skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn’t put it quite as strongly as that, but yes, the OS X docs have never been great.

It’s a shame, because the classic MacOS docs were amazing, amongst the best technical docs of all time at their peak. (I had a shelf of Inside Mac books, and they were useful for years.)
Fair point. In that case, the real issue then is that more people are retiring and living longer, needing more healthcare and labor, and the workforce is dwindling in comparison? Maybe the amount of resources that can be used as medical supplies is decreasing (and if you think single-use plastic like plastic bags and straws are a problem, wait until you see how much single-use plastic and other materials are used everyday day in healthcare).

What's the solution in non-financial terms? Make more young people care for the elderly? Automate as much of the healthcare as possible? Let some elderly people go without healthcare?
and i’m sure those people are competent enough to notice that their documentation is below average.

Sometimes having people critize « your » work in public helps you convice your manager’s manager something needs more care.
The ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ on Amazon is pretty telling: the Snowden book, a Yubikey, an electronics testing tool, coolers for Raspberry Pi, retractable Ethernet cable, wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner (what even is that), and sandalwood shaving cream.
You should try https://fastbmk.com/

Responsive 100% and better in every other aspect ;)
I pose this question to people when articles like this come up.

If you were wealthy, would you do something like this? In this case, if you were wealthy, would you pay to have extra protection for your home by hiring private firefighters? Almost willing to bet their answer would always be yes.
In C++, at least, you are right.

> The type size_t is an implementation-defined unsigned integer type that is large enough to contain the size in bytes of any object.

§21.2.24(3)
You, and them, are not their work. Both are subject to constraints of time, manpower, and talent. I don’t believe the issue is with the employees as much as the company not investing enough in that area. When you see a company with the resources Apple has, you expect to see better from them.

Secondary example is XCode, their IDE. It is painfully obvious they don’t have enough people working on XCode.
"Hello IMAP server. I'd like to deal with the message with this UID."
"The UIDVALIDITY has changed since then."
"Can you tell me the new UID from my old UID perhaps?"
"No."

(Okay, I last worked with IMAP back in the 90s. Has modern IMAP since added a persistent ID that will stay with a message?)
>When trying to fireproof a particular home, crews will take the time to rake away vegetation surrounding the home and close windows and vents, The Times reported.

Funny how it was just a year ago when the media was having a meltdown over the suggesting of raking away brush.
What grocery store APIs are you using?
There was a movie with that premise i think [1].

All around, money is a better currency of exchange than time, or any other measure really. It measures well the actual value of time , effort, what have you. 1-to-1 time currency would be particularly bad choice, just imagine how much time you would have to pay back for someone who was born 60 years ago. Life was much much slower and unproductive. In the same amount of time today you can do multiple times the work/product that they did.

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/?ref_=nm_knf_t3
> "If an ish also lie with zachar, as he lieth with an isha..."

What does that mean then?
I took a look at your comment history and you seem to be OK painting broad strokes on companies/institutions that you do not particularly enjoy. At one instance you were directly attacking a user.

It is clear, from your username, you like Apple. But ask yourselves whether you are being fair to the OP here.
The rich are not directly paying for this, but insurance companies are focusing on high value assets protected by high cost insurance. Similarly, the kind of homeowners associations that can pay for this is found in expensive communities. So, these firefighters are largely working for the wealthy by protecting their assets.

That’s more in depth reporting than I am used to.
Thats a good way to phrase it. About 1/4 way through the article I realized I wasn't anywhere close to the end.
No analogy is perfect, and I agree that this one falls apart in one important way: if you know what you're doing (!), a good CLI can be legitimately faster than even the best GUIs for certain tasks.

But that's a big caveat.

I've been volunteering at Girls Who Code. My club is doing a project that involves SSH'ing into a Raspberry Pi, and I've spent a significant amount of time getting the kids used to just moving through folders within the command line. Using cd and ls to navigate a file system is actually really tricky to wrap your head around if you're not used to it!
However, you had also ordered a book about castrati singers, so the announcement was ambiguous.
Fun fact: The "oid" suffix in factoid means "like", or "resembling". So a factoid is not a true fact, but a statement resembling a fact. The word "factoid" was coined by Norman Mailer to mean "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." So it is a source of great irony that the meaning of the word has been inverted by the press to mean a trivial but true fact. Historians of the future may have a fun time trying to figure out if our factoids are a true fact that we consider trivial, or a fact that we know is false but is believed to be true.
Android suffers a lot from quantity over quality. Classes are usually documented, but usually for a function like “setReturnVectorFlag” it’s just sets the return vector flag.

Edit to add: I also work on both platforms, and I’d say iOS (along with MacOS) is usually easier to work with because the design tends to be sane and the names are fairly descriptive; whereas Android has a lot of weird and questionable design decisions so it’s harder to guess how things really work. On the upside for Android, it’s often possible to just read the source code (at least for the core OS).

