skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was surprised this article doesn't mention DrawIt [1], Bohemian Coding's first (?) drawing app designed for UI elements and icons, which would seem rather familiar to any Sketch user today. It combined vector and pixel graphics, and allowed you to compose any number of effects like blurs, borders, shadows, bevels etc in a non-destructive stack.

Sketch was launched a few years later [2], and the way I remember it, it first focused more on vector art illustration on an infinite canvas. It was only later that DrawIt was retired while Sketch took over a lot of the UI/icon tools.

I always felt like the Sketch we have today is much more like the first version of DrawIt than the first version of Sketch.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090609142331/http://www.bohemi...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemi...
- they never fail and liquidate assets in a hurry
You're suffering from a very common misunderstanding about management: that their priorities should match yours. Obviously, I don't have enough detail about the particular situation but, as described, it doesn't seem that there is any particularly pressing reason for them to give priority to your angst.

The solution follows from the first sentence above. You need their priorities to match yours. Now, it's possible this may happen by accident but that's not particularly reliable. By far the best way is to actively help them come to the Promised Land.

So, how do you do that? You put together a proposal that solves your problems and you demonstrate that it solves theirs. Whatever they may be: cost, time to market, uptime etc. And then you sell it to them.

If you don't know what floats their boat, find out. If you don't know why solving your problems benefits them then why would you expect them to? And you need a proposal that's actually achievable.

Do that and you stand a reasonable chance of making progress. Or at least you'll be clear about why you won't.

At this point, most technical folk decide that it's too much like hard work and don't bother. After all, complaining about stuff can be quite cathartic. But if you genuinely want it fixed then taking responsibility is a good start.
It’s kind of fascinating and depressing how culture around this has changed. The Brooklyn bridge was so overbuilt due to safety concerns that despite being constructed with bolts that turned out to be far weaker than the ones specced (due to an unethical supplier), it’s still much stronger than it needs to be, and capable of surviving modern traffic (and at one time, subway trains) that’s much more demanding than the horse and foot traffic it was built for despite occasional decades of neglected maintenance.

If modern structures are designed to within an inch of their tolerances, how are they going to handle the way we totally fail to maintain our infrastructure? How are they even going to handle normal wear and tear or changes in traffic patterns (like the way the past few decades have seen a shift in dominant personal vehicle types from sedans to far heavier SUVs)?

If we want our infrastructure to last a couple hundred years without being replaced - instead of a decade or two - shouldn’t we be overbuilding instead of underbuilding? Isn’t putting ourselves in a position to have to replace rather than maintain large expensive structures penny-wise/pound-foolish?
And a G+ instant archiving button will be their 'killer' feature in a couple of months. KA-CHING!!

Yes, it will even conveniently estimate the exact plan you'll need to purchase in order to store all of your posts, collections, and important communities.
I think everyone here assumes that Capita actually tried to use the 113 million and so they are confused as to why the website is so poor. It’s much more likely that about 10 million was spent on the website and the balance lined the pockets of various people in government and at Capita.
And then Adobe released XD. I give Sketch about 3 more years before it becomes completely irrelevant.
One of the big problems with JavaScript is that some developers don't know it very well (me included) but have to get some feature working, so import multiple frameworks/libraries to get their job done, most of which is not needed.
> I want to be able to decide if my computer updates... It's not even that big of an ask.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...

As for the opening of you windows after a restart/shutdown that too is a Registry or Group Policy change you can make to adjust its behaviour (They may have promoted the setting to somewhere in the settings app since I changed the behaviour myself)

Basically if you don't want it to reopen your applications / windows when you next log in you make a small change to the shutdown command that executed when you shutdown in your preferred method (If you shutdown / restart with a certain flag windows won't do this).

EDIT: A quick google tells me they have indeed promoted such behaviour to the Settings App.

To change this setting, head to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in Options. Scroll down to the Privacy section and set the “Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device and reopen my apps after an update or restart” option to “Off.”

AND

launch File Explorer, click the “View” tab on the Ribbon and click the “Options” button. On the View tab, scroll down and locate the “Restore previous folder windows at logon” option. Ensure it’s unchecked or Windows will reopen any folder windows when you sign into your PC.
Imagine you need to create a website with every minor technical details perfectly matches the client's requirement. The client has no technical knowledge at all but he insist to be in charge on everything.
Inkscape is likely what you're looking for.
Price anchoring. I do this with my services.
The £113m was not for a website.

It was for a recruitment contract in totality for a decade (total £622m) including all efforts to recruit for the UK army, including everything that involves... of which a small part was the website but it was supposed to be integrated into everything and included running the old legacy system in parallel for a long while..

The details are in the report https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Investigat...

