skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Related article from the Daily Post:

https://padailypost.com/2019/06/17/sen-wiener-uses-gut-and-a...
We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.
Weird, the one I've see spells it out. But they aren't intending to say the image format.
Slack is a $16 billion dollar company on paper but still not profitable and showing no signs of profitability. It’s not like Slack is printing money.
That's exactly why I use Rust, I can not be sure when I get enough confident with C++ to not make my program crash in unexpected ways.
Since when has a company making poor over-priced decisions ever justified a better valuation? It's the complete opposite.

If Airbus decided to pay twice as much for planes would you say they should be valued higher?

While there is intangible benefits that come from deciding to setup shop in one of the most expensive cities on Earth I'm far from convinced a messenger app company couldn't thrive elsewhere.

What they offer is not unique nor difficult to create. Doubt they'll ever manage to pull in $1B a year to justify that price, the required business model for it would have their customers looking elsewhere overnight.
For me, Slack is good because it adds fun to the workplace, especially in one too big to chat to all these far flung people

You get to know people you work with before you even met them in person

And you swap gifs and jokes. It just helps built a positive culture I think
Microsoft and Kano are launching a build-your-own Windows 10 PC kit
IIAOPSW's law states the number of self proclaimed laws grows exponentially.
Interesting. Nearly 100% of the comments here are negative, perhaps because the title paints things in black and white?

Life before workplace group chats was really painful. We had IRC for those of us who knew how to use it, but it was never going to pass muster in a corporate office. Email was next to meetings as "the worst thing about work" and you were both drowning in it, but never able to get the things you needed over it. 1-1 chat with AIM, etc helped, but then every task went off into the void until those people reported back.

I love slack. We went from Hipchat to Flowdock to Slack over the years and Slack is the one that gets pretty much everything right. I've got channels for every client we work with, and they actually participate. I've got different Slack instances for work, friend groups, my hackerspace, etc. I can flip through and stay up to date on WAY more than I would without it.

And most importantly, people actually use the thing. It's easy, it's on everything, and it gives me the option to ping them or not as needed. Not everything is the same level of urgency.

It doesn't kill mail - mail still has it's place for longer form messages that need more thought and a deeper response, but damn if Slack isn't the right tool for a lot of my jobs.
I agree, I've never seen an article with "Monad" and "JavaScript" in the title propose anything even remotely approaching elegant, and very rarely do they even offer any functionality you don't get built-in once you're at async/await-level language support.

Yes, monadification makes it easier to construct new functionality out of tiny parts, I'm not arguing with that at all. What it costs though is more than performance and debugability, but just simple readability goes right out the window, as a rule.
Or you could mind your own business about something that doesn’t affect you at all.
To start, there's nothing linking the left and right variants together in the implementation shown in the blog. In Haskell and F# (never written f# but I assume) left and right are variants of a data type. In this blog they are just 2 disjoint classes. Those classes just happen to have the same functions implemented, but there's nothing specifying that to be the case.

In my javascript (well, typescript) version, I use an abstract base class and override the rightMap, leftMap etc versions. These concrete classes are internal, only the abstract one is exported.

There's no support for sum types in js

Using TSc is a linter, there 100% is support. I'd be happy to demonstrate if you're interested. Though it's a bit beside the point, despite having access to them I didn't implement them that way as I prefer method chaining.

or good support for pattern matching.

What pattern matching do you need for an either type? I enjoy pattern matching for lists, but even when using languages with pattern matching I don't use them for Option/Maybe, or Either. I was under the impression it was an anti-pattern to use pattern matching where a suitable function existed.

But there's no denying that you're shoehorning a concept into the language that it doesn't have good support for.

I deny it. IMO you can create a perfectly usable Either Type in any language that supports classes, objects and generics (well, maybe not C++). There's a lot I miss in JS from Ocaml and F#, but monadic error types are not one of them, because they're easy to implement and just as ergonomic.

There's more than two ways to skin a cat, and after going back and forward between OO and FP for a while I realised I could accomplish the bulk of what I wanted in both paradigms.
Maybe because the real future is web apps and has been for more than a decade now.
But I don't see anyone claiming a native app is the difference to profitability.
Seems like I’m in the tiny minority here, but since adopting Slack at work my emails have basically been reduced to just automated github notifications and the such, or the very rare capital-S-Serious topic threads.

