skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows keeps breaking with every update. My touchpad randomly stops working. Startup is excruciatingly slow even on an i7 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Starting up from sleep takes nearly as long, and for some reason, it takes at least 5 minutes for the machine to work at normal processing power again.

The search function is still as broken as ever. There is a useless "People" tab near the clock that hogs my memory. Then there is that other useless thing - Cortana. There are random noises for whatever error or notification that keeps playing in the background. Permission control is still completely broken. The Control Panel is a confused mess.

If I could go back to Windows 7, I might still be interested in keeping a Windows laptop. But 10 just keeps getting in my way. I just want to launch Chrome and use Google Docs, but Windows wants to distract me with a million little nuisances.
Same sort of thing, happiest I've been "working" was helping a mate with some labouring of a weekend back when I was 17. It's amazing the satisfaction you get at the end of the day feeling 100% exhausted, but with several tonnes of concrete mixed, or a few thousand bricks moved (even seemingly arbitrarily from one spot to another).

Not something you really want to be doing for 30+ years though, but to be fair, I'm not sure the prospect of staring at this screen for 30+ is especially appealing either...
What has stuck me to mac is ONLY this...I have to have XCode and Android Studio in one machine. That's it. How do I run XCode in windows or Linux even? I don't want to have to have a mac so I'm all ears.
Yes, though:

1. You can readily extract your information.

2. And re-import it elsewhere.

3. You can run your own instance.

(I've had a couple instances die and / or fade on me, which is why I maintain a few presences.)
I guess, if you want to know what your code will be doing when executed, don't use C (and don't even dream of C++).

Those are reserved for people who value speed over correctness.
One slightly good thing about all of this is that at least the issue of light that is potentially harmful is fixable with technology.

We will at some point have colored high-refreshrate e-ink monitors, I'm convinced of it.

I'm looking forward to e-ink, paper-like laptops and phones that work well in the sun!
It’s the software, stupid. Nobody wants to go back to windows. Ever.
LibreOffice works perfectly well for 99.9% of MS Office documents.
Windows 7 support?
Nowadays Fresnel Lens to fiber Glass cables are sold
Yes because by buying and holding our debt they both keep our dollar strong and allow us to keep over spending. Without them (buying our debt) we are screwed.
> There are no null values,

Unbound variables are the equivalent (detected if used, at compile time), but a much saner way to deal with value-less variables
Then your account is gone, but your friends on other servers are still where they were. With backup/import tools you can reconnect with them from a new account easily.
Context? (https://xkcd.com/1085/)
> no. If an ISP assigns you a dynamic prefix

oppressive regimes will assign people static IPv6 prefixes tied with their legal identities.
I'm curious how Google envisions the future of this technology. Will it be limited to specific, Google defined use cases such as making reservations, or will it be a versatile platform allowing developers to create various agents, much like Dialogflow?
Bonus: Turn your phone's display to monochrome mode. Force it to become less visually stimulating to our monkey brain.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. You should still be testing the different behaviors, what difference does it make to testing if they are in a branch or in another class?
I don’t use cmd.exe for anything. It’s Powershell all the way.

Powershell, while different from the BASH way of doing things, is a really nice commandline tool.
ActivityPub is built by the W3C and therefore relies on Web related technologies (lost of HTTP and JSON exchanged) :)

Does this scale properly and how does it compare to existing solutions like XMPP Pubsub (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) that is basically built to deliver content, in real-time (trough TCP sockets) and can handle thousands (millions?) of delivered packets per seconds?

I'm building a federated social platform that is fully relying on XMPP (Movim https://movim.eu) and I'm wondering about the limits and different usages of this fresh new protocol.
You’re stuck forever, unless you want to try to run XCode in a virtual machine.
I routinely test software and web applications (and a font) on Windows. It never ceases to amaze me how verbose PowerShell is, or how confusing and convoluted is everything around managing a Windows machine. You have vendor-provided settings panels and widgets for video, network, and wireless, you never quite know what went wrong where and which is the right place to fix it or where do you add a setting. I really don't want that.

