skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But even during those times, you were still free to install/mod whatever you wanted on your computer, and even now it is (just barely) possible with Windows.

True. For the users, app installation wasn't a problem, until Internet Explorer came for Netscape.

The problem was mainly Microsoft having the majority of manufacturers like, Dell, IBM, HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, Hitachi, Toshiba having Windows pre-installed and threatening a rise in prices of their Windows license or even revoking their licenses if they sell PCs pre-installed with desktop OS competitors like Be Inc's BeOS. [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.intern...
You mean 'Own Analysis of SwissCovid'?
Maybe they don't see the point of wasting manpower when they can let Russia handle it. (seems like one of Russia's historical fortes)
You are the one making affirmative claims. I am asking for evidence of your claims. You provided one Wikipedia page. I looked at it closely, and found it inconclusive. It did not reach a definitive conclusion as to your claims. I humbly ask that you link to sources either in the Wikipedia article, or another article, or ideally first and second party sources specifically which you find convincing. Simply saying an argument was made poorly or was made well by someone else somewhere else does nothing for our discussion here on HN.

In short, sources or why bother?
Drones don’t have unlimited range. The ones in the article have a range of 6km. If there was really a war situation I imagine an EMP could disable them or a MOAB could just blow everyone up instead.
The beauty of recursion and pattern matching in functional programming languages
Saying Trump shared a "deceptive video" is what's deceptive here and helps him get re-elected since every normal person can see it's clearly not deceptive and the media and Twitter are lying.

I guess techcrunch.com is just chasing clicks, it's hard to see what's stupidity and what's A/B testing these days.
In a vacuum - sure. You have to stop viewing everything through the eyes of a technical user, they have literally billions of end-users. All of them know "internet explorer" which MS is desperately trying to get rid of. It makes absolute perfect sense to walk users through Edge when they're getting rid of the default browser that billions of people expect to be there.

Were you expecting them to just get rid of the old browser and leave users in a lurch? You'd be on here blowing them up for "taking away a browser without any instructions so my grandma is calling me now" instead of whining that they made you actually acknowledge the change.
Ask HN: Best programming language to get a kid intrested in computers?
Hi!
I've got a little cousin (9 years old) with whom I have already done some things on the computer. We played some games (of course) and I have shown him how to use basic features in excel and how to make plots.

He will soon be getting his own PC, so I would like to get him interested in programming. He can already read and write, and I think he knows enough English to begin some light programming.

I want to show him a programming language which allows him to draw graphics easily, so he doesn't get bored. It also has to be easy to install on a Windows PC.

I looked at Scratch, but I think a graphical programming language is too simplistic and dragging all of the stuff around is really unintuitive. I also considered Python and Javascript, but I think their ecosystem is too complicated for a kid to grasp and not get discouraged.

Thanks for the suggestions.
I find the feeling of rooting for Microsoft very strange indeed but the Apple Appstore is really a thing that needs to be broken down/opened up ASAP. Microsoft gets slapped over IE and Media Player but Apple can go way further and lock out every browser but their own (all iOS browsers are just a skin on Safari). Apple has become what Microsoft used to be - IMHO worse.
That physical copy still has to be signed by Microsoft. It’s Sneakernet instead of Internet but everything else stays exactly the same.
Launch HN: Mighty Health (YC S19) – Health coaching for people over 50
Hey HN!

We’re James, Felipe, and Bernard, founders of Mighty Health (https://mightyhealth.com/gift), a personal coach that helps people over 50 become healthier through exercise, nutrition, and wellness.

With Father’s Day coming up, we thought some of you might be in the same position as we are, worrying about our parents and loved ones, wanting to do more to help out in these uncertain times.

A few years ago, my dad was rushed to the hospital for emergency heart surgery. Though he luckily survived, this was quite the wakeup call—he had to change his lifestyle habits immediately, or else he’d have to deal with painful, worsening chronic issues for the rest of his life.

These changes—exercise, nutrition, sleep, and reducing stress—are hard as is, but even more so for folks over 50. Most wellness apps are designed for motivated millennials, making them feel less relatable to older adults. They don’t take into account evolving health needs, joint issues, or technical limitations. Personal trainers and nutritionists are expensive long-term and often inaccessible. And because our older loved ones are at higher risk of COVID complications due to their age, they won’t be able to return to gyms for the foreseeable future.

