skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I keep seeing this angst over whether Linux will ever be ready on the desktop. Well, I've been using it exclusively for something like 15 years.

>For most purposes, it has been ready for years.[...] Most people, however, could switch to one of many Linux distributions and be just as productive if not moreso.

If "most people" includes non-technical users, I doubt they could switch to Linux without difficulties.

E.g. a typical non-geek user might be my friend that runs Windows. Some examples of showstoppers that makes Linux totally a non-option:

- Intuit Quicken which she's been using for 20 years. Yes Linux Mint was a possible alternative but its early releases (inside of your 15-year time period) didn't have reliable online downloads from financial institutions. Mint's later partnership with Yodlee api for transaction downloads still didn't make it equal to Quicken. Yes, Quicken is terrible and buggy software but early Mint was even worse for online banking scenarios.

- Netflix streaming was not easy to run on Linux until recently[0]

- AAA games (including recent ones like Fortnite) don't run easily on Linux. Valve Steam Proton is a recent effort.

- iPhone sync with Apple iTunes - running on Linux requires googling for articles of running a Windows vm or Rhythmbox on Ubuntu which may not work with certain iOS updates

- sewing machine embroidery software all runs on Windows and not Linux or even MacOS. The software also requires a dongle for copy-protection and the hardware drivers for the dongles only exist for Windows. Running Windows as a vm inside of a Linux Desktop and exposing the host USB port to the client vm won't fool the dongle software. If the ultimate solution to "Windows in a virtual machine" shortfalls is to dual-boot Windows and Linux, that advanced configuration adds more complexity and it contradicts the ideal of "run Linux desktop exclusively".

For people to run Linux without issue, the person would need to possess technical skills equivalent to you (e.g. a HN poster) -- or the person has a "guardian angel" as on-call tech support (e.g. a son/daughter/friend) to get them over technical issues (like Netflix) with workarounds.

I don't doubt you've been able to run Linux exclusively and there are more examples like you. Nevertheless, it still required a very atypical usage profile to run a Linux desktop exclusively for the last 15 years.

Even today in 2019, I would not recommend the Linux desktop to any of my non-programmer and non-sysadmin type of friends & family unless I was willing to be their on-call tech support to handle their inevitable Windows compatibility issues.

For Linux to work in a mass-consumer-facing situation, it has to be an "appliance" type of installation and "invisible" such that the user doesn't realize they're running Linux. E.g. as the underlying os in Android smartphones, or the os in smart TVs, or the os in Tesla cars.

[0] https://itsfoss.com/watch-netflix-in-ubuntu-linux/
I don't see how inertia would be the reason if you also believe that it has been good enough for 15 years. I would say desktop Linux simply doesn't offer enough unique value for the effort involved in large scale deployments, unless you are someone like Google. Most things that have improved for users in recent years, like web application, actually favours Windows. Because the primary use case for desktop operating systems are becoming what is beyond that of web or smart phone applications. Leaving desktop Linux with the lowest common denominator.
That's Hilary and the Democrats line too, isn't it? Wikileaks and Russians what did it.
In a nutshell: RDP is a good way to access remote systems that are running a window manager of sorts, X is a good way to have remote clients connect to a local X server (the display).

RDP is more closely related to VNC and something like 'screen' than X, which is more like a networked resource that you can access through remote clients.

RDP is an application sharing protocol, X is a screen sharing protocol, the two are radically different from each other which gives each advantages and disadvantages that the other lacks and a bunch of overlap. Most notably, with X security was bolted on as an afterthought. RDP, originally reading the screen contents and sending those over (compressed) does not allow for much interaction with what gets sent over, it is rather low level whereas X sends over display primitives. Again, X's initial - rather naive - implementation made a ton of assumptions because the original implementors had nice fat workstations and fast networks to work with and so the real-world utility of these features was rather limited.

Anyway, you could write books about this and not get all the details, besides the various implementations of both but all that there is to this is that due to their history and intended application the two are very different beasts and X offers a versatility that not a whole lot of people need but when you need that versatility you need it badly.
Microsoft of today is only interested in one thing: earning money. Like any other corporation. if contributing to free software earns money (Azure, Developer mindshare, Store) they will do it. And the Linux foundation knows how to defend itself IP wise.

It is about earning money. RedHat does it. Microsoft does it.
AOSP style is true open source, not Android. There are not too many phones sold with AOSP, and Android is a closed platform built on top of open AOSP core.
After installing Netguard, I was dissapointing to see how OSM sends information from its app to Facebook.. So much for privacy I guess..

