skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a discussion about AppStore monetisation using OmniFocus as an example.

The original claim that upgrade pricing is a scam can be trivially disproved. My claim is that coming up with an appropriate upgrade strategy is easy to get wrong and customers can still feel that these upgrade prices are unjustified, which does pose a problem for the company making the products and for this method of monetisation too.

What I will do doesn't really matter, but it's reasonable to assume I'm not alone in thinking like this.
‘Papers, Please’ Creator Debuts ‘Return of the Obra Dinn’
Im still wondering if the natures approach to repair- aka, discard after respawning a replacement, is after all maybe the best approach, even for tech. Because, catching all scenarios in programming is running against YAGNI. So if the replacement boots up, does its job for a second, fails gracefully and spawns a replacement to the very same, all meanwhile improving over generations, maybe that is not some sputtering failure, but instead something - that makes tech more lifelike. Think of your work not as a immortal statue, standing there for eternity, but more of something growing, maybe with the helps of guardians- or maybe- long forgotten, some long dead embedded controlled lawn sprinklers in a old house, saving some animals from a wildfire.
Okay, but if it lowered the price enough that more people will buy it, then they can still win on revenue.
The sad part is that a couple decades ago, anyone in the middle class could buy a house, one income households included. Now, property values are out of whack, especially in or near any global metropolis.
What I meant was the debate which has been taking place in the main stream of physics for many years now is whether or not its possible to build a quantum computer on the scale where it can do anything useful. In the article we read:

>> When Dr Shor made his discovery such computers were the stuff of science fiction. But in 2001 researchers at ibm announced that they had built one, programmed it with Shor’s algorithm, and used it to work out that the prime factors of 15 are three and five. This machine was about the most primitive quantum computer imaginable.

The context which was lacking is that I meant on a large scale and not simply the most primitive thing. And no I am not fabricating anything, see here [1] for some of the main stream discussion by someone who is more articulate and knows more about it than me.

Let's keep in mind that just this week it was announced that a grad student figured out an algorithm to verify that the computations done by hypothetical quantum computers actually are giving a correct answer [2].

I seriously don't think you know what you are talking about when it comes to the idea that its "already been done", D-Wave is not a "quantum computer" in the sense of this article or shors algorithm.

However, you are correct that my comment was overly hyperbolic and lacking context. Next time this comes up on here I will try to do a better job and not use phrases like "its a hoax" because to be honest, its not a hoax, it might be possible one day they will exist. I personally believe at that point there will be so many other advances that non quantum computers will simply outperform everything else.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/gil-kalais-argument-against-q...

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/graduate-student-solves-quant...
Has Dart taken off? I think most people recoiled in horror when they saw the early-days "hello world" turn into millions of lines of generated code.
There is abundant evidence that teen pregnancy has a severe negative impact on the economic prospects of young women. Many of these women will drop out of high school and almost none will complete college degrees.
Inelastic demand. Even with full throttle development, when you have a whole country (nay, world) of tech industry professionals would want to move to the heart of their industry in a boom time, you may not see much movement in price. Consider that all that worldwide demand would need to be soaked up before prices come down to working class affordable levels. We see inelastic demand with disasters as well as economic booms centered around geographic areas.

You see something similar in the phenomenon of how adding more lanes to roads doesn't necessarily relieve congestion.
Dart had some other downsides, like you needed Java I think and many developers have an irrational disgust for Java(I hope I remember right)

There are other languages pushed by a big corporation that fail so having the big corporation is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
It's especially damning when the article points out that some apps were removed after the article-writer contacted Apple.

Indicates that the process is clearly there at Apple, they just turn a blind eye.

But wow, I expected a lot more from the billing UI of iOS apps. You can start a billing process just by making the user click a button? IMO everything billing should require a round-trip through a standard billing App Store page just like if you were to pay something online with PayPal.

And I was especially amazed by how hard it is to see your subscriptions. I just checked mine and was subscribed to an app I completely forgot about.

Think of the kind of UI you would design if you wanted to ensure people weren't making money from others unknowingly. You'd give Subscriptions its own tab in the App Store. You'd create notifications like "You just paid $5 to <App> (Recurring: weekly)". Even PayPal's app gets this right.
You used to have to reinstall windows every few years because it slowed down over time. I guess microsoft thought it would be convenient if they did that for us.
Your story is so anecdotal and influenced by the people you know that it is practically irrelevant. Not trying to jump down your throat, but "people I see" and "I don't know anyone" renders your statement useless.
For the longest time, it was very profitable investing.

