skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fitness is an early-adopter market too. It's worked better because fitness nuts are incredibly passionate early adopters - build something that appeals to them and you get rapid uptake. But they're still quite limited in number, and that's eventually going to prove problematic for hardware startups that target them, at least if they're funded and burn cash as if they're a mainstream product. We saw Go-Pro hit the wall in mid-2015; Fitbit is next.

I own both an Apple Watch and a Moto 360, and I was really hoping to see the smartwatch market take off - enough that I wasted a year or so on app development for it. IMHO, the problem is that the "whole product" isn't there yet. I think the killer apps for smartwatches will actually be in logistics: replace managers & foremen with software, which interfaces with the line workers via smartwatch. The beauty of a smartwatch in this situation is that you can be doing other stuff with your hands, which you can't do with a phone. Imagine, for example, a retail store with no employees, where you walk in and your watch guides you to the items of interest, displays prices as you try out items, and then lets you check-out by tapping your wristwatch and having it instantly charge your credit card. Or a restaurant where the waiters know instantly when a table is waiting, and never mess up an order.

But that isn't a smartwatch app, that's a complete value chain, and building out the customer relationships and back-end software is non-trivial, probably the majority of the work. Nobody's done it yet, and probably nobody's going to do it until you get a critical mass of customers with smartwatches, so there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Another factor (according to the excellent Battle of Wits by Budiansky) was that the Germans were overconfident that Enigma was unbreakable. Turned out their confidence in the hard computation that would need to be done to decode Enigma was wrong.
I wonder what the most compressable language is. Would it be a C-style language due to {, }, and ; or LISP like languages due to ()s everywhere?
Also, OpenJDKs packages exists for various GNU/Linux distributions.
That's not how it works. There's the tariff union TBNE which covers almost every train in the country. I can use non DB trains without a problem (e.g. the HKX) - just not this one (and Thalys).
Shifting the blame between the various railway companies also happened in The Netherlands. On top of that, swapping train between different corporations doesn't work in a user friendly way (you need to log out and in, or be considered a free rider) because nobody in IT has figured out to fairly calculate and share the profit fairly. Since the government doesn't stimulate or punish this behaviour there's no incentive of corporations to fix this. They've been saying since forever that they'd fix it.
They also present their car service as "car sharing", but it is just another taxi service. So you don't share your care, but just go where the client tells you to go whenever you want to go there or not.
If there are good jobs there, people will move to just about anywhere, transit or no, boring or not.
IBM is doing the same thing.axway too. And I bet a ton of others too.

Making money is no soooo easy: hire sales,drain the engeneers.
Resign and allow an economically sane government instead of a communist former bus driver to run things. I know he loves power but you'd think he could look at the food lines and horrific hospitals and admit someone else might be better qualified.
I've been trying to replace most of my daily (chrome-based) browser tasks from my macbook air to an ipad pro 12" for the past 2 weeks. Trying to do anything reasonable on safari/chrome for iOS is a pain in the ass, and is nowhere near desktop replacement level. I really wish it was, and I use "request desktop version" often, but even then so many sites are so broken. Safari mobile is just not ready for this "serious" work. We need a desktop-level browser on iOS.
Slow? Okay, we don't have as much high-speed rails as France, but e.g. Hamburg-Munich (775km, once across the whole country) is 5:40h, while traveling by car is ~8h.

Flight may be 1:15h pure flight time, but you have to add 1.5h of public transit time to get to/from the airports, plus ~1h for security and pre-boarding wait times, and luggage costs are enormous. Oh, and the security checks make you feel like a terrorist.

Buses are f...ing cheap, but take ~10-11h.

So, the train is still the fastest and most time-efficient way to travel across big distances. The only problem is that it's expensive as hell, because unlike the regional trains, the ICE trains don't get any public subsidies and have to be profitable on their own.
For groups pushing any of those reforms you need to start by omitting the largest opposition coalition (MUD). They propose no such reforms, just that the government should "do things better" and be "less cynical". Implicitly, the message is that they would do a better job, but nowadays no one believes them.

