skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a few years after the introduction of electric motors they were still designing shops around line shafts with belt drives to every machine, because the electric motors were large and expensive enough that it didn't yet make sense to give each tool its own motor.

For instance the USS Olympia (C-6), commissioned in 1895 and now a museum ship in Philadelphia, was electrified but had a (very compact) line shaft machine shop on board.
Well that's the argument about immediate productivity and good documentation.
And the reason for that is that the market for phones in the US is greatly distorted by carriers - the handsets themselves (which are dirt cheap compared to the service), subsidies in the past and pure market dominance.

Canada might be similar, but outside of NA, people know exactly how much they pay for the handset and how much they play for the service (which is 5-10 times cheaper for similar limits), and as a result, most people don’t actually buy a flagship phone.
Pure numbers mean nothing. Neither a farmer with no internet nor an urban Chinese citizen with a mobile internet but no actual computer is liable to contribute much.

There are 800 million Chinese internet users almost all are mobile only. Those that work as professional developers are expected to work insane hours that are unlikely to leave much time for public works after 9 to 9 6 days a week.
I dont think there's any unused space at the bottom of the ocean, we keep the ocean down there. If you fill that space with air bladders you'll have just raised the sea level by whatever amount of space you inflate the bags with.
Feel free to develop a system that can provide high voltage cabling at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods if you think it's so easy. You'll have a boatload of money waiting for you.

Also, there's already plenty of electronics in most cabling setups for EVs that definitely WOULD notice if you ran a nail through the conductors. What you're proposing just isn't safe.
I don't think that fully captures it, Google is an advertising company, and so its incentives are all out of whack. For instance, Google probably benefits from having the top results be slightly less useful as that makes the ads at the top more likely to get clicks.
Napari, a fast N-dimensional image viewer in Python
Now google is trying to read my mind, my thoughts and my intentions. I've been running away from EVERYTHING Google.
Not so much "deaf" as "huge." They're supporting the needs of a billion users with sub-50,000 engineers. Anything that effects only 1 user can't pull priority from the needs of the many. Anything that effects only 10, 100, 1000 users, etc.
Could I ask a related favor? Stop killing the Page Up / Page Down and cursor keys.

Or put another way, if you have a main content section that is scrollable (and the entire page isn't), then please make sure the focus is set to that scrollable div on page load.

I loaded the linked article and tried to scroll with Page Down, and nothing happened. I had to click inside the article body first, and only then could I scroll it with the keyboard.

I think a lot of sites and apps are built by people who do all their scrolling with the touchpad, and they don't know that there are other ways people like to scroll and it is the designer/developer's job to make sure they all work.
small world!
I think we’ll need an extension that automatically put quotes around search queries’ words.
Did Google Just Make a Quantum Supremacy Breakthrough?
YIMBY Tweets the Process of Falafel Restaurant Getting a Permit in SF
I wonder if there is a typo in the title: '"C is how the computer works" can lead to inefficient code' makes more sense to me.
They dropped the magnifier between iOS 12 and 13. That's been bugging me quite a bit too as I was very used to using that to make cursor movement easier.

You can compensate a bit by grabbing the cursor from a lower spot in the I-bar, to the point where you can basically grab the cursor from entirely underneath (ie, touch the cursor as if it was a line below where it actually is), but discovering that was a lot of trial and effort on my part, and it's still not quite so useful as the magnifier was.
After a few days practicing this, it becomes second nature, and doesn't hold you up at all. Commit histories also become much quicker to parse through, especially with "log --oneline".

I notice no hindrance on my speed because I write good commit messages, and always value them when I one back to them.
Yes. I think "ambiguous" is the best word to describe all of this.
Ah sorry, you are right, will edit.
I was hoping for actual studies showing that regular fare dodging is an actual problem in London or in large bus fleets in general. The honor system + occasional inspection seems to work pretty much everywhere else I've visited, but again, I'd like to see some numbers on this.
> Google is failing at a level where even I could program it better

You should do so. You can set up filters to hook into keywords, domain names, etc., and route to spam. If the stuff you're getting is that obvious in structure, you should be able to kill it with a handful of such filters.
Sorry I meant I was using triggers to sent a NOTIFY which has an 8k byte limit.

Very true what you mention about trigger overhead. Also you don’t get guaranteed atomicity
Yeah, rearranging icons has always been inexplicably fiddly, but they somehow managed to actually make it worse in iOS 13.

