skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd put it even simpler. He's betting on uncertain future technologies, where it's completely unclear if the technology he is pursuing will work out.

Ten years ago nobody was particularly certain electric cars could ever be feasible, and currently nobody is sure that hyperloop will ever be feasible either.

In other words, is that next fitness peak even there? Or is it a mirage?

I don't think the current major players are lazily sitting on their hands, they just tend to focus more on the march of incremental improvement than blue sky research. Which can be incredibly valuable- the last hundred years of automobiles and fifty years of semiconductor manufacturing has been mostly the march of incremental improvement.
Not sure what you mean, I can download battle.net on MacOS and play every game on there, although admittedly I haven't tested them all. SC2 runs pretty flawlessly too.

There are some games not available for MacOS but they seem to be less and less common. Almost everything now is cross platform, in part thanks to Unity making cross-platform games easy.
Why do you need a major OS update every year? It's been a few years now that they are incremental with small improvements and fixes and not major changes that force people to change the way they use the system.

They obviously can't put all the under-the-hood changes on the slides as there's probably a ton of stability fixes and hardening going on behind the scenes.

There are good iOS apps for a lot of things, if they can easily be adapted to run on the Mac as they demonstrated by porting the News app it can only be good for the ecosystem. The apps won't look like they are running in an iOS simulator and you use a mouse pointer to do touch actions. It'll be a normal native app that shares code with iOS.
Yes, this is indeed a problem of english semantics, which is why the term "libre software" is sometimes offered as an alternative. "Libre" is a french word that means that part of "free" that free software cares about (ie not the cheap part)
The terms don't apply to the same context. A/B testing is a specific technique (well, not that specific) which can be used to do ethical science or unethical science.
Totally I had a power mac G5 i was using as a vpn, vnc server, and for some random legacy software up until last year. Eventually replaced it (sold it 10 years later, crazy!) for the poor power efficiency but thats not the machines fault it was rock solid for years and years and probably still would be.
As I think about this from a long term strategy standpoint, it might be to Apple's BENEFIT to actually eliminate advertising on their phones?

Given the current climate politically vis-a-vis privacy, such a move would put a lot of pressure on Facebook and Google. Here's the thing though, Apple doesn't really make their money from ads. They likely make a whole lot more money on premium apps, IAPs and store fees actually. (Not to mention hardware which just blows ALL of that out of the water in terms of revenue and profit.) I wouldn't be surprised if it's a COST center for them to run their ads infrastructure. They just have to run it because a lot of large developers, like Google and Facebook, want ads.

I'm not saying Apple would ever be this evil, but if they wanted, they could REALLY press their considerable advantages right now both politically AND in the market. Putting companies like Google and Facebook even more on their back feet than they already are and then going in for a crippling blow on them.
Good to see this discussion and the different viewpoints of the matter coming up to the surface from time to time.
I find it amusing, my friends and I continuously joke Apple-style hype pitches for mundane things like airline safety videos.

But otherwise, it's pretty cringy not only seeing them demo the new animoji stuff as well as people frantically clapping.
Believe the posters asking how we know that they won't shrink the feature set in the future in comparison to the existing codebase by introducing updates or quality-of-life improvements in the Enterprise version and not in the open version
It's not "convincing" and there is no sense of "style change" at all - it's very clearly just awkwardly re-orchestrating the melody with some timbral changes. The tonality is often entirely lost (the Rihanna to Mozart example is the most egregious).

I really hate that we have to criticize these awful articles and press releases all the time, because this work is actually really cool, but because the researchers and article writers constantly go overboard with their claims and rhetoric, the level-headed people have to come along and say: "look, this is cool, but it's nowhere near the claims you're making". I'm really sick of this happening with every DeepMind/FAIR/Microsoft/IBM result that gets published. It's so tiring.
"We know you're all very upset about our new keyboards that break and require a $700 repair if they get a grain of sand in them, so today we're announcing that the new OS is named after a desert.

We're Apple! We hate you, and you're going to keep buying it regardless."
This is actually a "known bug". It is more specifically called "libre" software, and the idiom "Free as in 'beer' versus Free as in 'speech'" comes up to help illustrate the difference in meaning.
My wife's engagement ring is cubic zirconia, it was like $120 (but that was the whole ring, not just the stone). I'm more then happy being the man that got his wife a cubic zirconia ring and a house downpayment... (House is, after all, a bit more useful then a diamond ring)
It's not a win win to lose potential customers because you could have made a few bucks in interest in the process.
The negative reactions seem to center on the phrasing of the title -- "an open source alternative to Git". This seems to imply that Fossil is open source where git is not, which is clearly incorrect.

