skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can certainly point out where various technologies were first discovered, and quite often it is academia (with a few exceptions like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC). But I think this is unfair to industry. What industry does is make usable compact products from these discoveries and one shouldn't denigrate this.

I remember Steve Mann from U Toronto demonstrating his augmented reality devices in the 1990s. They were very impressive for the time -- but they required him to wear a backpack of equipment and absurdly large goggles. We still aren't there yet, but Google Glass made his ideas into a semi-practical product.
Click the drop-down on a meme/clickbait post, then click "Hide all from 9gag.com".

Repeated about ten times, I no longer have any clickbait, and only about 5% memes.
So you think that patents and copyrights get in the way of the ecosystem. But what do you think motivates developers to invent in the first place? Without that motivation where would the ecosystem be?

Famous case is that when Japan opened up to the world, they sent ambassadors out to learn what was going on on the outside. One said, “we have looked about us to see what nations are the greatest, so that we can be like them. We said ‘what is it that makes the United States such a great nation?’ and we investigated and found that it was patents, and we will have patents.”

http://www.iphalloffame.com/korekiyo_takahashi/
I thought thunderbird was not actively maintained? This is great if that is the case.
"Organizations like Kodak, Blackberry, Motorola, Lehman Brothers and Enron are but a few of the many companies that became overly comfortable and lost their battle."

This can be argued for the first three of these, but Lehman and especially Enron were slaughtered by the relentless pursuit of (financial) innovation and absence of effective control.
Any country with satellites spends tons of their time gawking at everyone else's stuff, while maybe occasionally predicting the weather.

I think you're really underestimating how much counties spy on each other. Russia stole nuclear secrets from the US and China was recently implicated trying to get plans for US fighter jets. I think stealing military tech is much closer to an act of war than watching people's finances? How about assassinating people you don't like on a foreign countries soil? Because places like North Korea do that stuff regularly.

I'm just saying that this isn't even close to the worst stuff that's come out and I think your outrage is a bit much
Depends what he/she does with the money. There are many things that government won't do and there is no market for it e.g. Polio vaccine. You have to have wealthy individuals to fund these ideas. Never mind that. You cannot design the system to force people to give you the money. They would move with the capital abroad. What do you do then? Start a war? Wealth is not a problem. Corruption and poverty are.
Anyone know of a Mac OSX alternative to this?

I don't think you can run it under Mac natively.
LinkedIn is also a case study on dark pattern UI. I honestly do not understand how a company can fuck up their product to such a degree and still have such traction. Blows my mind.
It's been a while - but pretty much what Reason address - although I'd prefer filling in SML for js-ish syntax.
Mastodon seems like a promising alternative. From the description: "Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance and participate in the social network seamlessly."

https://mastodon.social/about
I agree. I started using apple mail and then Nylas but reverted back to gmail web interface after a few months. Unless you want to store emails locally email clients don't make sense.
I don't see how this will not lead to - rich gets richer - phenomenon.
Scientists who have highly cited papers are by definition already well established (full professors in tier 1 institutes who are already well-funded or might be occupying an endowed chair position). Do they really need tons of grant money to do further research? As per this scheme, they will be the ones getting the share of grant money.

And currently scientists in academic institutions are already giving more than 50% of their grant money as overhead cost to the institution.
I am glad that Sony Z5 has a camera button, it is much nicer and more natural to use than trying to touch the screen
People like me who have friends all over the country would have a very hard time keeping up to date and in contact with a lot of people we really, really like.

Seriously if your social circle expands to more than 40 miles in every direction, Facebook is useful as hell. Even with the clickbait bullshit and invasive ads.
And then they charge %3 foreign transaction fee.
At that point who cares if it has a PIN.
Uninvited and super annoying audio starts playing within 10 seconds when I open this page. And not just one, but two audio streams overlapping each other. Took me a minute to figure out why my background music suddenly went to shit. Didn't expect Harpers website to be so spammy. I have adblock and made no difference.
> but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.

Good lord, is this really true? I don't know about you people, but the basic pre-reqs for my undergrad had a single overview economics class where we covered among many other things the definitions of capitalism and profit and the idea that profit equals the difference between the sale price of a commodity and the cost of goods & labor used to produce it -- literally the definition of profit disagrees with the idea that wealth is created at the top, whatever that is even supposed to mean.