For most people, the web is the dominant platform and Windows is just what draws Facebook on the monitor.
The Commodore 64 User Manual. No contest.
Note that you forgot '-Wextra', but even `gcc -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic` doesn't enable all diagnostics (there are some 40 additional arguments to provide, depending on GCC version); so what you really want is a recent version of Clang and '-Weverything'.
I'm inclined to agree and I have Windows, Linux, and MacOS laptops today (as well Chromebooks). The Windows one is actually the most powerful one from a hardware perspective; it's a 17" Alienware. But I mostly prefer to work on my 13" MacBook.

I probably could configure the Windows system to be less annoying but the trackpad doesn't really work for me and I still find Windows a bit clunky comparatively. Perhaps if I spent more time with it day to day but I don't have the same feeling with Fedora even though I use it about the same amount.

I'm also skeptical about laptop/tablet hybrids. And that's not a comment on Microsoft.I've tried to use my iPad Pro as a laptop replacement when traveling and it really doesn't work for me.
Also, going back one on the URL leads you to the Google ML crash course, which I guess this is part of:

https://google-developers.appspot.com/machine-learning/crash...

Definitely worth checking out.
Real humans don't behave like that. They behave in all sorts of weird ways when they know that they're interacting with a machine. They SHOUT, O-VER-E-NUN-CI-ATE and use unnatural sentence fragments, which craters the accuracy rate of a speech parsing algorithm that was trained on natural speech. They get instantly frustrated, because they assume that this machine will be just as stupid as the archaic IVR system that their bank uses. They assume it's a scam robocall or a prank and hang up without saying anything.

Acting like a human is by far the most efficient option for a system that is designed to do what Duplex does.
Wow, yet another internet moral panic piece from Farhad Manjoo and the New York Times. For extra credit replace smartphone and facebook with MTV and television and see if you can tell the difference from something written in 1983.
I hate MS, but this looks like a genuinely nice piece of hardware... I wonder if it can run anything other than Windows without being half broken, then I might be interested.

[Edit]

Looks like everyone is thinking the same thing :P Now who can we pay to invest a month hacking away at figuring out how to get all the bits of hardware working in Linux?

Following the link various others have posted here [1], it looks like the surface book 2 support isn't completely terrible, much better than i expected, but not amazing either... Broken things and things that require more effort are:

- Sleep S3 broken
- Video is dual nVidia GPU, requires bumblebee
- TouchPad and Pen broken, work with a custom Linux kernel
- PCI camera(s) not working

The touchpad is probably gona be the most annoying one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren...
GDPR compliance is handled on a per-instance basis. a lot of fediverse developers are EU residents, so i'm sure there they'll do what they can to make it easy for admins to become compliant.

personally, i don't care about GDPR since i'm not under EU jurisdiction. even so, none of my servers store logs and i don't require an email address to register.
Feedback is Not a Gift
How WebAssembly Is Accelerating the Future of Web Development
I've been using Moment (https://inthemoment.io/) for about a year and am really proud of how I've been able to reduce total screen time from 4 hours to 45 minutes per day. Most of the gains were due to deleting Safari and Twitter from my device (Moment breaks down app usage based on battery usage).

To anyone reading this, be aware of how grabbing your phone in the morning to read headlines or Medium digest can turn into 30 minutes or even an hour. Think about how checking e-mails can take you completely out of context and badly dilute the quality of your work. Consider how the amazing small interactions with other people that make life beautiful can be destroyed by even a glance at the phone.

