skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All I meant was, if someone asks "What's a desktop app?" or "What's an iOS app?" or "What's a website?" you can rattle off 100 examples without breaking a sweat.

"What's happiness?" on the other hand is subjective. You could describe things that make you happy, but it wouldn't make sense to point to a banana and say "That's happiness." And if you ask "Am I happy?" the answer probably isn't boolean.

"What's a PWA?" seems to fall into the latter category. If so, then we're treading into philosophy territory, which has claimed countless victims over millennia. You can spend a lifetime trying to define love, but at the end of it, you probably won't produce work that can be built on and extended, the way scientific papers can.

It's notoriously difficult to pin down philosophical concepts into discrete buckets of meaning. We have to operate at the resolution of words. They break if you push them too far.

I think it's important to distinguish these two domains. If we can't effortlessly point to dozens of examples of PWAs, it might be better to reject the notion that PWAs can be defined at all.
If we could send a space probe billions of miles away and have it still work, despite being 40-year-old technology, I think we can make a robust system to run a slot machine without having to spend astronomical figures. But that's just me.
Yes, it is very much possible. Take a look here: https://github.com/romanz/amodem/blob/master/README.rst

The transfer speed and noise are, obviously, too low/high to make any practical use out of this, but it's a cool experiment anyways.

I remember reading about a exploit/virus for BIOS that could coordinate an attack with infrasound, but I can't find any link.
Another fun thing about mobile.twitter.com: it is built using react-native-web, so it uses <View /> and <Text /> instead of <div /> and <span />. In theory it could share code with a React Native app.

That would meet the true definition of a PWA in my mind. Ideally, a PWA could utilize everything the platform has to offer by running as a native app, but can also run in the browser for an install-free experience.
i only hope they end up named comcomm
“I'm not a racist, but”
It goes two ways. Some of them call us sheep for following the obvious and themselves follow the ridiculously complex. Those are the traditional conspiracy theorists. Others deny the complex and instead believe only simple explanations based on their own perceptions. That's where I draw the line between oldschool theorists and modern theorists. The oldschool theorist believes in a complex government conspiracy hiding behind a veil of secrecy (the black helicopter crowd of the 90s). The modern theorist dismisses a complex theory based such as climate change in favour of their own perceptions ("I'm cold"). The former believes the world to be run be evil geniuses. The later by idiots.
I've never been a fan of these kinds of articles. They beg the question "Why arent we doing X?". There's a similar article about "Why aren't we stopping gamblers from addictive behavior?" on HN's front page. They seem to share a trend:

They look for legalistic controls over an individuals actions. And both attempt to say that their actions are addictive, therefore we cannot trust their actions, so we have to decide for them. I'm not comfortable with that logic. Nor am I for shoving more drugs underground. Cause that's that high taxation and controls do.

I tend to go on the side of freedom, even if it's "free to be dumb". And people will do destructive things. I don't particularly like this notion of nanny state.
wow that is awesome
Don't use the tool, then.
Vid.me is attempting to become this, although they are very far behind.

The problem is that basic large-scale issues (business not technical) become hard or impossible to handle without serious investment and cashflow.
it's fixed now

\o/
Okay. I've got a dedicated seed box but it is only DSL. I have ample disk space.

What am I looking at, at that link? Is there a 'mirror the whole damned thing' torrent and how frequently should I update this?

I already mirror a bunch of Linux ISOs, so it's not a problem to add more.
Top Academic Publisher Kowtows to China: Censors Thousands of Papers, Denies It
Just started seeing issues as well on Comcast: http://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity seems like there's potentially large issues rn
If you use a very old version of your browser I'm sure you expect many things to break.
Feels like people are forgetting that Endemic is the perfect word for this sort of thing...They don't need to redefine epidemic; they need to use a more accurate word.
I hope that people are keeping a lot of virus research under wraps, because at some point the ability to construct random genomes from scratch is going to get easy and inexpensive enough for terrorists to knock together.
In the world of high frequency trading, 40-70ms is a lifetime. This is more of a big deal than cutting off 40-70ms for some FPS game.
Show HN: Compare Two Samples
> even the researcher who wrote it will have to pay.

Eh, pay for what? The author already has the article. Often-times, the agreement furthermore permits limited dissemination of the article by the author, possibly even on the author's web page.
TL;DR

* we use Slate for API docs, Google Sites for company documentation (and some Google Docs)
* am thinking about using a forum for Q&A e.g. Discourse [2]

Longer:

We've also been going through some thinking on this. At the moment we have an API docs page using Slate, and a Google Sites site which contains a whole raft of documentation. We still have some stuff in Google Docs as well.

