skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure about the generalization to enterprise software in general, but the critique of people choosing blackboard is spot on.

Before selecting a tool, professors should always ask: "is this the tool that two recent graduates would choose without my intervention?". Because to use any other tool is to deprive your students of skills they'll likely need.

Also:

> Once profs and students put down the pitchforks, committees will go back to their checklists, and feature creep will resume.

The solution is simple, don't put away the pitchforks. Keep them out until the people choosing the software inform the people that make the budget that that money would be better spent elsewhere.

If the professors don't know what tools those are, spend the money you're saving by not forcing featureful garbage down people's throats on engaging the studentry until the answers are clear.

Like maybe create work-study programs where students who know how to run the kind of boring website the web was designed for are paid to assist teachers in this task.
Would you give up Google for $17,000 a year? The Fed wants to know
You really couldn't be bothered to come up with one single example?

Yikes.
An extra few percent is not going to help significantly, but it will create a noticeable box around media. So a small upside with a (for you) just as small downside.

If we want taller screens, then we should use 16:12 or so. If 16:10 is the perfect ratio and 16:9 is just off, then I honestly don't think it can be bad enough to justify the cost of change, though I am of course willing to be convinced by research.
And this doesn't just affect America, but I think it affects every country.

I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.
And other big part was legalized abortion.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
Yes I think that, despite the humorous reaction in the movie, The Office, that simply printing something like PC LOAD LETTER was a vast improvement over the post script dump that would happen when an error occurred.
The Horror of PLC Programming
We do? I don't know. I find we rarely know what's going to happen. In 2016 everyone had for weeks talked about how Aleppo was going to go up in flames. And in the end, it turned out to be an actual operation to rid the place of rebels and then they established order when the city fell. Maybe in these towns the same will happen. But it's hard to say "we all know what's going to happen."
Kinship-Based Social Inequality in Bronze Age Europe
This code is so over-engineered! So many useless patterns in play; and so many useful patterns that simply aren't warranted, also in play!

The more I poked around this repo, the more funny stuff I found. Thank you, this was really enjoyable.

And the package name is perfect.
Anything involving AppleID is a huge dumpster fire.
As I've already been downvoted for this, I'll explain: the lower your income, the greater the proportion is spent on straightforward living expenses, generally. If you earn $10k/year, all of that will be going on basic necessities, so $1,500 a year in income tax (15%) is $1,500 straight out of your daily/monthly budget paying rent, food, transportation, etc.

The higher you go in income, the greater the proportion goes to things like retirement, investments, entertainment, etc. Millionaires (i.e., earning > $1M/year) paying 15% don't worry about eating well or enough, or being cold at night or losing their job because their car breaks down, or even whether they can pay for college for their kids.

This is why flat taxes are regressive, and if you propose a bottom line exemption (e.g., < $20k/year pays no tax, or less tax), it's not a flat tax anymore, it's a progressive tax, and we're just haggling over the details.
Yes; I stated so.

This is a cultural clash; there is an ample demand for a language with explicitly and harshly limited expressiveness, to prevent the C++ problems from ever happening. Go also is a safe enough language so I'd take it over C any moment where possible.
Do both.. but whatever you do, don't hold back any progress on space exploration simply because there might be another option. We need to get stuff done. Yes, increase the number of robotic missions! Yes, send humanity further too!
Yeah, Magic Leap actually built a VR headset with two separate focal planes, which no one else has managed to ship. It might be wishful thinking but you can't do that without some serious tech chops.
I don’t see why there is any need to worry about that, you can make fake connections with a real person to. They might be your world but from their end they might not actually give a fuck about you, they just pretend they do. Ever get worried about that?
Alphabet’s life science division Verily, partners with Color on genetic analysis
> At that point you should be the world expert in your subject

Well, maybe by the end of your PhD, but certainly not at the start, when coming out of the MSc.
Exactly. Most enterprise software is done to people, not for and with people.
Wouldn't Starlink by Space X solve this? Authoritarian govs. would make it illegal to subscribe... but like VPNs it would be very hard to police, even harder.
Sunlight Converts Polystyrene to Carbon Dioxide and Dissolved Organic Carbon
This guy got it completely wrong.
I went to the Louvre in 2012, and I was able to walk up the Mona Lisa without a queue. I and a few others admired it for several uninterrupted minutes. I took a selfie and left. It was a very special moment.

