skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's worth a mention just how buggy win10 has been for me. I don't spend much time working in windows, but every time I do I encounter one issue or another.

File explorer freezes / crashes.

There is that one empty folder on my desktop that I cannot delete because it is in use, but there is nothing in the folder and no program is conceivably using it.

There are occasional glitches with git. It wouldn't let me clone a git repo somewhere because it said the folder already existed. No such folder existed. Changing the destination name did nothing. Restarting fixed it.

There was a bug which kept rearranging the order of desktop icons, which was actually pretty annoying.

There is a bug that they seem to fix and then break with every other update. Basically, if I go fullscreen with some programs and two monitors set to mirror, the resolution zooms in and it's unusable. This is currently broken in the latest stable release.

Installs from the windows store almost always fail for no obvious reason.

I updated to 1909, or w/e the latest is, hoping that some of the isues I've encountered would be fixed. I've reinstalled the driver and tried fixing it but the USB wifi adapter that I have now no longer works (still works fine in Linux).

I could go on. That is with me going out of my way to not install much at all on the pc, because I know that installing things like tweaks to stop telemetry like the author suggests will lead to even more issues.

Contrast this to the experience I've had with Linux the past few years. It never crashes. Core programs like nemo (file explorer) do not freeze / crash. It updates without issue. I cannot think of a single issue i've had. The computer does exactly what I expect it to do. Stability is vital if you want to be productive.

I'm sure other folks have had the opposite experience. For me though, I am done with Windows.
Germans are famous for interiors and safety features, those translate well. also continuous improvement of their lines, I don't like the golf personally but when you get in one you feel the years of iteration and improvements. also transmission, and as a matter of fact they're already experimenting with that on the Porsche Taycan, produced in Germany and that's already doing 3k car/month without months of drama leading up the deliveries.

the rest is just an elaborate broken window fallacy, the economy will suffer not if they just shift the supply chain, as long as the job will be there.
You wear a jacket and try not to fall
They might as well hand a development tool to a client and call it a day ;) Super flexible
Sure, then we can keep corporations around as long as we balance their government-enabled incredible labor rate negotiating position with something comparably effective for workers.
I'll take the Windows Registry over an OS that litters my home directory with dot files, or even simply force me to create my own format of saving my settings (even ~/.settings is barely an improvement).

Saving your settings should be an API offered by the OS and the Windows Registry is pretty good at that.
Show HN: A tiny isometric city builder in JavaScript
Eliminating smallpox also comes to mind.
A reflection about automatic transcription of music (2018)
Many agencies are well-intentioned but wear congressional straight jackets. It's not all Anjit Pai land.
> I never got into an intractable package issue with windows, where the dependencies were broke in a way where I had to crawl through logs and manually delete things to get them working.

I cannot count the number of times that's happened for me on Windows, Linux and macOS. None of them are immune to this problem.
Even a lot of the more complex things could be automated.

For example, the only slightly complex thing about my taxes are capital gains and interest. It would not be hard to have my brokerages/banks coordinate with the IRS to autopay my taxes on that as well, just like my income taxes are auto paid.
Fork that "control" panel. Use the old one.
When corporations band together to extract higher profits we penalize them, same logic should apply to labor unions.
I use Zim Wiki [1]. I like the hierarchical structure plus the ability to link to any other page internally. It does a good job of staying out of your way and has support for check boxes, searching, and various plugins. It also saves to disk in plaintext so I can version control it.

[1] https://zim-wiki.org/
I think a bet you would loose :). Wine is an awesome project but 100 devs vs 10.000 devs is not fair on an API surface as big as Win32.
Look for feedback hub in your start menu.
Is there really a way to "use" energy for computation that doesn't just convert all of it to heat?
Perhaps a curricula on small electronic component repair. Starting with iPhones. Of course, they’ll need plenty of lab experience - say 4 hours a day?
Did you read it? Intuit lobbied....Republicans.
> Middle class people can afford to live in plenty of California, just not in certain places like the bay area.

This hurts us all. The economy would grow if people from poorer areas could participate in more productive economies such as the Bay Area. It's sad that the most productive cities consider themselves "fully developed" - when we are far from it.
> OH, and it would be stored in a normal text file; the source code for these BASIC interpreters is stored in a binary tokenized format, which makes it difficult or impossible to use version control systems like Git.

In some BASIC implementations, it was quite possible to 'LOAD' and 'SAVE' programs as plain ASCII text by adding the appropriate incantations somewhere, even though the default representation was tokenized. I'm not sure if the "Business" BASICs you're using can do this.

> Relying on line numbers, GOTO, GOSUB and RUN/CALL for flow control, all variables are global. This makes it extremely difficult to reason about code and make changes without breaking anything.