Our problem is that not all the team is part of Engineering, so keeping stuff in the repo isn't really ideal (hard to edit). Google Sites is fine but its main selling point is easy access to Google Auth. I have a thread on HN about this [1].

One of the things I have been thinking of is setting up a forum like Discourse [2] for Q&A. Sales often has product-based questions, and vice-versa. In my view, this beats other ways of asking questions (e.g. Slack) because there's no time pressure to answer, and unlike "office-hours" style meetings, it's automatically documented. The only problem is that it is yet another tool.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12540678
[2]: https://discourse.org
There's nothing "premium" about those gaming consoles, maybe the PS4Pro/XboneX could be considered "premium" for the console sector.

Imho parent was talking about the PC sector and in that regard, AMD has been sadly trailing way behind Intel/Nvidia for quite a while now. AMD has struggled to oppose Intel's i5/i7 dominance.
Similarly, they still have no real competition for the high-end NVidia GPU's, like the 1080's.

If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up with a build that does not include an Intel CPU and at least one Nvidia GPU.
Same in Chicago
Used homeschool curriculum online cheap and good quality
Author here: I created a simple tool to compare two samples inside the browser.

The tool was created with Angular 4 and uses Universal. Currently I am thinking about creating a service that allows developers to compare software metrics of different versions of their software to detect performance regressions. But I am not sure yet how to package that as a SaaS service.

I'd be grateful for any feedback about the site (especially about how to make the whole page load faster).
£8 is not even close to 'ridiculously cheap', compared to, say, Cortex-M0 STM32 boards for $1.5 with free shipping
https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PCS-STM32F030F4P6-ARM-CORTEX-M0-Co...
I wish Devuan would concentrate on a Server only release. Just remove SystemD from anything server related.
"Individual developers working for individual companies are rarely if ever thinking about the good of their users, except in a very narrow profit motivated sense, and never thinking about the good of the ecosystem as a whole."

Are you serious? No one thinks this way? I've worked at several companies where the software I've written was EXPLICITLY written with others in mind. To claim "rarely, if ever" shows that you know very little about this industry. Or, you surround yourself with a bunch of selfish people who shouldn't be doing software development.
Individual scientists don't have a right to screen over the future.

There is a nice combo of fatalistic, libertarianesque schadenfreude. Only the most politically and financially stable scientists can afford to publish in non-impact-factor journals.
Which ones? I wasn't aware that Cody's Lab could receive strikes. The content is so tame, copyright free, and educational.
The solution to all three is probably to offer more support for addicts and other mental health issues.
I was able to finally start using grid in production for a new project a couple of weeks ago. It made page layout a breeze and my html and scss are so much tidier and easier to read. Flexbox still has its place as the article points out, but abusing it to do 2-dimensional layout didn't feel any better than doing the same with older techniques.
> This is why old websites from 1998 still work in your browser.

They won't if they use a <blink> tag, for example. The problem is that if we freeze the entire web and demand 100% backwards compatibility, we also can't ever move forwards. This scroll event change is a positive in 99% of cases - should a web site built in 1998 really hold that back? There's no absolute in "putting users first" there - you're either putting the minority user looking at an old site first, or you're putting the majority looking at newer sites first.

Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to introduce an "archival" mode in a browser. Nothing published on the web is ever truly broken because it's very well documented what it should do. So we can turn those features back on when viewing an older site that requires them - blinking text and all - while still moving forward on the platform people use every day.
Fantastic piece. Clarity, breadth, depth, working examples... this is what “howto”-style, practical posts should look like.
What information asymmetry? They didn't lie about anything. They offered people a choice between repayment and equity. Some people chose equity, and to be quite honest, I wish I had too. It seems like they're doing very well.
They used image data because they had to do something first, but I don't think the techniques are at all limited to image recognition.
Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet
The CDC would point out that yes, Alcohol has a huge impact on society; in this context, via drunk driving:

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...

>Every day, 28 people in the United States die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver. This is one death every 51 minutes. The annual cost of alcohol-related crashes totals more than $44 billion.
Show HN: UltraEd – A level editor/game engine for the Nintendo 64
I'm in Northern California and also having issues.

One thing I noticed is that it is only Downloads having issues. My uploads are as fast as ever.

I then connected to my VPN, and everything is working great. I think it is their routing/DNS that is having the issues, not the connection itself.
> Why was it audible? Why not, one could ask. [...]
> Even then, the idea of not hearing what's happening
> on a phone line you're calling on was quite new,
> and modems would default to exposing the user to the handshake audio. [...]
>
> All you had to do to silence the handshake was to send the command ATM0
> down the serial line before dialing.

