skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> First, is it possible to develop software without inconveniencing business users with temporary ... regressions and inconveniences?

The trick is to avoid introducing change without simultaneously introducing perceived value to the user. Predictability and reliability are incredibly important for business users, because they're going to build processes and documentation and training around however they interface with your system. This includes both directly interfacing with your system and creating supplementary processes outside of your system to work around deficiencies your system has in supporting whatever need they have. If you introduce change, you inherently reduce the temporary predictability and reliability of the system, and the friction created for end users needs to be perceived as worth whatever value your change provides. If they perceive a benefit to themselves, it'll incentivize them to embrace and adapt to the change. If they perceive it as a regression to their processes/needs, they'll fight it and it'll eventually lead to resentment and friction between the business users and the developers.

Slack's WYSIWYG input box is a prime example - it unlocks capabilities which is convenient from Slack's perspective, and is potentially generating value for users not familiar with Markdown and are used to traditional GUI-based rich-text editors. Helping them better support the type of corporate-wide adoptions that are lucrative for them. But due to Slack's origins, a large chunk of their user base prefers the older, Markdown-based editor and perceive a decrease in value from the change. If you're going to introduce changes such as this which will be perceived as a regression by a large enough subset of users, then you need to account for that in your change management process such that it isn't abrasively disruptive.
Why am I being so hardcore voted down for this?
I’ve met a few people who feel passionately the way you do, and don’t get it.

I worked with archivists on a few projects and never appreciated the dumpster fire that electronic documents presented.

PDF is an amazing thing as you get an expressive format that preserves look, feel and content and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Just the fact that the US Federal courts standardized on PDF for most filings will ensure that it is a viable format for decades or more.
Ask HN: Anyone started an automation consultancy?
There's so much waste going on out there, with efficiencies easily to find. Fixable via macros on the easy side or machine learning on the more complex side. Had anyone started a consultancy around automation?Must be a large market for that no?
(Render founder) Thanks for the shoutout and congrats on launch. An ingenious use case for Render disks!
This is how I feel every time I type "youtube-dl" in my terminal.
Fuel becomes more expensive on reusable spacecraft. Granted, the first pound of fuel is cheap, but the costs keep rising.

With one and done you have a larger mass fraction to work with. Reusable spacecraft operate on much tighter constraints. Every single wasted pound in Space X’s design likely costs them 100’s of thousands of dollars in lost profit over time.
pandas?
"The tank can't handle that much pressure."

"Where'd you get that idea?"

"What do you mean, where did I get that idea? It's in the impulse engine specifications."

"Regulations 42/15: 'Pressure Variances in IRC Tank Storage'?"

"Yeah."

"Forget it. I wrote it… A good engineer is always a wee bit conservative, at least on paper."

- La Forge and Scott, Star Trek TNG "Relics"
I'm saying that all change is an annoyance to your users, all change has a cost.

Except for the changes like "reduce memory usage" or "fix crash when X happens" --- those are true improvements.
github issue: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/issues/6151
Facebook and Google's Surveillance Poses Unprecedented Danger to Human Rights
This same issue exists for the Dropbox Paper WYSIWYG as well.
There is no paradox. All questions of consciousness have been answered. Kaliyuga is too strong for the masses therefore ignorance is rampant.
Glad to hear it!
Location support actually launched just last week! Check out https://www.twilio.com/blog/new-rich-features-support-deeper... and https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/whatsapp/api#send-a-location... for details
Don't do it while driving or near water. Same goes for trying to sleep - avoid this around water too.
Thanks again!! Really appreciate it! It was definitely a team effort.
Many Costcos still have their pneumatic tubes in place.
Most engineers don't write code with hard performance constraints. Game devs probably need to be fighting to get every frame.

For the bulk of the eng I work with the concept of StoreLoad reordering on x86 would be an academic distraction.
This explains the dearth of options with other OEMs. This should not be a major factor for System76 who, with all due respect, arguably should hardly be a blip on Intel's radar.
Ask HN: What is going on with Tesla's website?
First I was getting an "Access Denied" HTTP 403 error page when trying to view vehicles, which I managed to work around by changing '?redirect=yes' to '?redirect=no', and now I am getting the same Access Denied blank page for the 'https://www.tesla.com/' homepage.