It used to be possible to explain most of the mechanisms and concepts in iOS with about a ten minute tutorial. Now it feels like every time I see my parents I have to explain some new concept or procedure to them.
I am curious why you take the pessimistic view. Their own testing shows an improvement for at least 10% of their queries:

"Google says it can now offer more relevant results for about one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English"
I agree that the power and distribution infrastructure hold special status as utilities, subject to whatever regulations as needed since it doesn't make sense to run wires from 5 different sellers to each home.

What I am saying is the price of a utility (or anything) should not be based on how much a person earns. If the utility needs to raise prices to cover their costs, they should raise prices. If the government wants to help poor people, the government should give cash to poor people, or pay the utility on their behalf. But the price of whatever is sold should not be masked.

And if the utility needs to raise prices, they should be raising the prices, not adding fees. I can understand splitting out the cost of delivery vs cost of generating electricity, but beyond that is just unnecessary confusion for a buyer.
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? (2019 Version)
This has been done in 3 of the past 4 years (2015, 2016 and 2018).

It will be interesting to see how different ideas are no longer cared of
With IPO, Startupbootcamp becomes the world’s first publicly traded accelerator
This is great, thank you for posting this. It seems like a good counterpart for Dark Patterns [1], though these examples are simply very confusing design choices rather than outright malicious ones. Anyway I'm happy to see Telegram's (and I believe Whatsapp's) decision to put archived chats at the top of the normal chat list here, that has always been totally inexplicable to me. I want these chats to go away, but not to fully delete them... on top of the chat list seems like the worst place to put them!

[1] https://twitter.com/darkpatterns
I wish they would let us use the "keywordese" engine as it was 10 years ago if we want to instead of funneling us along with everybody else into the newer intent search engine.
And not to spoiler it, but the Expanse series gets into this too.
Beware of Kafkatrapping (2014)
System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: Always
Jony was only doing iOS design for a year or so, around the release of iOS 7.
Podcasts, Music, and News were designed by Satan's minions in a brilliant effort to confuse and depress the public.
I struggle to find substance in your comment.

Could you perhaps expand with a few supporting details for your thesis?
There are 6000 languages. Even the top 5 would take a decade of your life. It would make more sense to have a miniscule fraction of people make machine translation better.
Why is it necessary to break them up when the alternatives are right there?

Google can exist, and people can choose to use Bing, DDG, Fastmail, etc., right?
It looks like a nice solution for navigating a forest or a desert during the mid hours of the day without getting lost, requiring only a calibration at morning.

I imagine magnetic compasses are a later invention, because they really make no sense if you can use a compass.
I think this is the bigger issue compared to the design of the scrollbar. Personally I don’t really mind if the scrollbar disappears like it does on my Macbook. But when the website hijacks the scroll so I can’t use any gestures to go back or forward, that really pisses me off.

The usual culprit is some crappy Themeforest WordPress Theme the website is using.
Rotate about the axle, but not turn from side to side.
Richard Scarry documented this in his work "What Do People Do All Day":

https://books.google.com/books?id=tuqKDQAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newb...
BERT is truly amazing. Almost all inovation in NLP uses BERT and transformers somehow. ALBERT will be the next HUGE thing for the next months, as it show results better than BERT with a small fraction of parameters.

We did a "Semantic Similarity search" for some documents, where we represent a document as a vector using BERT, and had to look for documents close to a reference document.

The results where breathtaking. It really returned semantically similar documents. You can do it now using ElasticSearch(But you really should do it using Vespa.ai, it is much faster https://github.com/jobergum/dense-vector-ranking-performance )
the three times I played, the bots were all focusing on the upper left corner, so staying in the lower right was safe for about 20 rounds.
A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing.

Apple is, generally, good in many particulars. It is extremely conservative, with only two desktop models (Classic Mac, 1984 - 2000, OS X, 2001 - 2019, and ongoing, which is to say, longer than the original interface). It is ultimately completely antithetical to how I work in desktop, and I find myself vastly prefering Linux and the option of selecting a desktop environment. Ironically: Windowmaker, based on the foundations of the OSX Aqua desktop, NextStep.

Increasingly it seems that Apple is stuck with implications of design decisions made decades ago which correspond increasinly poorly to current practices. The high cost of cycling between applications in particular. No, I don't want ALL FLIPPING WINDOWS of an app to pop up when I switch between the primary current working windows of two different apps. Or workspace flipping as I switch / open new app windows.

Apple's third OS UI, iOS, has a tremendous number of shortcomings. As do virtually all other mobile interfaces. I'm coming to the conclusion that any screen size < 10-15 CM is simply too small to be useful, and prefer a minmum 9-10" (20-25 cm) devices myself.
> Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement.

