skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft used to run Zune ads to the effect that it "cost $30,000" to fill an iPod, while you could get everything you wanted on a Zune for just $15 a month! As many people pointed out, what this actually meant was that a permanent music collection for a Zune cost infinity dollars. Admittedly, at $15/month you could get 166 years of subscription for that $30k. Unless, of course, Microsoft shuttered the program - which they did within a decade. Meanwhile, my decade-old iPod nano still works fine and is still a pretty good music player to take on runs.

And really, that was the best case. Microsoft supported their legacy setup long after they stopped selling it, then finally offered refunds and support for importing playlists to Spotify. Newer, post-transformation services have dropped all pretense of guarantees or ownership; the Kindle Store revokes access to titles or whole collections so casually that the words "your library" are essentially a bad joke.

Even news has gone the same way. I had a very bad moment the first time I went to link someone to an article and found that the body had been completely rewritten with no editor's note (and not for correctness). News companies aren't profiting on the transition like music sellers did, but basic concepts like newspaper archives and the "paper of record" are thrown into doubt by the loss of ownership and content stability.

The story about farmers hacking back ownership of their tractors is surprising only because it's a bit ahead of the curve on hardware. We're still in the early days of this hardware-as-a-service transition, and it's going produce much uglier surprises than the ones we got with software.
One incentive is that you get other more common drops along the way which help beef up your arsenal and help you progress at faster and faster rates.
Not sure if i would call this a good business strategy. Bet my whole business on some tech that might be 5 or 15 years away to truly start being profitable.
This isn't scalable though.

This is similar to running a wireless network for yourself vs your non-tech family members. For family members, it is easy to just get Google Wifi/Eero, and have good wifi through the home. For your own home, you _may_ consider running OpenWRT, and creating a bunch of VLANs, etc.
You are not alone. Typography is questionable but the worst parts are padding and alignment.

I have to apologize in advance because it's going to sound like a harsh comment and I know this is volunteer work. I really think that KDE is technically very good. The amount of basic design mistakes however is just unbearable as far as I am concerned.

I mean, let's take a look at this improved notification panel. The closing and setting icons seem slightly lower than the icon on the left of the title. The large hamburger menu icon is actually two pixels on the left of the closing icon. There are 17 pixels of top padding but only 12 pixels of left padding. The large image is one pixel of center (232 pixels on the left, 230 on the right). Every single line of text has a different interline.

And it's same for every application of KDE. They really need a design team to polish it up.
I think you are misunderstanding the linked code. The imaginary type in the Go case is not build in.
According to the article "Farré and González think that spending more time with their children—or the prospect of having to do so—may have made men more acutely aware of the effort and costs associated with childrearing".

Another (arguably more positive) reason could be that new fathers formed a better relationship with their child, and be extension felt more fulfilled in that relationship. That could potentially then lead to them not feeling the need to have more children.
> In 5 years when all the crap is worked out and you eventually buy a system with extra security at your door or backyard, or a something to that effect I'd like you to come back and admit it.

I heard this same song and dance 5 years ago. The problems with the "IoT" market are foundational. Most IoT devices are not designed to be used for extended periods without internet access and a continuous stream of updates. The former means that, in general, they are only as reliable as your internet connection (including that crappy modem/router the ISP gave you). The latter means that unlike traditional home hardware, once you install "smart" devices you're at the mercy of the business plans of the vendor. So even if you get something set up that works acceptably, it will last 5 years tops (see Nest) before the vendor's priorities change.

Finally to address the "extra security" comment. Security from what? The developed world is objectively safer than ever, why would I invest in "solutions" to problems invented out of whole cloth? The paranoia of people installing cameras all over their own home (often cameras whose footage they have no real control over) astounds me. We're more mistrustful of our own neighbours than the companies that are actually exploiting our privacy and manipulating us psychologically for profit.
People aren't dismissing it because they don't have it, they're dismissing it because the UX is terrible, it's too high maintenance, and the future of any individual solution uncertain.

In some ways it's like pre-iPhone mobile apps. They absolutely did exist, but were mostly too much hassle until they could be seamlessly downloaded from the App Store, sandboxed, and held to quality standards. We're still in the Symbian era of home automation.

(My wife worked at a home automation / security company about a decade ago. It had basically all the same problems back then too, but for a couple of years I had an internet-connected doorbell)
Thanks for calling me not smart. I live in DC but have a second house in the upper Midwest (close to family). An internet-enabled thermostat lets me keep an eye on the temperature remotely, and adjust it to cold and warm spells. It was -25F for a few days this past winter.
Postal balloting, aka vote by mail in our state.

