skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Infocom was experimenting with graphic adventures towards the end. (Zork Zero was a fascinating experiment. Maybe not a successful or entirely enjoyable one, but something with possibility.)

It's impossible to say how well Infocom might have done as graphics continued to take focus. The diaspora of Infocom's creative talent worked on many well-beloved graphic adventure games (Moriarty's LOOM and influence on other LucasArts games, Meretsky's The Space Bar and influence as a consultant to a variety of game companies in roughly the same time span, as two examples quickest to mind).

They still probably wouldn't have survived the "adventure game" crash that eventually broke Sierra and LucasArts, but it's interesting to wonder what sort of a contender they might have been had they not been forced to sell to Activision (or had they stumbled into selling to a publisher that was a better fit creatively).

Anyway, its interesting to armchair quarterback with decades of hindsight. The business software was a technical marvel of a sort and potentially had it been much better timed and budgeted it could have eaten Lotus and Excel's lunch. Maybe there's an alternate universe where we are all using an Infocom office suite and Infocom operating system on hardware Z-Machines, which is a fun idea to think about.
Just like the old gypsy woman said, today a huge percentage of white-collar office work could literally be replaced with a shell script or a couple days' work by someone who knows their way around excel. But it still hasn't happened and attempts to add more software to these jobs seem usually to do very little to improve efficiency, often just adding more jobs to support the software. Every time more software's added, actual automation gets harder, too, as more systems become involved. Pretty soon a couple macros and a script won't cut it, because there are so many pieces involved they'd certainly break all the time.

I'm not even sure most office technology's helping that much. I suspect most of the efficiency gains from tech have been in a handful of "knowledge" work areas, and manufacturing. Plus new markets. The rest... might actually be losing everyone money.
Outside legal also helps remove blinders and bias, somewhat. Yes, you're paying them, but they're also less beholden to "their bosses" as in-house counsel is, and more easily overriden, so it can be a good sanity check as to the merits of a case.
No no no, the content producers are the ones doing the work and the readers should be funding the platform somehow. And possibly the creators too. I'd like a "Reddit gold"-like system.

(I know I wouldn't pay to post because I have lurked on metafilter for most of its life but never paid the $5 to post)
There is a problem though that Turing completeness allows for inconsistencies. i.e., you can technically "return" a bottom type in these languages by looping forever. That is actually why Coq is not Turing complete since Coq is primarily used for theorem proving and less for programming.
كلمات اغنية ريما ماجد المهندس
I admire your optimism.

https://gizmodo.com/there-are-5-000-janitors-in-the-u-s-with...
This is pretty awesome, thanks for the link. I like what he has done with Quake 2 as well.
Why Apple and Qualcomm made peace now: A 5G iPhone in 2020
This is fine and all, but I think they're completely ignoring the elephant in the room. R is a crazy, random, whimsical language that puts PHP to shame.

I use Python instead of R unless I'm told to use R. I hate using R, even if there are better libraries written for it than the Python equivalents. I can't stand the terrible naming conventions (seriously, can't you at least be consistent with CORE FUNCTION names?) and ridiculous amount of data structures. There are vectors, lists, matrices, tables, data frames, S4 classes, environments, oh my... I've been programming in R for a couple of years now and it still takes me around 2-3 tries to figure out what's stored in a variable and how to access it. Do I need two ['s, a trailing comma inside the [], etc.

Debugging R basically seems to mean "use a hack to generate stack traces."

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I see _absolutely_ no reason to encourage use of R over Python. I love lisp and the ideas it espouses, but R seems to take the worst from that world.
> I went to take a look. There were so many people, it's sad that the fire has made it even more of a tourist attraction.

I wonder if you see the hypocrisy here.
The vast majority of people want stuff for free, there isn't any grand reasoning beyond that for choosing Python.
Incredible undertaking. Looking forward to play with it for simple machine learning tasks.
I think that loading packages directly from PyPI will be a huge milestone.
>> If I want to hire someone, how can I tell the good schools / MOOCs from the bad?

You probably shouldn't. If you want to hire someone, test their skillset on a small-ish 1-week Project with realistic goals and expectations. Optionally with integration in a team, since soft-skills are not really teachable but usually very important to solve problems on a certain level.
The vast majority of people employed as professors or lecturers at university are there because they want to do research, and teaching is the compromise that lets them do it. They definitely do not want to be teaching. Most people try to find ways to reduce their teaching schedule to make time for research.
I got nothing but I see the sorry in the interviews page.
Do you see anything there?
One reason: some can make $150K+ (some can even make $500K+). If you get a coveted post, then you could end up with a high salary and the freedom to research what you would likely research in your free time anyways.