I think the docs are about equally bad overall.
I think a very tiny fraction of people with socialist sympathies get riled up by this, which is exactly the point. This is just another drop in the "engagement via culture war" bucket.
I do it (because I buy so little online). Also, Illinois (and maybe other states) published tables saying "if you don't want to calculate it, pay this amount instead."

Most states are now imposing sales tax on online retailers, so the point is pretty much moot now.
Their diagnostics is pretty cool, though. How about this gem:

ld: warning: ignoring file build2/libb.u.a, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for unknown-unsupported file format

Going to steal that "unknown-unsupported" term for sure.
Even in humans, which are relatively short on instincts as animals go, you can see cases where the "instinct" and the "behavior" are not the same thing. Humans have a suckling instinct, which allows us to drink at birth. But it's not an instinct that says "ok, here's how human reproduction works, and here's how milk is produced, and you need to drink from things that look like this and then when you do these things, your hunger will be slaked"; it's an instinct that says when you are tickled here in this manner, turn a bit and start some muscle contractions which result in sucking. They don't cry to say "hey, I need to suckle"... they cry because they feel bad. They don't know "understand" the bad feelings or know how to make them go away. But a combination of a few basic instincts and the environment combine over time to teach them how to eat for the first time.

Many other animals have much more complicated instincts, but even then you can often see the instinct starts as something very simple. A fawn "knows how to walk" at birth, but, look at video of a fawn at birth. I say it's a lot more like "a fawn knows to recognize it is falling and trigger an only-modestly complicated reaction to stab the closest leg out in that direction", a neural circuit so simple with a bit of effort you could almost assemble it by hand in some sense. A little bit of control circuitry on top gives it a small amount of mobility.

I think one of the reasons "nervous systems" are so evolutionarily successful is that they do give that mechanism to go from simple instinct to a much richer learned behavior, and it's obviously a combination of many things to get to that point. It's amazing how some of these things work on not necessarily all that many "instincts".
Developer goodwill is not really that essential to a lifestyle accessories brand.
Most developers who are making apps for iOS are working for companies that only care about money. There is no fanaticism about it. If developers optimized for working on platforms they liked, no one would write console games.
Alright, but that doesn't really solve anything, does it? It just makes the problem easier to debug.
It's really funny to think about cyclical stuff and see how Blackberry used to treat their developers like shit (with stupid signing keys and stuff) and just look at Apple falling into the same trap.
Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker Chooses Encryption over Backdoors
Hey, I invite you to https://fastbmk.com/
> Depression is a common thing, but such severe depression that you have suicidal tendencies is not in the cards for most humans.

I'm very happy you can feel this way, but yes, on a long enough time scale, depression will get all of us.
Yes, that was one of the best things that I loved about StarControl2. Of course, I have lost ony first playthrough, and desperately watched the Galaxy burn.
I will, on occasion, see an AD that runs on something of value, or that engages in some common sense advocacy.

If you can figure out how to do either one better, faster, whatever, I do not mind those. And I remember who took the time to be considerate enough to create them too.

Got nothing else. Hate inane ADS right along with everyone else.
It's perfectly reasonable to say that a company of Apple's magnitude should invest in making sure their APIs are well documented. We're not talking about OSS projects with donated developer time.
Desensitization to the URL bar is just one of many, many problems with AMP. Google is training users to ignore it, because sometimes it says google.com when they’re somewhere else.
I'm sure it hasn't been perfect either, but "I write better developer documentation than the large software corporation Apple" wasn't the focus of his complaint.

Specifically, he claims: that large portions of the Swift user interface API are entirely undocumented; that he was unable understand the full capabilities and limitations of the package manager through reference to its documentation; that he finds himself frequently searching video transcripts to find information unavailable in the documentation.

I think that, if these claims are true, it does not reflect a good state of affairs, and that the extra work imposed on the individual developer is worth complaining about.

I don't think that he is calling out the work of the technical writers in any unsociable or shameful fashion in the text of his blog post. I agree that 'garbage' is not a good metaphor for "woefully inadequate," as it implies that the existing documentation would be better disposed of than referred to. However, I think that when dealing with a large software corporation that has teams dedicated to writing and maintaining technical documentation, it is not especially cruel or unfair to use hyperbolic language in calling extraordinary lapses to public attention.
Human context switching.
I'm being cheeky; I mean closing down and bringing up all relevant applications, their state (open windows, tabs, files...) and so on for working on a given task or project.

Sort of like a workspace manager for the OS. Releasing an open beta this winter.

There's a short, low-res demo that kinda illustrates the basic concept on https://cleave.app
A “peace spring” that’s anything but
I am sure all the documentation this guy has ever written has been 100% perfect.

