skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I did factor that into consideration. However, planned obsolescence is fairly unethical also and many European nations are legislating to force companies into stating how long they believe their products should last for. And in Australia our consumer law deliberately uses the word "reasonable" to prevent companies from setting arbitrary time limits on product warranty specifically to limit unreasonable attempts at planned obsolescence.

In terms of Windows having bugs - unless you are a dyed in the wool conspiracy theorist who hates everything Microsoft stands for then it's fairly self evident that Microsoft doesn't intentionally introduce bugs into their products.

But a Tobacco company exists solely to hook their customers on their products. There sure is planned obsolescence, but the ones who they plan on becoming obsolete and thus discarded are their customers!
> Web apps are a long way from having the responsiveness and control of a desktop app.

I don't think this is the case. Facebook never needed desktop apps, did they? The web worked great for them.
That's actually the plot of a Bosnian movie No man's land.
One of my two small companies develop Windows development libraries for use in desktop and server applications and I see the native desktop apps doomed, except if you are targetting the enterprise (best in niche markets) and you know how to sell to enterprises.

Rule of thumb #1: if you can build the same application for the desktop or the web, choose the web. Don't think more. My company does Windows drivers and some other operating system internals stuff that is impossible to offer as a web app and this is the reason I can't follow this rule.

My last suggestion is trying to attach your app to other revenue streams such as trainings, customization, integration with other apps, and any other service that make you escape from selling individual (and probably cheap) units of your product.
Yes that's true. GMs are GMs, because they have full and complete mastery of the game- opening, middle, and ending. But that mastery is disproportionate, which is what I was trying to say (and didn't do that great of a job). You might be able to play a mad middle and end game, but if you didn't open strongly, your game could already be decided.

To pinpoint my gripe with chess, a single tactical error in your opening game can be unrecoverable, and the deciding factor on losing your game. It's too precise. Whereas with some other abstract strategy games, such as Go, you might make a strategical error, but the game might be more forgiving, where you can heal from your mistakes.

Of course, weak players should lose to strong players, regardless of game. I just wish chess didn't depend so strongly on defining a strong player by who has more opening variations memorized.
We will probably become fatter and at the same time remain very unhappy about it. People don't get sexually attracted by fat people.
That works only in theory, subscription has a cost which is above and beyond whatever price listed: it's the mental cost tied to renewing, cancelling and tracking it.

Single subscription multiple website model may work, but as soon as buy-in ramps up for that model expect everyone jumping in with me-too services, killing it.
Show HN: MapReduce Implementation of Spatial Co-Location Mining Algorithm
It absolutely is so black and white. If I buy a computer from you and you send me a parcel which explodes in my hands, no amount of hand-waving is going to get you out of this -- this even holds if you just distributed notes "Call this number to get your own personal computer free of charge!".

And just as a computer reseller/free-computers-for-everyone-distributor has an obligation not to send bombs to people who asked for computers, a website owner has an obligation not to serve malware to people who asked for content.
I feel there are two very contradictory views on HN. The first of these, is that anything safety critical needs to land on an RTOS.
The second of these, is to avoid C.

Both of these have reasons behind them and appear to make sense. Leaders in the RTOS space appear to be QNX and vxworks. Suitable languages people raise are Rust and Go.

Based on some Google time, neither of these platforms support either of these OS's. Multiple "Introduction to vxworks" documents are all exclusively in C.

In terms of accessibility, safe languages are far easier for someone to get their hands on, test to death, than some of the OS's recommended.
List me all the positive health qualities of cigarettes and I'll see if I can give you a fuller answer.

P.S. If you are smoking Butterfingers you are doing it wrong.
Are you on mobile? I get a hamburger menu at the top that pulls out a ToC from the left side.
But they have a native mobile app where the FB main consumption happens.
You're right that responsibility ultimately lies in the individual, but people aren't silos. If advertising didn't work, people wouldn't do it. Some responsibility must be given to those who try to convince others to do unhealthy things.
hey what kind of co-founder are you
Well, as an autocad replacement you have:

https://www.onshape.com/

and as a Photoshop replacement, you have things like :

https://pixlr.com/

And yes, there are people using these online tools.
Ok, so maybe "representative democracy" (in a strict political sense) was bad terminology to use, but my point is that both experiments set themselves up with a veneer of democracy only for that to come crumbling down when they didn't like the answers they got.
Depoliticize the justice system.

Elected prosectors, elected judges, elected sheriffs, and the politicization of sentencing rules are just completely nuts.
Yup, back at work now and still can't get to it - definitely looks like a corp network/firewall issue.
The Swiss Will Vote on a Universal Basic Income – There's Only One Problem
Police and Tech Giants Wrangle Over Encryption on Capitol Hill
Perlisisms – “Epigrams in Programming”
I don't think you can compare the way you use Facebook with the way you would use AutoCAD or Photoshop...
I think LISP is an excellent fit for the poor text input facilities that touchscreens offer.

