skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The positive side of breaking compatibility with all legacy technologies (COM, VBA, XLL, etc) that currently force large companies to stick to MS Office is that it has the potential to reintroduce competition in the office-like software space. And in my opinion Office is the main reason why large enterprises stick to Windows. Most internal apps are moving to the web. If office backward compatibility goes away, then it's not clear that Windows is an obvious choice anymore.

And it is kind of consistent with Microsoft's new strategy to de-emphasize Windows.
I've tried Dynalist and had numerous performance issues. Talked to developers a bit and switched back to Workflowy.
And its definitely worth examining if there is a rational, simple hypothesis that implies a relationship between the two. Here, that is clearly the case: could what you think about something impact your health? It doesnt seem like such a stretch to believe so (see placebos, etc)

On the other hand, if you found a correlation between butter exports in India and mortality rates, you probably shouldnt dig further into whether there’s a causation relationship. It fails the Occam’s Razor test missrably.
Maybe it's not about knowing that is wrong to kill someone, but something else. Fear of God? Belief in a greater good? Who knows
So, it plays by ear. It indeed resembles how a mid-schooler would answer it.
Obviously it won't know about off-topic questions. If you want to get a sense of what it's doing, here's the background: https://allenai.org/aristo/
I was wondering that after reading more of the tweets; React native doesn’t compile the JS to native, so not sure what they are using to do all of that? Bit worried about the far superior languages C# and F# if they are not even dogfooding anymore.
This is such a laughably unprovable claim. "Few people who have the vision, motivation, and skill" is equivalent to saying "few startups succeed". It's just a truthism. It's equally likely that few companies are lucky enough to have a talented and motivated team of engineers.

Finding someone who thinks they have it all and will be the next big billionaire is easy. Finding a group of people who know what work needs to be done and can put their nose to the grindstone to match the "vision motivation and skill" is the hard part. Just look to google, the holy grail of tech visionaries. No one doubts that Page and Brin have vision/motivation/skill but they readily admit that their initial team of engineers is what carried them and they rewarded them like it.

What you're advocating probably feels good for the ego though... everyone loves imagining having demi-god-like status. For me it's always interesting to look at what people are fighting for. "The founder deserves 100 million, not 80 million, pay the engineers less!" At the end of the day it's just greed.
Not only that, billions of hours of invested time and knowledge will be thrown out of the window instantly and everyone who integrates anything with Office will have to start again from scratch. Literally at least a third of the world is built on bits of spaghetti and duct tape on Office.

For developers though, this is chargeable so I'm on the fence :)
Recruiting is incredibly simplified
>even worse language

What's wrong with JS, exactly, that isn't made up for by its advantages?

I see these 'kool-aid' / 'JS is cancer' comments all the time, but they don't come with any real details.

I feel like you've probably never really used JS, if I'm being honest.
How much more real world evidence does HN need to see before the "JS isn't a real language" meme is abandoned?

Pretty sure we're up to billions of real world value created by software written in Javascript. If you're still dismissive at this point, it's time to catch up. You've missed the boat.
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MBA revenge on nerds...
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because it is not a pile of trash. the programmer can be a pile of trash though.
Outlook on the web is certainly better than the application on windows... word won't be too hard. Now excel, that's the one I'd be surprised to see.
I would recommend making a distinction between a startup that manages to get acquired as a small team for building a good product (Instagram is an extreme example... but I know of a few startups that few here have ever heard of where the outcome for employees was substantially better over the same period than if they had worked for Google or Facebook).

There is perhaps a warranted disdain for the behavior of founders on this thread, but I would also like to point out there are founders that genuinely care about the people on their team and would either ensure the equity was sufficient upfront or--if the total size and scale of the startup was miscalculated initially such as assuming the startup needed 100 employees when it really only needed 10--ensuring they receive ample compensation from the acquirer or not taking the deal. These types of founders do exist too, and I think there is an onus on an employee to figure out what kind of boss they have signed up to work for. If I had a few interactions with Steve Jobs, for example, I'm 100% sure I would have quit.
No! Bad MS! Stop it!
Most of the CS tracks I've seen recently (and even back in my days) have an "introduction to C/Linux" module which requires writing common command line tools, starting easy and gradually ramping up to a basic shell, a web proxy, etc.