I think they should do a reservation or lottery system to preserve the opportunity for intimacy. Make sure you actually get to spend time with work. Otherwise if you are only giving people 30 seconds (as the article states), you are encouraging the just-take-a-selfie-and-leave attitude.
This is the text from that article:

"Police confirmed that an officer opened fire at a protester, saying he was acting in self-defense. “A large group of rioters was attacking police officers in Tsuen Wan,” police said in a statement. “Police officers warned them, but they were still attacking police. A police officer’s life was seriously endangered. In order to save his and other officers’ lives, they fired at the attacker.” One clip posted on social media and verified by Reuters shows the protester, an as yet unnamed 18-year-old man, swing a baton at a policeman, brushing his right arm."

The article and video are designed to imply that the Chinese are claiming that the the officer who fired at the protester is the one who's life was in danger -- that brushing the officer's arm was placing his life in danger. Somebody only consuming that media would have no idea that in the middle of the group of protesters was a police officer who the protesters continued to beat, potentially to death. Note as the crowd disperses to the point that the beaten police officer laying on the ground would become visible, the video immediately cuts to a new frame - repeatedly.

This deception is made even more gratuitous by the inclusion of the police spokesperson's response. Without being able to understand the context of what was happening in that video, which is not provided, the spokesperson's comments sound completely absurd and basically like he's just overtly lying to justify shooting a protester. That in effect makes people think the officer's statement is simply propaganda. Somewhat ironic.

I think the whole propaganda war is idiotic. Let people see what's happening on both sides with complete context and judge for themselves. Real life is not full of Hollywood heroes and villains, it's invariably a million shades of gray. Debate and discussion these issues is healthy and productive for everybody. Most ironically, I suspect people would ultimately come to the same conclusion even with honest context. So why lie?
If anyone even uses it at all!

I have a friend who works in a sales role for IBM. He told me that part of his bonus is contingent on being able to prove that the customer has actually installed the software which they bought.

The policy apparently arose because certain public sector entities had refused to consider new deals since they still hadn't got round to installing the software for which they had paid millions of dollars, years before.
Ditto with job applicant portals. They have a bunch of weird features for doing obscure HR stuff like internal approval chains, but terrible UX for the actual applicant. Would it be so hard to handle applicants whose resume is a url?
We all understand that insurance was invented only a few decades ago, right? Its not been some fundamental requirement for most of humanity (still isn't) for most of human history.

I get it; the family has to be protected. But if we'd never heard of insurance, we'd all be living our lives anyway, and adopt a more fatalistic approach. And preventable tragedies would occur more often.

Sometimes I think that insurance is a scam, a con game where we all surrender our money because of scare tactics and threats of unlikely events that probably never occur.
Yeah me too, I find MS Word very useful too tbh. Not sure why higher level comment thinks people hate them.
Microsoft open sources SandDance, a visual data exploration tool
They are? They seem to live together in coops ok. Sorry, I don't know much about chickens except they live in coops (the hens do, not the roosters), and they'll eat just about anything.
Convert Curl Syntax to Python Requests
Considering I already make an effort of avoiding Google, sure, free money. When I say make an effort, that is because if you really are trying to avoid Google, it is an effort, there services are embedded everywhere.
The 17k figure in the article was associated with all online search engines. This would be a little more difficult. I remember the internet before search engines. I would probably be creating my own, and better about book marking things.
Air travel is very safe and regulated because of behavior that persisted until recently. It's clear that systemic deviation has happened since the 90s that is leading to a system that can't be trusted in the same way that it could be historically. It's just that these are changes in a complex system that take years to surface as real problems that affect people. As long as financial incentives are so high that they override regulatory concerns as they do now, punishment is certainly in order.

It's not the kind of thing where you make a change and planes fall out of the sky. No, you make small, gradual changes in processes and in safety margins until at some point in the distant future, planes fail catastrophically as a direct result of decisions made as an organization 1-3 decades ago. It's the same set of behaviors that led to the Challenger disaster.
The challenge with adapting any algorithm that operates on photos to video is ensuring consistency across frames so the effect isn't jarring. That said, perhaps not surprisingly, there has been work in solving this which seems to have started with the paper below.

http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/vidret/index.html
This is spot on. She is like a vegan cat. You know who makes those choices.
Ask HN: What do lawyers use to manage contract revisions?
I imagine something git-like would be useful here. Is there some ubiquitous software that most/all law firms are using? Or are they still passing word docs back and forth?
> The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining.

Bingo—the dysfunction of the software reflects the dysfunction of the organization.
Probably by accident, but it hijacks the back button. I find that annoying.
The reported issue was addressed within 21 days.

