skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android.

Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" :-) He also said that there are whole parts of the codebase that he was not allowed to see, all indications pointing to stuff related to routing the traffic through servers of "the man" ;-)
Same. Is it that hard to just ship a library via CocoaPods? Google do it, Facebook does it. But nooo, Twitter is "speshul" and they just have to be able to drop multiple folders in the root of my project.
Even if animals can eat vegetable waste or graze, that may not be what's happening. I think if you're going to address the GP it's probably worth working with some of the source material behind the views. I suspect the GP has watched Cowspiracy, I'd recommend taking a look:

http://www.cowspiracy.com
Well, the press release did say "That is why Nissan is proud to be at the forefront of developing efficient and reliable in-vehicle connected technologies that are available and accessible to all", no? ;)
Is this a surprise, really?

Lync (their custom, completely incompatibile VOIP solution sold to -- idiots, essentially) only works half-decently on windows. There's an OSX option, but it's just a factual checklist on the product spec, as in reality it's garbage.

The best part, is that "skype for business" actually lowers the quality of the product even more. I had my own set of issues with Lync, but it just doubled since we had to transition.

And that's for the "business" side.
That isn't cheap. It keeps you above board, so that's worth its cost already, but offshoring is such a grey-area that it might not pay to even investigate it if you ever fell foul of any local regs. I once knew a Swede who successfully operated his business through a HK company, but how feasible that is now, and how well that fits into German regs is beyond me.

Your affairs sound so simple I'm surprised there isn't the equivalent of a low-cost, online-only type of accountant in Germany. Plenty of those here, at least, in GB.

My other thought was for you to enlist the help of a local to call around for quotes to confirm whether or not you are being quoted an "English premium".
Actually I fully agree with you. Linux should be about open standards and freedom. Skype breaks both. I suggest to everyone to use some VoIP app based on open standards (SIP) and not the vendor locked Skype.
I agree, the general problem can no be solved technically. However I do think its valuable if apple builds the system in a way that forces the state to adopt clunky tools blanked backdoors.

At this point the techindusty should have drawn a line and fight for it.

Maybe this is Apples strategy. The want to raise the conversation but know they are gone lose this perticular case, so that they have a better position in the next, more important case.
Of course it is. Did you already forget that Microsoft <3's Linux? That the world has completely changed since Nadella joined Microsoft?
The data behind gaming
These aren't bots. These are people, pretending to be other people.
ooh wow.

I have to admit, searching for "skype 100% cpu" or similar shows lots of people having this problem on Windows and OS X, so I wonder if I'm not just seeing disasterousness in a shared part of the codebase.

I never even touched the mobile app though; 30MB/day is insane. Wow...
A human is a machine.
How UX changed the way I look at my app
Command line prowess is not the be all and end all of competency. Some people like to have less of an overhead in brain cycles when doing menial/repetitive tasks (like dealing with source control) so that they can actually get on with real work.

Personally, I think git is overcomplicated. Powerful, yes, but still ridiculously complicated, but that's the price you pay for all that power and flexibility. If a GUI can make many of the simple tasks easier and quicker then I'll always opt for that; I'll drop down to the command line when I need to deal with more complicated scenarios.
> maybe you consider git and clang a crappy tool?

No I don't, and good for you that doesn't work with bozos that like ClearCrap, oops, ClearCase. Apparently they evolved

> that you consider advanced signal processing

No, I don't consider that simple, but sometimes the frontend signal processing is split (DSP stays in one part and higher level processing in another part)

> numerical analysis, SoC architecture, discrete optimization

Well, SoC architecture is hardware, no?
Our project added calls in latest release: actor.im, works much better than skype
How does this inner voice compare to a real voice?

Given that the scientists link that with auditory hallucinations, I'd expect that for at least some people it's indistinguishable from a real voice (one of the earliest known example would be Socrates' daimonion).

I hear a voice usually when I'm reading but it is of some kind of soundless intensity. I think different characters in books have slightly different voices but it's possible that my brain knows that different characters should have different voices and it just tricks me in believing it.

I only have an inner voice for my thoughts when I try to articulate something. Otherwise I only think in concepts, structures and visualisations.

This is also how I tackle programming or solving problems in general. I visualize the problem and build a "problem structure" and then try to make it collapse into a simpler structure.
Do we know what can the software running on the secure enclave do exactly? If the software itself doesn't have access to the master key (a.i. can't read it directly), and if the slow authentication is inherent from running the algorithm on the chip, rather than a having been slowed down artificially, then even an update to the secure enclave would not compromise the security of the system.

