skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow.

UWP isn't a mobile OS ported to Windows. The whole WinRT is an OS and WinRT is an API set confused things. Forget that there was an ARM tablet. WinRT means the Windows Run Time. It's a set of API's that are built with the Windows OS. The "they made it mobile" part was really a side effect of trying to move to a more managed execution model where the OS took a more aggressive approach to managing the execution of an app over it's lifetime.

That has certainly needed improvement since it has been released. The WinRT API set was and is limited to a set of API's that are governed by a security broker. Applications are intended to have an identity, that is a SID, and execute in a very tight sandbox ala Chrome or Edge. It's a good model that makes some of the traditional malware vectors very hard to exploit. (You can't call LoadLibrary, for instance.)

OK. Set that aside for a moment. The desktop bridge uses technology called App-V that has been available to enterprise customers for a long time. It lets you run an installer and it watches all of the things it does to a clean system. It then bundles all of those things into a single file. It provides shims to your code that, for instance, will intercept your attempt to write to a global part of the registry and directs it to a registry hive kept in the file.

What they did in the anniversary edition was include parts of AppV in Win10, and they built a set of technologies that help with the process of "sequencing" a Win32/.Net app. Your application still runs just like it used to. There is no emulation. If you want to use API's that are available in UWP you need to follow some guidance on adopting them. Some are less invasive than others. Its a tradeoff, but it's one that you get to control as a dev and you can share a bulk of your code between Win7 and Win10 builds that use the strengths of both platforms.

So, its a sandbox, but not an emulator. The AppX installation method is more like the ".app" model in desktop OS X where you have a bundle of things for your app. There are also new security model things that you can adopt over time to gain access to new functionality.

You DO NOT have to install AppX packages from the store. You can download them from the Web and double click on them or use powershell to install them. The store is separate from the app packaging tech and API set.

Your comment reads like someone who doesn't use Windows enjoying some schadenfreude at the trouble they have had over the last couple of years. You're going to need to get over that. They are getting their shit together in a big way. Yes their mobile platform failed. They have admitted that and moved on. They produce a lot of software for Android and IOS. You can develop native Linux software with Visual Studio now. They contribute to Linux, Mesos, and Docker. .Net is open source. They contribute to FeeBSD. What more do you want? No one is making you use their stuff. You have never had more options. Why do you feel like that for you to be doing better other people have to be doing worse?
Ask HN: Did IT matter?
In 2003 there was a Harvard Business Review article by Nicholas Carr titled "IT Doesn’t Matter". It argued that companies had greatly overestimated the strategic value of IT, which was providing a diminishing competitive advantage and was becoming just another commodity, like electricity.

At the time it seemed like it was hugely controversial and ruffled a lot of feathers.

Was there any fallout from that article in the industry? To what extent was it correct, and to what extent was it nonsense?
"Why would you consider JS to be a terrible language? "

JS is kind of a 'bad language' because:

1) It's missing some pretty important things. Try to determine if a value is a number. Seriously. Look into that mess. Or anything else. Doing simple type-checking is crazy, and we basically are resigned to 'best practices' - which is crazy.

2) Prototype chaining is a neat idea and has some merits - but in reality it makes things super-duper complicated. Ask 10 JS devs how it works and get 21 answers. That is bad.

3) Almost nothing is built in. You need to use a lot of 3rd party libs to do common things.

4) There is no such thing as 'JS' - ever browser, every version - you get completely different implementations. Maybe we can't blame 'JS' - but pragmatically, this means JS is a problem.

A minor issue is issues with packaging, encapsulation and scale, which is also a function of loose typing. When JS programs get complex, they get unruly, and you wish you might be able to do things in an OO language at that point.

JS is really light, and that has advantages - and I think it's the best language for a lot of async things - and UI's are inherently async - so that's good.

In 5-8 years JS might be 'stabilized' in terms of libs or de-facto standards and it will grow.

To anyone who's programmed in other, more established languages, I think it's clear JS has some weirdness that doesn't need to be there.

But I like it.
I am aware of Calculator and Edge being UWP, which explains Calculator's poor startup time and needless splash icon on loading.

Settings really hasn't replaced Control Panel in the slightest - each item you open in Settings typically opens the items from Control Panel if you go beyond the entry level stuff (all just COM components anyway). Settings happens to be a needless frontend to the same items, but with reduced functionality and a titlebar that ignores the system colour settings (it's always grey despite your settings). For example, try this:

1. Settings let you choose desktop colours. It does not let you choose a custom colour. Open Settings > Personalisation > Background and choose "Solid Color". You have a limited choice of a few colours.

