skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wouldn't be surprised if some life saving drugs would be developed and used in practice faster because of sci-hub.

Seems like it'd be difficult to precisely estimate the effect of open literature on advancing education, research, and development efforts.

Back when I was a student, we had access to a lot of journals -- but not all of them. And to use them, we had to connect through a laggy VPN to the university, as we often traveled; sometimes it was down. And then when we worked with industrial partners, we couldn't just email them relevant papers as that'd have been illegal. And we couldn't even just email each other papers, as I think the terms-of-use required us to independently download articles.

And, again, that was with university subscriptions! Rising students and professionals who go into industry typically can't access articles at all. Sure, if they really need a specific paper they can try to find a way, but that's a horribly inefficient way to do research; to be effective, a researcher really needs to be able to browse through the literature freely, reading lots of papers without being distracted by technical barriers.

Given that the current system slows down everyone, it's hurting all of us. All of science, technology, engineering, medicine, whatever -- it's all less than what it could've been because we're being held back.

But how do we quantify the on-going harm? How can we guess what sorts of inventions weren't made because researchers didn't have access or were fighting with a buggy VPN? How do we guess at how much education's being held back by students not knowing how to access the literature before college? What about all the damage from working professionals not being able to browse the literature related to their field?

Anyway, yeah, the article's constant references to Sci-Hub, as though it's somehow criminal, were definitely jarring. Sci-Hub feels like it should be legal based on the same sorts of arguments that make self-defense or providing emergency assistance legal.
Pentagon to Test Hypersonic Missiles at Five Times the Speed of Sound
Why so serious? These visions can be had with more fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHMDrhBREXU
Exactly that. Bundled 3rd party software would probably be the easiest part to remove, but there is tons of supporting code, libraries and whatnot intermixed with core components that even if they wanted to, it would cost them a lot of resources to strip it clean of that stuff.

But just imagining that happening... Would be super crazy.
The Most Important Social Skill You Can Master, According to a Harvard Professor
Most pitches come off as scams to me, as their main goal is to sell you an idea that you haven't heard before...

And some people will do what ever it takes to convince you, like; lie, obfuscate, appeal to emotion etc...
(warning, rant follows)

I wonder if the trend to confusing designs has something to do with the recent rise of "use case centered" UI design.

My impression is that many graphical designs in the past were designed by coming up with certain fundamental abstractions or metaphors first and then integrating the different functions of the software into it: That way, we got windows and standard widgets which function the same way everywhere, no matter which particular application makes use of them. We also have abstractions like "files" or "desktop icons" that a user can interact with in a consistent way independent of application.

This way of design has pitfalls: You can choose the wrong metaphors and paint yourself into a corner, you can overvalue consistency to the point the UI becomes cumbersome to use or you can find that a new feature doesn't fit into your abstractions and you have to shoehorn it in. However, what this design guarantees is that the user has some basic tools to orient themselves, without needing to consult a manual for everything or remember some random onboarding popup that appeared a week ago when the user had completely other things on their mind.

I feel today, UI design has shifted away from common abstractions to the point it's almost seen as an anti-pattern. Instead, the design process is started with assembling an exhaustive list of "use cases" or "user stories": The app is supposed to enable the user to do the tasks on the list - and only those tasks. Then, every item on the list is passed, one-by-one to the UI team, who add a button, gesture or other affordance to perform exactly that task. Finally, users are watched via telemetry to see if they are using the app as intended and if any additional tasks must be added via the above procedure.

This method of design does have advantages: The most common tasks are easy to access, even if they are, by themselves, complex procedures involving different components (such as "make a photo, color-correct it, upload it to Twitter and refer to it in a tweet").

On the other hand, everything that falls outside ymthe immediate attention of the developers becomes ridiculously hard to do or even impossible: Take the above photo, but zip it, then send it in an email? Sorry, you need an app for that. Take a photo, color-correct it and send it to mastodon? Sorry, not integrated. Etc, etc.

To be honest, I have no idea if modern UI design really is done like this, but it very often feels that way. I really wonder if a return to some well-dosed consistency wouldn't improve a whole lot of things both for casual and power users.
Not only may but do; I like Common Lisp a lot, and while some people complain that LOOP isn't lispy enough I personally do like it.

But it doesn't have the elegance of just specifying the inequalities you want your loop variables to satisfy :-).
I really like Smart Audio Book Player. It is freemium. I think I don't need any the premium features, but I liked so much the usability of the app that I paid for it.
I won't echo the statements from others about the headache in licencing it would be for Microsoft but I would like to point out :

In the petition:

> We want more proof that you really respect users and user freedom, and aren't just using those concepts as marketing when convenient.

How do you even define that ?
It really seems like this was just setup to inflame people about Microsoft again. Yeah windows 7 is end of life.. ~10 years.. I would consider that pretty reasonable.

