skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A fascinating piece of trivia I was not aware of. To me it seems reasonable that instead of trying to reinvent the whole shebang that instead you get these incremental changes over time that just make an OS really really good.

OS X too a lot of getting used to for me as a kid, as I had an old mac clone and an iMac with 10.1 side by side in my living room, and I loved my little mac clone. OS X didn't immediately win me over because I was just too used to OS 9 and had everything I needed on my offline mac clone. But I distinctly remember Spotlight being what really sold me on OS X because from the get-go it worked basically as intended, and man was it magnificent. If the author of Spotlight is on APFS, I have a lot of faith in it then.
That's why I use a tiling wm (i3). All windows are always on top.
A solvent.
The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact

It was around that time in the 80s that "the nerd" or "the geek" became a staple movie character. Computers up 'til then had just been a piece of industrial machinery like a lathe or a microscope. Now they were associated with "losers". Richard Pryor in Superman III. Revenge Of The Nerds. Etc etc.

And by and large society was perfectly happy to relegate computing to these losers and shun them. Noone cared about the demographics of these losers, either, it was not "problematic". It's only recently when the geeks have built something that took over the world, that people are saying, hey, I didn't do the work or make the sacrifices but I deserve the rewards. That's where we get "brogrammers" et al.
I agree there are different motivations for alt-jvm languages, and I guess Kotlin should be mentioned as well. Many developers are in for the (supposedly) greater language expressiveness or productivity; personally I'd be more interested in a language specifically targeting the case to slowly migrate away from the JVM and JIT compilation into machine code and AOT (ARM and x86).
It might have been true 25-30 years ago. While dietary advice may still be fraught with charlatans, the general quality of work in psychology has improved tremendously.

Methodologies have been devised, reproducible results have actually become an expectation, and psychology has benefited quite a bit from biology, computer science and information theory.
Your post should win some kind of award for how confusing it is. Can't tell, when you say bcash, whether you mean bcash the term, or bcash the thing. I'm not asking though. Moving on...
There are now 60 women graduating for every 40 men who do so (in the US). There has also been huge growth in the number of overall graduates. To find absolute numbers you need to adjust your percentages by these factors.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_320.20.a...
I don't think it is a prestigious job today. When was the last time you remember a movie starring a computer programmer? How often do you hear the phrase "We better consult the computer programmers before we make this important decision"? How many novels center on the daily procedures of computer programming?
Here is another "minimum viable" blockchain implementation in Haskell: https://github.com/adjoint-io/nanochain.

It's a bit simpler in implementation; the relevant data structures are defined a bit differently, so it could give a nice alternate perspective about what a blockchain written in Haskell may look like.
This seems to me to be written by someone who uses MacOS almost exclusively, but has touched Windows just enough to understand it. The complete lack of understanding of IPC, filesystems, scripting, and other OS fundamentals is pretty painful.

>Why can I dock and undock tabs in my web browser or in my file manager, but I can't dock a tab between the two apps? There is no technical reason why this shouldn't be possible. Application windows are just bitmaps at the end of the day, but the OS guys haven't built it because it's not a priority.

I'm an idiot when it comes to operating systems (and sometimes even in general), but even I know why there are issues with that. You need a standardized form of IPC between the two apps, which wouldn't happen because both devs would be convinced their way is the best. On top of that, it's a great way to get an antitrust against you if you aren't careful [0]

>Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem? Why is it fundamentally hierarchical?

Soft/hard links, fam. Even Windows has them.

>Why can['t] I sort by tags and metadata?

You can in Linux, you just need to know a few commands first.

>Any web app can be zoomed. I can just hit command + and the text grows bigger. Everything inside the window automatically rescales to adapt. Why don't my native apps do that? Why can't I have one window big and another small? Or even scale them automatically as I move between the windows? All of these things are trivial to do with a compositing window manager, which has been commonplace for well over a decade.

Decent point IMO. There's a lot of native UI I have a hard time reading because it's so small. That said, I think bringing in the ability to zoom native widgets would bring in a lot of issues that HTML apps have.

>We should start by getting rid of things that don't work very well.

The author doesn't understand PCs. The entire point of these machines is backwards-compatibility, because we need backwards compatibility. I'm sitting next to a custom gaming PC and I have an actual serial port PCIe card because I need serial ports. Serial ports. In 2017. I'd be screwed if serial wasn't supported anymore.

I won't touch the rest of the article because I there's a lot I disagree with, but he seems to just want to completely reinvent the "modern OS" as just chromebooks.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
One of the reasons Windows succeeded for so long is that it enabled people to do a common set of activities with minimal training and maximizing reuse of as few common patterns as possible.

