skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It isn’t a forward-thinking move like Apple’s decision to kill off the floppy disk, because no one’s playing along.

In an article about how too many phone manufacturers are removing the headphone jack? A lot of people are playing along. The market for bluetooth headphones has blown up, covering a range of prices and form factors - it's absurd and perhaps wishful thinking to say this isn't a real trend. I also don't believe there are no benefits to the manufacturing process.

I predict this article will feel very outdated in a couple years. I was very skeptical of the removal of the headphone jack, but six months ago I tried out a bluetooth headset, and I would never go back. It's easier and doesn't snag, and is easier to put away. This isn't to say everyone should get rid of the headphone jack, but I don't see why manufacturers shouldn't be able to.
Apple customers have a choice. Which is why I'm typing this from my brand new Galaxy instead of an iPhone.
Only if it's Musk demanding quarterly earnings figures. SpaceX is privately held, with overwhelming control by Elon himself, and much of the rest by his friends. While eventually he might be diluted out of control by (very large amounts of) additional investment, that's not going to happen any time soon, and is predicated on being significantly unprofitable for a long time.
Its all fun and games until you have a family...then it is difficult to have 3 roommates to an apartment, you have massive healthcare premiums, deductibles and you find that 70% of the tech jobs are in a metro area where your salary doesn't pay for more than a 1br apt for your family.

...but yes, our entertainment costs are fairly inexpensive. Too bad there are so many other things to pay for.
Apple's AirPods, in their tiny package, are capable of 5h of battery life. The case recharges the buds about 5 times, giving you almost 24h or battery. If headphone makers can't bundle at least a comparable battery life in their extremely larger package, that's not bluetooth's fault.
Sure, but the phrasing used here was "...the first man made object shot into space."

This whole story is awesome, no doubt. That's just not quite the right question to ask.

In any case, sweet picture.
If "doomed" means a slow eventual death, absolutely everything has been doomed from the start.
>We’ve tested a wide range of phones over the past year, and found that a number of premium handsets like the the iPhone 7, the Essential Phone and Xiaomi’s Mi 6 have nixed the jack.

I giggled a little at the idea that testing was required to find out that the iphone 7 had ditched the headphone jack.
Hedge fund returns often show delays relative to the underlying assets for a number of reasons. First they are not "marked to market" daily the way mutual funds and ETFs are. They can also "sell Peter to buy Paul", use options, and do other things that complicate serial complications.

Lo's book does a great job of explaining it and also talks in detail about a quant strategy that was almost as good as printing money in the 1990's that eventually burned out.
"These are salaries much below the market rate."

Are you really comparing US market rate, which even varies inside the US, with that of Eastern Europe ?

Or are you saying that USD 40K is much below market rate in Eastern Europe ?

In the latter case I'll have to ask for sources, because my experience differs greatly.
Been running Linux since 2002.

I do have to say, though it took 10 years longer than I thought it would, the combination of hardware standardization in consumer laptops and maturity of Linux kernel has meant that, in the last few years, Linux has "just worked" more often than not (and WAY more often than it used to). I recently upgraded from a Lenovo X220 to a 4th-generation Lenovo X1 Carbon, and installed Ubuntu GNOME 17.04. Didn't need to tweak a single thing about the hardware. Everything just worked.

That said, I did hit a weird GPU bug[1] that reminded me that no matter how good Linux on the desktop has gotten, there's always something. :-/

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video...
I'm not a junior developer and I recently changed jobs, partly also because I haven't had skilled and passionate coworkers.

I was actually hired to bring more passion and skill - so I didn't expect milk and honey at the new company. I did expect, however, a few like-minded persons, but have yet to discover them.

Also, my current life-situation doesn't allow me to work on open-source projects, although I would very much enjoy doing that.
I question the reliability of these statistics. Look in particular back 1 year (before the default view) at April 2016. In that month Windows was < 90% and the Mac was nearing 10%. Is there really such a large variability? Regarding other comments on Windows, it's all about where your starting point is. If your starting point is April 2016 then Windows is actually up.