Just for clarification, I don't have Facebook installed in my phone, neither have a Facebook account.
Some interesting quotes (can be found in other accounts as well):

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

So, from what I've read, there is also the huge factor of being able to easily source parts, much easier than in the US, and also much easier to change a factory.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-an...
A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language (2002)
They can also be more difficult to refactor and adjust at a later date. This can be especially problematic if you're in an environment where logic needs to be altered rapidly in response to changing external conditions/requirements.
I'm on a 1700 and I completely agree that it's fantastic. Around the time I bought it, Unreal Engine was released for Linux, so naturally I built that for Linux and the cores made it to a lot quicker.

Over the last 6 months or so, I've had lockup issues, and I thought I'd have to buy a new chip or RMA it, but it seems to have been fixed in a recent kernel as I haven't seen the problem in the last few months.

I'm looking around for decent AMD laptops and they're definitely making their way to the market. Lenovo's A and E series laptops look pretty good (though I've heard of throttling on the A series), and I'm waiting for more reviews on the new T series line. I need a laptop soon, but I may be able to wait until Zen 2 chips are available, depending on launch date.

AMD is making a strong comeback, and I'm excited to see what they release over the next few years and that Intel's response will be.
> you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting

That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting that since long before Steve died, too.

Hence the iPad, literally just a screen. Or last year's iPad Pro, where they took the bezel away and there's even less screen, same for the MacBooks. The iMac must be the poster child: literally just a screen.

The less device you see, and the more content (ergo screen), the better.

> The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho

But plastic also chips and breaks. Of all the plastic MacBooks I had, none of them finished life without a few chips of plastic missing. The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well.

I agree that the sharp edges aren't fantastic but, strictly speaking, you're supposed to keep your wrists raised above the keyboard to avoid developing RSI so the edges shouldn't come into it anyway.

I miss the PowerBook G4 design. That was aluminium but had round edges. That design but with modern thinness, that would be nice to have back.
> my hard work.

But it's mostly not their work - Apple's protocol is basically a bad implementation of OpenID Connect.
If you are very certain, do a step back and add a option to circumvent your certainty with a manual option.
It will be certainly useful.
Yes, one usually does and can repair all those things. Except for the pacemaker, which I’m not sure.
It's very "pirate of Silicon Valley", i.e. very old-school Apple: "so sue me". Regardless, the right answer is to engage privately first, to see why they missed that 5% and if there is any way to find agreement, not to go pedal-to-the-metal with public shaming.
If Sapiens Were a Blogpost
One for each continental plate? Adding explenation power and prediction to flat earth science. Its good science, if it can be used to predict and test against ;)
Do Not Use Euronet ATM’s
And that's just browsers... if you provide an API you may be dealing with external users who are a lot further behind than the browsers.

If your API clients are diverse, turning off pre-TLS1.2 versions even now will probably break a lot of them.
Multi-Class Image Classification Using CNN over PyTorch, and the Basics of CNN
I always had this conundrum about how an image goes through a Convolutional Neural Network; in this blog, I try to address it and build a multi-class classifier for classifying apparels from scratch using PyTorch. And no it's not on the MNIST Fashion dataset. It also shows how to work with DataLoaders in PyTorch and many other things. Please have a read and comment down if there are any discrepancies.
I presume they meant that the app sends a normal unencrypted message to clients without Signal. (The user is clearly informed when this will happen). This means you can use Signal as your default SMS app and as your friends start adopting Signal, you'll automatically start sending encrypted messages. It's how I'm using it and appreciate it.
Here's the elegant Snap! visual Y Combinator:

https://imgur.com/cOq8tvR

Visual Lambda: Note how the gray block after the "report", shrink-wrapped around the "call (fn) with inputs (fn) []", is a visual "lambda". It looks like a "gasket" or "baggie" that insulates the code inside from being immediately evaluated, returning a closure instead.
Carbon is obviously a problem longer term but immediately, air conditioners generate heat.

A city full of air conditioners is that much hotter. We're ploughing energy (even renewable) into the air and that's making summer that much hotter. We need to stop.
I really miss wired.

I got into the Internet with their 93 article by William Gibson where they sent him to Singapore.

It was a really neat place to have articles by people like Stephenson and Gibson.
Carnet is one I like, though it's quite early in its development cycle (started less than one year ago, I think). Author is supported trough donations.
It also syncs with nextcloud (and is available as a webapp --nextcloud or standalone), and explicitly takes google Keep as an inspiration. The desktop version has a barebones google keep import feature.