How is that an improvement? I get that the shaking gesture is horrible, but this one is not better: a three finger swipe is unusual, impossible to discover, hard to do. I don’t get why swiping left, usually associated with going to the right (= forward in Western cultures), is here used to undo (= going backward).
Also ants can walk over each other in heavy-traffic areas. Would be a game-changer for highway congestion.
uhmm, weirdly enough it might explain why some (myself included) have found that Google's results were shit /sub-optimal. Turns out I might have been using Google wrong for the last few years. I am used to using specific boolean search parameters while it seems that Google have been optimizing for natural language. An example from the announcement may clarify - "Here’s a search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.” The word “to” and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn't understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query." Personally I would never have formatted a search query in natural language. Perhaps I should have been.
Does a setting like this exist for iOS?
I agree with his sentiment based on my personal experience.

But we'll see, maybe this will actually be better?

also, maybe we should stop googling in "kewordese"?
The odd part about capitalist based policies on trade and skilled work force immigration is how much the left has supported them. The right has long held a "capitalist laissez-faire" approach to economic policy, and has been open about that. But what I cannot wrap my head around is the paradoxical message of the left. On the one hand they have long been known for supporting and using government intervention to protect and bolster the common working man in the United States, but on the other hand have continuously and audaciously supported and put forwards free trade and ultra capitalist ideas. The outcome of which has been a disaster and is only getting started. Even more paradoxically, the most pro American Worker campaign ever ran, was run by Donald Trump, a quasi republican, who in turn won the election by stealing support from democrats in key states (Michigan, Ohio, Florida, etc).
how can you inject an exploit from a plaintext file?
I think you two are actually in agreement
In the US, carrier subsidies on phones haven't been a thing in like 3-4 years now. The carriers have moved everyone to installment plans, and when buying a new phone, it's laid out pretty clearly how much the device costs up front. They then give you the option to pay for the phone outright, or pay monthly for the hardware (on top of your service.)

Frankly, most people in my life, family, friends, etc, are using flagship phones. I know people who keep said devices for 4+ years, but I genuinely don't know anyone using throw-away cheap Android phones. Those people who keep their phones forever, balk at the prices of new iPhones, fully knowing the "nice" ones go for $1000 or more.

I don't think my experience here is atypical. A few years ago, the price of a phone was heavily abstracted by the carriers, but that really is not the case anymore.
What defines precious cargo? Satellites and astronauts seem to do alright going into space attached to a giant rocket, but I will admit I'm not well versed on the forces created from a electromagnetic launcher.
I just queried "I struggle to find substance in your comment."

Top results:

* Managing Your Feelings Without Substances ...

* Why We Should Treat, Not Blame Addicts Struggling to Get ...

Google missed the ball here, the word substance in this case is not about drugs.
Thinking of Moving to the Cloud?
The consensus became less overwhelming since you commented this. See:

“Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack” by Caitlin Johnstone https://link.medium.com/7qYYVU2Z40

Back in 2012, when ISIS beheading videos where showing up on my Facebook newsfeed every week, I recall it was Syrian rebels who were brandishing chemical weapons - but the MSM never mentions it: https://youtu.be/TpIRRRuCEyg
I kind of hate the entire iOS 13 share sheet. Having the option to instantly send anything I happen to be looking at to my mom with an errant tap wasn't a feature I'd been missing.
> the problem manifests itself for people sending legitimate emails from legitimate email accounts to a Google account

It's funny to me that people in this thread are complaining about Google being large enough to serve as a de-facto authority, when the only way one could solve a "legitimate emails are being blocked" problem is to have a definition of 'legitimate' that would come from... an authority.

Google is dropping the ball but I don't know what the solution would look like that isn't just "Someone else be Google now." ;)
The major problem with mass drivers in Earth atmosphere is that anything like escape velocity combined with atmosphere introduces a lot of G forces and a ton of heat. (For intuition, imagine reentry, except even faster at lower altitudes.)
While I would love for that to happen,I still haven't seen an obvious plan on how we're going to manage millions of electric cars in high density cities.

It seems it will take decades before we have a pervasive enough grid, or effective charging techniques.
Does the steady-speed method work, even with cooperation?

The problem is usually people merging in front, requiring that everyone else slow down. I don't see how steady speed is even really possible there, let alone how it helps.

Let's say everyone has a two-second following distance. Then each lane moves one car by every 2 seconds, and that's that.
"This is a structure, with attendant control system and safeguards, about 1080 km, or 670 mi, in length. This is not affordable. By anyone."