Also, if you move from professor to administrator you can make $300K+ with arguably fewer work hours and responsibility.
Not saying I disagree with you but, anecdata: n=1
I don't know anything about web dev, so maybe it's a stupid question, but you still need javascript for the front end, right? You can't build the front and back end development completely in python?
You could spent nine more in the navy, retired with a pension, and got a cushy DoD/government job (assuming you wanted to live near a base or government contractor)
From September 2018. Maybe someone can do an update?
Netflix just released its Q1 numbers.

They've added record 6.9 million subscribers. That's new subscribers - defectors.

I'm not sure what would cause the "masses" to re-evaluate the quality of selection, especially taking into account the fact that Netlifx is now adding tons of content they'll own forever, so 10 years from now "The Crown" and "The Stranger Things" etc. will still be there plus all the shows and movies they've added in those 10 years.

Competitively Netflix is safe because to watch those 250 top movies online in one place you can go to... nobody.
Pretty nice garden though.
I use R because mainly due to the RStudio guys. I totally understand many of the author's points but you can easily write your code to avoid storing massive amounts of data in memory.

edit: grammatical error fix
How clueless or ineffective do you have to be with what your original idea has turned in to before people stop listening to or caring about your thoughts on it? Oddly, the "meritocracy" crowd don't appear concerned if rich/powerful males have no idea what they're doing.
I've used it for a couple small projects in the context of trying Iodide.

It's pretty good for data science—I can't speak to DOM manipulation that much, I've only done very minimal work with it for that. My two cents: it's bit rough around the edges—the performance is noticeably worse, and for data science, with medium-sized datasets it can freeze a tab for 10-15 seconds. Sometimes you get an odd edge case though where standard Python cannot run perfectly due to some combination of operations.

That said, overall, I'm really excited by where it's going, and I've always been able to work around the limitations.
You don't transfer back and forth if you use managed memory.
A smartphone can probably deliver better-personalized ads since it can be tracked to an individual person. No benefit to the consumer, really.
> Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter

This is true, but it's not only advertising. Replace ads with any revenue generator large enough to sustain the service and you'll find that (1) the audience disappears or (2) big compromises in user experience or privacy.

Maybe some services just can't be delivered by profit-maximizing corporations at all.

A big reason for the wildly improbable success of Wikipedia and Craigslist is that they are non-commercial. No ads, no subscriptions, no selling firehose data, no paying for more access, no "freemium".

We need an alternative asymmetrical social media service that is free for readers, free for posters, fosters deeper discussions than Reddit, and ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls.

Maybe the only way to accomplish that is with a community-driven collective effort, not a commercially-driven corporate service.
>Today, the 28-year-old realtor isn’t sure she’ll get a credible offer for the 8,343 square-foot mansion.

The age of the realtor is obviously essential to the story...
Although I seem to be in the minority, yeah, I've been pretty happy with the recommendations they give me recently.

It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in.

For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
So if Y Combinator updated their Hacker News terms of service to say "vkou is no longer allowed on the site" you will turn yourself in to the police?

My point is, you aren't doing yourself any favors by championing the ability of big institutions to put you in jail simply for accessing information.
When you get anything write it here please.
Not a solved problem, GPS is too inaccurate for interferometry. The problem is you want to do correlations between radio signals; consider a 1 GHz signal, which has a 30 centimeter wavelength. Error compounds as you integrate longer and longer signals. To do anything decent, you need to know absolute position within millimeters, and it can't be drifting too much.

Also, the positioning error isn't the whole story; there's also timing drift. Rubidium GPS-disciplined oscillators actually drift too much instantaneously to be useful...
Not especially. The last Infocom/Activision Zork game was released in 1997. (There was a licensed browser game in 2009-11, but it sucked -- it was really just a demonstration of how little Activision cared about the IP.)
You don't license the good stuff with the rest of the slop, that you want to rent out a la carte.

It's also why you don't see certain prestige shows on streaming such as Fargo, Twin Peaks: The Return, Preacher, or Legion. They know that people will pay top dollar to rent/buy the really good stuff.
Any feedback, comments, questions are welcome.
I would need to watch an unhealthy amount of Netflix to run out of things to watch and I already watch one episode per day.

If you seriously can't find anything to watch on Netflix, I suspect you either are uninterested in trying new/unknown things or are so hard to please that no service could satisfy you. I can't imagine either is a demographic all that large or rewarding to pursue.

I don't mean that in a bad way. Rather, I don't think it's in our best interest for any single company to own the entire catalog that would appease these demographics.