That’s why we started Mighty Health. Everything is designed intentionally for people over 50:

1. Coaching: A personal coach keeping them motivated through SMS, providing a real human relationship

2. Exercise: At home workout videos that are easy on the joints, led by top-rated certified trainers

3. Nutrition: A personalized plan and grocery list designed by cardiologists for heart health

4. Reminders: Preventative health checkup notifications (based on their age and gender) and medication reminders

5. Celebrations: Texts to family members about milestones in the program so you can celebrate together

Our app is simple to set up and use, accommodating large and high contrast text. We chose SMS (through Twilio/Front) for coaching because it’s a more familiar medium, like texting with your family. We integrate with Apple Healthkit and Google Fit, as well as a number of cellular blood pressure cuffs and scales.

Dr. Bernard Chang, our medical co-founder, is the Vice Chair of Research at Columbia University’s Department of Emergency Medicine and leads our team of physicians, trainers, and coaches who develop our plans and content.

These plans are optimized for health goals specific to people over 50, such as losing weight to prevent chronic diseases, becoming stronger/decreasing joint pain, or reducing their risk of heart disease. On average, 85% of our users stick to our plans for at least 12 weeks and lose ~10 pounds.

We’d love for you to check out our website at https://mightyhealth.com/gift and are eager to hear your feedback and ideas below. Feel free to reach out directly at james@mightyhealth.com as well!
What, like this? https://www.foxnews.com/world/al-qaeda-secret-us-missile-kni...

Dunno about "untraceable" though, there's a long history of tracing munitions from fragments.
> "At least with a console you have the option of buying a physical copy of the game and loading it onto the device"

Possibly not for much longer. Sony is releasing the two versions of the PS5, the "digital edition" of which has no BD drive and can't use physical game media. It'll be interesting to see whether it has much uptake.
So yeah, you're right, comparison would be possible if you subtract all the timer stuff. But as I recall of the offered implementation there wasn't actually an easy way to do that...
I'm not sure this is what you're looking for, but the Feynman lectures give the basic idea in an elementary way: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_23.html

> This idea of using exponentials in linear differential equations is almost as great as the invention of logarithms, in which multiplication is replaced by addition. Here differentiation is replaced by multiplication. . . . See how simple it is! Differential equations are immediately converted, by sight, into mere algebraic equations
Too late to edit: it was actually 53 years ago, not 70. My bad.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/help.html?...
Assault weapon and AR-specific tools, such as:
Vise blocks
AR-15/M16 armorer’s wrenches or combo wrenches
Bullet button tools
I think the answer is simply that Google is massive and sometimes competes with itself. Android’s Instant Apps, announced a few years ago (seemingly to go nowhere?) seemed like a direct attack on the use case for web sites, but the company tolerated it.

As a whole I think Google wants to chase ubiquity. A PWA will work on laptops, phones, Windows, Mac, Android... an Android app won’t. So they’ll push PWAs.
Hackattic – Becoming a Better Developer
If I remember the story correctly the founders of Dragon Systems sued the bank that handled the acquisition. They claimed the bank convinced them to take stock and not cash at a point in time when the same bank already had been preparing for the inevitable bankruptcy of L&H. They lost because M&A was considered a different branch of the bank and not supposed to know about the imminent bankruptcy.

BTW: The founders of Dragon Systems are a married couple with an interesting bio too.
My favorite line was:

> I understand that the self-organizing neighborhood committee that removes a tree that blocks their street does not go on to build the Empire State Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry. Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the thing that people do.

I don't necessarily agree with the "kids these days-ism" direction the article goes, or that Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of human achievement (to me, its the opposite), but I definitely agree that there needs to be a bottoms up approach and cultural shift to start moving again.

I have a friend that is very involved in state and national politics and is heavily invested in top down solutions, where systems and elected officials are the instruments of change. We frequently discuss our different perspectives and usually arrive at the notion that you need both top down and bottom up changes working in conjunction. I think this article is mostly trying to say that there's an imbalance of too much top down with not enough support from the bottom up.
Those are all things that you have no choice in.

You can’t install an alternative to Siri. You can’t use a different push notification system. You can’t use an alternative store and send updates yourself.
It's more like the supermarket keeping track of what isles people are going down and what items they are looking at. Which supermarkets would do if they could because it's extremely valuable data.
Swarming drones and AI is the scariest tech and we are going to see the consequences. Because it will be so cheap and ubiquitous. This isn’t even the atomic bomb — where the work was just too sweet to stop. This is basic technology with small incremental improvements tons of people can do.