I'm not sure that this issue illustrates the case you're trying to make here.
Pretty much this. We had a stint on Slack in our enterprise. We kept asking for full licensing for it, but the higher ups moved everyone to Microsoft Teams instead. It's not lacking against slack in any way. It really just comes down to if you like the UX, which I don't like for either Slack or Teams.
I was a workshop at the google office in Toronto a while back, and people asked when Google sheets would be able to perform big data analysis.

The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance.

Somewhat unrelated story, but it shows how well loved some software is, and how some users will take it to use cases you never imagined.
CRM products tend to be super easy to customise, so they often end up a complete mess simply because it is so easy to add or change stuff.
Every popular computer OS except android has an ssh client now. Just give the students and professors shells and have them put the documents in shared folders.
Causality and deceit: Do androids watch action movies?
>Edit: It appears that dogs are allowed on the train/bus in DC if they are in carriers.

With a "toy" breed, that's easy. With some 80-100 pound dog, good luck with that. I don't know many people capable of lifting that much weight easily, certainly not all the single women in this area that have big dogs.
You need more Design Ducks:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
Java's generics solve vastly more problems than they cause.

Yes, I'd rather Sun go with an ML lookalike in 1997, but such was the intellectual fashion, and also computers were bitterly slow at the time, so a compiler had to be simple.
That doesn't add up. Isn't that how it worked before? By your own description.
A lot of enterprise software isn't even sold to the people who will actually end up using it (users OR admins). It's some VP talking to another VP agreeing on terms/pricing for "good enough/checklist" and "implementation" costs so it will look good on their yearly review.
i used to be a heavy excel user, when i worked on windows, it was great for eyeballing data quickly, now, in a different job, i use a mac, i would really do anything i can to avoid using excel - visidata FTW http://visidata.org/ . I really don't miss excel at all
Thanks! This seems a major shortcoming with USB-C if you want to build docking stations. And it will get worse once everything uses USB-C. I have already converted my USB drives back to USB-A so I can use them with one hub that’s plugged into my laptop.
Chatbots are improving customer service
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Everyting. Not a single word makes sense anymore.
I'm going to make a bet that the next one on the list will be infiBond. Israeli A.I. startup valued at something like 1.25B[1] but doesn't seem to have ever done anything.

[1] https://sifted.eu/articles/infibond-investigation-israeli-st...
Deep Regret over the Choice of Peter Handke for the Nobel Prize in Literature
"So Apple has made it clear that if China wants something, the tech details won't matter."

This is an interesting statement and has important implications here in the United States as well: who's the bigger entity? The Multinational Megacorporation or the Country? Who dictates terms to whom? If a company wishes to do business in a country shouldn't they be expected to follow their laws? We need to be very careful in how we answer this question because we're at risk of losing our own democracy to a corporatacracy.
Given, but flight envelope protection has it's warts too, and I don't wish to (and probably chose my words poorly to convey my true meaning) turn this into a Boeing v. Airbus design philosophy flame war.

Where your examples pass my test of acceptable fly-by-wire, is that even in their most automation crippled state, (direct law), the airframe demonstrates longitudinal stability, and the automation doesn't induce undesired behavior detrimental to flying the plane. Thereby it can be thought of as a Hardware Abstraction Layer between the inputs and the control surfaces that faithfully represent pilot inputs to output behavior.

Boeing's MCAS fails this sniff test. If the input sensor breaks, it actually generates dangerous input that actively detracts from the flyability of the plane. The airframe itself necessitates this dangerous subsystem because uncorrected, no test pilot would be willing to sign off that it was consistent with the older 737's handling characteristics.

Just wanted to be clear: I'm not anti-Airbus. I'm anti-"Hey let's automate this, but do it with minimum scrutiny and reckless levels of awareness building for the end operator."

Which is what happened with the MAX, and seems like a page torn out of McDonnell Douglas playbook.
Threadreader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html
Why Twitter sucks
Regarding Excel, its Mac version is terrible. Our heavy users have to run the Windows version in a dedicated Parallels VM to get anything done once the sheet contains more than a few hundred rows.
TestConstants._1_2_FIZZ_4_BUZZ_FIZZ_7_8_FIZZ_BUZZ_11_FIZZ_13_14_FIZZ_BUZZ

I have to say that I've seen real code that had constants with a suspiciously similar naming convention, which I guess is the genius of that repo :-)
An observation: Instructure (Canvas) was started by a couple of college students; it was born out of frustration with Blackboard.
Not mine, just one I ran across some time ago. But yes. Pretty much all of the reactions I've seen to the repo fall into two categories:

1) The guy who says "There's no way a real product could ever be this bad."