Well, I'd say less "difficult", and more like "impossible absent a tedious reverse engineering effort". Figure out all the jump targets and all the subroutines, and document the globals that each relies on/modifies. Then you can treat your subroutines as something a bit closer to plain functions. (They'll still be non-reentrant however. Meaning that subroutines cannot recurse in general, not even indirectly.)

> So a "record" (in this system at least) is basically a really long string with the fields stored in specific places in that string. If you need to change the data structure you have to update the hardcoded substring references in every single program that accesses the file.

The really old BASICs had their own notion of "record"-based file that was essentially the only kind of file that could be randomly accessed. "Sequential" files were entirely separate and only supported appending, absent language extensions.
> Want to be constantly fiddling with your system just to keep it running? Use Linux.

This may have been true 10+ years ago; the amount of fiddling required is pretty low these days.
The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.

We have systems in place to push back against the slow but incessant march (back) to plutocracy, but we don't always use them in a timely fashion. After almost 250 years there's been some... entropy.

Except it's not entropy, it's order (which helps with the sales pitch). Just not the kind of order everybody needs.
How Amazon Chose Speed over Safety in Building Its Delivery Network
No, I did not watch all the videos. It seems like they/you are proposing a hypothesis that mercury poisoning is responsible for a significant percentage of Alzheimer's cases? And reading between the lines on your other posts, you seem to believe that mercury poisoning is a factor in your own illness due to your perception of chelation therapy being effective for you?
This would make it impossible to fight the yoke of your Boeing Max 8 and communicate with ATC at the same time.
Oh, it's tips about running. I'm embarrassed to admit that I assumed it was going to be a blog post about running some software I hadn't heard of yet called Tips.
> Just don't outsource it

But how else would you charge millions for half broken and otherwise still shitty software and UIs? Sorry I'm super bitter because all the government sites are absolutely garbage and so many links for more information, explanations, other forms, etc, don't even work and makes dealing with anything related to the government the most frustrating experience.
https://www.moosejaw.com/product/stabil-icers-run-crampon_10...

no affiliation and i've never used those but there you go. aside from the shoes very warm gloves and a balaclava.

warm glove hack: get dish gloves and wear them under whatever mittens. your hands will sweat and the dish gloves will contain the warm sweat. it's quite gross but quite effective.
FTA:

>> That morning, Frommer polled his colleagues in the Assembly and found they were a vote short. No Republicans would vote for the bill, and some Democrats would vote ‘no’ too.

>> Once again, Intuit had blocked ReadyReturn.

It's definitely an Intuit thing, but being bought by Intuit seems to be a majority Republican thing.
Electric bikes/scooters will stay illegal in New York thanks to Governor Cuomo
We have that it's called "supply and demand".
Link has been updated
I tried ~3 years ago, vanilla Ubuntu. Still enough fiddling that I had trouble focusing on my actual projects. At least there's decent app support now thanks to Electron.
I have a windows 10 laptop that i keep around for the few things that need windows (updating an old remote control, that kind of thing), and the odd/annoying behavior is that the fonts will go insane after updates. There will be no fonts at all for the desktop icons, or traditional windows apps. Even cmd.exe doesn't show any fonts. However, web browsers (chrome) will work (with some fonts being weird), as will the new-ish windows 10 style control panel things.

I've finally figured out that logging in as a different user, logging my account out, and then logging back in as me will "fix" the font issue ... until the next update.
That would be funny. Their engineer employment motivation boils down to: Come to Google and be comfortable.
> Voting matters

Gerrymandering and voter purging matters
The problem of Linux DEs seems to be that they're run by UX geeks. Which makes sense. Who else would be willing to dedicate the amount of time to get them working?

The downside is that utility comes in absolutely last place with UX geeks.

Ergo, you get a full UI redesign at every opportunity.

But... that's why you pay people: to do boring things. Like port an old UI into a more modern underlying framework without changing it.
Just picked it up on Kindle.

Thanks so much for the book recommendation and the pointer towards BJ Fogg.
That's a valid argument against "closed shop" unions, which is a reasonable discussion to have; but we started this thread with banning unions tout court.
I do a lot of running with 1-2 marathons a year. Two recent things had a big impact on my running:

1.) Understanding the importance of rest. The FIRST method described in “Run less, run faster” really changed how I structured my weekly training regimen and drastically reduced my injuries

2.) Getting a Stryd footpod to accurately measure my pace even during fast changing interval sessions. It’s still magic to me how a footpod can be that accurate
A trick for when you're trying a strategy you aren't sure of:

you can overpay the IRS by the amount you would pay if the exceptions you are pretty sure apply actually didn't.

They will return the extra to you, and you lose the interest that money could have earned but gain the knowledge for next year of whether you can or can't do what you wanted to try. Depending on your specifics might be cheaper than a tax adviser.