Do we know exactly what the secure enclave software can do and what it can't do?
Structure IoT Platform
One difference between software and drugs is that the chemicals are fairly unique. If two people have the same chemical then one of them wins. That may not be fair, but at least it's over quickly. With software the claims are so vague no-one knows what's covered and what's not, which leads to the biggest, richest bullies winning based on nothing but legal threats and tiny little companies with nothing to lose acting like stick-up artists.

"Good fences make good neighbours", imagine property law if your claim was something like "the grass by the river with the nice trees" and it was in the middle of a bustling city with lots of businesses on adjacent land, rather than a precisely drawn plan.
Sad thing is that skype for business/lync is bundled with office products and when we came to some big enterprises they say "we have free lync!". Insane.
Not sure I understand the issue here, can someone summarise? Yes, Skype is an utter POS on Linux (90s UI, total incompatibility with any of the fancy things like picture sharing, inability to join group calls etc.) but the link implies the client can no longer participate in calls. I was chatting to a friend just yesterday via the Linux client - they called me and I accepted the call.
Why people use Skype is beyond me.
Skype on Linux is far inferior recently. Mostly due to the fact that the Linux version has been somehow abandoned. It haven't received updates since at least 1 year. For example, one recent change is that when someone sends a picture, on Linux you are sent a link to it, where you have to go to the Skype website and login in order to view it (and login each time you open a link). Sometimes it's a resized version of the picture which makes things worse. Another thing is the screen sharing. On Linux you can't share screen with more that 1 person, making it useless for telcos at work. And there is much more...
I am using Crashlytics, which got acquired and is now part of Fabric.io. For the most part, it's "use Crashlytics and pretend the rest doesn't exist".
And when someone tries to innovate in this live group chat space, they get bought out[0]. I doubt we'll see the features of Talko in Skyp any time soon, and I expect whatever creative buzz they had going over at Talko will surely be killed by the forced reintegration into the Microsoft bureaucracy.

[0] http://www.talko.com/
I mean i understand that, but they didn't seem to do much of an evaluation before launching.
Would you mind sharing with us what product you have shipped?

I just like to see what other people can achieve in 3 months of time, it's kind of a motivation for me :)
I thought this was how it worked in most countries except the US.
Isn't spotting an AI algorithmically about as hard as building it?
For gaming I use https://discordapp.com/
Not only that, seeing "the government" as a single entity is at best naive.

Can a schoolteacher access a citizen's digital data with a court order? Can the FBI access a citizen's digital data with a court order? Can a court access a citizen's digital data with a court order?

Those questions are fundamentally different and have varying support in lawmaking.
Are you saying that the "rooted/non-rooted" distinction should never have appeared, and that all devices should be "rooted" (for a lack of better word) by default, giving control to the owner/user? If that's what you're saying, I would certainly agree.
If you get a great boss, stay where you are. There's not much more important, IME.
integration architecture for old big systems is so difficult people make a very good living if they´re any good at this. Software architects in that field can make up to five times as much as a regular senior developer. I guess this article shows why.
It depends on the video driver.
CSIPSimple seems to be abandoned. Happy to be corrected. On my network it wasn't handling NAT rewriting at all so I couldn't connect to my ISP's SIP server.
Because they have friends/family who are scared to switch?
The Mac OS client is COMPLETELY BROKEN. Message orders change constantly, if you type fast the messages are jumping up and down constantly which is annoying since the order sometimes gets messed up.

Also the background colours of messages are bugged, sometimes my messages are grey, instead of being blue as they should be.

What the fuck?
The problem with trade secrets is that they're never made public, and can be lost if the person holding them dies. If they're granted a monopoly on the secret in exchange for publicly documenting the secret, then the rest of the world is better off once the patent period expires - the trade secret is now trade public knowledge.

The problem is that if they make up a BS "trade secret", they can get benefits without actually having anything to contribute, which is the textbook definition of rent-seeking.
Either way, it would be very hard to generate significant chaff that the surveillance guys would go after.
Genuinely curious: could you chance a guess as to why they chose bipedal over quadrupedal?

I don't know much about the field, but mechanically quadrupedals simply make more sense - a lower center of gravity combined with more opportunities (in the form of more legs) to correct blunders.
Hmm. The parent says he needs voice though, no?

'Desktop version':

- it is a Chrome App (arguably not a desktop client?)

- it in (restricted) beta, aka not available

- the beta requires (acc. to the link you provided) "your Google account email"
If the reference manuals are overwhelming, I'd recommend to start by reading Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. It covers how computers work for a general audience, from logic gates and boolean algebra, up to assembly, opcodes on the Intel 8080 processor, and how operating systems work. It was one of the most consequential books I've read, and I'd recommend it to both professional programmers and anyone else who is intellectually curious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159895
In fact years ago I switched from Skype to Hangouts because Skype on Linux would crash all the time on my EEE PC, whereas Hangouts just worked.
The reality is that, Skype is a kind of software that is better to use Windows version + WINE than native Linux version.
> but starting from February 22 the Linux client is unable to join calls

Hmmm... My Linux client just made a successful voice & video call to an OSX Skype client.