Starring channels I care about and muting everything else, I end up with a way more flexible communication medium where I can still decide when to respond, and do way more things than I could with email (eg edit past messages)

Am I crazy?
>He should know the difference between making something useful and making something hard to simulate.

You're talking about the guy who showed the computational complexity of Boson Sampling.
There was also an Armageddon spell in Ultima7 which killed off the majority of NPCs, leaving only a handful alive. The dialogue with the survivors was pretty cool.
Overpaid executives. I worked for a darling in the security space that has not posted a profit ever in it's 7 years post-IPO (they could at this point, but choose not to). Yet the company paid the CEO, multiple years I was there, over $300M annually. The current CEO makes a "base" $128M and has incentives of over $400M dangling in front of him. Yet any time the company misses guidance do you know what they blame? Paying the "field" (sales and field engineering) too much in commission and stock grants. Yet if you roll up all executive and board grants on an annual basis you're north of a Billion (with a B) in pay. Yet... No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.

Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses for said show. The return on that is miniscule.

Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive pockets as quickly as possible.
Which desktop mail client do you recommend? I keep trying to leave g-apps, but the search (and address autocomplete) keeps dragging me back. I'm more than happy to pay for quality, if that makes a difference.
Why should existing folks be given preferential access to urban job markets? No one born outside a city chose to be born there.
It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone.

The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.

It's not a problem.
In the same way Linux is perpetually the future of desktop?
We use slack at the three companies I currently work on and it's mostly a distraction and a place to quickly share files. It's good for some shared notifications. My most active slack is one I have with friends.
I'm sorry, did anyone mention quantum effects..?
If it’s been the future for a decade, and that future isn’t here ... is it really the future of applications?
They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.
> He should know the difference between making something useful and making something hard to simulate.

Please provide evidence of this claim.
Slack targets the same market that made Microsoft big: the corporate sector. For big companies, even recurring licensing costs for Slack are trivial, and it gives the managers of the bigger companies a feeling of importance to be able to negotiate big bulk discounts. In this corporate sector market, all you need to do to get rich is to be the established player, which Slack very much seems to become.

As for the easily being replaced part, Slack will just buy up any competitor while its small. Just like how Facebook did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook is deemed uncool by the younger generation but not Instagram and Whatsapp.
Age comes faster than people expect. People say they will start saving later, turn around and they are already 35 (Or older) and later came sooner than they expected.
I'm 33 now and have been saving like you since I was 28, but I only had that realization of how fast time moves because until 27 I was trying to be a professional athlete. One day I woke up and realized it was too late for that dream and I didn't want the same thing to happen with retirement.
Thanks, I'd imagine an extremely small number of proofs could be verified this way
Electronic payments completely exclude the unbanked and cost proportionally far more for low-income brackets. Cash is the only near-zero or zero cost transaction method available.
Slack can replace email for certain things, namely intra-company discussion where you wind up CCing half a dozen people anyway. But I'm not going to start getting receipts or reset my password over slack.
i've seen this when people dont use jQuery and think they are smarter than John Resig.
If all you want Slack for is for IRC style conversations then there are lots of tiny Slack clients. My favorite being wee-slack that I use every day.

I swear people complain about Slack being bloated like the majority of us aren't using Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, VS Code, Atom, IntelliJ all day. This is something that at best is a mild annoyance to people outside HN. There's zero business value in developing desktop software that is lightweight because if people are willing to pay $5/user/month for it they're willing to give their employees computers capable of running it.

We're in a forum of hackers -- we're supposed to feel smugly superior about our 500kb terminal Slack clients that have a built-in lisp interpreters.
Building a DIY Router in 2019
>net loss of nearly $139 million

Even that seems like a lot to spend, and that is just the loss...

I wonder where the money goes.

Granted it is a big impressive product but still it would be interesting to track expenses for a company as they approach unicorn status.
From the filing it's apparently $157M R&D, $233M marketing, and $112M "general and administrative costs".
If Nevin's law is true, then qbit computational power will grow at a doubly exponentially rate rather than simply exponentially as in Moore's law of bit pushers. That alone is apocalyptic.