Monitoring phone usage and actively cutting it down I really feel has improved my quality of life. Now that Apple has built in tools to do this, I hope more people will treat this as seriously as they treat exercise, nutrition, etc.
Are you using a bias-tee to insert power on the center pin of the coax? Your antenna probably has a preamp built in, which needs to be powered otherwise it acts as an attenuator.
The data send to be in on gravitational waves, relativity, and big whooping chunks of quantum mechanics, but I'm in no way qualified to interpret that data. I have to trust someone else's interpretation. Unfortunately, they are likely wrong about some of it.
A company I used to work for several years ago (technically American, but effectively a Chinese company), offered very tempting and lucrative “work in China for 6 months” incentives. Like US salary and subsidized housing in Shanghai. If I wasn’t married with a kid, I’d have jumped at the chance.
This does NOT look easy to repair.

I'll keep waiting for the new 2012 MBP.
> Even recently there was a chicken dispute case with China [1].

> That's not perfect in any way, and that's crazy slow

You're right about how slow the WTO process is:

Per your Reuters link: China's chicken tariff was enacted in 2010. The WTO ruling against it was in 2018, 8 years later, but it's unclear if the dispute has actually been resolved:

> [China's Ministry of Commerce said] that China would assess the WTO report and carry out “follow-up work” in accordance with WTO rules.

That sounds extremely non-committal to me, and I couldn't find any more recent updates the first several pages of Google News results. However, I doubt anything has actually happened based on prior precedent:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/business/us-china-trade-e...

> The United States could press its argument with the World Trade Organization, which oversees global trading rules and prohibits big loans from government-controlled banks at artificially low interest rates. But the W.T.O. requires many contracts and government documents to prove cases, evidence that can be hard to get in a tightly controlled country like China.

> Even when the W.T.O. rules against China, persuading the country to comply can be challenging. One such ruling, involving China’s restrictions on foreign electronic payment systems, was issued nearly six years ago. China is still mulling how it will comply — despite numerous complaints from the Obama administration and more recent nudges from the Trump administration.

If the current trade dispute is really about the "China 2025" program, attempting to resolve it through the WTO could take until 2032 or later, which seems a bit late.
SLACK DOWN: WORKPLACE MESSAGING SERVICE HIT BY MYSTERIOUS OUTAGE
Google Chromecast is down world-wide
Hmm, it's now off the front page entirely, which seems strange. I don't see much incendiary commenting or similar...

@dang, care to comment?
Broad agreement about the network parity aspect. If you can have a working TCP/IP stack /and/ can run Chrome, you have the ability to pretty much be "usable" by many users.

I'd like to stop the argument there though and ask, first, why bother for a research project? Not that it's useless, but if you're trying with a few other hackers to reconceptualize OS layout and write the relevant tools for your system, you've got enough on your back.

Arguably in this hypothetical next-gen system, if you can provide an interface that looks like a Linux container, you can run a Linux application like Chrome and be done with it.

(and even more to my point original point of things could have been very different: web browsers are essentially reimplementing a cross-platform GUI without a toolkit and with a custom language (JS). Maybe it's time we just had plain old network applications without a web browser..... but that's a different discussion, a different musing).
From blogpost: this flipped laptop screen standing next to bigger monitor looks very interesting. If it's close enough to mess up using your fingers, that potentially could be very interesting setup for work. But software seems to be a limiting factor; I'm not aware of apps on screen (a) that would react to changes happening on other screen (b) or even other app window.
Polymorphism and inheritance often assume that differences are hierarchical. The real world is often NOT hierarchical, or at least may easily change to not be hierarchical in the future. Noun "classification" of most domain things is messy. It's one of the reasons for the backlash in the 2000's against OOP as a domain modelling system.

IF's often handle unpredictable variations better. Features are often better viewed as a buffet restaurant instead of an animal kingdom classification tree as found in biology. The biology classification-like approach popular in the 90's usually fails outside of biology. And, "lots of little methods" can make code rather hard to read & follow in my opinion. Your eyes may differ.
> In fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that.