It’s not less irresponsible than buying Tesla stock.
I wonder if this could replace the cross platform memory mapping in LibreOffice. This is part of the Operating System Layer (OSL) which is at least several decades old and uses a C interface.

https://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/include/osl/file....
Yeah. I have been in such a situation, and it was not all people. It was a minority. They were what they always were. What changed was my tolerance to their antics. Mind you, this was pre-internet so perhaps giving all a voice online has led to too much input IRL.
It's not necessarily all or nothing.

It could be that the actual story is something at some small company, which ballooned into a shit storm of assumptions and embellishment.
Thanks, always nice to get a downvote when someone corrects a data point. And your link cites the whole area, not downtown. But thanks anyway.
ram throughput isn't that different on a cheap to high end pc.
Conspecifics are more important than other species.
Hmm... flags and more down-votes, but still no counterarguments or questions. (Dang, what's up with that?)

Anyway, here's a September article from Axios entitled, "The Trump administration's secret anti-China plans" https://www.axios.com/trump-administration-anti-china-campai...

From the article: "The broadside against China — which is planned to be both rhetorical and substantive — will be "administration-wide,"" [emphasis added] ""The push is coming from the national security apparatus," the source added."

Personally, I hope no products are compromised, ever. That's probably not the case, and either way, the average person won't care much in the short term. Busy w/other stuff, they probably don't remember this story today, if they even heard about it. Businessweek is, after all, a business magazine targeted at a pretty specific audience.

As for whether Bloomberg's story is part of a wider campaign, I don't know and don't believe I've said otherwise. It doesn't really matter to me, as I know that a game is on and that it isn't unreasonable to use such a story while playing. I've seen and heard all sorts of curious things in the last few years. Nothing about today's environment tells me that I'll have fewer such occurrences.

Toodles, kids.
Wow, this is great. Thank you for the link!
The exact same thing happened to me with OmniGraffle.

The old version still works, which is great, but OmniGroup probably won't get any more money from me for that particular product. Customers like us will likely pose some problems for companies like Omni, so I don't see why several people are trying to dismiss these stories.
These houses weren’t purchased to rent out. They were safe deposit boxes for cash. The expectations were that they would just keep going up in value. Their rent value didn’t matter.
The letter and response may be apocryphal. I think he made some statements at a conference that were publicized and then he "clarified" that he was looking to have the Guard trained on the latest equipment including offensive and defensive nuclear related systems, but he did not want them to actually stockpile and control nuclear weapons.

One reason it may be in the popular consciousness is because Stephen King mentioned the episode in The Dead Zone.
Yeah, this is why I'm not worried one iota about deepfakes. Say what you will about fake news, but blantant lies like a faked video or image generally does not get through journalistic filters. Something big like a fake video of a celebrity or a president would very unlikely be published (and if it grew viral through some disingenuous source, its spread would be severely dampened by trusted newssites warning the public not to believe it). I mean just look at the subsequent backlash after oobah butler's pranks. Sure, his prank fooled the news, but it's effects were totally nil in the long-term steady state.
The sole problem from population contraction, is replacement tax dollars for existing entitlement-type programs that are built on a ponzi scheme approach to ever larger inflows of tax revenue to support them over time.

Most of the developed world has the same problem on that front. The desperation by these countries when it comes to figuring out how to patch up the finances of those programs will increase by the year.

Robot (productivity) taxes will be one small answer. Another will be ever higher income taxes, also eventually including heavy wealth taxes (that comes last). Most of the developed or semi-developed world is starting to get hit on demographics at the same time. The weaker economic nations are being forced to respond first, as in Russia having to raise their pension ages so high it starts to cut people off at the life expectancy line (plunging Putin's popularity numbers in a rather startling fashion, which tells you how important the pension promises were). France is being forced to confront similar problems, with Macron trying to dress that up as market reforms. The US is temporarily avoiding it thanks to its ability to run absurdly high budget deficits for now.
They were setting up a non-profit arts space. I don't feel like the customer/business relationship is a good fit there.
So does Vancouver.

https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...
On the other hand I need to go and fix something after every update on my mums Windows 10 machine.
Flushing behavior is precisely the kind of thing that varies the most between systems. I'd be very suspicious of a "fault tolerant" system that tried to use a library like this to be "cross platform". That's almost a contradiction in terms.
> racism

Sorry, but I didn't actually say anything about drawing final conclusions about individuals' predeterminations based on their ancestry.

What I will gladly say, however, is that individuals who don't contribute to the good of society (and this is easily measurable economically), are not worth being kept alive at others' expense.