People have been foreseeing a mass exodus from Netflix for years now though, often when Netflix loses their hobby horse show. Yet Netflix only grows in net subscribers. Since everything always comes to an end, surely you need to put a timescale on your claim if you want to receive credit when Netflix finally collapses. Even Chicken Little is eventually right.
Serious question. Who's better? Amazon Prime is OK and it's "free" if you use Amazon Prime for other reasons. But I find it inferior overall. We're just collectively reinventing the cable bundle in a new form.
> What voting system are you using?

Good point. I'm in the US, so it's overwhelmingly 'winner takes all.'
This depends quite a lot on how you define selection.

If you want highly rated content of all genres and formats (TV and movies), you get more than you could ever hope to have time to watch.

If you want to watch one specific thing, then yeah chances are good it's not there.
> ...for the money you pay.

That's where I'll have to stop you, as its still a very cheap service comparatively.

I worked at Blockbuster toward the end of their run, it was about $4-7 dollars for a single rental.

Current streaming rentals on Amazon range from $4-8 as well.

Netflix, streaming only, is currently $13 per month.

The only alternative I think is very good is HBO, which is $15 per month. They usually have before-cable-run-but-after-initial-rental-period movies. And they have a handful of stellar TV shows. We still struggle to find something to watch on that service.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it

That's how Reddit and (to a lesser extent) HN work.
I simply don't understand what is going to happen to all of the PhD students that I saw when I was in university. I managed to escape the PhD trap and find software engineering but I was extremely lucky. Had I gone to any other school I probably would not be anywhere near as fortunate.

That being said, I worry about the people who go to PhD programs just because that's what they are "supposed to do" or because they just don't know what else to do. Especially the ones who lack social skills or lack "connections". Many of my friends from college fall in to this category.

I don't even want to think about the people in the above category who get a PhD at a "non-target" school.
I am. It's called Micro.blog.

Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.)

In short form:

Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have your blog hosted on the service (in which case you're paying for a full-featured Hugo-backed blog with themes, pages, full posts, themes, etc., not just a $5/month Twitter clone), but you don't have to -- if you have an existing blog which can meet Micro.blog's requirements (an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, webmentions, etc.), you can connect it up for free and get a Twitter-like timeline. There are no advertisers. Micro.blog doesn't have "better tools for managing readers," per se, but for the time being they're just not about the model of "celebrity tweeter with a million followers."

Micro.blog supports comments and follows, but favorites are private (i.e., mostly just bookmarks) and does not support quotes or reposts. This is by design. In theory IndieWeb principles would allow some or all of this to be added down the road, though.

Because this is, again, really a set of individual blogs doing traditional bloggy things woven together with bloggy standards, there's no way to do locked accounts or private posts.

Micro.blog has a full-time community moderator. No, that's not going to be enough to scale if it gets huge, but for the time being that's not a big deal.

Micro.blog has an API and has mobile clients available for both iOS and Android.

And, last but not least: yes, Micro.blog does support ActivityPub and Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon users on Micro.blog and they can follow you from Mastodon, and replies Just Work (tm).
The solution is very simple: let people subscribe to tags.
Proving correctness is always an incremental win when executed correctly. Everything that can be proved correct is one more bug that your editor will underline in red, and often one less test to be written.
I mean, you can definitely fake Dolby Vision. The Apple TV 4K has an option to always output Dolby Vision, and they do their own tone mapping to output normal HDR or SDR content in Dolby Vision. I don't use this feature, and it had pretty terrible reviews at launch (although I heard they have improved it).

But yeah, I think the actual presence of additional dynamic range is pretty noticeable for most well-produced content.
I like the way the author characterizes the "feel-good" nature of bouncing between keys with traditional touch typing. I type mostly in Dvorak these days (with some modifications to make it less terrible for programming), but when I do foray back into QWERTY there's often a moment where I'm struck by how nice it feels to stretch my fingers away from the home row, and the novelty of typing mid-size words with only my left hand. It doesn't hold up over time with QWERTY, but now I'm pondering devising a keyboard layout that optimizes for "fun" motions the way modern layouts optimize for finger-travel distance (and how awful the results would be in terms of hand strain!).
yes. everybody in the team. i sure hope there aren't places out there where you have thousands of people each responsible for millions of lines of code.

my point was that you should not have individual code ownership and individual gatekeepers. I can see how that might be misinterpreted.
> “I’ve been through only the peak, never the low,” said Sun as she schedules a makeover of the property.

Relevant context for this quote I think.
This is how compilers and IDE's were, back in the day. Things changed and now community editions are rife.

Maybe this will happen someday with Maths software.
Isn't this common knowledge in academia?
Fargo is on Netflix (UK).
I don't use web frameworks but it's always occurred to me that the big 4 JS ones are Angular, React, Vue, and Mithril.

