skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question of why text user interfaces are difficult is an interesting one, but I think boils down to "Why can't you have a conversation with a computer like you do with a person?"

Graphical user interfaces bypass some of those issues with direct manipulation but I don't think people have an easy time learning how to use complex GUI applications. Before the smartphone I remember 1000 page books about how to use Microsoft Word and lately graphic designers are starting to realize that "It's not just me, Photoshop really is hard to use."

The big difference between computers and humans is that computers tend to require you to formulate inputs in a specific way and that they don't tolerate ambiguity. Early programming languages such as COBOL and Perl had highly complex grammars that most developers today have an aversion to. (For instance almost everybody things that "unless" and "ACTION if CONDITION" in Perl is stupid; even though natural languages are that way.)

Closely related to that is the "namespace problem" which boils down to an inability to create a unique meaningful name for every concept (ex. function, variable name, file, ...) that somebody might want to refer to. People let you use ambiguous words and will usually guess what you mean correctly, if they aren't sure they usually know they aren't sure and will ask clarifying questions.

The trouble w/ making programs that can do that is now you are dealing with something that doesn't necessarily have a right answer or we don't know what it is. My experience is that (despite what many of bosses have thought) it can be a lot harder to make something that has to be 99.9% right as opposed to 100% because you might find that there is some 0.001% case where you think you can tolerate an error but no... If you work out the math for something to where you can define what correct is, it might take a while to think through and implement but the task is finite. On the other hand there is no limit to how much time you can spend screwing around and going in circles.
It's fun to develop it - computer vision, facial features detection, 3D mesh deformation - I programmed all those parts for another unrelated app and it was total fun. Not that it was useful or something, but I enjoyed it a lot.
There's precedent: Chrome and Firefox both implement WebGL on Windows with ANGLE, which translates OpenGL to Direct3D.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANGLE_(software)
I assume you don't know any people born in the last 15 years or so. Emoji communication (using just emojis) is quite common, often several in a row.
The original poster claimed it was "destructive" which doesn't logically sound like a way to build a lot of value, especially to be one of the top 10 companies on the planet, at the very least without clarity on what they are supposedly destroying. From the votes and other comments, I'm clearly not alone in wondering. You had your chance to enlighten us but went with juvenile retorts instead, ultimately only really proving that you don't know either. Thanks for playing I guess.
I guess we will be saying our last goodbye to “write once, run on all major platforms” graphics code. Does this mean that the only choices now are 1. Fork your graphics code into two separate implementations or 2. Go up the stack and use a cross-platform “game” engine like Unity? I suppose 3. Stop supporting macOS is another (sad) option.
That idea was dismissed several thousand years ago, and for good reason. Text is way more powerful and precise than pictures. And I'm not saying having both is a bad thing, but this focus on Emojis is just idiotic.
How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Secret Government Phone Tracker
I agree with most of your points, except with volatility. If bitcoin becomes a global currency then it will have a much higher market cap than now and global support. This means it will have equivalent volatility to the dollar or euro. As adoption increases, volatility decreases.

"the lack of connection to something physical" - one can also argue about this. Money in your bank account is pretty much virtual too. If everybody right now wanted to withdraw their money from their bank account into physical money, we wouldn't be able to do that. There just aren't enough paper notes. Far from it in fact, it wouldn't even be remotely possible.

The biggest hinderance to bitcoin becoming a global currency in my opinion is the fact that governments are very scared of having a currency which they cannot control. Printing money is a wonderful thing to have for governments.
Open Source does not care about the Free Software ideals. Except for that one thing, that source code shall be available.

The meaning of Open Source is a lot more precise than just "the source code shall be available". See:

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
Metal allows for Vulkan to be implemented on top of it
Like most such critiques this is thick on criticism and thin on alternatives or solutions.
I completely agree with this as well. Also look into the alternative stones like ruby, sapphire, amethyst etc.

I've always told people if the girl is concerned about what type of stone you get her then that is a real cause for concern IMO.
That's not their achievement though, but a workaround to break their lock-in despite their efforts.
This is just quibbling, but 1) you can write Metal code with Swift as well as Objective-C (and that's not even vendor-locked; I'm doing Swift in Linux right now), and 2) you can write C++ in Objective-C.

I know this isn't what you're really complaining about, though.
You're acting as if the opensource initiative in MS of late is down to Nadella and nothing else. It's much more a case of market forces changing and an acceptance of opensource within corporations.
I was one of those. I bought the Kia Optima Plugin. I really like it, but clearly not as spaceshippy.
Lol, Metal is Mac-only which relies heavily on CoreWhatever dependencies and thus can never be cross-platform, right? The only reason any game or CAD developer even supports Mac at all is because OpenGL is a cross-platform API that works great on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so they only have to write one type of shader program, etc. No game developer in the world will write both an OpenGL/DirectX/Vulcan and Metal renderer for the purpose of staying up to date with Apple's "deprecations".