But the headline is not the story.
I wonder if the article is omitting information about the requirements.

I mean, if the website is actually a portal that on top of the UI has some automation. Eg, once an application is submitted, it runs some sort of background check to asses whether the candidate meets requirement. Think about listing previous disputes with the law, problems with authorities, mental health problems, ties with extremists/other governments, ... .

I can imagine the nightmare it would be to integrate with these N systems that are probably ancient, poorly maintained, and the people knowing how to handle them are extremely scarce.

That would justify the price, IMHO.
Inkscape: https://inkscape.org
My first introduction to this concept was through the wonderful https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061204/ (The Wrong Box). Highly recommended.
You Can Do It in SQL, Stop Writing Extra Code for That
> Why not set a fixed price; with reductions for overruns.

Because then the only companies willing to take on the project would be those that have no idea what they're doing (and will burn the money with nothing usable to show for it), and those who will insist on detailed requirements beforehand that cannot change. And the latter is not something the government is able to provide.
The Technical Writing Process
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeees.
With Google -- and especially considering recent history -- I be worrying about when this product is going to be end-of-lifed.
GTK+3 fits well only into GNOME. If you want to make an app that works and behaves well under other DEs, Windows or macOS, then even GTK+2 would be a better choice. Basic stuff works, but as soon as you want to use something more platform specific, like notifications, event sounds, systray, platform native decorations etc. then GTK+3 is going to give you a hard time.
Wondershare Recoverit 7.2.1.3 Full Registration Code with Crack
I would be interested to hear the counterarguments to this.
I'm curious of the legitimacy of this story, given one of the comments at the bottom:

> Don’t believe the results. I’m retired FDA and investigated this company since its inception. 23and me swabs go to labcorp in NC. They aren’t a lab. They take the results and issue what is tantamount to a horoscope based on your demographic information. Save your $100 or whatever they are charging now.
There are two levels where ultimately tech wins:
1: end to end cryptography is easier to make than break
When what you're describing happens and it's banned, there's a level two technical solution:
2: put the software onto your machine in such a way that it's not possible to know that the software is on the machine without entering a specific code. Basically an at-rest encrypted volume, which looks like unwritten blocks. I'm not a crypto guy but that seems in principle impossible to detect or ban in the long run.
If you set a fixed price you might get nothing. Half finished bridges and railways, that kind of thing.

This is of course why you end up paying 113M for something that should cost a tiny dragon of that. You're held to ransom by the contractor.

The thing to do might have been to recruit (!) some in house devs.
I like to go one step further and use a first pass to convert bytecodes to a list of labels. Use a pointer in this list as the program counter. Then the dispatch becomes as simple as:

goto *pc++;

Here's an example of the technique for a Brainfuck VM implemented in the Ethereum VM assembly. (a recent competition entry of mine):

https://g.solidity.cc/submissions/wicketh.eth/3bb28842856230...

This technique also makes it easy to do some peephole optimizations and combine multiple bytecodes into a single label. The above example also does a lot of that.

Brainfuck is actually a great language to built a VM for. You have a simple interpreter up in no time, but you can go really far in optimizing it. LC3 looks comparatively messy (more state, more instructions, etc), but more representative of real CPUs.
Actually it's available in Romania too, I noticed that today, that list is outdated.
I'm not an expert on this, so perhaps you could tell me if a family history of cousin marriage increases the likelihood of the recessive trait being passed by both parents. I mean, if for the last 10 generations a family has been marrying cousins to each other and introducing little variation from people outside the family, the odds are increased, right? I'd imagine cultures with a history of cousin marriage, such as the Pakistani community in the UK, are much more prone to this type of problem than when cousins marry, but none of their forbears married a cousin.
Nancy Lynch – Distributed Systems Pioneer
The whole contract was actually £1.36bn over 10 years (NAO report, p.2), and the £113m covered the new online recruitment system (including the costs of running the old system longer than expected) and was triple the budget (p.6).
Why Staying Organised as a Designer Is Essential
EDIT: The HN title changed so I don't know if this comment is relevant anymore.

That sounds like saying "living is the leading cause of death".

I mean, I don't particularly like JS, but it seems like we decided long ago that plain documents and links won't cut it. Everything, apparently, needs to be a rich web application with huge images and a gazillion of ads.

Why is that Javascript's fault?
Adobe is a powerful company and XD is gaining mind share pretty quickly and it is being heavily invested in. Thus it is a very serious threat to Sketch. At best case for Sketch it splits the market with Sketch in a few years.

