skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did read the entire article. Most of it more than once as I went looking for quotes to include in my comment.

I get that you weren't trying to say that we should switch from a modern OS to one from the 90's. You make that clear. However, you absolutely spent most of the article comparing Windows 95 to modern day software.

>Take the launch of Microsoft’s latest version of their operating system, Windows 10, for instance. No music, no comedians, no party, no fun and a lot of dubious statements.

>I’m not saying we should solve every UI and UX issue with a start menu, but most web designs out there could surely learn a lot from how Windows 95 solved so many problems by thinking about how target users would deal with their product.

>All 19MBs of Windows 95 consisted on useful tools that you could expect from a computer. There was no Cry Translator or Electric Shaver app — wonders of the modern day, available on any smartphone — as it was focused on a few objectives only.

>Imagine if such a strange object as a phone that could only make calls existed. That would be the equivalent of Windows 95 on a computer back then. It had everything you ever needed from it, without the unnecessary waste of space.

>What really stands out are the main qualities that Windows 95, as a product, had and that are not common nowadays. It had a memorable launch, it was honest regarding its objectives, focused on the user, objective and transparent.

The problem I have with the chart is not that is shows junk and paid increasing - it's that it shows the utility decreasing. As a percentage of the junk/paid/utility trifecta, I might agree that utility's percentage is going down over time but the absolute quantity of utility has increased an insane amount in the last 23 years. Your chart does not show that, at least not very clearly.

This quote is what precedes the graph:

>Imagine if such a strange object as a phone that could only make calls existed. That would be the equivalent of Windows 95 on a computer back then. It had everything you ever needed from it, without the unnecessary waste of space.

Phones like that do exist. You can get one for your house still. If you're willing to accept texting as a feature, you can get a cell phone like this. You seem to be arguing that such a device is somehow superior to an iPhone or my Pixel because it doesn't have the "unnecessary waste of space". You completely gloss over the fact that the utility section of the 2015 graph should have things like a web browser, Google or Apple Pay, Uber, Slack, Netflix, Spotify, GrubHub, and many others in it which make it substantially bigger than the 1995 graph.
Thanks for your inputs. A few comments:

I first created that script called m years ago on some Unix boxes that I was using. Could have been HP-UX or other version. And I've used it over the years on many Unix and Linux versions that I worked on. It could be that in some cases, the script is needed due to a tty or TERM or other configuration issue. But I'm pretty sure that I've had the need for it (to remove those control characters) on at least some systems where such config was okay. I know this because, while I do tweak env. var., stty and other settings now and then, I do not always (need to) do so, and have still found control chars [1] in the man output, even when redirecting to file. That is why I created the script, because when working on a C, Python or any other project where I need to read man pages, I often like to redirect the man output to a file (in my ~/man dir) and then read them using vi/vim.

[1] See what I say in that post (about m) about nroff and troff.

Also, I do know about stty, have used it for years, although there is less need for it these days. Used to do a lot of tweaking and experimenting with the erase option (for which, BTW, instead of backspace key in your example, we can also write a literal ^h, i.e. caret, then letter h), intr option, onlcr, ocrnl and others. Used to be good fun and sometimes frustrating too, because docs for this areas were somewhat lacking then.
I used to work at place where one coworker did bring his own parrot everyday.

He was interesting animal: he could roam the offices freely, he had people he liked, people he dislike and people he liked to tease (like making notification sounds or phone ringtones), he also liked to sit by window and barked on cats outside.

They said those parrots have mind of two year old baby, having that old kid right now I must say it is quite accurate.
3) The Saud family is understood to be more liberal than the general Saudi population and MBS had to supposedly overcome powerful conservatives to start with the (social) liberalization agenda. How true is this, and what are the implications if MBS is deposed?

Saudi rule throughout the peninsula is legitimized through the support of the ulama, who by right of being the stewards of Islam in the world (the keepers of Mecca, Medina, and the cube, the most important sumbols of Islam) wield enormous power, not just through their leadership of their local populations but through their religious significance to the larger Islamic world. In exchange for their support, the Saudi family has historically granted the ulama a wide berth in their regulation of the Saudi people’s moral and religious lives, support they were forced to concede after their near deposal in the ‘79 seige of the cube.

You’re correct that the Saudi family is a liberalizing and moderating force in their lands, who are currently in a long battle to wrest control of their countries moral and religious lives away from the ulama. It seems lots of westerners are under the idea that if the Saudi family was destroyed then the ulama would all become liberal and Islam would move further away from wahhabi style interpretations - when the reality is undermining MBS would just give more power to hardline wahhabists and the peninsula would move from a conservative state slowly liberalizing to a theocracy run by wahhabists.
I get the idea that at some point in the Windows 10 project they made a kind of breaking change, which when compared to Kubuntu is more like moving to a new release than just a set of patches. There seems to be some cruft attached to that that the fresh install solves. I genuinely think it is a one time thing.

