skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Duplex is making websites redundant. Designers like me are now faced with the possibility that we could ‘optimize’ the experience by simply removing it altogether and have the AI interact with the server instead.

This was one of the original points of HTML and the original design of the web. The Semantic Web meant that 3rd party and automated assistants would be able to control it. Burners-Lee described it like so:

> I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Everything goes full circle, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Where voice assistants are concerned, this is a largely unexplored UX space. Voice assistants in the future are not going to be the same as they are today, because our design trends are going to evolve as we learn more.

If those trends move towards predictable interactions over interpreted ones, and if we decide that there are times we want to use assistants without physically talking to them, will we see a resurgence of text-based assistants? Will we eventually go full circle all the way back to command lines, just under a different name?
Linked from the open letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311000
Iphone user. Recently i tried to find an app to manage torrents on a server. Nothing for iPhone but it looked like there are options for Android.
That sounds pretty darn good. I wonder, does Rust run on it? I mostly do C, C++, Rust and Python development. Basically the only things I need besides those are Emacs, Firefox, and a tiling window manager.

The issues show up because I'm a hyperpolyglot when it comes to programming languages. So for instance I'm thinking about trying J (which I've messed with in the past) and Idris. As you can probably guess, having a common OS is nice for this.
Can You Teach Yourself to Be Creative?
It really isn’t. They used to sell to a very discerning but tiny slice of the public who was very bought into the brand. Now the sheer numbers dictate that they are addressing a much larger slice of the market (most of the market in some geographies and product categories) that isn’t anywhere near as bought in to the brand.
What I love about all this is we managed to get networked together in time to enjoy the roots of computing together.

I had no idea the fun 8 bit, and older machines would still see development and innovation.

Makes me happy, and I know there is fun to be had when I get old.
This isn't necessarily on-topic, but how is Duplex going to deal with Captchas -- particularly when its doing 100% automated things like remembering to book an appointment in the future?

Are we going to see an industry shift away from the belief that a physical human needs to be at a website in the future? Is there going to be some kind of back-door where Duplex won't need to solve Google Captchas?

It's hard for me to look at Duplex without thinking that it's something of an admission that bots and automated assistants are a legitimate way to interact with the web, and that we should be trying to block behaviors, not agents.
Yes, on the last. Captchas are meant to increase revenue by decreasing fraud, not blocking AI from helping customers spend money on your service.
Like others are saying here, there's more access to the underlying system than iOS. There are applications on Android to record calls and there's the ability for applications to send texts (you can send texts from your web browser with MightyText for example)
While this is interesting info, it's seemingly unrelated to the article.

The article is explaining why random DNA damage doesn't cause cancer in plants like it does in some animals.
This is a side note, maybe it's been covered before.
Has anyone noticed that microsoft.com runs on Apache now?

http://dpaste.com/3HTHQ96.txt
I never understood why it is called linear 'programming'. Why programming instead of optimization ?
So why is Apple pushing all these Ive bashing articles? Just part ways with some class Tim...
The Cold War was far from cold. The Korean war, Bay of Pigs and then the various proxy wars that each side supported whilst pretending not being part of. Like the Soviet-Afghan war where the US funded, trained and supplied $billions of munitions to the Taliban. Or the rush to get influence of every revolutionary or post-independence third world nation (hence the coining of third world). Sustained hostile military stand off to keep that containment. Constant cat and mouse in the air and at sea. Every frigate, "research vessel" or "fishing" trawler, backfire or bear bomber got a scrambled escort, every exercise a response. Any one of which could have turned it hot. It got close often enough. However much it seemed like a game watching it on the news twice a week throughout my teens and beyond.

None of which are really comparable with today.

Today? A minor trade war, and some considerable industrial espionage, proven or not. There's barely even minor mention let alone posturing over Taiwan, Hong Kong or the airfields being built on China Sea islands. There's no stand off, aside from the N/S Korea border that's remnant of the Korean war stalemate. It's going to take a huge escalation to go hot (or cold war).

You really see them as comparable? I don't, not even slightly close, except only for the few shades of McCarthyism in the feature article.
That's a great point. And that combined with the cryptic nature of many error messages could easily make debugging a nightmare for people who don't speak English...
The $99 yearly developer program fee is hardly Apple getting "their cut".
The title makes it sound more like the inevitable requirement for releasing the game, though with $1.1 billion profit (figure from few months back) it's more like the human cost for maximizing profits.
This is why watches are a big deal. Being able to talk to your watch and have it order for you, show images.