(... except insofar as individuals voluntarily commit acts of charity.)
Facebook destroys billions of dollars of shareholder value with open source
Exactly. I'm not suggesting that it's all going to come crashing down or even happen overnight, just that the trend line for them isn't up and to the right. I sincerely hope the auto companies realize this and plan accordingly even if they won't say it publicly.
> inflate a codebase dramatically

This is usually only done for very specific algorithms. Unicode validation, hash functions, things like that. Unless you have an absolutely tiny application (which you might, if you're some kind of microcontroller), it's going to be a small percentage of your overall code size.
I can quite easily conceive of manufacturing things becoming almost entirely remote, with only a skeleton crew on-site.

There are quite a few start-ups I'm familiar with manufacturing various widgets in China without ever stepping foot there, just sending CAD files.
Have you considered that there may not be as many African American economists as there are scientists, doctors and inventors and that is the reason the search behaves differently? Do you have any substantive basis for your claim that google is racially biasing their results?
In Seattle Uber/Lyft drivers drive 95% Toyota Priuses. High gas mileage == you can actually make a profit in the job.
Looks like a fun little data science project but I don't see any data here that would be useful to determine similarity among women and thus who would benefit from which type of BC. The closest thing I see is age. I think you'll need a better data set if you want to make something that's more useful. That said it's a good idea in general - someone should get on that.
Poincaré conjecture
Hmm, maybe. I wonder if it will be slightly more nuanced.

Documents are forgeable, but we generally believe documentary evidence. (Well, in courts we need a person to vouch for a document, but we already also need that for video too-it's a very testimonial system.)

When two people dispute authenticity (outside of courts), we reflexively gauge the credibility and perceived motives of those involved.

It's a rough system, prone to error, but my point is we navigate these things socially without assuming bad faith for all documents.

It's like how home locks offer close to zero protection, but they are still a normal part of our world.

We can't be sure a document is real, can't be sure a lock will matter, but we are all busy, so we shrug and go on with our day in most cases.
Do you think your manager will get this?
Not universally. In California, for instance, by law half of the state budget must go to education regardless of source.
Sure. But even in the case of personal internal judgments, people vary widely in how much they do this. Some are constantly consciously trying to measure and compare everyone they meet, whereas others seem to generally not notice much.
It's not which is why many think these houses were bought not to rent out at all, but at inflated costs to park capital or launder money.

Now that there's a tax on empty housing and an upcoming speculation tax persons the carrying costs on empty homes is high enough that some are clearly looking to get out of their investment.
Children are public goods with massive positive externalities. I think it would be a shame if the population declined.

My favourite policy to increase birth rates is to give parents a percentage of their children's income tax revenue. Standard econ says we just need to internalize some of these positive externalities. This has the advantage of scaling with the wealth of the parents, as economic productivity has a significant heritable component.

Though this policy triggers an intense moral disgust response in everyone I've proposed it to, so likely not possible unless things get very desperate. But I think it has a chance of working, which is more than I can say of most natalist policies I have seen.
This looks interesting, it's a bit like how Medium handles logins IIRC.

One issue I see is the fact that people have to click links in emails. With the current state of phishing/spam/scams it is good practise to never click links, so encouraging users to click as part of the authentication process seems a bit risky.

Perhaps there could be a user or site configurable option to receive a 'magic password' rather than a link?
Didn’t read entirely but it looks like collaborative filtering based on preferences. That’s fine. When I saw the headline I thought it might be a personalized medicine model that predicted side effects of different hormonal treatments using whatever omics. That would be a really impactful area to do some data science. There’s probably a lot of low hanging fruit, and there’s really no good resources as far as I can tell to help women choose which contraceptives will negatively impact them the least.
Yes, the laptop always had an SSD and I know about the difference an SSD can make in terms of overall performance.

However, the same comparison holds. I have an older backup PC in the basement with a hard drive, and it still takes just a few minutes to update in the background on Linux. Windows on that machine was simply unusable.
Cars aren't built from iron ore in Detroit either. They're basically assembling parts put together in various countries around the world.
I am curious how much lag Toronto has on Vancouver. Not quite the same problems, but very similar. TO seems to be about 1.5 years behind Vancouver markets
> While it does introduce the dilemma of reducing spending on the elderly

We live in a Democracy, and the elderly have the most free time and seem to be the biggest population right now (Baby Boomers). As such, the elderly are always going to be the most powerful voting block (doubly so now that Boomers, the biggest generation by population, is hitting retirement age).

Good luck "reducing spending on the elderly" in the coming years. Its politically infeasible on population dynamics alone.

When the "lack of children" issue starts to hit 40 years from now, Millennial are going to be retiring. Millennials are the 2nd largest population after the Boomers. So the same issue will hit us again in the long term.
Thanks for the additional response. I agree that there are fundamental technical questions that are very difficult.

