skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't agree more. Self-driving cars are exciting to report on, so get all the attention, but I'm absolutely convinced that general day-to-day automation of award-wage jobs will be the sneaky left hander that shakes society up.

When they get supermarket self-checkouts to be as foolproof as staffed checkouts (eg some kind of NFC/RFID based walk-through scanning, and not this current "customer does the work" one that still needs constant assistance and staffing), you're already putting a HUGE number of people out of work.

McDonalds has been pushing their automated systems HARD here in Australia, with all kinds of perks if you use their app or in-store touchscreens to order and pay. Our local one in the last couple years alone went from 4-5 staff on front, to 1, maybe 2 in peak.

Online grocery shopping is so common here now that I don't know many people who actually go to the shops for their big weekly shop, just to grab a few items for cravings and bits and pieces on the way home from work. Of my 5 closest local friends, 4 do their primary weekly groceries online, whereas a couple years ago it was 1.

Ikea does self-checkout now, and sometimes has no staffed checkouts open here, unless you have special needs then they'll open one for you (we're usually dragging kids and prams so they'll open one for us).

I now renew my car rego, insurance, license, etc online. Just a few years ago that HAD to be done in person, at the dreaded roads authority. I haven't been in there for a couple years now, and it used to be 2-3 times a year for various things.

The robots aren't coming, they're already here.
There are a couple of ways to look at this. Philosophically, to pick any one of your examples, my emacs is version 26.1. Is this the same software as emacs 15.10 released April 1985? Will a perl 6 program run on perl 5? Am I the same person I was 5 years ago?

Another take: what is the ratio of the same software still in use after, say, 10 years to all software in use? I would argue that more than 99% of all software (e.g. by version number) is no longer in use after a mere 5 years. Software is inherently disposable, let's not pretend we're building bridges that will stand for generations.

My point is that developers (I'm one) have a hard time with the qualities of software: we don't understand the nature of software change, and bicker about what bumping a semver number means, and we fight its disposable nature by engineering it to the point where it could run for a decade (it won't).
I don't have a natural right to prevent you from doing so.

But there's social contracts on top of that. Copyright is one such. It's not a right at all - it's a privilege (specifically, monopoly grant on distribution of certain information), that we as a society have decided to grant some people, because it incentivizes them to do things that we as a society want them to do.

Coincidentally, this also applies to regular property in a broad sense. The shirt that you wear on your back is yours in a physical sense; but, say, an apartment that you own and rent out in New York while living in California is only yours because the society declares it to be, and enforces that on your behalf - you don't have a natural right to such property, it's a social contract.

And no, I'm not a communist. Not anymore so than this guy:

"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1813
How to land the Space Shuttle . . . from space [video]
But that's my point (which other people are making). There's a difference between Google APIs, products and software platforms. Some are riskier than not.

It adds little to the conversation if someone just says "scared of abandonment" without providing more context. Yes, one's entitled to that opinion, but it's slightly misplaced sentiment.

Out of interest, how long would it take for one to migrate from Go to say C or Java (if Go is killed)? Similarly, how long to go from some Google cloud service to either another provider or a different other service?

I agree with you about instinctively performing a risk analysis, but was offering a different perspective that perhaps one should separate Google into a few categories, then make judgement per category.
Proof of work cannot be made to consume less power. Every single increase in hash rate efficiency just results in the same kWh being used to make more hashes followed by an increase in block difficulty. This is literally a security feature of the network, since it’s designed to prevent 51% attacks.

It might be technically possible to change the bitcoin protocol, but at this point the politics are insurmountable.
Come on.

edit: Oh, ESR wrote it. Makes sense
Cool! I play that game.

Here's a very unscientific test (showing GPU usage) I did on the Note 8 switching between menus really quickly. It's barely noticeable (if at all) for me, but it certainly shows on older phones.

Canvas for Android (Native): https://i.imgur.com/5mWueG7.png
Falcross Menu: https://i.imgur.com/DpKVNDK.jpg

(It's also important to note that this isn't noticeable at all on iOS. The app is buttery smooth with a consistent framerate on iOS.)

Other than that, a few nitpicks: The "recently played" icon at the top is clipped for me, the energy/star/circle icons at the top flicker when you switch views, etc.

Things like that basically don't happen if you use "real" native development (or Flutter) with "real" native components.
You realize your objections can also be said of the Finance industry as a whole.
fdhgdchus
The article lists several on the team. They’re mostly senior executives, data scientists and engineers. They’re definitely pulling strings from that room - in total, there’s a team of 300 specifically working on the issue, not to mention the dozens of teams that make this type of real time analysis and decision making possible.
Simple Golang library to identify cloud providers
... so is the Finance sector as a whole.
From a marketing perspective, that was an awful choice. Releasing an effectively unrelated product and calling it 2.0 is just asking for trouble.