2. Open Control Panel > Personalisation > Desktop Background. This now opens the Settings app, annoyingly.

3. Run control.exe /name Microsoft.Personalization /page pageWallpaper

This will bring up the magical missing dialog (not accessible from any GUI) where you can actually set a custom colour by clicking the "More..." button at the bottom. Setting a custom colour makes the Settings window show the wrong colour for your desktop background, as it isn't in its feebly small selection of colours. So the settings app has reduced functionality that the other existing items in the system that they haven't properly removed or tidied up.

Why add another settings app that has less functionality? Is this the future?

I would stand by my original point that instead of writing new things, why not make the existing items consistent? Icons would be a good start, let alone behaviour like I have detailed above. Why not make the Start menu search use the NTFS index instead of being dog-slow etc? Why do we have 3 different right-click menus? Did we need 2 new ones in Edge and on the Start menu? They can write 2 new menus and an entire Settings frontend but not new icons?

Also, they can successfully change icons in DLLs with no side effects - look at Shell32.dll and observe the new jaunty angled "My Computer" / "PC" icon compared to Windows 7, and stuff didn't break when they changed it. See also the new Recycle Bin (whilst they have also kept the old Recycle Bin icon which isn't used anywhere). It's a mess.

EDIT: BTW, the Cocoa analogy is a good one. It will take time for these things to change in Windows, if they actually bother making the changes. I am not convinced they will. I wonder if they'll just leave it all as it is (like they have done) whilst adding new stuff to duplicate the existing functionality of old stuff.

And what are we meant to do with this 2 million+ lines of MFC codebase we have? What future does MFC have? There is silence on the matter. All in all it doesn't instill confidence at all.

I feel that that small simple changes (like icons) would lead to a better feel of the OS, particularly to the non-techy user who doesn't care about Win32/UWP. And to us end-users who are more techy, it would feel less like a giant rolling ball of 25 years of different technologies, covered in mud.
in principle the software could be forecasting an envelope of possible future trajectories of the aircraft given the current state. if we detect that we are about to commit to a state where our only remaining future options all involve colliding with terrain, we make an intervention.
I was pretty shy / introverted in my early 20's. Got a job as a whitewater rafting guide, where I had to interact with new people every day (in a foreign language). It quickly goes away.

Another friend was terrified of public speaking so started doing stand up comedy, and now helps run one of the regular shows in a pub here.

You have to put in the hours to an extent, it's not just a case of trying a couple of times and giving up. Alcohol helps to a degree, but obviously don't go crazy with it. Probably hanging out with extroverts and taking note of what they do helps as well.
Nerd Love.
If the creators read this, please add MX shaming! Some sites have AAAA records but still use IPv4 MX records.
For anyone paying attention, the dearth of comments in this thread is a key indicator that the most commented threads on HN are all bike shedding threads.

A topic like this suffers from high barriers that prevent the formation of opinions, whereas today's Pardon Snowden thread[0] provides ample opportunity for lengthy editorials.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12494998
The statistical value of a life in the US is ~$10M as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...
Why would any non-retarded person need any help getting recursion? Recursion is not hard.
If you remove Google sites from the numerator, you have to remove them from the denominator too.
Sure, but if you repeat your utterance there's a good chance that the conditions will have changed the second time around- maybe background noise will have subsided or you'll have swallowed that bit you were chewing on and so on. It makes sense to ask you to repeat a couple of times even if it's a computer you're talking to.
"... I do have less ability to do brilliant-late-night-ninja-coding stunts,..."

Isn't this an advantage as well? How many ninja stunts have you seen without hundreds of bugs and being easily integrated into existing stuff and not requiring to change many existing things because they don't fit anymore with the genius code (and thus replacing well tested bits with alpha quality code)?

Being older helps to plan well before you code and get a result that does the job. As you said: getting things done.
You'd be an excellent teacher!
I get why IPv6 is going to be massively important in the future, but we're not (as far as I know) in that future yet, and these sites aren't going to be dropping their v4 addresses as soon as they get V6 ones, so it's not going to be freeing any old addresses up.

So - and this is a genuine question - what is the issue right now with, for example, the BBC not yet having an IPv6 address, as long as they have plans in the pipeline for when v6-only clients need to access them?
I'm kind of astounded that modern planes haven't had this feature for a long time
In what ways having call/cc for free is usefull?

The use of call/cc i see in real programs i am aware of is green threads.
For impersonating Elon Musk... to get confidential information.
Neat ideas. It never even occurred to me that the power rail would be voltage-programmable, but of course it probably would.

Your second idea is even more scary and realistic.
http://www.nightmarejs.org/ uses phantomjs (headless Chrome browser)
This is funny. Singapore is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. Density there, people work so many jobs just to live in the smallest possible dwellings.
I love this bit: "I prefer to spend my college years searching, exploring, and wondering, as opposed to training to become an "asset" in the file cabinet of a "human resource" department. Rock on fellow baristas, rock on."