And I think the user was comforted by the ritual, as far as I can tell from conversations with my friends and scenes from pop culture like You've Got Mail.

I am for using the computer's own low-level apparatus as progress bars, instead of the opaque logos or polished animated graphics, blocking the view like a royal guard. For example, I wish my laptop and my phone listed the shell's output during boot, like some Linux distros still do. Even though most users wouldn't fully understand it --- and I have to admit that even I don't understand a lot of it --- the quickly scrolling text is no worse than an animated spinner in conveying, "Loading..."

I think most users, and I mean nontechnical, are okay with the exposure and even kind of like it. It makes them feel like they're in a spy movie. Some will never try to understand it and will just take it as a more-detailed progress spinner. Some will slowly become familiar with some of the lines, google them out of curiosity, and it may be the spark that lights them down the long trek to becoming a programmer. Isn't that one of our country's goals, to encourage kids to become programmers?

Anyway, my point is, I came to programming from graphic design and front-end. I spend a lot of time thinking about user-interface design. But maybe I'm against the grain in wanting some of the architecture to be allowed to hang out. (Does that make me a Brutalist?)
I had the chance to see Rachel Andrew speak at laracon. Great presentation and got me excited about flexbox and grid. I'm still wondering is the browser support wide enough to implement this in production for the average site?
Poor wording on my part. I've made it a little clearer. Thanks
Show HN: Visualization library to convert any JavaScript code into SVG flowchart
Yes - we have customers all over NA and have received a couple of reports so far
Same here with Comcast in Oregon.
> Secondhand smoke harms children and adults, and the only way to fully protect nonsmokers is to eliminate smoking in all homes, worksites, and public places.1,2,3

>Yes, I mean, that's trivially true. Eliminating all smoke in the world is the only way to ever truly be safe <cue scary music>.

Sure, but when I'm by a campfire and the smoke gets in my face, I move. Don't you?

I don't want it affecting me, whatever the effects may be.
I’ve never heard of a court ordering drug addicts to consume alcohol or tobacco as part of their sentence. In certain states however, courts routinely order addicts into opioid drug replacement therapy programs during sentencing.
Why the heck would they take out the checkbox on javascript alert box to "not repeat anymore". Since they did, the only option to leave annoying website that pops javascript alerts in never-ending loop is Ctr+Alt+Del.

What were they thinking??
Would you consider hiring a more pure security role with less hands-on development work?
Azure Batch Rendering
Free publicity is hardly bad news ;)
People ought to get used to erring on the side of freedom.

Heroin is being cut with fentanyl because heroin is super fucking illegal for nothing more than political leverage over 1960's blacks in the US.

Err on the side of freedom today, save 500 million in price gouged narcan tomorrow.

You can ban everything you want, lock up dealers and distributors, sue doctors, burn poppies etc all day long. You'll just step on more used syringes until each one of us has some tough fucking conversations with each other in these United States of America.
Except of cause that's also how very real grassroot movement's look especially those not made up of American college students, i.e. you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users.

Remembering that almost all of facebooks growth potential is outside of the US. Facebook really cannot afford to just kick off people based on not being us college students.

The problem is that while it might be easy to find someone who diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be from a beltway centric viewpoint, it's far harder to differentiate between a bot and some yahoo posting her local mainstream view from a netcafe somewhere in Siberia.
there seems to be a service disruption at the provider level somewhere, not really tied to any single company/website.
In practice, the causality is even more delayed than you describe. Browser vendors implement what they want, and then once two or more vendors have implemented a feature and some developers have adopted it, it gets considered for standardization. Standards which are written without a working implementation are widely ignored; there's a whole graveyard around the W3C (see eg. the Semantic Web) where somebody wrote a standard and nobody cared.
You are sort-of right. It's not 'capitalism on paper' but 'capitalism in reality'. It's what you get when you implement it with real human beings as opposed to conjectured hypothetical actors in a model. I did specifically say 'as practiced in our society.' It was meant as an example of how 'providing the best product for the best price' is used as an excuse only exactly so long as it lines the pockets of those parroting it. The moment that changes and their product is unnecessary, they squeal like babies stuck with a pin and suddenly they need protecting.
This is a compromise made to appease antitrust regulators in some situations, already. In a deal of this size, approval would likely require some patent portfolio compromises to get done.

Case in point the current Qualcomm acquisition of NXP. In that case, to satisfy EU regulatory officials, Qualcomm has agreed to give up some NXP patents (that must be sold) and agreed to not take legal action on some others, except for defensive purposes.
OK, this sounds bad. But... Devil's advocacy here: are there any real-world examples of actual sites whose event behavior was actually broken by this change in Chrome 56? It happened a few months back, and I don't remember anyone complaining.

