skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1. Software should be free of bugs. At the very least, updates should not introduce new bugs.

This is the ideal, especially since it could make software usable indefinitely. Sadly platforms change out from underneath apps, even apps carefully written to use only officially sanctioned APIs. And even Microsoft's years-long efforts at backward compatibility have failed to keep many apps running.

I don't think it's possible without walking back the rolling releases in favor of discrete, infrequent upgrades--at least as a long-term support option.
But "buying back stock" only temporarily creates value for the shareholder. If they don't immediately sell the stock, the price will return to what it was before they buyback, because no underling value in the company has increased (especially when dividends are never payed out, like most high tech companies that are always in the "growing" phase : looking at you FB, Goog etc).
The problem is online social networks. There is no fix.

Any medium supported by ads is toxic. This predates online social networks.

Any news feed (recommenders) is intrinsically toxic. Such feedback loops are just outrage machines.

It's highly doubtful that likes and ratings can be redeemed either. I'm fresh out of goodwill, so I don't care to try.

So what's left? The graph. Maybe that could be useful.

Meanwhile, it's hysterical that anyone tainted by Twitter imagines they have anything constructive to contribute. Now were he to completely renounce the whole effort, acknowledges it's deleterious impact on democracy and society, turn it off, and beg for our forgiveness. Well. That'd be a good start.
Intel compilers have an -ax flag which will compile functions into several versions for different instructions. GCC has target_clones which can be set for particular functions. Both ways will choose the function to use at runtime based on the cpu.
You get get that from Dell. They and HP have been selling this stuff forever.
Symbols of a tragic transformation: The abandoned cars of Venezuela
Copy 0 would see 0, and copy 1 would see 1.

As soon as the copy was created, it would diverge. But both would have ~equal claim on being "me".

> They'd have no way to tell which of the two entities they are though.

Not until they learned it from someone authoritative.
What changed? As in, what made you think they were okay and then realize they were not?
Aren't these already taxed? If the company is buying that implies that someone is selling and would be taxed on that sale.
My experience is a lot of money gets burnt making designs match some on-brand design that looks awesome in mockups but is worse for the user than just using the platform default GUI widgets with maybe some light color theming. Worse if they decide to customize widget behavior too (guaranteed to be worse than default—may look cool but there will be jank, broken state, and more) or do any special snowflake navigation crap when some normal and platform appropriate pattern would do.

This adds cost and worsens UX. It has less to do with making the app look attractive from the user’s perspective than with designer ego and satisfying the brand-over-all-other-concerns product owner types. Usually there’s little discussion of features that will be missed so the widgets can work worse, but design flair should, properly, be part of the discussion of what your velocity may look like.

[edit] I suspect some of the motivation for designers here is a combo of selling designs to clients or product owners, who are easily flattered that they need this kind of thing, and their version of résumé-driven-development—that is, highly-custom trendy screenshots probably “pop” a lot better in a portfolio than a better-functioning app that looks more ordinary.
Yeah, and once dinosaurs roamed the earth. It’s easy to make generalizations about the merits of moving on when you aren’t being left behind.
Remember when you could buy bluetooth speakers that you could listen to without the speaker listening to you ?

Nowadays everyone of my friends has a alexa or google speakers which sound shitty compared to real speakers and they spy on our conversations. For what ? to turn the fucking lights on or play a tune on demand? those lazy dumbasses cant be bothered to get off their butt to turn the lights on ? If only I had privacy conscious friends.
It's amazing how fast capacity and pricing changed back then, and it still happens today.

I remember my first PC clone in 1992 it was a white box with a 40MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM, within 6 months or so I spent $200 on two more 1MB 70ns SIMMs.

Our high school had a small lab running Mac IIci's with 8MB of RAM and those things were probably $8K each with display, it was a big deal to get time on them. We had more physical space than money, so we had an IBM PS/1 lab, a couple of ][e labs, and my personal favorite was a networked TRS-80 Model 3 lab where the master machine had a 10MB hard disk. Those things were beasts -- we used to play some sort of a networked crossword puzzle game while wearing an onion tied to our belts (which was the style at the time). Give me 3 B's for a quarter you'd say...
Snake Game in Console
Is there a distinction between competency and being any good at your job? I would hesitate to call (most of) my management chain incompetent. I would also hesitate to call (most of) my management any good at their job.
I agree and disagree. I mean, the thing is that outside of personal projects it's not uncommon to inherit a codebase from other people, sometimes quite a large codebase. Such a warning can be useful when eliminating boo-boos (acting as an lint I guess).
Do planes like that still require leaded gasoline?
Federation Is the Worst of All Worlds
No. I would never work like that. In all the projects I have been doing remotely we have used email, wiki, and occasional online meeting or phone meeting. It has always worked great, even with people from a completely different timezone (day/night difference).
How do you know that we aren't machines?