So far, two politicians come to mind. Leopoldo López (who is in prison) and María Corina Machado (who has been removed from mainstream MUD and derided as a "divisionist" by the MUD themselves). Their reach is extremely limited, though. No access to goverment-controlled media and conveniently forgotten or shunned by mainstream opposition.

Regarding Ecuador, I'm not sure. I do not have a full picture of the economic circumstances Ecuador considered then and how they relate to ours, right now. If anything, --if-- we were going to try that measure it should be after we try other methods to increase trust on our currency and then find them to be insufficient, I think.
What makes you think those carriages are significantly less efficient than those made today? The engines[1] are fairly modern. Plus, they only drive at a leisurely (and more efficient) 200 km/h.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_ES64U2
Not to start a big discussion about infinitesimals, but don't they generalize a lot worse than limits?
For example, what are their analogies in non-metric spaces? Say in topology or category theory?
Slightly unrelated: I often find myself in the browser console, exploring data scraped off webpages (often from Wikipedia tables). I think REPLs are another kind of "tool of thought". E.g.: I recently scraped my country's election results off Wikipedia to see how voting areas affected the distribution of seats. Very insightful.

Being tightly integrated to the browser offers the whole web as a data set. Unfortunately JavaScript does not lend itself very well to data analysis.

What is your tool of choice for interactive data exploration?

I've been looking for something similar for my phone, a sort of calculator-on-steroids even if not web-scraping ready. J for Android[0] fits the bill perfectly... except the language itself seems to get in the way with its short mnemonics, unrememberable verb train rules, function composition words and other weirdness in the construction of tacit phrases. I've (partially) learned and forgotten J three times already. Every single time I come back is like starting anew.

I tried Clojure too but the Android REPL[1] is stuck on Clojure 1.4.0 and the lack of an S-expression enabled keyboard/editor makes it a pain to code.

Any recommendations in this area?

[0] http://www.jsoftware.com/

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sattvik.cl...
Book Review – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
I am german and have seen a lot of Audis, BMWs on the inside and recently had a test drive with a Model S because i contemplated getting one, but the interior quality at that price point is kind of a deal breaker, even though the electric drive is amazing. I don't even like the giant touchscreen too much, i think it does not work very well in a car, the knobs and buttons in in combination with touch screens in the german brands work better imo. In general if you compare the Tesla to a new Audi Q7/A4/A5/TT-S with their Virtual Cockpit and overall interior quality, the Tesla feels downright cheap, more like a Hyundai/Mazda than any of the german high end brands. Parts of the Tesla i love, but for this amount of money i'd still rather get something else.
There are few things which can be more embedded in your app's architecture than the data store, especially if the initial (and reasonable) assumption is that you won't ever switch away from it.
> Instead, you'll use Mono and its bindings to GTK or QT. This is exactly how it should be.

Oh, I'm quite clear. My point is that, if the stack had delivered on the premise of the idea of WinForms-level-easy GUI development, why haven't Mono-based GUI apps proliferated on Linux? Yet, after many years of including Mono in Ubuntu, they've pulled it from the default install.

> Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.

Fair enough, but even all the way back in 2000, it was obvious that, if you were going to start from scratch on a language, there was no point in making it closed. There wasn't any more real money to be made in compilers by that point. GCC was being made available on everything, and $1,000 proprietary compilers were dying out.

> Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?

Sigh.
Well, yes and no.

As you know, the italian train system can be divided in two layers: "Le Frecce", fast trains that only stop in important cities and "Regionali", (relatively) slow trains that stop even in tiny towns. The former are fast, pleasant and reasonably priced (especially the Freccia Rossa, the fastest trains in Europe IIRC); while the latter are extremely cheap thanks to state subsides but the experience offered is awful: perpetually delayed, dirty and overcrowded.