Drones are the first robots that are among us (overhead). Self-driving cars are at least very expensive to produce. But drones can be mass-produced and deployed anonymously.

Drones with live munitions is terrifying. Imagine an anonymous swarm descending on Union Square in SF.

Even under normal operation, drones can fall and hit someone by accident. Let alone a swarm.

This is one technology I should not want to be in anyone’s hands, but if it is, it should be in the hands of the State and not everyone. Just like bombs.

PS: With cheap cameras being ubiquitous and people can be identified by their gait, heartbeat etc. consumer level tech can also include an AI that can cross correlate everywhere you’ve been. Businesses would use it to fine you when you park your car for too long and don’t go into the store.

But governments and police departments can concoct tons of believable stories with parallel construction and put anyone they want away. In fact AI can also be adopted in other places in the policing and judicial process (as with Palantir) leading to a Kafkaesque experience for sentencing.

And with deepfakes it’s worse than that. Anyone could create a believable video of a rape-caught-on-video or a damaging “speech at a private event” or whatever. Reputational attacks were cheap already (see CIA handbook) but with a swarm of sleeper twitter bot accounts and other bots you could introduce anything.

In short I am worried we are going to be entering a dystopia soon. This video nails the drones issue:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
EY had been WDI's auditor for well over a decade. They only now refused to sign after KPMG wouldn't give the company a clean bill of health in April. Obviously, these shady practices didn't just start in the last few months, so there are clearly things that EY should have flagged much earlier, but failed to do so. And for that, they will be on the hook.
Honestly, 90% of the work out there seems to be maintaining some heap of shit, whether it is built in Python or Wordpress or whatever. All the better paid work at least. I have a theory that if a company has been around long enough top make money the software will be a mess.
> Are there many applications these days which are not available as a "web app" aka website?

Pretty much no, with a few exceptions:

1. Any kind of hardcore gaming

2. Any kind of CPU/memory/disk intensive media production software (though this is becoming less so)

3. Any kind of infrastructure application; you wouldn't run a web server or database in the browser (yet)
Sure, of course. I'm generally against the use of force by the state, and to be clear, don't support the police shooting first and asking questions later. Unless he were really violent and might attack someone else or had a weapon, that didn't make sense. I'm a little unsure as to this situation even with the taser (I don't know whether he might have actually tased someone), but I can understand that the policeman had to make a spur-of-the-moment decision. I suppose we'll have to see if the investigation turns up any further information.
I think this is the wrong thread bub
I agree. Technology trickles down the bank account spectrum. At first only nation states could do drones. Then smaller nation states could do drones. Then bigcos could do drones. Now we've got drones in consumers hands. It should come as no surprise that some nation states decide to use consumer quality and price drones for nation state purposes (their police probably patrol the streets with the same handguns consumers can buy). Just because it's trickled down doesn't mean it's not useful.
A simple method for sending pictures by wire or radio. 1936
USA has been operating drones since last decade in conflict zones in the Middle. The same drones that they use to "neurtalize" terrorists and dictators. Is there still time to oppose that or have we casually accepted them as a necessary for the war on terrorists?
That locked down crap made it possible for the non English literate and non computer literate to have a consistent experience video calling their loved ones (FaceTime) and use WhatsApp and browse the internet on iOS Safari without worrying about clicking on malware links, and that was as of at least 7+ years ago.