The Hyperloop[1] is a proposal for a 350 mile structure that actually sounds remarkably similar to a mass driver, at a projected cost of $6 billion -- quite affordable for governments, corporations, and even some individuals.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
Dropbox did the same on ubuntu
I run XFCE (via Xubuntu) on my home desktop for the same reason. The lightness is a bonus.
Yeah, you are right! We darkened it a bit now :D
Beauty of Love
Love is beautiful when you meet the right partner
Myths of Color Contrast Accessibility
Let me play the devil’s advocate: you buying those products is measurably better for those disadvantaged blue collar workers, than you not buying it (on a 10 year horizon IIRC - There are some UN studies on this, on phone and can’t find them right now).

So you are damned if you don’t enjoy them, damned if you do (but a bit less). Obviously, it is better if you could improve their situation to the point where their labor stops being cheap.... but how can you do that?
Gunned down by police in her home
Such a great show. They really hit the perfect compromise between realism and fun.
but the question is how better they are compared to existing similarity measures. E.g. for documents in a domain, even simple cosine is pretty good.
The “original disruptors” go head to head in The Current War: Director’s Cut
Substituting pressure with more volume is highly impractical when storage is involved.
Basically. His fundamental issue is that Internet services that lack an authority framework organically bred "ghetto" infrastructures, where things work worse because a person lacks access to "the right kind of people" in a system that's supposed to be democratized. He's not wrong, but it's not like someone sat down and decreed some email sources should be untrusted for fun; the system started out very implicitly trusting, we added a pile of humans to the system, and oops! They acted like humans, took advantage of other people, implicit trust broke down, and now there are "good" and "bad" online neighborhoods.
Thx, that was the quote i was looking for.
Yes that's the best I think, and very suitable for HN audience
> people most likely lived in small tribes, so this idea that women have to be skeptical or critical of men doesn't really hold up.

This premise and your thoughts on polygamy can coexist with my suggestion about women being selective. If you can have only a handful of pregnancies in your lifetime each of them carrying the very real risk of death for both yourself and the baby, as well as the burden of taking care of any children that survive, then you really need to make sure that your shots count and you're choosing the best mates from the tribe. Men don't have the same burden of pregnancy and childcare - additional partners only increase their chances of passing along their genes, so as a result they become far less selective.
Maybe you've seen some of their films? If not, highly recommend checking out Ex Machina :)
Eh, I feel like that's a rather small factor compared to the main reason we experience traffic jams (tragedy of the commons) and ants do not:

>"Traffic jams are ubiquitous in human society where individuals are pursuing their own personal objective," the authors explain. "In contrast, ants share a common goal: the survival of the colony, thus they are expected to act cooperatively to optimise food return."

If everyone drove 40mph during rush hour, we'd be well within capacity even with increased drivership. When everyone tries to go 65+mph, that's when things slow down to 5mph. Prisoner's dilemma here, not the limits of acceleration.
Each time they move away from what people type vs what profile data collected from various sources suggest we move away from the ideal.

Best example is ads targeted to keywords on the page vs shows ads based on past purchases.
I've found that collaborative editing can be very confusing, and prefer a commit/merge step over simultaneous editing. I think all collaborative editing software should at least offer this kind of interface.
Automated gardener ushers in new era of 'robotony'
On touch devices, that's frequently the case.

Some form of multi-stage action (select/confirm) and a scroll-undo / scroll-backnav (return to prior location w/in doc/screen/page) might help.

Small-screen design is hard, and there are a number of distinct breakpoints at which different concepts do and don't work.
According to Satya Nadella, the system is "long term efficient", so it'll all work itself out eventually

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/10/microsoft-ceo...
i just googled "why are google search results getting worse" and was redirected to this article. Thanks BERT!
Awesome, checking it out! Thanks for sharing.
I would love to have an employee like you in my business BUT the fact is that it is not your call to determine the company's vision. The owner decides the vision and goals for a company. So perhaps you need to respect that since they don't want the extra hassle of growth and I can assure you that the more you try to grow, the more hassles you take on (I am in the middle of it right now). So yea, unfortunately your boss's visions are not aligned with yours and you cannot expect them to change that. I would say embrace it and move on accordingly.
> Excel and other spreadsheet software products localize their function names.

And, most annoyingly, their thousands and decimal separators. That has tripped me up countless times.

100,991 vs 100.991.
Err, why would a mandatory warranty be paid? Under current US law statue of limitations is for 4 years, and in a few states the seller is unable to disclaim any implied merchantability or suitability for a particular purpose.

So, effectively, all warranties are 4 years. But you have to go to at least small claims court.

Also, if the defect is within 30-90 days, you don't need to do an RMA regardless of what the seller and manufacturer say. The person who took your money has to take it back.