Demanding for the source in a petition ? That's quite unreasonable.
Wow. I don't even know what to say or what kind of advice to offer other than, if you need a friend or somebody to talk to, I am here. Seriously. I've been through trauma and I think I can empathize, although certainly have no idea what you're going through. I am SO sorry.
A finite set of numbers has a mean, yes. A probability distribution with heavy enough tails does not have a mean (e.g. the Cauchy distribution).
Yeah, and I imagine this is only going to get worse from now on. The Qt Company now have much less incentive to make the open source versions reliable and usable, because their commercial customers aren't relying on that code anymore, and something of a financial incentive to make them unsuitable for anything except developing Qt itself in order to force people onto the commercial packages.
unfortunately, bibliography , which is the most important kind of link is almost never hyperlinked.
look for unlocker on github
Well, maybe if you have implemented a server in Qt which is accessible to open internet, such as PHP in your example. 99% of the Qt applications I'm aware of are desktop or "embedded". I'm working with Qt since 20 years now and had never a security issue or a known vulnerability relevant to my projects.
If a customer pays you to do the maintenance and update, I hope you're doing it.

But regardless, this is why integration testing is important.

"What will break if I update to Qt-latest?" being one click away.
From lazy brain to laser brain
CopyQ, Touchégg and ElementaryOS (Ubuntu LTS based)

give it a roll.
Nah, it was reasonably easy. The main issue with 4MB calcs is that it used a secondary hardware port to add two extra bits to the page address. Until then we were able to page with only one port, so everywhere was hardcoded to use it. We had to replace all of that with a marcro, and update a few places manually. There's a comment in that code which speaks to this:

; we can't use getBankA because it behaves differently on the 84+CSE, and we don't want that

getBankA was the name of the macro we used to interrogate which Flash page was swapped into bank A (address space 0x4000-0x7FFF).

The real pain with that port was the new color screen.
this would be very interesting!
My desktop environment is macOS/Windows but what you describe is IMHO some pretty solid selling points for XFCE.
Ah that makes sense, thanks. I guess there's no reason it can't serve pages because it is just "text" being returned after all!
We know that Apple uses x86 macOS Servers internally on commodity hardware (from previous discussion on HN[0]). Presumably, they'll need to keep some way of booting on machines missing the special Apple security hardware while staying secure, so Hackintoshes will always be able to find a way, since macOS will have to be able to boot on non-T2 systems for quite a while [1] (some machines they sell don't even have them yet, and presuming they keep up the 8-10 years of software support, there's nothing to worry about).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18114712
[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/mac-computers-apple...
I replaced my roku stick with an old laptop and bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it was great having a super fast and responsive smart tv. Ultimately I replaced it with a $20 chromecast which is just as capable but with better ux.

Im using an ex corporate hp dl380e server for my home lab, loads of computing power for dirt cheap because there is no SLA.

The server was cheap but the electricity is not, and while its powerful I could get a modern quad core would be as powerful and use less electricity for about the same cost over three years.

A lot of this stuff is e-waste not because its no longer powerful but because it is no longer economically viable. A lot of e-waste, phones in particular go to Africa to be reused, outside of this I don't see any reuse / recycling thats realistic.
I know he does, but so what?
Well, there's Wine and ReactOS as two major efforts to reimplement Win32 user space and the operating system as a whole. These are big team efforts, certainly, but they manifest a very detailed understanding of Windows, mostly obtained through reverse engineering.

I would assume that there is enough interest in maintaining Windows - especially commercial interest - that finding and funding a sufficiently large and knowledgeable team is actually not unrealistic. It's just unrealistic to assume that the source code will ever be published willingly by Microsoft as long as any part of it is a direct ancestor to a product they still sell.
Isn't it against amazon terms to show prices?
Loads of Android apps do this. If you are running Android >=9 then you can block the trackers by changing your DNS settings to use one from https://nextdns.io/

Instructions on changing DNS settings https://joyofandroid.com/how-to-change-dns-on-android/
You solved it! Except the post office won't accept Fedex or UPS packages, and if you try to have a package delivered to one, UPS and Fedex will refuse the shipment.

https://www.quora.com/Will-FedEx-deliver-my-package-to-my-lo...
It is a mix. Resupply depends on many factors. Remember ships are stopping at different ports - and often different countries every day (except for cross ocean cruises which of course which don't stop). Thus they look into local taxes, availability, and such. Meals are planned which means they know what they need - but also means they can look at what will be available. They have the ability to load at any port. If they can get X cheap at some port they will buy it there. Thus if they can contract a local farmer to supply something cheap in one port they will. If shipping means some non-local food is cheaper in one port than another they will buy at the cheaper one. If labor is cheaper in one port they will try to use more of that labor.