While it would be nice if Skype was properly maintained, I'm not sure quite what the "unable to join calls" bit is all about.
er, first build and get it there. It's very unlikely that it will flood with users.

If it does then, great, go pitch the investors :)
It is written in C and has several desktop clients.
Yeah but it hardly ever happens does it; I'd love to get 12 solid weeks to show what I can do but I'm stuck trying to build and launch something quite complex in my spare time, it's really difficult so we've taken ourselves to Lanzarote for a full week developing, which we are half way through. You quickly realise that a few issues and a few nights out and your week is over :-/
So it's just a dating site, with the understanding that both parties just want a fake relationship?

Cool. The larger players should add that as a profile setting/filter.
> Hmm. The parent says he needs voice though, no?

You can make voice calls with Signal, to other Signal users.
Network effects. I've been forced to install the client (Linux) twice for work. Worked fine for calls/chat, but I'm not keen on running it, to say the least.

Also, there are project managers in my industry who check availability of freelancers via Skype, rather than email. Remaining logged in keeps you visible with them. I don't do it, and I find it a shame that this is the state of affairs.
Why google over aws? Why isn't this man answering the real question?
I still think you need to specify what latency are we talking about. Scheduling latency is about scheduling. Network interface latency is about putting data in the buffer and then on the wire. Network latency is about actually delivering the packet. Web page latency is about time-to-render. First few pages of google results about various types of latency always qualify it with some other word, so it's not clear anymore what people mean if they just say "latency".

These are all both durations in one context and latencies in another. For the app syscalls are "how long did I have to wait for that call to give me a result" so a latency and a duration as well. (just because it's a period of time)
>Another thing is the screen sharing. On Linux you can't share screen with more that 1 person, making it useless for telcos at work. And there is much more...

Consider yourself lucky, for me screen sharing doesn't seem to work at all.
"MouseJack" Wireless Mouse and Keyboard Injection Vulnerability
Plans Being Devised for Human Outpost Near the Moon
I'm currently working on something like jinja/django templates in Rust, hopefully ready soon-ish
Sex Is Sex, but Money Is Money
Not deafness, but there's a visual hallucination that affects people with deteriorating eyesight.

It's called "Charles Bonnet Syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations

You can hear about it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071fs79
The android client is also a bit random. Notifications pops when they feel like it. Some upgrades change for different kind of wrong.
> XDG: TL;DR = says stuff should be in ~/.config, ~/.cache, etc.

XDGBDS is such an unstandard even xdg-utils doesn't care for it. And Skype predates XDGBDS (let alone whatever the current version of XDGBDS is this week).

Also you're wrong, XDG doesn't say stuff should be in specific directories, it defines envvars specifying directories with various defaults, defaults which are at best only correct on Linux distros which purport to follow XDG, which you can't test for because XDGBDS didn't see fit to define a way to say it.
At 0:55... it looked like the robot and human might hold hands!
Crappy phones have been decoding voice calls for years now. it shouldn't require powerful hardware.
Unless they start doing something, they will lose market. Whatsapp calls has been rising and people in the gaming world are starting to switch to better alternatives. I don't understand why such little effort. It's not like Skype for android is much better either. I've had trouble with it too.
The codecs used in GNU+Linux don't infringe copyright, only patents.
There was a Swedish summer hit song with basically this premisse a few years ago. "Anna, the bot".
BeeGFS, the Parallel Cluster File System
Because they work remote, and everyone else at the company uses Skype?

That's my situation, so I get to run a Skype client in addition to Google Changouts, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and IRC.
My biggest disappointment with the business version the fact that it is impossible to turn off the pop up notification when somebody logs in or out from Skype. Before you post me URL from the support website, non of them works, everybody in the office (10+ engineers) tried to disable this but no success. The only way you block that is to put yourself into do not disturb mode, but than non of the legitimate notifications are displayed either. Skype for business is a perfect distraction tool without providing any quality or functionality that other software already have. I just do not understand that in 2016 MS is at this level when it comes to user experience after being in the user facing software business over 40 years.
META: Seems like the . is stripped from the end of links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Street_Bank_%26_Trust_Co._v._Signature_Financial_Group,_Inc.
Best feature is when the wifi drops out it gets unresponsive and you need to kill the app, re-log and redial to get back to were you were. Even WeChat handles that gracefully on my phone.
Skype is far inferior to any competitor. I just send a link to people through https://apprtc.appspot.com/ to have better video call experience. Skype does not even keep track of notifications cross devices. It was way better in the old days.
It is a viable strategy in many games to act so irrationally that other parties will go out of their way to accommodate you in a way that they would not otherwise.

