skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1 - Do windows have better backwards compatibility? Not according to my experience. For example plenty of old games run better with linux+wine than with new windows versions.

2 - X is not a UI API, Qt and GTK+ are. You're thinking about the graphics server which's not any better on windows(better isolation, maybe?).

3. Why is choice a bad thing? Even if fragmentation is a drawback it's not an important one.

4. Singular UI vision is the worst - just look at how clunky are all windows UIs. They're needlessly complex and uncustomizable. They also assume that their users are stupid but they aren't. I like nice and user-friendly UIs like KDE and cinnamon and clever UIs like i3 and awesomewm. I've installed linux for many non-techie users and they quickly learned how to use their desktops - and for my surprise they started to prefer using the terminal over the software center.

5. Not sure how windows is better there. Maybe you got used to it.

6. There IS accessibility support but not perfect.

Please, go on. But in the reality the actual reasons are these:

1. Regular users(or people in general) don't like change.

2. Missing apps: adobe suite, ms office, specialized apps(at schools and offices) and the most hyped games.

3. ms has far better marketing and makes deals with governments, schools, universities and hardware vendors/sellers.
Let me tell you one thing, it's going to be tough. Cyber security is one of the fields of IT that requires the most deep knowledge of how computers and networks work. So, be aware of that. It's like, when someone is asking how to build a game, and the first answer is: learn a lot about Math and Physics. This is the same thing.

Recommended path:

1. CS Basics (concepts)
Conceptually understand how computers work, how interpreters work, compilers etc. You're probably past this point.

2.Low level programming
Basically C, but pay attention to the OS APIs (posix, win32). Make sure you understand the fundamentals of memory management, procedures, threading, etc. You need a lot of C knowledge.

3. Networking [0]
You basically need to know by heart all the TCP protocol. I have a friend who's incredibly successful working in security and he knows each bit in each packet in a TCP connection. He can just recite it.
Once you know about networks, start throwing code at them. See if you can push the wrong bits to a switch, or if you can access some other processes network stack, etc.

4. Web standards
Basically, how the web works. Once you're past that: Apache and Nginx. You have to know them in depth.

5. Known threats and vunerabilities
In this process you'll know that there are many exploited issues that have been resolved. But you should study from them. For example, Heartbleed. Would you have the knowledge to find Heartbleed?
You should also practice with every other security threat known like XSS, SQL Injection, etc.

[0] depending the security field, you might not need so advanced networking knowledge, this is just a general recommendation.

This is just my recommendation, I'm more of a purist, and I have a lot of respect for cybersecurity people.

Source: +10 years programming, I have a good friend making A LOT of money as a private security contractor and we speak about this all the time.
Hi, I'm a developer of Haste. There are two predefined Custom Searches to search within Hacker News on our Custom Search examples page:

https://www.plastic-software.com/haste/searches.html

(In the "Others" section)
* Stories, by popularity
* Stories, by Date

It would be awesome if you would play with them and create your own. Thanks :)
High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik is a canonical resource. Lots of deep historical and technical background on WebRTC. As well as WebSockets, HTTP/2, TLS, UDP, TCP, and much more.

https://hpbn.co/

Then for a practical example, try this Codelab on Real time communication with WebRTC:

https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/webrtc-web/#...

Once you are ready to build your own prototype. You can check out existing implementations from PeerJS, SimpleWebRTC, SIP.js, and Twilio.

Although it is relatively easy to invent your own. Dedicated third party cloud providers such as Twilio are quite mature. Best of luck!

http://peerjs.com/

https://sipjs.com/

https://simplewebrtc.com/

https://github.com/coturn/rfc5766-turn-server/

https://github.com/otalk/restund

https://talky.io/

https://xirsys.com/

https://www.twilio.com/webrtc
Duh, this was coming for some time. The market has also been artificially pumped up by Bitfinex and their money printing machine Tether.

Expect some massive fraud investigations in the coming days. A lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.
This is how web auth was supposed to work. It turned out to be too hard to deploy outside of enterprises.

U2F is the modern re-do of client certs.
Three Delusions: Paper Wealth, a Booming Economy, and Bitcoin
Robocode meets Halite? I love this!

However, more dramatic camera angles and close-ups of the action would be awesome!
This is a good point about desktops in general.

If someone with major resources announced a focused effort to enter the desktop OS space right now, I wouldn't put their odds in a good place. Why would an unfocused effort work?

I cringe at the idea of Linux itself containing a desktop, rather than distros adding one, so if that's the solution hopefully it keeps not being its year.

EDIT: clarification
Technical reading from the Cloudflare blog for the holidays
And anyone who bought in at $15k-19k is left holding the bag, as expected.
Still crashing. Down to 11k. ::grabs popcorn:: https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD
Unfortunately GNOME and consistency never went together.

