skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead of asking why these problems are endemic to every platform, people just say "let's try silver bullet #24 so that we can keep doing the same pernicious stuff with a veneer of progress" and now you have several more problems on top of the ones that already existed.

Are humans in large numbers capable of interfacing with individual human beings without engaging in pernicious behavior? The answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years is a resounding no. Are humans in large numbers capable of behaving immaculately when it comes to preserving their own or their customer's privacy? Once again the answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years (and several decades longer if you include proto-business networks) is a resounding no. If you add progressively more humans to anything, does the output improve? If the metric is human satisfaction, the answer is no. If the metric is the rate of return in a Ponzi scheme, then yes, okay, you've got me there. The cause of almost all problems is solutions.

As far as social media goes, it's literally designed to use people to promulgate human-motivated pseudo-information for as long as humanly possible. It's not for "socializing" or "meeting people" in the same way that TV shows and movies aren't there for entertainment. It's to sell the viewer's attention to people that have anything but their interest in mind. Moving to federated enclaves is just further deregulating an already throughly pernicious industry.
That’s not too far fetched.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
Although even then both players pretty much have similar tools, similar resources, and similar goals. ("Gather minerals and gas, build a base and an army, destroy the other player's base and army.") I can't offhand think of any videogames that are radically asymmetric (e.g. one guy is playing an RTS, the other is playing a shooter), though I'm sure there's something.
None of those features on the X are what I’d call flagship, and is likely what is contributing to their lackluster sales numbers at that price point.

Just provide a decent battery and screen, TouchID, and the best camera you can with the remaining space.
Outlined link:

https://outline.com/5CcYvM
> rely exclusively on networking with former coworkers to find you new positions

Maybe not exclusively, but having a strong network is one of (if not the) best ways to stay gainfully employed. The best jobs I’ve had were found through former coworkers, friends from conferences, or folks I’ve corresponded with on technical issues. Knowing and being respected by someone internal to a company typically bypasses the first two or three interview steps, insulates you from petty interviewers to a large degree, and overall greases the hiring wheels. Keeping in touch with former coworkers and cultivating friendships through conferences pays off tremendously!
I used a tiling window manager years ago when I ran Linux as my main OS. I’ve used similar third party tools to try to get... a similar effect on macOS but it always falls apart.

In the long run, I more greatly value the software I get to use on macOS (not to mention things like first party hardware and software support) over the window managers and that type of thing available elsewhere, and frankly, as a geek, it feels cool having a matrix-operator-like setup as my workstation so I’m happy.
Two methods I always use:

1. Google the article title and click on the search results to reach the article.
2. Refresh the webpage; as the page loads, hit the x in the browser to kill the loading. Sometimes this loads the article but not the paywall.
Furthermore, the economy presumably has more productive uses for everyone's time than expecting them to be amateur lawyers...
> “It has been demonstrated several times in this thread that there clearly are cases where the types can be deduced effortlessly and avoiding explicit information leads to cleaner code.”

I do not see a single example in this thread that demonstrates that. Absence of explicit type info is an inherently bad thing. It’s never good to offer code readers less explicit / more ambiguous info.

Like I said, you’d expect some offsetting benefit (what you call “cleaner code”) to compensate for paying the penalty of giving up valuable explicit info. But auto does not actually provide that in comparison to typedef/typename. auto, by comparison, is not meaningfully cleaner code. It only loses valuable explicit information, without an offsetting benefit that couldn’t otherwise be obtained without losing that valuable explicit information.
Thinner for the sake of being thin has been an Apple problem for a while now.
Speaking as an analytic number theorist, the branch of math of which the Lindelof Hypothesis is part:

This is a huge deal, if true. But USC's PR machine seems to have jumped the gun.

The paper in question, found here

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.06607.pdf

has so far only been posted to the arXiv (and only eight days ago). It has presumably not been subjected to any sort of peer review yet. No third party other than USC has announced the results. There's no chatter among my mathematician friends, or on the blogosphere.

Fokas's results could be correct. If the community comes to a consensus that they are, this would be a tremendous advance, and the analytic number theory community as a whole will be trumpeting them.

But, for the time being, I stipulate that some small technical error is probably lurking in the details, which would take hours to find, and which will tank the proof.

I hope that I am proven wrong. Until then I propose the headline: "Mathematician-M.D. claims to have solved one of the greatest open problems".
I recently was fixing a relative's early gen Macbook Pro which had the same keyboard as the Powerbook. The keyboard felt soooo nice. I really miss that keyboard.
It’s kind of like putting your stuff in a safe rather than showing it to everyone: sure, nobody gets to see what you put in. But it’s probably something of value.
From what I can tell, the newer iteration of the keyboard fails just as often as the old one. My sample size isn't huge (mid-high single digits on both iterations), but the result is consistent.
I mean, I agree but that's a rude way to tell the above poster you disagree
There's plenty of phones on par with the iPhone that blow it away in the cost department. Android hardware has had good screens, good cameras, good specs, and plenty of screen unlock gimmicks (face recognition unlock was introduced ~3 years ago if my memory is correct), and all of that usually well before an iPhone ever did; the iPhone's only compelling feature is that the stock software is kept pretty slim (but even that is slowly slipping away as Apple loses focus).

