skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Overlapping windows doesn't provide any benefit.

Just yesterday, I overlapped a tiny terminal window (resized to be very small and set to "always on top") showing the current disk space ("watch df") over the corner of a larger window which was doing a file transfer. While I agree that non-overlapping panels are better most of the time, sometimes overlapping can be useful.

> treat my Google Drive as just another folder

That illusion would fail quickly as soon as your network connection dropped. Non-local folders have fundamental differences to local folders and should be treated differently. (Local folders can be assumed to always be present unless manually removed, be fast, and unmetered; non-local folders can disappear and/or change at any time, can be slow and/or vary in speed, and might have a per-megabyte cost.)
Technology changes but the human nature at the core does not, we are a social animal and we need to live in packs where communication, verbal and nonverbal are key, it's not just cultural but primal, i see it everyday, people don't know how to socialize or communicate anymore and that leads to isolation and depression.
Little new technology, but a substantial financial cost. One would need a much heavier Martian probe that would include return stage for the lander.
I can't add much to the comments already made but I notice your blog is currently hosted on a subdomain. I would move this to the main site as in example.com/blog in order to concentrate any authority. That said, you need to be adding a lot more content to it.

I would also say, don't be disheartened at the lack of progress thus far. If it's something you believe in then keep going and keep making incremental improvements.

2 reasons I see these kind of ventures fail is the creator throws in the towel too early or he keeps going but doing the same old thing over and over. Avoid these traps and you're halfway there.

BTW, I worked in Dublin for a while (many years ago) and O'Sheas on Talbot St was a regular haunt of mine. I was disappointed not to find it on your site.
This story is simply fantastic. I like the idealistic stubbornness of investors like this one.
Thanks exolymph - that's our plan!! :)
I think this may have been part of a deal where Microsoft agreed to put Office on the Apple store...
”After the decision has been stated, the decision maker requests that each team member commit support to the decision aloud.“

This seems infantilizing and cult like.

Forced speech in general is a red flag in a company culture or a relationship.

If people don’t respect that a decision has been made, that is a problem, but this ritual is not going to solve that.
Sounds like you'd enjoy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
Wow, yeah I tested each of these (#2 I had to replicate in an incognito window) and this is really bad. These are basic, basic features that are built into browsers and HTTP, and they don't even work because the designers wanted to be clever. Awful design.
Maybe we could have a country-specific tag on plastic, like doping the plastic of the 10 largest countries per GDP. We would find out within a year where things are going and from whom. Not that it really matters in the end, but politicians and blame games going hand in hand, that be 'entertaining'...
Those series of complicating factors are quite interesting.

I wonder what the reasoning is for no brightness adjust when in recovery mode or similar situations.
Your point that other filesystems get by without checksums stands, but Apple does not use ECC for all hardware.

Also, we are left to wonder if their "reliable" SSDs are as reliable as checksums at the filesystem layer (or as reliable as both). I suspect the answer is yes, for the majority of applications running atop APFS (which is to say, iOS). Probably not for video assets on that Promise MPX bay (i.e. "external" non-Apple storage media).
I don't think this apathy is just unique to Americans. I feel like today's population in general (across the world) is more tolerating and expects less from their governments and leaders compared to say 60-70 years ago. We don't see protests like the old days. I don't know the reason - maybe student debt (people are too stressed out about paying back their loans etc that they don't have time for anything else), stagnant wages (people have to do multiple jobs to make ends meet), maybe because cops have much easier/powerful ways of tracking anyone they want, I dunno.
Thank you!!

Pricing wise, we've been thinking to delay until we see traction. The cost of hosting the sites is fairly trivial because they are static output, which means we can let it grow for a while before introducing some kind of paid something (extra cards, or extra looks, or domains).
Browser profiling and fingerprinting with new Java Script side channel attacks
That was a low blow. I didn’t know whether to upvote it or downvote it. The Apple fanboy in me want to downvote it. But truth is truth - upvoted....
Have any examples so we can see for ourselves?
Sweden (5.1) is very close to the world average (4.9 tCO2/capita/year) in fossil CO2 emissions, so they're doing really well for a developed country. (2017 data from Wikipedia.)
Thing is, we kicked off climate change a long time ago. Even if we cut our population in half, we’d still cook the planet at our 1970s levels of emissions.
Let me put it that way: CO2 might be mitigated at some point, but plastic in oceans is a lost cause.
What did you do to make it use less ram? I'm in three workspaces, two mostly inactive, and I need to shut it down every few days to free up a few gigs.

There's not even a lot going on there, somebody pasting an image url that gets shown or a link that gets a preview is pretty much it - still, it starts with about 200-300mb per workspace and gains weight faster than I do over the holidays.
The only successful example I can think of was RIM rebranding itself as Blackberry. There are probably a few others. Although they're likely all narrowing examples (company changes name to focus on single product) rather than widening ones like this.
https://peterattiamd.com/heart-disease-begin-tell-us-prevent...