Structuring, wrapping an navigating code bodies is very easy, thanks to the simple syntax structure of the language, and you need very few uncommon characters (parens, quotes and dashes being the most common ones), buttons for which would easily be fitted into the touchscreen UI.

auto-completion is also pretty simple, since most of the time the first entry of a non-quoted list will be a function listed somewhere near in a defun, and other entries will often be an identifier nearby. Other cases, such as constants, new identifiers or unknown functions, will need more input work from the user, but this is still feasible.
Nestle is trying to avoid the trap Coke and McDonalds fell into: Only offering unhealthy food choices and loosing the young generation of health-conscious consumers. They can't go the Wholefoods way since organic is inherently more expensive and harder to scale. Nestle is a food-tech company that wants to feed the globe. Now they try to do it in a more healthy way. I don't know why Bloomberg is so negative about that.
They do think it is their right to buy publicly owned municipality water and then sell it back to the public.

I mean with soda at least they are putting a few cents per gallon into it.

There should be a truth-in-advertising law they makes the bottle labels say "filtered publicly owned water $1".
And even ability to execute won't help you without the right social network.

It is extremely rare to see an actual individual being really successful. Most of the time, they are or were part of a company. This is because a person can only devote so much time and skill into anything.

And making the right connection is a matter of place (Ivy League anyone?), time (gold rush is good, recession is bad), interpersonal skills and finally luck.
I suspect you could use the echoic environment to your advantage with a MIMO type system.
One of the problems with the patent system is that it pushes medical research in the direction of drugs because they are easier to market than alternatives such as knowledge of medical procedures.
Lending Club Chief resigns
I've seen no comments about the legitimate use of a laptop in a meeting. I take my laptop to meetings all the time, and am paying attention. I use my laptop to take notes, using a different piece of software for different kinds of notes: Notes for textual bullets, CMapTools for a concept map of the meeting,and a Trello clone (albeit not as good as Trello) for tasks. Usually most of the time is spent in concept mapping, as that is my preferred method of notetaking.

The idea that we all still have to take notes using pen and paper astounds me, and seems horribly inefficient.
> Children wouldn't mind taking medicines so much.

This assumes children can only tolerate maximally-sweet foods like fruit juices, soda, cookies and candy. This fundamental assumption that kids won't eat healthy foods is very dangerous.
"What, let a company supply a substance to intentionally harm people so they can sell them a cure?"

Let's not forget our history here, since it wasn't exactly all that long ago. For decades, the consensus has been that the root cause of dietary issues is excessive fat in the diet, not sugar. Sugar was on the top of the food pyramid not because it was "bad" for you, but merely because it displaced other better things. I've been flame-roasted on HN in the last few years for being on the anti-sugar side, because consensus science and official government positions were strongly against the idea. It still isn't even the consensus today that sugar is the problem.

(My read on the current situation is that the evidence strongly indicates that sugar is a major problem, though probably not the only one, and that the government is moving as quickly as it can to adjust its recommendations while never having to admit they were in any way wrong, which is a process that takes many, many years of little slight tweaks so that at every point they have cover to claim this is what they were saying all along. Such moral cowardice where they'd rather let millions of people continue hurting and dying rather than take even a hint of responsibility is why I don't take my scientific cues from the government and recommend against anyone else doing it either.)

Trying to show that Nestle is "deliberately harming" people would require basically claiming that they should have known all nutrition science and government position was wrong and to some extent is wrong, since treating "Sugar is bad" as consensus is still premature!

(The mercy is that nobody has ever said it's good for you, unlike transfats, so nobody really looks at you too weirdly if you drop it out of your diet.)
I've been developing Horcrux Email Backup[1] over the years. The application had to be desktop by the nature of it. I'm not a living out of it but it is a very good side income. Given the fact that I live in a third world country helps too.

[1] http://thehorcrux.com/
I'm making video games for PC, Mac and Linux (like this one - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900), it's a very traditional release cycle, I work on a project for x months, and then I release it, moving onto the next game after a few weeks of post-launch support. PC games are generally seen as more valuable than mobile games, so I don't need to sell a terribly large volume in order for me, a single developer, to make a living.
No worries, I'm more than happy to answer questions. I love showing and helping others get out there. My site, http://theroadchoseme.com has a lot of details on my Alaska->Argentina drive, and now my trip around Africa.

I'll answer those questions as they apply to Alaksa->Argentina. Let me know if you meant something else, or want me to expand.

>1) What did you eat and drink?

I bought bottled water for the entire trip - it was easy to get 20L of filter water everywhere and fill up my container. I tried to cook all my own food on my little camp stove, rice, beans, pasta. etc. Then cooked food was very cheap in South America, so I was buying it at markets, etc. It was around $1USD for a huge plate.