> When you think about it, it’s insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.

There's a lot about the world that gets completely insane if you think too much about it. Cars are insane. Jobs are insane. Politics and money are insane.

We have to have better options for smart people than highly compensated and interesting work at Facebook and Google. How do we create better options? I don't think pointing it out will cause better options to materialize.

> Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society’s biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income.

> But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in “solidarity” with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society’s strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.

OH! That's all we need to do, eh? It's so easy! :)

It's not the first time this has been suggested. There are even names for this. And it sounds great. But the forces keeping our system the way it is are stronger than this. The narratives we need about the origins of wealth already exist, and they're not strong enough to turn the tide. I don't know what is strong enough to turn the tide.
OK so it will eventually load if you bang it enough.

This is a collection of papers written Ken Iverson[1], some with his frequent collaborator Aden Falkoff. The most important, longest, and latest (1980) is Iverson's "Notation as a Tool of Thought" from the CACM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_E._Iverson
The email alerts have never worked reliably for me. For messages they arrive a week later, if at all. And I regularly get emails telling me I have 50+ notifications, but there is actually just a few.
It's been totally unreliable and random since I joined many years ago.
>> DSLRs are quicker, sharper and have much better low light performance.

Sharpness and low light performance have less to do with the type of camera you're using than the sensor and lens combination you have. DSLRs might still be faster than mirrorless for action, but for the average person, that speed difference probably isn't meaningful enough to justify the added bulk.

For most people, the best camera is the one you have with you, and for most people, I highly doubt that's going to be an DSLR.
This article is very light on details about the proposed next-gen adaptive optics system. If you already know what that means, the only new info I could glean was that they mean to use seven laser spots ("guide stars") instead of one.
The problem is we don't tax wealth directly, only when it's transferred. A large portion of government spending is to protect the value of capital, but we fund it largely with taxes on incomes.
>Does anyone here really believe Facebook deserves to be a multi-billion dollar company?

Not as soon as I find a link or invite to Marxbook, the non multi-billion dollar Facebook competitor all my friends and everyone I meet every day is on! Unfortunately - I don't know how - but somehow I can't seem to find a link. Do you need an invite? I've tried the obvious search[1] but I simply can't find it.

Since this is an anonymous forum where I won't face any repercussions, I am going to admit to you that in my heart of hearts I am beginning to question whether Marxism really works at all. In moments of weakness, I think the answer to the question

>Does Facebook deserve to be a multi-billion dollar company?

is, "obviously yes!". It would help if I could at least sign up to Marxbook. I feel like I'm not being a good member of the Proletariat. How does North Korea do it? Maybe we could try shutting off the electricity every night. It might not make Marxbook happen, but it would at least reduce Facebook usage. Capitalist pigs.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=marxbook
Is Dr. Calvin in the Room?
When it finally comes up I'm surprised to find it's an offshoot of the Computer History Museum, though odd it isn't hosted out of their normally bulletproof site, computerhistory.org.
What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message.

Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier.

Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc.

Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices.

[1] http://www.claws-mail.org/
In support of the claim that 16MP is enough, it is also instructive to recall that a full magazine page at 300 DPI is ~8.4 megapixels. So 16MP is technically just about good enough for a double-page spread.
This was in HN a while back. Take a look at the graph.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

Alternatively, read the DoJ report on Feeguson.
This, one of the key perks of Sandstorm.io is that you can use apps written in any language that runs on Linux pretty much.

Cloudron.io is fairly similar, though makes some different design choices.
At the end of the day it's peoples' choice whether they choose to read sites like that, which pages they like on Facebook, etc. Those sites are popular for the same reason newspapers like the New York Post and the Daily Mail are popular. For as long as newspapers have been published online, those sites have been part of the web. Maybe not BuzzFeed, but sites posting sensationalist content.

