skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clearly, Microsoft killed windows phone. Between Windows mobile 6.5 devices not being able to upgrade to WP7, and then again from WP7 to WP8, they weren't doing well to support existing users. WP8 was pretty good on low spec phones though, so you got a lot of new to smart phone users buying the cheapest thing; yes, a lot of apps were missing, but a lot of those run so bad on similarly priced androids that it's almost better not to have them.

WP8.1 added some good things, but also added the ability for the homescreen to swap out; loading... when starting a backgrounded app was bad enough. Anyway, there were new cheap options that were decent and shipped with WP8.1, so.

Then came WP10 -- the promised upgrades for WP8 devices didn't really pan out, the majority of WP8 devices aren't eligible because they don't have enough ram, and very few of the rest were offered the upgrade through the update system, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops.

That's really for the best because the first year of WP10 releases seem like nobody actually tested them on a phone, until Creators Update, which was actually pretty decent -- except for Edge, which is so much amazingly worse than IE, but Microsoft didn't want any other browsers on their store. It doesn't help that there's only about 5 phones available that ship with WP10, three of which are high end, and the low end ones are more expensive than the WP8 phones upgradable to WP10, and have at best, equivalent hardware.

I'm not saying a good WP10 release would have somehow gotten windows phone into 2nd place (even worldwide, where Apple is way behind Android), but it would have kept them out of speculation for which platform would finally fail first -- Symbian, Blackberry, Blackberry 10, or Windows Phone.

Edit to add -- each flavor of Windows Phone strongly encouraging developers to throw out the SDK and start again doesn't help either. There may never been more WP10 users than there are WP8 users right now, rewriting the app to better support WP10 is a waste of effort, and the proposed update to WP10 to stop supporting apps that can also run on WP8 is a great way to kill both platforms.
A good example of why the rich get richer. It would be interesting to see this on a per hour worked basis. Of course, the Airbnb host (maybe) had to work to acquire the capital to purchase the residence, and the drivers to purchase the cars, but it's still interesting to see how wealth begets wealth.

All that said, I am not saying whether such a system is good or bad, just that it's interesting to see it here.
The problem with older studies (such as Card-Kreuger) is that technology has advanced to the point where it is possible to replace at least some minimum wage workers, either through outright automation or increased productivity of other workers. Smart business owners will calculate the costs of replacing an employee with technology, and recalculate them whenever the variables change significantly (such as when the minimum wage is increased). If the numbers check out, minimum wage workers can and will lose their jobs.

So, minimum wage increases, worker's comp changes, tax increases, etc. today may indeed spur job losses where that may not have been true before. We are in a brave new world.
You haven't worked in a large company. :-) Much of the code behind your phone, the train system, chain restaurant ordering and any paper bill you get is likely 10+ years old. These companies undertake 5-year programs to replace ancient systems, and the 5-year programs frequently fail, and run late when they don't.
Huh. I've never even heard of this app in Canada. Around my office we just use PayPal for that kind of thing where needed. Hamilton here (near Toronto).

I've found a lot of us startup brands missed the boat invading Canada and let eBay eat their lunch here. Kijiji beat Craigslist for example.
You are correct in not relying on "any and all info" out there, esp., on topics that carry risk like this.

The best sources are KBs of AntiVirus vendors. The catch though is that malware "names/labels" are not standardized - so each AV vendor names it differently.

Try these to start with:
1. Symantec KB: https://www.symantec.com/security_response/landing/azlisting...
2. McAfee listing: https://home.mcafee.com/VirusInfo/?ctst=1

AFAIK, VirusTotal had some way of giving out virus definitions but not sure now... I need to check.

Some legwork is needed before getting the right info - thanks to the proliferation of SEO tactics, letting marketers float to the - without necessarily any solid content in there.
> I question starting people on Ruby for web development.

news.ycombinator.com and its various tentacles runs on Ruby and Arc
Makes you wonder if on one of these business meetings they discussed the location of the start button.
I'm not sure how accurate the little graph google gives you when you search "baltimore population" is, but it looks like the population is falling.

Less people means less commerce which means less demand for buildings. Perhaps those rundown empty buildings have not enough value for someone to invest in fixing them up (and therefor, have no incentive to employ people to do so).
As someone in their early 30s living in the Valley, I actually don’t know too many people who uses Venmo. My friends are generally not too hung up on having exact numbers, as it isn’t worth the awkwardness & gives the opportunity for someone to be generous.