It is hard to predict the future here. How nimble is Sketch? How nimble is Adobe?
actually it was, the whole recruitment contract was for £495m, of which £113 went on the website

from the NAO summary:

> The Army initially expected to launch the new online system in July 2013.
As we reported in 2014, the Department failed to meet its contractual obligations to provide the IT infrastructure to host Capita’s recruitment software. In January 2014, the Army passed responsibility for developing the whole system to Capita. After a series of delays, Capita launched the system in November 2017. The Army spent £113 million developing the new system and running the legacy system longer than expected. This was triple the original budget. Capita funded development of the new system and the costs of running the legacy systems from July 2015

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Investigat...
I don't understand why JavaScript is so ubiquitous now. There seem to be very few cases where it is actually necessary and useful (e.g. a calculator form that does computations client side that would otherwise overwhelm the server).

I am constantly surprised at the number of sites that should be totally static (e.g. a local restaurant's menu page) that display nothing at all when I visit with JavaScript disabled.

Can someone who actually makes websites explain why this has happened? Is this about varying screen resolutions and aspect ratios in the era of phones and tablets? Can't you just use CSS instead?
How PayPal, Facebook Could Create a ‘Match Made in Heaven’
While I do acknowledge that increase in generic third-party things like ads and trackers definitely plays a certain role here isn't the study is kind of moot unless sites with similar feature sets are compared.
I would say Inkscape and it's about as complicated.

I'm still looking for a simpler vector graphics application.
add to that a commercial model that thrives on confusion, and a race to the bottom in terms of cost and see where you end up!
Can’t you map those by seeing where air is still flowing in? Release some dust and map its flow. Or better yet just cover the surface with foam.
Adobe XD is being smartly managed by being multiplatform, and subsidized to gain marketshare.
Your logic is sound, but is Google's? We all thought that a product based on top of their already-necessary spidering of substantial portions of the web -- Reader -- was also unlikely to go away, and look what happened.

I think that Google have passed Peak Innovation, and now all they can see is stuff other companies are doing and thrashing about going, "We ought to be doing that, too." Check in with MS to ask how well that works.
But is that risk not increased when the family has practiced cousin marriage for many generations?
I have never seen Figma used, but always Sketch, Invision and Adobe XD. Does Figma have marketshare?
You can launch xfce-terminal in drop-down mode..
O(c^n) is what makes websites slow. Piling libraries, frameworks, trackers, and other third party services on-top of each other, that each has thousands of dependencies.
Google Mail feels like it's transmitting over a 57.6k modem these days. If developers at Google can't make fast JavaScript front ends, what are the odds that an average front end developer can?
But smaller companies also want to save money and think RN is good enough.

I actually learned RN, developed two apps in it, and kinda hate it, but like the idea of delivering the same app on both platforms, of course. Which I didn't do yet, because we don't have Macs at my work (previous work, got fired friday).
How to Make Your App Rank High on Google Play Store
Page reflow is nothing compared to <canvas>es flying on top of the <video> thanks to some overengineered JS code.
I'm a former Capita employee.

Internally, by the time your idea has been discussed across the thirteen departments involved with implementing it and it's been OK'd by a committee, its pros and cons weighed up between a pile of alternative vendors and the delay of requisitioning some virtual machines for it to run on, you've already solved it, thrown something live on AWS (or the server in the corner of your IT dept's cupboard) and moved on with your project. It's just slow and painful to the point where internally people avoid process.

Externally, they can't. They'll have used some massive heavyweight CMS to write plugins to achieve what a small team of decent Django/Rails devs could have written from scratch in a month.
It tends to be things like trackers that report back what browser versions, supported plugins, cookies for directed adverts.
It's not legally incest, but it's not a good idea.
The thing is, though, if the world becomes as much of a dystopia where the people who have their data on file at 23andme causes some sort of major havoc in their lives, why do you think it will stop there?

Either the world will turn into a dystopia or it won't. If it does, not giving out your DNA sequencing information is, in all likelihood, not going to allow you to avoid getting caught up in it.
To be fair, Google for years have been perfect examples of developers that can't optimize to save their life. Virtually every other site is faster than any of their sites.
Fixed:
Ad-tracking libraries is the main cause for making websites slow
It is entirely possible to build rich web apps with very small size. As shown in the article, the main source of bloat are 3rd party scripts: ads, tracking, metrics, retargeting, security...
It may not be functionally necessary from the user's perspective, but much of this JavaScript is included because of the business model of the publisher. It has a function, even though it's not a function that's visible to the user.
Nice photos. They represent personal view of the photographer, as every photo does in the end. One thing can be captured in many ways, showing different points of view or emotions. Enjoy one point of view from one specific place, one photo at a time.
Google One, and Google Drive.. why not just merge the products and call it OneDrive?
"This sounds like a great way to draw attention to yourself. Besides, I don't want to live in the woods, I want to live in society without my privacy being violated constantly by advertisers, other companies and government. Because everybody has a right to their thoughts staying their own. "

Yeah, it just means you won't have to walk by the doorbells. I wasn't really serious about it. And between cheap drones, IR cameras, etc. if somebody wants to find you, they will.

