skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the things I miss about the 1990s is the degree that Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors of desktop operating systems such as NeXT and Be invested in refining the desktop computing experience. I personally believe that the Windows 95 interface is the most usable and most well-designed Windows user interface, with further refinements made in Windows 98 and 2000. For many years I would use Classic Mode in newer versions of Windows such as XP and 7; I wish Windows 10 had a classic mode. And while I love Mac OS X's Aqua interface, I love the Platinum theme that was developed for Copland and was introduced in Mac OS 8.

While there was still an effort in the first half of the 2000s to continue refining the desktop user experience (e.g., Aqua, GNOME 2 [which is personally my favorite Linux desktop], KDE 3), once mobile computing and Web 2.0 technology took off a little over a decade ago, I feel that emphasis has shifted away from refining the desktop experience. Moreover, there has been an emphasis on trying to make the desktop computer experience more mobile-like, leading to products such as Windows 8 and GNOME 3 that, in my opinion, are worse than their predecessors. Even Windows 10 still has mobile-like influences such as its penchant for large title bars and ribbons that take up a lot of vertical space (ever since Windows XP's Luna theme, Microsoft has had an obsession with using a lot of vertical space for bars). In my opinion, Mac OS X peaked in the Snow Leopard era, and while I still prefer Mac OS X to Windows 10, I feel that certain parts of the Mac experience have downgraded over the past decade (some pain points include the transition from iPhoto to Photos.app as well as the differences in font rendering in macOS Mojave that affect users who don't have 4K or higher resolution displays). I'm also very concerned about the implications of Marzipan on future versions of Mac OS X, but I guess we'll find out very soon when WWDC 2019 takes place.

I would like to see more investments being made in desktop computing. Despite some pundits prematurely proclaiming that desktop computing is dying, the fact is many people rely on desktops and laptops to do their work, and tablets and smartphones cannot replace all tasks that we use our desktops for. I still believe that the personal computing revolution is far from over; there is still a lot of room for improvement, refinement, and innovation.
Everything is unevenly distributed. Race, height, money, attractiveness, IQ, etc.

If you are unlucky, you have to work more.

If opportunity doesn't present itself, you go look for it.
Liftoff: The new race to the moon begins
Market competition is usually in the opposite to profits. Market competition usually works against the competing companies and in favour of their customers.
You do realize there are 6 foot NBA players right. Hardly 100000 in the world. So if you're gonna go to the power ball extreme on one end then you must extend the analogy just as far on the other side of the argument.

Most billionaires were born in top 0.01 percentile of their respective population pool. And had to be lucky and smart amongst other traits.
Are you sure that GDPR only concerns itself with PII information. In other words, is it legal to collect information about users as long as it isn't tied to PII?

I consider PII to be things like name, Social Security Numbers, a credit card #, an email, DOB, etc.

You seem to be suggesting as long as the data isn't associated with the above or can't reasonably be tied to the above then GDPR doesn't apply.

I am in favor of rules around the usage and collection of PII information. i.e. that information should not be shared with other parties without the user's consent and in general access should be restricted.

My main beef with GDPR, is the difficulty to implement such a system, with on demand wipeout.
The thing I miss about development in the 90s is that building a web application (such as they were) didn’t involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a database and then spewed out some HTML. In many ways the way we do it now is far superior, and there’s a swathe of things you simply couldn’t do in a web browser back then, but at least it was simple.

Outside of tech? Life was not simple. These days I can arrange more or less anything with a few taps on the supercomputer I carry around in my pocket, with an internet connection that would have put anything but a large institution to shame in the 90s.

Want to listen to some obscure 70s album? In the 90s that’s weeks of scouring record stores.

Order some food? First I have to rummage around for the menu, then call them up and place the order, and finally hope they can find your place because if not your food’s arriving cold after they get back to the restaurant and call you for directions.

Watch a recently released film? You’ll have to drive into town and hope the video store has it in stock.