I’m a fucking awful violin player, but I know unskilled/professional playing when I hear it. Is the implication that I have no room to complain when I buy a ticket and the performance is bad?
1. As others have noted, the metric in question (and what I do call out in the post) is: does documentation for this even exist?

2. Turns out that yes, I do prioritize documentation extremely highly when I publish projects for other people to use. See e.g. https://true-myth.js.org – and when we built this, we did not publicize it or ship a 1.0 till every single item was documented.

I'm not looking for perfect docs; that doesn't exist. It's something you can always improve.

I'm just looking for any docs.
Well it all happens for a reason. And I don't mean as part of some master plan, but cause and effect. Since we're talking about an alien civilization capable of traveling to earth, vastly technologically and intellectually superior to us, they'd probably be able to assess the problem pretty quickly based on human nature. It confuses us because we can't understand collective human behavior. This made me think of the line from MIB: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
Leaving Prison at 72
Looks neat but I don't know why you'd choose it over one of the big 3 (React/Vue/Angular).

Seems to have far less community support and 3rd party libraries available. If you're a business it's probably harder to hire for too as it's less well-known.
The quote in question that I was responding to was “They [Coca-Cola] can collect the packaging.”
The only two examples he gives for this "a lot" is a completely new framework that was released about a month ago, and a tool that is, honestly, still in development and not part of normal development workflows for Apple platforms.
DuckDuckGo TTY Search
Ask HN: Is C# developer to electrical engineer a vertical or horizontal move?
I've been a C# dev for long enough that I feel like I've plateued.

Meanwhile Im in love with microchips like the esp8266. I see dirt cheap intelligent single purpose devices opening up a lot of new opportunities.

But how do you compare a good C# developer to an electrical engineer? Would it be a step up or just a step sideways?

When I say electrical engineer what I mean is the person who designs electrical systems on PCBs using software like Autodesk Eagle.
Yes, but that has been done before.

The newsworthy portion seems to have been that it's been longer in orbit than before, and then returned.

Is it really all that impressive that it stayed 2 years in orbit before returning, instead of 1.5 years?

I'm sorry, I just don't see what the story is here.
Docs are always something I evaluate before moving forward with a specific tool or language for a project. I have not done much work in the Apple ecosystem but it surprises me that a company of this size would have lackluster docs. It makes me wonder how many non-Apple developers give up on their idea for an app due to frustration and how that translates to lost profit for Apple given their 30% cut.

I am not a huge Golang fan but recently I found myself using Go quite a bit and I really appreciate their docs which include a description of each function and an example. The example code is even editable with a "Run" button so you could test and understand the function much better before moving it to your own code. Here's an example if you are unfamiliar with Golang docs (click the "example" link for the editable code): https://golang.org/pkg/strings/#Compare
I've been working on implementing Apple Sign In on the server side. While the iOS side seems to be simple enough, their server side documentation is horrible. I can't imagine anyone actually used the documentation to implement Apple Sign In, and instead had to trial and error their way through it, relying on Googling well and finding other similar solutions.

This is sad, because if Apple wants Apple Sign In to succeed, you'd think they want to make this as easy to implement as possible. Instead, they relying on simply rely on mandating it's use in iOS Apps.
> Oh come on... why 70%? Presumably retirees don't have childcare costs, can downsize on housing, no more daily commute so savings on transport and lunch costs, ... Also, does "private savings" account for accumulated housing equity?

I came here to say the same thing; was even typing it up. Then I paused. Healthcare (in the U.S. at least) is going to be at a crisis point in a decade. Prices keep going up and it isn't sustainable. Retirees will spend a large portion of their retirement income on healthcare.
In my experience, many companies legitimately don't really know what to do with very senior engineering staff. And how many distinguished engineers or principal engineers or technical fellows do you really need for your relatively straightforward technical challenges anyway? The IC track often fails to work in practice for the simple reason that technical work at an extremely high level is just not needed at many companies as much as engineers want to believe. Very senior ICs are also difficult to manage in the sense that the more you pin them down to specific work or projects the less you benefit from their skills. But sometimes all you need is to be able to assign someone to a specific project that isn't all that glorious or interesting or hard but is valuable and needs to be done by a certain time.
Your US Social security retirement "invests" their money in US Tresury bonds. The US will default by 2030. Those treasury bonds turn into "IOUs" that can't be paid back, ever (aka default). By 2030, people won't buy new treasuries as the last generation mature, so they will have to be paid back by money printing.