Although, I am questioning the utility of WhatsApp as they seem to be particularly fond of forwarding absolute garbage on WhatsApp.
If he's interested in games, might consider something like Gamemaker. Although the language there is Gamemaker specific (actually I last used Gamemaker in like 2009 so I could be off here), it'll teach all the same programming concepts you'd need to learn. Far more interactive than just drawing circles or w/e too.
.xyz is far too difficult to type to be a good tld, no matter how memorable it is.
It amazes me that anyone asks this question. I have trouble seeing why you would want put documentaion in a SPA. Search result perhaps, but the rest of it?
Valve, the company that almost holds a monopoly on the PC games distribution.
The Wall Street Journal covered this extensively last year. Amazon allows sellers to list and sell many dangerous items that would never make it onto the shelves of a physical store.
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its...
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-dodges-responsibilit...
Remember though that until BUILD 2018, the revenue split on the Windows Store (even though it had long been a failure at that point) was 70/30. At BUILD 2018, they changed it to the 85/15 and 95/5 as a last-ditch effort, although it took until December 2018/January 2019 to finally roll out that change.
The likely future is the other way round: frog boiling and border pushing, like at the border with India. China doesn't want to have a real conflict, it wants to keep poking and pushing until it gets what it want.
I'm against the walled gardens of Apple, Google, Amazon etc. too, I'm just saying that if you want to launch an app for which it is especially important that as many people as possible should be able to use it, you have to think pragmatically...
I think they're imagining more along the lines of Twitch Plays Pokemon[0], where that's a feature, not a bug.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon
That’s conflating availability of lots of data with ability to understand though.
Thanks for clarifying. Confusing story if you’re just starting to get into it
The issue I have is non-state bad actors acquiring or building them on their own to create flying IEDs. It would be pretty easy to fly a drone into a crowded stadium or protest and kill hundreds if not thousands of people with a weaponized drone. Getting the explosives is the hard part and many groups have already shown they can do that.
Would you please go into more detail about what viewers might want to see / configure for viewing? I’m presuming it is some selection of meta overlays on top of a primary video feed. Is that correct?
Have any specific recommendations for a hobbyist and outsider to formal mechanical and electrical engineering disciplines? Thanks!
> Except that the physical copy of the game is still gatekept by Microsoft or Sony.

And Nintendo.

I don't follow consoles these days, but the gatekeeping by region that console makers used to do (even if I understand the reasons behind them) was incredibly annoying as well.

I think the perception of game consoles is different from PCs and mobile devices. Even though the game console is a computer, they're still not seen by the public or governments as a general computing platform no matter how blurred the lines have become.
>Theories fall in and out of favour, but they never seem to be affected by reality very much either way.

It's the opposite. Theories happen, but reality isn't affected by them in any way. Part of the reason is because there is no longer a pipeline for public intellectuals or academics to be in any sort of advisory position in government. Those roles are all taken up by career bureaucrats, industry-linked experts from the private sector, or well-connected political flunkies now.

The trouble with that is that while these people are usually established with PhDs or whatever in the relevant field, they're usually a decade or more out of practicing in that field by the time people reach the level in their careers where they can end up on a Presidential committee. So they end up with ideas and preconceptions about their own field that are frozen in amber from a long time ago.

What's more, they've spent the time since assimilating the values of other people who are even older than them. So all their practice and discipline involves explaining theory that is a decade out of date to get buy in from someone whose understanding of the theory is 2 decades out of date.
If you're seriously going to downvote me and claim that Russia hasn't been assassinating people then you're either being paid by their government or you're just being a troll. If you want to dispute the list Wikipedia posted, then dispute it. The "But the US kills people too!" is literally completely irrelevant. And if you want to cite a list of US journalists who have been hunted down and assassinated by direction of the President, be my guest - please just hold your breath until your list hits 5 names.
<<VR gaming is mostly compelling to people who are sexually unfulfilled.>>

<<Apple builds products that are desired by attractive rich people>>

Ergo atteractive rich people are sexually unfulfilled. Scratching my head here.
Nobody finds apps through the app store. They find them on Google and click a link that opens the app store.
So in this case the connection to algebraic data types is that they provide static type checking for unions as well as structs in C along with type introspection which is novel.

The linked article explaining the whys and wherefores of ADTs (https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/three/algebra-and-calcu...) has hit the front page of HN twice now!
It’s almost impossible to do that in real time. The problem is fraudulent activity can often be hidden behind a smokescreen of legitimate behavior, and stratigraphic investments can look overpriced. Apples acquisition of NeXt must have looked all kinds of shady at the time.
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Big sticks don’t work against non state actors
I'm not denying that the phrase was uttered at least once by someone in the US at some point in the past. I refer you to my other post in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23573675
> Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.

I don't think this holds up. Throughout history the greatest examples of "building" in all domains have occurred in these conditions. I don't think the impediments to building are related to scarcity. The author is making this point as well, it doesn't matter where a person is located, a city, a frontier, a farm, or a village, what matters are the attitudes and beliefs of the people in those settings. It's the old adage "where there's a will, there's a way". I think this is a better explanation of why it is so difficult to build in some places _at the moment_ because it also explains why it was not difficult to build in the same places at different times in the past. The question here should be how do we effectively teach people to think this way en masse despite their current circumstances or past training?
I feel like you're over focused on the repercussions of the swarm technology, but not the murder bit.
Turkey is slowly becoming a regional power. It is interesting how well they seem to be playing the political game with EU, US, Russia and Israel. I am not a fan, but I can't help but to admire that level of skill to balance competing interests.