And ironically, one of the reasons why Windows was successful in developing these patterns for office applications is that much of the work was done by IBM.

The UI in Windows 3 was functionally almost identical to the Presentation Manager interface that had been designed for the IBM-Microsoft collaboration OS/2. The design implemented an IBM standard called CUA [1].

CUA is not an exciting UI, but it did a good job of consolidating existing desktop software patterns under a consistent set of commands and interactions. The focus on enabling keyboard interaction was crucial for business apps, and a strong contrast to the mouse-centric Mac (which didn't even have arrow keys originally).

The kind of extensively data-driven UI system development that CUA represented is totally out of fashion nowadays, though. Making office workers' lives easier is terribly boring compared to designing quirky button animations and laying out text in giant type.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Setup GitHub Pages with Ghost
There was a really interesting nerds vs feminists war on Scott Aaronson's blog a few years ago:

> I believe that “the problem of the nerdy heterosexual male” is surely one of the worst social problems today that you can’t even acknowledge as being a problem

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2119
> If you think incognito mode protects you in any way, than it's you who is naive.

> If anyone really wanted to track you, they can use your IP and see every single page you've visited. Even the size of your window is enough to track you.

> Tor is the only tool I know that you can use if you don't want to be tracked.

Sorry, it seems like you didn't read my post fully or get it. I described that incognito/private browsing mode is one layer of defense, not the only layer. I also provided examples of your device being borrowed by someone else or it being stolen. In those cases, whether you used Tor (not Torbrowser, which I explicitly excluded even in my previous comment) doesn't matter. Whatever your browser has stored on the device - including browsing history, cache, cookies - is available to them to use or sell to others.

Also, I didn't mention the government as the sole hostile entity in my comment. One's own employer may use information in your browser cache on an employer provided device to fire the person or even file a criminal lawsuit against the person. Some malicious program a person downloaded may scrape all information from your caches and send that to insurers or other "data brokers" who in turn would classify you as too high a risk to support. There are far too many possibilities here that I cannot list every single one of them.

As for those who post pictures on social media about being drunk, posting racist messages, etc., that's really bad in many ways, but such protections and more should also start with each of us individually. It's in that space that I see using icognito/private browsing mode as one more helpful layer. Tor is another layer. Encrypting one's devices' storage is another. And so on.
The linked page is a proposal for the Eclipse "foundation" or whatever it's called to "take over" Ceylon. It's not a page about Ceylon itself.

The web site of Ceylon is at https://ceylon-lang.org/
First, that's not true. https://i.imgur.com/pkZPrOI.png. CS was a third women in the mid 1980s, dropping to under 20% today. Twenty years ago, the Space Shuttle's software team was quite gender balanced: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff.

Second, nerds can do a perfectly effective job pushing women out of the profession without being aggressive or having social power. We do a lot to gender the profession in ways that has little to do with the work. Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas." We emphasize hiring the lone gunman coder who learned to code in their basements, while the job actually is highly collaborative and team oriented.
The stereotype wasn't created be a shadowy group of men to exclude women. That is absurd. Why would sexists block women from programming, while letting them into plenty of other more high status jobs?

Well, we should be careful with claims like that. Think of the gender of most of the secretaries at all the jobs we've had. And little things, like if you're in a relationship, how often do you do the laundry and dishes?

More directly, women really weren't allowed to become the things they wanted to be until the 70's. We like to act like that was so long ago, but that's one grandpa's lifetime. Not even a very old grandpa.

I'm not saying it's due to systemic sexism, just that we're talking about a group of people whose very recent ancestors were denied opportunities we take for granted. They must have faced enormous social pressure to conform.
Why is the obsession with this topic? I have never been to the US but is there a problem for a female to be a software developer in the US? Is this problem just in the US?

By the way, there are countries where over 50% of CS Students are female.
I don't understand where you are going with this... Is your argument that since society seems biased to pay men more money, we should blindly do so? Does that logic apply to race as well as gender?

IMHO, Damore was playing to the misplaced belief held by some men that they are innately better then everyone else and that societal biases have played no role in their successes.
Need for Speed: Get Out of Debt Faster with Refinancing
Calling C++ programs "cancerous abstractions" is simply funny. I'm sure even C++ programmers agree :) It's NOT "why Lisp environments don't take off".

That guy's face on the screen is creeeepy af though...
Great article, I gave it a clap!
Also, Wilt & Shaq are generational outliers that are not in any indicative of your typical pro athlete. Shaq is a really bad example for the article to use as indicating any short of progress in sports performance. The current NBA isn't filled with Shaq-like players. It's guard dominated with a heavy emphasis on 3 point shooting.
I still end up using a sophisticated note app (AnyList) for remembering spinach. Real-enough-time syncing with my non-techie significant other's phone is pretty great, the latency is low enough that we divide and conquer at the grocery store.