Translation: "I'll come out of university with no transferrable skills whatsoever. Dreadfully unintellectual dead-end jobs are where I'll be able to keep pursuing my love of knowledge".

Dude.

The author's bio is probably the most important part of this article:

"Grant studies at Wake Forest, where he majors in philosophy and economics."

Translation: "I'm passionate about half the university course I'm currently doing and have absolutely no idea how the job market will treat me when I'm done with it."

Full disclosure: I myself studied philosophy at university. I'm proud of it, but I'd never boast about how poorly it prepared me for the job market.
How do I know they got their statistics right? It seems like a very easy mistake to make to look at health of people and see runners tend to be more healthy, not taking into account that health issues might prevent people from running in the first place. (So running would just be an indicator for health, not a cause).
Yes. The government (customs) already has processes in place to stop and collect GST on any incoming goods worth over AUD$1000. Plus extra duties on certain items like musical instruments etc.

The threshold is probably there so that cheaper items like Sven's moccasins don't use up valuable (people) resources.

However, perhaps they are realising that the millions of small transactions slipping through are costing them massive tax revenue.

Ok, they can fix the 'Goods' side of the GST, but how the heck are they going to police the 'Services' part of it?
This just looks extra confusing to me
The idea is new to me now, but looking back from what Ive seen the last 7-8 years, especially since ycombinator and "startups" becoming hot everywhere, and everyone and their dog starting a startup, the outcome is, candycrush like games for the masses. Easy fun, just look at reddit, it was a place of discussion, now its a place where people take a shit together.

While real problem domains remain unsolved and have diminished in development, such as healthcare.
Seems to be less of a problem in the UK (though may well still be a problem) - I guess I will find out soon.
It just means using some API's that aren't available unless your app is well behaved. No admin access is the big one. Don't write to \Windows or Program Files. That kind of thing.

It doesn't mean...whatever paranoid thing you think it means. Also, its a developer related thing. If you don't have a desktop app that you want to move to the store or bundle in an Appx package for distribution on the web, it doesn't mean anything to you.
NAT. If your server is only available via IPv4 then the client (user) needs an IPv4 address. Sadly there are so few IPv4 addresses that virtually everybody has to share with at least some people/devices and go through NAT (your home/office router, or for countries where ISPs don't have large ip blocks, some large NAT style router at your ISP). NAT is a horrible hack and causes all sorts of issues (port forwarding being the most common issue).

If you make your server available on IPv6, too, then I can use my non-shared IPv6 address to communicate with you which means that the packets don't need to undergo NAT which means a less horrible, faster connection without messy port forwarding requirements.
Completely this.

As someone who was profiled and eventually experienced an attempted-blackmailed by a company in India (employer details gained among other things) - everything seems inconsequential ("I've done nothing wrong"), until it is used, abused (and lies added to) to threaten you.

It doesn't matter whether things are true or not. What matters is, when someone gains details about you, the story and lies they can spin. The cost, distress, and difficulty in trying to resolve and take control of the story can be incredible.

Your personal details should remain just that.

Don't be complacent.
I wish people would just stop pointing this out. While technically true when people refer to React they're referring to the canonical stack that people use (i.e. + Redux).
That's the crux of the problem. The GST is essentially every business person in Australia having to self assess and become a tax collector on behalf of the ATO.

I am scrupulous when tracking GST for my local clients, but when I sell to someone overseas, I haven't a clue about their local regulations or tax requirements, and I don't have the resources to stay abreast of it.

I used to be a consultant for various enterprise systems. In Australia, there are something like 8 total permutations for GST (GST Free, GST Exempt, Capital Acquisition etc. on purchases and sales) Quite straightforward.

However, if you look at the USA, with their local, state, county and federal tax laws across the country, there are something like 60,000+ likely permutations.
They should hire us for remote work! :-)
Sorry, what is this based on? I for one don't like the idea of self-driving cars and that has nothing to do with wanting them to be "100% perfect", or forgetting that human drivers are not safe either.

On the one hand, there are very good ethical arguments, for example about who bears the moral responsibility when a self-driving car is involved in a fatal accident.

Further, there is a great risk that self-driving cars will become available long before they are advanced enough to be less of a risk than humans, exactly because people may implicitly trust an automated system to be less error-prone than a human, which is not currently the state of the art.
This kind of speculation is hardly the preserve of philosophy students, either. It has to be one of the top 10 topics of drunken (and stoned) conversations among undergraduates of all disciplines.
Unrelated Languages Often Use Same Sounds for Common Objects and Ideas
The BBC has more clickbaity headlines than Politico, Fox, Breitbart? Really?