Second, they immediately announced no migration path and no more bug fixes at the same time. I’m not sure if they stuck with that, I was in the backbone camp at that time, but that is a painful pill to swallow. That they made that call without considering the downstream pain is a sign to me that I should be wary about depending on them
Alibaba Java Diagnostic Tool
Yep.

I find Twitter useful by following accounts which tailor to my taste in information consumption. They typically broadcast very useful information, and stay clear of politics and especially stay clear of politicizing for brownie points.

Now, I can see Twitter being a very annoying place if all you are following are accounts which are looking to "engage" their audience and get retweets and mentions, etc., and try to be cool, set tone, influence, and throw signals --all of these mostly add noise.
> Bugfixes-- from simple grammar flaws, to finishing dangled story threads, why aren't we patching and re-releasing novels?

This is pretty similar to what’s happened with Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. He’s repeatedly reworked it, tweaking the production and verses and in one case adding a whole new song.

> Customization -- if you've made an attractive image or song, and it hasn't been repurposed to sell Diet Pepsi, you haven't really arrived.

https://youtu.be/zxyTk3ligAc – a band playing a very close copy of their hit song Winchester Cathedral as a coke ad.
The thing I'm worried about is niche content that is very interesting/useful, but only rarely - the kind of stuff that old Web1.0 personal sites, blogs, forum threads, and university-faculty webpages can be a treasure trove of, and which is especially prone to linkrot. It is precisely this content that a "permanent Web" would be of most interest, to me, about preserving. This is the "long tail" of content - any individual piece is only rarely interesting and only to some people, but in aggregate they actually make up a substantial fraction of the value of the Web to me.

So if IPFS aspires to be the "permanent Web", but is virtually useless for preserving these, it hardly seems to qualify. With a few exceptions (for very large content that would require a ton of bandwidth to download and host, or to very complex content that requires preserving the structure of a whole large website to stay functional instead of individual pages, or for inherently server-side content), the kind of stuff that would be popular enough for someone to pin virtually never vanishes from the Web - even if links to it do break - because that's the kind of stuff that has almost certainly already been saved locally & reposted to other websites. And the stuff that's served unpinned from user caches is, very clearly, not permanent.

So it's a "permanent Web" ... which is, at best, barely less fragile and prone to linkrot than the current web, in that if content is popular at one point and then the site layout changes or the original host goes down entirely it can still be kept up at the same link if someone was smart enough to save it locally, and specific versions of a website can be linked to specifically (even if nobody's necessarily hosting them anymore). But in all other respects, it is exactly as ephemeral as the current Web, and the fancy decentralized parts of it that are different than the current Web are among the most ephemeral parts, while the option to still have the boring old fragile centralized-server solutions where you host your own content personally are the durable ones.
The "hot-reload" development builds (which I think run JIT) definitely do lag, but my production bundle is almost indistinguishable from a native app.
It's really sad how Google can possibly (I won't bother wasting my time to find out) make something really truly awesome, and it just doesn't matter at all. Their brand has a stink to it that won't wear off any time soon, if ever.

They chose an evil path of manipulating users into giving up privacy. Talking out both sides of their mouth with politics and freedom of speech and other things. Creating and dumping tech like hot potatoes. Attempts at mass manipulation of the internet (AMP, messing with the location bar). The list goes on...

Google is schizophrenic, and I don't know if they can come back from this in the long term. I won't even bother looking at any of their tech anymore, there are plenty of great alternatives to every service they offer without all the Google baggage.
Hardcore history talks about this aspect of total war and how they justified and wrestled with it
Hey thanks for sharing your experience -- have you written about this anywhere? I'd love to read up on what you've been through. I personally want to go through the process you've gone through (except replace react native with nativescript) to see how it feels.

I like Flutter but I just don't want to commit to dart, but it represents an entry in the hybrid continuum (native -> webview) that can't be ignored because of how it works.

One thing though -- looping through 5MB of JSON doesn't seem like something you should be doing...

[EDIT] - Just saw your other comment with the render comparison pictures -- thanks so much for the input!
I'm not completely sure what the difference between a technology and a product is, but I think it was a product, because it was SaaS with only one provider and closed source until the shutdown announcement, and very few developers were integrating with it. Only when the shutdown was announced did they open source it, and it became more of a technology than a product.