There's no term for "git + issue tracker + wiki + pull request manager + web presence + access controls + organizational tools" that GitHub represents at the moment. Fossil checks a couple more boxes in that list than Git does, and represents an open-source alternative to GitHub in that sense. That's hard to express in the title, but the title as it stands is misleading at best.

"Fossil - a SQL database based alternative to Git" would be more accurate, but a little less sexy.
Who is liable to whom when user A use a free service B based on an ambiguous agreement, and that service makes an ambiguous agreement with another service C, and C does something that is arguable a violation of one of those agreements?

How much restitution am I entitled to for an ambiguous violation of an amorphous concept like privacy? And how much is Facebook entitled to from a partner who (might have) violated that agreement, causing non-measurable harm to me?
I use vim and thus repeatedly pressing directional keys has never been my primary concern. That said, I use tabs.
Please don't Godwin HN discussions. A minor change in social media functionality is in no way comparable to experiments which caused actual physical harm.
The writing was on the wall since they stopped updating it (OpenGL) 5 years ago.
Seymour Hersh on spies, state secrets, and the stories he doesn’t tell
What are you missing that doesn't make it a "real developer system"? Can't say I ever got stopped by macOS. It mostly stays out of the way.
Didn't Microsoft have an OS project called Mojave? http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2008/08/...
viral how? You think it's morally ok to just use others work without contributing back any improvements/disclosing it to make money?
All I expect is if Apple does any sort of blocking of web based ads, I would expect the same treatment in App Store apps. Without that, the web would be dead on iOS.
Part spider, part scorpion creature found fossilized in amber
Exactly! My three favourite points about open source:

- Transparency

- Knowledge sharing

- Repairability (hackability)

I see those as what I hope will one day be seen as essential consumer rights regarding software they purchase: The right to know it, the right to understand it, and the right to improve it.
Upvoted, but with a caveat I wanted to throw out:

> 20 years ago Microsoft was making strategic acquisitions to quash the viability of free software; today they're making strategic acquisitions to be at the center of it.

I think you've run afoul of the very confusion RMS is talking about in TFA. They're not buying into free software, they're buying into open source. Most of what MS is doing in the space is using Apache-style licenses. I'm not going to say Microsoft is bought into Free Software until I see VSCode being distributed under the GPL. (It's currently MIT.)
The big difference between BSD and GPL (after all the legalese is said and done) is as follows:
* BSD says you have the freedom to swing your fists
* GPL says that your freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose.

That's pretty much the difference in practice. That's actually pretty similar to how our capitalist, democratic society works. (we do restrict people's freedoms where they would end up taking away freedom from someone else).

Sometimes the one approach is better, sometimes the other. Apply right tool to right job, as needed.

Note that it is entirely possible to earn money using free (as in speech) software, and many quite capitalist companies do so.

(ps; in my limited experience in hiring expensive lawyers to resolve legal conflicts while capitalisting: the GPL appears to deliver a lot more bang for buck than MIT or BSD. In that limited domain. MIT and BSD can be quite useful in other domains! )
Your anecdote on notification use cases has been noted by the Ministry of Statistics. Thank you for your participation.
As you say liberated software implies a removal of restrictions, but I think it implies it was accomplished by force. I think it would be a good term for someone who believes piracy to be a moral imperative, but I don't think it's a good term for expressing the idea of the author willingly sharing their work.

"And the soldiers liberate them, laying mines along their roads." ~Megadeth
More like: No...t yet
From a publishing industry standpoint, Apple News desktop is pretty big. Especially if that means Apple News is coming to other countries (including, more specifically, Canada). And especially since they bought Texture. There's likely more to come on that front.
They will do what they say until they don't have to anymore,l. Until they have killed the alternatives and there is only their choice left.

This is Microsoft. I cannot understand why people trust this company. Actually trust their PR messages. It's amazing.
I agree that people are overreacting, but I think the overreacting is good for git in general. It helps smaller players (Gitlab, etc.) to break the monopoly of Github, and reverse the wrong conception a lot of new developers have that git == github. Remember git is supposed to be decentralized? In reality it's actually centralized on github, and github is becoming the single point of failure on the developer world, which is not great. (Google actually has an internal mirror of github[1] for that reason)

[1] It's only for public projects with a license that doesn't prohibit Google from mirroring it, and only for projects Google depends on.
I wonder if they'll ever fix `localStorage` in private Safari windows. It breaks countless sites and Safari is the only browser to block it.
Let me put it another way, when was the last time you heard a user ask for an iOS app to be on the Mac? Is this what Mac users want or is it something that Apple wants?
It would be interesting to see how many of the waitlist cancellers bought electric cars from other brands. The Bolt, the Leaf, and the BMW i3 are the obvious alternatives.
Sexual orientation is also not a protected class under the Civil Rights Act. Hence the topic.
> It's "freedom" on someone else's terms.