Certainly Occam's Razor implies that we are.
Ive’s fetishization of looks above all led to the keyboard mess.
Sadly C++ doesn't have the `restrict` keyword.
Serious question. Why is Alexa on an Echo different than Siri on a phone? Seems like there is clear outrage about “surveillance economy listening devices” (from some members of this community) when they’re in your kitchen but not your pocket? Why is that different?
HN enforces this as a system and a contract similar to how agile enforces a certain philosophy. Perhaps something similar can be done for how to build a company of managers that must answer to the +1 -1 system.

Something between a union and unionless company.
Bill Gates recommends 5 books for 2019 – and looks ahead to ‘Infinite Jest’
> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware)

It irks me when people, including blind people, advocate against something on accessibility grounds when it's something that current screen readers can handle perfectly well. Another example of this would be saying that JavaScript-dependent sites are inherently inaccessible. We should save our accessibility advocacy for things that are actually problems.

The fact is that if we assume that people want to use little pictures to communicate, then exactly because emoji is part of the Unicode standard, we should encourage its use, as opposed to, say, graphics that may or may not have alt text.
Corollary for #3 on desktop: Don't steal focus!

Windows is egregious for this, I'll be typing away and a window pops up and I hit a key and now I've just cancelled something that was running the the background and was ready for the next step :(
Floating point has a specific purpose in computing, where you deal with measurement, and don't know the scale. Adding one nanometer to a light year (to get back exactly a ligh t year) is actually a useful feature in numerical physical computation.

Outside of scientific computation, machine learning, statisticd, etc there is seldom legitimate use for floating point.

Nothing to do about performance I think. Either float is exactly right. Or, it is abused and is 100% entirely wrong.

Right now Javascript specifically is to blame -- for its insane choice of making floats its only and default number type. This is a problem with Javascript only though. If you use Java or C# or go or pretty much any language except Jabascript and type "float" the problem is the programmer not the language.
How do you know beforehand what sort of environment you're really involving yourself with? What sort of heuristics exist during the hiring / interview phase that let's you sort good from bad? I have a few of my own sniff tests, but outside of knowing (and really trusting) a contact at a place, it's sort of a crap shoot.

My experience has shown me that it can take years to find the seams that you need to tug on to expose deep-seated work culture problems.
This title is awful. Plenty of programmers care. It just takes a lot of work to get a project to this level of done.
Breakage due to OS upgrades is one thing. But at least make sure that the software doesn't do anything obviously bad. For example, I was dealing with a "security product" (basically something that profiles activity on the OS looking for malware activity) that we were required to roll out, and come to find out it reliably corrupts the RPM package database on both CentOS 7 and Amazon AWS Linux 2, whenever the OS is rebooted (assuming the software is set to start on boot). Things like this are unacceptable.
> It's not clickbait, it's a long rant. He was too angry to make a straightforward video.

I'm struggling to imagine how a person faced with losing access to their site/facebook page or whatever is making a video at all. I mean, what does that thought process even look like? We're locked out, the passwords are changed! Only one course left! Stand back everyone, and get me a video camera!

And besides, who in 2019 would believe that a random stranger offering to post "legitimate" or "relevant" ads on their page or site is actually legitimate?

I don't understand the world any more.
> Whispers and grabbing coffees with people are much better weapons than being the one that always brings the harsh truth into the meetings.

There was a point where I was noticing that I was being less politically effective than I had previously been, and I realized that a good bit of that had to do with open office plans. Having these little intimate exchanges is much harder to pull off reliably.
Ask HN: Can 20x price difference hurt us?
We are https://extracttable.com - an API service to extract tabular data from images and PDFs. Recently we tested an approach to speed up the current process, amazingly, it is cutting our operational cost to 40%.

Considering 17% of current users have re-purchased the credits and the other 83% users who are yet to completely utilize credits of their first purchase - Should we consider to revise our price (slash by 30-35%) to the user, which is already 4-20x cheaper than our competitors. Can it help to attract more customers? or give a negative affect?
Where does that go? To whom? What do they do with it?

In a lot of companies, any generic name email address probably goes to the trash, some group like customer service, an auto-responder that says "Sorry no" and sometimes to marketing. None of these help you. On rare occasion webmaster@ might get to someone who is useful and technical, but it might also be in a folder with thousands of other junk messages.

A better guess would be security@ . But still, wouldn't it just be easier to have a standard place to lookup who or where to go to contact someone for security issues? oh yea... security.txt
> that is, highly-custom trendy screenshots probably “pop” a lot better in a portfolio than a better-functioning app that looks more ordinary.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The designers that have worked on my site seem to be focused on screens that they can add to their Dribble portfolio rather than getting the job done in an efficient way for my users.
I don't feel this list is very reasonable. At least, it's far too dogmatic.