What's up with the jankiness today?
In 1995, Niklaus Wirth wrote "A Plea for Lean Software" - abstract "Software's girth has surpassed its functionality [..] The paper discusses some causes of "fat software" and considers the Oberon system whose primary goal was to show that software can be developed with a fraction of the memory capacity and processor power usually required, without sacrificing flexibility, functionality, or user convenience"

That was discussed on HN in 2014[1] and right in the top comments is "I think one factor that leads to bloated, ruined software was missed... I don't know how common it is overall, but I have personally seen it ruin several very good products. And that is the simple fact that employers want their employees to remain busy. If a piece of software reaches a point of exceptional quality - the developers working on it still have to fill 40 (likely more) hours a week to appease bosses. And so they do the only thing available - they ruin the product."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8301511
That's very encouraging to hear! I hope that this does end-up extending to your laptop line. At least you're participation in this thread means S76 knows HN folks are paying attention to this detail.
"If you can't convince with a real argument, bring ethnicity into the discussion to discredit."
That's unfortunate. I'd love to know more about this.
It is if your parents raise you to ignore the law and then pay off the people you steal cookies from as an adult. They're responsible in part for the monster they created.
Friction stir welding is popular in rocketry because it is very controllable.
Show HN: Bootcamp Report – Compare coding bootcamps on metrics that matter
Another thing in Slack that has annoyingly changed (without an option to toggle off) is: its "Drafts" feature - where leaving a channel with an unfinished message means that the channel itself gets moved to the top of the left sidebar. This completely breaks my flow, because 1.) you can no longer use up/down hotkeys to reliably go between specific channels, and 2.) I frequently have to do a double take and ask, "where did that channel go?" - especially if you Star specific DM channels, because those go under the drafts section but above the rest of the channels, meaning the Drafts section is out of view most of the time.

Long ago I created a Chrome extension that reordered things nicely, but their CSS changes frequently which made it a maintenance hassle, and I read on HN another dev saying doing so is against their terms of service anyway. Not a fan of that anti-tinkering attitude.

SLACK: don't make dramatic changes to a user's workflow without giving a simple toggle to preserve old behavior.

I get it, most users probably love this feature. My wife does, for example, and she works at a big organization, which has different needs from my workplace. But even if dramatic changes to product are approved of by 75% of users, every time you do so, you create whiplash for the other 25%, and prevent many from ever loving your product. Rinse and repeat that whiplash too many times and product design rants on HN with 600+ upvotes will be a regular occurrence...
It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now.

His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks, businesses can now be scaled to national, if not planetary, scale. And we get a very small, and shrinking, number of big players. One Google. One Amazon. One Facebook. One Alibaba. One Tencent. Three big US telcos. Three big US banks.
This is literally how I fold shirts, so I think it could work if you could find a way to give some indications of where to fold. In fact, it's interesting because the folding method is how I was taught to fold a karate gi. I also use it for my jimbei (kind of summer Japanese casual wear.

With a jimbei, etc, fold the trousers in half lengthwise (so two pant legs become one). Then you fold in half the other way (fold the bottom up to the top). You put the trousers inside the top. You arrange the right side of the top first (left side if were wearing it) and place it naturally over the trousers. For Japanese style cloths it will go all the way to the left side of the garment, but for a shirt, it just goes half way. You then fold the left side front over the right (other way is for dead people -- and again, for a shirt it just meets in the middle. You might want to button the top button). Now the trousers are contained inside the top. With one hand you grab the right hand shoulder of the top and with the other you grab the bottom of the sleeve and the bottom of the top. You fold over the whole thing just until you get the the trousers. You pull the sleeve all the way to the left to straighten it and then you fold it diagonally over top of itself so that it is facing down. Then you do the same for the left side. At this point you have the trousers in the top and the right and left side of the top is folded over top to make a kind of package. The arms are neatly folded so they point straight down. You grab the bottom of the top and trousers together and fold it a third of it up. Then you fold it again. The end result is a square package. For a karate gi (or something similar), you can loop the belt around it and use it to carry it over your shoulder. If not, you can roll the square package into a cylinder and put it in your bag. Rolling it will stop if from getting getting wrinkled.

Traditionally, you would fold a shirt with the arms at the back of the shirt, so that the collar faces up. When packing, I prefer to do it the same as my Japanese clothes because, while the collar get crushed, it gets crushed in predictable way.
Non-mobile URL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
I spent far too long looking at that and thinking why is the first or second slash drunk.
> hedge their bets by combining a post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithm with a classical one

OpenSSH does this with certain algo choices for anyone particularly inclined.
The Marketer’s Guide to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The trouble I have with #1 is when someone tells me their problem and they don't want help with it, now I have a new problem to worry about, and worse, I can't take action to solve it because the problem isn't mine.

I guess the trick is not worrying about other people's problems. But... I dunno, I just don't like unsolved problems hanging around.
The FAQ addressing an objection doesn't mean that the objection is overcome.