Angular and React are popular because they're backed by giant companies who have the resources to market and document it well.

Vue and Mithril seem better built, but Vue has nicer syntax, and Mithril is more lightweight.

But if I wanted lightweight I figured jQuery and JS might be better. I'm possibly wrong about this but that's the layman impression I get.
Webcomic Satire of Startup Experience
In general I don’t think education is their product. Their product is research and their ability to bring in high grant dollars is the source of their prestigious pay.

The recent explosion is numbers of students attending university requires them to expand the pool of teachers without a corresponding ability to expand their demand for grant winning researchers. Hence the lower average pay.

I would love to hear an expert in the field chime in on this, because I’m as armchair as it gets when discussing this ecosystem. Are there any high paying professors whose primary responsibility is teaching students only?
Note: this paper is from 2010 and he has been making similar statements since 2008 (https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/?Papers_and_Talks)

Giving the timing, I'm interested in what he might think of Julia, which seems to have reaches a similar conclusion - statisticians need a new tool.
Greta Thunberg Addresses the EU Parlament
Seems striking especially topic not touched like radio astronomy.
Make the readers pay and you'll lose your audience.

Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content.

Without advertising, that means the service cannot make a profit.

Maybe that's the solution to the puzzle.
The AT&T/T-Mobile merger is a bit of a weird case. The breakup fee was substantial at about $6B (half in cash, half in spectrum). Without that additional spectrum, T-Mobile would have had a hard time launching an LTE network. The combination of the breakup fee and the merger with MetroPCS left T-Mobile with a decent amount of new spectrum to deploy LTE on. Without the breakup fee, T-Mobile's future was a lot more dim. In some ways, I think regulators would have been more likely to approve it without the breakup fee.
The case was basically "T-Mobile doesn't have enough spectrum for LTE...you know, unless you deny this merger in which case we have to give them the spectrum they need."

It certainly turned out well for consumers, but part of the reason behind that is that T-Mobile was literally thrown new cards via the breakup fee. Their hand was really bad before that.
Marketing.

But its 2019, if you still believe Tesla doesn't have ethics problems, you haven't paid attention or don't care.
? doesn't transform anything back into a runtime error. It's explicitly saying "I don't know how to handle any errors that happen here, so give it back to the caller." The "potential unhandled errors" are all still perfectly listed inside the return type.
I don’t mind paying the 3 or 4 dollars to rent a movie off google play to watch a movie when I don’t find it on Netflix. But I guess I don’t watch too many movies so it’s not too bad. Anyone remember how much it used to cost to rent a movie at blockbuster?
Once you're already at HD, 4x the resolution is not 4x the bandwidth.
> During the early years, we at Alibaba also work long hours, why?

A hell of a lot more equity than the average Alibaba worker gets today?
Also in Mexico
King's Quest 6 is better about it, but there are a few zombie states I can think of. However the game does its best to warn you that you'll have a bad time. Any of the following, without the right items will make sure you can't finish the game.

- Going into the catacombs on Isle of sacred mountain (specifically the hole in the wall is what killed 10 year old me)
- going to the land of the dead (funny enough with coins that you need to get from the catacombs)
- going into the castle (short or long ending)
- telling the druids you're selling these fine leather jackets
In addition to what the article points out, another issue is that many tradespeople are employed by small or family owned businesses, so your prospects for getting into a decent job may depend on your family and connections. Otherwise, you'll be working behind the parts counter at Auto Zone.
I've found Netflix to often be the 21st century version of "100 channels and still nothing on". Strangely, despite the on-demand nature, I find I watch it a lot like broadcast TV+PVR or discs: there is the occasional show that I enjoy, sometimes including something I found via Netflix itself, and I typically watch new episodes of those not long after they are released or maybe binge-watch a short dramatic mini-series over a few evenings. However, if I'm browsing for something new to watch, a lot of the series are mediocre to poor, and for movies, the big names arrive far too late to be relevant for me and the rest are mostly straight-to-video quality at best.
Netflix used to be a great deal. I remember I wanted to watch a movie some top 100 IMDB movies, and checked their selection in 2015. There were most of the ones I wanted to watch, and the price was < $8.

Now the price is going to $12-13, and the selection is abysmal. It's heavily geared towards "original content" which are mostly series of 10+ episodes I have not the time to commit to.

Still not bad for the occasional documentary and comedy special, but this is a bait-and-switch. They don't have too many more pushes before I unsubscribe.
"Impact Report" is a poor choice of words in light of all the autopilot crashes
Not just the 5G modem, but the current intel modems are worse on their new higher priced models compared to previous generations, I'm sure everyone at Apple HQ is panicking about that. They are selling a $1500 phone with an inferior modem to a $100 chinese android device.