party Android ROMs like Cyanogen, etc.)

Apple is decent (but not great) user experience, but has a few serious flaws: Apple's morality policing (and other restrictions) keeping apps users do want off the platform, as well as restricting people to using Apple cloud services for a lot of functionality, and not allowing some core OS functionality to be overridden. Apple's cloud services would be less of a problem if they didn't suck.

Android (well, the two versions; Google vs. the open version) have much more flexibility, but kind of suck. (way better than they used to be, but still inferior to iOS on a strict functionality basis).

I think it's inevitable that more and more computing moves to mobile (the next 2b people on the Internet may ONLY use mobile). Maybe Apple's cloud and policies will improve. Maybe Android will improve in quality. Maybe a new platform will emerge.

"Locked down" is awesome IFF it is locked down to the owner; if the owner has to do some small amount of work to lock down a different config, that's ideal. The "owner" might be an individual for a personal phone, or a corporation for a fleet of phones.
I'm guessing you have an Android device? Yep those Android security is nasty. the conficts of interest between the OS manufacturer, the handset manufacturer and the carrier have caused a load of fragementation and lack of support.

My personal opinion is that, unfortunately, regulation is the only way to solve that issue, as the market does not appear to be addressing it well.
Does each microservice really need its own database?
I also found the article to be too vague in explaining what from the headline appears to be the central point of the article.

From what little was said seemed like activist investors had decided that they were better positioned as a cleaning product company than as a true bros based robotics company...

Guess in the long run this is why google went the Alphabet route.
Ignore it. You can't change the outcome anyway :-|
Most people probably don't need free speech either, but we don't remove the possibility anyway.

There are also plenty of examples of mobile devices being infected even though the user didn't have root access.
Ask HN: Are you satisfied with insights you discover using analytics platforms?
I assume that HN users who work/own a company are very data-driven.
There are amazing analytics and BI platforms out there that want to help businesses understand their data.
I have a serious crush over Domo :)
My question to everyone here is:
Are you satisfied with whatever platform you're using?
Does it actually help you discover meaningful insights about your business every day/week?

I've had experience using Mixpanel and a lot more platforms, and mostly they are used as an SQL replacement.

It feels like there's still a huge gap between what you can understand from your data, and what existing platforms help you discover.

What do you think?
I quite like this style for technical blogs/pages.... I don't have my browser full screen allot of the time though.

btw here is the style sheet for that page :P
https://www.devever.net/~hl/style.css
> Some people will never be happy.

... with overengineered, potentially buggy and vulnerable junk stuck into their devices which serves no purpose to them and can't be controlled or disabled.
No it isn't. Just like random scammers leading people to give them money doesn't mean everyone should be banned from having a bank account or a credit card.

Some minimal level of responsibility of action from a users side isn't unreasonable. Being locked out from your own hardware because there are a few uneducated users out there is absurd.

Not to mention that now there are actually viruses and exploits out there that install themselves through security holes on users devices and the users can't remove them because they're locked out!
Basically I just don't like some "features" which are anti-patterns IMHO:

* With SPA I mean that clicking on a link, my browser doesn't load a new page, but rather some JavaScript seems to do it.

* Depending on the browser width, the description of the icons on the left disappears. It should always be there, I'd rather have a horizontal scrollbar than not knowing which button does what.

* Fixed headers. Vertical screen space is the most important thing to me, so there should be nothing on the top blocking the stuff I want to read. Also please don't start to animate it or let the header slide in when I scroll up.

* Infinite scrolling.

* Icon fonts. I don't like the default font. If I block it, some icons don't work anymore.
The N9 was one of the best designed phones I've ever seen [1]. It's really frustrating Nokia did not follow the Maemo/Meego path. As a developer I'm not so fond of smartphones because they are not little computers, but locked down devices. Nokia's view was aligned with mine, as the first device of the series was an "Internet Tablet" (N770, released Q2 2005!)

Why they followed an erratic path instead of going full steam ahead with their Maemo/Meego platform is quite well described by the article, but does not sound less stupid to an outsider. They had a device that was in some fronts superior to iPhone much earlier, but they got stuck with Symbian first and Microsoft afterwards.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review
Perhaps browsers should have p { max-width: 72ex; } by default. And a user setting for this, just like default font size.
This is what I am getting from the article but seems very short sighted... Working on development and R&D with the government is more likely to enable IRobot to be competitive in the real robotics industry that is finally springing up in the next decade or ao
> it's because the demographic you're talking about is vanishingly small, and therefore apple does not care about it. do you notice them hurting for customers?

How do you know?! There are billions of people out there not using Apple devices, how do you just claim that the demographic is vanishingly small? How did you measure it? Apple doesn't even own half of the market.
Oh, that's from very long ago. And most of them weren't that bad. And I have had good managers, really good ones who added value, but only 3-4 really qualify (in 35 years).

I work in a flat organization now. No managers at all. So it's an interesting perspective.
I love my nokia I bought 1€ on the black market in poland that is charged once a week, have the radio, and a correct mp3 player that you can use as an usb key and is not locked, brickable.

In fact I bought 4 of them. I am now awaiting the moment someone will try to smug my phone and show him my wonder and expect him to say: keep your trash!

Just for anyone thinking I love nokia, just remember how cumbersome their software were to use. They are so shitty, I don't have a data plan, thus I am making savings on the accessories, the phone (i dont fear to break it) and the communication plan. ~400$/year

Compared to my old habits, I am sparing money. I can backup my music, I can load music easily and I don't care anymore.

The morale of my story is : don't complain about a market when you are driving it.

So called geeks nowadays are a joke that have high incomes, and shape the market of computer and electronics appliance by early adopting the most stupid ideas possible that cost the most.

The inability of "geeks" to influence positively with their habits of consumption a market on which they are supposed to be more knowledgeable than the mass makes me wonder about the technology they adopt in companies for producing. They really seem to not care about costs, recurrent expanses, adequation to the needs.