People usually complain about the "Regionali", also because they are used on daily basis by commuters.
If your tomatos were expensive, dirty, and three-quarters rotten, and the Italians start selling better, cheaper tomatos, are you going to be upset, or rejoice?

Depends on whether you are invested in providing terrible, expensive, mostly rotten tomatos.
Rosling's cheery stats are a good antidote to the usual horrors you see in the news.
The ‘oddball’ flying machine that would have revolutionized delivery – in 1892
SQL Server is meant primarily for enterprises, what they're doing makes sense. IMO if they want to be super nice* they could provide a zip package which other distros can turn into their specific packages.

* Open Sourcing it is probably unrealistic at this point.
Been thinking about related topics recently (probably as a result of this wave on HN) and realized that despite I am still a young pup (30) my goals are not that different. Knowing that certain company is actively hiring older, more experienced folks I would take it as a sign of potentially very interesting workplace where experience is actually needed and office environment might be actually sane.
I suspect TBNE is pretty much what your parent comment meant by "...only for DB trains, and their partners like regional transport associations."

I.e. DB would only partner with regional operators on tracks where DB itself doesn't operate anymore.
I was thinking about this for a second. Specifically about saving on employees.

I guess it is safe to assume on-board jobs don't have a bright future. Those are up for automation.

So maintenance staff remains? But can't that be a separate entity? Just like with cars? That might solve the safety issue too. One has a bad rep? You go to another.

It's just that one public operator doesn't seem to work well either (lots of issues in countries with those too).
that's the beauty of the vibration. You don't need to look at your watch to get a fifteen minute warning (or whatever you've set it to). The buzz is silent to others, but enough that you'll recognize it.
Sun cut off MS from Java because MS was creating an incompatible version of Java. That's the extend step.
There's also the case of child pornography, which can't be reasonably defended against copyright infringement in countries where it is illegal to even possess. But there are other incentives (money, sharing with your neighbor) which keep it going, which do well enough.

The idea that you can't claim copyright infringement stops new things from being made is a fallacious one.
Chile is culturally homogenous isn't it? Ethnic background of its population varies, but they're already all Chileans today.
You could post a hash of the paper to a trusted host like Twitter at the point you submit it, and you could then refer to that for proof of authorship and priority at a future date.
> Walk around Berlin right now and count how many "screening" checkpoints their are in the train stations. Spoiler: there aren't even doors on all the entrances. Somehow, as if by magic, trains are clean and run on time. The strongest smell is from the food vendors in the attached mall.

Times have changed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Zoologischer_Garten_rai...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_F._%E2%80%93_We_Chi...

"Cinematography is bleak and dreary, depicting a dilapidated, working-class Berlin with rundown structures and dirty, blighted backdrops. Modern Berlin is very different and most of the landmarks from the movie (the station, the Bülow street stalls, the Sound discothèque) have either been demolished or completely remodeled."

"Most of the extras at the railway station and at the Sound club were actual junkies, prostitutes and low-lifes rounded up by producers just for the crowd scenes. In the scene where Christiane runs through the alleys of the station to find Babsi, the camera lingers on several terminal junkies leaning against the walls of the underpass. In a 2011 interview, Thomas Haustein, who plays Detlev and was still in school at the time, recalls how terrified he felt being surrounded by all those real-life addicts, but that he was able to successfully copy their behaviour for his character."
In my opinion, the way for ARM to succeed in the server space is:

1) One quarter the price for equivalent performance for server task (e.g. 500 USD for 48-core Qualcomm vs 2000 USD for 16-core (32-thread) Intel). E.g. the problem of 48-core Cavium ARM chip was poor performance, that could be fixed by Qualcomm, with better IPC (big enough L3 cache, and 3 or 4 OooE).