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/carnet

https://github.com/PhieF/CarnetDocumentation

https://carnet.live

I've been on the lookout for such an app as well, and after trying a lot of different ones, this is my favorite so far.
You're forgetting Intel's trouncing in the Pentium4/Athlon XP days also. It's been a while, but I for one am looking forward to a very competitive marketplace for desktop CPUs.
Constricting one's anus can work as a polygraph countermeasure provided that it is done timely with the asking of the "control" questions. This countermeasure so concerns polygraph operators that all federal polygraphers are required to use a seat pad that purports to detect such activity.

Alternative countermeasures include mental activity (such as thinking exciting thoughts, or doing math in one's head) and tongue-biting.

For more on polygraph countermeasures, see Chapter 4 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector:

https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml
The Panacea Trap
I cannot answer your question. I can just tell you that they brought back Dave Cutler from retirement for this concept found in XBox and now Windows 10. This is definitely not that everyone's VM.

And if you do not know Dave Cutler... Well he is a VMS veteran (a system which was also ground up virtualized) who designed the Windows NT Kernel. He is essentially a legend in the field of operating systems and engineering. There is a nice documentation around him.
"If Iranian government agrees to the inspections (which is a big question why it should), then there is no purpose for them to hide the program from their own public."

Sure there is. It's to make them appear to be defending themselves from a nefarious foreign plot. 'We cheated because we can' is not a good PR point even in those regimes.

"If Iranian government agrees to the inspections (which is a big question why it should)"

The truth of the matter is that the world doesn't want a nuclear arms race in the ME, nor do we want crazies which threatened to destroy another state to have nukes. That is treating Iran uniquely, but it's a unique regime with unique behaviour.

"So the countries which have significant nuclear stockpiles cannot go around and tell other countries to suck it up."

In our reality they can. That may not be ideal, but it is stable and prevents new world wars.

"Why do you defend sanctions as a tool, then?"

To get an inspection deal without sunsetting clauses and other loopholes, to pressure the regime to stop its malign foreign behaviour. I'd have also liked a change in the human rights situation, but that's apparently not a goal of this US administration.
On Software and Salmonella: Shouldn’t we avoid digital food poisoning?
Fails to login with SIP accounts of eg sipgate, but works a linphone account. Regularly crashes on desktop.

I came back trying gnu ring every couple of months only to realize nothing changed.

I wish ekiga got revisited instead.
I recall the story of Micron's first Chinese fab: 1 millisecond out phase brownout and they loose few megabucks instantly, and like that during every electrical event.

Giant UPSes are not an option in the industry because fabs eat oodles of electricity, and it is cheaper to loose a megabuck once a year than build a stabilisation/ups plant
The fact that it creates multiple intermediate arrays is a sign of the bad design in js ... and why (IMHO) if you want to do functional programming, sticking to a functional programming language can be a better option.
The brain rewires - literally.

So whatever you are used to - you are used to it because your brain wired itself to recognize those patterns. So obviously, when you look at something you are not used to, you are not wired for, it takes a lot longer to process because a lot more of the brain needs to get involved. However, with some time the brain rewires and what was alien now seems completely natural.

Of course, this is within larger limits, you cannot adapt to everything and not to everything at the same speed.

Anyway, my point is, for any such comment people make they should make this test: Do I feel how I feel because of the above, or do I have actual hard knowledge that there is a deeper effect? Meaning, is my comment simply a report of my current wiring state (so, mostly useless to others), or do I have to share actual insights?

Then there's what I wrote in another comment here, about disagreements on waaayyyy to general topics, where people might not actually disagree nearly as much if there was a specific context, but since the topic is so broad everybody comes with their own imagined scenario, depending on their own past experiences, which may very well be best served with very different approaches, but since the discussion remains abstract everybody keeps defending their opinion. Which may actually all be right - for the concrete scenarios they all have in their heads.

For example, there are several commenters here arguing against nested ternaries. I did the same for the longest time. But TypeScript's conditional types require - and officially advertise - exactly this pattern. The way they write it it looks perfectly clear, and I found myself agreeing with there actual concrete code (i.e. types; I posted the link in another comment here).
Wouldn't we have eight seasons then?
> Buttons looked like buttons

That's an odd one to focus on. Buttons only ever showed in the navigation bar at the top; one rarely, if ever, saw buttons other than to go back and to edit, and since the newer design, the focus has been on swipe gestures for navigation.

iOS 7 did go too far. I think people forget how much the design has improved since then, though.

> There must have been a good reason

All those designs looked hideous, hokey, and everybody hated them? That was made all too clear when those designs made the leap to OS X Lion.

Even back in the iOS 6 days, I thought iOS was beginning to look old and tired.

I think the extensive use of textures and animations (like Passbook's card shredder when deleting a pass) also limited to what extent iOS could be made to dynamically scale up between iPhone and iPad. I'm fairly certain that iOS 7 is when the foundations for this started, with a cleaner design that could more easily adapt to larger devices and different orientations.