It's freedom on my terms too: GPL protects the developer and user community from malicious patents, hostile forks, lock-down attempts, bait-and-switch-to-closed.
True, but it'd be a shame to lose out on the library of legacy software and games.

Edit: and XQuartz (X11) with OpenGL comes in handy once in a while too...
I built an app that generates single purpose email addresses for privacy
Honestly, this is really up to women to make a change. There is a zillion other beautiful stones out there, but for some reason they are all obsessed with the diamond. They want it at any cost. I'd much prefer to buy something uncommon for the woman I loved, maybe my birthstone?
This reminds me of Incorporated (TV series), with a similar idea of using the deserts for seawater adapted crops. This is so fascinating to see being developed in real life and even more so to be marveled at in an exercise of forecasting the changes it ought to bring into the world. Just to pick a few such changes, this how the deserts will suddenly start worth something (and offer new reasons to be fought over, unfortunately). This is also how dramatic demographic booms took place over the history, so expect UAE to growth several times its current number of inhabitants; or next to it, in Saudi Arabia, expect a growth to something on the order of hundreds of millions!
I believe that would put apple in an awkward position because they also offer an ad platform to developers. This would put them in a situation similar to adblock plus where they allow a few websites to use ads (mostly if they are paid money in exchange and they don't seem to flashy/annoying).

I believe Apple would rather avoid such a position for themselves (especially considering that this might not even be legal -- Adblock has already has a legal battle in Germany over the conflict of interest which they have won but might lose in other jurisdictions).

What I would really like is a proper ad blocker. The ones available in Safari are not really good. They seem to be only using a blacklist and cannot have well defined rules like uBlock origin.
I feel the system wide dark mode is the next step from Night Shift mode to acknowledge or encourage people to work more toward late night/evenings. Eye fatigue has been one of the reason my body reminds me to go to sleep, now I can maybe deal with some more emails before I head to bed.
I think the whole situation of consolidation into titanic unanswerable powers is horrible, but I can say this for Microsoft and its intentions: If the situation was that GitHub would inevitably be devoured and consolidated into something, I can think of worse devourers (by at least a small margin). Amazon. Facebook. Bayer ;D

I preferred Github to be an independent thing, and I wonder if the world's changed to where you can't have independent things, you can only choose your master, and you can't actually choose that either. If it's that, could be worse.
Israeli meme-reply to Iran's Khamenei calling it “malignant cancerous tumor”
le plan se déroule comme prévu !
Trading long-term customer trust for a short-term cash infusion is not a winning play.
When does any company get consent for changing its product or advertising and measuring the response?

I never gave my consent to McDonald's for putting up a billboard or changing their menu or their recipe.
What is the point of me putting my app on iOS if I can't make money from it? Not every app has a viable strategy for purchase based monetization, nor should it.
You mean from 2011 when Microsoft had totally different management and business model? I don't see the Steve Ballmer Microsoft has much bearing on today's Microsoft.

Also it wasn't the Microsoft Account change as much as the they had the weird MS Store or Local account sign in options. I removed the Store sign in and only used local and had no issues. Am I missing something?
The reason you can trust Atlassian a bit more because they have more narrow focus on dev tools so less chances that they could become a competitor. Unless you’re developing another (git/bit)(hub/lab/bucket)
Well, I think that's the point. They want to monetize the enterprise edition better. Combining GitHub's product with Microsoft's cabal of credit-card-ready existing purchasers. Microsoft has built a community of developers that expect to pay for dev tools, which is rare.

So, they can have the existing product operate as-is, and Microsoft can make money by moving their legacy high-paying consumers to something better.
I moved all of my friend's Facebook data into MonicaApp [1] [2] (open source friends crm, you can self-host if you want, I pay to support the dev). I get reminders for any events per-relationship, and there's a reminders API [3].

[1] https://www.monicahq.com/

[2] https://github.com/monicahq/monica/

[3] https://www.monicahq.com/api/reminders
I would assume it's more about making it more convenient for developers to build an app for iOS and macOS using similar frameworks and APIs, without depending on React Native or just throwing Electron and the web stack at the problem. From my own minimal experience you have to pull in a fair few dependencies or do quite a lot more work if you want a more modern look for a native Mac app.

Additionally, if I want to bring an iOS app to the Mac, then it'd be great to not have to figure out the Cocoa version of a certain UIKit view and then rewrite all of the code to fit.

I can't imagine this would translate to some next-level version of universal binaries, but who knows what it'll be like in a few years.
What on earth are you complaining about?