Go to a wedding in a town you don’t know? Lots of planning, and hope you don’t get lost along the way. I sometimes joke that I couldn’t make it to the end of my road without GPS now.
But did it? Perceived speed has remained steady, using a computer in the 80s was not that different from today, only a lot less powerful. The UI for software like Photoshop is essentially the same 30 years later. VisiCalc and Lotus 123 were not that much slower than GDocs today. And we still have a hard time beating input latency from an Apple II: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
The 80s were even better
Clearly different tunnel implementations are appropriate for different situations. If you're going from LA to Las Vegas you'll do it differently than if you need to go a dozen city blocks.

The practicality of the hyperloop has by now been demonstrated in various places. What's being demonstrated here is the entrance and exit technologies that go with the hyperloop.

SpaceX investors take note.
I don't think the 90s were any simpler, but I do miss some things.

Popular music was IMHO objectively better even in a pure composition sense and was much more interesting.

I also miss 90s cyberculture. There was a more genuine ethos of inventing and exploring and people would never have tolerated today's lockdown and surveillance stuff. I'm amazed at how the mobile revolution boiled that frog.
> except it was a little harder to get a hold of people

Hmm. Really? Few call centres or queuing systems around yet. My bank had a local number that was answered in 3 rings - often by the same person. So did the phone and electric companies, and the tax office. They might actually remember you.

I probably couldn't ping a friend if they were out with the dog, or on holiday, and definitely not in the car - few had mobiles yet, though by the end of the 90s they were getting common enough.

A lot of things were indeed simpler as we've added needless complexity to loads of things. Adding complexity layers seems to be how we solve everything. Even politics was simpler - note I don't say better.

Then again a lot of things were fairly crap - VHS recorders, CRT TV, cassettes.

Computing was much more fun - far many more platforms - SunOS, Amiga, ST, PC, Apple, BeOS, etc, and it was still feasible to know all of the thing. Now it's more likely to be a small part of a much more complex whole, too big for an individual. That speaks of maturing, but also of over-complexity.

Swings and roundabouts really.
Right, I think it makes a lot of sense that the engineers designing the cores didn't think about the security implications. I know I wouldn't have.
Makes as much sense as police and judges being above the law.
This data set will be a blackmail goldmine. I'd be shocked if the Chinese government hasn't already mined it for "discreet" users.
Hmm... Hard to say. I think you may have trouble differentiating your product with this description. When I hear "persistence as a service" my first thought is "I can just use RDS, or maybe something like Firebase. If those aren't suitable, how hard is it to spin up my own instance of (Mongo|Postgres|FoundationDB|ExistDB|DB2|Oracle|SQL Server|CouchDB|etc) in the cloud?"

Of course the fact that RDS, Firebase, etc. exist suggests there is a need for persistence services in the cloud. I'd just be curious to know how your thing is different/better than the existing alternatives?
KidSwitch: Identifying Kids in Apps and Sites
> This is clearly what Intel did.

And ARM, and IBM, both the POWER and mainframe/Z teams.

Although this design decision of Intel's was in the early 1990s, shipping in their first Pentium Pro in 1995. When AMD's competition was a souped up 486 targeting Intel's superscaler Pentium, although I assume they were also working on their first out-of-order K5 at the time, it first shipping in 1996.
Show HN: Generate RSS feeds from links shared in Slack channels with RSS bot
I can't speak to the origin of the word, because I simply don't know. If you're right about that and the parent was wrong, why not put the facts out there?

To put it another way, regardless of whether you agree with their logic, they've provided you with it: 'SJW' came from the right wing and describes progressives, therefore it is derogatory. If they have the facts wrong, demonstrate that and perhaps they will change their point of view.
Their intentions are pretty obvious. Use that data to identify intelligence sources to blackmail, find potential double agents to recruit, and stop potential infiltration into their own intelligence agencies.