From time to time I revisit the GNOME dektop to assess if it's a viable alternative to my KDE.

What I still see is random, incoherent apps, meshed together, with the worst possible default values set, for each one of them.

Also the idea that half-baked and ultimately broken extensions, could provide basic functionality that should already be present in the first place, didn't do them any favors. Even the plugin/extension installation mechanism is broken!!

The general lack of configurability doesn't help either.
These articles tend to focus on the technical reasons Linux has not been adopted, and I think it is worth also exploring the business issues (I think Linux desktops are mature enough technically that most average users can use it just as easily as Windows).

How many computers ship with Linux installed from major distributors (i.e. places where the average consumer or business would buy from)? Dell has one model but you have to look hard to find it. Most consumers and businesses think of the desktop world as having two options: windows or mac, with windows as the default. No one is out there marketing and selling Linux desktop machines. That's why they aren't out there.

The one exception is ChromeOS. It has actually taken off and is widely used in schools (and anecdotally at least becoming a popular option for people to install for their kids or parents). ChromeOS is heavily marketed by Google, and there are lots of Chromebooks marketed and sold by major distributors.

I don't consider it a true "Linux Desktop" because it isn't a full-featured OS, but the adoption nonetheless provides a contrasting case study that demonstrates the importance of marketing and distribution that the full-featured desktops lack.
A Model Shift Well Received by Adobe Customers
- Ubuntu's approach was too fragmented + insular.

- Microsoft is pushing hard in the consumer space.
Thanks, we'll add more drama to the game soon-ish :)
Christmas comes early for the cynic.
No, they aren't. They are the one chance we have to escape it.

You see humans are terribly biased. Racial bias isn't even anywhere near the strongest bias we have. Unattractive people get sentences twice as long as attractive people. Judges give far harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungriest. Socially awkward people seem to be pretty strongly discriminated against. Studies have found people discriminate by politics even more than race. Job interviews have actually been shown to degrade performance over just judging resumes. Before statistics and credit ratings, getting a good loan required being an old friend of the banker.

It's not just that humans are unfair. We are objectively terrible. Very simple statistical algorithms beat human "experts" in almost every domain they get tried on. Way back in the 1920s, a statistician came up with a formula that was better at predicting recidivism than a group of 3 prison psychologists.

Simple linear regression has predicted the success of medical treatments better than doctors, diagnosed psychoticism better than trained psychiatrists, predicted academic success much better than admissions officers, predicted loan risk better than bank officers, etc, etc. To say nothing of modern machine learning methods on modern computers. It's insane we allow humans to continue doing these tasks at all.

But there has been huge resistance to algorithms in every domain. From people who stand to lose their jobs and be put to shame by them of course. But also even outsiders tend to reject algorithms. And overly trust humans. Psychologists have actually studied this. They call it a bias labelled "Algorithm Aversion". (http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-Algort...) The study showed that humans were willing to forgive the mistakes of humans far more than those of algorithms, even when the algorithm made far fewer of them.

This is why they aren't everywhere already. The last thing we need is fear mongering articles like this. As shown, humans are far worse. If an algorithm shouldn't do it, then a human certainly should not.

A big part of the case this article makes is a reference to a propublica study that found a slight bias against race in an algorithm once. Yet that study wasn't peer reviewed. The findings weren't statistically significant, which is a pretty low bar to begin with. And yet it always comes up as the main reference in these discussions. It's the only piece of evidence they can find of this nonissue ever happening. Stop. You are just making the problems you claim to care about worse.
I'm not going to pretend I understand anything about fluid dynamics.

It brings to mind how people say "Bumble bee's defy the laws of physics to fly".
I think a lot of sites already do that, although they may not send an email saying 'sorry, we don't have that e-mail on file,' it is pretty common to get a 'if that email exists, we have sent a reset e-mail to it' message when you do a password reset that doesn't expose if the email exists in the system.

Although to the point of this article, they will then happily tell you you can't use an email during signup, so it is a mixed-bag.

I suppose if you allowed multiple usernames per email, you could just email them all the usernames that they have on that email address when they forgot their username, but that seems like a clunky setup. It probably depends a lot on the service though, as someone posted a link to a discussion from 2014 about Amazon's reasoning for allowing multiple emails elsewhere in this thread, which makes a bit of sense for their use-case.
Serious question: who didn't expect this? Did anybody think that the 19K high of last week was going to be the new normal?
Voice-First Is About IoT, Not AI
There's also probably a set of people like me who got in when ETH was <$10 and want to get enough out to have at least something to show for it.
As a non-IT professional, I do not see the reasons why I did not switch personally despite being increasing uncomfortable with Windows 10 and thinking that I will need to do that one day.

1. Poor driver support (it is mentioned last but I think it's a major problem). It is a lottery to know if you install linux on a laptop which functionality will work or not. Even on a dell laptop that came with linux pre-installed I ended up with some functionalities not working correctly.