As an aside, I'm actually well versed in the difference between quantum annealing and Turing like computation as I got my PhD in an ultra cold atomic physics lab.
I believe you'll find that Ford at least is taking autonomous driving quite seriously. While Google & Tesla make good headlines, the investment in these fields is deeper & broader than you might think. For example, the #1 & #2 companies with the most advanced self-driving capabilities don't even make cars (o;

And those that do make cars rely on a single graphics card manufacturer (as far as I'm aware)
I first learned about Haxe through Lucas Pope’s dev log for “Papers, Please”. Sounded interesting and fun, though Pope (who developed PP on a Mac) said he also had written custom tooling for his work — maybe that situation had changed since 2014: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/209905/Road_to_the_IGF_L...

For his new game, Return of the Obra Dinn, he went with Unity because of its 3D capability:

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0

> I'm gonna use Unity for this one. I fell in love with Haxe/OpenFL on my last project but unfortunately the 3D situation is not that great there yet. Also, it's time to finally see why 90% of the indie scene is using Unity. I have a good amount of experience with 3D games and the few days I've played around with Unity so far have been pretty productive. The animated title screen scene up there (with post-processing shaders and all) was created in one day. I now have unrealistically high hopes.
I'm not sure that this is such a bad thing, given that more and more people are working non-physical jobs and can continue to do so as they get older. Personally, I have no problem with anyone that worked physical labor their whole life retiring earlier with benefits while I continue to work. I like my work, and it's been a pretty easy life, comparatively.
Yes, but it was the cheapest iPhone. That was my point. There are some people who are iPhone people, but cost conscious.
I thought it was all the diff they had to do to cater for all the hot fixes, or combinations of previous updates that the user may or may not have applied.
I would have had more children if childcare was more heavily subsidized. Make it a tax deduction up to a fraction of the amount you pay in taxes to keep it from incentivizing those without financial means to have children.
> MeowHash is also a bad cryptographic hash.

MeowHash is not cryptographic at all.

> Is MeowHash faster than MD5 or not?

Meowhash is advertised as 16 bytes per cycle. MD5 is around 5 cycles per byte[0] or 0.2 bytes per cycle.

Pre-existing fast non-cryptographic hashes apparently top out around 5.5 bytes per cycle (CityHashCRC256).

[0] https://keccak.team/sw_performance.html
I actually quite like Google Keep. Curious why you view it as so bad?
Speculation tax hasn't even been implemented yet. We're seeing a 20% drop due a basket of measures such as CoV empty homes tax, airbnb regulations, provincial increased school tax on homes over $5M and a fear of the upcoming speculation tax.
I'm confused, so just to clarify:
You're saying that Windows on a virtual machine updates faster than Windows on bare metal? (I'd believe it, mind; reminds me of how some programs perform better on wine)
The cafe chain is a privately held company. I'm not sure it's public information that they earn some of their income from owning & leasing nearby properties to completely unrelated retailers. I just happened to talk to someone who told me about it.

But my general point was less about this specific chain, and the idea that your profits may come from a part of the business that you're not known for. You then use that money to subsidize the other parts of the business. A bit like how Sony Corporation's profits come from life insurance & medical insurance, while their electronics division makes a loss.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-bre...
I hear that on occasion an exasperated lawyer has resorted to citing Arkell v. Pressdram in open court.
It's a tough switch both ways. The ideal experience IMHO is starting at a small company with prototyping and fast delivery that then transitions to a more established business and makes you clean up all your messes.
It's not just a struggle for control - it's a struggle for survival. The auto industry has reached one of it's rare inflection points with the arrival of pure EVs. They will have to offer a model that people will buy, or they'll lose the company.

Previously, this happened to the US tire makers in the post-1973 oil-crisis years. They'd been happy producing bias-ply tires, when suddenly everyone wanted radials because they got better mileage and lasted 2-3 times as long. Goodyear was the only one to make the switch, and they're still in control of their business. All the others - Firestone, General, etc. did not, and ended up getting sold to someone else.

https://www.alixpartners.com/media-center/press-releases/pil...

The car makers realize this, and will spend whatever it takes, regardless of the return on capital, to stay alive.
Thalmic Labs ending sale of Myo armbands
Exactly. Talkting to a doctor instead would at least get you a professional’s opinion.
I'm not sure I understand. How would the state calculate a child's future income tax revenue?
They aren’t good at talking about it. Nobody has any idea what the hell Jim Hackett is doing at Ford for example. GM is much better but they haven’t been able to position themselves as leaders yet.