2) One quarter the power usage

3) Reliable and affordable motherboards

4) Devices at similar price vs Intel ecosystem (high performance Ethernet, Infiniband, PCI-E SDD, etc.)
But that's the same pretty much everywhere. The Austrian Railjet Vienna - Salzburg, for example, isn't subsidized at all, but still much cheaper than DB. Or check out the prices of the Austrian operator "Westbahn". They are even using brand new Stadtler train sets, not decades old DB cars like Locomore.
Cities like New York, LA, Boston, DC, SF have bigger governments than many states, and even larger than some countries.
Are you sure the people that will do it are the ones you want to be doing it (if you are paying?). If they are so vastly underestimating their market value, perhaps it's because they are actually vastly overestimating their ability.
In EU, you have to pay to enter a public bathroom. But as return, the bathroom is kept clean (or at least that is the idea).

I read a story the other day how restaurants allowed free bathroom usage to tourists in Germany. This was paid by city council, and allows for a more pleasant stay of tourists. So they like to come and/or return. Word of mouth works.
The cheapest DB ticket may be as cheap as Locomore, but Locomore's maximum fare is half as much as DB's (~75 EUR).
The Copenhagen interpretation also seems most in line with how we think of Quantum computing?: You manipulate the complex wave forms (interference), and at some point you make it collapse (experiment) and get results with the predicted probabilities.
Shopify has paid over $300k in security exploit bounties
Philip Wadler: A prettier printer [pdf]
Some kind of new political organization might come out of all the worsening things that are happening as people lose trust on an ineffective mainstream opposition, but I haven't seen it as of yet. So far all I see are people trying to get by at the levels of the individual and the family.
Briansbit
Yeah, but the trains are half as good and half as fast.
AVG is a threat. When you can't uninstall a piece of software completely with normal means and have to start ripping it out by the roots with special tools, there's something wrong.
Sybase SQL Server 4.2 and Microsoft SQL Server (circa 1993) were identical. The products have since diverged, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase#History

Sybase 11.0.3.3 for Linux was made free for production use somewhere around 2002. It is still useful for some applications, if you can find the binaries, http://froebe.net/blog/2013/03/10/howto-installing-and-runni...
Thanks Sharmi. I will investigate further. Anyone have any experience using this service?
That is what I meant. I may be a bit outdated with C# versions, still working with 4.5
The Saudis are the principal funders and ideological exporters of terrorism and our closest friends in the region so it doesn't take genius to figure out what is happening.

Its nearly impossible for terrorists organizations and certainly not anything like ISIS to exist without state support. Its now well know they are being funded by Turkey, Saudis and the US intelligence forces.

So we are funding terrorism on one hand and then spending billions of dollars on to build a surveillance state to protect ourselves from our own actions, both of which benefit the state, intelligence agencies and defence contractors.

I think things are now are farce level and democracy is near meaningless if these state actors are allowed to do whatever they want.
> Yes, "social policies" like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Would you prefer planning that tells those people to stay at home where we can pretend they don't exist?

This is one of the reasons why there's 1st and 2nd class train wagons. If you don't want to sit with "the plebs", get a more expensive ticket and go 1st class together with the other travellers in suit.

This does not exist for busses AFAIK. Although one could walk, rent a bus, rent a car, carpool, or grab a taxi (renting a train(wagon) is actually also possible in some countries/regions).
You mean the CTRL-L query profiler, the table editor and the server performance monitor that the MSSQLMS had since 2005? Or is there something else?
:)

So I've read everything of his at least three times. And I'm waiting. Anyone know if something's immanent?
This makes a lot of sense. Or take some kind of consulting position, where you just advise and help the newer people grow into more senior positions.
Pleasantly surprised to see the stats for a change.
From a brief look Trenitalia seems about the same as DB. The express train Milano - Roma is 89 EUR. I think DB would charge something like 100 EUR for that. The travel time (2h55 for ~420 km) is impressive, I'll give you that. I wonder how many stops there are on the way -- not too many I'd wager.
Great list, especially for a highly caustic base :-)
> The first pig could be like Martin Shkreli, pricing necessities beyond the reach of people who need them.