If you're Pixelmator or Apple's own Final Cut team, sure, use Metal. For anyone else that wants to make a living, supporting multiple platforms is a given, so you won't pay the slightest attention to this deprecation notice.
WebGL is a browser level API that does not require native driver support like OpenGL. They're related only in semantics.
iOS 12 Preview
I think what bothers me about this announcement is that _anyone_ owns Github; that is, a tech giant with a lot of influence in the software world owning the largest repository of code in history. Something feels wrong about it. I'd be as uncomfortable with it if Google or Facebook or Apple owned it.
I suspect some people have either never heard of emoji - could be old or young, not sure - or simply didn't think they would use it before these kinds of features came along. Outside of Apple nerd (and broader HN) social circles, the awareness of this is probably much smaller than we realize.

After all, even with social networks, we still haven't convinced everyone that the "at" username construct is a useful way to get people's attention online.
There is the reader function, which you can set to white on black and a darkish gray.
The lack of a desktop client is the main reason I don't use Apple News. If I were Feedly or any other RSS reader I'd be scared right now.

Granted, what Apple News could really benefit from would be an option to log in and read from my sources through a web browser. It would be nice if I could check up on things from, for instance, a public library.
As mikeash mentions, anything non-Tesla for charging is either slow, broken, or unreliable.
Where is a good source of average auction prices?
I don't fully understand point 2.

Is just making GitHub better worth $7.5 billion dollars for Microsoft? It will stay independent for this pile of cash? Why they bought it? For prestige?

For me the answer is that it can't be independent for long as it was (with VCs on its back was it ever?). It will gain Live login, maybe they will integrate it so you could login with your GitHub credentials to your computer if you so desire. But that's hardly worth billions.

Maybe the better thing would be what others suggested - setup a non-profit that would run GitHub and all those big companies could put something in the jar. Certainly less than what was paid. But I know it can't work, VCs want their exit.

For me it's a same game for GitLab. Current situation probably will accelerate GitLab's burn rate so prepare for the next acquisition.
WebGPU would gain traction if it was based on Vulkan. But it's not. However, Mozilla's Obsidian API is:

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLNext-Proposals/tree/mas...

Apple has so little to gain over Vulkan by developing its own API but so much to lose by not adopting Vulkan (gaming companies may actually prefer developing games on the cross-platform Vulkan to target macOS/iOS devices, too, at the same time, instead of using DirectX).
How can Santa keep his lists when GDPR is around?
But, if you could easily take your contacts or word docs or reviews etc over to another platform there would probably be more competition and more value would probably be passed to the consumer.
His family was wealthy, and he worked at Microsoft for two years, so you have to move out from GitHub?

What are you even trying to say?
The May monthly sales numbers say "not many".

https://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
So that's how they weed out the still good 2011 Macs...

I can't say I'll be protesting by not buying a new Mac because I'm already devoid of any desire to do so.
Location: San Francisco
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Technologies: Vanilla JS, React, Redux, Node, AWS
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmblumenfeld/
Email: bmblumenfeld@gmail.com
> You can think any way you want to, and I will respect your right to think that way. I can respect that you think, but that doesn't mean I have to respect what you think.

That's totally fine, just in my personal experience, stuff like that has a funny way of coming back in thought.

I find that no matter what words come out in reality, transmission through language, it never really tells you very much about how a person actually thinks. Kind of hard to know how another person thinks, because, that kind of seems like believing in telepathy.

Let's say that the mere act of me saying what I 'think' causes my thinking to change, instantly, perfectly flipping to a perfectly opposite perspective. What's there to respect at that point?
Yep, I bet the MoltenGL guys are throwing a major party right now. I wonder what kind of effort it would be to hook up Mesa to a Metal backend...?
I can totally relate, while we need a car upgrade right now/soon and I can currently configure and order a Model 3, I'm waiting for the 35K version as I just don't see a need for the current longer range model.

But at the same time there is no real alternate if I want an EV so I'm waiting. Worst thing is that the federal credit may expire by the time I can order the 35K version.

If my current car, a Prius, that needs to be updated dies, my 2 options are Prius Prime or the Honda Clarity Plug-in.
There's a license for you, but it's nonfree:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON
Seconded. This seems like a major step back for x-platform GPGPU. I always just assumed a natural transition from GL, CL support to Vulkan would occur at some point, but this is just a shame.
All things considered, I think there are some companies that are worse to the FOSS community than Apple, but I can't think of one that has Apple's degree of baldfaced cynicism to exploiting FOSS and open standards only to the degree that it benefits Apple, and then throwing them under the bus the instant they're no longer useful.