I think the Android userspace might count as a technology that's been shut down. When Android first came out, it looked a lot like a mobile counterpart to a Linux distro with Gnome or KDE, with built in simple open source apps, like music, photos, downloads, and notes (now Keep). Now all these apps are littered with tie-ins to Google, and Samsung and Huawei have gone off and developed alternatives because it's annoying to use these apps without fully buying into Google (same to a lesser extent for Maps and Chrome). This might be a stretch though, and besides this I don't know of any Google technology that was popular and useful and got shut down in a way that reminds me of Google Reader.
Yes, that was my conclusion a few months ago. I'm currently working on an Android app, and even though I published the Flutter app in "record time", the drawback is the amount of mental energy needed to make certain platform tasks work.

Background execution was the biggest for me, I didn't want to write a Flutter plugin that interacts with a background service (because even though that's now possible, it still feels confusing to me).

Simple(r) app, Flutter's very good at that. I'll see what happens post 1.0
I fully understand this reaction. Crypo is delivering on none of it's promises and leaving an ugly mark on the production side. Transactions are way too slow for retail, decentralization is a joke because the largest mining pools are manipulating the supply with less transparency than national currencies, the value is too volatile to entice people to use it for anything other than speculation, and it is literally the most environmentally destructive modern technology at the moment. If miners moved into my town you bet my ass I would be at town hall telling them to fuck off.
The best realization of the American dream was on the decade after the end of WW2.

Yeah, surprising how being the only Western power not destroyed economically can do that. Your theory of higher corporate taxes is just cherry picking numbers. Yes rates were higher, but there were way more ways to get around them than there are now.
Here's something of a search engine for IPFS: https://ipfs-search.com/

It works by crawling the DHT, though I don't think it's quite perfect yet. As for URLs vs Hashes, you point URLs to a hash through DNS TXT records.
I always like to ask, "who wins?". News gets out that Russia is poisoning people critical of it. Who wins? Do they achieve their goals of silencing criticism? Obviously people think negatively of them and think twice before visiting the country. So, who wins?
I don't think that the harm of breaking windows is solely due to violation of private property rights. Maybe the windows are on a publicly owned building. Or, even if they are private property, there is harm done to the public as a consequence of the damage. People will take steps to avoid such damage. And conversely, maybe the mining of Bitcoin harms public interests too. I think it's easy to just assume away the issues that go beyond private interests if you identify morality with sacrosanct property rights.
Heaven is being able to play fortnite every day. Hell is _having_ to play fornite every single day.
There are probably a hundred times more professional-level guitarists than professional guitarists. It’s a ton of work, but it’s a ton of work that a lot of people already put in just for fun.

Professional production is very hard, but it’s also kind of a moving target. A lot of production is trying to hit trends set by other producers so that your music sounds professional itself. It’s largely competitive rather than artistically significant, and there’s some great production that doesn’t sound professional but still works.
> and no more bug fixes

Angular 2 was released in Sep 2016. AngularJS continued releases up until Jul 2018, with 3 years of security fixes after that. 5 years is plenty of time to rewrite your app.
A portion of those Ticketmaster fees are kicked back to the artist/promoters/venue.

https://help.ticketmaster.com/s/article/What-kinds-of-fees-c...
I've been a chartered accountant in a past career.

From my experience a sizeable percentage Chartered Accountant's / CPAs are happy to do whatever they are directed to as long there is plausible deniability (and you can generally find that if you look closely (or don't look closely enough).

I don't see this as special to accountant's I see it as a function of human nature.
Yes, I try to point out: Name one great American industry that came out of a 'red' state, other than extractive industries like oil. Does the whole country want an economy and human welfare like Alabama or like Massachusetts?

Ok, let me try.... Semiconductors in California?

California was a red state up until the 1992 presidential election. Long after the birth of the semiconductor and computer age.

What do I win?

And looking back to earlier in the 1900s, it was states like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois (all red states back then) that were major economic powerhouses.

I would argue that states like NY and CA are economic powerhouses in spite of their politics, not because. Just take a look at what democratic policies have done to NJ. It's been on the decline for a long time.
The biggest lesson I got in dog training (which is really "owner training") was that the dog really wants to know what to do. So for example if my instructions were clear there was no ambiguity of what was expected. I suspect this is a big driver of the phenomenon.

The funny thing is I had a very very anxious breed of dog (an IWH) that people thought was docile and would not even notice that he was leashless even in a crowd or even crowded restaurant (and of course in the office). But it was simply that the dog was so used to my needs and wishes that he was comfortable in any situation -- or perhaps confident that I would not put him in a scary situation?
I have been pushing a pet idea that we should leverage our RDBMSes as platforms more than we do. Pretty frequently the model layer in MVCs end up with some functionality that would be much more robust inside the database. Validation ends up being done (at least) twice, query results end up being quite distant from objects, transactions which should be one are split, etc. Problems that could be mitigated with user defined procedures in the database.