2) The gray-beard who responds, "You've clearly never worked on an enterprise Java product."
Since you keep your notes in files, what naming convention do you apply?

I am in the process of moving away from proprietary note taking tools like AskSam (more than 15 years ago on a Windows machine), Evernote, Bear Writer and some more). Got a long list of legacy systems that I want to migrate to markdown / file based system.

I keep date stamping files like so: `yyyy-mm-dd_topic-subtopic-subsub`
They aren't your friends. They're your competitors. Welcome to capitalism. This is the sort of thing leftists are talking about when they talk about atomization.
I wholeheartedly agree. I think part of the reason I ended up on the product-software side of design was that the timesheet software our agency used was infuriatingly bad. It was like a windows-web port. I'd have to bill an extra quarter, just for the time it took to put in a change order.

EDIT: A little embarassing, but I found an attempt I did at redesigning that timesheet software from 2014.
https://dribbble.com/shots/1501268-Webvantage-Timesheet
This wasn't a tech fraud like Theranos or Ubeam though. Quintillion did build a working fiber network. The CEO faked numbers to their investors, but they had a real working product, and the company is still in business providing internet access.
Contributor Spotlight: Indiana Lee
I switched the language of the OS on my computer for this very reason. This is idiotic.
> New devs almost certainly shouldn't be given maintenance and repair tasks.

This would just massively increase churn. Old guys get sick of doing the same old crap especially when seeing the new guys get all the good stuff. So it increases the likelihood that people will just move around a lot more often in order to build that "new stuff". Eventually you'll have lots of companies saturated with "new stuff" that's no longer so new and nobody to maintain it because everybody knows the second you're too old in the company you get saddled with maintenance tasks.

> the old guard wants to move on from the problems they created

Just because it's old doesn't mean it's a problem. It still has to be maintained though, with higher effort since the technology may be outdated. Even the best designed systems become a chore to maintain when you have to do it for 10 years instead of doing anything new.
That's a really good point. In general, the more you reduce the cost of doing a thing, the more of that thing you'll end up with. The Jevons paradox.

If the reduced cost is of making gratuitious changes to a system's appearance or interface ... you'll end up with a bunch of gratuitious UI changes.
For the last few weeks, Chrome 77 breaks very badly when there are more than 255 failed websocket attempts: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100624...
Even refreshing the page doesn't workaround the problem (you have to open a new tab). This has been causing a lot of trouble for long running single page applications that use websockets. Fortunately, a fix is being rolled out right now for Chrome. We've also been getting reports of this other websocket connection issue breaking SPA's.
Maybe because "someone else pays for it" implies more than one person involved, which usually means an enterprise?

Do you consider the G Suite to be enterprise software?
Talk about underplaying the difficulties. Computer science needed a whole new package system (Nix) just to guarantee reproducible builds. Compilation is pretty much the definition of a pure input/output function, and most builds are simply not reproducible. If even builds aren't reproducible, good luck reproducing anything more complex like machine learning.
Large electrocaloric effects in oxide multilayer capacitors x wide temp range
There are different types of generators: some supplement, and others replace, the grid.

Cogeneration is designed to produce heat (in chillier climates) and the process makes electricity as well while doing so, because why not?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration

Emergency / standby generators do nothing most of the time, and only kick in when needed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standby_generator

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_power_system
What if you're just interested in pushing a specific agenta.
You might be right but that is the job of a COO not a CEO.
But there are people that love doing it. My wife is an example of one. To her is it a great mystery novel where she gets to tease out all of the details and try to understand why things were built the way they were. Then try to make them 'better'.

Of course, she was a government employee (mil) and her career path was set regardless of what she actually did and the pay level was set in stone regardless of what she did as well. So there is that.
i believe this is a category error. AI is not sentient or aware, it defintionally cannot “do” anything.
I dunno, the Nokia 3210 (and successors 3310 and 8210) were pretty good phones given the available technology at the time.
True, but Ikea is also nonprofit so it’s hard to tell these days.
It is a multithreading profiling technique called causal profiling. The idea is by slowing everything else down running concurrently with a region of code, you can infer what the effect would be of speeding up that code.

http://anthonylloyd.github.io/blog/2019/10/11/causal-profili...
You raise a good point, but it doesn't mean the OP is wrong. There is an inflection point where, even if the software was originally designed with a target user (persona) in mind, the features that keep getting added are designed for the buyer. It is impossible to design software that works for wide set of personas.

Melissa Perri calls it the Build Trap: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/escaping-build-trap-melissa-p...
SAP’s Bill McDermott on Stepping Down as CEO