It's easy to think of ways to combine all of these hack data streams into one database that can be cross referenced. You go to China on a visa, your entry to the country trips a flag in a system, and an intelligence agent shows up at your hotel to recruit you.
To the death of closed source streaming!
Or did no one bother to check the older designs??
Ok I’m going to reach out to a few lawyers I know and see if they can help. Thanks again!
>But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they often talk about the '90s as some kind of dramatically simpler time. But that's not because of anything about the '90s; it's because they were children during the '90s, and people of all ages look back on their childhood as a simpler time.

That sounds like an easy copout.

Some eras are simpler than others, others are safer than others, some are more creative than others, and so on.

History is not some amorphous soup of self-same eras...

And yes, the 90s were kind of simpler than today in several areas.

In fact, "when I was younger things were simpler" is so empirically verifiable that it's almost a tautology, for
most eras, and even more so for the 1950s-2020 era. Legislation was simpler, bureaucracy was simpler, technology was simpler, choices in many areas were much more constrained, and so on...
For the first part of the 90s we still had Commodore. Now they’ve been airbrushed from history by those left.
It's a refrain as old as time.
The lack of cynicism today concerns me

Interesting. I’m 6 years your junior and quite vividly remember the optimism of the 90’s but I find myself equally...erm...annoyed with the volume of cynicism now and kind of wish for a more optimistic vox politic.

And that statement alone comes with all sorts of caveats and qualifiers that would end up with this post being several volumes long just to point out “I recognize the challenges of both eras; today and yesterday but I’m sticking by the argument as delivered because reasons”.

In fact I had a quite literal shower though this afternoon after a jog through my neighborhood “I wonder if it’s possible to plot out the empowerment/cynicism index across generations and what that system of measurement would look like”

It’s fun to ponder.

Until it isn’t.

That’s not a value judgement. That just an opinionated observation.
Which is my point. This is like the arguments around cars. Cars and the design of cities that requires people to drive to do anything are one of the larger contributors to ghg's in the US, but we can't expect people in those cities to essentially die tomorrow in order to fix things. This argument that blames people who essentially live in cooler areas seems even worse, you're blaming things outside their control.

You can change street design and work on public transit because those are things we built. You can't change where people live without displacing them. Just like you said, not existing would save the environment too, like bulldozing every spawling suburb and exhurb in the US would save a lot on GHG but it would be pretty cruel.
I guess you can use the free IDs, and then place the uuid in the stream or packet. Everybody happy.
Neither residence nor citizenship are tests for GDPR’s territorial application.

It applies to any data collected in the Union: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/
archive.org isn't archiving the spam. Websites were far, far worse visual and interactive experiences then. Everything blinked and scrolled, popups were rampant and almost impossible to dismiss, there were no ad blockers. It was a nightmare. There weren't sophisticated ad tracking systems or geolocation databases for targeted advertising, but there was far less privacy and security.
Isn’t this comment a verbatim cut and paste from a few days ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19981905

Using HN as a campaign platform seems to violate the guidelines.
Honestly, the biggest problem with GDPR is it's current implementation, i.e. the on demand wipeouts.
Yes, 90% of this opinion piece consists of anti-Trump rants and over-the-top fawning over Michelle Obama's book (which is, of course, available on all the major ebook platforms, so I'm not sure why it's even relevant to the author's thesis).

The rest of the piece is borderline deceptive. Ebooks from major publishers haven't destroyed print sales from major publishers for the reasons mentioned by others in this thread -- the main reason being that the major publishers price their ebooks artificially high to avoid cutting into their print sales (DRM plays a smaller role, but its effect isn't non-existent, either).

The reason this is deceptive is because the major publishers do not own the ebook market, or anywhere close to it. Indie ebooks are doing fine, in fact they are curb-stomping the major publishers in this area, as a casual glance at the Kindle best-seller lists in different genres will conclusively show.

You are being unfairly modded down for your observation.