2030 is when US Social security retirement hits a big wall.
Coding on the Weekends
I was programming professionally in Fortran but, when I got my Apple II+, I became totally caught up in learning how to program it in both Apple Basic and assembly. A Apple-centric magazine at the time published an assembler which I laboriously typed in, corrected mistakes, and finally got working. The opcodes were easy to learn and Woz had printed the ROM code he wrote at the back of the manual so that served as a great way to learn the language. What I learned from that helped me later when I had to do some assembly program on the Motorola 680x0, a DEC PDP/11, the Intel processors, and on an IBM main frame.
Sinkhole Swallows Port Authority Bus on Busy Street in Downtown Pittsburgh
Keyboard input handling glitched out for me (from firefox 70, linux, connecting from an academic network with a gigabit link so stuff like input latency isn't usually a big deal for us). Random key presses were dropped, some were repeated, it seemed to get stuck on the letter 's' regardless of what key I pressed after a while
Maybe the probblem is that they have too many people working on xcode, too many chefs in the kitchen usually produces mediocre results.
And that's kind of my point. If most 6502s are needed as legacy drop-ins, then there's no reason to shrink the die if you're just going to weld it into a massive DIP package.
The difference with Fallout 1 constraint is that in SC2 you feel the galaxy to be alive and breathing, with multiple events happen and influence each other. While in Fallout you just have a timer. The world in Fallout 1 & 2 feels very static, where nothing happens without your direct intervention.
Interesting. The clonal trees aren't much like humans (disconnected, mostly in suspended animation), but other trees make a good point of comparison.
> The only real choice we have is to give our money and positive/negative attention to these organizations irrespective if they are governments or companies, so I would ask why not make both types of organizations responsible?

What has that got to do with my point?
I'm guessing they think it's being tested.
Isn't that the exception that proves the rule though? Why is Twitter the most effective way to get developer support from Apple as opposed to their own website?
it's a NUMBER - there's zero maintenance required for a number of constant value.
> VAT is applied to business to business transactions. Sales taxes are just applied to consumer transactions.

This is not true. The final user pays the sales tax. So if a company buys a bolt and uses it to make its product: no tax. If they buy bolts and build shelves to hold inventory: pay the tax.
Listen to some podcasts with Marco Arment, the developer for Overcast and before that Instapaper. He details how bad the documentation is for some of Apple’s low level audio APIs and how it seems like no one at Apple has actually used some of the WatchOS APIs. Catalyst (Apple’s framework for porting iPad apps to the Mac) documentation is a constant source of complaint.

Swift UI’s error reporting is also obtuse.
Whoops, I meant to say that I’ve been using Pythonista (which is a Python shell & basic IDE)
The example question may have fallen too close to actual beliefs to be properly illustrative. If you mentally substitute something that you believe Facebook is not doing which would definitely be harmful, the "no short, truthful answer" result may be clearer.
Not to mention that for counter-intelligence the clues aren't the contents of a message but who is contacting whom, when, how often, and from where, most all of which can be determined from network traffic monitoring even if the contents of the message can't be read. In fact, if someone who shouldn't be contacting someone in China/Middle East/etc is doing so using encrypted data, getting a search warrant should be easier. Requiring back-doors to encryption is just laziness on the part of Law Enforcement.
Context Is King: Turning Ugly Logs into Rich Structured Events
You really think this headline is engineered for people to click because they're outraged, not because they agree?

Articles and headlines based around classism are everywhere these days- and they arent marketing towards people who dont buy that classism is a huge problem. There are an extremely large number of americans who eat this shit up as truth.
Was just about to comment that in lieu of buying an ebook version of the currently discussed Unix book, I discovered he had written "Understanding the Digital World" and bought it on impulse. Currently going through the first chapter now. Like all of his books, extremely well-written. I was surprised at how much the introduction focused on data sharing and the Snowden-revelations, which he segues into after talking about how he and his wife weren't using Airbnb, Uber, and Whatsapp, on a recent vacation trip.
Well, he gives two examples. One is a framework first released about a month ago, in a great rush. The other is a tool that is not part of normal workflows, and is basically still in development.

I'm sure documentation will improve on both, and I've very rarely suffered from a lack of documentation when developing for Apple platforms. It has been a lot more pleasant to read than, for instance, Android documentation (although it has been a number of years since I did that, so it may have improved.)
Still? It has been a while since I have done any Apple platform specific native development, but I remember about 5 or 6 years ago writing an iOS and OS X app for communicating with an audio modelling device, and the documentation for CoreMIDI was woefully lacking.

I couldn't believe that a part of the Apple operating systems that had been ingrained for years had so little documentation and examples at that time. I ended up finding out more from a lot of third party blogs and via forums.

I haven't checked, but are things like the MIDI framework still badly documented in the Swift docs?
Top Words in Malayalam Learning
It's really bizarre that people who don't believe in "souls" somehow think that they would be alive if a sufficiently similar mind existed somewhere. Like, okay cool, nice to know a similar mind will be out there in some computer, but that's not me, so why does that help me?