Although with outages like these, I doubt it!
I can resize, copy/paste and change font/color/transparency settings on my cmd.exe without any problems. I get your point but they really improved it since Win7/8
Additionally, MTA-STS has recently been approved as Proposed Standard, so we may see increased support for it in the near future. [1]

The key advantage of MTA-STS is that it can be deployed quickly, without almost any disruption of the already-deployed infrastructure. Of course DNSSEC and DANE already solve the same problem, but MTA-STS is the designed by and for people who don't want to use DNSSEC.

The EFF's efforts are complementary to MTA-STS. As schoen mentioned elsewhere on this thread, in the early days it's probably useful to have a preload list. (That said, I am not sure why they feel it necessary to cast MTA-STS in negative light: "[...] so the sender will never know the recipient supports STARTTLS." [2] They should explain that there MTA-STS is trust on first use and has a memory effect, exactly like the well-accepted HTTP Strict Transport Security.)

We added support for MTA-STS testing to Hardenize just today, along with a blog post that explains the background and explains how to deploy it. [3] (Disclaimer: Hardenize founder.)

[1] https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/technical-deep-dive-st...

[3] https://www.hardenize.com/blog/mta-sts
Break the EULA and install OS X in a virtual machine.
$250M more Tether added – is this good for crypto?
31% of likely voters think US civil war likely within 5 years
I know it's not exactly scientific, but the front page of https://downdetector.com shows a number of services that have problem spikes starting anywhere from 3am US/Eastern to 9am US/Eastern and continuing through now (11:24 US/Eastern): Google Home, Fortnite, Exede, Level 3, New York Times, AWS. Maybe totally unrelated to each other, who knows.
Agreed. Windows updates and the fact that it still doesn't have a viable shell after 30 years make it a no go. Powershell and Ubuntu Bash on Windows10 isn't as nice as having built in native support.
Mistakes on their own don't discount the approach. Kids learning to walk fall down constantly, that does not mean learning to walk is a bad idea.

Science is not about today, it's optimizing over longer than human lifespans.
bloating bloatware dev situation ouch
If you gotta go back two centuries ago to find something major, I think this proves my point. Regardless I was talking about the post war period, when modern international trade began its earnest desire to propagate free trade.
Good practice, something I tend to catch only after writing something inefficient.
Its not even that it doesn't run macOS its that it makes doing _stuff a hassle. Like I wanted to dual boot my gaming rig to also run Linux, and figuring out sdd and hdd partitions and clearing up space on the hard drives was made way more difficult than it needed to be. Had to enter a second shell look up commands for it etc. On a nix machine it was du -sh | sort -h
$10K/successful Referral –  Smarking (YC W15) Is Hiring Sr. Front End Eng in SF
I have a couple of 20 character VFDs with a serial-to-HD44780 interface I bought about 10 years ago and still haven't used for anything useful. They are power hogs, and with bright blue LED displays so cheap now, essentially obsolete, but I simply can't bring myself to throw them out. I just love the look.

Maybe I should use them in a Z-80 project ;-)
It's a blurry line, as with TensorFlow the heavy lifting is done in C/C++ with a python/JS wrapper. The issue becomes efficient data management in the language itself, which arguably is why numpy turned virtually into a parallel language.
Chromebook is nice here.
something like mono has to come out, that would be funny if the tables were turned on macs and they started making shells for windows
300 comments in one hour will definitely kill it. HN penalizes controversy, which it uses comment count as a proxy for. It works well most of the time
> I don't want a serious gaming monstrosity, I just desired something that can do the job well, had great build quality and could run the Unix-based tools I need to use to get through the day while offering reasonable battery life. It's a tall order, but should be feasible.

Proceeds to not touch upon a single way the Surface 2 is UNIX-y in any sort of way? I know the WSL is there but the biggest stop for me using anything other than a MBP is that I wouldn't be able to develop without a *nix environment.
My experience differs drastically.
good luck downloading them with 10KB/s.
I assume any sensible mouse driver would have the possibility to extend the protocol for more buttons, scroll thingies and, say, rotation, braking, on-mouse output and so on.
I've used it regularly on Windows 10 and I still have to "mark" text to copy paste. Am I missing something?
Docker is not required in any way with Consul Connect.
There's no single smoking gun - for any group.

