skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Your entire comment feels awfully dismissive and egocentric.

Actually, it's dismissive of the app developers' egocentrism. In so far as theming breaks usability, they do have a point. Distributions shouldn't make potentially incompatible changes to the default theme without QA. But it's not all the fault of distributions and not respecting branding is not a UX problem.

Yes, I may be too harsh towards people voluntarily writing free software. Developers putting their branding and their "vision" before usability and user control is just a major pet peeve of mine. And diplomacy is not my strong point.

> Even the slightest change in color can introduce friction between UI elements. Or to be more extreme, if a theme turns your entire app into a white blurry mess, you would get mad at the application, and not the theme.

Actually I would blame the theme, but yeah, the average user would. Wrongly assigned blame is a broader issue with free software and the distribution system though.

> On the topic of icons: just like language, they evolve over time.

The XDG Icon Naming Specification does not actually specify the names of concrete icons, but of meanings. For example, there is no "looking-glass" icon, but there is a "system-search" icon. If you use the "system-search" icon to display a looking glass because that's the metaphor the icon theme you're testing with uses, your application may display the wrong icon with a different icon theme.

If an application needs an icon that is not standardized, it can include it similarly to its own application icon.

> It's about being able to recognize the brand across different operating systems

No, it's about the user recognizing the application. Which they can. The Firefox icon the open letter used as an example is very much the Firefox icon, just in a different style.

> it's also [...] not designed for the purpose of user experience (but in a sense, they still are)

Exactly. User experience >>> branding.
My wife and I had split finances while we were dating and for a few years after we got married. The thing that tipped us into "everything shared" was when we were expecting our first kid and my wife left her job. At that point split finances just didn't make any sense. Now we have a system basically identical to the OP's system and everybody is happy with it.
Thanks for the details! I’ve been reading that website for a bit now.
Facebook has laughably weak moderation.

Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent.

In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war.

Then there are the 100k+ follower accounts that seem to get away with blatant incitement and rule-breaking, and Twitter is too afraid of a backlash to shut them down, even when they admit to having multiple admins (something that should disqualify them from the blue checkmark).

WhatsApp seems to be an even more pernicious vector of viral garbage...why it doesn't disable forwarding entirely (or forwarding to groups) remains a mystery.

It isn't an SV phenomenon: in another recent election, WeChat was used to spread fake electoral propaganda.

It may be time, for the sake of democracy, and stability in the world to "de-platform" the platforms entirely. The other option would be for remorseful founders to allow them to be swamped with spam (it might provide plausible deniability to shareholders), and be killed off that way.
Clojure Web App on GraalVM
Yep, just gotta pass the robot test.
> I keep coming back to this: we keep underestimating our coworkers, users, bosses etc.

guess it depends who you work with. Had a recent experience where I spent half an hour for an user who has trouble with basic filesystem navigation - even though he's been using computers since close to three decades.
Curious about the suggestion to try plain TeX. Could you expand on what are the advantages? Do you mean it as a learning stepping stone or for actual usage?
Perhaps there are other incentives besides the threat of the destruction of livelihood that might work?
They didn’t look at it as being civil servants, they were civil servants. The last civil service entrance exam in FT was in 1995. The vast majority of employees hired before 1995 were in fact civil servants. When FT was privatized, part of the deal was that the new company would keep the existing civil servant workforce. (Source : worked at FT/Orange from 2004 to 2017)
France is in fact losing ground globally. Compare PPP-adjusted GDP per capita for the US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita-pp... to France: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/gdp-per-capita-ppp.

From 1990 to 2017, U.S. GDP per capita is up from $36,500 to $54,200, about 50%. France is up from $29,500 to $38,600, about 30%. The forecast for 2021 has France at $41,100 and the U.S. at $60,100: https://tradingeconomics.com/forecast/gdp-per-capita-ppp?con.... That means in 30 years, Americans will have gone from being modestly richer than the French (24%) to being quite a bit richer than the French (50%). To put that into perspective, the 50% gap from France to the U.S. is the same as the gap from Turkey to France.
I'm not sure about what the article is specifically referring to, but end-user programming refers to a spectrum of people that need to accomplish a programming-like task without being a professional developer.

The paper "The state of the art in end-user software engineering" discusses this spectrum from an email user to a middle school child to a scientist: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1922658
Themeing is not a valid or supported feature. It's a hack that uses some facilities in GTK that were not intended for that purpose.
Moderation is an extremely hard problem to deal with well. Have you ever attempted to manage a community?
The Unbundling of Ethereum
This would absolutely impact end users when they can no longer find custom themes through their distro of choice.