1. Yeah right. I assume you write software for a living; I'm not sure how you got through writing that sentence.

2. I agree that this should be 100% opt in. I'm fine with an initial prompt asking me for anonymous usage data, then get out of my face. Obviously there are reasonable exceptions for some types of software, but in general, agreed. How do you feel about license checking though? It's trivially easy to rip off software with no server side management.

3. Meh. No one would ever click them. They're annoying, but I've handed my email (with a +<company> appended) over to certain companies for certain coupons. I think a banner is fine.

4. Yearly? I enjoy getting small updates frequently for many types of apps. Being able to iterate on specific features can be good for both sides, and large releases put a big burden on the dev org.

Like most things, it depends. Some software should remain stable for a good amount of time, but if e.g. slack wants to make minor changes every few weeks that are mostly transparent I really don't care (the WYSIWYG debacle is really a management failure.)

Also, #1 is unreasonable. There _will_ be bugs, and now you're proposing they be accumulated for a year before release.

I worked on medical device software for more than a decade and we had a release schedule shorter than a year.
But what if there is no ROI, like high tech companies that pay no dividends?!
PBS recently had a good show about the AI revolution, saying it's similar to the industrial revolution. They show Embark AI/trucking in SF, and interview an unsuspecting truck driver: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline-in...

Excerpt about tearing society apart:

"I believe about 50 percent of jobs will be somewhat or extremely threatened by AI in the next 15 years or so,” says Kai-Fu Lee, who has written a book called AI Superpowers. He fears that the rise of AI will contribute to another alarming trend: the growing inequality in earnings. “AI will exacerbate that and I think it will tear the society apart,” Kai-Fu Lee warns, “because the rich will have just too much, and those who are have-nots will have perhaps very little way of digging themselves out of the hole."

It also mentions China's heavy investment in AI.
Not at big companies. But there are lots of smaller ones.
Yes, some trans women have prostates. In 2019, even if you have a penis and balls, you can identify as a woman for the day and be considered 'trans'.

I'm glad people are starting to respect pronouns, so I can be called by my proper pronoun: "gigantic cock".
I'm curious about their motives here.

One of the massive "troubles" that social media has been having to deal with in recent years is the whole fake news problem. (in quotes, because it also has driven social media engagement, and thus revenue from ad impressions up, so from a business perspective it's a boon with the right narrative) Admittedly, it isn't a new problem, it just it's perceived impact has grown to the point of catching the public eye.

Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about.

Now, they're pushing a decentralized social media system that by it's very definition will be hard to control content on. In being a client for said open standard, they are certainly free to block whatever comes in that suits their fancy, but to me, it feels more than they're using this as a way to shift blame with regulation looking like it's on the horizon. It'd be an awful conveinent excuse to say "but Mr/Mrs/Miss regulator, we're just an aggregator, other entities are responsible for this content."

Maybe they really do believe the best approach to combatting this is to serve as a principled (by someone's definition) client of a sewer of public content, or maybe this is a strategic move to shift responsibility. I wonder which it'll be...
Gotta do what you gotta do. C'est la vie!
>Personally, I can't Not say anything when I see people doing the wrong thing. For sure I try to be tactful, but there it is.

I've been paying a high cost for having urges like this for a long time.

I'm curious. How many people are like this? Is this the majority or the minority? I've had trusted friends tell me that I'm crazy and I'm in the minority.
> NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK.

They may handle emoji, but they also regularly fail to handle other common screen-reader situations well.

I do understand the difficulty - most interfaces today are visually-oriented, and often don't include the necessary contexts for accessibility. This turns our screenreader programs into massive and complex programs that have to handle so many different formats and edge cases they become truly monolithic.

But I haven't found either of those to be up to a level of quality where I can put up with them on a daily basis. JAWS is simply the least-worst at the moment.

(Small examples: NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing anything on a network (whether not its the active window). Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable itself at random and unexpected times).
Fish School Search Algorithm
Be ready to move at all times, then.
Back from the Brink
Here’s something users don’t care about. Your next version. You’re a fucking text editor. You do not get to update, ever. Not “remind me later,” not “skip this version,” never. How fucking dare you throw an update prompt or a release notes screen when I’m trying to use a tool to do a job. It’s unconscionable arrogance to think a change to an already-complete piece of software is worth an interruption like that.

If I want it to behave differently than it does, I’ll go looking, and the answer is “you gotta upgrade” then I will. But not a moment before.
My dad has his whole house wired up with echo dots in every room, voice-activated lights, voice-control TV, and those shitty $100 security cameras in every room.