Not exactly OS/DBMS but still pretty low-level.
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All these issues currently exist with the existing domain name system as well.

> What if someone spams the ledger with too many names

You need to pay in coins to register a namecoin domain so this attack won't work.

> What if someone takes domains that should be illegal for them to possess?

This should be up to courts to decide if the name is illegal and handle it over, not to some random organisation like the ICANN which has no legal basis.

> What if someone takes someone else's private key?

Same as if some gets access to your registrar password right now, nothing changes with that.

> What if an organization gets their private key stolen?

Again, same as before, nothing is improved or changed by a blockchain here.
Show HN: Side-Project: Collection of blockchain, ICO and cryptocurrency websites
Managing my bookmarks bar with so many blockchain related resources was becoming a problem. So, I decided to launch a side project (non-profit) which would be a directory of blockchain related resources like -

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I have built a first draft of the website here - http://cryptomanual.co

Anyone can contribute to the list of links so the list can keep getting useful.

This is still in beta. Please let me know your feedback.
The more white and privileged you are - the more predictable your life is.
> Facebook said that it tracks mouse movements to help its algorithm distinguish between humans and bots.

Stupid cat and mouse game. How difficult would it be for a bot to simulate a human's mouse movements? I suppose not very difficult.

Also, doesn't this conflict with rare types of input devices? Or people with a motor function disability?

> to also determine if the window is foregrounded or backgrounded

Shouldn't there be an API for that?
https://github.com/NectarJS/nectarjs

Still not sure if it's just a 'cool hack' or an attempt at a serious product though.
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What I have understood from my little experience is usually the "next big things"
- Always seem way to big in the start
- There is good exponential acceptance initially
- But then there is always slow acceptance rate

I think its more about chat then chatbots. Chat has already become the next big thing between customer to customer interaction. What chatbots are trying to do is enabling brands to start interacting with their customer on chat. Human-based support was always there but to able to interact with customers using chat during his/her complete lifecycle was not possible using human agents. But chatbot can solve that. We are moving back to chat because it is one of the two natural media of communication (voice/chat & gesture) to humans. The hype about chatbots was bad, resulting in everyone trying their own version of chatbots and fail. But for those who used it in its actual capabilities, it has done wonders. For some top financial brands of India, it has increased no. of people interacting with a brand to about 400% resulting in ~200% increase in marketing leads and lead quality by ~150%. This is actually the NEXT BIG THING for the marketing department. Also, chat apps are more evolved then SMS/phone apps which give user/customer more control over communication, resulting in happy customers.

Chatbots are not solving any problem as they are not a solution. Instead, they should be used as a tool to solve any other problem, just like AI/Crypto.
I very much agree that this is a broken line of argumentation.

However, I find the opinion to be correct: Scripting languages might not be a good first programming language for a CS bachelor, where priority is deep learning of programming. I'd also argue that JavaScript would be a bad candidate, as it is a very "unclean" language, being a poor way to teach language/compiler theory.

As a first practical programming language for a non-CS bachelor, scripting languages are fine. Without CS courses to support you, other approaches might be too difficult, while scripting languages often let you get (terrible) programs up and running (ish) while ignoring basically all CS aspects during the learning phase (only while you're not making anything big, though—the "high level" illusion breaks down fast as things grow).

(Also, yes, you can write a DBMS or an Office suite in a scripting language. I can't possibly comprehend why you'd want to do something like that, but it's very much possible. Bringing OS's into things is cheating, as most compiled languages can't be used there either, and those that work often only work with a subset of the full language.)
So essentially C++?

"Version 3 and subsequent versions were essentially a subset of C++ and supported basic object oriented programming concepts such as single inheritance as well as extensions to the C standard that conformed more closely to the requirements of Mac OS programming. After version 6, the OOP facilities were expanded to a full C++ implementation, and the product was rebranded Symantec C++ for versions 7 and 8, now under development by different authors"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C
Coinbase can release a bunch of fancy features: index funds, faster trade times, heck even 0 fees. But I only care about 1 killer feature when it comes to a crypto trading platform.