What Android hardware severely lacks is manufacturers that aren't bound and determined to destroy their products with shitware. It doesn't help that the platform isn't obnoxiously marketed as a social/economic statement, either.
Totemic–a digital trading card exchange built on an NFT-only blockchain
There’s a new site for digital collectibles crypto trading called Totemic (https://www.totemic.co/?f=ct) where you can buy and sell and trade cool exclusive cards made by established artists. These cards are each unique and limited edition in a similar way that CryptoKitties and RarePepes are. Card ownership is recorded on the public Bitmark blockchain which is a built-for-purpose property blockchain (made for NFTs specifically).

Fans can buy packs of eight cards at a time. Cards are all noted as common, uncommon, or rare, giving collectors an authenticated understanding of the value and scarcity of each card as they buy, collect, and trade cards with other users within the marketplace. Collectors can also buy and trade single cards in the secondary market.

Cards accumulate value by being traded, the chain-of-ownership and provenance are viewable on Bitmark’s built-for-purpose public blockchain.

Jamie King, former media executive at Bittorrent and producer of STEAL THIS FILM, recently launched this new exchange. It is not just another blockchain project with a white paper and a dream. Before even raising a dime there have been fully functioning prototypes we’ve tried and tested. It’s live now… go get yourself some cards: https://www.totemic.co/?f=ct
The article mentions it at the end, by "downfall" they don't mean Apple is going to fold. They mean that Apple making such a difficult to repair laptop is now going to cost them a ton of money because the "keyboard" repair requires replacing the entire top half of the machine due to the design. The article argues that if the design had been easier to repair they would be able to do this otherwise minor repair much more cheaply.

I think that's a fair claim, even if the title is a bit overblown. Apple is paying the price for what is probably too big of a compromise in the design of the laptops.
I Built a 'Google for Shopping' Website
Hi, guys. I am a coder. The reason I created the website is that I always spend hours to do some research before purchasing an item on Amazon. I am tired of it so I created a website which can do all comparison for me. This is how it works: let's say I wanna buy a book about python. I will type the keywords in the search bar, then the web will gather all related items from the Internet and return the best 10 results based on customer satisfaction, ratings, reviews, and popularity. Eventually, I can pick the one I want on the best 10 books. Is it cool? I just launched today. Please give me some feedback. Much appreciate it. Best10: https://www.best10.store/
They registered a patent for pretty much exactly that before the original iPhone was introduced.
None whatsoever. Given Apple's very well known proclivity to elevate their design/product teams, it's probably more likely to have come from someone on that side of the fence anyway. But it's pretty popular to deride non-technical people (especially those in management) as know-nothings, so it's an easy reach.
Apple losing the image of quality engineering will effect their entire product range, with consumers less willing to pay a premium and second guessing engineering achievements by keeping in mind side effects.

If the next iPhone is 20 grams lighter but I can’t make phone calls after 6 months, will I buy one over a equally powered Android $300 less?
Just another way to impose impossible standards. =)
I was absolutely ok with repairability of 2013 pro models. But what they did with new keyboard design is awful. I write this now from my Dell XPS 13, not from my MacBook Pro different models of which I used for > 5 years.
Similar boat with an LG V10, I Upgraded to a Moto z force that has Moto mods which include an extended battery, been really good for me.
RescueTime
How long did the repair take? I talked to a guy at the Apple store who said they’d likely do it even if the issue is intermittent, but I don’t love the idea of not having my machine for several weeks.
Its great that the keyboard hasnt failed you, but you have to know there are other people with opposite experience. When a product fails in a systematic way, its upto the company to remedy it (Galaxy S?, Toyota, J&J ..) One could argue Apple could have done more here.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsoft-extending-gdp...
IMO, 2012 Retina and its updates were masterpieces of hardware design. I wish they continue producing them with more up to date hardware.
> They do thinness for lightness sake.

Would you consider getting something like a LG Gram 15" then? It's thin and light but appears highly repairable [1]

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+A...
Even the Google AI finds it frustrating to deal with automated IVR according to this article. That concept needs to get an award for one of the most awful UX to ever exist - to say nothing about its (mis)use in phone numbers that could field emergencies.
Well into the era of digital mixing consoles, the complex tactile control surfaces remain. Faders and knobs are the right abstraction for working with sound. Contrast with lighting, which has become almost entirely keyboard driven; faders are now optional add-one for some of the most popular consoles like the Ion.
My God, this, 1000x times this. I've owned a Macbook Pro 2017 for 6 months now and still manage to get a miss 40% of the time. It's maddening.
This is what happens when you do user testing and the users you primarily test are only internal folks.