I feel like I'm making it up when I say Autolayout started with the new design, but I'm sure the new design was initially made with Autolayout in mind. It wasn't long after the new design that the first iPhone with a different-sized screen came out. Since developers started adopting Autolayout and the new sizing system (well, newer than springs and struts from before) that iPad software can now easily adjust for four display sizes and adapt to macOS in Catalina.
Macos is not "mostly Linux-compatible". It has unixy tools from GNU and other places, but it has little to do with Linux. Ecosystem, native development is different. Some tech is badlyemulated, e.g. Docker containers. If anything, use of Macos shows that people found a way to work with a shiny unixy desktop software without Linux and without software freedom.
This is scandalous! And very depressing. One would think, that these topics have been understood in the meanwhile, especially in a community like San Francisco, which once was the stronghold of the 68ers.

A society, that can't criticize itself is a weak society.
It did come up explicitly in the DCMS subcommittee hearing on the incident, including headlines that the exec producer claimed he had no idea if they worked or not.

I note that they haven't come up in Love Island yet this year as they normally do, and I suspect they won't.
Super sane choice, C has had its time, Rust is an improvement over C++, but lacks higher kinded types and other niceties that are easy to implement in C++. C++ is also used in a large number of projects that fuchsia needs to interface with, such as skia, the graphics stack and so on. This is one of fuchsias competitive advantages. Moreover FIDL (fuchsia interface description language) allows for components to be implemented in a number of other languages.
I think the recent link on HN (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopam...) gives us a clue. Consuming gives us instant gratification in the form of a dopamine hit. Whilst producing unreliably gives us a hit only once we complete a significant chunk.

I have been aware of this dynamic for a long time and by recognising that we develop an addiction to dopamine we can take the sorts of steps that are applied to weaning off any addiction. There are numerous articles on the interwebs on different processes. You might need to experiment to find the one that works well for you.

The other thing that I do is to "chunk it down", i.e. pick one small, manageable piece of a task. One that takes me no more than 90 minutes and do that. Once completed I do an affirmation and take some time out. Then tackle another chunk.

If you have trouble concentrating for 60-90 minutes then I would suggest embodying some of the strategies in "Deep Work" by Cal Newport.

I find that making a short (3-5 item) ToDo list each evening for the next day helps too.

Finally, it is best to recognise that there are many interlocking pieces to making these changes, and it takes time. And don't beat yourself up when you drop the ball. Take some time out and muck in again.

I no longer have any social media apps on my phone or notebook, only on the desktop and check them at most once a day, sometimes not for several days. I leave my phone on silent and only return emails once or twice a day. But HN -- that is the one "luxury" that I browse for a few minutes between chunks.
You got distracted by the Rose Tinted Glasses Brigade, but I think you're absolutely right.

On top of that, I think there were other design considerations — how to make iOS' scale up to iPad more easily (remember when Siri was in a little box in the middle of the screen?) to the point where iPad apps can now be adapted with a checkbox to run on macOS. I think the groundwork started in iOS 7.
What is this repo based on? Was Microsoft working on this since 2004? It's commit history shows it was started in 2004??
I thought blockchain doesn't solve trust issues, you still need to trust the developers of the blockchain.
not usually, because:

1. usually a library has a wider range of features than you need. So you don't have to rewrite the whole library, just the bits you need, and you end up writing much less code because don't have to integrate the bits you need with the bits you don't need.

2. you do have to spend a lot of time understanding the interface of the imported library and writing integration code to use it correctly.

3. (as others have said) there's a lot of time spent auditing the library (and all its dependencies) to make sure it's not doing bad things. And that auditing work needs to be repeated every time any dependency of the library updates a version.
This is especially important if you're doing anything with customer information involved - you're liable if you import a library that imports a dependency that quietly sends your customer's personal information to a url in Russia.

4. you may have to make architectural compromises to fit the library in; it might not support concurrent access, or idempotent calls, and that may cause more time loss in the long run than just writing what you need yourself.

5. the library becomes a black box, and your code becomes plumbing connecting the black boxes together. Trying to debug your application, or improve performance, or make it more robust, is impossible because you can't change any of the black boxes and your plumbing code does nothing important.

that's most of why I prefer to roll my own code rather than import a dependency in most cases (crypto being the notable exception).
Imagine if you spent 5 years trying to make the world a better place or fight cancer.

There is so tremendous time waste in developer world just inventing new langs or rewritting new frameworks that do the same.
Heh do you recall Mondo 2000

It was what wired was inspired by...

Also since we are on the topic: 2600 was a great phreaking resource back in the day... 2600 may still be going though...