2. Non self-discoverability of the OS. Outside of very basic tasks, you very quickly end up writing command lines, much earlier than on Windows that gives you a UI for quite sophisticated things. People who code every day don't realise how difficult it is for someone who never coded to get into it. It is the same for someone who doesn't use CLI extensively. There is so much to learn before being to do simple things that I can do in a few clicks on windows that this is a heavy investment. An investment I will probably do one day but that I do not have the brain/time budget to make in the short term. I appreciate the power of being able to do everything with command line (and to automate everything). However don't underestimate the friction it creates when you need to do something like 3-10 times a year, not often to learn the command by heart but often to be seriously annoyed every time you do it and spend a disproportionate amount of time. Not a problem for linux sysadmins who do that all day. But if the target is 10% market share, it needs to be usable by more than sysadmins.
Should Consumers Fear the Big Data Privacy Threat?
low level programming / radio.
try not to cry ;)
Lizard Squad's founding member pleads guilty to cyber-crimes
Not just machine learning. I remember learning in ecology that if the computer models didn't match with reality. Reality was probably wrong the model just needed better variables. I remember thinking how incredibly stupid that was at the time. Now I realize that's the way it works with everything and has for a while.

The problem with modelling real world systems is there are too many variables and we have no way of knowing just how many their are and what effects they all actually have on a system. We can never make a complete model yet we act and make decisions as a society as though our models are complete and infallible.
Downvote me all you want, but HN really needs to cure this bitcoin-jealousy. Yes, people who invested early became millionares and billionares with a single mouse click. I know it feels unfair when you spend countless hours creating and innovating and not being rewarded. But some of you here needs to stop hating and being bitter. I have been watching HN and bitcoin related threads for months now. Same pattern.
Well, that's the problem for every new (image) format.
I can't speak to consistent, but I think people who call any linux graphical experience polished are fooling themselves in the same way that android users are when they say it's got "just as good an app library"
Well, GNOME 3's lack of consistency and complete disregard for established UX practices didn't help. Client side decorations are annoying and hurt discoverability. Just give me a normal menubar and toolbar without fancy animations and buttons that aren't the size of a postage stamps. GNOME 2 and Windows XP/7 were the pinnacle of usable interfaces. It's all been downhill from there.
Not saying I agree or disagree, but what's the relationship here between Bitcoin Cash (Bitcoin Crash?) and the drop across the board?

If capital is moving into other currencies, it must be a small percentage of the capital, since the others aren't exactly rallying either. Capital's running for the hills.
Top reasons why teams fail to achieve company goals
> It's also the same experience every single time you use a Windows machine.

Recently I helped a small company migrate their PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Trust me, it is not the same experience at all for the end users. They (the users) will get used to the new interface and way of interacting with the OS not because it is more intuitive but because they will use it and gain experience with it.
I'm sure there was also someone who predicted 5k, 15k, 20k, and so on. Of course one of them will be right.
More interestingly: the targeted datacenters have installed drivers with EULA that didn't include this clause. So if they don't upgrade the drivers, they should be OK?
I've been avoiding buying for this very reason. I know bitcoin well enough to know it's going to crash, it's always going to crash, so never touch it on an upswing.

Buying it now is fairly reasonable. Though, I wouldn't be surprised to see it crash yet again, even harder, but it felt like buying on that upswing to 20k was suicide.
Same way I deal with their silly cookie laws: don't sabotage my site's user experience for somebody else's poorly thought out laws.

I still get the occasional angry user complaining that my website deleted something of his after he clicked the delete button and the confirm button. So I make his day by flipping .IsActive back to 1.

If you really don't want something to be on the internet, don't upload it to the internet.
Cross-Platform vs. Native App Development: which one to choose
Good point, and I agree there is room for a disruption, as right now it's all pretty bland with regards to innovation in the desktop space.
I was trying to use radare2 some time ago when reverse engineering a printer driver. I couldn't grok it, so I gave up and just used `hd` and `grep`.
Nautilus is a US website. At the same time, to imagine that every Jewish person is somehow required to criticise Israel with every second breath - no matter who or what else is actually being discussed - echoes the "Jew second" obsession of anti-semitic nationalists. Is it possible that the writer is Jewish and has no interest in writing about Israel in the article, accusingly or defensively?
Here is a super useful article about how you should build login https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-god-login/ (if you don't want to rely on professionals from Auth0 or Okta :-). In the article, there is a very good statement "being user friendly is way more important than being secure" and this is exactly this case also...
Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 3: The Persistent Multiplayer CRPG
From JavaScript to Clojure(Script): Writing a Webshop, Again
Cboe & CME must have some extensive performance clauses with exchanges used for futures pricing. A few weeks ago, selloffs like this would result in exchanges closing.
I switched from Linux (KDE) to Mac about 5 years ago, with some attempts to switch back.