Apple loved HTML5 when they had to kill Flash and get web developers to support mobile, but then as soon as it became a threat to the App Store, Safari's compliance came to a screeching halt and now Safari is in last place, even behind Microsoft's browsers, in HTML5 support.

OpenGL was useful when it was a way to potentially lure people away from Windows, but as soon as Apple had the clout to not care about it and force develops onto its proprietary API, that's what happened.

I almost prefer old-Microsoft's honesty about wanting to kill FOSS, rather than this blatant acknowledgement of FOSS as a tool to be ripped off to improve one's ecosystem dominance and then promptly thrown aside. Makes you wonder what's going to happen if and when Apple no longer needs Clang/LLVM, or, hell, Unix.
Related to the article (but not the subject here); as a
user of "dark" themes:

The precise wording they use seems to indicate a view of dark themed sets as being less colorful. High contrast themes and visibility aiding limitations in theme color use have their places; so too do themes based around darker, more night time, friendly colors. Thinking of a system as having only one true theme, or of light/dark as being full / visually impaired themes is a dangerously limiting misconception.
Interesting. I imagined that with a name like "Night Mode", it would be more universal (like Night Shift is). I'll be interested to see how this evolves and whether third-party developers adopt it.
It's not their fault, but their presence is still disruptive and unpleasant.
As someone who read this with an editor full of OpenCL kernels, I think apple must really have missed the point of these sort of frameworks - heterogeneous computing.

If I wanted the best possible speed, latest features ect. I would write multiple back ends in things like CUDA.

I choose OpenCL because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.

:/
I’m happy it’s Nat.
If that happens, I feel it's one of the good things, speaking from general perspective on how humans interact with devices. I'm a power user, who discovered f.lux around 3 years ago, and I've been hooked ever since. Around a year after, I converted my family to use whatever blue light restricting settings they had on their devices, and can say with confidence that it does help. I wouldn't say it's encouragement per se, more of a guideline that should be there in the first place. Most users don't care about colors being off at odd hours, as they're not power users, whilst power users will have the knowledge to turn this feature off. Raising awareness is not a good term, but I feel it fits in this case.
> It's like taking a poem and generating another poem of a different author based on phonemes alone).

There is already a school of poetry that does this. For the LANGUAGE poets, meaning is often secondary, what is really of interest is the permutations of existing material. As an example, see [1] where Charles Bernstein creates an English poem by choosing words that sound similar (but don't mean anything similar) to the German words in Heinrich Heine’s classic poem "Lorelei".

[1] https://jacket2.org/commentary/lorelei-heine-translations-sh...
Realistically, 99.9% of AR is probably Snapchat and the like.

But I assume you aren't counting those. Furniture placement is probably the most useful thing, even if not a common need.
Funny how Software updates make me more excited than Hardware ones... I'm so excited for iOS 12!

Also, iOS on Mac OS! I wonder what this means for the React Native devs... I have no experience on that platform but I'm curious about the potential impact of iOS + MacOS on that community
"Hardly anyone uses" ??

Any data to support that complete falsehood?
Worth noting that only iOS got the "double down" on performance. Probably because the userbase is larger and this idea had crossed into the mainstream news as a thing people were complaining about.

They could get into this during the developer SOTU, so there's hope...
10 Rules for Startup Success
Hopefully they don't fuck it up like they did when they changed from high contrast to Smart Invert on iOS.

I used high contrast accessibility as a de facto night mode. In iOS 11 (or maybe 11.x?) they changed it to "Smart Invert" which tries to be smarter about inverting by not inverting the colors on images. Unfortunately it has all kinds of problems. Safari will randomly crash when viewing images. Sometimes is shows the wrong image (e.g. two images in a row and it will show the same image twice instead of two different images). Sometimes half an image will be inverted. Sometimes when I go back to regular mode the images will go into inverted mode. And it makes charts or maps with an HTML legend impossible to read because legend gets inverted but the image does not.
Const – Friend or Foe in C++?
Apple's platforms are amazing, but fragile. API's constantly change. And even if they don't, they functionally behave different.

You just can't release an app without constant maintenance. Apple has no problem innovating, even if it means pulling every developer along with them, ready or not.
Stacks looks cool if fast and reliable.
So what's next? This.

https://youtu.be/24jKGoA9IVw?t=703

Had to find it :-)
> Inexpensive brands have the same parent companies as designer ones, and backstage at Fashion Week all types of cosmetics are being used on runway models. Professionals do not care.

This is not true at all. Videos of YouTube makeup hoarders are hardly the best sample set to draw such conclusions by.

There are significant quality and consistency differences across high-end brands, and the professionals may come across as indiscriminate because they use the best tool for the job (or whatever they're being sponsored to use), not because it's all indistinguishable.