But that's not the qbit's only trick. They have a talent for pattern recognition that bits can't match, and pattern recognition is the key to autonomous agents. For good or ill, such agents have the power to leverage human will enormously. That has a high potential for apocalypse, and doubly exponential qbits would make that happen much sooner.
They will be if they inject ads in between your messages (free version only).

"Rid Belly Fat NOW! Click Here!"
I think the pure-web play will end up being a better decision in the long run tbh.
Probably true in some ways, yes, though I grew up with relatives who came here from Sweden. And I definitely identify more as American than Swedish.

At the same time, though, should we then say that all English-speaking Americans have more in common than whatever ethnic stock they came from in another country, whether Mexicans or Asians or whatever group? Or do you say that just because the Bavarians are "white"?
Shout out to FlowDock, which has far superior threading!

We waited for ever for threading to come to slack... and when it landed we were so disappointed.
> In a sense, quantum computing needs an upper bound due to its computational complexity.

You mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWPP_(complexity)
My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.

It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.

I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.
FWIW, The ReasonML, Rust, and Elixir language all have active communities on Discord. It really is pretty good for the use case.
Do Microsoft and Apple really want native apps? I've got the opposite impression: they've tried very hard to herd desktop apps into Apple Store model. Third party vendors, like Adobe, are also forcing clients to adopt subscription schemes.
This makes me want to reinstall it just to see this again. It's been too long since I've played it at any rate!
Any tool can be used to cause harm. Let’s start suing car companies for individuals who use their vehicles to slaughter innocent pedestrians. Or, HELL, let’s sue gun makers for all the mass shootings!
The Flying Saddle
Not really comparable, the web already has massive adoption, just needs to get better at high-performance client apps. And with WebAssembly + PWAs, and WebGPU in development, it's getting very close.
I'd recommend BetterTouchTool and things like finger swipes for volume up/down and brightness up/down and showing things like Spotify. Originally started with Vas3k preset but eventually replaced things with the built in widgets and gestures
If you also have an iPad, the Touch Bar will make an appearance on that when using it as a second screen in Catalina's upcoming Sidecar feature: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/05/apple-sidecar-app-has-t...

Not as useful as when it's right next to the keyboard, but that's probably the closest other Macs are going to get.

I could sort of imagine Apple making a desktop keyboard with one, but it seems better suited to a wired keyboard than bluetooth. You'd have to recharge the battery way more often.
72 Caprice, mild tune 400, 700R4 semi-automatic valvebody.
R&D expenses will presumably not grow at the same rate
Trello is a decent product! (but not created by Atlassian)

Jira I've always hated... gawd. Just something about the way it does thing... so complicated. Hated that product.

BitBucket is what it is - almost never used the web interface.

Confluence is their other product... also not great and just a bit annoying to use for some reason.
I don't even think they need to make a native app; I use plenty of Electron apps day to day, like VSCode, Atom, GitHub Desktop and they're all fine.

Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops.

I've tried it on three laptops from two vendors all with 16gb of memory, 100% SSD and an i7.

I've got Mac user friends that tell me they've never had any of the above issues, and I believe them. I've used it on a Mac, though not as a daily driver, and it's fine.

It just feels to me like Windows is a second tier platform for Slack, where they're fixing the bare minimum to not lose market share.
Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.
...and when you encounter a person whose skills cannot, at present and for whatever reason, be elevated above the minimum wage floor what do you do?
Mozilla has been very destructive, and I have had to restrain Firefox in a number of different ways. It's Updater.app will disregard your wishes and repeatedly download updates over and over again. This happened to me when I had to turn in an assignment and I was on a 2G connection a few years ago. Most of their updates are unidirectional, even though they don't need to be. And major features are quietly removed, as if it is just normal for your car's speedometer to disappear one morning. This ends up feeling like gas-lighting. At least Chrome's updates are small and hard to notice, but Firefox has all the same disregard for users, except they are very clumsy about it. And the official response from them has been that if their updates destroy your profile folder, that you should have made a backup and it was your fault for assuming that their software wouldn't do a destructive update.
This is an _excellent_ Radio Documentary on a Russian Pianist that mentions these records 'Music on the Ribs'(41:00~). He was persecuted and sent away to work camps.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03csqbn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadim_Kozin
Thanks for this. When the Multics source was released a few years ago, I really wanted to play around with that environment. It's nice to know there's something a mere mortal can install and use.
I would replace "the future" with saying that it's much more profitable for vendors and less convenient for users, so it's being adopted as fast as vendors can overcome users's resistance.
Coincidentally I also just upgraded my personal laptop from a 2012 retina MacBook Pro to the 2019 i9 MacBook Pro!