>2) Where did you sleep?

In my ground tent about 3/4 of the nights, the rest in hostels or cheaper hotels. I always tried to "wild camp" for free - off the side of gravel roads, etc. I never had a single problem or bad encounter doing that.

>3) What was an average day like?
Wake up with the sun, eat breakfast, exercise, break camp, drive about 1-2 hours, then find something to do for the rest of the day - swimming, hiking, markets, cities, reading, chatting to people, walking on the beach etc. then find somewhere to camp (free, hopefully!)

> 4) How did you deal with days like christmas day, new years eve, your birthday, the solstice and any other special day to you.

A couple were lonely and I was a bit sad, for others I had friends fly in, and even my whole family came to Buenos Aires for Christmas.

> 5) Did you see or find anything curious? Something that made you pause and wonder?

Yep. The energy at the magic bus is something I still wonder about. It should be a sad place, but it's actually an extremely energizing, happy place. Something is going on there I don't understand. (I'm not religious... but... I dunno)

> 6) Is that sort of adventure a man thing? Did you ever hear of a woman doing something similar by choice?

Absolutely women do it too! A female friend just drove AK->Argentina solo, and another is setting out in the next couple of years. I met hundreds of solo female backpackers too, having the time of their lives.
Looking for feedback
Looking for feedback for subproject of "Live's worth living" project:

https://github.com/marcin-golebiowski/Anonymous-dating-system

Any feedback is very welcome
I sell desktop software to individuals (not business / industry) at a cost of $50-$100.

I have tested SAAS but have seen that:

* People trust a desktop app more.
* People value a desktop app more as they feel they "own" it and will pay more

YMMV
Write once, crash everywhere! For everyone!
Yeah it's more of a well-connected graph than a tree. Most of the examples that contain a concept that hasn't been covered include a link to where it is covered, and generally completely understanding the details in the example may help improve your understanding of the concept being introduced but isn't necessary to get a basic grasp.
Mind sharing your stack?
For people interested in getting into diving as a sport I recommend reading "Diver Down: Real-World SCUBA Accidents and How to Avoid Them" by "Michael Ange" (just search on Amazon).

It contains numerous case studies of diving screwups that either ended in death or near-death and what can be learned from them to avoid those situations.
What consumers want is a combination of product or service (1) database, (2) curation by category + quality, (3) recommendation, and (4) discovery. As an odd category, there may also be product sponsorship, like with Kickstarter.

Advertisements suck at all of these.
I have this same problem with Python apps. One has to verify if the dependencies are acquired in a reasonably secure way, because security is a second (nay third) thought for developers.

It also makes it difficult to do offline builds.
> is tap water safe to drink?

As someone who lives across the pond, it never ceases to amaze me that this question needs to be asked at all. Is tap water safe to drink? I wouldn't take "no" as an answer unless I'm in some remote third-world country that has known issues with the availability of drinking water. And yet...

Not saying tap water here tastes great everywhere (far from that), but you can be pretty sure it won't cause you any physical harm.
Which is why, interestingly, Chris chose to not take a map when he hiked into the wilderness in Alaska.
> I'm not yet powerful enough to get out of the fraud/shit-show entirely :P

In many organizations, the 'more powerful' are even more greatly hamstrung by mandatory (and fruitless) meetings.
I agree, smaller is better.

Just like big corporations, I am totally convinced that if countries get too big, there is an increasing risk for corruption and evilness.

Just look at Russia, China and the US. Today, Putin is president (cough dictator cough) and he is kinda scary since he is so unpredictable. What if he gets cancer and wants to be remembered as someone who gave Russia more power and start WW3? I will be as scared for Trump if he gains power in the US.

China feels kind of stable, but none of these mega nations feels safe for us living in a smaller country. When so few people gains so much power, corruption is inevitable due to our nature.
As I recall, Levine insists that FOSS is a perfect example of why we don't need copyright, even though (AIUI) it is in fact foundational to most (all?) OSS licences that the authors assert copyright. For instance "How to use GNU licenses for your own software"[0] states right upfront :

Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL).

AFAICT - and I'm more than happy to be corrected - without copyright (that intellectual monopoly against which the authors argue) there would be no enforcement mechanism for the GPL?

[0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
My Calorie Limit – Weight Loss Calculator App
By outside of NYC do you mean just elsewhere in the USA? I didn't realize the situation was that bad in the USA, outside of places such as Flint.

I'm from the UK, and this question never comes up anywhere in the country (I'm aware of the scale differences we're talking about)- if you travel anywhere, you can drink the tap water.
It all depends on where you live Maarten. I'm from Holland. Moved to a 'burb' three years ago after nearly 20 years in NYC. We picked a town where some of the things you mention are still a reality (spontaneous play, kids walk to school in groups, biking is difficult because... hills). Meanwhile, I know that the situation you sketch isn't the reality anymore in large parts of Holland either (many more cars, fewer new developments, not enough kids, many old people).