It is unreasonable to expect each end user to build their own custom themes, it makes far more sense for distros to do the work once.
What about Unreal Blueprints, Dynamo BIM? Visual GUI doesn't make them less DSLish.
It's a midi port. It does midi. Hence the limit of 16 players. Every player is using a dedicated midi channel.
That twitter thread is a complete disaster. The thread asks how has serving in the US Army impacted you, and instead they get a bunch of attention seeking people who have never served.

This is a perfect example of why social media increases depression and isolation.
As someone not intimately familiar with the field of cryptocurrency research, I wonder if truly decentralized currencies can ever be completely secure? It seems as if one ever became important enough and there was a strongly motivated enough state actor with lots of computing resources, staving off a 50% attack forever would be infeasible, especially if the people using the cryptocurrency day to day weren't mining it actively as well (it superficially seems that more and more people need less and less powerful computers anyway as cloud based services become more popular - it's not infeasable to imagine a world where your average Joe no longer has the computing power to mine ar home because they fully use cloud swrviea). Is this a valid concern, or are there ways to address this?
DSLs for non-programmers are battle-proven. The author dismisses SQL with an anecdote but the simple fact of the matter is that SQL is known and used proficiently by a massive number of non-programmers to get real work done. I guarantee you there are numerous non-programmers that know SQL better than the author, but he met a few guys who aren't so good at it so he thinks nobody else is. Terrible article.
I wouldn’t say that doctors are necessarily technical (when it comes to software).
And now all the 'hackers' who weren't smart/lucky enough to figure this out also know how to exploit this.
If you develop for a system which permits theming, you have to include that use case in your design. You can’t complain about users making use of system features when you develop for that system.
Walking around the park and speaking privately with a friend is not the same as making a permanent, public post on Twiter.
It's not so egocentric if you factor in the fashion aspect. Not everybody wears the same matching clothes.

Then more crucial aspects of ability - such as eyesight being a major one.
Some people can't see some colours that well, some need larger fonts. Things like that in which theme's are the saviour and for many a developer - how they cater for disability usage.

Sure some theme's can break the UI, but to blame the user, which is the case here - now that's egocentric IMHO.

As for branding - how many users care about that?
Probably that they could force old generation of workers out one way or the other?
Overvalued stock happens all the time. Musk himself has repeatedly stated his belief that Tesla stock has been overvalued by the markets. Even with a bunch of fraud that is still different from Enron.
And let's not forget that you need theming support so your OS can accommodate people with different vision requirements. So you can have a low-contrast theme, and a high-contrast theme, and a red-green colour-blind theme and so on. And let's not forget people who need a large text theme. Remember 15 years ago when we were so proud of GTK for being able to dynamically adjust for all these things (as opposed to Windows's half-assed support)? Remember when user experience was more important than designer vision? Remember when we all solved the problem of separating the data from the presentation? Remember when GUIs were written with a particular look in mind, but could adjust for various themes?

There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort.

Edit: And if you really need your app to not be themed, just force Adwaita on startup. This doesn't seem like it should need a complete upheaval in how we use GUIs.
From Twitter's rules: "You also may not affiliate with organizations that — whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform — use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes."
> Don't do drugs, kids. Drugs are bad, mmmmkay?
This is insane.

The issue's primarily addressing distros and projects that ship their own GTK themes as default to users, like Ubuntu and Elementary and System76. My wife's desktop runs Ubuntu, and if something doesn't look right, she doesn't even know she's running something called GNOME - she just knows that the problem is with software (OS, desktop environment, kernel, video drivers, GTK style sheet, whatever).

Most people aren't going to blame GNOME for broken style sheets, they'll be blaming the creator of the style sheet, whether they know what GNOME and GTK is or not.
This isn't about the user theming. It's about distros theming.

There currently is a growing conflict between upstream developers and distributions, because some of their interactions and dependencies bare badly managed.

For example, upstream maintainers see an influx of bug reports and angry users due to bugs, where the distributions are at fault. Sources for this can be changes to the code that the distributions make for various reasons like backwards compatibility, themes that break user interfaces or simply outdated packages or missing backports.

The GNOME upstream maintainers all are having their ass hanging out on a public gitlab repo, while some of the distributors, who break stuff, are very hard to find, with sometimes ancient bugtrackers.