Apple, next time: take your prototype, throw a handful of fine sand on the keyboard and shake... if it can't be fixed by customers (via canister air or removing/cleaning the keys), then rework.

P.S., I am tying this now on this absolute crap keyboard with multiple letters sticky and repeating.
It seems like a business thing where thinness=money. Can't be from any other angle.
The PR is open here: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/29490

Looks like it's waiting for tests to pass at present.
Considering it reinforces a commonly held engineering ideology that only engineers understand or are capable of solving a problem or goal, and every other job function in a corporation is clueless deprivation of engineering, I’d say the response is fair. Apple is quite successful despite organizing in a way that baffles engineers, and will spend a bit recovering from this, then everyone will forget about it within a few Christmases. That’s not even advocacy, that’s just, like, exactly what will happen. It’s dust in the path of an asteroid at this point, with well-documented prior art. All of us with the keyboard get a bum deal, but events are probably proceeding exactly as engineered, if we are all honest with ourselves.

The correct following step is “what can I learn from that,” including, yes, many pitfalls and questionable decisions to learn, rather than “I know exactly what’s wrong with that success, and it’s business leaders.”

I realize the irony of saying this here, as many are at least amenable to said ideology. It also doesn’t strike me as an intentional color, just subtle thought basis underlying the sentiment.
It's a common idiom. Someone who says "I don't believe in psychics" means "people who call themselves psychics don't have the abilities that implies", not that nobody claims to be one.
They claim 3 - 5 days, but the last time I did it it took 13.
No, there is something special to machine learning and AI in general. E.g. SIGGRAPH papera are different. No one there claims to solve more than they actually do solve. DL is soaked with hype and self congratulatory BS. The best way to spot it is to check the citations. Typically they solve an already solved problem, skipping entirely any pre deep learning literature on it (or if they do cite it, only to dump BS on it) and then just cite a few of their own more or less relevant papers. I'm aware I'm overgeneralizing here and not every paper is like that, but I've seen enough to detect a trend.

It is as if defending or advertising "deep learning" was the purpose of the paper. It is not. The purpose of a paper is to show a solution to a problem. Much of DL literature (again not all) is a "solution in a desperate search of a problem" rather than the opposite.

I think many of these papers (including this one) would make a great blog post, but just isn't quite enough in terms of scientific content for a full blown paper. A curiosity, nice gimmick, but nothing more. Not really a solution to a problem, not really any idea of non trivial universality.
I am a die hard Mac fan. I upgraded from Windows and never looked back. Recently, I thought Windows might have improved over the years and decided to give it a shot with my girlfriend's Windows 10 laptop and it was because she wanted me to setup a new user account for her.

And you wouldn't believe me if I told you that it's near impossible to create a normal user account without a Microsoft Live account along with it. You need to google for it and find some specific workflow to make it happen.

I felt so outraged and I totally lost all trust and confidence in MS. It felt really a cheap and scammy way to get more people into their walled gardens. It's a shame because I really wanted to give Windows a chance.

Now imagine, if Apple had forced you to use an Apple ID to sign into your Mac. How outraged you'd feel?

Having said that, I think the Surface series have a far superior design than any of my Macs. I sometimes feel jealous when I see these guys in coffeeshops playing with it by directly interacting with its screen and the sleek keyboard that comes with it.

Ever since then, I've been seriously investigating if there's a way to get Mac OS run on a Surface almost flawlessly. That'd be the perfect laptop for me.
Having interfaced with Apple in a different way (apart from owning a new MBP and an iPhone X) I'd say the issue is, and continues to be, growing pains.

They're certainly losing the lead in software engineer talent (giving it away to whom, I'm not sure). But the single most horrible experience I've had with Apple in the last year was trying to get software published on the App Store.

That's a department that's so large that it's become a classic bureaucracy -- middle managers run amok, pettiness, lack of professionalism, etc.

I was trying to publish a piece of software using their less extortionate subscription options and I was told by a young woman manager that I would have to have feature X in order to qualify. I added feature X in a couple days and got back to her. She was surprised (disappointed?) and then told me I'd have to have feature X + feature Y in order to qualify.

I have a couple of contacts from the "good old days" and sent a very angry email. Middle manager woman disappeared, her boss called me and apologized within a few minutes.

If I didn't have that contact I probably wouldn't have gotten past her.

What has happened to Apple that their dev teams work against devs, compile times (this is 2018 remember) are now counted in minutes for small projects, my MBP crashes when plugging in an external monitor, etc?

They've grown too fast. My contact told me that their App Store team is now interfacing with over 2 million developers. How do you grow to accommodate that?