Plenty of cases of "ballot parties" in unions, military, churches, job sites, etc.
Why would you carry ID when out for a run? When I was a regular runner I just had a loose (i.e. not on a key chain) copy of my house key that I took with me.
A Woman Who Saved John McAfee from an Epically Bad Deal
Again I am not trying to be a contrarian, but in my experience quantity != quality. You can take this statement the other way and say too much information is bad. There is a reason there are so few Go Stack Overflow questions and answers: most of Go's documentation is excellent and easy to follow and learn and they have excellent community resources, videos and guides. From what I have seen so far, the OCaml and Reason docs are great, and their communities are extremely supportive.
> previous history can not be without issues merged with the new one

I don’t understand what you mean. Why would you rebase a branch and then merge the rebased version with the old version of that branch? I don’t think that’s a common workflow, that is a specific case you should avoid.

Typical use of rebase to clean up the unpushed portion of a personal repo before pushing doesn’t normally cause any problems. The main thing that pops up for me is trying to re-order my own dependent commits when I forget that one commit touched the same code as another. Squashing them during the rebase is the easy fix.
> Most of that was down to booking stock-based compensation plans for employees, who earned $894m from Lyft’s initial public offering

Could someone help me understand what this means? Is this compensation above and beyond employee stock options? If not, that means employees own ~5% of Lyft, which is much less than I would expect.

As an employee of a pre-IPO startup, I'd love to get a better handle on the realistic value of my stock if we do reach an IPO.
why are you responding to my comments to other people?
Read Ayn Rand's title essay in her anthology "For The New Intellectual" for the history and current state of Western thought.
Ah ok, the point about reflog makes sense. Thanks!
Simplicity: Implementing a smart contract language in 30 lines of Haskell
a bit off topic, but I was wondering, can WASI API be used directly from c/c++ without compiling to wasm ? Basically to have native perf but still benefit from the crossplatform APIs that WASI will expose
I'm familiar with the reflog and use `head@{n}` on occasion, but it never occurred to me that you could use that same syntax with branches. It seems obvious in retrospect—I feel silly.
Why? Getting the major browsers on board going forward has always worked fine before. Most of them update automatically now, anyway.
So...this all seems insanely complicated. Is there any kind of rough guidance about how "big" an organization or codebase needs to be before it becomes a net win to go down this path? Either in terms of lines of code or number of services or requests served or servers needed or any other kind of metric? Obviously the breakeven point is somewhere between "CRUD app that runs for free in Heroku" and "millions of requests served per second" but I don't know where it is.
No, vocabulary is the hard part. It's where you spend most of learning time.
I only recently, as in two weeks ago, purchased my first home automation product in the form of a few Philips hue bulbs. Not so much for the automation aspect, but the ability to control the color temp and brightness. The automation will be nice when I take my next vacation and want to give the appearance of someone being home during that time. As for what happens when the WiFi goes down or the bridge fails, simply power cycling the lights returns them to a default color/brightness state like a normal bulb.
Is the plan for the original investors to sell their stock to regular investors before the whole thing tanks? They make their money and whoever followed is left holding the cheque. Seems like a Ponzi scheme as it's been clear for years these companies are not going to be profitable any time soon.
I'm confused by your reference to people who live paycheck to paycheck. Shouldn't lower supply and higher demand for workers result in higher wages?

At the same time, automation will result in lower demand. Hard to say which trend is more important. Combined, I would expect a lot fewer truck drivers and more healthcare workers.
The global financial crisis, for example, hit Spain in full force about a year after the leave policy was introduced.
Yes, I'd been extremely cautious drawing any conclusion...
the old commits stick around

They kinda are, but that's like saying that deleted files are not deleted, but stick around for a while.

While technically true, for most practical purposes _rm <file>_ deletes the file. The fact that each and every "git 101" manual has to explain how to recover deleted commits, means something is wrong.

It's like saying: "Here's the key, and in case it doesn't work there's a pry bar in the garage". This is usually a pretty good indicator that the lock is broken.
It will be Java 15 then.
Yup. Something I learned too: e-commerce platforms do not work as product discovery tools, not anymore. They're all full of bottom-feeders selling various combinations of generic garbage-quality brands, fakes, and used items presented as new. If you want to buy something of quality, you need to explore the space elsewhere - e.g. via /r/$niche recommendations, Wirecutter, Consumer Reviews, etc., and then preferably buy directly from the vendor/official distributor.
I used to agree with this, now I've stopped worrying. Because if git is the worst part of your workflow, that's a great problem to have. But at many places, git is the best part.

(I've also had to work with various IBM CVS, and they are universally garbage. When I get frustrated at git, all I have to do is think back to those.)

So yes, Mercurial is better, but is it worth the effort? Not in my experience.
I'm not sure I see the advantages Uber and Lyft have in the race to make AV's.

Intel and Nvidia have a hardware advantage. Ford, GM, Tesla etc have the advantage of making their own vechicles. Google is Google.

What do Uber and Lyft have that makes it likely they can figure it out before the market is conquered by others?