I've tried to explain why he doesn't need them. His response (about the security cameras) is always, "If there's ever a break in, I'll be glad I have them." The fact that actually using a light switch sets in motion a 20-minute repair via iPad doesn't seem to bother him. He doesn't view the wiretaps as a problem. He (with my mother's help) recently bought a wifi-enabled fridge and kitchen sink.

I love my parents to death, but it's ridiculous. I'm to the point where I usually leave my phone in the next room over when I'm not using it (and please check me in at a psych ward if I ever buy a smart-watch with a cellular connection and an omni-directional microphone). Its beneficial for clarity of thought / lack of distraction as well as for privacy.

Connectivity for connectivity's sake will be the death of freedom.
"Running a website 24/7" would fit something like a $10/mo instance on DO or Linode.

Unless you specify what kind of site you run, and what traffic do you face, the use case is nebulous.
The Economist Who Cried Recession
Nothing gets fixed if you don't say anything, but the odds are always supporting the fact that this bozo was placed by another top bozo.

The leaders who appreciate this, will go the extra mile to develop trust and/or open door with ICs but if you aren't 100% sure you have this, it means you don't.

Bozos excel at social aerodynamism and those who start to like them are to be worried about just as much.
Bozos can even end up on boards, VCs or public figures.
Never assume there are rules, never assume someone is addressing the obvious problem.

In the end, if you sniff a bozo, pack up and go.
That's your only move.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/31/why-ever...
> Outside of scientific computation, machine learning, statisticd, etc there is seldom legitimate use for floating point.

I don't disagree with the broad strokes but wanted to point out that graphics is another area where it's useful.

And lots of mathy stuff with practical applications. Audio could be another.
Hong Kong's best data science companies
I've said before, and I'll say it again, much of the content I want to consume is basically advertising, but the way today's internet works, is that I have to view ads for stuff I don't want in order to see the ads I want to see. And for some reason, people call avoiding this "stealing".
A third party could do this if they wished. Savepagenow is one of several wrappers that can save an arbitrary URL's contents to the Internet Archive: https://github.com/pastpages/savepagenow

Hook it up to RSS and away you go.
Yes, sometimes when you use new updated ... these things go missing in other places so it becomes painful to retrain to the next version.
Don't want to ruin it, but I didn't expect this to be a narrative. Chilling and extremely hacker-oriented!
Facebook, Google drop out of top 'best places to work'
> eulas
Fair point on this one. It's pretty difficult. I don't have a good solution here.

> What about mortgage docs?

Yes. 1000% yes. What kind of insane person wouldn't read their mortgage agreement in full? I read the entire PDS of every lender I was considering.

> Credit card agreements?

Yes. Jesus, yes!
If he's telling the truth, major props to that guy for sticking to his principles regardless of what he had to lose.
If you're using an open source editor, compile it without the update check.

If you're not, pay for your software, then disable the setting.

In neither scenario is there an excuse for entitled laziness.
When someone is given feedback they'll walk away with one prominent takeaway. If the first piece of feedback was positive, the second corrective and the last positive, that person is going to walk away thinking they're doing a great job.

If you have a piece of feedback just give that feedback. Don't decorate it. Don't sweeten it up. Be direct, objective and be helpful if it requires support to implement.

The shit sandwich is just bad management advice.
MacBook Pros are extremely popular with certain segments of developers. But we (typically) need a quad-core and 16Gb of ram, not a 28-core and 384GB ram and three graphics cards.
Enterprise software is a different beast, since the users are not the purchasers and not consenting to use, and so their concerns don't matter.
I find reviews useful anyway. I simply ignore the "good" reviews and always look at the worst ones. There are three kinds of bad reviews - people who had random bad stuff happen (postal service broke it) that is irrelevant and think everyone should know - people with some sort of vendetta (possibly disgruntled employees, or competitors, or crazy customers) - and finally, people who actually had a bad experience that might be characteristic of the product's quality or design.

If the third category can be used to construct a narrative about something that is a deal-breaker, then that's the information I'm looking for. Of course, it has to be taken in context of the competitors.

My expectation is that the best products have some type (I) and type (II) bad reviews, but no type (III). Almost as good is something with type (III) that are about something that either doesn't matter to me or is actually a positive from my perspective.
I mean, any API call to an external server can be considered "phoning home". What is your specific definition? I think submitting bug reports only through official channels is pretty lame. Most of the 'official channels' don't really provide much meaningful info to developers, there's limited support for custom debug/logging/etc. So your point 1 and point 2 are basically at odds.
Amazon vs. Apple
Machine learning is a little different since it can actually make use of all those GPUs, but yeah