I mean... it broke the author's app. Probably a few others somewhere. But it seems not to have broken anything significant.

I guess I fail to see the concern here. It's an edge case of an existing API that apparently "no one used". Google found a way to get a benefit from exploiting a "change" in this "unused" API, presumably tested to make sure it was unused, and then went ahead and pushed the change over an 8 month period.

Is that really so awful? As someone who lived through the early '00's and IE, this seems pretty benign to my eyes.
Ask HN: Could information warfare make the web and democracy incompatible?
Something worth thinking about. If the Russians/Chinese/other bad actors keep doing influence operations into other countries (and let's say for the sake of argument, they are effective - it's hard to think they wouldn't be, considering they are used by both state actors and private enterprise) is it possible that there is no way to secure the open web agaisnt it? In that case, is the open web a threat to democracy itself?

As in, even if you ban political ads coming from foreign countries, you can't limit "free speech". However if that "free speech" includes a massive botnet that's actually conducting an influencce operation on your population, the only solution might be to isolate your population from foreign actors entirely. Which would mean the end of the Open Web.

Looking into the recent Russian information warfare operations, I wonder whether the only way to insulate from something like this (a massive online effort to pretend to be citizens of another country so as to influence its elections) would be to simply cut them off your internet. This sounds terrible, sure, but then what do you do to safeguard democracy agaisnt this?
Government research grants need to require that papers produced are available online for free. This would rapidly change the academic publishing situation.
Don't use confluence :(
In every team I've been, confluence feels like an huge hole, we can never find what we are looking for...
>The only problem is that it is yet another tool.

That's one of the main horrors we are trying to avoid. We'd like to have a single location to track both kinds of documentation ideally, but realise we are probably going to have to make compromises. Tools which keep things in a standard format will ease migration in the future, so something like Slate would be nice and looks a little better than our current way of "Go view the file in Github".
One other thing I've noticed, and it's been happening for a few years. Is that somehow, magically, there are websites out there that have the exact combination of my search results in their title. Almost as if Google forwarded my search to some party which then went ahead and created a dummy "proxy-search" site with the exact heading, and whose body just contains their own results for the same search criteria I used.
Their library also has to pay thousands to subscribe to this journal.
Password manager applications that are not built into the browser use clipboard pasting to insert passwords into login form fields. If browsers honored autocomplete=off, websites could block the password manager applications from entering the passwords (on their own websites).
I was part of a hardware startup for nearly a decade.

Most real hardware companies that I recall failed for reasons other than hardware. Which fits with the author's overarching argument.

When people imagine a hardware company failing, I think most imagine something going terribly wrong with prototypes, some failure in the field, manufacturing failures, overbuying, etc, etc. But I think those events are rarely fatal for real hardware companies.

I say "real hardware companies" because those kinds of failures are endemic with crowd funded hardware startups. And I think that's why most people assume that all hardware companies fail for those reasons, because crowd funded hardware startups get so much public attention.

But outside of the crowd funding bubble, my experience has been that those kinds of events are just normal bumps in the road. We were on razor thin angel funding, and we hurdled all those kinds of problems. What really kills hardware startups is what kills _any_ startup. Bad product-market fit.

Over the decade of my involvement with my previous hardware startup, we watched _tons_ of fellow hardware startups die. Not because they hit some manufacturing snag, or shipped a million units of explosive doorstops. Every single one died because no one wanted their product. The classic startup tale.

Perhaps I have a unique perspective on the whole software startup versus hardware startup thing because I'm a jack of all trades. I'm just as comfortable working software as I am hardware (and boy does that duality come in handy). So I've seen both sides from the trenches. Hardware people will tell you it's harder, because they don't know how frustrating real software development is and assume it's some kind of greener pasture. And software people will tell you it's harder, because hardware is a mystery to them.

I've wasted days dealing with Google Cloud's SDK issues. And I've wasted just as many days chasing a defect in a board remotely with a customer half way around the world.

In other words: The grass is not greener on the software side.
Also, it blocked the phone line - unless you had several phone lines or ISDN, going online also meant nobody could call you. And that in a pre-mobile phone setting.

After that year with 14.4k modem, I got an ISDN card. Back then, that was a huge step up. Unfortunately, with ISDN you do not get the screeching noise modems make.
The site is loading now, and we're continuing to monitor. It had trouble loading for some between 17:31–18:10 UTC.
An iOS bug won't let some users type 'I'
Leaked Documents Expose Secret Tale of Apple’s Offshore Island Hop