Disclaimer: YMMV, I'm not a tax advisor, I pulled this out of my * * *, etc.
SnipCSS (https://www.snipcss.com) -- webdev tool to copy styles of a portion of a webpage

SuperAnimo (https://www.superanimo.com) - free cartoon video maker I've been working on for years, recently made the publishing more user-friendly

Neither project has any traction or sales.
I used TaxAct in the past but they're now almost as expensive as TurboTax.

I now use https://www.freetaxusa.com - a little less hand holding than TurboTax, but if you know what you're doing it handles almost every situation and is, as advertised, free.
Ask HN: Would you be interested in an easier way to pay people for feedback?
I don't think I am good at finding a sweet spot for lot of things people suffering from disabilities or other problems go through whenever I design build/design something. Collecting feedback is not an easy feat. I would love to have a chat with a blind person about my designs and ideas but often have no less intrusive and easy way to do that.

There is no easy way to pay for feedback as well. Asking people for their PayPal or something similar doesn't cut it online.

For the second problem, what do you think of something that will let you give someone money by generating a small username tip.

Example - You made a post on reddit and someone with username hn-kun replied and gave you feedback, you want to give him money so what you can do is create a tip with a reddit username hn-kun and send him a link. He can transfer the money into his bank by oauth or other flows to verify himself instantly.

He doesn't need to register or you have to ask him for something like his PayPal.

I am not sure about the first problem. Any ideas or existing services?
Financial Times is great! Not worth the price if you dont split it with others, though.
Does not for 99% of consumers (only because of browsers) and does matter for 75% of business users (reduced by 24% because of browsers)
Communist manifesto?
Spot on! I was terrible at making it seem like I wasn't just trying to one-up them or seem smarter when I was little. Delivery is so important.
Interesting. There was a really good talk at the last CPPCon by Chandler Carruth about how there is really no such thing as a zero-cost abstraction. The main point being, while you might be able to optimize against a runtime performance cost for abstractions, the cost will almost always be shifted to compile time, or to the cognitive burden on the developer.

It really makes me think there must be something like the first law of thermodynamics for logical complexity.
The Strange Tradition of Watching ‘Dinner for One’ on New Year’s Eve (2018)
I use both platforms regularly. Using dual screens, I have noticed many more bugs in MacOS graphics stack than Windows. From out-right freezes, to black screens, inverted colors, wrong colors, fuzzy fonts, screen glitches and more.

The best things about MacOS is its Unix underpinnings and general consistency. The flip-side also happens to be the two worst things about Windows.
Considering that, even if you ignore that 90% of what goes to the recycling center doesn't actually get recycled, plastic recycling's value is still fairly equivocal, I think it'd be better to just make it a straight up excise tax.

Save the deposit method for the things where returning them leads to a clear win: aluminum cans and reusable bottles. That way you're encouraging reduce and reuse first.

"Recycle" was never supposed to be the first resort in waste reduction, and, at this point, it's arguably not much of a waste reduction technique at all, and instead the centerpiese of an elaborate ecological shell game.
If you ever get a chance to visit the arboretum at UCLA, they have a lot of labelled eucalyptus trees.
Your appealing to the big bad state to solve some problem is anything but market-based. If you don't like unions, compete against them with a better idea.
It's pretty disgusting. Summed up in one of my favorite tweets, which went something like

> Gov: you owe us money. It's called taxes

> Ctzn: oh ok, how much do I owe you?

> Gov: you have to figure it out

> Ctzn: oh well, then I owe you 0

> Gov: no, no, we know how much you owe, you have to figure it out, and by the way if you get it wrong you go to jail
A Twitter war in 2010 helped change the way we talk about women’s writing
In which it was credibly explained that this is not what it claims to be (models of life forms), and that there exist such platforms though i.e. AVIDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida)
Curiously - half of this comment was copy-pasted as a comment to the medium article and not by me.
I'm not sure we do kids a service by skipping over fundamental aspects of mathematics in order to stick to the 'more concrete' stuff. The staggeringly vast majority of kids will never learn a lick of group theory or category theory, and I think that is unfortunate because the fundamentals aren't difficult or big. Most high school grads will hardly have touched even basic logic, and it is frighteningly common to run into people who don't understand that "A -> B; B; Therefore A" isn't valid.
This is fairly spot on though a bit overly generalizing perhaps (e.g. might be me, but 8 years of Win7 on work machine and it's still running completely ok and depending on what exactly you use Linux for there's only moderate amounts of fiddling, though fiddling there is :) I've used and still use all the major OS. There's no silver bullet and there's bugs everywhere, one more annoying than the other. Learning to use them properly (yes that sometimes means finding ways around annoyances) goes a very long way though.
Doesn't matter. The pain and anguish is the goal. I have heard multiple commentators/politicians ( mostly GOP ) state that they want taxpayers to have a negative experience when it comes to paying taxes.
Cool. Maybe when Democrats stop pushing Marxism and unchecked third world immigration (to the detriment of the working class) we can have a conversation about voting based on issues like tax filing.
Western democratic countries use this for unscrupulous purposes too, just look at the many documented instances in the USA for example.