Now, what is the answer to all of this? Fix the marketing driven culture. Thinner isn't better. The number of apps on the app store isn't a meaningful metric. New languages are cool only if you can actually pull them off. Etc.
My god, yes. My hit rate on the half height up/down keys can’t be better than 30%
Very cool! Though on my MBP at 50% volume the ultrasonic transmission is clearly audible. Although much less audible than the other profile.
It also seems to be based around Oryol [0], where this project is part of the test suite [1].

[0] https://github.com/floooh/oryol

[1] https://github.com/floooh/oryol-sticky-tests
So, a company can just advertise any low price and add on a bunch of arbitrary "fees" to pad their numbers? Sounds perfectly sane.
> The tide turned on Friday, June 8. Out of the blue, an email popped onto the forensics community mailing list. It contained a single link, to an Anonymous video.

All that video said was "the API you seek is called Activities". Am I missing the joke, or is the name of the API literally the only thing that they needed to get this working?
> The lighter your laptop (or tablet, or phone), the more you'll choose to not leave it behind but rather to just lug it around with you, and so the more places you'll have it and the more it'll be there to aid your productivity in random situations.

I didn't know how true this was until upgrading from an old Lenovo T400 to a newer Lenovo Carbon X1. I'll regularly carry the X1 a few blocks to a library, park, or coffee shop. The X1 and my work laptop - a Dell Latitude - are about as thick and heavy as the T400 alone, so it's not even a question that I take both to a location when working remotely. Now I need a bag with 2 laptop slots.

> [Also, for phones and tablets specifically, the longer you'll be willing to hold it up to your face to stare at it before putting it away due to the "gorilla arm" feeling.]

Conversely, the Samsung Tab A has enough magnets in the back to stick to a fridge - this remarkably makes it feel heavier than the X1, especially when working on magnetic tables and surfaces. The Tab A causes the "gorilla arm" feeling almost immediately, making it basically worthless to me. To add insult to this injury, when it's stuck to my fridge, the screen refuses to turn on when rotated to landscape. So it can't effectively play full-screen Youtube while stuck to the fridge, negating the last use case I found for it. I think this is due to a magnetic screen-off sensor that all Android devices seem to have on the back, but don't know why this would only turn off landscape and not portrait.
I've also seen ATMs displaying Internet Explorer scripting errors, and uninitialized Microsoft FrontPage Components
>I always saw 10x average, not worst. See: http://antirez.com/news/112 (first result on google after writing "10x developer")

It's a pity that's the first result, because it's flat wrong. This article actually talks about the origin of the claim:

https://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2013/09/29/the-10x-develope...

I believe in 10x programmers, because I have known many programmers over the years, and I can think of many pairs where one was clearly 10x as productive as the other. And I think the reason there are 10x programmers is that our profession tolerates a lot of embarrassingly incompetent people. If someone were 10x as productive as an average developer, that would be truly extraordinary. But I don't see 10x programmers as all that extraordinary, because there are so many people who get paid to program but suck at it so bad, that being 10x as productive as they are is not all that impressive.
Writing from my 2017 MacBook Pro. Apart from the keys being louder than before and my nagging fear of an errant crumb or cat hair I'm happy, typing is crisp and maybe faster for me than on any other keyboard. I move my hands less. In comparison my regular Mac keys now feel loose and smooshy, almost as if they'd been produced by the Haribo Gummy Bear factory. (Not that this is a horrible feeling. I miss gummy bears; can't they make them out of xylitol or something?)
"Everything" is the among the greatest pieces of Windows software ever written. It is wonderful. I cannot figure out why, with all of their money, Microsoft doesn't just pay the guy a little cash and make it a built-in feature of Windows. It would increase the usability of Windows, especially among novice users, enormously.
> I've worked a few gigs, and shipped some products, where we didn't use any GNU software at all.

That's very impressive (assuming you were developing for Linux). I guess no one used Emacs, or GDB, and you were cross-compiling (using Clang and LLD) from Windows or macOS?
I've been using mine daily (more than 6h per day), for 10 months, and I still miss most of the times!
Why? attrs does it already.
Leftward? lol

In every respect except gender and sexual politics we have moved massively right since the seventies. The UK Labour party are now to the right of the 1970s Heath Tory party. Yes even under Corbyn. In 1970 he'd have been mostly a moderate. It was Nixon who oh so nearly brought in UBI, at a surprisingly generous rate too.

As far as LGBT rights are concerned that seems far more a generational thing than of the right or left. Here in the UK it's had cross party support in recent years, though of course there are more anachronistic conservative views on the right. It was, nevertheless, the Tory party that legalised gay marriage.
It appears that the current paraphilia disorders involve:

- Non-human objects

- The suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner

- Children

- Non-consenting persons

Being a "disorder," they must cause distress.

But if distress is the requirement, the list is by far not long enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia