skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why is consumer tech not as hot in 2018/2019
No big consumer tech companies have launched in the past, or become a unicorn in past one year.
Template literals also have the benefit of being able to embed variables without concating the string, ie: `My name is ${name}.`
Financially, Apple continues to be a well-managed company. It is generating returns for shareholders in spite of operational missteps.

What "operational missteps"?
Why Most People Fail in Internet Marketing
In a world where track points were widely accepted, you could go without the big track pad, and put the keyboard to the edge of the laptop, and not have to reach over a big wrist rest. Alternatively, you could make some much smaller laptops, with regularly sized keyboards (and probably overly wide monitors)
CppCon, BoostCon, MeetingCpp and others all archive their material on YouTube. I’ve spent countless nights falling asleep on the couch listening to fascinating C++ talks :)
Wind is better than Solar when considering dynamic generation problems, also in terms of output per dollar Wind is gives better return in Texas than Solar. Everything said and done, there are not many places where Solar and Wind can reliably replace conventional sources of power.
My closest mall still has its Sears and JC Penney but we'll see for how long. Macy's is its most successful anchor store. The complex has already lost Toys R' Us. There's a successful local grocery chain and a Home Depot that are always busy in the same shopping center; the mall itself has stores but very little traffic.
I was surprised to see you didn’t mention the ubiquitous cell phone repair kiosks in every mall. I co-own a chain of cell phone repair stores, and although we don’t have any mall locations, the people in our industry who do have mall locations generally do well with them.

These small services type of businesses are able to pay larger rent and are more stable clients than the “boxes of clothes or accessories from China” types of stores. And since phone repair is an in-person service, it’s less likely to be hurt by online retailers.

I believe more malls will move toward service businesses. One here in Austin allowed a giant trampoline park in what used to be a flagship store. The store is packed with kids and parents.

I’m very interested in this area and how it will continue to play out!
I grew up going to this mall. I think the premise of this article is a bit misleading.

Sure, some malls are not doing well, some will go out of business, and some will evolve. For example, the nearby Bedford mall lost tenants, turned into a ghost mall, and was demolished a few years ago. But in its place, they built a Whole Foods. And right down the road, a large outdoor mall with outlet stores opened and is thriving with over 100 stores filled with upscale national retailers.

Lots of large chains and even anchors have died. Circuit City, CompUSA, Filene's, KB Toys, Ames, and so on. Amazon didn't kill these companies. These stores were killed by poor management (For example Best Buy is thriving in the age of Amazon). Tech giants would do well to learn from big box retail failures because having a website does not make one immune to poor management or a failure to innovate.
Why do you? Why do I? 'cause we don't have a highly effective solution yet; I'm happy to see a clearer description of the problem.
Are you open to Interns , Juniors ?
Would you be open to work with such a profile REMOTELY ?
>20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone.

If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, development patterns will tend to build up around it.
The point is that it's not nimbyism that's primarily driving housing costs here. Because first off rebuilding costs which isn't effected by nimbyism. Because hey this place I'm living in burns down the neighbors can't prevent or slow down rebuilding. And no one's preventing developers from building multifamily in SOMA. And they are. In both cases you can't pencil in affordable housing due to $500-1000 sqft building costs.

A point why the city allows developers to building large multifamily SOMA and not in the Sunset is because transportation.

The reason I called out the argument as propaganda is because it has everything to do with the axe developers have to grind. And nothing to do with affordable housing. Developers hate having to work the process to get permits because that doesn't add to their bottom line.

My response to your point about Detroit and other cities wanting some of the tech bro action is that they aren't getting the love because the river of money is only being pointed towards the cities that the elites want to live in. SF, LA, New York, etc. The solution is to force them to redirect a bunch of that development money to other cities.
Driverless cars are part of a system that includes GPS, mapping, OTA firmware updates and updates about traffic conditions, regulations, weather, etc.

Errors or malicious attacks upstream could lead to disruptive or even dangerous behavior by a lot of cars at the same time.
Out of curiosity, how are you handling embedded programming with makefiles in CLion? Do have cmake run make, use compilation databases, or something else?

I'd like to try CLion with a hobby project and some esp32 modules, but there doesn't seem to be a standard, best practices way to do that.
With old money, reversibility is handled by return policies, merchant account charge-backs, liens, and civil lawsuits.

If you hand a bearer instrument like a bank note to someone, that transaction is technically irreversible. They put it in their pocket, and you can't recover it without a physical assault. You have to trust them to provide the goods or services that you just paid for. Or you have to trust the justice system that it will allow you to (eventually) recover your payment if the other party reneged. These remedies are often not available with cryptocurrency. You may be unaware of the counterparty's physical location or true identity, and even if you did, they may be in a different legal jurisdiction altogether. You can't round up a posse to go get the money back.

If you pay with a finance system account, you can dispute the charge with the payments processor, and your payment may be reversed by them, even after the cash balances have already been altered, by withholding payment from a future transaction through that processor. Criteria for reversal may vary between processors. If consumers trust the reversal policy of the processor, the merchants get more money, because consumers don't have to trust them or the formal justice system. They can get refunded now, and let the processor and the merchant argue over the details. This remedy is available to cryptocurrencies. While individual transactions are irreversible, it is possible to redirect future transactions through a trusted intermediary or a smart contract.

Basically, everyone wants an escrow mechanism of some sort built in to the system, so that if a customer doesn't get the goods or services, the merchant doesn't get their money; and if a merchant doesn't get paid, the customer doesn't get goods or services. As long as the transactions are irreversible, someone can get ripped off, and they have to go out-of-band for a remedy. As long as transactions are trivially reversible, someone can get ripped off, and they have to go out-of-band for a remedy.

Conveyance of money and delivery of goods or services are each half-trades. We don't like those half-trades. They're too much like gifts, in that there is too little ability to enforce reciprocity without a preexisting social link. If you conduct business in half-trades, you still have to trust, and people can still get ripped off. So far, cryptocurrencies only technologically validate the money-conveyance half-trade. What it needs is a way to validate the other half-trade, for goods or services, and bundle them both into an atomic whole-trade that either reverses or becomes permanent as a single unit.

Trade chains would be nice, too, but atomic transactions are what people need to trust the system instead of trusting each other.
Man, we really have come full circle.
I'm surprised that Iberia considered this whole Brexit situation back in 2011. Smart move, but the EU could still just ruin the plan...
I suspect at least partially due to the sunk cost fallacy.
Because 52% of people voted for it, and apparently any future votes on the subject would be "undemocratic".
Ocaml is, imo, a pretty and not utterly impractical language as well.
> Hugely easier than trying to image from the side at closest approach

True that. AFAIK the closest-approach images have not yet been downloaded.
Years back, most public services in the UK provided this exact thing. Junior nurses, service personnel, police constables and the like all lived in what was effectively a small dormitory, akin to university halls but much cheaper. It worked well and allowed them to save money to buy their own properties, while being relatively cost effective. It also made becoming a public worker a reasonably desirable profession; providing them essentially free housing, a decent pension, and a good sense of community that comes from living with colleagues and friends.

As funding was cut to public services over the years, the housing was sold off to private buyers and replaced with grant schemes. Unfortunately the grants have not increased at the rate of rent and housing, leaving many junior public workers worse off. It is in my opinion potentially contributing to a public worker shortage at the very least [1].

The armed forces kept much of their housing due to their bigger budget, but less group housing has meant worse economies of scale, and many of these buildings have become horribly dilapidated, lacking basic amenities [2].

[1] https://fullfact.org/health/are-we-short-40000-nurses/

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43135967
Isn't the main problem the same one that beset PC manufacturers as the computers got fast enough that no one needed to upgrade anymore? Couple that with Apple making phones that cost >$1000 and it seems like the natural end this was headed to. My iPhone SE does every single thing I need a phone to do and it costed about $99.
> even what’s basically a convienence store

I find it funny that that's the most extreme in your list. Why wouldn't there be a convenience store where people go to shop?!
Every single bit of government, with different parts of the press. No, Trump's not in bed with NPR... but it's hard to argue he's not closely involved with Fox personalities. Hannity showed up at Trump rallies and often chats to Trump via phone.

Every Congress member will have a variety of sympathetic press sources that match their politics. Every department has a press corps that depends pretty heavily on access to do their jobs. etc. etc.
No, that's not an obvious or safe assumption at all, and in fact I believe this is from the study that inspired the article linked in the root comment:

> The lack of objective confirmation of actual amount of alcohol consumed, lack of information concerning alcohol intake before baseline, and inclusion of ex-drinkers with never drinkers in the non-drinker category, as well as lack of assessment of drinking patterns place reservations on the observed findings.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3377489/
For a consideration of some alternative Brexit scenarios I can heartily recommend this discussion:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/11/brexit-m...

I rather like the "surrender to the Republic of Ireland" option - if for no other reason than the effect it would have on the DUP.
I was expecting/hoping for analysis, but it's more like an anniversary press release touting a bunch of success without reference and ignoring anything negative.

> For ten years, the world has known a decentralized source of truth. At all prior times in human history, we relied on centralized third parties to establish trust.

This is your periodic reminder that >51% of the mining is currently controlled by 5 large mining companies based out of China[0]. If you think these companies not entirely beholden to the non-democratic, highly centralized, Chinese government (or that this is a non-issue) then I'd really like to hear that argument.

I must admit I was surprised to see that 20.1% of mining is currently "Unknown", which was not the case last I checked.

[0] https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools
Seems like multiplayer + freemium model is the ultimate "DRM".

I wonder if there are any popular private or reverse engineered League of Legends or Fortnite servers. These are also the most profitable games in the world.

I have to wonder if a game like World of Warcraft, if it were released in 2019, would even consider a monthly subscription given what it has to compete against these days. I would assume private servers for WoW made sense because people wanted to dodge $15/mo.
You got your stories wrong, the new blood is ruining Portland and Seattle, where they hate outsiders (as long as they carefully avoid having a racial component to this complaint).
As someone who has worked for a startup in this space, I understand the sentiment of this article. Shopping malls desire anchor stores to be the driving force of footfall traffic. Those stores are very keen on knowing the spending power of where they operate which the malls use survey data to collect that information. When the profile of stores change in the mall, it changes the spending power of people visiting. That in turn can cause those anchor stores to relocate elsewhere.

Retail is suffering right now. High street brands in the UK are collapsing with HMV in just the past week. Mike Ashley (Sports Direct CEO) has called to tax online retailers to make it a level playing field for the high street[1]. I personally disagree because I honestly don't think the retail experience is helping themselves to innovate and train staff correctly (at least in the UK). When visiting shops becomes a frustrating experience for the consumer, then no wonder people turn to shopping online for convenience.

I think the article is saying that if things continue on their trend, it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/03/mike-ashley-...
2018's most popular Wikipedia articles
The text in the hex data seen in the article (part of the Bitcoin genesis block) was the headline of The Times to prove the block wasn't generated prior to the newspaper's date.

Bitmex (one of the largest exchanges at the moment) put an ad on the frontpage of the newspaper's issue exactly 10 years later as a tribute: https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/108059040132345036...

EDIT: It seems there is a full page ad that goes with the front page one: https://imgur.com/sVBZVfN
I know JS has had a rough last few years and we have sayings like framework du jour, etc... but... haven't things actually started slowing down?
If this article resonates with you, here are some games I'd recommend you try. They are all indie puzzle games, they can all be easily picked up and put down in a moment, and they're all fairly cross platform.

- Monument Valley

- A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build

- Mini Metro

- Braid

- The Witness

- Snakebird

- Gunpoint
The creatives, not the technologists, are still the future for the ad industry
The mobile phone market was already becoming the largest electronics market in the world before Apple entered it. It made perfect sense to focus on that.

Eleven years later, there is still not a single electronic item that is larger than the smart phone market.

PC's aren't making a comeback, TV's are low margin and bulky, etc.
I'm in a similar boat (a year or two further down the road). I haven't got a new big game in years. In response to the GPU shortage a year ago, I've started playing through my Steam backlog. It's almost entirely games from the Humble Bundles over the years, mostly older games and indies over the past 15 years that don't have said business models.

Side note: I've recently played Battlefront 2. The old one.
The far away beacons make the math easier. Also those beacons are awfully bright.
ICAO Air law rules date from 1949. Airlines are super aware of these treaties/rules whenever ownership changes hands. It's not like they thought about brexit as a particular scenario, it's more like, lets make sure the airline we're buying is actually embedded legally before stumping up the cash for it.
Hey HN,

Check out HN.Academy and let me know what you think. It's the result of mining the HN archives for references to online courses and then ranking them and displaying all references in one place.

Ranking currently takes into account HN stories (points) and comments (sentiment, karma, estimated points).

I had started with a much broader set of course providers, but Coursera ended up swamping the rankings of pretty much all the other providers. edX is also in the rankings with a few courses. I plan to add more providers but as of now none of them will impact the top rankings.

If you were looking to start a new learning endeavor in the new year... here ya go.

Best,
Yaj
I believe I read somewhere that this is largely a myth—that some specific 555 numbers are kept empty for fictional use, but that some of them are legitimate.

Please feel free to fact check me, though.
I'm doing well enough with that same laptop and my budget, so save the spending advice for someone who needs it. This is a pointless diversion with so little context.
6 apps that will improve your work-life balance
It's been 143 years, and finally the fad of... phones is behind us.
Seems like they have followed the rules, if not the spirit of them, since well before Brexit became a thing. Given that even the popular airports in the UK are owned, in large part, by a variety of non-EU interests I’m not sure how anyone can really argue the point from a legal perspective.

Edit: typo
> He added: "Growth has been fuelled by the dominance of free content and in-game monetisation, which expands the adoption of games but also removes the cap on spending for those gamers that are really engaged in the experiences.”

I always wonder if these experiences can be priced accordingly

Flagship games have been priced at $60 for 25 years and should be priced higher to reflect a variety of other things, but their primary purchasers dont have the money for more. People really into games dont have money, and children’s parents dont respect the medium to want to pay more. (Fortunately there is the aging demographic of everyone else, who do have money and dont mind preordering)

But with the price of a game being mentally fixed in the collective conscious I wodber what the average price per user is now with the in game transactions factored in
This really is just a fun little weekend project to learn Go.
It's a great point! I'm always skeptical of the "move to experiences" narrative, but it sounds like you're having success there! I think that's definitely one route to go. I'm mostly curious about how Simon and similar companies are viewing this landscape? Are they planning on managing these malls indefinitely? Or do they largely view them as depreciating assets that they'll milk until they are demolished?
Why not? The history of computing is about isolating applications, really. Why do we have Virtual Memory? Because it allows each process to have an independent address space. Why do we have preemptive multitasking? Because it allows each process to behave as though it is the only task running. Why is hardware virtualization so great? Namespacing and containers?

I think Casey Muratori did a good job outlining the case for removing the OS from the equation entirely in "The thirty-Million Line Problem" [0]. He describes a hardware architecture where standardized ABI and hardware virtualization replaces the OS and drivers, allowing each process to behave as if it was the only software on the computer, as it was in the olden days with platforms like the C64. The closest thing to an OS would be a hypervisor, which should be the kind of thing an enterprising young programmer could write in their spare time in a month.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk
Would you be open for remote work ? or at least give it a try ?
I'm not British, but I don't see any evidence that people have re-evaluated it. The political elite, sort of people you see on HN, and press have been screaming about it from the start. The polls haven't really changed a whole lot [0].

As far as I can tell canceling it would just be saying "we don't have to listen to referendums we don't like".

[0] https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/if-a-second-eu-referen...
I dunno about undemocratic, but definitely tainted by the smell of "keep voting until we get the right result", which has its own problems.
Out of curiosity, do you have that same mindset (i.e. a factor of your decision to purchase is whether or not you're willing to buy another one if the first one is unusable) with anything else in your life? Also, Applecare+ is a worthwhile deal if you're that concerned about breaking the phone (and probably even moreso now with the glass-backed phones).
You'd think, but no, that's not actually how it's done. See e.g.:

http://dnc.tamu.edu/drjunkins/yearwise/2000/conference/AIAA_...

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9069467.pdf

for some state-of-the-art research on this topic.
You will only make a few blocks a day depending on how much you stake. It's not too intensive from what I've seen. I think it will work fine even on a slow HDD.

One important thing to note is that the proof of stake Ethereum chain is a different chain than the proof of work Ethereum chain. You won't need the legacy PoW chain to stake.

With PoS you only need data from the last checkpoint to stake. This is only a subset of the entire chain. You also only need the data for the shards you are a validator for which further reduces the data required. The goal is to allow anyone to stake if they want to regardless of hardware in order to increase decentralization.
Unfortunately, I think one of their problems is that iPhones last too long. I'm still very happy with my iPhone 6. The spec updates aren't as tantalizing as they used to be.
I don't see how searches for xkcd being in decline necessarily means that xkcd itself is.
I didn't delve into all the downsides, but I did mention the stress and related depression that could be associated with a false positive. I also noted how there are downsides to mammograms, such as a breast biopsy. We could go a step further and note that some women opt for mastectomies as well, especially for genetic screening (BRCA).

There's plenty to delve into regarding the risks and benefits of screening tests: Here's a good framework for those interested.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279418/
Maybe they're using telecom satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit?
I know that growth is obviously important, and Apple has had bigger quarters, but estimating $84 billion of revenue with a 38% gross margin in a SINGLE quarter is wild.
Actually it isn't. The EU Court of Justice ruled last month that the UK can unilaterally stop the process known as "Article 50" and stay in the Union. (Previously it was unclear whether Britain could stay in without reapplying for membership.)

All it takes is a vote by Parliament and the political will to admit that it was an insanely stupid idea to ask people to vote on a deal that didn't exist yet.

Countries that have previously held referendums on joining the EU have done so after negotiations were 100% completed. Britain should have done the same when leaving: negotiate a complete Brexit deal first, then vote on that.