I trust that the community will find a way to update their relationships and solve these issues, but it starts with seeing what's going wrong and where we have bad incentive structures.
Churn Prediction Machine Learning Model with Python
I think you're onto something. A "pip install" for models. Perhaps "pip install" is sufficient and we just need to start using it.
Mutexes and Closure Capture in Swift
As an end user I never had any of the mentioned users. On some rare occasions when the state of my distro was probably too unique, I had some problems, but that's why I use linux.
While I agree with most of the list:

3) With Airplane mode on while on vacation to take pictures, none of your pictures are getting sync’d. I have sync set up to iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Photos. If something happens to my phone, I’m SOL.

9) For that I would just use Do Not Disturb. If anyone is calling me in the middle of the night, it must be an emergency. In my case, as an only child, I only have three people that I’m concerned about enough to hear from in the middle of the night who don’t live with me - an older daughter, and my parents.
I'm sure the original tweet didn't intend it, but effectively it did ask everyone how it impacted them, direct or indirect.

> instead they get a bunch of attention seeking people who have never served

That's a bit harsh. Seems many of the people writing in that thread have relatives that did serve, but now are unable to tell their own story, for one reason or another.

I'm glad people are telling their stories about it, but you're probably right as well that social media might not be the best area to drum that up, as it's hard to have real conversations about whatever subject.
Many DSL can be replaced by python modules: it is far easier to develop and document a well written python module than a good DSL Defining a syntax, documenting it, doing parsing, syntax checking, generating good error reporting on a DSL is far harder than just designing a python API.

Of course it is a programming language, but Python can absolutely be used by non-programmers. Not as cleanly as a good programmer will do of course, but I've seen many non-programmers learning it pretty quickly for basic usage (in this case the basic usage is just to use your python module which act as a "DSL")

It also has the advantages of having tons of resources online, IDE, code coloration, etc... the random "user" of your module will in general just have to search "how to do XYZ in python" and get plenty of answer.
> four years or something like that (Ex: Israel)

Israeli conscription is mandatory for adult citizens on or about their 18th birthday with a service obligation of 3 years for males and 2 years for females, but you can defer service until after completion of undergraduate education for 6 years as an officer.
They could start with being honest that those aren't the DoD's only motive behind wanting such a corpus and analytical model.

There are many positive and negative things that could result from something like this, and it isn't the fact that the Navy is doing it that scares people. It's the fact that the US government is doing it.
Congratulations, you did a fantastic job of ignoring the responses of people who did serve, so that you could dunk on “social media”.
How do we make automating the work of a computer more accessible?

1. Visual programming usually turns into a hot mess. It's actually as hard to learn properly as a simple programming language and once learned - usually harder to build things in. How many devs choose a visual environment when there is a genuine option?

2. "Simple" languages - BASIC, Python, Applescript, Logo. They often become complex over time unless ruthlessly maintained.

3. DSL's - probably is they tend to be, erm, domain specific and therefore you have to learn from scratch multiple times if you want to do things outside of your initial domain.

I think a hybrid of all of the above might be interesting:

1. A visual builder as "training wheels" but always ensure a perfect transform from visual to code and back again.

2. A small language with a simple syntax (something Logo or Python-like but even more carefully curated)

3. DSL-like behaviour without being a DSL. Extensibility with elegant syntactic support. Ruby aspired to this but it's Perl-isms stopped it being a good beginner's language.
Meep Meep – Achievement Tracker for the European Parliament
Completely agree with your points, except the extensible bit.
I believe having a DSL with strict boundaries will make it easy for new users to grok than having to go through N pages of modules(/ libs / extensions) documentation and feeling overwhelmed.

Smaller DSLs that could be mix n matched depending on the problem at task might be a better fit.

Wait, I feel like I'm describing a std lib here...
Making a public post is like standing on a soap box in the park. If you and I go to the pub and I tell you that the Mayor is a crook, then that's between us. If I stand on a soap box and shout that the Mayor is a crook then that's slander and I should either have to prove it or I should be sanctioned.
Earlier submission, still on front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000496
How do you imagine a dead soldier writing a reply?
WinXP is still very much alive in the retail sector. Retailers are extremely sensitive about migrating their systems.
Bullshit. I need dark theme and I don't care about "brands" nor "identity". Stop burning my eyes please.
Beta looks like a tool that does term rewriting, extended with a state machine to choose which grammar.
From the document:

The Beta program first reads in the rules and then performs the transformations to the input data as defined by the rules.

Beta rule grammars may be written to perform various kinds of tasks, including data conversion, extracting interesting examples out of text data, modelling morphological structures or processes and selecting correct readings of ambiguous word tokens and parsing surface syntactic structures of sentences. Thus, the Beta program can be used both for tasks for generating and for analyzing linguistic expressions.
Um, no. Statism (communism/socialism) is based on the falsehood that someone other than you, yourself, can decide what you need. This lie has lead to more violence, starvation, and death than any other in history. Giving such decisions to a machine doesn't change the basic tenet of taking them away from the individual, which is the root of the problem.