Further I would like to see ChromeOS separated into its own category. Are we going to start counting Android running on a laptop as "Desktop Linux?" Do we care about the kernel or the userland?
The Top 'How To' [Google] Searches in the World
>The vast majority of the academic work produced by people who employ this "philosophy of science" is in-falsifiable and never cited.

Number of citations do not indicate or validate the worthiness of a piece of work. Do you not realise the irony of saying that the works questioning the philosophy of science are unfalsifiable? You seem to hold that the idea of falsifiablity is sacred and that any questioning of it should be thrown away because it's unfalsifiable. It's tautological.
> I mean really, when was the last time you ever accessed a namedtuple by index?

They are good for database stuff. The row gets stuffed into the tuple, by index, and then you get to write readable code accessing the fields by name.
It feels like Microsoft is entering the next stage of the IBM lifecycle -- technology eliminates the value of the monopoly, and they're forced to find new ways to make money, while they coast for a few years on market inertia.

Ultimately MS (like IBM) will not to be able to sell anything outside the C-suite, because anyone closer to the technology knows there are better cheaper solutions.

(But Xboxes...hmmmmm...maybe my view is a little to simplistic.)
Macro-programming Office documents is one of those things that should immediately elicit the question "Is there a better solution?" There almost always is. Office documents are an extremely poor workflow and a terrible artifact for data.

Which is why replacements seldom have more than the most trivial of automation -- the people who are making the move usually change their workflows. The offices that built around Office 95 are, however, still doing things the way they always do.

EDIT: What a changed world when this is a contentious comment.
I definitely fall under your last point. As soon as I can play my entire Steam library on a Mac or Linux, I'll make the switch. Until then, I'm stuck on Windows.
Detecting and blocking bad bots
> It seems odd to expect an article focused on criticizing Google to also criticize a bunch of other things at the same time

It's not just about this one article. It's that none of those critiquing Google mention the ISP monopolies that everyone knows are there.

If I were going to rage about tech monopolies as a journalist, and I believed both of these were monopolies, I'd mention both.

> I don't think the lack of that proves anything.

No sweat, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I often see Google critiqued as left-leaning, and NN critiqued as leftist policy. I noticed a pattern in recent news. It's fine if you don't see it the way I do.
When to use Component or PureComponent
This introduces possibility of DRM, while regular audio jack has none.

See https://boingboing.net/2016/08/12/how-a-digital-only-smartph...
There are a couple of certification programs out there that are well regarded (with vary levels of real-world usage):

Energy Star: https://www.energystar.gov/newhomes/

Zero Energy Ready Homes: https://energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home

Passive House: http://www.phius.org/home-page

LEED for Homes: https://www.usgbc.org/cert-guide/homes

And my favorite, the Pretty Good House: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/guest-blogs/p...

Honestly, if you're buying a new home and the builder hasn't ponied up for Energy Star, you've got to wonder where their priorities are - it's not a difficult program to achieve. You can find Energy Star builders here:
https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=new_homes_pa...

I agree, there is little transparency on the home-buying front, largely because adherence to one of these certifications is still pretty rare. Also, it's rarely taken into account in the appraisal process.
Early on we had real organic traffic. Reasons aside, people stopped making websites and (specially those who didn't) started to act hysterical when one dared to share a link to theirs. It was just better not to promote your website (and give up on it)

Without organic traffic the right to be seen shifts to an increasingly small number of judges/players.

It use to be that if you knew your topic and put a lot of effort into writing an article you could post it any place, even on your own website. Its audience would take notice of it then at the very least tell you they didn't like it.

I'm not trying to complaint or express a desire to get back to the good old times. You could argue there was no money in freedom. Digital slavery was just more profitable and those who could/should have defended the freedom sold us out in stead. (made a handsome profit at that) It is a kind of "you don't know what you have until it is gone" type of situation.