It's an annual, incremental OS release. We're not talking about multi-year developments or grand visions. There are a bunch of features that look quite nice from a usability standpoint, some improvements to the App Store, and a crack at a unified development platform for iOS and macOS. Those seem like a pretty reasonable set of features to roll out, and no doubt they'll be accompanies by the usual array of more minor improvements.

The only thing we should really be hoping for is that they focus more on reducing the number of bugs, performance issues and security vulnerabilities.
Transmuting documents into graphs with OpenNLP
There are positive uses. I can see this being useful for monitoring health in animals raised for food in addition to the medical applications the article mentioned.

That said, the potential for abuse is limited by what society will tolerate. We tolerate tracking and alcohol monitoring bracelets for people who drive drunk. If we tolerate tracking implants for sex offenders on parole or something I'm sure it'll filter down routine probation sentences eventually.
Housing is not really a positional good. As a counterpoint, consider the extremes. If a market is saturated, the value of a house remains non-zero. If there is only a single house in an area, the value probably remains low since there is nothing else of value around it. Housing just more or less just follows a normal supply curve. Building more housing isn't going to cause the overall price to approach zero.

As a side note, with a healthy housing market a house would probably be a depreciating asset, like a car. This would have the side-effect of making those who put a lot of money into their home unhappy, and so homeowners have put a lot of effort into ensuring artificial restrictions leave the housing market in an unhealthy state that lines their pockets.

Getting affordable housing is possible, but it requires fighting the extremely entrenched mentality that a home is a form of savings that should always go up in value.
It is interesting that at the same time, sales of the Chevy Bolt aren't doing too good. This despite that at least a few reviews I've seen indicate it is a decent EV with decent range.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/05/ev-sales-table.asp...
Developing on Mac? Not so bad.

Developing for Mac? Abismal.
> reasonable fees for special cases

Who'd like to pay for a stackoverflow clone without the most annoying stackoverflow rules?

I mean, - a site not focused on curating knowledge but on asking and answering questions?

That answer could of course be: have you looked at this <embed or link>?

But nobody should be punished for asking again and certainly nobody should be punished for answering a duplicate.
Which is why FreeBSD has taken over the world of UNIX, and everyone gladly contributes back to it.
The Apache license is absolutely a free software license. Even the FSF agrees with that.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2

> This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL.
I love Safari, it's my main browser - but there are so many small annoying things that take ages to fix it's just sad.
It is a single point of failure for devs around the world. Remember the attack on Dyn DNS? Thousands and millions of devs stopped working because GH was down.
The real question is can that conversion be done in an efficient enough way with materials that are safe to put inside someone and in a small enough package.
I wasn't expressing my own opinion on such licenses; 'viral' is accepted terminology for licenses like the gpl that require derivative works to use the same license.

However, if you would like an argument, then yes. Or, rather, I think it's morally ok for people to make software under any license they choose, including licenses that allow big companies to use their work. Personally, I use bsd-3 for most of what I write, and I support other people who do the same. I also bear no ill-will to people who use gpl or apache or mpl or what-have-you.
OMG!!! But Dark mode!!! It's like, so, so cool ...

I can't believe I can be allowed to change the colours of the desktop after years of Jony Ive dictating/advising what my desktop should look like.
The Finder photo mode reminds me of KDE 3 or even Windows Vista. How can you hype something so old?
Globalization and free trade benefit corporations, not workers, hence the increasing income inequality.

Corporations are pocketing the difference in labor pricing from off shoring labor rather than passing the savings onto consumers as was promised by politicians and economists when trade deals were signed.
> this is the same Microsoft

No, it isn't. It's like saying that Ford is the same company that finds more profitable to let customers burn than to fix a flaw[1].

[1]: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/The_Ford_Pinto...
With GitHub acquisition, open-source loses a friend
The rogue world of one of New York’s major trash haulers
Canton?
Issue importing rarely works. It needs a lot of related changes all over, which cannot be automated.

I edit my CI scripts almost daily, until the workflow is acceptable.
I try all the others constantly, but it's a headache and needs weeks of time until it works good enough. Github only hosts the results and releases, but still.

Just last week I spent again a full day to get the encrypted auth working for github deployment from some random new CI.
My CI's do work together with connected hooks, e.g. if appveyor and travis passes, merge to master, then appveyor deploys the binaries to github, then the release is published, which sets a tag, which triggers travis to make distcheck and deploy to the very same release on github.

On github I have static pages with custom domain names for free.
On github I can host releases and dailies for free.
Someone needs to pay for it. Better a big company which backs this.

I'm a bit sceptical with Microsoft as I'm sceptical with Google. You can never trust PM's in big companies. But so far I give them the benefit of doubt, they clearly love github (unlike google which didn't love code.google), and we'll all see.