If I send you a PDF the point is that I don't want you to edit it. Otherwise I would have sent a docx file. An 'editable PDF' may as well get lumped in to the OpenDocument standard. It is already universally editable and I'm sure it has support for adding application-specific metadata.

Having a PDF editor isn't some violation of sacred principles; but making changes to the standard to make it easy to edit is not improving the situation. I want to send a format that is hard to edit.
I looked a bit a few months ago. There are some interesting things out there. But you will probably be a bit on your own (but not uncommon when it comes to game dev though!)

https://github.com/mrautio/duktape-webgl

https://medium.com/@bnolan/translating-sites-into-3d-with-du...
I am not looking to be a co-founder but your delivery and presentation are very polished, if you are ever in the bay area we should grab a cup of coffee or something :) lmk!
“printing documents consistently and with selectable text”

It’s fine for that purpose but it’s terrible for eBooks, manuals, science papers and a lot of other stuff it’s used for. Some HTML with everything in one file would be much better in my opinion. Something like CHM maybe which MS used to use for help files.
It’s phenomenal for so many use cases it’s absurd. I have a huge stash of PDF files—tons of articles that I’ve saved so I can refer to them later. Meanwhile, half the links I have to blog posts are dead, if not more. I know that I’ll be able to read these PDFs 10 years from now, or 20 years from now. Plenty of them are 10 or 20 years old.

PDF is great for:

- Archiving. It’s self-contained and will work 20 years down the line.

- Math. Anything with equations.

- Printing.

I’ve tried various techniques to archive web pages with varying degrees of success. With PDFs I don’t need to think about it.
Every time a Deepmind paper is published, I feel simultaneously very excited, and also very depressed that they keep speeding ahead while I'm not anywhere close to understanding their first paper about AlphaGo.
Good clarification -- when I talk about change, I mean a workflow change. XKCD aside, I don't believe that every code change breaks someone's workflow, or at least I believe that some code changes break workflows in such a minimal way that none of your users will care.

To expand on your point, how many bugs and crashes do we tolerate in software simply because rebuilding features has priority over refining features or handling more edge-cases?

Slack's new interface isn't just different, it's buggier. Stuff like copy-paste is broken. So it's not just that we have to adapt to a new workflow, we're also accepting a lower-quality piece of software that is less reliable than what we had before. And in theory a refactor or rewrite might be so valuable that I could tolerate that, but I don't see that value here.
yes and no. the actual content of a conversation is often not the literal meaning of the words. many conversations are actually meaningless, but serve to anchor participants in the script. when the cashier says "hi, how are you?" and you say "alright, how about you?" even though you feel awful, this is not really lying; it's just a choreographed handshake that begins the transaction.

in the stereotypical "does this dress make me look fat?" conversation, the person is (probably) not asking whether her partner think she looks fat. the actual content here is usually a request for reassurance. even if the partner does think she looks fat, "no, of course not" isn't really a lie; it's just satisfying the subtextual request.

if on the other hand, she says "I have a meeting with some executives today, does this outfit work?", she is looking for a literal answer and responding with reassurance would be unhelpful.
Problem is that PDF does not preserve content in a machine readable format. It’s a one way street. Once converted to PDF you can’t convert to another format without losing a lot of content and formatting.
EverQuest lead producer and designer Brad McQuaid has passed away
That's quite humbling. Thousands of years later, we could build it "cheaper" (relative to our sum societal output), but not a lot cheaper.

Then again, the proportion of basically good people probably hasn't changed much over the millennia either.

"""One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
"""
It's not just about the rights of the person being executed, but also those of their loved ones.

You may say you wouldn't care if your dead carcass was, say, grotesquely abused for someone else's amusement—after all, you're dead and no longer around to have any feelings about it—but how would your children feel? How would you feel if that was the fate awaiting your life partner?

The shared endeavor of human society entitles people to dignity even in death. That includes the right to bodily integrity.
Samsung launches 5g smartphone with 12gb RAM
> And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

I don't think it's the spending that the US is allergic to, it's the collecting the money to spend.
You say they knowingly chose to take a risk, but I'm arguing that in many cases they won't have had a choice. At present, there is functionality that you simply cannot provide without a native app. If your competitor chooses to provide that functionality and you don't, your business will no longer be viable. In many cases, a business simply cannot choose to ignore a significant percentage of their potential user base.