Source? Who was unable to buy the medicine? According to him IIRC about 60% of the drug is given for 1$ or some nominal. Also, most people's insurance buys it.
The Pebble Classic v1 did not ship with a lot of functionality for notifications, music and alarm (I remember needing Music Boss for a while), but later on I got all three working (it was permission related). The notifications can be customised. Firmware also did extend such features at the price of less uptime (mine went from 7 to about 3 days).

The lack of a to-do app is a huge one for me. Why? Because the use case of using a smartwatch with a grocery store list is huge for me. I'd use it twice a week, at the very least. Replacing the screen on my phone sets me back 85 EUR. A Pebble cost me ~115 EUR (including duties & S&H). And with all the kids and perky people in the grocery store the question isn't if my phone is gonna drop, its when. It is just so unfortunate that Google Keep doesn't have a public API. There also isn't an abstraction layer for to-do lists (I, for one, am not going to pay for a subscription app like Evernote with a cloud based in US). Preferably I'd self host, and gladly pay a one time fee for such an app.

> Everyone I know with Pebbles love them, but they tend to be more technical users who wouldn't get stressed over a few bugs.

Yeah, that and lack of apps/features perhaps makes the device just not user friendly enough. You can't sell that if you focus on productivity, but you can mask it if you're going for fitness.
All of these changes that the author is making are changes that the compiler should be generating.

Unless you work in the embeded systems I don't expect people to have done or needed the % 2048 trick.
What's the point of ASP.NET webhooks
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2016/12/14/introducing-microsoft-asp-net-webhooks-preview-2/

What does it actually do of use over ASP.Net standard functionality that can easily handle webhooks anyway?
> What makes you think I stopped reading?

Well his complaints about the talk are after the "loon" bit, and you didn't say anything to the effect of, "well he called me a loon but did explain his position", so I figured.
New BBC Podcast: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
> Is it just me that stopped looking into smartwatches because they became too fitness oriented?

What would really matter is some kind of market research. Did Pebble do those? Or did they just follow Apple/Fitbit and bet on the wrong horse? Did they bet on the wrong horse?

> I loved the focus on productivity and having a watch becoming slower because it had to track an increasing number of health metrics I couldn't care less of actually killed it for me.

You appear to assume the two are mutually exclusive. You know you can put off the fit part of the Pebble?

As for the article, the graph backs up what I concluded reading the previous threads:

1) The Pebbles were relatively cheap with low profit margin. (early Kickstarter adopters got the device a bit cheaper than the final price)

2) Pebble did not yield enough volume in sales.

3) People don't buy a new Pebble every year.

4) No resale value (like Apple devices do have).

Add to that

5) Profit margins are much higher for expensive, luxury products.

6) Not deep enough pockets to sustain (other companies have their smartwatch dept on 'life support').

7) Due to its immaturity the smartwatch cannot replace the smartphone as of yet, nor can any other portable device of similar size (ie. a "Google Glass").

8) A perceived 'fitness' niche puts the smartwatch in the position of complimenting the smartphone instead of replacing it. This is only short term beneficial.

9) Is there even a market for a low power, high uptime (juice-wise) smartwatch? Do customers complain they need to refuel every day? How important is it? I'd like to compare this to the zealotry Apple put in size of the MBP, sacrificing horsepower (RAM, battery power, ability to replace hardware such as RAM/battery/SSD) and the quality of the keyboard. This while they already had a brand where size mattered over horsepower; the Air.
How the Salaries of Software Engineers Have Evolved Over the Past 20 Years
It probably is, but there's an even better reason: Windows may be worth getting rid of, SQL Server isn't (except perhaps on grounds of licensing cost)

I've worked with all major RDBMS systems at one point or another and SQLS is by far the nicest.