Supply management is important to a cruise line. They are very good at getting the best prices. They take advantage of the ship moving to get the best prices.
>Europe has some of the best spots on the planet for wind generation. Winds are in many places, a near constant companion, and usually within the range that turbines prefer.

And how much area does that require? Sure, the countries with a long coast might be able to do it, but others might not be able to as easily. Even if they can do it, electricity and land prices would be more expensive there than elsewhere. I'm not sure how this would work politically, because business would probably just move to the other parts of the EU.

>the Nordics could supply a huge proportion of Europe's power needs with fully developed offshore wind.

The further you have to transport electricity the less efficient it becomes. And when you say "Nordics" here are you talking about just Denmark or do you include Sweden too? Because remember, Norway is not in the EU.

This kind of an energy solution is likely unthinkable politically as well. It would render some nation states vulnerable to others.
Padding?
The problem with looking at words is that you are learning language to language translation instead of language to thought. When I think of "pencil", I have a schema of a pencil appear in my mind. When I see enpitsu (well, the hiragana or kanji for it), if I have to think "pencil" to bring up the schema of a pencil that is an extra layer of thought that slows one down. With more abstract concepts there might now be a better solution, though with more abstract concepts you also have greater issues with things not being one to one translations.

>Just use flash cards.

That is effectively what the apps are mimicking and what I am using. What I'm bringing up in a desired feature I haven't found (granted, I've only checked out a dozen or so apps which is worlds apart from serious market research). As for why I use an app over flash cards? Phone is more convenient and always on me. Also, other than a stack of the most common kanji, flash cards don't really scale in a portable format.

But I probably should buy a deck including kanji for at home usage.
Three fingers left and right, theres also a three finger pinch for cut and paste.

uh...they all make more sense on an iPad than the phone though lol.
And Jobs WAS a sociopath. He was also a ruthless genius.
Many examples of companies out there wasting $$$$ money for years on dead end projects.
With the ever notable exception that graphics acceleration straight up does not exist at all in macOS in a VM. The only way to get it is to use virtIO on a Linux box to pass through a secondary AMD card, I believe.
> which translates into 4.8 Gbps for OP style

I think you are misreading/misunderstanding the performance of modern NVMe SSDs.

SATA based SSDs which it sounds like you have, top out at around 550MByte/sec.

However a PCIE 3.0 NVME can easily achieve 3500 MByte/sec throughput. That's saturating the PCIE 3.0 x4 link. PCIE 4.0 based SSDs are even faster, with advertised 5000MByte/sec throughput (but in testing may top out slightly slower than that)

Yes, modern SSDs are stupid fast.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/review/1893-pcie-4-vs-pcie-3-ssd/
Funny timing - this s theVerge's headline story: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-l...

Sometimes waiting too long for your personal trust to be broken (after seeing them drop on others) can be a lot worse than just a broken toy.
All change is bad. A lack of change is even worse.
Gruber has some good points, but I think in some ways he misses the forest for the trees.

The iPad is essentially, at this point, a two-mode device. There is the simple paradigm, screen-as-app mode inherited from the iPhone. Then, for power users, there is the multitasking paradigm with Flyover, Split Screen, Drag & Drop.

The multitasking paradigm is not meant to co-exist with the simple one, and it is not meant to be discoverable. I agree with Gruber that there is work to do here to make it better, but iPad can't drop the simple paradigm, because many people use it that way. So anything more that the iPad offers has to build on top of and integrate with that paradigm.

That is really a huge challenge. It's not often that challenges like that come along. In desktop computing, lots of things are un-intuitive or at least not intuitively discoverable, such as right-clicking for context menus or keyboard shortcuts. We all don't consider them that way because we are so used to them, and we almost never meet someone who hasn't ever had to interact with them the first time.

I'd also argue that the simple paradigm iPhone and iPad offer has made computing more approachable to great swaths of people (not even considering things like cost, etc).

Yes, iPad multitasking is not perfect. But I think they are at least on the right track, and I am thankful they have protected that approachability.
I have this naive fantasy where every country that has nuclear weapons independently and secretly came to the conclusion that keeping them operational is ultimately more dangerous than not (due to accidents, human error, clinically insane leadership, ...), and just removed the detonators and unplugged the big red buttons. The nuclear deterrent remains, but is now actually based on a collective fiction. We've discovered the ultimate defensive weapon, one that only needs to exist in our imaginations ;)
I go the other way round. The project should not depend on stuff only available with the new new version of the library. Even if I use Qt 5.4 or 5.9 on some projects most of it would still run on Qt 4.4. And these are not only open source spare time projects.
I don't think you can really say that the iPad has failed as a general computing device, and that it is propped up by the situations below. What do you think generates $20B in sales? That's a lot of tills flight aids.