Re: Samsung, LG, etc. I'm not referring to phone manufacturers, I'm referring to businesses which must provide mobile device integration for their (otherwise unrelated) products and services. Examples include banks, game publishers, remote product controllers (for you car, or drone, or IoT light fixture, or ...), etc. "Only available on Android" generally isn't going to be viable - customers expect you to work with their (mainstream) device.
Newton and Pascal are boring, I suppose.

Certainly one wouldn't want to live in a place where J. S. Bach got to write music for eternity. Imagine the torture.
Buckingham gets an extra 5 million tourists each year over Versailles, which likely relates to having a living Monarch.
This is just an ad for a job board, "Key Values"
Exactly... You don't have to expire the old front-end, you can build a new front-end on top of the old API, maybe introduce a few new functions in the API to support both old and new.
> like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory

Speaking of muscle memory, I still remember these &#133; and &nbsp;&mdash; from the time when most web apps understood HTML. Too bad they stopped…
AMD's Rome processors are an interesting case, with 8MB of L3 cache per core. So the 64 core processor has 512MB of L3 cache. It wasn't that long ago that 512MB was a respectable amount of DRAM in a big server. An early 90's fridge sized Sun 690MP maxed out at 1GB of DRAM and had 1MB of L2 cache, no L3.
And then of course there is the deliberately edit hostile way that PDFs can be (ab)used, by printing a document and then scanning it to PDF. In my experience some lawyers like this because it means that to suggest edits you have to retype or OCR entire paragraphs
"Every day you're breathing is a good day." isn't something that happy people or grateful people say. If you are happy or grateful, you wouldn't even think to say it. Being happy is a state of being that doesn't require rationalization or justification. Happy children or even happy dogs are in the state of happiness and don't require lies like "Every day you're breathing is a good day.".

It's been my experience that people who are unhappy or discontent try to "persevere" with trite mantra like "Every day you're breathing is a good day.".

My father used to say that a lot like your grandfather. And I suspect, like my father, your grandfather was dissatisfied and unhappy. He, like my father who fought in vietnam, probably also suffered through PTSD for his entire life from the horrible things he saw and did in war.

Honestly, if the only thing you can be grateful for is "breathing", then you might as well be a plant.

During the happiest times in my life, I've never even thought to say "Every day you're breathing is a good day.". It was only during the unhappy times in my life, that you have to resort to such quotes and mantra.
"Slack is terrible" - There I fixed it.

It is not a troll comment. I tried to get my org to move to slack from whatsapp groups. People (non tech) love them flexibility and UI etc. However they were quickly disenchanted due to the various issues with the system like it eats a few GBs on desktop, push notifications don't work on some phones, some UI elements are very irritating (when you upload a picture, it vanishes to a progress bar, trying to type anything with a / makes slack believe I am typing a command etc etc).

We all went back to WA groups
The crazy thing to me is that if they rolled out a native desktop app that was maybe a little bit lacking in features and used ~20MB RAM and had this particular misfeature in it and called it beta, people would applaud them for it, especially here on HN.

Instead they spent actual time, effort, and money making their product worse.

My company has certain deficiencies, but one of our core principals is that we'll never break a workflow, even if the workflow is dumb, even if the "feature" is actually a bug that an enterprising user abused in a way we didn't anticipate. The bad news is that we're saddled with a ton of legacy crap that can't be rewritten. The good news is that we've grown into one of those behemoths that dominates a niche specialized industry and won't be unseated by a product that is only, say, twice as good as ours. It's not as fun as iterating fast and breaking things, but the low stress is nice.
That's another way to see it... I get it: water gives you rust.
I think a lot of it is your perspective. To many people a remote company is still an insane idea. To other people a remote company is just common sense if you have business that can make it work (the company I work for even has home workers in their call centre. It's amazing!) Where you are on that spectrum depends a lot on your experiences.

Like others, if you saw the shift happening from 2017 to 2019, then you were experiencing things very differently than me. I don't think that's unexpected though. If you speak in a way that assumes your reader has the same experiences as you, you will create some dissonance and I think that's the feedback you are getting now. You can choose to write in a way that shows your personal perspective, or you can back off a bit to be more inclusive of people with other perspectives. Either way will work, I think.
I wonder why it wasn't possible in the case linked by the article[0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/wire-fraud-email-cond...
I am quite saddened by this news. EverQuest meant a great deal to me for a long time. I made a lot of (so far) lifelong friendships in EverQuest. Truly a remarkable game designed by a visionary.
This is why people make fun of HN.

How to be a billionaire: Work hard!

How to start a business: Start working, believe in yourself!

Now that I've read OP article, I realize what I've been doing wrong all my life. I had disabled my "fun" switch. Glad someone finally pointed it out. Everything is so much better now, wow! Thank you!