Long story short I think the touchbar is totally useless. I have it set to emulate regular function keys right now (expose, launchpad etc)

However everything else is top notch and well worth it. The touchid is fantastic, and you will immediately enjoy the difference. Screen is amazing, 8 cores is super nice. Also I might be in the minority but I actually prefer the feel of the keyboard vs the previous unibody keys.

Touchbar is a dud but the 2019 version is well worth it otherwise imho.
I don't think they do, most "office worker" computer resources are way over provisioned, at least in the developed countries.

Does resource consumption matters to me? yes, but that is because I compile stuff, run VMs, do simulations, like many other developers.

My grandma or dad at his office? they could do just fine with 1/10th of their resources.

This is not an argument for wastefulness, but the reality of business world and the value of computing resources.
Another small but nice utility is Haptic Touch Bar. It uses the click feedback mechanism in your trackpad to make the computer tap slightly when you hit the Touch Bar.

Makes it feel a bit more tactile and I'm surprised Apple didn't build some sort of feedback like that in by default.

Using the trackpad mechanism is a little cheesy, but it could have its own haptic hardware.
My company just switched from Slack to Teams.

I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.
I love the keepass ecosystem, but would never recommend it to family who isn't very computer literate, and the iOS offerings are poor, with kypass being the only full functioning one, and it's closed source and a little buggy. I worry a little bit about using it to manage my passwords.
Is politico a credible news source for this sort of thing? It would be so much fun to be on the committee tackling this.
Hulu, Xbox Live and Reddit Go Down Wednesday Afternoon
I miss Screenhero.

That was an amazing implementation of an application.
I have sort of a weird theory about this.

Unless you are extremely self-motivated, I think it might be better to be 80% financially independent than 100%.

Having forces acting on you to get you out of bed and be useful might be the best thing for you.

Yes, by all means, don't live paycheck to paycheck or have to work in a demeaning way.

But there have been studies showing that mortality goes up for people who have retired.
Not a fan of Slack but they do have more than chat: voice and video, screen share, drawing on screen, shared control
I'm only posting this because I think Hulu is still mostly broken for a lot of users? Search function not working, 404's on most shows.
Those are still native apps. I believe parent is comparing to bloated Electron crap that requires an entire Chromium instance to put a GUI on what is basically IRC and text editors.
I am not sure what else you mean by ‘at a fundamental level’.

Get enough neurotransmitters of the right type at the receptors of each neuron and it fires. At the level of chemistry that’s very much computable. It’s only by digging one step below that and saying you need to simulate quantum effects for some reason that doing so in a chip becomes an issue.
There's another city in India, Vrindavan, where widows goes to die, and it's probably the grimmest place I saw in India.

https://womennewsnetwork.net/2007/11/05/nothing-to-go-back-t...
Thunderbird?
Reverse Engineering the Sound Blaster 1.0 Card
No, design tools & frameworks can also evolve to make them more easily. It doesn't always have to be as cumbersome as it is now.
We had /giphy banned b/c of inappropriate use.
It’s fundamental that some members of the public are problems. By prohibiting the content but keeping the people around, they are curating a culture where predators are allowed to roam on the platform as long as they don’t cross a specific line.

They do this because acknowledging and dealing with bad users would also mean impacting fake users that make them money with ad fraud, growth metrics and ginning up engagement.

End of the day, if you operate a social platform, and you have people uploading child pornography and animal torture video, you should do everything in your power to make the user go away, for good.
And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it.

Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.

Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.

I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!
A typical system has dozens or hundreds of processes running even when nothing is going on. If they all had their own copy of every system library in RAM, it wouldn’t look so free. Especially on mobile devices.
What does a subscription have to do with native apps though? All of Adobe's apps are native apps even though they require a subscription license.
That can't be right... according to this https://www.investopedia.com/highest-paid-ceos-2019-4687532

Musk was the highest paid (and that was incorrect, he was not paid that much - that was the max.)
I would take this comment a step further.

Why should anyone have credentials for my car, including the car manufacturer?