This is not "tech news" by any reasonable definition of the term. It is straight political ranting with a thin layer of tech-bashing on top. Flagging.
Show HN: Hack Your Online Productivity
Depends on the malware authors - while in many cases they're just looking for simple money through mass attacks on random machines, there certainly are may active attackers where the malware is explicitly targeted to particular victims, so they definitely know whom they're targeting, and they won't be sending payloads that brick a specific firmware version of some siemens ICS to the windows box connected to your printer.
On-demand warehouses power today’s hip consumer brands – Flexe, the Airbnb of
If you are doing web dev, it is normal to require a wide set of skills (but not very deep). You are not a researcher or PHD student. Also, you are not working on a pacemaker or anything with life/death consequences, so cutting some corners like merging UI/UX/QA can only be profitable. Communication is faster within a single brain than within 'n' amount of people with slightly different jobs.
The use-cases for this are obviously pretty wide. The really galling thing about this is that YouTube(Google(Alphabet)) didn't start offering this 3 years ago.
Renowned architect I.M. Pei ’40 dies at 102
Sorry for assuming that you don't redefine "for their own benefit" to something useless and idiosyncratic.
Or something really far away, like lightning.
Bloomberg's 'Decrypted' podcast had an episode [0] about the company and founder behind Blue. They are also getting into the business of surrogacy abroad for gay Chinese couples. The interesting thing is that the company have managed to frame what they are doing as a business matter first and foremost. This is helping them avoid pressure from the government that are usually hostile towards LGBT causes.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-04-15/the-app-that...
> first of being that at 70x current nuclear power we're going to reach peak uranium in 2 to 5 years.

Can you show your math?
Amazing answer. Truth
No one has airbrushed Commodore from history. The company went away. Many of us learned on the C64 and moved on. You make it sound like there's some conspiracy against them.
If your argument is that this regulation is fine as long as all other regulations are infallibly drafted and implemented, that only works until the other regulations are fallibly drafted and implemented. But fallible regulations are the rule rather than the exception.

Battered spouses frequently run away without notifying authorities, because leaving gets them out of the situation whereas contacting authorities extends and inflames the conflict.

And, because everything is a trade off, if you pass a law which is highly protective of victims then the abuser can file a false abuse complaint against the victim, then kidnap the children and deny the victim all access to their children until the fraudulent abuse complaint is dismissed.
Edwin from Stripe here. If your new business isn't related to your old vaporizer business (or selling any product on the restricted list at https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses), then this shouldn't be an issue. If you email me at edwin@stripe.com, I'd be happy to help you get set up with Connect and Atlas.
I don't think that's relevant.

If a software has a feature usable in creative ways, and there are persons willing to exploit the software, they eventually will. Exploits and malware will be written due to human curiosity and greed.

And then the exploit is out there and generated, and then it'll be used. Attackers of e.g. Norsk Hydro or Baltimore use the malware in an aggressive, targeted way. A botnet uses the malware in an aggressive, spray-and-pray way. Pentesters are another thing.

However, if the malware hits the right thing, ugly things will happen. That's what I meant with "wild-west". Don't blame the gunsmith for bullets flying around. Build a solid wall to hide behind.
I'm also in my 40s, and I strongly disagree. While I don't see the 90s as some sort of idyllic calm Zen, the nature of discourse and social connection (or lack thereof) I feel has been seriously harmed by technology.

While I think it's a mistake to look at the past through rose-colored glasses, I also think it's a mistake to think "Oh, well things have always been that way."
And yet we get another billion people every 15 years.
You have to follow all the laws of all the countries that you or any of your employees or contractors have any presence in.

Even if a prosecutor of a country you've never set foot in decides you've done something wrong and wants to make the effort, they can create trouble for you. Ultimately they can ask your government to extradite you, and you have to defend yourself against it. You may succeed, but it'll be expensive and you'll be living under a cloud for years.