When I take meeting notes, I end up using OneNote or Google Docs:

- I have a tree of `Who - What` (and the counter-bikeshedding).

- Images of block diagrams sneak in, especially if it's a planning or design meeting.

- Full text search is handy, one-note especially spoiled me by doing OCR

- I like GDocs in particular for the real-enough-time collaboration. It can help quieter people not get steamrolled in conversation, especially if you have a boisterous note-taker to speak up for them :)
How advertising of computers was made had an important accelerating effect towards the exclusion of women from the industry.

https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
And DOS (back in the day): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q
See that's the thing. I've been a console gamer since the NES and I don't remember ever really having to troubleshoot one.

And since the hardware is fixed games don't have incompatibilities. None of the "this version of the driver causes this but that version of the driver causes that" issues. No worrying about system requirements. If it sold for the system, it will play.
> but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand

But it is not dismissed out of hand. It is dismissed by serious scholars after significant research. It is Damore who dismisses their well-informed position out of hand by taking out of context some papers whose significance he is not qualified to judge. It is he who rejects scholarship and serious investigation in favor of gut feelings. If Damore's view were as well researched as the prevailing view, then it would merit more careful consideration. But as it stands, he is some lay person who, for his own reasons, decides that the scholars are wrong.

Physicists don't debate all the bloggers who misunderstand or take out of context physics papers, so why should social scholars debate some random guy at Google who wrote a rant? After all, the couple of papers he cites are scholarly works. Do you think those works are not debated in the research community? But you can't debate some layperson who clearly did not bother to put any effort into studying the issue (e.g., he does not discuss any other paper that contradicts his political views, and there are many more of those). If you want, there are some venues (like /r/science, /r/AskHistorians and others) where experts discuss research with laypeople, and you're welcome to ask them questions there. The belief that there is any serious scholarship behind Damore's rant that's being silenced by non-experts is the exact opposite of what's really going on.
AA is a wonderful tool to get sober - its enough to pull you back from the brink and if you're mindful enough reevaluate your life and why you're self medicating - it may not however be the tool you need to stay sober.

Look at AA as addiction transference - you're transferring your addiction from Alcohol to AA - and for some, thats the best they can do, for others its the start of the journey to moderate consumption.
Woo it finally loaded for me.

"This data set is generated by linking two large academic graphs: Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and AMiner.

The data set is used for research purpose only. This version includes 166,192,182 papers from MAG and 154,771,162 papers from AMiner."

There's zip files:

* 103GB MAG papers

* 39GB AMiner papers

* 1.6GB linkage
Sounds like the Ballmer Peak: https://xkcd.com/323/
Right. If I was using a PC all the time at home for something else it wouldn't be such a big deal, but given that I was only using it for gaming and most games I wanted to play were on the console it was just easier to give up.

Like you said, it's an appliance and I never have to think about it. You buy a game for the PS4 and it works on your PS4 and that's all there is to it.
How to Raise $24M in 48 Hours?
A ridiculously simple, but good notes app I've found is https://standardnotes.org
Here, https://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.3/introduction/ seems to be a good place to start with the language.
That's because the women "programmers" were largely doing things like plugging wires into a certain configuration as dictated to them by the (usually male) engineers. What the article terms as programming as essentially operating a switch board - it had nothing to do with programming as we know it today.
For sure there are projects that are driven by dollars, but many that are not... If we're going to get a desktop environment with the level of openness that the OP would like, I do think this would be a job for libre developers as it is fundamentally at odds with the pursuit of dollars via lock-in (that is, every app would be increasing the value of the OS and sacrificing lock-in of the customer's data).
I think this is more of a complaint about HN's title policies.
Didn't swift only target iOS devices? Then you have to write an entire second application?
Plus researching WHICH graphics card to buy, plus constant driver upgrades, plus the driver upgrades may cause issues with some of your games...

It's not as bad as it used to be… but it's still not like an appliance.
so, my life goal should be to spend my time such that you (or anybody else) would be willing to read my biography?
Related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15051645
I'll add an anecdote as a counter-example (I think the details might be a bit off here, it might not be VS):

Visual Studio removed 'macro' functionality, and a bunch of developers went to the forums to complain and demand an explanation.

That explanation was as follows: None of those developers enabled "send usage feedback," so the usage statistics for macros was close to 0%. The developers sensibly thought it made sense to stop supporting that feature.