Too bad I hate wearing watches.
I was going to say that in my ignorant perspective, galls and other such growths sure remind me of cancer.
And yet we appear to be debating.
sizeof does not perform evaluation of its argument in the traditional sense, so this is not an issue here.
The Pike Programming Language
I think this is a natural run of things. Junior people are in India, and always stay junior in the sense: their oursourcer companies never get hired to do critical stuff, or that's just a mistake.

Senior people are those who started off writing open source as a hobby, built up a great github profile, got hired into a small and poorly funded startup to do a job which a senior would do (because that startup didn't have a better alternative), broke some things, built experience, and proceeded to work in normal places as a senior.

This is how i see it should happen in a perfect world. It's just the international division of labor: if you have a low budget to pay someone do low-impact coding you will have a better bang for the buck spending it in India, not hiring a junior in the Valley. When you need to do serious stuff, you need local people of a senior level.

There is no place left for an American junior, as well as for Indian senior, too (their companies operate, or at least should in the perfect world operate, in outstaffing mode so they don't really need architects, only job for a senior developer may be doing interviews, probably).
What part baffles you?
My personal experience was at Siemens VDO (Automotive). And here was the layout: teams (me part of one with 5 other programmers) -> team leader (programmer also, my direct boss) -> groups (my group was BCM - Body Control Module) -> Group leader (non-programmer, the middle manager) -> Department (Hardware for me) -> Head of department -> Board of directors -> CEO.
After a few weeks I started to learn that the middle managers roles are to make sure to set broad goals within their groups/teams and to make sure resources are available to programmers to make those goals achievable before deadline.
So my interaction with the middle management was very easy - give them the list of resources I need it to make sure the goals are done before deadline. And in doing so I've learned the absolute best truth about this - power is a balance. I have the power, as a programmer, to make life miserable to a middle manager if he failed to fulfill my list of demands. Also he had the power to make my life miserable if he fulfilled his part of the bargain and I do not achieve those goals before deadline. So after learning this truth instead of taking a "sir, yes sir" ass-kissing attitude like usually people do when they meet somebody above them on the ladder, I started to treat them as buddies with "Hi George, how's the house redecoration working" style. Definitely dispelled any tensions and made both of our lives easier.
Also I had on other organization I worked for a stuck-up-ass type who expected everybody to bow before him. Since I was never the bow-before-you type sure we did a collision shortly after I started working there. My direct boss also told me to suck it up because he was afraid of that guy too. I didn't like it so next thing I did I went directly to CEO and complained about that stuck-up-ass manager and that he was making my life hard without a real reason. Long story short, for the remaining of my time there (another year) that guy was only honey and sugar with me while still remaining an a*hole with the rest. It all depends of how you crush the bad behavior on 1st encounter in the end.
"When camping, I enjoy pegging the guys" can also have a wildly different (sexual) meaning.
Of course, the next generation of pencil and iPad charges differently - and without question in a more sensible manner. Are you QUITE sure you’re not attributing to incompetence what is obviously better explained by shipping schedule?
Yep. Funnily enough, it was a lawsuit against Microsoft that triggered this. A court said that Microsoft had to give the group in the class action compensation for not giving them ESPP (https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-...) and health benefits etc.

(My recollection is that since ESPP was given to every employee, but stock options were supposedly merit-based, they were able to sue for ESPP and not options, contrary to what the article says)

Anyway, that led to a hard separation of temps vs permanent employees in the tech industry, and probably other industries with similar compensation schemes.

Of course, US companies have always been scummy with regards to this kind of thing. I remember when Microsoft moved receptionists from being permanent employees to temps. There were probably fewer than 50-60 affected at that point, so it just felt like unnecessary cheapness to me. For a company that was making dozens of people millionaires every day at that point (mid 90s).

You can blame those sorts of things on the drive for shareholders to extract the last drop of blood from a stone. The management must show growth in stock, damn the human toll.

Game companies on top of the perm/temp caste system, also have a QA/not-QA hierarchy. They treat QA as a job that anyone can do and treat the people accordingly. Of course, good QA lead is valued more. Lots of young people wanting an in to the games industry are willing to do the job for low pay, so that doesn't help.

It would be nice if employers could be nice to all employees, but that's not how capitalism works. Every SV tech company that has masseuses and yoga for their employees also has contract janitors, cafeteria workers, security etc. Not to mention things like IT support and other better-paying jobs that are still temporary or outsourced.

You might say "well those people are not essential to the company", but that's exactly what game developers say about QA.

The way Treyarch treats QA seems particularly shitty, but I'm not surprised. If you start treating them the same as employees, you are literally asking for a lawsuit demanding equal compensation sooner or later.