Anyway the end result is everything will be encrypted. The real battle is forcing ISPs and governments to not log device locations and giving real teeth to it. Something that is fairly doubtful.
Curious, what do folks get out of Zinnser's book specifically?

The title has made its rounds in tech circles for a while, and I've read it. Not to be an HN contrarian, but apart from a few tips that it offers toward the beginning, it's actually a pretty dry read and does not itself, in my opinion, reflect good writing (the first few chapters are OK, then it goes downhill from there). I read a lot and unfortunately I wouldn't say Zinnser's book is a piece of writing I would admire.

I've taken IRL creative writing courses since, and I gotten a lot more out of these, because not only did I manage to receive instruction in technique, I also received continuous direct feedback in the form of workshops and instructor critique.
Put on enough layers everywhere with an outer layer to block the wind (with a buff or something else for your face) and wear shoes with studs. I use a pair from Icebug and can run when it's icy and be completely relaxed, zero slippage.
The problem generally comes down to the fact that no Republican is for improving tax filing. So all it takes is for a handful of Democrats to be lobbied to oppose it and even a Democratic majority can't push changes through.
The relatively common (?) experience that:

1. Running `sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade` is much, much faster than explicitly going to the windows update screen, checking for updates and then updating.

2. Linux OSs are usually stuck "updating" while shutting down and restarting, far less frequently and for a far shorter time (if at all), than Windows.

Obviously the comparison isn't entirely fair (though in some ways the comparison is biased against Linux, since its update also usually includes the vast majority of user-space programs), but comparing the percentage of "updating time" of two OSs (whatever the technical reasons) seems to be reasonable, to me.
did that and also tried from the power shell and as soon as I reboot is back
Generate grid (it's static);

Find first weekday of month using your favourite algorithm;

Print month's name above the column that begins with that weekday.
Except when discussing technologically hyper advanced civilizations, the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a (vaguely) reasonable place to expect our laws to break.

The 2nd law is an observed fact with very shaky theoretical underpinnings (I am not talking about the behavior which has very strong underpinnings). It appears to be an emergent behavior rather than a fundamental one. It is a surprising fact given what else we know about the universe. It breaks the time symmetry of the other laws of physics. This is akin to learning that even though the laws of physics dont break position and rotational symmetries, there is a preferred direction and spin. In fact there is a preferred spin- all neutrinos are left handed. There are huge research efforts to understand why or if there are corresponding right handed particles. Broken symmetries mean big things because as far as we can tell the universe is ruled by what symmetries exist and in what ways they are broken.
It's quite a bit more expensive here in the U.S. The issue is that many of the people they are steering away from the free filing (i.e. low income) would benefit from it the most: they have very little money already and their taxes are often a very straightforward tax table lookup. So most would receive no value from a premium tax prep service.
I'm no Windows fanboy but there's a lot of misinformation here. In the spirit of bullying the reader with a big list of points, here are some examples of incorrect claims in TFA:

1. It's not hard to disable Cortana and internet-assisted start menu search completion. I assume that's what they mean by "keyboard scanning and voice recording" because I don't think there's anything else like that in the OS. It is possible to disable telemetry. In general Windows 10 does come with a ton of cruft but it can be disabled with e.g. https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script

2. Disk fragmentation hasn't been an issue for awhile. Defrag runs as a scheduled task in all versions of Windows 10.

3. I like UAC. The article claims that giving users a dialog box to permit admin access is good for malware, but the alternative is taking admin away from users altogether on their own computers. I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff.

4. Windows has arguably the best plug-and-play driver support of any operating system. It's not hard to find drivers as the article claims.

5. The article claims that it's difficult to figure out why your startup is so slow, but task manager has a "Startup" tab now which tells you which startup items are consuming a lot of CPU at login.

6. The article claims that you can't disable Windows Store apps, Windows tips, and ads in the start menu. That's untrue. I don't even have Windows Store installed as a Windows component, I have no idea what "Windows tips" even is, and my start menu is devoid of ads https://i.imgur.com/xy69BWe.png

I think Windows is pretty bad and most users would probably be better off running Lubuntu or something, but there's no need to resort to exaggeration to make that case.
Is this an argument against high density construction and tech workers at the same time?
That certainly was not my meaning!

Sometimes I add little twists into these things to make them less bone-crushingly tedious. Occasionally they cross a line. That's how I find out where the line is.
What is the point of this comment other than to say Google has a lot of employees?
Hi everyone. I've made a isometric tile map a while ago - http://jsfiddle.net/victorqribeiro/k3bazwnj/ - but yesterday I found this really cool tile set - free to use - so I decided to make a tiny city builder. Hope you like it.