All the articles are very good.
From Apple's perspective, it seems clear that the in-between is the iMac Pro. It might not meet your needs for whatever reason, of course.
In my school days the main scare problem was acid rain.
Boris Johnson allowed arms sales to Saudis after Yemen bombing
That's actually an interesting point. Uber Eats and the various scooter companies are just the very beginning of these companies trying to branch out into new areas of revenue. Whether they can branch out into profitability... I guess we'll see!
I'm not saying you should believe Apple. What I'm saying is that it is completely fair to criticize them based on what they say and do.

Apple promised a Mac Pro replacement for pro customers but delivered a new Mac Pro only for the high end of those customers. That is why they are being criticized.
I like your cynical take, but I'm not convinced it's actually the goal of management in all cases. I could see it drifting in that direction over time regardless. That said, some founders are actually idealists. I frequently discuss this topic with people who are aware of the invisible hierarchy problem and are interested in potential solutions. I think there are well-meaning attempts at this, even if they don't work perfectly.
Congrats to everyone involved!!!
Facebook Unveils New Paid Research Program to Track Competitors
It's hard to talk about things without names. You could use the CVE but it's hard to remember one from the other and is about the same as using no names.
My work's been effectively operating as a flat organization for the last several months as our manager's been away on leave. It works for the most part as we all have our own jobs we do and all know what we should be doing. Until it doesn't work. There's no accountability with the schedule and a big communication problem between everybody. When things change, nobody really knows whats going on, when mistakes are made everybody's quick to point finger and problems take longer to solve. You really notice the lack of a manager when they're gone. All these little things that used to be taken care of now fall onto whoever happens to be around to deal with it and it's definitely been causing problems we never used to have before.
Correct. Also called cougar.
Marijuana’s Black Market 2.0
I wouldn't expect that level of disk IO to cause issues dragging existing windows around without some deeper lock contention or something, it does not behave like just IO bound. Stuff being slower, totally, but not to this level. It was never an issue before the filesystem upgrade.
When we recommend our users to use Firefox instead of Chrome
Building A scalable data management system for computer vision tasks
The Genesis of “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”
> The TL;DR on "ZOMG we're gonna drown in trash if we don't do something!" is that it was always basically bullshit—we didn't fix it, it was just a made-up problem to begin with.

Er, we sent all the trash to other countries, and they dumped it in the ocean.
When the power is generated, it is usually done so by a 3 phase generator that is separated by 120 degrees of rotation. All 3 phases inside the generator are bonded together on one end. The other end are the 3 current carrying conductors leaving the generator. The bonding of the phases on each side of the conductors is what creates the closed circuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power
I'm sorry but I don't see how what you're describing is different to any of the existing office rental companies out there and if WeWork were valued like them it'd be a completely different story.
Certainly not easy, but if we see Apple and others do it I expect it provides some cost savings / patterns for the next wave (if any of it happens).
An Introduction to the Mathematics of Georg Cantor
IKEA sells in Germany straws from paper. Kids love them. Very light.
YES. The minute we accepted garbage as a fact of life, we started down the incorrect path.

Hoping society can start correcting it.
Looks like it's back up. Their web site was returning a 502 Bad Gateway for about an hour and the General availability on their status site https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ was "The service is unavailable".
I wish Mozilla embraced the red panda instead of the fox.
Can anyone answer whether plastic recycling actually happens? I've tried to search around before but can't find much concrete data on how/where plastic can actually be recycled and what it is recycled into.
> Things have been on a strong downtrend since 2012 and alarms have been ringing loud since around 2014.

Can you elaborate?
Hahaha I didn't even think about that.
When you’re writing code that you 100% sure won’t ever become a performance bottleneck, you still care about time of development. Very often, unless it’s a throwaway code, also about cost of support.

Writing any code at all when that code is not needed is always too slow, this is regardless of any technical factors.
Fantastic post. This is exactly how it goes, especially with a bootstrapped company. Detachment and delegation are everything.
The Silent Meeting Manifesto
You mean laptops that can be serviced without a heat gun? Where's the problem?
I don't understand Brex's USP. Amex gives corporate credit cards. What does Brex do differently?
From a user perspective it's effectively a zero cost feature. Apple should add it in.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I would say its definitely part of a bigger strategy. Simply put, now that Apple is focused on being a Services company over a Hardware company, it doesn't make financial sense to limit its availability to only Apple device users.