Maybe I generally just know decent human beings though. Greediness/cheapness is just not a problem in my circles.
Same in Canada. Sometimes you have to tell them in advance so they keep track of each person's orders separately instead of assigning all purchases to the table. I haven't seen a restaurant that outright wouldn't do split bills.
Hell, look at the discovered/mdnsresponder disaster that happened with Apple a few OS releases back for a publically visible instance of this.
It was Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky that killed Windows Phone. They killed it first by being late: Android released September 2008, Windows Phone was released November 2010. Two years behind Android!! They killed it also by being not sufficiently differentiated. Then they also killed it with the bland Metro look & feel. Microsoft learned nothing from previous failures such as Zune.

Microsoft has learned nothing from the failure of Windows Phone, and is now in the process of killing Windows. Yes, Windows 10 is pretty good, but as an app platform it is a failure. Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. And why would any developer make native Windows apps? Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps. So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron. (Yes, Electron is bloated but if your application is substantial this is not a deal breaker.)
>The headline is right - one alarming study isn't the final word, nor should it be. But we seem to be rather quick to let one study confirming our biases to be "the final word" when it confirms our priors, and rather quick to dismiss it as "just one study" when it contradicts them. Neither position is intellectually honest, and if we truly want to help the most vulnerable, we have to do it in ways that are backed by the evidence.

I disagree with this conception of the problem. As the other downvoted comment links the general consensus is that minimum wage hikes of small/medium magnitude are going to have zero/small effect on employment numbers. People like Card/Krueger because there's a lot of good reasoning in it and it's one of the earliest really good studies that showed the effect it did. But they quote it because the effect that it shows agrees with our scientific consensus. This UW study not only goes against consensus but also to an extreme degree:

The UW report nonetheless finds an unprecedented impact of wage increases on jobs, ten times higher than the average in 942 published minimum wage and non-minimum wage estimates, and triple that of minimum wage critic David Neumark. [0]

The UW study also tries to sell it itself (or has been accepted by laymen) as a more definitive study because it doesn't limit itself to one industry. And while it's true that it's pursuing a larger scope the sampling problems in their methodology have made it almost useless. If you refer back to the pdf in the previous citation and you can read about them. So I think people's skepticism about this study is actually pretty well placed.

[0] http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Reich-letter-to-Robert-F...
Heck, I work on a web product, and I regularly work on code a decade+ old. None of the developers who wrote that code are around anymore, except for the heads honcho. It always surprises me when I go to use git blame to see code that old (going to git blame to get a better understanding of the purpose), and at that point it's was actually an svn commit I'm looking at.

Fun times. It shouldn't surprise me that since the code from that time uses Hungarian notation.
What killed Windows Mobile/Phone? The iPhone (the first one) did.

Windows Phone was complicated, and all about the enterprise. The business model was all about selling more server licenses, and everyone having a phone that tied them into that ecosystem was good.

Once Apple put out a phone that normal (non-techy) people could use, it really was over. Their UI was much, much better, and although it had less features to start, all their features worked.

It was all downhill from there.

And yes, I agree with the story that culture was the real culprit:

> We know who/what killed Windows Phone, and it’s not Android. We could point fingers at one or more Microsoft execs as the culprits, but that misses the point: Microsoft culture did it. Culture is dangerous; under our field of consciousness, it sneakily filters and shapes perceptions, it’s a system of permissions to emote, think, speak, and do.
Restaurants in China don't split bills. It's a foreign concept.

You'll often find people at a table fight each other to pay for the entire bill.
You may be assuming incorrectly that there is work that needs to be done - if there is no one who wants to pay to use the building, there is no reason to fix it (i.e. just because an asset exists doesn't mean there is demand for it)
Is 7nm the Last Major Node?
Thanks for the suggestion. After poking around a bit I realized I probably need to factor in weight as well. Good news for me since lighter is cheaper.
> I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it.

What world are you living in? I work for one of the big 5 and 75% of the software stack features I use have been in continuously developed for over 5 years.
I agree with others on the thread that "maintenance or innovation" is a false dichotomy. In particular, I think we need innovative maintenance. For e.g., this article about new ways to fix potholes: https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/217003...
"this outrageous move from the police brought about fierce reaction resulting in tens of thousands of 1-star reviews on the facebook pages of the companies involved"

In the old days, protesters used to physically go and picket in front of company offices. These days, protesters leave one-star reviews. I wonder which is more effective.
Are you a web developer and want to find somebody nearby to hang out with?
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Interesting. The sexist aspect also seems to be a U.S. thing. From that article:

> Interestingly, a recent study conducted in the more socially egalitarian and gender-equal Sweden failed to find the “white male effect.” This national survey of nearly 1,500 households found that, all else being equal—and in stark contrast with the U.S. data—Swedish men and women had very similar perceptions of lifestyle, environmental, technological, health, and social risks
> What you're saying is probably more true in the web dev world.