I think the iPad has succeeded as a general purpose computation device for normal people who use computers for email / music / Facetime / photos etc.

Always seems like its the 'power users' who don't seem to understand the iPad when the average person can pick one up and do most things they want to do with one.
I wish I could find the source, but I once read that people at Apple considered opening up Classic, but there was so much 3rd party code a releasable blob would take a ton of engineering hours to scrub it all, and couldn't justify the cost.
Not everyone lives near an Apple Store either.

Thankfully Apple has recently made genuine iPhone batteries more available to repair shops, but that was just 4 months ago. They spent 13 years not doing that first.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20838307/apple-iphone-rep...
This is a publicity stunt. Nobody in their right mind would expect that this would get any official reaction from MS, even if it's just a plain "no". I just don't get what the FSF has to gain from that. It rather makes them look petty in my eyes.
Do you know why a request wouldn't contain a list of all the other apps on your phone? Seems like a foolproof way to fingerprint a device.
I have the same, 9900k with a 5700XT. Catalina works with SIP enabled, FileVault 2 works perfectly, etc. Been doing hackintosh since 2016.

With that said I’m pretty much done with it now that they made the 16 inch MBP. I bought one with the i9 and 64GB of ram and the experience is way better. I don’t need to mess around with clover or update random kexts anymore. It gets old after awhile!
So in the end people who don't want to be tracked in their movement by the government only have the option to drive through small back-in-the-woods roads, while the new "highway toll" is to have your data harvested?
Microsoft or Adobe can afford to make a billion dollar mistake.
I would have thought Double Click was something "Death would take care of it" [1] by now, so may be not.

I remember twenty years ago teaching my parents double click, they then spend years on computer and they still cant understand it. They have 4 modes in their mental model, Left Click, Right Click, and Double Click on both Left and Right. They dont understand when to use which.

A lot of nerds / geeks/ tech people to this day still dont understand what makes the whole touch screen / iPhone UX so special. Scott Forstall said it [2] these people just dont get it. The single tap app opening may have been trivial for most of us, it was a world of difference to 95% of consumers. ( And that is why you should not put these people into consumer tech product design )

[1] Something Steve Jobs said with regards to people dont know how to use a keyboard, but I cant find the video with Google. It was during an interview with Walt Mossberg.

[2]https://youtu.be/IiuVggWNqSA?t=3102
Don't know why Amazon doesn't just leave protestors to their actions. Bezos needs to watch Southpark episode 100 and rethink the strategy.

We can be a nation that believes in war
And still tells the world that we don't
Let the flag for Hypocrisy

https://southpark.cc.com/clips/103534/bleeding-heart-rock-pr...
> you’ve repeatedly talked about apartheid which is a highly inappropriate

There's a wall with guard towers. I've been there and seen it myself. The existence of some 2nd class Arab citizens that they couldn't ethnically cleanse or expel any other way while the world was watching doesn't change that fact.

>I ask you to recognize that these things are complicated

It was never complicated. Israel was a racist European colonization project just like South Africa. The fact that it screams anti-semitism until it's blue in the face and asks you do to the same does not change that fact.
> Easier to get receipts digitally

if the need was there you'd already get a qr code to a shortlink to a rest api to fetch the data. existing tech, well defined behavior, augments existing data transfer without being incompatible with the current clients (the squishy humans)
>to introduce good software engineering practices. What happens? The data scientists go rogue and start running notebooks left and right. How do they productionize their work? Well, they don't. They were academics.

My background is programming (instead of data analysis & modeling) so I'm sympathetic to your idealistic "software engineering" view... but I'm also sympathetic to the academics' side as explained by Yihui Xie's blog post:

https://yihui.org/en/2018/09/notebook-war/

He's convinced me that criticizing non-programmers for using (or over-using) computational notebooks when it should be a "proper" programming language and deployment is like criticizing financial analysts over-using Excel to learn how to program VB or Python and re-write their spreadsheets into a "proper database" like Oracle or MySQL. That's just not reality. This divide between "end user tools" and "proper programmer tools" will always exist because there is no perfect tool in existence that serves the needs of both skill sets. Therefore, the programmers will always be able to say the data scientists or financial analysts are "doing it wrong".
What made you stop using one?
agreed. graphic design - perfect niche for ipads.
Except everything after "Looking forward," is still an open research problem.

> Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism

IPFS has no anonymity, so individual nodes could be attacked the way individual torrenters got sued back in the day.

> but there are many ways this could be done

There are currently no scalable ways this could be done. If there were you wouldn't have a single bold researcher providing a single point of failure search engine that hops to some other location each time authorities shut it down.
If if weren't for Excel, would there be any reason for businesses to stay on Windows? That seems to be the "killer app" for finance.
It does work on wine but requires some work to get it running: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...