Capitalism, a fairly recent invention, is responsible for raising the standard of living of more people (at all income levels) all over the world than any other idea in history. Even Marx said that, were capitalism to be eliminated, it would simply spring up again immediately.

An excellent explanation of why statsim fails can be found in Ayn Rand's A Textbook of Americanism. And a terrifying example of what could happen were machines to take over is depicted in the movie Colossus.
That was the case in the early days of GTK3, but I don't think it is anymore.

If GTK3 still does not support theming, that explains why theming causes issues. In which case it would be better to implement proper theming support because stopping distributions from theming clearly doesn't work.
My take is that you don't get rewarded for it directly, but rather once you're finished, you can move on to the next thing without having to constantly firefight and squash bugs on the previous project. So ideally you can get a lot more done in a given half than someone who pushed out a pile of buggy spaghetti that they're now constantly having to deal with.

On the other hand, if you can ship something a few weeks faster that might have a few bugs, but the customer never notices, I can understand why a business would reward that.
I think these are examples of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language#Examp... are purely text-based.
The gnome/gtk team introduces breaking changes to the styles and themes all the time. I think this is misplaced outrage.

One of the things I like most about gtk apps is the ability to theme them to achieve a uniform look across all my apps. I would rather use a slightly less functional gtk app than a qt/kde thing for this reason.

Users who care enough to mess with themes by necessity accept that sometimes things may need some tweaking. Most popular themes are on gh and have responsive maintainers who are invested in their themes looking good/uniform. The burden should be placed on the theme maintainers and the users who choose to use non-default configuration, rather than disabling themes on an ad-hoc basis.
Yes, sometimes I might take my phone with me on the toilet to solve a cryptogram or two, but usually I take my toilet time as a moment of tranquil reflection, a respite between my multitude of daily responsibilities.
To add to that: Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion 2 Developer, which I learned to make games with back in elementary school. It is strictly (although not exclusively) "no code." Hell, one of my favorite indie games of all time, Knytt Stories, was made in it.[1]

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160821143752/http://nifflas.ni...
Do you have evidence to qualify that somebody is promoting violence against civilians?
When thinking about the benefits of the military it is appropriate to ponder the broken window fallacy [0]. Economically speaking, building a rocket and blowing up a foreigner is strictly worse than paying everyone in the economic chain the same amount of money and using the raw physical resources of the rocket to do something else.

So for military action to be rational the troops need to be securing access to foreign wealth/raw resources, or dealing with a somewhat imminent threat from people who want to break and steal stuff from the military's sponsor.

The opportunity cost of the military is huge. Artificial violent conflict/threat thereof doesn't prop up anything on its own, the military doesn't generate wealth in and of itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
There are a number of CV areas which are well suited for a final project including scene, landmarks and object recognition Also, in-scene text recognition, think OCR for video, and, of course, image/video manipulation detection, aka deep fakes.
> "I think DSLs are about defining a 100% textual format."

That's an unjustified qualification. I could throw together a spreadsheet format that is all text. The spreadsheet GUI then becomes a advanced text editor that, when editing that particular format, exposes advanced content-aware controls not at all unlike advanced text editors like emacs can for s-expressions.

We can bridge the gap in other ways too, for instance the '2d' racket language that lets you do control flow using a two-dimensional ascii art grid: https://docs.racket-lang.org/2d/index.html It's not hard to see how this concept could be iterated on to become something quite like a spreadsheet, and with editor support the editor/language combination would begin to look a lot like a spreadsheet too.
In the US, at least, the post office is entirely self funded. The junk mail actually subsidizes the “legitimate” mail.
I don't think I missed anything in communication -- we're both reasonably articulate and know each other very well. Paraphrasing, there was an assignment that stretched over a few weeks, where students were supposed to try to start rumors about each other, and report back any such rumors that took root.

There were also assignments given to each student in turn, of the type "this is the position you are going to defend -- you have two hours to prepare, then you must front a debate in front of the class where you defend this viewpoint, regardless of whether you agree with it or not".

It doesn't require abnormally critical skills to imagine what sort of societal power structures such an education is meant to support.
Really? Do you have a source for that? Theming GTK has been a not uncommon thing since as long as I've been using it (~15 years).
EU vote faces new covert digital threats
Why exactly is the military doing this? What's the business of the military what "popular movements" do inside the country?
You mean beyond the simple fact that the Army has killed millions of them?