Different designers are also better suited to particular skin colors, with either more offerings or simply better formulas to account for other aspects like skin sensitivity, oiliness, etc. or other external factors (heat, cold, day, night, humidity, etc.). Many put fragrance in their products, which causes rashes. Some are more water-resistant than others.

Women accumulate closets full of makeup because it's a matter of both chemistry and art-- you have to try a shit-ton of products to find the one that actually suits you, enhances your features and doesn't make you look like a hot mess under heated conditions (catwalks or outdoor shoots), give your face unwanted glossiness or cause you to break out like you've endured an acid attack. Every canvas is chemically unique-- what works for Jill won't necessarily work for Jane.

Yes, you pay a lot for the name, but if you actually work with them, the overpriced designer products really are better than the drugstore competition.
Hmm I would have thought screen sharing was a native feature of FaceTime. Great idea to add it if it's not already there. If you don't want me to buy it, is there somewhere I can leave my email address so I can find out when I should buy it :)
I am a full-stack engineer experienced working with React, Redux, Node.js/Express, various DBMS, and AWS. I build highly modular, service-oriented web applications that have significant insight into agile team management methodologies, as well as system design and multi-tier architectures. My most recent project was a Zagat restaurant ratings page clone scaled to handle a database with 10 million restaurants and 2,000 requests per second deployed onto an AWS EC2 instance. I produce my best work when working on teams that have a growth mindset, and strive to be highly inclusive.
I was responding to, "There may as well be no territory, the only thing relevant is the map and how it reacts to probing."

If there are only maps, then when map A is wrong, I can just make my own map B for which map A is a good map. In that case, no map is falsifiable, and all maps are equally valid. It's Postmodernism!
Its worth putting in context that my last job, a round trip commute into the downtown of the biggest local city regardless of pay rate would be $11.50 and about four hours by public transit or roughly $25 and a bit under 40 minutes in my car outside rush hour. There was a nice condo in walking distance to a former employer similar in quality to my house although a little smaller, that was only three times the purchase price of my house and the HOA fee was twice my current property tax, so yeah, not moving downtown. Also the "crime rate per thousand" stat is about four times higher downtown, I wonder how long my family or I would survive. Of course at $6500/year spent on my commute, a walking distance condo would become profitable after only 61 years of employment. The point being that even full time work is not terribly appealing at $15/hr if I have to work two hours per day just to break even on the travel costs to and from work. Or I could work 87.2 hours per week just to pay the mortgage on the condo using half my income toward housing, assuming no PMI but adding in the cost of HOA. Obviously I get paid a large multiple of that per hour, but I wonder if your labor market situation is similar.
iOS 12 Preview – Features
> They do realize developer brain-trust is the long game they need to win, and GitHub fits that strategy.

Only problem is that this move was net-negative wrt developer trust.
But that's an emoticon, not an emoji.
> And, where did the Nazis publish, again?

I can't answer that as it is generally agreed that this data should not be readily available, however Nazi experimentation was cited for decades, and much has been written over the ethics of this: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ethics-of-using-medi...
I encourage everyone who supports Bitcoin to actually use it as a currency, instead of a sketchy investment vehicle
This Is Why Crypto Beats Fiat: Follow the Money Printing
Mixing Metal and OpenGL Rendering in a View
How come when it is an electron it doesn't just stick to other matter?
Everybody gets old at some point, so I would extend that.
And yet, still no cure for iTunes.

They really need to dumpster iTunes and break it up in several smaller apps.
> They’re not at war with any particular company, mainly at war with a business model equivalent to cancer.

Look, if you declare war on "primarily German-speaking countries", the end result is you're probably at war with Germany.
What's silly is running around like Goldilocks complaining that this porridge is too hot or that porridge is too cold. Well, it's not your porridge. You're not making it, nor are you eating it. So what business is it of yours?
A major part of human communication happens through facial expressions. Emojis/Animojis enable this for digital communication. It's new in the sense that we now have a global set of symbols for these expressions.
Yea, I read what you said as they don't need to eat that many calories, but over time their body says they do.

Do you know any poor people? People that grew up in poor families? Just like everyone else when overweight their body wants to maintain that weight. That's going to take food, and in some cases a lot of it which is a real cost.

Eating cheap calorie dense food can cover based nutrition requirements. It's not optimal for health, but it's cheap, really really cheap.

Poor people also indulge in nutrition free food like soda when they can afford it, but then they still need to cover nutrition and the cheapest way to do that is high caloric foods. After a while they need to eat just as much to maintain that weight. But, at no point in that viscous cycle are veggies more than a garnish.

Would a lifetime of 3 servings of veggies a day help avoid weight gain while allowing for some indulgences? Of course, but it would also cost significantly more especially when raising a family which starts up the cycle again.