I don't doubt for a second that they will make the services behave in a way to drive users towards adopting their hardware too - such as gating certain functionalities.
Kubernetes on the Spot (Instance)
There are several reasons that wasn't a viable option in this case. First and foremost, the problems were usually in explicit code, not the result of optimization. Second, even for problems that are caused by optimization, such an approach tends not to work for something so timing- and workload-dependent. These problems don't cause incorrect behavior every time. The code can pass tests over and over again, and still fail often enough in production to annoy the customer - especially when they're in the kernel so the result is the whole machine crashing. In fact, reducing the optimization level might well reveal new race conditions. Thirdly, performance was one of this system's selling points. Its customers would hardly have tolerated making it slower overall.

Think of it like you would any more common garden-variety race condition. The solution is not to add sleep() calls, even if that appears to work. The solution is to put in the necessary synchronization. Failing to use the right barriers on a data structure that pings between processors is exactly the same as failing to take the right locks when accessing that data structure. It's just easier to get away with when all the code has run on before is x86 processors with strong ordering.

P.S. This same processor did at one point have a bug that prevented locks from working sometimes, but that's a whole different horror story.
It also felt pokey as a result. I really wanted to like it (I switched to Safari on my Mac when it came out) but the Windows version wasn’t worth using outside of development. At least as I remember it.
Stripe Terminal is now generally available in the US
Can Volkswagen Overcome the Dieselgate Scandal by Pivoting to Electric Vehicles?
Part of me thinks that competing propaganda might actually be salutary.
You can also type the first letter of your username then hit Enter.
A Summary of DeepMind’s Protein Folding Upset at CASP13
1. At present I can take a text file even not on the PATH put a shebang on it, mark it executable, and execute it because the underlying medium is a user visible hierarchical data store that I interact with directly. It's not clear how the app store application would be associated with it or even know about it or how say a terminal would borrow the application that it didn't know about to run it.

2. An actual filesystem allows you to run things that aren't in an app store bundle

3. Which app owns the files when An app starts an addon which starts a process which runs an app which accesses a file. Does the last app in the chain own the file? This is challenging because plenty of apps could do things based on arguments passed in that involve modifying the filesystem.

4. The way ios and android handle 2 apps accessing the same file is only acceptable if someone has envisioned the way you want this to happen to some degree on both ends. A file picker works on any type of file and an OS that can't have a file picker seems to be objectively worse whereas adding an image picker would be an upgrade. I enjoy using calibre to manage how ebooks are stored and beets for music but neither is bounded by an underlying system designed by others and neither locks said files into said structure or limits access according to it. Its trivial to all out to calibre including via the cli get the full path to a book for example and do something with it.

It seems fairly clear to me that there several layers of filesystem access.

Applications that should never have access to your filesystem because they are malicious. Avoided by installing only from trusted sources to avoid malware in the first place the best possible line of defense. This also makes it possible to get a list of applications that ought to be revoked and communicate this to users.

Running code that should have no or very very controlled access to the filesystem ordinarilylike the Javascript on this page.

Apps that run as the user on their behalf that accesses the filesystem.

You appear to want to pile a layer on top of the last. This appears to only work for the simpler cases and I'm not even clear what the benefits are supposed to be.
And I suspect there's a secret cabal of mole-men (and -women) who are selecting presidential candidates for the Democratic primaries.

Are either of these claims falsifiable?
>> Now we have to specificlly mention in our integration docs that when we do multi-zone backups, none of those backups are in China.

Similarly I've seen docs which explicitly mention that no EU data is backed up to the US
On hacker news, you just stamp out anything of middling deviance.
> * However the flash memory knows the checksum on the hardware level, and running its own internal checks for data integrity.*

Assuming that the flash controller has no bugs and doesn't fetch the wrong sector/LBA.

The OS asks for LBA X, but instead Y is fetched, and the sum(Y) passes so the data is sent back as "OK". If you don't have checksums at a layer above the hardware, how do you know if the right sector was sent to you? (I've seen reports of ZFS catching errors like this.)
It would have made more sense to call this on "RAMbo First Bleed". Next year it can be "RAMbo First Bleed Part II".
If finding tasks is part of your job that might be a fair criticism.
If we ever successfully colonize the moon, the recreational activity I'm most excited for is being able to fly by flapping wings attached to your arms in pressurized domes (or spheres, if near a space elevator instead).

We aren't strong enough to fly with artificial wings on earth gravity, but it seems like moon gravity could work pretty well.

(I think this idea is from an Arthur C Clarke novel?)
I can't directly refute any of your points, but I also think you are still talking around the problem a bit. The point I was making is that in the cheese grater era all the items you point out where Apply is behind were also true, but the delta between Mac and PC on each of those points seemed much smaller. It was worth the tradeoff to be able to use Mac OS. This is not the case with the latest Mac Pro. The world changes over time, I get it, but I think given that at one time Apple was able to hit that sweet spot, the hope is that maybe they one day will be able to again.
Red Bull X-Alps Race
Really? Isn’t the telemetry in the HTML on most sites?