There's a tradeoff associated with extreme privacy, and perfect is the enemy of good.
I have not citation but from the recent articles on HN, is the problem not that they are not enough female CS graduates to hire from? The crowding out is happening in high school and college.
> Does event management exist yet? I.e, can my friends and I create events and invite people to them like you can on Facebook?

No, not yet. See https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359
10 Great Reasons to Visit Solomon Islands
>Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas."

From my memory since the mid 1980s, those references came in somewhat later - about the time tech became cool and there was money to be made.

Maybe something about the macho culture of game programming once it reached significant mass?
Oh, my sweet summer child! You have no idea how modern AI works.

If it looks like it produces the right answers, it's done. If you ask why it fails on this case, you get a shrug. If you want to know if it will keep working, you get a blank look, like you are speaking Etruscan. If you ask, "So, how does it work?" you get a paragraph on the basics of matrix multiplication.
Abraham Lincoln, albeit not a scientist.
I have tried many times to use a single one of them without the other 5 interfering and it has literally never worked.
I found evidencs from CAH(Congenital adrenal hyperplasia) rather convincing, in that it is hard to imagine how that effect is entirely social. Admittedly, this evidence was not presented in Damore's memo, so I guess "The only way someone would find his arguments convincing" may stand, if we strictly restrict to "his arguments", but I think it's more useful to consider the best possible version of his arguments augmented by other people.
For academia/public this may be true, but these jobs were always balanced.
> Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good included into society.

That's precisely the main point of the article. The reason why programming was left to women. Then men just took over when it was field tested and proven to be a profitable business. Doesn't matter how awkward those men were, they were still men.
Yes, turns out there is indeed a site exclusively devoted to guitar weirdness
Can anyone recommend an ocr program that can convert these old pdf scans to modern type?
I love it, especially using structured data instead of text for the CLI and pipes, and replacing the file system with a database.

Just to rant on file systems for a sec, I learned from working on the Meteor build tool that they are slow, flaky things.

For example, there's no way on any desktop operating system to read the file tree rooted at a directory and then subscribe to changes to that tree, such that the snapshot combined with the changes gives you an accurate updated snapshot. At best, an API like FSEvents on OS X will reliably (or 99% reliably) tell you when it's time to go and re-read the tree or part of the tree, subject to inefficiency and race conditions.

"Statting" 10,000 files that you just read a second ago should be fast, right? It'll just hit disk cache in RAM. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. You might end up waiting a second or two.

And don't get me started on Windows, where simply deleting or renaming a file, synchronously and atomically, are complex topics you could spend a couple hours reading up on so that you can avoid the common pitfalls.

Current file systems will make even less sense in the future, when non-volatile RAM is cheap enough to use in consumer devices, meaning that "disk" or flash has the same performance characteristics and addressability as RAM. Then we won't be able to say that persisting data to a disk is hard, so of course we need these hairy file system things.

Putting aside how my data is physically persisted inside my computer, it's easy to think of better base layers for applications to store, share, and sync data. A service like Dropbox or BackBlaze would be trivial to implement if not for the legacy cruft of file systems. There's no reason my spreadsheets can't be stored in something like a git repo, with real-time sync, provided by the OS, designed to store structured data.
A couple of things.

1. Programming didn't start in the 80s or 90s. It started in the 40s-50s, and we've been doing it for seventy years now. When you were (by your own admission) a socially awkward boy interested in PCs, there were 50-year-old professional programmers working in banks, defense, aerospace and other industries whose programming culture was very different, because they didn't have computers at home at all, and all of them were first exposed to computers in college at the earliest.

2. When historians and sociologists say terms like "crowd out", they do not mean there was any conscious intent behind it, let alone ill-intent. They describe social dynamics. Also, since the eighties at least, professional programmers in the industry have had a lot of power -- whether you felt it or not -- as evident by the size and influence of the tech companies where they worked.
At an atomic level, events are not deterministic.

At a molecular level, events are not deterministic.

Therefore, we all behave randomly. Qed.
The ancients thought a lot about what makes a human "good", and they came up with the notion of virtues[1]. If I'm not mistaken, none of them was particularly oriented towards altruism. It seems to me altruism was very much introduced by Christianism. I vaguely recall that Nietzsche analyzed the subject in details, for instance in ''On the Genealogy of Morality''[2].

Now, I'm not saying one of this point of view is right and the other is wrong, but at the very least there is a debate to have. Therefore it seems presumptuous to me to call one of them "basic humanity".

Philosophy, or in the present case psychology, should use accurate words as much as possible. IMHO "Basic humanity" is not satisfactory in that regard.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality