skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Windows 98 interface was actually not bad. There only issue I had was that to stop the computer you click on Start. :-)
It's likely. Plus, most cars here are likely to be scratched or dented. The state of UP recorded the highest rate of road accidents in the country which also indicates the recklessness of the drivers.[1] I attribute this to a poor bureaucracy, widespread corruption[2], and careless drivers.
My driving test was literally just accelerating and reversing the car once.
Personally, when I park my car somewhere I assume it might be a little scratched when I am back. Perhaps that's what most people do and therefore we are content with not-so-pristine vehicles.

[1]https://www.hindustantimes.com/lucknow/road-accident-deaths-...
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronakdesai/2018/03/07/india-con...
Ok, then what about the universe which is simulating ours then?
If I wrote an article titled:

"Is Scientology real?"

versus

"Is the universe just a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream?"

The first statement is bland while the second statement is more complex as it contains elements of inception and recursion.

You know that some poor fools mind was blown away by the second statement. When someones mind gets blown, they fail to see the "useless" part of it as the mind is too busy being blown away.
The problem of evil was ably taken up by the Christian Philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Here's a short video summary of his thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VOMrozCISA . He has a folksy way of speaking, and is actually quite a good teacher, but keep in mind that Plantinga is a first-rate analytical philosopher, so there's a lot more depth in his books.

So much so that some of his work in modal logic (necessity, possibility, counterfactuals, etc) is quite a good introduction to the subject. (see, for example, The Nature of Necessity: https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Necessity-Clarendon-Library-Ph...)

The problem of evil is an interesting one, in that you can take it two ways. On the one hand you might call it an internal problem to theism. Something like: "the Christian understanding of evil is incompatible with the Christian conception of God", and that's the argument Plantinga is primary addressing (that theism is not incoherent or internally inconsistent on this matter)

But you can also take it as an external problem - that theism doesn't do a good job of explaining the existence of evil. In my mind this is a stronger argument, but what sometimes gets lost in the discussion is that the problem doesn't go away if you discard theism. If evil really does exist what alternative worldview does a better job of explaining it?

That evil is just a social convention created by minds produced by random processes geared towards evolutionary fitness?

Maybe. But doesn't that just explain away the problem by stating evil doesn't really exist? (at least not the kind of evil suggested by Christians?) And if it doesn't really exist, how can you use it as an external argument against theism?
A real Linux distribution for phones and other mobile devices
> adoption failures are mostly networking issues specific to their cloud

Do you have any pointers/write-ups with more information or plans in this direction? I would be interested to learn more.
All of my tech support calls from family are about smartphones (both Android and iOS, but more for iOS, "what do you mean I can't do that?").

Well, and getting the email server switched to something more reliable than Gmail, but that's a business tech support call, technically.
I use tarsnap for off-site backups. It has a reasonable price, even for some GB of data
Csvtk – a cross-platform, efficient and practical CSV/TSV toolkit
There was no notion of a virtual dom in the ie6 era that I can remember. Unless Prototype (the precursor to jquery) used one and I just wasn’t aware of it. I believe the libraries of that time either directly extended the dom or wrapped individual elements, but did not maintain anything resembling virtual doms as we know them now.
1985: Micro Live: WIMP on the Amiga
If you ever read an offer letter they are non binding and most states are at will so I don't think a verbal commitment means anything. However how are you suppose to agree to terms of an agreement you don't know.

Also is this company in the US because I don't think any lawyer would approve of this.
There are services that use machines to do the handwriting part, or you could build / buy one.
Possibly stating the obvious, but you know that you can manipulate the excel object model from ExcelDNA in the same way that you can with VBA (thanks to VSTO!).

Add a reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel, and get a handle on the Excel Application object using ExcelDna.Integration.ExcelDnaUtil.Application.

Alternatively you can use the excellent NetOffice.Excel (instead of Office.Interop.Excel), which will have less functionalities but with better version support.
Forgot the link:

https://tarsnap.com
Facebook Backs an Independent AI Ethics Research Center
> Do yourself a favor and use standard Ubuntu.

Do yourself a favor and use standard Debian. Honestly, I don't know why anyone bothers with Ubuntu anymore. It doesn't really add much over Debian except for it's shitty release cycle.
Not especially relevant, but funny!
> If you ask people what’s the most fondly remembered or impressive OS, computer game, word processor, mobile phone, music player, etc., it often is the first one they really used.

Anecdata: I used Windows for the first 10 years of my computing life, and today I'd rather use any obscure Unix over any Windows. The "Unix philosophy" as an attempt to produce a consistent UX has held up pretty well over 40+ years.
Understanding Debian: The Universal Operating System
Did the same but switched them to a Chromebook. Basically dropped support calls to zero.

Funny story. Sunday morning I get a panic call from them that the computer will NOT power on.

They tell me they are pushing the power button and the screen displays "It is safe to turn off the computer".

For some reason it was not clicking. Actually drive over there as my curiosity was killing me.

Did you guess it?

Turned out they were hitting the power switch on the monitor.

I was speechless. I felt like such an idiot it didn't dawn on me.
I'm fine with the child and dog being considered unequal, but why isn't one a subset of the other?

It could be: cruel to euthanize either

It could be: cruel to let either one suffer an agonizing life

It could be: cruel to euthanize a child, but do whatever you want with the dog

It could be: cruel to let the suffering dog live, but do whatever you want with the child

It could be: do whatever you want with either

It's none of those. Why?

If I can (and must) keep my child alive despite an agonizing and fatal illness, why can't I do the same for a dog? Why do I risk going to prison just for treating a dog like a child? Why am I required to have the dog killed?
SHA256 hashes can be computed faster than line speed.
I never worked with it, but will give it a try for my daily work (y)

Currently I use following setup for myself: LibreOffice + languagetool for spelling
Humorous to think that in the future they'll know what forests were. Or maybe it'll remain a vestigial word for "field of CO2 scrubbers"
I think windows 95/98 interface was great. I don't want ads when I click on the start button. All they needed was to add a search bar and call it a day instead all these ads or apps you don't want.
Akira, the Linux Design Tool
I switched my mother to Linux years ago and it was much better for her than Windows. These days, though, Chromebooks are even better since they are essentially Linux and much more foolproof than a general purpose Linux distro.
Similar situation here -- my mom uses Linux and my dad insists on Windows (to be fair, he has tried Linux here and there). My mom's computer has been trucking for over 10 years and after initial setup, she has rarely had issues. My dad has been through 4 different systems in the same amount of time and each one ends up riddled with malware and nigh unusable before he decides he just needs to upgrade again.

In my dad's case, major barriers to adoption are a) EVER rendering an MS Office document noticeably incorrectly, on either end; b) DRM'd video components like Comcast's Xfinity streaming services; c) a feeling that he doesn't really have control over it and can't just search for any software he wants and be able to use it, or can't Google a concern and find reasonably-basic instructions to get something to happen.

Those are all fairly legitimate concerns, I guess I'm just bothered by the way he treats all of these as direct failures of the OS rather than applying a little more flexibility -- if not to his computing habits in general, at least to his interpretation of the situation.
Turn Your Raspberry Pi to an Amiga
A good sibling to EN is Homo Deus by Harari, who puts humanism in perspective. The short gist of it is that humanism is a great fit for modern times, but may be yet another phase as opposed to an objective moral goalpost.

https://quillette.com/2018/03/18/wizard-prophet-steven-pinke...
I don’t think it’s just personal experience. I had a similar feeling as the OP, but my feeling happened at a very specific time. I upgraded my MacBook from Snow Leopard to either Lion or Mountain Lion (I cant remember which version it was), and overnight I went from having my entire life spelled out on my calendar to basically not being able to use iCal (it might have been renamed by that point as well) at all.

The new version of iCal’s only purpose was to look pretty and offer very basic functionality. The older version might have started looking dated, but I could use keyboard shortcuts and see details about my appointments easily at a glance. The new version didn’t even want me to know details existed.

The same story played out in Mail.app, Address book, iWork, etc.

MS’s new “Modern” apps show that the same influences have driven Windows development in recent times as well.
It can be. Not in my brother’s case, though - he lived with my parents and my mother used to harass him about computer problems daily. Linux helped, but now she has a Chromebook and her computer problems come down to confusion about where and how she is signed in.
Having used Docker Compose/Swarm for last two years, I remember having problems with them twice. One of which was an MTU setting which I didn't really understand why, but overall I was relatively happy with them. Since Kubernetes seems to have won, I decided to learn it but got some disappointments.

The first disappointment is setting up a local development environment. I failed to get minikube running on a Macbook Air 2013 and a Ubuntu Thinkpad. Both have VTx enabled and Docker and VirtualBox running flawlessly. Their online interactive tutorial was good though, enough for the learning purpose.

Production setup is a bigger disappointment. The only easy and reliable ways to have a production grade Kubernetes cluster are to lock yourself into either a big player cloud provider, or an enterprise OS (Redhat/Ubuntu), or introduce a new layer on top of Kubernetes [1]. Locking myself into enterprise Ubuntu/Redhad is expensive, and I'm not comfortable with adding a new, moving, unreliable layer on top of Kubernestes which is built on top of Docker. One thing I like about the Docker movement is that they commoditize infrastructure and reduce lock-ins. I can design my infrastructure so it can utilize an open source based cloud product first and easily move to others or self-host if needed. With Kubernetes, things are going the other way. Even if I never moved out of the big 3 (AWS/Azure/GCloud), the migration process could be painful since their Kubernetes may introduce further lock-ins for logging, monitoring, and so on.

[1]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/pick-right-solution/
"Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent."

Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work.

One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...
Is that even a thing? I’ve never heard that being possible before. I would be willing to pay a premium for guaranteed non-commingled products. But Amazon commingles to make their own internal logistics easier.
Facebook and Google's facial recognition software is so advanced that they have no real use for photos of people explicitly tagged 10 years apart.

Google Photos has been able to track my goddaughter from literally her first photo (when she looked like an alien) to now (5 years later), with about 2 photos per year.

The subtle point here is that people have became so suspicious of these platforms that everything they do is observed with a sharper eye on privacy, speaking of which... I wonder how Portal is doing?
That's all too true. However it's important to remember that when H.264 started to get public traction (this is back in 2005, when Apple started pushing H.264 movie trailers), realtime CPU encoding was deemed impossible at that point in time. It just wasn't realistic back in 2005 to produce H.264 on a CPU, instead hardware encoders were used to accomplish the task.

Fast forward 10 years and basically every single laptop has hardware accelerated H.264 encoding through Intel's QuickSync FFHW and desktops have it through Nvidia. On top of that the software encoder (x264) is so fast that it's possible to do it in realtime on a CPU.

There is a fair chance that VP9 will see the exact same pattern here. Today CPU encoding is unfeasible, as you've noticed. However Intel is releasing VP9 encoding on their QuickSync encoder with newer CPU's and Nvidia will from my guess have it either 1 or 2 GPU generations from now. Same goes for AV1 here.

It's also interesting too think that the age of these aggressive improvements in CPU speed we've had over the past 14 years (from 2005) might come to an end, where efficiency instead comes from specialised hardware, such as fixed function hardware doing encoding on the chips, as NVENC/QuickSync does today. I don't know if realtime AV1 encoding will be feasible on a consumer grade CPU within the next 10 years, but i sure know it's hardware counterpart will be.
both of these need seek functionality
This gets funnier. I just asked the little one whether his comment had been as spontaneous as it had seemed at the time, and got a sigh and eyes rolling for my trouble.

"Dad, it is a joke off the Internet. All the kids in school say that whenever they see a diskette."

Now I feel really old.
The same art style was used on portable consoles with LCD screens, and on line doubled VGA modes with blocky pixels. Even pixel art designed for SD televisions and low quality interconnects might not have been intended to be blurred, e.g. Chrono Trigger includes a pixel art typewriter in the starting room, where the keys are represented by a single-pixel checkerboard pattern that is easily made unrecognizable by blur. Some designers even showed blocky pixels in printed materials, e.g. the cover art and the instruction manual of Super Mario Bros. It's possible that some artists intended their pixel art to be blurred, but it's not universally true.
Indeed, I came across this project while googling the idea! I figured out SSL would be a nice feature to have - surely you wouldn’t want your Star Wars ASCII stream to be tampered with, would you? ;)
Are you really pushing 1TB/mo, though? That would be a full quarter of OP's lifetime of data. And in those cases where you are, could you not afford business class internet for a bit of a premium?
Currency of Trust (Rachel Botsman, Author) – DLD 19
Another factor I think is that we (culturally) have a bias towards certain domains being "smart" material or not. Mathy logic is just one of many things that your mind can analyze.

I have a friend who's a metalworker. He'd never beat me in an algebra test, but he's damn smart when it comes to manipulating the physical world. He also happens to be very thoughtful and insightful about film and photography. But I'm not sure he considers himself "smart", even though he does original and careful analysis in the areas that he cares about.

Another friend is -- as far as I'm concerned -- an absolute genius at understanding people psychologically, their decisions and motivations. I'll never be as smart in my own preferred areas as she is in this. But I don't think that most people would give her a "smart" badge for it.
No accounting for taste, but to me those icons are rather unsightly. From a utilitarian point of view, they might be good, but for art (at the time) I would have looked at NeXT icons.
For our team size kubernetes was overwhelming so we stayed with docker swarm but we were afraid docker might drop swarm in favor of kubernetes but that didnt happen yet.
Yes, and for some folks Linux is always the solution and they are pretty vocal about it.
Only on the website, which almost nobody I know uses except to adjust billing information. Why wouldn't they expose this choice in the app client? Amazon Prime exposes it in the app. YouTube exposes it in the app.

That is clearly a deliberate move by Netflix, because they know it will reduce binging and reduce the metrics they so covet, like total hours watched per user.
Why is open() in fcntl.h and close() in unistd.h? Why does bcopy go src,dst

I don't know about the rest, but open(), close() and bcopy() are not in the C standard library. They are either POSIX or Linux specific. The C standard library functions for files start with f e.g. fopen(), fclose().