At this point I think your only real hope is finding a place that aligns with your values, moving there, and working to keep it good. Effecting real change is 99% luck and places heading towards dystopia have a lot of wealthy forces arrayed against you.
Hah, GOne.

In the near future, 2 people are on GChat, I mean Hangouts, I mean Duo, I mean Allo, I mean FB Messenger. And one of them is one of those people that can't use the shift key:

"Where did you put the pictures from our trip?"

"oh, gone"

"What do you mean they're gone?!!!!?"
Well you get a half finished bridge and your money back, or as much money as the company has assets and then you have one less company trying to rip us off. Probably, you need a clause on C-suite assets being secured against the project.

"But no one will do that" I expect is the response. Must be some honest companies prepared to do a job for 100 times the cost?
A wild guess is that these days the developers tend to specialise along the front/back end line. So a user-facing Web interface of any kind is usually assigned to front-end developers, which is now mostly synonymous with "Javascript developer", or even more specifically "React/Angular/etc developer" (just like on the back end side we commonly have Django/RoR/Magento/etc developers").

I used to be a full-stack developers, trying to balance my apps/pages just right between the server and browser side. But lately it's much easier to just focus on building APIs and let the front-end devs deal with all the interaction, forms and other user-facing stuff.
> The way the user has no control over certain Microsoft processes unless they have been lucky enough to be allowed to pay for a Group Policy Editor license should also be criminal.

regedit.exe All the tweaks I make to friend's & family's machines can be done in either the registry or in GPE, Its just GPE is a bit more user friendly than regedit but when I've come across a home licensed machine I can still make all the needed tweaks in the registry.

> The way they reset settings after forced upgrades should be criminal.

They have stopped the resetting of privacy settings after updates. I only notice major resets with large insider build updates (But those updates are more "refresh installs" then "Update installs" so I will let them off on that one) apart from one thing...

Audio. Seems like they are transitioning audio config from control panel to Settings and every now and then they reset my preferred audio settings But I do have a pretty weird audio set up.
It's 6MB (closer to 7 if you round it).

https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/1073538289582436352
> I am constantly surprised at the number of sites that should be totally static (e.g. a local restaurant's menu page) that display nothing at all when I visit with JavaScript disabled.

I am constantly surprised at the number of people that explicitly disable JavaScript to make their lives difficult in 2018.

My point is, JavaScript makes it easy to build nice websites at scale. Plenty of CMS platforms (like Wix.com) use JavaScript by default.

If 99.9999999% of people are fine with JavaScript, then why should a website cater to your need by providing a version specific to people who disable JavaScript?
It's not the fault of JavaScript the language, but JavaScript as the name we give to the parts of a web page that are not HTML and not CSS.

And it's not really "living is the leading cause of death"; most of that JavaScript is superfluous garbage - ad scripts, trackers, bloated frameworks. You don't need this for a page to serve a socially useful purpose. You just need someone in your company with enough clout, who's willing to say, "out of respect for our users and for engineering as a practice, we will not partake in the latest iteration of the insanity that is the modern web".
You nailed it. Everything doesn't need to be a rich internet application. One important aspect of this trend is that it based on decisions made by a few for their specific use cases and then copied, without much analytical decision making, by the majority. The assumption that Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Apple know better in all categories tech contributed to widespread adoption of SPA's.
Hell even the Windows client is shit compared to Dropbox. I think it is because they want everyone to keep everything in the cloud - not to use it as synced backup for stuff that really lives on your desktop (which is of course what everyone actually wants).
Also, JS is cached. First time will be slow, others, not so much

The mainstream libraries are fast and optimizable (Angular/React/Vue/etc). Other, not so much.
Prime example of crony capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
did you just compare a bundle size with the modem bandwidth?
Same here - Illustrator absorbed a lot of Fireworks features and offers decent optimised JPG/PNG/SVG exports for web, but over the last few years it's become excruciatingly slow while not really adding any new functionality.

Even with a 24 thread CPU and 1080Ti it drops frames constantly, even when the document contains just a single circle. It regularly hangs for a second or two when zooming or adding new shapes or text to the document. After Effects & Premiere are even slower for video editing and are the cause of much swearing in our office.

If Sketch and Figma can smoothly display 100+ populated screens with plenty of functionality then more power to them, we're definitely due competition in the graphics & video market.
WP Gutenberg puts a document.write onto your website
The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2016 with Craig Federighi and Phil Schiller