My last Ubuntu distro upgrade caused the sound to stop working, a problem with graphics drivers and an issue with window management. I am no MS fan, but everyone can get caught up in update problems.
Does O'Reilly still use DocBook? Is this the choice of the author?
Will you please stop spreading this misinformation? If you want to use backwoods folk medicine on yourself, you're free to do so. But stop recommending this bullshit to others. What you're doing here is no better than the tick-removal version of the anti-vaxxer's playbook.

The American Medical Association says in multiple places to use tweezers in a very particular way to remove ticks:

* https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/207551
* https://books.google.com/books?id=2Yg7LVohnXEC&pg=PA314&lpg=...

So how about you let the doctors be doctors and stop spreading misinformation and ignorance?
Playing Pokemon via SMS in Swift
In terms of stability and performance, with work and gaming capabilities, Windows NT4 Service Pack 3 (IIRC) was the sweet spot for me. I could use my Windows NT workstation for gaming with DirectX support. It was both snappy and solid.

The sweet spot OS for me at the moment is Ubuntu MATE.
Some spots on your body are very difficult to check carefully and/or reach for a clean, safe extraction.

I went to the ER once to have a tick removed. I felt absurd doing so, but I simply couldn't reach it properly, and I had no one else around to take care of it.
Minus Windows ME Microsoft was delivering amazing updates that increased stability and added useful features in the 95 -> XP years. Then as XP started aging OS X really began to pick up steam peaking with the 2009 release of Snow Leopard. Since then we've been in a bit of a rut with both Windows and MacOS.

We are about due for something to shake things up, but I'm not really sure what that is going to be. Maybe it's Chromebooks, or tablets, but it seems like they'd have taken off already. Maybe we are just waiting for someone to drop a revolutionary release and suddenly it will be obvious in hindsight. I'm excited to see what's coming next though.
>But I don't see the issue with exposing the HTTP interface to the world?

It's a quick solution, but it is not user friendly.

- What the IP it has is highly dependent on your router config. Even finding the IP requires work from the end user and you, every time. You can tell the router to give the device a static DHCP allocation, sure, but that will break as soon as you switch to a new router.

- Browser changes might break rendering of the config pages.

- The config interface is not standardized: it works for now but it will look outdated a couple of years from now. It can't be improved upon. Understanding and working with it is another annoyance that the user has to learn.

- You need to handle credentials management, which is messy, or you can put nginx or whatever in front and let the proxy handle authentication. The first solution requires a whole bunch of boilerplates on the device and is not secure. The second one is secure, however, it requires you to have control of a nginx server that has to know specifically about your IoT device.

- On a small device, you likely are unable to host and deliver all assets on the device (for example, boostrap). That means you'll have to rely on a third party to deliver those resources for you. It might break in the future.

- Let's say a person wants to know all the params and controls, they have to read your web page source code. They have to tease out UI intermingled with logic.

- All of those is well if you know you'll gonna deploy it at home where you control everything and reconfig it every time you have a new router. But let's say you want to gift it to a friend or deploy to the end users. The amount of work you'll need to setup for that HTTP config thing to work consistently for the friend is a lot. You can't tell him/her "just find the device's IP and go to the website..."
There is. When you witness and are the victim of profound bullshit, betrayal, and evil, it changes you. That can happen when you're "young", but it usually takes a while to accumulate.

(Too soon?)
GRPC-Rs: A Rust Wrapper for GRPC Core
They had, in their own words hundreds of followers.

At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.
Slackware 4 ever.
Its movements are really slow and choppy. I bet it can’t even run...

The uncanny valley is not even in sight. I guess I’m going back to this week’s Westworld...
> What compelling tech does Google have that Walmart needs?

Google knows that I've been researching segways( with possible intentions of buying). Could they possibly use the information for product recommendations, inventory predictions ect?
I don't think that means what you think it means. US patents only cover the manufacture, sale, and use of the patented thing in the US. You would have to get a separate patent in China, Europe, or any other jurisdiction to prevent someone from legally making use of your invention.

Similarly, in the US you can make something that was patented in China as long as it isn't also patented in the US.
Adobe XD Developer Platform: Be the First to Know
Damn, even years later it's still prohibitively expensive. 198k yen (~2k USD) and 90k yen (~900 USD) lifetime or 2980 yen (~30 USD) per month for the "basic plan" which is required for the AI services.
Our data is fine. All cloud hosted and available on GitHub.