The article brings up many good points, but the suburb outlined in the article describes a very specific kind. Having lived in a metropolitan US area for 19 years, I relish the lack of noise, the extra space (1 acre) and suburban life in general.

PS It's a little disingenuous to mention the bus/snow situation. Snow days here (5 max) are rare and typically well-warranted. You really cannot compare a 5cm "snowstorm" in The Netherlands with the 1+ feet (40cm) that fell overnight last winter.
Oops. Dratted iPhone autocorrect. On another reply I was forced to hit edit because I told someone that most editors on HN "unstalk" uBlock Plus.

I have no idea under what context I made my iPhone learn that word.
Depends on the audience and the application. As Photoshop and AutoCad are both mentioned, I think that's the benchmark and not something like Facebook that wouldn't benefit as much from running as a desktop client.

On a side-note, didn't Facebook just release a new UWP app and didn't they regret going the HTML5 route to start with (not focusing on native apps)?
You don't need a fibre connection to run JS client side...
Maybe not for those cases, but a lot of apps aren't as demanding as those. So I don't think you can say in general that the web can't compete with desktop apps, maybe only just for specialist cases. The web is good enough that it didn't stop Facebook becoming a billion-dollar company. Mobile is a different matter, but think on desktop how many services are fine to work web only on desktop with no desktop app (especially if they have a mobile app).
Agreed. Some health problems are reversed by making healthy diet and lifestyle changes.

If your body is unhealthy because you eat too much sugar and refined carbs, and you take a pill for that, you now have two problems.
I wasn't but it's a Ruby library while mine is written in the C#. And the usage seems to be rather different. The name might be ambiguous though.
The rule should be "Ask 'why' at least five times" !
Pinball in VR is surprisingly immersive. It's a much better simulation of playing pinball in real life, plus you can press your face to the "glass" to see the fine details of the playfield.
What do we know about the Zika virus?
Their marketing is designed to sell cereal. People unfortunately are happiest (short term) to consume sugary cereal. They really are.

I met a breakfast food operative in the supermarket once. I told him I thought his company should offer a low sugar version. He said everyone tells them to do so, but once it's on the shelves it does not sell.

People want less sugar in the abstract. But they love sugar in their shopping carts, in the mornings, and in their mouths.
That I find harder to believe. A lot of video is going through https, that would be huge amounts.
I see that binary might be interesting. But why add OO to the mix? There are other worlds to mix the best from.

As one silly example, you can consider Google's protocol buffers. They are not particularly OO-y. (I have great sympathies for functional languages, but I don't think they offer too much insight into how to format your data files. And neither does OO?)
Honest question: do you see nothing wrong with someone monetising other people's lack of self control?
Perfect skill reuse does not exist in our industry, one can at best hope that when the next thing hits one doesn't have to learn it from scratch. C++ offers a good compromise between evolution and stability IMO, I could go back to doing C++03 and the tools, libraries, etc would still be there.
Because they have nothing to contribute. Snake oil. You can't share with VirusTotal the data you stole from them, which probably is the only one they have.
They were fine for years without any kind of desktop app, and the HTML5 backtracking was just for mobile. I don't think they ever said they regretted being web-only on desktop from the start. In fact I think it is even a big reason for their success - would Facebook have taken off if it had an installer?
Playtronics was the office they were headed to.
how on earth was this comment worthy of a downvote?
> Also the difference from taking home 250k+ a year and
> 250K+ and a bonus because you hit your targets a year
> isn't 'for the children'

I take it you're unfamiliar with the cost of private schooling.
If 1MB is obesity then what is this page? https://www.javapoly.com
Achieving PHP interop with .NET
Is having your laptop open so different from doodling[0]? Even if there's no comparison, one can work, or puzzle out other issues during those parts of the meeting which they already understand. Banning laptops entirely is a good way to reduce productivity.

[0] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/education/2014/07/keep-ca...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ7oht6TD9c
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519438
Ask HN: What's the best way to get a good computer science grounding?
Every time a new framework or new trendy tool is released, there's always the guy in the comments complaining that people are learning the tools, not the technology behind it.

Aside from school what's the best way currently to get a good grounding in computer science?
anyone making a living from tutoring
That's very poor argument.
And some people are pointing to the magnitude of the recent changes in some places in the US, $8->$15 per hour, as an experiment that perhaps hasn’t been tried before. It’s possible this will be different.

But anyone who claims that minimum wage hikes will affect jobs, is making a hypothesis based on some theory that is far from settled, not a predition based on evidence.
Mayors are not elected officials in the Netherlands (let's hope it stays that way).