I think it might be the current state of version control tooling that's in the way here. It can be a tricky and often fairly manual process to sync database changes (even just running the migrate command) when releases are tied to git repos.

That's not to say git repos aren't wonderful, but I see underutilization of database functionality as a subtle downside.
Engineering is more than just application. In some places you need to be certified as an engineer, for better or worse, which says that there is an understanding of how to calculate and communicate product tolerances and service level guarantees that go beyond just applying science. Basically be the bare minimum of applying science I would call hacking - which is a great thing, but there is value in the distinction between hacking a solution and engineering
A raise has added value also in that base salary seems to go further when negotiating your next jump. Of course, this also motivates the employer to give bonuses vs raises.
DNS works just fine for IPNS content-hash-addresses too, and heck, you can do that right now. You just use that, the same way you'd use anything else - just say that dweb.foo.xyz is associated with a particular IPNS address (and www.foo.xyz can be the regular ol' web address).
> why shouldn't I expect to be using these programs in 50 years?

No reason at all, if they still solve the same problem, they're still the best solution. The problem with 'problems' though, is that once they're cornered they tend to change into a whole new problem. A nasty one the current solution won't work for, usually.
You must be new to the internet :)

But, yes, it would a better world if people read links before upvoting/downvoting/commenting.
Owner/CEO/Steward of RubyMotion here.

1. Laurent did sell RubyMotion off (to basically retire). He sold it to me. The guy that built the mobile adaptation of A Dark Room with RubyMotion (which hit the number one spot on the AppStore _and_ the number two spot on Google Play).

2. Since the acquisition, there have been monthly updates to the platform, and measures to slowly open source RM under a _sustainable_ open source model.

3. I have since released 4 other apps using RubyMotion. Combined they have approximately 3.5 million downloads.

4. RubyMotion is _actually_ native (unlike React Native).

5. RubyMotion is definitely not cool anymore. It's battle-hardened, "just works", fast (faster than Swift in fact), and can leverage all the existing Android and iOS libraries out there (which React not-Native can't do out of the box).

6. Email me and I'll hook you up with an Indie license <3.
> The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behavior.

I don't think this is the right target to blame. The much deeper reason is people ARE stupid, while think they are clever and correct. You, me, all the others included. And at the same time, the education once applied to us, failed. Simply put, it's not a technology problem, it's a sociology problem.

Around the year 2002, when I was connected to the Internet for the first time, I thought it was a magic place where you can discuss with people on a topic until the truth emerges and learned, then everybody come to a conclusion and live happily ever after.

That thought was the very first few which been destroyed. Because I instead found people are more likely to turn discussion into a "clan war" and mob each other instead. And that was long before Twitter or even Google is a thing.

Here is a book that many people may already read, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Crowd-Study-Popular-Mind/dp/143410055...
Not the OP, but the obvious interpretation is that the Trump administration is not only not equivalent to, but in opposition to, the "Western political establishment".

c.f. the "Deep State".

True or not, it's a charitable read of OP.
Seconded about the development experience. I wrote the same app in native Swift/Java, Flutter, and React Native. I did Flutter last, and even though I had never written a line of dart in my life, everything almost just worked.

There are still some really weird problems that occur, but after fixing those with `flutter clean`, it's hands down the best experience I've ever had making a mobile app.
May not apply to everyone. For me, more socializing means I feel worse. I’m happiest when I can spend as much time alone as possible. If I spend too much time around people and in social situations it immediately affects my stress levels.
I think the key word there is "limited times", which someone could argue that 140 years (even 110) is no longer limited, but "unlimited" for the authors/inventors lifetime.

I do agree that copyright could last longer than patents, although the current laws are made to grant copyright for many (~6) generations, while patents are for only ~1 (all depends what you call a generation, I estimated at 20-25 years).
I think you are attempting to present a solution to a problem you can't possibly help with.

No individual at Google can assuage any concerns caused by the corporation as a whole. (maybe the CEO could?)
Also, he writes,

> Once the SEC decided that most technology company stock option procedures were not as desired, the jail sentences were handed out arbitrarily.

The SEC does not jail people, courts do. I don't see how the SEC's motivations would lead judges to hand out arbitrary jail sentences.
> Russia wants important enemies to die slow, painful deaths

> wouldn't have been satisfying or vengeful enough

You know this how ?