While I don't want to promote the 99% meme either, the thing is, if you exclude 99% from "collective" opinion making you will have the 1% doing it. Thats just how basic logic works.

What kind of shape or form this takes is not very interesting imho.

What is interesting is the growing opportunity it represents.

You could say the proverbial Google has a million points of trustworthiness left. At some point they will find ways to sell it for a price that is right to them. When enough of these entities sell enough of their trust there will be room for new innovations.
Once you accept the fact that the meme of the dying desktop and mobile only comes from people who are "creative" by answering mails/reacting on social media and dragging things from A to B, you will quickly understand that the desktop on which most of the grunt work gets still done will still be there for a long time.
IDK, I over-engineer my side projects every single time. Like tweaking for days something which is so clearly premature optimization.

But sometimes I need that knowledge again for the next side project. And this over-engineering is often a way to simplify a reference architecture and be much faster at the end.

So for me over-engineering equals learning but is also a big part of the motivation.
Distant galaxy sends out 15 high-energy radio bursts – Berkeley News
Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
Clickbait. The author switched from Angular 2 beta 9 (not even a release candidate) because he was unable to migrate to Angular 2.0.0 since 'too many things broke to make the upgrade non trivial'. Yet somehow rewriting the entire app in Vue is easier?
What about Consumer Reports?
I’m not sure if you watched the video or read its description, but pipes are the focus of this implementation. He describes pipes as “the core of the UNIX shell” in the video. I suppose that is somewhat up for debate, but building complex tasks out of composable pieces is certainly up there among UNIX’s design goals, and pipes are a big part of that. OTOH, his implementation does not seem to cover output redirection à la `exec` (file-based, file-descriptor-based, or named-pipe).
Dumb question from a non-developer: wouldn't using a dict object make more sense if someone wanted an unordered named tuple?
Well I don't really know how much torque a helicopter would need. The only number I was able to find was that a 35-foot rotor could spin about 550 RPM. Even with a smaller rotor that would spin somewhat faster, I was guessing that a reasonable gear ratio would give an electric motor plenty of torque at those speeds.
Umm.. So why are we allowing pro-communism advocacy?
If you rely on a beta product you should have no expectation of API stability.

It's very easy to blame vendors when it's your own poor decision making that got you in the mess to begin with.
Is this finally the year of the Linux desktop???
I dunno, I'm going to keep upgrading my Windows box and version so long as it stays the primary gaming platform. Consoles are fine and all, I even have a couple modern ones, but there's still no replacement for mouse & keyboard for hi-fidelity input, and the only desktop that lets you play the vast majority of m&k games is Windows.

That'll keep it in the home, and AD & Office will keep it in the workplace. Seems not so doomed to me.
Wow; that is horribly unreadable. :-(
I always had trouble explaining what I do, and having a 5 year old, I need a clear, concise answer:

I'm the generic lego businessman[1]. (I don't work for Lego, but that would be awesome)

Longer answer - I do strategic technology planning for a specific segment of a large company. I used to be a data engineering director, to standardize the title somewhat. That was easier to explain to people.

[1]: https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/lego/images/5/52/AQ_Bui...
Right, entrepreneurship is the only field of human endeavor where amateurs can become the best in the field without any study or training whatsoever.
Welcome to the mythologizing of the startup world.

For one counter narrative, you should understand why serial entrepreneurs are more successful, why almost the only correlation with success is how many startups a person has done before.

Another counter point is why there's a PayPal mafia and a whole host of successful founders coming out of specific startups.

Yet another counter point is how successful businesses built by people with experience in the same domain somehow don't get counted as 'startups' because they didn't take 'risk'.