Maybe their assumption is that if driverless tech is widely available then their brand names will get them more business?
Hence the word "seems". It's like science but without the rigor.
Will they own those cars? Today, they rely on driver's providing their own cars. What will be the capital costs of purchasing and maintaining the autonomous fleet?
And to top it off, this entire business model is temporary. The end game for all of these companies (and Tesla/etc as well) is to have autonomous fleets. They have to bleed cash to snap up as much of the market as possible before that happens so they're not starting from zero. At this point it feels like a game of who has enough funding to survive the interim to make it to a driverless service.
Why KDE keeps rewriting every single component every few years? Is that because of improper design/planification or because of bad implementation?
No, real bees must be saved.

Black Mirror used robotic artificial bees.
It will never be worked out. Desktop computing is how many decades old? And it’s still crap. Basic Windows desktop functions still have intermittent problems (that missing file issue in Windows 10). Computer controlled consumer stuff will never reach the reliability and predictability of dumb consumer electronics.
Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Sling, Amazon Prime, Amazon Fresh, iCloud, Xbox Live, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Favor. Probably more.
We unfortunately aren’t eligible.
Probably one of the most true things I have ever read on this site.
Easiest way to mine with Your Linux, Windows, or Mac OS
> In 5 years when all the crap is worked out and you eventually buy a system with extra security at your door or backyard, or a something to that effect I'd like you to come back and admit it.

Honestly I change my mind much faster than 5 years. I have no issue to admit that I changed my mind over something. Personally I even like to be taught better by something or someone as I feel I've learned something then.

All in all my comment is very tongue in cheek, but I really mean everything I said, because that is just how I personally feel today. I don't see much value in smart home devices today. Not a big fan of the products which are on the market, not a big fan from my own experience using them when I did and not a big fan of all the big issues that people constantly report when relying on them.

I'm not Einstein who invented some physics law which will stand forever. I have a personal opinion which is relevant today. If things change tomorrow then there will be a new HN discussion and perhaps I'll have a new opinion which will be relevant tomorrow. I don't see anything wrong in voicing my thoughts on this topic today as it stands today.
Yeah I've found a few brands that I now just would rather deal with directly. Shipping and cost whatever ... Amazon is more of a hassle filtering sometimes.
Check out the Respeaker Core v2. Right now there isn't much in the way of an end to end solution, but there are a ton of options to roll your own. And really, rolling your own is the only way to ensure privacy and longevity anyway.
In short, no.

I read this in literally every HN discussion of ride sharing, but there's literally no reason to think that ride sharing companies will have any special role to play with autonomous vehicles if they materialize (which seems extremely doubtful in the short or medium term) and there's even less evidence that it will be cheaper.

I still can't figure out why people don't realize that low income humans are cheap. An autonomous car, if such a thing is ever in the real world, will at least for a long time be a complicated technically advanced computerized machine.

Like here's a pretty straightforward machine that rents for $125 a day: https://www.adoramarentals.com/p-~nkd4skit/NIKON-D4S-KIT

For reference that's about the same price as the cost of hiring a minimum wage employee for an entire work day.

Now tell me if the guts of a self-driving car are going to be cheaper or more expensive than a standard DSLR camera.
The half-life of code and the ship of Theseus
From Collisions to Chosen-Prefix Collisions Application to Full SHA-1 [pdf]
Well, yes, variance is the big thing. Even ignoring obvious fakes, the common argument, that brand products and cheap clones are probably made in the same factory, doesn't really hold water. They might very well come from the same assembly line, but the difference is in QA. Because there's always some copy-to-copy variation, it makes total business sense to make one hundred copies of a part, sell the top 10 to a big brand name with stringent QA criteria, and the rest to progressively less scrupulous companies.

Edit: Oh, you mentioned this as well in your edit.
Getting some premise or early bit of reasoning wrong, or taking something for granted that really deserves some prior justification (assuming such exists), then building a whole castle atop that foundation of sand is basically mises.org's whole thing, FYI.
I would say most of the examples you mentioned are actually examples of well implemented libraries, with well named methods and abstractions, rather than DSLs. If you want to imply that a good large codebase is similarly structured into libraries of independent components rather than one big class hierarchy then I would agree.
Hehe... Cool, I'm a "dark matter developer" and I like it. Edit: Because of downvotes, I'll expand a bit for more interesting comment. I work in a pretty large corp. as a developer, and solve a lot of smaller day-to-day business problems - let's say it begins with Excel and ends with a web form. I also set up the server, database and anything else I need on Azure in co-operation with our (very big) IT provider. I find it quite interesting, but my workday ends at 16.
Doesn't matter if you can reuse something if refurbishing costs as much as building a new one. Space just has a more sensible design with better materials and computers.
While the idea of the article is entertaining, the data is ridiculous.