And that is ridiculously high returns and a bull market.
Mand Mobile – A mobile UI toolkit, based on Vue.js 2
As for the former, I'm pretty sure I'd trigger as robot since I use keyboard mostly (using some special features in Firefox) just because they make it a lot faster and nicer.

As for the latter, iirc there are blur/focus(-like) events for the window object. Maybe mouse movements gives them better confidence? Because of course you want to make absolutely sure your users are seeing all the ads.
> I am an atheist and don't need religion to tell me it is wrong to kill another man

You do - but religion can be non-theistic. As an atheist, you nevertheless strive towards ideals that have ultimately no reason but your belief in them... That is religion - it is personal and it does not require supernatural beings.
This should be no surprise — received chat messages are marked as read on Facebook if you wiggle your mouse after a few minutes of inactivity.

To be fair, this makes sense from a UX standpoint. You don't want messages to be marked as read if you have your window open but have walked away from the computer.
I hate DDG auto DYM (did-you-mean) so much.
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meanwhile who designed their stack properly enjoy running their software for decades across multiple platforms without modifications.

I guess we just have to relearn all the lesson from the 80's
I'm using the two phrases synonymously because the GDPR protects personal information, which is the superset (the distinction of PII as a subset seems to be more relevant in the US).

The GDPR is concerned with privacy. If you derive information from my personal information in a way that makes it impossible to go back from the derived information to identifying me as an individual, it's anonymous and thus not relevant to my privacy. However if you use this exact same process but only use it once and record that you only did it with my information, it becomes linked to me again and can no longer be considered anonymous.

For another example: imagine you have a closed group of 1000 participants. "One of the guys with blonde hair" is probably a fairly ambiguous identifier because you'd expect there to be more than one person in the group that description could apply to. However if I'm the only blonde guy in that group, it's now clearly referring to me as an individual and thus affecting my privacy.

The thing about storing IP plus timestamp on the other hand is that while it may be practically anonymous to you, you're storing it. Even though you can't resolve that information to a single person right now, someone else could if you gave them access to it.

You can make an argument about where exactly the line should be drawn considering it's rarely impossible that someone somewhere could use seemingly innocuous data to identify someone but it's not much of a leap to go from an IP address and a time stamp to a subscriber who might be a single individual: IPs are publicly registered to ISPs and those ISPs know who they assigned the IP to at a given point in time (especially in countries like Germany where ISPs are required to keep records of this) so you can already easily convert "IP plus timestamp" to "IP plus timestamp plus an organisation that is capable of resolving that IP plus timestamp to a subscriber". In other words: at best an IP plus timestamp isn't anonymous, it's at least pseudonymous (even if you have no legal means of resolving that pseudonym).

FWIW there are free privacy policy generators out there for small scale websites (e.g. most blogs). Here's a good one for Germany: https://datenschutz-generator.de/

EDIT: For programmers:

You have a set (IP, timestamp).

IPs are publicly registered to ISPs so you can resolve that to an ISP, which can act as a function (IP, timestamp) => subscriber.

A subscriber can be, among other things, a single individual.

So storing the IP and timestamp is the equivalent of storing an identifier from a lookup table of subscribers (some of whom are single individuals).

Whether the result of the lookup table is accessible by legal means (e.g. a warrant) or technical means (e.g. a decryption key) or practical means (e.g. a literal key to a safe) makes no difference.
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I don't know where the 4% comes from but I've seen it in several places, including in an attractive offer from an educational establishment I once attended. Apparently, if I gave them 25x (pre-tax) the annual cost of maintaining a research student then they could create a perpetual studentship and call it the "Bloak Studentship" or whatever I preferred. So they think that it is possible to get 4% for ever in real terms from a well-invested untaxed fund. They've been doing this sort of thing for many centuries so perhaps they have an accurate long-term view.
>good, far more suitable languages

Can you give a simple analysis on what weaknesses JS has that other languages would avoid with no pitfalls of their own?
I think one of the best ways to maintain youth and health in your advancing years is to continue to work.
Similarly, one of the hosts (software engineers) on _The Bike Shed_ podcast mentioned driving people around for Lyft in his Tesla just for the excuse (and justification, since it must more than cover fuel) to drive it.
Does this allow detecting drug addicts and recommending treatment?
>Stupid cat and mouse game. How difficult would it be for a bot to simulate a human's mouse movements? I suppose not very difficult.