Don't fall for the jargon and hype. Expert entrepreneurs have transferable skills that will reduce your risk of failure. It's your bravado and ego that's failing to recognize the difference.
Is that still true to this day? JS has exploded in popularity and utility in the last few years. Even Stanford and other high quality CS schools are teaching JS now.
Apple Acknowledges Siri Leadership Has Officially Moved from Cue to Federighi
People are not objects, and your analogy is not accurate (or maybe just unclear). People (at least in our industry) are free not to accept jobs with low pay. You are also free to seek clients rather than employers.
No. JSX is a small domain-specific language for expressing a hierarchy of virtual DOM nodes. Angular is a template language in that it eschews JavaScript compatibility in favor of its own directives that try to emulate basic iteration and conditional expression evaluation.
Have been using angular 1 and I so wish that I had used vue instead. vue is easy and intuitive compared to angular bloat. May be will take less than half hour to understand basics coming from angular.

Can anybody share experience with nuxt.js ?
> The good news is, once you've done that, you can get a pretty decent job.

And you'll likely have to.
I've recently started mentally comparing tech companies that complain about the "lack of talent" to SUV drivers who complain about the price of gas.

There is so much low hanging fruit in terms of improving engineers productivity, but the companies refuse to even consider the possibility. If you offered private offices or remote work and the opportunity to use more productive tools, candidates would line up to apply. And would need fewer workers because they would get more work done.
I think flying drones for home delivery will be the new flying car. I think autonomous road vehicle is the future for cities with an attempt to deliver to the home and then to a central pick up.

Reason is money. UPS or the USPS can do it if Amazon and Walmart don't beat them first. Salaries and benefits are the biggest slice of the pie for expenses.
Outside of work? Not anything formal.

I offer mentoring as a consulting service. It's often a followup of some longer training. It's lots of fun when it happens. We usually talk once or twice a week and discuss "the problem of the moment". Contracts like this usually last 3-6 months, and I probably do one every couple of years.

There isn't a huge demand for this sort of 'one-on-one' training since most programmers with moderate experience can "Google until it works"
I could suffer android, or like you know I could plug in the 3 cm converter onto my 20cm cord when my can’t find my airpods.
The Stories Behind a CV: Growing Up in Science
They have enough market to justify continued development at a slower pace, but windev (OSG?) is no longer going to have growing profit and they would probably cut back on R&D and focus on ASG and C&E where profit growth is happening.

Reading the article, the problem becomes more obvious: without mobile, they have a huge gap in their offering and have to embrace competing OS's (Cortana goes nowhere with a non mobile windows).
considering your income is $0, maybe you should fix that first.

but in any case, what's your point?
This type of argument about meritocracy and class, although important, is missing the point.

It's not as if you eliminated all class contributions to elite school attendance suddenly problems with meritocracy would disappear.

The problem is that we overvalue superficial indicators of ability or human capital as if they were perfect, and ignore more significant, directly relevant ones.

Not too long ago, there was a linked article about selection bias in education (https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-t...). Lurking in that insightful essay were even darker problems, though: if you look at Figure 1 of that piece, what you might notice was the huge spread in CLA scores as a function of SAT, revealing how imperfect SAT is. But it goes further than that, because each of those points is a mean, and behind each point is an even wider distribution. What we tend to do is take something like SAT, and treat it as if it were a perfect rank ordering of ability, when it's not. I'm not saying SAT is all it takes to get into an elite school; what I'm saying is that we overvalue things like SAT in evaluating outcomes, and ignore all the vicissitudes of life. It's not a class-based issue, it's much broader than that.

This extends much more broadly in my opinion than education, though, to licensing laws, regulatory capture, patent abuse, corporate management, etc. There's a kind of "winner takes all", or "the end justifies all rationalizations for the means", assumption with regard to credit in our society, and meritocracy is just one symptom of this.