If privacy against governments is a focus, you should have ties with only one carefully chosen jurisdiction.
I’m being downvoted, but the article itself confirms that a huge, wasteful amount of time and money has been thrown down the drain by people who could otherwise just have read the original text: http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5419-2016-IN...
OMV project produces synthetic crude from Austrian Airlines plastic cups
A better question for figuring out the best parenting style, not a better question for addressing disparities in test performance
I mean, there is a big difference - you have to directly send your exploits to the enemy so that they'd work; you don't have to send any escrowed keys to them.
>Also the 90s kind of sucked. Otherwise grunge and goth culture would have never taken off.

Goth culture was a thing of the 80s. Grunge didn't suck, it was a reaction to overly commercial music and rock losing its roots.

>recessions in many countries '91/'92

Countries like Italy, Spain, Greece, etc had it worse in 2008 and on.

>higher crime rates

Depends on the country. Some have their record highs these days.

>reunification in Germany (causing massive budgetary/cultural issues)

But hardly a bad thing in itself.

>collapse of Soviet economies, esp. Russia

But also dissolution of the USSR and Eastern Block...

>WTO riots in Seattle 1999

That wasn't a bad thing, that was resistance. It looks like you've just posted news items from that era as downsides of the era...
I can only speak for me, but I found the comment informative and helpful, even if it had already been made elsewhere.
You're asserting that X is happening, so the burden of proof is on you.

However, I think the lack of any forementioned lawsuits is strong evidence that the situation is at least a little more nuanced.

If an internet commentor came up with the idea for a lawsuit with all of 5 minutes of thought, then I promise you that the teams of lawyers that the advertisers employ have also already thought of that, and Facebook's lawyers have also already thought of that and have made sure to limit illegal behavior.

Facebook is not stupid enough to tell a bald faced lie to advertisers and hope that nobody finds out. I would be confident in saying that Facebook has very specific metrics that they present. They aren't going to shrug their shoulders and say "eh, we have about X users". They be careful to say something like "we serve X requests per day" or "we have X numbers of engagements from people". They will make specific and factually correct statements. Those statements may very well be crafted to mislead people, but Facebook has every incentive to make sure they are not actually lying. It's not like they are starved for people buying ad space.

In general, I think it's pretty arogant and ignorant to claim you have a perfect understanding of a situation that you have no actual insight into. It is always safe to assume that there are better informed people who have thought a lot more about any given issue than you have.
This is one of the biggest problems I've seen amongst corporate culture throughout my career. There was a time when companies were run with the intention of building a legacy. Now, it's all about the next quarter's earnings report, if not the next month's.

It's a shameful state of affairs, but the entire system is set up to reward this kind of behavior now.

I'd love to hear someone who understands the problem explain how we got here.
Because-

it shouldn't need to touch almost any code in the OS- the UART can pretty much receive raw bytes. There's no signalling layer besides start/stop. The serial "stack" is tiny- as long as you don't somehow manage to involve the OS's terminal emulation layer, which should generally not be a concern- compared to TCP/IP.

there's no risk of accidentally leaving a service listening on the machine

it's incompatible with normal network connections- don't really have concerns about somehow connecting it to the Internet.

all network adapters on the machine can be disabled, rather than "only one network adapter"

But the main point is the reduction of attack surface going from a general purpose networking stack to a bidirectional stream of bytes.
In 1995 I was making $6.75/hour as a line cook, and my combined rent, utilities, phone, and cable TV was $180/month, renting a large old house downtown with 6 other friends.

Dial-up Unix shell/internet access was free through the university. I picked up an original 128k Mac and Mac Plus with 40 MB SCSI HD at a local thrift shop for $40, both of which I still own.

A CD cost $25, a pack of cigarettes was $5, and pitchers of beer were $8.

Ten short years later I would be walking around with an always-connected Blackberry in my pocket wondering how I ever survived without Google Maps, push email, and IM.
Woody Harrelson – An Important Message to the World