(Now, in my opinion, they should get equal compensation, but that's an argument for another thread. Or likely another site).

As far as crunch goes, I challenge anyone who's ever worked on products with hard ship deadlines to tell me that they haven't had to crunch. Companies like Blizzard (pre Activision anyway, because they were private) could afford to "ship when it's ready" for their games, but most publishers don't have the luxury.

You've put tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars into a game and it needs to ship on time or you cede buzz/momemntum to a competitor, end up out of the holiday season, or whatever.

It's not that the game industry is particularly horrible with crunch. It's just that no one else really ships packaged software within time constraints any more, so games look bad comparatively.
Term for this is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
I realized that they even copy the logo. Is this even legal? How can it be in any way legal to "impersonate" a business, just to funnel business away into a funnel that forces the business to pay fees.
Opposition to anti-China hysteria isn't anti-Trump. If there's anything Trump has done that Democrats have enthusiastically backed, it's his policies against China. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have given full-throated support to tariffs against China.[1][2] Even Bernie Sanders has taken a hardline stance, criticizing Joe Biden for being weak on China.[3] To his credit, Biden is one of the few prominent Democrats to have spoken out against the anti-China hysteria.[4]

> The Chinese have been watched and accused of theft of IP for more than two decades, but it's only now open season on the current administration because the media loves to hate Trump. I'm sick and tired of it.

We must be watching very different media. The media loves to beat up on Trump for other issues, but his measures against China seem to be one of the few things that receive widespread support across the political spectrum.

> The Chinese have stolen plans for fighter jets, been banned from buying Xeon processors, have been accused of directly copying the AMD Zen chips via masks instead of producing copies based on specs like AMD intended during the sale, and many other such things which either happened or started to happen before Trump took office.

I'm sure the Chinese government could make a very good "national security" argument for stealing fighter-jet plans. That excuse seems to work pretty well for United States government on all sorts of issues. All these claims of IP theft should be tried in court, and if there's something to them, the courts can impose penalties. What is not okay is hysteria and generalized suspicion of Chinese people. What happened at MD Anderson, and has happened elsewhere,[5] looks very ugly.

> Anyone who believes this ought to be ashamed of themselves for falling for this garbage sensationalist journalism.

I think that quite the opposite, a lot of people are going to feel ashamed of how far this hysteria went, and how innocent people's lives were turned upside-down because of American political angst, just as people felt shame after the Red Scare.

1. https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/1125143336837206016

2. https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statemen...

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/02/sanders-slams-bidens-china-t...

4. https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...

5. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/terminated-emory-res...
The title makes it sound as though he's donating his entire fortune to support Trump.

Thankfully, the article goes on to clarify:

> "Marcus said his political giving remains far smaller than what he gives to philanthropic causes and what he plans to give in the future.

> *"After he dies, 80 to 90 percent of whatever is left of his wealth will go to his foundation, which in turn will give to philanthropic causes, he said."
Agreed, though design will evolve to facilitate these sessions. My guess is that it will become more artistically / brand driven and less technical. A designer won’t need to think about the fidgety aspects of the interface and more about the presentation.
Slice exists?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
IT made them do it for good reasons though. Managing a large number of users and workstations in an enterprise environment is one of the things that Microsoft stack stands out.
Going from that link to the atkearney report, I tend to interpret that the 19.1 kW/h per GB of data as data centre cost. If that’s the case, it would not be correct to use it to calculate per phone consumption.

The 1GB of data cost is sunk cost, whether it’s accessed by one or a million. On the other hand, if we only had one smartphone in this world, we wouldn’t be storing zettabytes for it to access :)

More suitable numbers were 3.5 kW/h for the phone, and 23.4 kW/h for each connection. So, phone consumption should more accurately be 23.4 + 3.5 + (19.1 * total world storage / total world smartphone) !
> Because there is no way any comparison with the number of people who own an iPhone

Apparently you measure success by "besting the single greatest consumer product success story in a generation". By this metric, virtually nothing would be considered a success.

Meanwhile, Apple became the biggest watchmaker in the world as of 2017. After only three years of producing watches, they unseated literally every other watchmaker in the world on revenue. That seems pretty damned successful to me.
Top Trump Audio Boooks – Audiobookreviews.com
Excellent. Fingers crossed it works well and provides a blueprint for other cities and states.
$99 / year
This is fine, so long as the $3M funded research is still open and available to anyone to productionise.