I recently got a laptop with Windows for some gaming for the kids, and I feel Windows is actually less polished than Linux with KDE. Restarts, weird issues with multiple users, sudden switches between Modern UI and something that looks the same as the Windows 2000 I last used.

I really wonder when Windows will be usable enough for home users...
Third thread on the same topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15986302

Edit: So the downvotes now. It seems pointing out regurgitation of the same topic is somehow wrong. Learned my lesson here.
If this keeps up, we can look forward to the "It's under 9000!" memes...
I think as technologists we have a natural preference for clean technological solutions that don't involve politics or messy interpersonal relationship issues. Failing to confront that whole human sphere of life leads to negative consequences everywhere, and the talk does a great job of pointing out some of the macro social effects.

On a similar note but a more localized scale I'm reminded of this talk on one of the downsides of moving to microservices being that people can avoid difficult conversations https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s
This all sounds plausible, but I actually don't buy any of it.

An example anecdote: we gave our technophobic MD a desktop that had been used by a previous sysadmin add a temporary machine while he was waiting for a new Windows one. It was running Maté on Mint. He never noticed it wasn't Windows.

The reason the Linux Desktop hasn't happened is multifaceted (as you contend) but by far the biggest factor is OEMs. Normal users don't know/care what an OS is, so they're certainly not going to install one.

If you're contending that usability is a factor, look at Windows 8.0 or early Androids. There was plenty of complaints about both, mostly valid imo, but they still got a lot more new users than traditional Linuxes. Because people don't download OSes, they buy devices. And if they get stuck with one that's less than usable, they just stay stuck, and maybe get a relative to help. They don't switch.

All the reasons you listed are valid and true criticisms, but the above makes them moot.

The idea that fixing X Windows' complexities or unifying the community on a focused UI/UX vision will popularise the Linux Desktop is hopelessly naïve. You won't get far without a device manufacturing operation and billions of dollars.
Why does price of a bitcoin matter? You can buy the equivalent of $50usd in bitcoin, and enjoy many if not all of the 'opprotunities'.
It's not even done crashing
I think there are three elements contributing to the negativity:

(1) People may get hurt. I was in an Uber two weeks ago where my driver talked about taking out a second line on his home to buy Bitcoin. By today's mark, he's lost money. That people who clearly have no idea what they're doing are being preyed on is disturbing to many, myself included.

(2) ICOs are a cesspool of frauds. They allow promoters to make money without putting anything up. That's different from early Bitcoin adopters, who actually put time or money or computing power at risk.

(3) Bitcoin is an article of faith. Discussions around its value often devolve into "does god exist" arguments.
> Normal users don't want and/or need that much choice.

No need to take it. That's why ubuntu is a popular choice.

> Say what you want about the (many) flaws of Windows, but you can't deny that one of the easiest out-of-the-box-this-thing-just-works experiences.

Except when it doesn't install the right drivers(compared to distros like manjaro) and when you get a crappy browser by default or when the menu just crashes or fails to find what is certainly there. Or when you need to suspend your work because it's Update Time Like it or Not™. It's definitely not the best out-of-the-box experience, but the one which is the most advertized with the most misc software.

> Try explaining the difference between Arch, Ubunutu, and Debian to a normal consumer and their eyes glaze over before you even begin.

That's not true. Their main differences are how they handle software releases, install/update software and how you install them. If you're not a complete digital analphabet you'll understand such easy concepts.
This time I think we’re done for the year. Unlike in July, this time if you look on Reddit there is very little appetite in ‘buying the dip’. People are fed up after the Coinbase shenanigans and are wary about Tether, IOTA, etc.
How to choose the best WiFi channel
Reminds me of crobots (http://tpoindex.github.io/crobots/) a great little game I played many years ago. In it you program your robot in a C like language and watch them compete in a curses based command line arena.
Sounds a little paranoid, especially since Service Workers are on by default in the latest Safari Technology Preview: https://webkit.org/blog/8042/release-notes-for-safari-techno....

You might want to check the WebKit status page; you might be pleasantly surprised: https://webkit.org/status/.

When Safari has complete support for PWAs in 2018, you guys will have to come up with a new Apple conspiracy against the web. ;-)

Until just last month, Firefox was pretty damn slow compared to Safari and Chrome but they got a pass from the HN crowd.

I suspect Tim Cook isn’t losing sleep about PWAs vs. native apps. It’s win-win for Apple either way.
I think the problem is that you're looking at "bias" as a dirty word.

> If the real world is biased it can then itself be biased.

And if said algorithm corroborates that bias, then is reality somehow "bad" as a result, or do you just not like the outcome because it "feels bad"?

There is a difference between truth and an idealized outcome that you desperately want to be true.