Wikipedia is definitely able to compete. It is the 5th most popular website, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of every online tabloid and content farm.
Or even the recipients: "If my children are competent, they don’t need my money. If they’re not, leaving them a lot of money is only doing them harm."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese-philanthro...
I was thinking about trying this in a Linux VM with VirtualBox, but maybe someone already knows why that wouldn't work.
Trojita is a really well written client. Fastest GUI based email client I've used, easily. They're still lacking on full PGP support though so I'm sticking to mutt for now.
Their Amiga emulator lasted 2-3 weeks before they pulled it offline, probably due to legal issues.
Astroid – Fast mail user agent based on Gtk, Webkit and notmuch
It's been a few years since I worked on Draft, but can't you just define a custom block style to implement alignment?
in response to your first question, yes of course. it's thier job.

w.r.t. your second question, this is where things start to get grippy. see my response to another question referencing "realpolitik". in this context, then whether or not they should becomes a secondary consideration at the policy level.
This is how all alphabets came into being:

1- Egyptian hieroglyphs

2- Sinaic script

3- Phoenician script.

Then alphabets evolved from that like Latin and Greek with all the bells and whistles. Semitic scripts on the other hand remained true to its roots and didn't evolve to have dedicated vowels early on.

Arabic as a Semitic language descended from Syriac and Aramaic and thus lacked distinct vowels. Heck early Arabic script didn't make any effort to differentiate similar looking consonants as diacritic were totally missing. Case in point, Hejazi Script, one of the early Arabic scripts lacked vowels, vowel diacritics and consonant diacritics but only possessed the defining quality of cursive/adjoining writing.

However, for later versions of the Arabic script, things improved substantially esp. when it had the full support and backup of the then-young and burgeoning Islamic state, and thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets but retaining a few distinctive features like compactness.

So, yeah you can say that vowels were afterthought in early Arabic scripts but definitely not for the current system in use for centuries now and that's why I characterized his/her statement as an orientalist claim that's completely inaccurate and improper.

For Ottoman Turkish, I get the frustration that some Turkish speakers may have had with reading or writing in Arabic script. Original Arabic script is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for any language. It needs first to be extended and re-purposed to meet the requirements of the target language and with languages like Turkish with a wider selection of vowels, it gets tricky to work around the limitations of the script like vowel diacritics.

Absent these additions and workarounds, it becomes more advisable to make the switch to more accommodative script like Latin and forgo the succinctness and terseness gains of the Arabic script and that's why I view Kurdish written in Arabic script as a big mess as the developers opted to full hard code of the vowels in the script while dropping vowel diacritics altogether.
Part of why Facebook paid such eye-popping sums for Instagram and Whatsapp is any network that gains critical mass poses a real threat, that monopoly is not as ironclad as it seems.
Gmail has keybindings for most actions I think.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gmail+keybindings&atb=v16&ia=cheat...
They have two US air force bases, and we just sold them eleven billion dollars of arms. There is no question that they are an ally, there's just a chance that will change.
> But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises.

I guess fuck all the parents who think their kids deserve more than an economically-optimized future?

Seriously with the future of humans doing work so utterly in question right now, especially work that can be done by "drones," this advice is fucking archaic. The days when you acquired some base skill, got good at it, and worked at it for 60 years till retirement are gone. I'd rather be broke and happy.
I share your frustration. Unfortunately, public schools are not places where remarkable people tend to congregate, and those near the mean are typically not equipped to teach such technical subjects, or even recognize the value in having young children learn them. There is vast potential wasted in our [U.S.] public school system.
To be fair, CRISPR-based technology looks to be a much, much bigger deal than Page Rank. It's not really much of a stretch to analogize this to the invention of the planar transistor, or the internal combustion engine.
> Do you really want to convert the lines one-to-one?

Yes, as much as possible!

> This seems pretty wasteful.

No, it's not! The more 1 to 1 the rewrite is, the more of it is possible to be done automatically.

Assuming your language gives you enough expressive power, it's often faster to write a library of shims for semantics and translate syntax automatically... in the worst case with a bunch of regexes - even that works better than manually writing the code from scratch, even if you read and drew inspiration from another implementation.

As an example, I started porting Python code, the PyParsing library, to Io[1]. I stripped docstrings for the moment, but if you open it side-by-side with the Python code, you'll see that it's almost line-to-line identical, except for the syntax. To do this I first wrote a library emulating some of Python features in Io[2], then passed the original code to a series of around 20 regexes, which resulted in not-working-but-close Io, which I manually corrected.

Now, writing 1.5k (it's about a half of PyParsing for now, not finished) lines of a library (not to mention 3 times as much docstrings, which you can reuse if you keep your translation close to original), even if you had previously a quite good understanding of such a library, wouldn't take two days. Which is exactly how much time it took me using this approach.