On a tangential topic, I don't know of a good reference for exploring what is included in the standard library.

The classic book The C Programming Language covers most, if not all, of the standard library. The whole thing can be found in an appendix. Admittedly reading an appendix isn't normally the best way to learn about something, but the library is so small and the amount not already covered in the text is even smaller so it wouldn't take long to skim. Of course it doesn't cover Unix-specific functions, like the unistd.h header; for that, I recommend Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment.
As with so many other topics in philosophy, the question of "where do we draw the line?" exists separately from "does the line exist?".

Holism amounts to the claim that certain things should be viewed primarily as wholes, rather than as their constituents. It is up to individual thinkers to propose and argue for which things should be viewed this way.
Thanks for the kind words :) I do try hard to "keep the spirit" as much as I can. Like everyone on HN I need to balance that with many other things, but I figured out a few lines of Go + a heroku app wouldn't be too time-consuming :)
It's on top of your other bandwidth usage though. Family of 4 with Netflix/YouTube/Twitch can accumulate quite a bit. Still, using an online service at least for an important subset is a good idea.
From the article:

> There’s no ambiguity about what you’re getting when you buy a particular book, CD, or DVD.

About a year ago I ordered a soundtrack CD from Amazon. It turned out to be a “fake”, it was a CD-R that had a printed label. If you didn’t know it was a CD-R, it looked reasonably convincing, the case was quite good quality. And it did contain the correct music - it was just a pirate copy.
> supernovae are the main source of many of the heavy elements that form the ingredients of life

Neutron star collisions are now suspected to be "the main source of the r-process elements, which are elements heavier than iron, like gold and platinum" [1].

(I also have a quibble with the claim that "any kind of chemical complexity would have been physically impossible" if the strong nuclear force "had been 0.008 or higher," and caused the universe's hydrogen to all fuse into heavier elements. Carbon has no problems bonding with elements other than hydrogen. Moreover, given we have no idea where the constants come from, altering one may not leave the others unchanged--saying no complexity would be possible in this entirely novel universe is a bit rich.)

[1] https://www.space.com/38493-gravitational-waves-neutron-star...
I first tried to switch family to LibreOffice but existing Office documents kept getting corrupted (especially complex spreadsheets). That was a deal breaker. Last attempt was as recent as last year
Phone calls across the world are still not cheap.
If I only live for this single moment, I don't think I'd spot such an inconsistency. I'm now so focused on your comment, that I doubt I'd notice if I didn't actually have half of my body, any memories from my childhood, or if behind me was just empty space.

It'd be a short existence with a pretty violent end.
PRs welcome :) I guess for the curl version it's gonna be tough because you can't really interact with the stream that you receive. You should be able to do it with the telnet version, though
Looking forward to your public postmortems.. (either yours or whatever you find in the wild)
I like the idea about the LinkedIn Tagline, thanks!
Siddhartha Gautama was a Hindu. His whole schtick was "why are the Gods incapable of eliminating suffering? I'll sit under this tree until I find out." </Oversimplification>

Definitely not an atheist. He merely believed, as most Buddhists traditions believe, that the gods are not relevant to acheiving Nirvana.
I was thinking the same thing. Ubuntu is getting hoggy and commercial. And the default desktop, ick. (Can you get Mate for that?)

I use Debian + Mate mself. Install it on my clients' machines too. People like it.
I agree that the Wikipedia definition is not very good, but Holism can sometimes make sense if its specified more precisely. Sometimes it means that a system is such that if you change one component, then all other (or many other) components of the system are changed as well. In other cases, holism may be taken to imply that some value of a whole can be described by a superadditive function of the values of its parts, i.e., v(a⊕b)≥ v(a)+v(b) where "⊕" is some form of concatenation, mereological "sum", or combination operation.

What I'm saying is that some meanings of the vague term "holism" can be made precise and can be interesting. For example, the Choquet Integral in decision making allows for superadditive combination of attributes.
Try my new lib... here it is right here!

document.createElement("div");
https://asciinema.org/a/8
but we have more sand than iron-dust, no?
I met with Yanis in 2013 and had the opportunity to briefly discuss the work he did there. Truly fascinating.
I don't mind talking to my parents or grandparents, but I just want our conversations to be about something else than computers. There is nothing worse than being with your family, and constantly dreading the moment they are going to ask about 'fixing their computer'. It makes one look forward to talk with one's (grand)parents.
I really like your story. I'm glad you're successful now!

Just to add one thing:

> People may forget what you say. They may forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Maya Angelou is the source of this quote
If switching OS creates those problems, it's entirely reasonable to blame the OS.

An attitude of "switch to Linux and if you can't do anything that you used to do then it's something else's fault" while possibly fair is exceptionally unhelpful.
Ancient DNA oligopoly