A classic example is a game of chicken (at least, where something is on the line). Sure, it's irrational to run into the other person; but it's totally advantageous to convince the other party that you're willing to do so. At a certain point there's not much difference between a determined effort to look crazy and actual crazy behavior.

It gets even more interesting when the strategy is designed by a different actor or process than carries it out. For example, the people running a society might believe it to be advantageous for their group to look so defensive and prickly that no one will touch them; but in order to do so, they have to create a society that actually is quite irrational. Or, natural processes of evolution might favor organisms (well, genes that create organisms) that are actually quite irrational in their behavior, because that irrationality will change the behavior of other organisms.
"One hundred and sixty posts from [Yahoo Answers] were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis approach"

Cool tips on how 2 become a rsercher?

The discussion here on HN is interesting, though.
Same here, WeChat and Telegram provides everything that I need, I do not mind having two tools for slightly different use cases.
It depends on allot of things if you are using some fancy super duper HD camera and hanging out with 10 other people all using the highest possible bit rate streaming also you'll need a good computer with graphics hardware that will support all the required features for hardware acceleration in Chrome.

Back then there was almost no video HW acceleration in hangouts anyhow (well in Chrome) not on the silly 1st gen Atom for sure and it still worked fairly well (at about 60% CPU usage IIRC) even with the 720p camera on the EEE PC.

And it's not that Skype would be any better in that regards Skype might have slightly bigger selection of video codecs (Google probably had too back when Google Talk had actually a thick client) but Hangouts is limited more or less to video streams that Chrome can handle which usually means current web video formats.
Seems a bit counterproductive to me!

Why would you choose to not have information about the other party, when you are trying to evaluate them?
The problem is this is a hard problem. Developing staff takes effort, time and resources, while a ping-pong table just requires money.

Personally I am of the belief that work is work. Pay for what you expect and expect what you pay for.
>Skype keeps ignoring people who complain or are having issues with Linux client

Well, if they are too few and far between compared to Windows, OS X, iOS and Android then it makes sense. Opportunity cost et al.

And, while it's often brought up, I think that when it comes to consumer products (as opposed to server and dev stuff) Linux users don't really have some kind of "extra-influence" to compensate for being a niche group.
Show HN: WebRx
> First: it simply encourages patents where the entire computer is included in a description of the software, turning it into a product/apparatus patent.

That worry is completely nonsensical.

That would trivially be caught by the patent office.

And it would mean that a competitor could use the software on a different architecture without infringing, making the patent worthless.
well, since one of the arguments seems to hinge on stuff not being made in erlang and nobody using it - off the top of my head:

Couchbase,
Couchdb,
Riak
Process-one jabber related stuff

I mean I know these aren't maybe as great as Java's hold on development, but I guess they have some usefulness.
Pointless. The bank can easily print more money to create the needed inflation to devalue cash with as much as needed.
Well, TLS with "trusted" CAs is useless, for extreme threat models.
As a futurologist I don't like this one bit. Seriously, I feel like this company will destroy us all.
Curious why "even" WeChat. WeChat over the years has been one of the most reliable apps I use including for video/voice chat.
OCR Using the New Open Google Cloud Vision API (Ruby)
Power.

All the other technologies are increasing extremely rapidly but battery technology isn't.

We are at a point where a breakthrough in batteries would have an incredible effect across a huge number of fields.
It's simple: Skype is big and everyone's using it. Kind of like Facebook.

I'll give you an example. When Skype goes down, nobody bats an eye. They just wait for it to start working again. When Tox (or to be more precise, qTox) behaves unexpectedly in a single situation, people come to me and say: "It's shit." (literally, no explanation whatsoever).

Since everyone's using it, they think of positively even when it behaves like a complete garbage.
"Completely broken" with all caps would mean "you can't make a call" or "calls get cut short" -- not "message order changes" and "sometimes the background of my messages is a different color".

(In fact the latter points to some color-code of sorts, e.g. grey = message hasn't been received yet, etc).
The deep irony of this is that I prefer the linux client to the windows one (or did until it broke, haven't tried to make a call recently), because it is ad free, clean and simple. I wish there was a reverse-wine I could use to run it on windows.
Those are usually a "full time job" for those people, they probably handle 1000's of profiles a month.
Better Parse Alternatives Than AWS and Firebase
Great article form CodeMentor in which they analyse 3 great Parse alternatives. https://www.codementor.io/development-process/tutorial/what-to-do-after-parse-shuts-down