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm An interesting read on this cat and mouse game.
Why is this trend going on with using js in domains where it previously was not a component?

Office products need to be on the web these days. Having a common code base between desktops, mobile and web makes that much easier and in that world JavaScript is the lowest common denominator.
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Sounds like Dennou Coil
I can understand this.

I already planned 3 weeks for the Android port of an app.

But probably still better than the 5 months the iOS app took to make.

I have to set up an Android build environment and install all the Android versions of my native modules.

Since iPhones required dynamic sized UIs for iPhone5/iPhone/iPhone+/iPhoneX anyway, I expect to use most of the UI code without any change.
Kool-aid in the sense that JS is extremely attractive to MBA types that don't have to write anything with it. There is a huge pool of JS developers (quality is questionable but price range is mostly low), browsers run everywhere, Node.js made it possible to run the whole stack on it, so that's a win for MBA types and a great value proposition. The fact that it's a historically atrocious language doesn't matter as they have peasants (i.e. us) to deal with it (to be honest, it got much better since async/await was introduced, but hacks/warts are still there to be abused in horrible ways).

I wrote bleeding-edge games and other crazy stuff in JS you might be using right now in your business, so my opinion is not unfounded.
How difficult would it be for a bot
to simulate a human's mouse movements?

Very very hard. Because the bot author does not have the giant database that FB has to analyze how humans move the mouse around. Also the bot author does not know which aspects FB looks at to determine if it's a human.

And even if the bot author had all that information, it would still be super hard to write an AI that accomplishes a given task in a way that mimicks a human successfully. It would mean to win a 'mouse turing test'.

Shouldn't there be an API for that?

What the API returns is under the control of the user. So the API does not help FB to fingerprint you.

This issue touches on the real privacy problem the net is facing. It's not the wrong cookies or privacy policies. It's fingerprinting. There is no technical solution to it.
Brendan Eich is our generation’s Thomas Midgley.
Google's already doing it with captcha: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/78807/how-does-...

But does Facebook track user during everyday session or just during some validation-action?
Nobody is going to pay you $1200/day to write JavaScript. The converse is true, there is an overload of low-paid JS devs.
I actually think its difficult to simulate mouse movements. Is there even a way to do so using PhantomJS or Headless chrome?
Thats simply not true. GSSAPI allows you to forward kerberos tokens over ssh, with or without passwords or keys.
This is beyond absurd. Why would you do that? What could go wrong? Is this a social network or spy agency?
This one is quite a big quality of life improvement IMO. It used to be that I sometimes left my browser accidentally open on facebook, and people would get offended because I 'read' their messages and didn't respond.
I've always considered it as self-fulfilling prophecy, like Moore's law. There is (was) no inherent reason for the semiconductor market to grow like it did, but the simple prediction, coupled with competitive pressure, made every player in the industry work to match the prediction for fear of falling behind.
Paying workers isn't "socialist".
> for a CS bachelor, where priority is deep learning of programming

The priority is deep learning of computer science, not of programming.

I think JavaScript is a fine language for teaching a lot of CS basics. For example you could run a course based on SICP using JavaScript instead of Scheme, I believe.
It isn't just Facebook that has been doing this. Web development tools are able to track scroll and mouse movements as well, and have been used to test website usage
It's a "real" language, it's just not a terribly good or fast one. It's works decently when its use is limited to what it was made for: manipulating web pages. For anything else, the "designed on the back of a used piece of toilet paper" starts to shine through.

And no, a JIT can't save you from this, it can only make things acceptable.

That it can create "real world value" is an extremely low bar, which is passed by any turing complete language. COBOL creates "real world value".