It becomes mindless at times.
Linux Desktop is definitely gaining more users. Personally, I didn't start really using Desktop Linux until Ubuntu 16.04. Now I use Ubuntu at work and Manjaro at home.
The sad question is more if I do mentoring inside of work.
And think of how many people worked on everything related to Linux and how many tried their best to use it, all because of their hatred of Microsoft. And for what?
I read the description, but must have missed the part about pipes; oops.
If they wanted to add audio DRM, could they not have done so with a regular 3.5mm jack? Just because the physical interface is a "standard" doesn't mean they have to send standard data over it.
'97 Sergey Brin: web research 20ya
No it's a standard. You can use JSX with Vue 2.0 now, as well as Preact and others.
I didn't know about that, thanks for sharing.
The tuple was Python's answer to the C-Struct, really. If I want to duct-tape 4 values together and hand them around as 1, the convention was to use a tuple.

Tuples don't name values, but that's actually important for performance - Python is an old-fashioned dynamic language that still uses hashtable access for everything, but tuple indexing is a simple array offset. Considering Python's age, reducing that endlessly-nested series of hashtable hits was important back in the day.
Call me oldschool, but my headphones that work with everything else, should work fine for my phone. I will continue to vote with my dollar and only buy phones with 1. Removable battery 2. Removable storage 3. Headphone plug.

Don't think me some luddite, I love my wireless buds when working out, or riding a bike. But when I want it to 'just work', no drivers, no batteries, no formats, just a plug and good sound. It seems steange to me, as apple used to be known for its quality D/A converters, and they are cheaper than ever now.
If I don't overengineer my side projects -- if I stick to what's simple and practical -- how am I going to gain marketable skills with the modern frameworks?
Show HN: Duck as a Service
My notebook with Arch is my favorite. The reason: I can run the system without any desktop environment. I use just i3 as my window manager. Can't do this neither with Windows nor macOS.
Well, unfortunately, the dominant version of Windows of that time (2009), Windows XP (released in 2001) still has twice the market share of the entire desktop install base of Linux.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Perhaps in another decade Linux desktop will finally overshadow a version of Windows from 2001...
> Strangely I suspect Microsoft may of actually dented some of this, social media around win10 and wsl generally seem positive.

I sit here this morning in a diner, with a Windows 10 tablet hybrid. It's the first Windows machine I've owned in half a decade.
First of all, LeEco’s president of R&D Liang Jun said that it is more complicated to include USB 3.1 type C than 3.5mm jack AND USB 2.0. It certainly frees up space and makes it easier to make the phone water-resistant, IP68 certified.

Secondly, I personally own a pre-USB-type-C phone and a Sony bluetooth headset with a 3.5mm jack option. I'm looking at buying a new laptop, with as many USB type C 3.1 ports, as possible. Why? Because I buy one for about 5 years, and its the future, and I'm happy that we are converging to a single laptop charger and data port. Don't get me wrong, I don't say that it hurts to have a jack as an option, but I do say that it hurts not having an USB type C port. If I got the latter, but not the first, I don't mind. Anyone can buy an adapter, the USB 3.1 supports analog audio in and out and has an audio controll interface (http://www.anandtech.com/show/10719/usbif-publishes-audio-ov...), so no functionality is lost. Of course, it is a change, and people tend to take changes quite badly. If someone is afraid of losing the adapter, just tape it to the headphones, if they are using a 12 dollar one, I'm sure it won't make worse the experience. As for quality, I'm sure audiophiles will welcome that now they have more power over the DAC. And yes, it can help a lot.

So stop whining, if you want a phone with a 3.5mm jack, buy one, there is plenty, and there will be quite a few for many years. Postpone the change, but keep it in mind when you buy your new pair of headphones.
His ideas stand on their own and should not be polluted by armchair psychoanalysis or worse, immediate dismissal by people who are too lazy [or too stupid] to read and comprehend what Kaczynski has written.

It should be obvious to any educated technologist that reads even a few pages of Kaczynski's output that Kaczynski is a genius. His writings are not the ramblings of a schizophrenic but should be analyzed and discussed without the popular preconceptions that can only serve to cloud one's critical thinking.