What we've lost is our social graph. That's not something which can easily be decentralised.
Windows 95 had a bug which could crash it after about 50 days of uptime:

https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
But is the readership smaller today than it was 50 years ago?

I'm totally fine if SciAm writes for a broader audience because it has grown from a niche publication for academics to something that most American's have at least heard of.

But if the reading level has declined AND the readership has declined, that might indicate a problem.

I still hold out hope that this is a result of knowledge fragmentation more than anything. The computer scientist of 50 years ago, may have been better inform broadly on all the sciences, but maybe gave up that breadth of knowledge to read focused journals on quantum computing, and other topics the computer scientist of 50 years ago would have trouble understanding.
Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up.

What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Kubernetes first" cloud offering. We're currently on Google Kubernetes Engine, and I'm disappointed in the lack of integration throughout Cloud Platform. GCP is great in many areas, but the Kubernetes offering is clearly an afterthought. As an example, if you create an ingress, this creates a bunch of load balancer objects (forwarding rules, URL maps, backends). But these are all given obscure names (k8s-um-production-zippediboop-f8da5e6c92f38300), and none of the Kubernetes labels transfer over. Same with disks; GCE disks don't even have labels, so they put a bunch of JSON in the "description", which of course cannot be filtered or queried. Similar things happen with VMs and other things; the "mapping" of Kubernetes to GCP concepts is basically either lossy or non-existent. Many other similar weaknesses exist: Cloud SQL (if you want to use Cloud SQL, you have to manually run the Cloud SQL Proxy as a sidecar), GCP service accounts (different from Kubernetes service accounts!), etc. GKE is solid, but everything seems like it's been put together without any over-arching design; GKE is just another thing buried in a somewhat ramshackle jungle of different services.

There's an opportunity for a vendor to come in and offer a platform where you start with Kubernetes. In particular, this means that the platform should be manageable from Kubernetes, through the use of CRDs and pluggable controllers. For example, I should be able to define a persistent disk using a Kubernetes manifest, instead of having to go through some web UI or CLI ("gcloud compute disk create" or whatever).

That said, it's hard to compete with GCP at this point. Whoever wants to compete in this space have to compete not just with GKE, but with the technical awesomeness of GCP.
Hypocrisy on the side of author is a logically false argument about the actual content.

I can be a murdering psychopath and express in my memoirs from prison that while I love killin', murder is immoral. Murder is still widely accepted as being immoral regardless of who asserts the opinion.

That aside I found the article's author heavily corralled observations to support his opinion.

> I’m not trying to compare operating systems with social media or mobile applications,

Yes, yes you are.

> I’m not saying we should solve every UI and UX issue with a start menu

I find it hard to actually understand what the author is really saying, perhaps he/she is saying nothing at all. The irony about substance and honesty isn't lost on me.
Sell your shares
The potential savings from shutting down welfare programmes would be fairly easy to calculate, though.
That seems like a gross overgeneralization. Yes, there is brain drain but it doesn't mean that the engineers working in Indian startups like Flipkart are the ones who pursued engineering as a safety net. A lot of them are as smart as their Indian counterparts who are working in US in companies like Amazon, Google etc.
Just wait until people start opening doors for you next year.
This is a good point. Maybe Twitter finds that these changes are driving away people who don't monetize as much and appealing to the people who do. Much like Fox News found that scummy "buy gold now!" / "sell your gold now!" ads worked well for their audience, maybe this is what engages people.

I mean, it works for spam. Obvious bad english, poor spelling and punctuation, etc. weed out people who know this is an obvious scam, leaving only the type of people who will overlook every red flag imaginable because their gullibility and greed overwhelms them.
You maybe an Indian, but you are no Historian. As such the same logic can be applied to the term "West" or "Western Civilization". While no single civilization, or people create anything original, there are definitely histories of a people, and therefore the accusation of borrowing, using, or obtaining some outside source of inspiration doesn't preclude that people from their own history.

While you are Indian, I often feel that many Indians also tend to lack also unfortunately basic understanding of Indian history, perhaps it's the incessant cultural demand to pursue other subject, so far as to even claim that there's no such thing as "Indian" history, but rather merely the history of different people in a region arbitrarily created by the British.

I'm not accusing you of that, but simply pointing that being Indian doesn't shield you from the accusation of either being "anti-India" or lack of knowledge.
Show HN: Loans and Payment Plans for funerals
i think this post is idle speculation, as the author himself admits:

"I’m not a lawyer, and not the right person to be making this argument". Case closed.
Tesla patent reveals secret behind its solar roof tile’s camouflage capacity
No, they just haven't expanded it. I also think that the finish experiment has two main problems: they only give money to the unemployed, and they are only interested in measuring whether this leads to more employment. Seems almost cynical that they are not interested in other possible outcomes, such as benefits for unpaid work, family or health.
I am saying that the evidence suggests that 70-80% of adult[1] intelligence is based on genetic factors (that is distinct from heritability, which is lower, ~60% iirc) leaving the remaining 20-30% as unknown environmental factors. Wealth intuitively does play a role in that, although I believe (with as strong of evidence any anyone else does in the matter of environmental outcomes) that a strong parental bond matters more than wealth.