3 data points: '00, '05, and '10.

The policy came into play in '07. Yet the downward trend was already visible in '05. It barely changed for '10.

A more interesting (and honest) take of the data is in women's desire for more children. It was on a decline in '05, but ticked up sharply for '10. So if I was writing this, I would have said: "After men in Spain got paternity leave, women wanted more kids."
> The trick to getting people to sign up is... (you are not going to like this)... a pop-up.

LOL. No sir, I don't like it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA

But I am going to put the subscription form at least at the bottom of each post, and think of other ways to get it in front of people. I may consider a popup in the future if I put the work in to make sure people who are already subscribed generally don't see it. Like when they confirm their subscription, set a cookie that will block the popup. Something like that. Or a "don't show me this again" button. I didn't see a popup on your site FWIW.

EDIT: Or duh, just a URL param like show_popup=false in the notification email URL.

Anyway thanks for the feedback. I'm realizing now that I've read your posts in the past and really enjoyed them, so you have another subscriber!
Ok, we'll take that bit out of the title above.
> As soon as one of them increase prices to generate profit

Once prices get back to a sustainable level it will be more appealing for other entrants and they won't need to burn that much money.
Elm was what lead me to begin using Haskell for serious projects. Elm is the perfect gateway drug to Haskell.
I have spent a non-negligible amount of my life looking for remotes. But the really big waste is the amount of time fiddling with 5 remotes trying to figure out how to get the f-ing AV system working.

I have a magnificent non-smart home theatre on my property, set up by one of the other co-owners. He's pretty much the only person that knows how to use it; the last time I tried, I had to call him. This stuff is a disaster. Over in my house it's "Hey Google, play some music".

I replaced my 60s-era manual mercury switch thermostat with a Nest. It's way better! More accurate, accepts voice commands, tells me the temperature, can be turned on before I get home, and can be turned off remotely when I left for vacation and forgot (yes, I've done this). Call me a very satisfied customer.

I'll take the smart home, thank you. If that makes me dumb, fine. I don't want to have to be a genius just to watch a movie.
I just added a mention right after the big scary warning about how everything you do in git is non-destructive. Thanks for the suggestion!
I was pretty skeptical before trying it. I found that you don't spend much time configuring things and it's actually quite nice to just go to bed saying "Alexa, turn off living room". Not life changing, but definitely worth the investment. If something fails, you're no worse off than you were before. Also, smart sockets and switches are great items for a Christmas/birthday/wedding/etc registry/gift-list.
My recommendations:

Mastering The Complex Sale -- Jeff Thull

Exceptional Selling -- Jeff Thull

The Prime Solution -- Jeff Thull

The Challenger Sale -- Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson

Selling The Wheel: Choosing The Best Way To Sell For You Your Company Your Customers -- Jeff Cox, Howard Stevens

And while it's not exactly about "sales" alone, I'd recommend The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank as well. It touches on aspects of selling in an enterprise setting, especially for new products.

The Salesman Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL5m7amy0FXEAe9WxhXTI_A
Honestly, I think that smart home stuff is really cool, and also that I don't want anything (okay, much) from the current spread of commercial offerings.

What I do want to do is put a ESP board with an IR receiver and a servo on a lightswitch in my basement so that I can turn on and off the lights without moving from the couch.
Electricity grid cybersecurity will be expensive – who will pay, and how much?
Bisect still works anyway. For non-huge projects, all this obsession with tool minutiae is a waste of time.

As mentioned by another poster, the fact that a whole website is needed to explain the concept illustrates the design and UI failure.

This is an uphill battle that can't be won until a next-generation interface becomes usable by mortals. If that can't be done due to complexity, it's a lost cause for average developers paid for delivering business value.
The CBC is a news public service. If you have a reference for your version of the mandate, please share.

For what it’s worth I do work in the media and with some people who’ve been working in it as long as I’ve been on this earth. (And no, not for the CBC) [edited: thought I should clarify I’m not a reporter or writer, but I do work closely with editorial and arts teams]

I’ve never once heard anything like anything you’ve said.

News organizations have long done this kind of thing. Right in the candaland article they reference The Canadian Association of Journalists’ Ethics Guidelines which states that once it’s in the public domain there is no copyright if the publisher comes to the same story. That’s typically referred to (at least in some copy as “independently corroborated”). As a best practice the CBC probably should still be referencing the other outlets that covered the story, especially the original. But there’s nothing unique about this, nor especially rendering it as a practice or the CBC as a scam.

As a side note I don’t favour NP opinion pieces as qualitative evidence. Hopper clearly just wants the CBC to crumble.

The Canadaland article is better, but is mostly tweets and complaints. The CBC is not the reason the press and media in general is struggling business-wise.
KotlinLooksLikePythonWouldLookIfJavaDevelopersNamedThings