I assumed they were looking to block any cross-origin fetch that they hadn’t whitelisted.
SEV is a completely different thing than ECC. It encrypts the memory. RAMBleed reads raw physical bits which are encrypted and thus useless when SEV is enabled.

The paper even specifically says that SEV and other similar technologies protect against this.
Unless everyone can spend money drawn from the corporate account, and everyone can fire anyone else, the structure isn't flat. It's just that management is choosing not to manage. There is a difference.
We can leave Microsoft and Apple aside because their IPOs were so long ago, but there were certainly many periods in their history where a "tech savvy" investor would have wanted to drop them from an indexed portfolio because growth had stalled and they had no exciting new products on the horizon to justify their valuation.

On to FANG IPOs. If there weren't people saying they were overvalued at their IPO, their underwriters would have done a very bad job.

Facebook[0] - 'The problem is that the smart money on Wall Street simply doesn't think the company's prospects justify the $105 billion that the offering price implied. And no wonder. That values the company at 108 times 2011 earnings, requiring almost ridiculous financial growth to make sense.'

Amazon[1] - 'Online bookseller Amazon.com's push to sell some 3 million shares for as much as US$13 per share would value the company at $300 million - a pretty penny for a firm that lost about $6 million last year. And Amazon.com's prospectus suggests those losses could grow larger. Bill Bass, an analyst at Forrester Research, attributed the high valuation to "Internet inhalant" - the extra high that Net-related stock offerings can carry with investors. "Some people smoke Internet inhalant and their judgment gets bizarre," Bass said.'

Netflix[2] - 'Netflix is not profitable with an accumulated deficit of $141.8 million. The company had $4 million in operating losses on $30.5 million in revenue for the quarter ended March 31 on $20.4 million in operating losses on $17.1 million in revenue for the same time period the year before.'

Google[3] - '"Although Google enjoys faster growth and higher profitability, we see several risks to its valuation, which may mean the stock ultimately trades at a discount to its peers," says Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Marianne Wolk.'

[0] - https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Facebook-IPO-undersc...

[1] - https://www.wired.com/1997/03/amazon-com-high-on-ipo-so-is-i...

[2] - https://money.cnn.com/2002/05/23/markets/ipo/ipos/index.htm

[3] - https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/lessons-from-goo...
The old Mac Pro wasn't exactly pro, no matter how much Apple says it is.

The new Mac Pro is an actual pro product, at least the higher specced ones. So they did make a replacement.

Is Apple terrible at naming? Yes. Do they throw Pro into the product name for no reason? Yes. Is it better this way? Who knows. They still have the MacBook "pro".
Superbugs in the Anthropocene
> muscle memory makes for very easy pickup of intuitive gestures;

The problem with muscle memory is that the gestures vary between operating systems or even different devices on the same OS if the user has changed settings. Your muscle memory ends up getting in the way instead of helping and causes endless confusion.
I'm sure you've all worked some place that talked about 'meritocracy'. I'm sure most of you have worked some place where every time a promotion happens, people joke about "I thought you were already a <new job title>".

Years ago someone put me onto this phenomenon. Some people in a business have no trouble making decisions and others are hesitant for a myriad of reasons, from self doubt to not wanting to be responsible for the consequences, to just not liking being randomized. These people will line up behind folks who seem confident, and as this manager half-joked, all he really had to do was 'show up' and start making decisions and people would follow him.

The best description I've ever heard of this phenomenon, and describes my own experience, is that people are looking for and will line up behind someone they can trust. If you sound confident they will give you the benefit of the doubt. But if things go wrong and you don't jump on the problem, they get burned and they won't listen to you as much in the future, even if you are ostensibly in charge. Strong opinions loosely held, own your mistakes, be good at troubleshooting, talk to other teams (even knowing things an hour before everybody else makes you look a hell of a lot smarter), and people will defer to you even without a title. Because even if the boat goes down they know you'll go down with it instead of running away. People will take your advice, rank be damned.

That said, there are darker patterns here too, that could easily dominate in a 'flat' organization. Hoarding knowledge forces people to defer to you. There are obvious flavors of this that I don't need to explain, but here's one I see all the time but others miss: modelling systems to exactly reflect your mental processes (instead of a simplified version, see Brian Kernighan on debugging) means nobody else can work on it except for trivial things. This makes people feel stupid, and imposter syndrome stops them from fighting back.

As one of my bosses said, you should fire all of the 'indispensable' people because they are holding up progress. An earlier boss started a new project and wouldn't let a bunch of us work on it because we were 'too important' to the old project. I think maybe 2 of us figured out this was a trap and worked to hand off our stuff.