I think the research may need to take a second look at the algos used. Would have been interesting to have the Economist in there as well.
In offices of the future, sensors may track your every move – even in the toilet
People who actually make money on windows development know that WPF and Win32 are not deprecated.

In fact, they don't really deprecate things. They may stop pushing something as the new hotness...but VB6 apps still run on windows. Those data access technologies that no one uses anymore...those still work on windows. If you are worried about your investment in time not being the new hotness, well that's one thing. If you are worried about your investment in effort being abandoned...they have done more to support backwards compatibility that I think is even reasonable.
Great Products Demand Great Sales: Elegant Entrepreneur
The IPv4 address may be a private one, with a NAT box between you and the web site. This is very common on cellular networks (because of the large number of devices), even in developing countries with good allotment of IPv4 addresses. They have to do large scale NAT (CGNAT = Carrier Grade NAT), and it can have a bad influence on performance. During peak time those boxes can become a bottleneck.

Let's take an example I got from a Cisco presentation, when NAT is used. A map web application may have to download a lot of tiles quickly. It's best done using several parallel TCP connections. Each of those connections must be tracked by the NAT box. At scale and for peak time load, this can become a nightmare and some connections may be dropped --- leading to retries and delays in completing the web page display. With IPv6 this issue doesn't exist.

Supporting IPv6 can help providing a better mobile user experience in this case, and is why a lot of the big companies do support IPv6 already. Bypassing CGNAT helps with latency in a situation as in the above example.
MS is seeing that it can't extinguish Linux, as well as the iPhone or iOS system. It has to adapt to it. Making it easier to develop on a Linux subsystem makes people stay on Windows, which still has stuff like Photoshop that blows away Linux alternatives. Plus of course MS Office, for which LibreOffice is a real alternative, but in some environments it's not.
There is no censorship IIRC, the entire thing was overblown. (shocking, huh?)

if you put blacklisted words in your tags, description or title your video gets demonitized. It isn't censorship of content whatsoever.

Did you really think youtube bots were watching every second of monetized content looking for the f-word?
Full text of 'IT Doesn't Matter" http://www.roughtype.com/?p=644

List of reactions compiled by the author http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99
We used one here in the UK when our daughter was young and had a series of chest infections (coughing throughout the night etc.) at the recommendation of the doctor (and it seemed to work).

It might not be big, but there is a market for most things, most places. Your (and my) experience is often not generalisable completely.
I'm not sure. Maybe I would try to integrate the product suggestions into the product more, along with just reaching out to users directly and generally conducting the product in a typical open source fashion.

What bugs me a bit is mostly the constant presence on the Hacker News forum, with this somewhat aimlessly customer-pleasing tone: "What can we do better? How can we improve your experience?" etc.

It seems like a premeditated PR/marketing strategy, which might be working well, but it's still off-putting to me.
I think we should all agree and call it ng2?
You didn't define 'extensive'.

Is it 20-30 miles/week over a long period, which you claim is already way too much for the majority? If I read study [1] correctly the runners were running 3.5 hours a week at the beginning of the study, which would be around 20 miles/week. That same group had a lower incidence of osteoarthritis than the control group.

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim?
I'm not comparing against Angular (which in v1 is known not to be super fast) just between browsers. I was mainly looking at https://vaadin.github.io/gwt-polymer-elements/demo/#gwt/Java... . It uses a lot of widgets on one page. Take a look how on loads in Chrome, Firefox, Edge (refresh to minimize network effects). I didn't go really deep in it, but first look was that lots of time was used in registering custom elements. Sure, here it is wrapped in GWT (which would be my case), but it doesn't seem to add much, rather the fact it loads all widgets from Polymer.
> Their website (http://soixante-neuf.homosexual.horse/veritas/) does seem at least somewhat satirical

How far through the URL did you read before realising that?
Code is code and stacks are irrelevant. As other commenters have said, curmudgeonly old guys say, "I know better" and quite a few of them do ;-). But I think get get your point.

The other day, a promising young programmer asked me how to deal with the overwhelming load of new frameworks. Which ones should he learn? Which ones should he ignore? What should he do if he picks the wrong one? How will he know?

In my opinion, it really doesn't matter as long as he is learning something new. You only get stuck when you try to stick to the things you are familiar with. You need to keep stretching yourself time after time.

If someone says to me, "Do it in Python", "Do it in Elixir", "Do it in Haskell", "Do it in Go"... it just doesn't matter to me. I've been through that blender before a hundred times. In fact, that's precisely why you would pick a guy like me. I'm not trying to keep up with the current trends. That doesn't matter. But I'm also trying not to hang on with a death grip to what little I know.

On the other hand, if you need some guy who knows every single detail of how Rails works, hire a young guy who has only ever worked with Rails before. You need a mix on a team. Pair him up with an old guy so that he gets some perspective before he burns out his career.