Any world in which OOP is the primary paradigm. Then again, I've seen truly horrid procedural code as well. Do you have any specific ideas on why the code you're working with seems to be the exception to the rule? Or is it pretty much all in that blog you linked?
Well good and evil is a pretty binary description. You will only have a market if seller (the driver) and buyer (the service operator) are meeting. If the driver do not want to operate under those conditions there is no "invisible hand" forcing them to do so. Of course in lack of alternatives it is a small but easily accessible form of immediate income.
Online Dating Guides Chubby Women's for Male Chubby Chasers
I mean, I think the best way to start with this is to use a word other than "maintenance." That's not really the most sexy word if you really want people to get behind it. Furthermore it just suggests that the work is keeping something as good as it was from the beginning. Filling in holes, giving it a coat of paint every now and then.

What it really should be called is "refinement." The innovation ends up being incredibly crude but it gets the job done. How can we build on that, make it better and less coarse than it was? How can we make it more efficient?
I think those low cost drivers, if they even think about it, believe they're more than covering their marginal costs. They idea that they're essentially paying depreciation plus a small premium to themselves would not go over well if it were more apparent. Perhaps what we need is another anti-ride-sharing calculator where you can plug in a whole bunch of details about your car and insurance, normal driving habits and ride-sharing driving habits and it will tell you how much you make minus the hidden risks/costs.
> Every side of an argument has an element of truth.

Agreed. To have an honest discussion about minimum wage, it's important to recognize that it's two things at the same time. First, it's a minimum wage which most people are familiar with, but second it's also a law that makes it illegal for low skilled workers to get jobs. Yes, we're helping some people earn a better living, but we're also not allowing people to work if an employer or employee aren't creative enough to find a way to make them more productive. It's a trade off, and that's one reason why it's more complicated that most people realize and why a dialog needs to be created around the topic.
> When I went to college in 1986, Pascal was the primary language used in all entry-level courses at Virginia Tech.

When did Virginia Tech switch from Pascal to C++? I did my undergrad there in CS between 2002 and 2006 and the introduction courses were in C++ by then (though I believe they now have switched to Java and Python).

The only exposure I had to Pascal was implementing a compiler for an undergraduate and graduate level course for a subset of the language's features.
As good a time as any to trot out my hobby horse
with suggestions on how to mitigate data rot.
Aimed at science, but more broadly applicable.

"Identifiers for the 21st century"
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414

note/claimer/disclaimer:
Although I am included as an author I do not write that well.
You can increase the rent up to 15% (Berlin) within three years, well above the rate of inflation. This forces some people to move out, as well.

Rents in Berlin are a joke compared to London. You can actually get cheap and plentyful housing just outside the city, but then you'll need a car as well.
I agree, plus a lot of the best hole in the wall restaurants don't take credit cards.
It seems like the Sony Xperia X is becoming a sailfish option: https://blog.jolla.com/sony-xperia-project-update/

Now if only I could work sony's naming scheme. Apparently the x series is the replacement of the z series (what happened to the y series?). Then looking at local retailers, all I can find are the XZ phones, so who knows what they are. Haven't looked at specs yet because I'm lost in code names. I really wish buying from any other manufacturer was as simple as buying from apple.
Yea ditto, I just fixed a bug in some other team's 5 year old code cus it was breaking on some of my team's stuff. Beyond some ungainly test code involving counting byte offsets, it wasn't that bad. The fix involved dropping in some other 5 year code via a library and voila it worked.

I get some of what gp is saying, some older stuff gets abandoned and not improved much, while other stuff gets modified so much that it's sorta like that "at what point does a ship become a new ship though gradual replacement of all timber?" question.
I never considered a Windows phone because it failed to provide a substantial value prop vs Android and iOS. They could have competed on price, physical quality (we still have no truly waterproof phones), battery life (as in not a few more hours but actual weeks of battery, or warranty. That last one would have been the easiest: offer substantially better warranty than Apple (are there any Android phones that have original comprehensive warranty? I mean not through the carrier or Best Buy.)

The other thing to do would have been to offer Android app compatibility. I wonder if it would have been possible to spend that money they paid developers to port apps on developing a decent compatibility layer that would have made the porting unnecessary. Or provide tooling that made APK -> Windows app compilation super easy.