Is that how it works or are private companies funding some of the 'open' research phase to then privatise (i.e. make secret) the outcomes?
$99 is almost nothing for a large company, who likely gives Apple a lot more money via the 30% cut.
Applying market forces to medical services is another way to spell extortion. What blows my mind is how easy it seems to condition so many people into believing that extortion is a normal way to approach healthcare.

It is not.
> and I'm not sure how to even start explaining what's happening when I punch in commands.

Though perhaps not trivial, it seems easier than, say, explaining what you're doing when you fix/manipulate things on a car engine.

The terminal uses a form of language to give commands, and the result is the execution of the command and/or some sort of printed output.

`ls -lah` could be explained as 'a fast way of inputting' the equivalent of "Alexa, tell me in detail what files are in this directory". (Yes, you would have to explain something basic about files and directories, but that still seems reasonable.)
This is not only not new, but has been done by countless other online ordering sites since as early as 5 years ago. I know this since I tried to make monthly-fee based ordering system for restaurants.

This turned out to be a hard sell so most other systems took the other route: they bought a domain and did SEO for thousands of restaurants across the country. SEO and websites is not something the average small business owner is an expert on.

To make it even worse, some of these online ordering systems even convincend Google maps that they were the official site, and a google maps search would also list their fake website as the official website.

Of course to these businesses it just seemed like they were getting a lot of sales from these companies, in reality these people were just typing in the restaurant name into Google. The restaurants usually had to pay 10%-20% to Grubhub, beyondmenu.com, et. al.

The most egregious company that does this is probably beyondmenu.com.
Googling "linear programming etymology" returns https://mathoverflow.net/questions/145077/why-are-optimizati...
Ship it. Restrictive zoning laws are choking the poor and middle class and causing cities to stagnate. Hopefully CA follows suit.
Read a Paper: How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof?
Now with Sharepoint and Excel Online, we've discovered that function names follow the base language of the Workspace that the sheet is stored in. It's essentially rendered Excel Online useless.
Any biology that developed without a gravitational gradient would definitely be affected by finding itself in one.

It would probably not be, strictly speaking, biological for long. Technically, it would become "goo".
FWIW, I’ve given this talk to people unfamiliar to the terminal and they’ve been able to get the gist of how basic things work in under an hour.
Here's a silly photo from a Nairobi hotel room. The tv is hooked into a raspberry pi b, $75 2014 phone running android terminal, and a laptop... The phone iirc was providing internet and local network for the other two. (And I was trying to compile Sage on the pi, which ended up, at the time, taking close to a week, due to one memory hungry dependency...)

https://inventingsituationsdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/0...
In addition to this they removed anyone considered a socialist or other political enemy.
Ah yes, thanks for the reminder. This is also the reason why COUNTOF is valid for a zero-length array.

Even though array[0] is non-existent in this case, it's fine to pass it to sizeof to get the size of an array element as if there were one. After all, a pointer can point one element past the end of an array.
Not saying you're wrong about the hardware analogy. But I think it's no different than learning to drive or play a sport. Eventually it just becomes automatic.
That's a really sweet deal.

https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/113786
To your point, I saw a set of job listings for a start-up where the most junior engineer was a "Lead Engineer". Keep in mind that the requirements included basic knowledge of programming languages and web design, so this seemed to actually be their entry level job.

I wanted to apply just to ask why it was so important to throw "Lead" in front of there. What happened to all of the "Junior Engineer"s? If nothing else, that title is a lot more honest!
I had a few friends in high school that did this. I only witnessed it twice, and both times made me pretty uncomfortable.

The very first time I saw one of my friends do this, I didn't believe he had actually passed out, so I lightly tossed a tennis ball at his crotch and he didn't react at all. I felt bad when he woke up in pain though, but I honestly thought he was faking. He was out for maybe 20-30 seconds.

The second time this girl we all knew did it, and we freaked out because everyone normally woke up in under a minute, but she didn't wake up for almost four minutes.

We started discouraging people from doing it after that.
> So perhaps you're assuming that 5G will result in unlimited data and the obsolescence of cable internet as a result, but that's not obvious, at least to me.

For some reason with every new generation of mobile broadband many people think this is just around the corner but I have yet to find any basis for this belief.
Why would they bother paying nginx the outrageous price for their server?
If you do that you have to include the energy savings from the phone use as well. The television that isn't turned on, the desktop computer that isn't running, the drive to the movie theater that didn't happen. I'd bet dollars to donuts that smartphone use reduces an individual's overall energy consumption.
Years ago, Microsoft used Akamai as their CDN. Akamai ran on Linux/Apache.

Don’t know if that’s still the case though.