Of course, how beneficial this method may be to you in practice depends on the target language and how well it matches features of the original or how easy it is to extend it. Io and Racket are two examples of languages extremely well suited to this approach, but you can do the same with JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PERL and many other high-level, meta-programmable languages, just with a bit more effort.

Anyway, my two cents, as I recently had such an experience :)

[1] https://github.com/piotrklibert/ioparsing/blob/master/src/pa...

[2] https://github.com/piotrklibert/ioparsing/blob/master/src/sy... and str.io
> Kids are society's problem

Respectfully, I'm sad for children whose parents think society is going to look out for them. Every kid deserves a couple of people who take personal responsibility for their behavior and well-being.

I have a pretty high tolerance for kids being bouncy and boisterous, but it's always nice to see parents giving the sort of information that helps them become considerate:("Look, that woman's trying to read. She wants it quiet!" -or- "That lamp could break - can you find a safer place to bounce your ball?")

Another big issue that isn't always mentioned is diet. A kid who eats a "normal" amount of sugar, corn syrup, and zero-nutrient high-carb products will understandably be going berserk on the outside because they're on a blood sugar roller coaster on the inside.

As an alternative perspective, I think that in France "kids are society's problem" doesn't mean building special places where they can run rampant, but training them to appreciate the culture and society they're inheriting. French kindergarteners spend 90 minutes sitting down to a white-table-cloth four course meal each day during school. This is done because it's considered essential for them to learn the table manners and appreciation of the cuisine that will allow them a lifetime of enjoyable, civilized dining.

(I think the creation of lots of "good", dignified jobs in the kindergarten-chef field is a wonderful side benefit, as opposed to cafeteria workers in the US who can hardly feel fulfilled while dumping bags of frozen nuggets onto trays.)
But only for a very short period of time (4 seconds on average).
If you load stuff from disk vs the web, I'm pretty sure those numbers bear out. BTW I was happy to write the code, but he wasn't happy to take the pull request. That's fair enough but it changed my calculations on where to spend my hobby time so I wrote my own version of his code.
"Given the heat of pushback on small tax increases, I wouldn't bet on this happening without chaos."

There's a big difference between pushback on increasing taxes from zero to five percent, or ten to fifteen percent ... and pushback on increases from 40 -> 42% or 45 -> 48%.

In the US, it is the latter that we are most frequently discussing and it is the latter that gets all of the pushback that you find so familiar.

If you think your chlorine level is too high in your pool, shouldn't you oppose all increases, no matter how minute ?

If your blood pressure is too high, shouldn't you be opposed to all increases, regardless of how small or how much "you can afford it" ?

Some people (like me) think that effective tax rates of roughly 50% (US, California, Marin County) are too high. I would then, ipso facto, be opposed to further increases and I am troubled by the fact that this is considered a definite political marker. It's not.
According to Sir Googalot....

Europe includes 51 independent states. Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are the transcontinental countries, partially located in both Europe and Asia. Armenia and Cyprus politically are considered European countries, though geographically they are located in the West Asia territory.

Also, there are 28 member states in the European Union: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden ...

Granted, five eyes is more like fifteen these days, but still, doesn't make it right or just because everyone is doing it we should just tow the line, doff our caps and cry for more. Some of us have been fans of Dickens and Kafka far too long to know that.

[Edit] - Going to try and update this post here because I'm not allowed by HN to post very often currently...

--- snip ---

First of all I don't see any comments here that say that the US are the only country that spies. I mention this since it seems to be a straw man that is stuck on repeat.

Secondly, surveillance done right takes a heck of a lot of resources and infrastructure; and even though all countries and humans partake, some have rather more resources and connections to accomplish these goals than others.

It's kind of like the 1% - there's nothing wrong "technically" with 1% having half the cash (given that it is ultimately reinvested), the problem is abuse of power that comes with it and lack of oversight.

Ultimately, we have seen stories repeatedly regarding US and Western technologies for surveillance, not Palestinian, Iranian or Luxembourgian... and this is another one.

How many is that this week/month/year/decade?

My family has been in and around SIGINT/COMINT for decades so I'm hardly surprised, although it is a bit surprising how comedic it is seeing people comparing the capabilities of the NSA to that of nations with less GDP than Luxembourg.

I think it is good to "Have the conversation", whether it be right or wrong to infiltrate SWIFT et al.