As is, they had a sad story of a phone with some neat features but no big steps forward, in a market already saturated by good-enough competition.
Right. There's a lot of stuff that's in use I wouldn't recommend for starting with.
>not totally sure how to achieve it [replaceability]

One of the most crucial keys is: make your code greppable. For example, don't treat OOP classes as a license to use generic method names ("add", "set", "close", etc.), or it'll be difficult to weed those classes out.
And you're coming into java at a better time - lambdas and inferred generic types for contractor calls reduce the boiler plate a little.
I work on a big java project - I'd love to write new stuff in kotlin though.
Sweden leaked every car owners' details last year, then tried to hush it up
> It lets you take your foot off the clutch ;)

If that's what you like, go for it, but two posts seemed to imply that I'm doing something wrong by keeping the vehicle in gear with the clutch in while stopped in traffic, and I'd really like to know what that is. One post implied that UK law encourages or even requires that the vehicle be taken out of gear when it's stopped in traffic. I've never heard anything like that in the US.

I've never encountered a clutch that took any noticeable effort for me to operate. And, considering all of the other bearings in a vehicle that are rotating under load constantly, I question the value of trying to save the throwout bearing a few extra seconds on each stop.

So I would really like to know why I should shift to neutral when stopped in traffic. Should I do it when I'm waiting for a break in the traffic in the oncoming lane so I can turn across it? (A left turn in the US.) When I'm stopping at a stop sign, and then immediately going because there is no other traffic around? When I'm stopped for a few seconds in a stop-and-go traffic jam?
Side note: this page gives me the weirdest Firefox behaviour I've ever seen: https://gfycat.com/HandyRapidJabiru
Operational innovation is maybe the term you are looking for.
By saying "reference counting is a form of GC", I'm not sure whether or not you think that reference counting has usage outside of (and could have predated) GC. David did not write "a form of" either, although you think the meaning conveyed is the same. Also one could also counter similarly with saying that if David meant should, he would have said so, but whatever.

I realize memorymanagement.org conflicts with my usage, although I'm not sure I subscribe with the idea that the usage people have been using first historically is sensible.
The Life of a South Central Statistic
Dude, put down your guns and chill out a bit? When you said "obtaining rocket fuel on a given rocky planet" and "springboard to the wider universe" I naturally assumed you meant launching a rocket from Venus's surface, not making a colony in the upper atmosphere. That seemed quite reasonable to me, but obviously not to you. So you replied with a snarky comment telling me to read the literature of Venusian colonies (which wasn't even the topic), and after you changed the subject, I asked what makes YOU think we could actually build one when we haven't even had anything like it on Earth. (I emphasize YOU because you had asked us to convince YOU, not some random researcher in NASA.) My comment there wasn't sarcastic; it was a completely serious comment that did consider the fact that people have been researching the idea seriously.

I stand by it: just because people are proposing the idea of a base over Venus seriously that doesn't mean much about its feasibility compared to a base on the moon, and just because one person is convinced something is possible, that doesn't mean another person will be. (As a more Earthly example of this, I might respect Elon Musk, and I know he knows what he's talking about more than I ever will, but that still doesn't mean I'm convinced the Hyperloop is as feasible as he seemed to think. I still respect the idea and will take it seriously if he does, but that doesn't mean I'm convinced by it in any way. Same here.)

Now, instead of firing all your cannons at me and flaming me, I suggest you calm down and take a walk before replying, so we can be a little more civil here. If you're already an expert on the topic, maybe explain a little more of what you already know and why you do/don't find it convincing when you're asking your question, so the rest of us plebeians have a foundation to build on that you won't find "offensive".
It literally is a press release:

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/press-release/seti-instit...

Much or all of the content on phys.org is press releases pulled from science related institutions.
Magnetic Lander might be a decent smartphone game...
That's how the DMCA works. Remember the guy who gave a talk about Adobe's PDF creator which purported to produce "secure" documents (required a password) but the feature was easily bypassed.

Adobe had him arrested the day after he gave his talk.

Link to a Wired article here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2001/07/russian-a...

EDIT: I have a terrible memory-- thanks to the folks who replied to my comment with corrections.
Alternatively, they know the words that a mathematician will understand, and realise that those words are the fastest and simplest way to get a mathematician to understand what is meant. Or perhaps the author is just not very good at aiming their words towards their target audience (if that target audience is not mathematicians).
This story takes place in Hungary.
Much more interesting than the question, "is minimum wage good or bad?" is the question, "what policies accomplish the goals of minimum wage more effectively?" I wish half of the ink spent debating the sign of the impact of minimum wage were spent on that instead.
Thinking about it, the entire MS business model was to pay royalties on hardware that is now often made by ODMs in China. It is very likely that the next economic collapse will result in a decline in PC sales. Of course, shareholders rely on MS stock to go up every time PC sales increase.