It's a lifetime of small or direct disadvantages working towards the overall trend.

There are data-based studies showing how individual factors impact.
If Apple made a 12-13" laptop with a 3:2, non-glossy display, an all-day battery, and a non-broken keyboard, I'd probably pay double for it.
Yes. The Chinese establishment is much more organized and organizationally intelligent than the US government right now. They peg the renmindbi, so the proper way to analyze this is while is to assume it has a goal and is intentional.

The idea that Xi is "running scared" is too ridiculous to be funny. I'm not pro-China, but one has to have some frightening bias to say that. He's the most powerful person in the world right now.
I've been a Linux user for ages, and I disagree. Readable yes, but the formatting is almost always off (in Writer and Calc).

Basically unusable if the docs have to be shared back with MS Office users.
I don't have a big problem with it at work, but at home I tend to go kind of hardcore at home since it makes me feel validated as a geek.

I know you can install X on Windows, but I tend to prefer using XMonad with urxvt to navigate at home, so as to minimize my time using a mouse; AFAIK, you can't interop the Windows version of Firefox in my XMonad setup for WSL.

I'm not saying I couldn't make an equally productive setup in Windows, but I've come to prefer the setup I have on my personal laptop, which is sadly five years old and finally starting to show its age.
Doesn't powershell still have the same UI limitations of cmd.exe? I'm not talking about the actual shell itself, but the application the shell runs in.
In some languages you can use the named-parameter version to indicate what's being true-ified:

create_file(path, contents, temporary:=true);
That alternative tools have their own learning curves (which generally compare unfavorably to Docker's, which is exceptionally gentle) and that you have to make decisions about how to fit them together is a very valid and relevant point.

But it struck me that all of your 'just's really didn't seem like a big deal to me.

I set up a Nix installation on a separate BTRFS subvolume on a Debian-based system that I got as a multimedia PC for my uncle as a gift a few weeks ago. I also had to replace the default initial ramdisk image generator with another one to get the subvolume mounted early enough for systemd to automatically launch services that lived on the Nix subvolume on first boot.

It really didn't seem like that big of a deal for me. Each piece of it was just a small step away from a background of Linux administration knowledge I built up as a teenager when I used to distrohop and play around for fun.

All of this is to say that a difference in background is likely behind this gap of perceptions.

Someone with a background in ops is likely invested in traditions that have different strengths and weaknesses than the approach that Docker offers. For people in positions like that, approaches that are perhaps more involved but preserve more of the virtues of those traditional toolsets may seem like a smaller leap than the one to containers.

You've used the word 'just' here to highlight what to you seem unreasonable levels of difficulty or required background knowledge, which makes sense. But couldn't I just as well say that Docker advocates would have us 'just' abandon the very notion of shared libraries, 'just' try to get by without actually knowing how to build or verify our dependency chains, 'just' grab binaries from strangers on the net, 'just' download gigabytes of binary data to perform builds, 'just' virtualize Linux on macOS in order to use software that runs natively on it, etc.?

At the same time, for things like microservices development, Docker also makes some serious demands on time and knowledge, e.g., 'just' refactor all of your legacy services so they can be safely started in any order or 'just' learn Kubernetes so that your can initialize services in order of dependencies.
At what point in our industry have we ever said "Let's stop innovating and making things easier, we've come far enough, now the people have to adapt to us." Natural language processing and conversation is the next step right now... to me this is such a logical progression I'll be shocked if it's not being planned by many teams.
I believe this is commonly referred to as a guard clause? I tend to prefer writing things this way too... but I could see an argument for putting something in an else block instead of just leaving it there.