Again, my concern is that if unstructured wealth transfer is treated as a panacea, it will end up having compounding dysgenic effects that outweigh whatever short term individual benefits come of it. This will, in the not very long run, make poverty worse.

It isn't saving me any karma since people can't be rational about this topic, but I'll stress again that I think we should help the poor for moral reasons.

[1] - It is important to specify adult intelligence, because interventions do appear to help childhood IQ, but this effect fades into adulthood and eventual life outcomes. This is why there was a lot of excitement around Head Start initially, but it has failed to produce the large changes in society that was hoped for.
> so what we're seeing is major updates that would have been 11, 12,

I think you are spot on with this, MS have pushed some really major updates, which would at least have been a service pack in the past, if not a new version. Not least I believe they have made some breaking changes to the update process which should do away with the enforced restarts in future
Levi's proudly present the smoke jumper pants. Protecting your Future Family with patented CTE Technology. (Controlled Trouser Explosion)
Save your last pair of marbles.
For context, I posted an algorithm that's about 1000x faster than the state of the art on HN a few months ago as an open source project to solicit job offers, and I know at least a few companies are using it in production.

I got quite a few offers for interviews, but got turned down because of "culture fit" when they found out about my health condition. I have a rare autoimmune disease that's basically destroying my eyesight. A few companies were bold enough not to cut me off right away: some assured me that a job was just around the corner, and asked me to "help them out a bit". Based on the descriptions of their servers and AWS's pricing figures, I estimate that I cut SpectraSeis's server bills from $250k a year down to about $10.

I feel taken advantage of. I'm going blind, I'm unemployed, I can't leave the pitch black bedroom at my mom's house because the sun hurts my eyes, and life is pretty bleak right now.

Is it still unacceptable to patent my algorithm?
Half my childhood I grew up in poor conditions. The stress of everything just drenches you. People traumatizing each other, young and old, in their stress and grief. The poor dull each other. Dulled minds are handed down. Poverty is not just economic fact, it is a state of mind.
> To my understanding, the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes, be that aid funding or food stamps.

No. A common belief among UBI proponents is that it is generally superior to most means-tested public benefit programs, but it is neither generally (though some, especially right libertarian, proponents do argue for this) seen as replacing all other social welfare programs, nor is it generally intended by advocates to replace any charity (which is a different thing entirely than government social welfare programs.)

In fact, I would argue that there is no one fundamental premise of UBI, because while it is one broad class of policy conclusion, people come to it from widely divergent premises: the various schools of left-leaning supporters don't share much in terms of premises with right-libertarian supporters, they just have the same answer to very different questions.
> The drawbacks include the fact that if you want to configure it you always have to be on the same LAN and figure out its IP or port-forward, but if you port-forward, it will be not very secure due to the attack surface of the mini web server.

But MQTT suffers from all of these same drawbacks, does it not? (MQTT is a TCP based protocol, and will thus suffer the same issues w/ NAT, and has no security aside from "can be run over TLS" (which I frankly think is okay / the point of layers of abstraction / I would not encourage re-inventing the TLS wheel; my point is only that MQTT and HTTP are in the same boat, AFAICT.))

> Moreover, it's not very elegant for you or others to programmatically control it.

I would think the ecosystem for HTTP vastly outstrips that of MQTT's…
3) you’re missing tons of history here, especially in ‘79 when those wahhabists who were great friends of the Saudi family committed a coup and the ulama demanded power in exchange for their blessing in putting the uprising down.
IQ tests are frequently biased. How biased will vary from test to test. Also, the data is can be misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with the tests procedures/results 1

70-80% comes from where? Nobody knows exactly what the "smart genes" are, and studies in twins show that variance between individuals in IQ is about 50%-60% genetic...or 40-50% environmental factors2A/2B

Even Haier has said that the fact that intelligence is in some way genetic just means that the factors that might influence those aspects of it would also need to be genetic. This can include things like nutrition and mental illness/stress, which are more prevalent among poorer communities.

TL;dr- Just because it's genetic, doesn't mean that it's determined at birth. Your biochemistry is constantly changing based on your environment.
1- http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2013/09/intelligence-testi...
2A-
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/genes-dont-just-influ...
2B*-
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/intelligence
Bound for Mars, World's First Interplanetary Cubesats Phone Home
Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck