skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author notices that the nr of bachelor degrees went down every year from 2005 until 2014, at which year it went up again.
It takes 4 to 5 years from the moment of choosing your study until earning your degree.
That means relatively many people chose a CS study in 2000 and also in 2009.

I guess the explanation for 2000 is that the dotcom bubble was still alive and well, the explanation for the popularity of 2009 must have been the credit crisis that made lots of people pursue the job certainty of a CS degree.
Covid-19 Drug Remdesivir to Cost $3,120 for Typical Patient on Private Insurance
This article is from 2017, and the author refers a previous discussion here at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14440507
Well, also I guess it's good because apple has failed to make a reliable or reasonably priced charger for all of the second millennia so far...
> you need to dedicate time to a project. I do this through predefined 2-hour slots each day or week where I have to work on a project.

I'm glad this system works for you; it wouldn't work for me - my professional coding life is regimentalised enough.

When I step away from "work-stuff" to spend some time with a project I want to work on, I can't approach it like a job; instead I need the work to be challenging and engaging and loosely structured. I'll have vague aims and hopes for the project but I'll also be hoping for unexpected turns. I give myself permission to get sidetracked, to let go of the project's purpose (for a while) so I can explore new thoughts and ideas along the way.

It's all very unprofessional, yes. It's also fun - which is the main reason for me tackling any side project.

And when it stops being fun? I stop working on the project: save it, put it somewhere safe, go entertain myself on a different project for a while. I can do this because I know the first project will still be there, waiting for me to become interested in it a few months (or years) later.

It helps that I keep my side-projects very open-ended - none of them will ever be "finished". Horses for courses, I suppose.
Probably auto correct on someone's phone
> Many keyboards with US or US-International layout display the broken bar on a keycap even though the solid vertical bar character is produced. This includes many German QWERTZ keyboards.
Using your analogy, probably because there aren’t many well established civil engineering degree programs.

I don’t know what “practitioner program” could get you close to a guaranteed spot at a top software firm. I’ve been out of school for a few years and figure this stuff has been changing fast though, so that perception may be out of date.

Never even heard of a software engineering degree. Only computer engineering or computer science, either of which may include some software engineering courses.
> What I described is a substantial benefit of using emacs over sublime text.

I think you're _assuming_ "more control" is a substantial benefit for them.

> The OP wasn't asking why would anyone want control they were asking what are the benefits of emacs in comparison to sublime.

Right, but if you don't see a strong use case for that control it isn't a benefit. The examples you gave were of changing the UI in a way I am not interested and a way of triggering emails and slack messages when I save a file which would be actively harmful.

Giving me the ability to do something I do not want to do is not beneficial. It's like telling me a car is better because it's so modifiable I can install a Margaritaville. That would be a bad change to me so it's not selling me on the benefit of this car.
I can't reproduce, would you mind emailing me a screenshot of this? (I'm the author) colin at any of the domains in my bio.
Be careful with the bluetooth implementation.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18625028/google-titan-sec...

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/05/17/google-recalls-t...

edit: formatting
I've been using vimwiki daily for the past month after I saw it mentioned here on HN. It's really changed a lot and has replaced the method I had before that involved VScode markdown snippets. It's nice to be able to directly link between my diary / task lists and my general knowledge base that contains code snippets and information about my projects, etc.
Site is back. Thank you, Cloudflare.
I find it strange that the author couldn't find this in a textbook. This is rather common material in a developmental neuroscience textbook or lecture. I've looked through two such books during my (only) course on the topic, and all three sources covered this material.
It depends on the specifics of the approach. Some variants of Geometric Algebra like Conformal GA are particularly well suited to boolean operations and for finding intersections. Also, GA can help reduce numerical error in many circumstances where vector algebra has issues, because it is more numerically stable in general.

However, some of the issues raised in that article will still be a problem, and the solutions in either vector algebra or geometric algebra would similarly benefit from this approach.

One related trick I've seen recently is to purposefully degrade floating point performance (e.g.: using fp16 or just zooming in a lot) so that rounding errors and numerical instability can be "visually inspected". This is an under-utilised method that reveals that many common graphics algorithms are designed for infinite precision reals and aren't optimal for IEEE 754 reals.
“Where are all the deaths?”

Hopefully you don't soon find out!
Which is the best ERP system in India?
I think it's pretty fair to say we've all been pretty down since GitHub's acquisition by Microsoft.
The UK can sue itself for pulling out of the EU, which is what triggered this series of events.
Thats because the high classes dont go into CS. They do philosophy, math, biz admin (to admin the money they already have), and law (to continue to control the masses)
The USSR lost the Cold War.
> wasn't the heyday of the Motorola 68k the 80s?

It depends on the market. For PC/workstation class machines, the 80's into the early 90's were 68k's moment in the sun. But I distinctly remember doing new embedded development work on 68K in the late 90's and and Palm Pilot (1997) had a 68K core also. So even though they had to retreat from one market, they stayed active in the embedded space. (Of course, so did Intel... that same project with the 68K also ran on an 80188EB, 386SX, and an AMD Elan SC400).

> by the time the 486/040 came about it was already starting to show that motorola was not able to match intel's mhz push.

Intel had a few more minor growing pains too. The 486/25 and /33 chips were easily accepted into the market, but the /50 was not. There were problems at the time getting a 50MHz motherboard to work correctly and not cause too many problems with radio interference. So the 50MHz part wound up being limited to the high end of the market. The step beyond 33 for the 'mainstream' PC market was the DX2/66, which left the bus/motherboard at 33MHz and used the on-chip cache to run the CPU itself at 66. So faster CPU than a DX/50, but less bus bandwidth, which turned out to be a reasonable tradeoff. (Particularly given that I/O was often very slow, anyway, being forced through a 16-bit 8Mhz AT bus.)

The Pentium, of course, brought the >=60Mhz motherboard back into the PC mainstream, and there was also a 486/DX4 part around the Pentium timeframe. Contrary to its name, the DX4 was a clock tripled CPU that would run 33/100 (with an option for a doubled 50/100 as well). Clock multipliers came to the Pentium with the second revision... the original P5/60 and /66 ran 1:1, but the subsequent P5/90 and /100 ran 1.5:1.
what if i was also involved in scoping out the requirements for that purchase and/or also involved in designing certain features?
i think we can all agree the EU is pretty far away from the concept of a gym.
when't the last time your gym imposed rules that had a direct consequence on your life?
I didn't say decimal is floating point, I said I used decimal for db. Not to confuse what I use for the rest of the software. And the persons replying assumed that I had no idea about what I'm doing. Which isn't really nice.

Anyway I will break off the reply train here. Hope someone gets educated reading this thread so all those "nice" replies don't go to waste.
I belong to a similar generation and for me actually only Windows and macOS map to the feelings that I enjoyed while using those 16 bit machines and small flirt with BeOS and QNX demo floppies.

For many years I looked forward to GNU/Linux settling into one stack and offering a multimedia experience like the Amiga, Atari and Acorn, but that was in vain in the kingdom of CLI and forking projects.
Amen! The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

For me, without the OmniBox Windows would be unusable by now. I consider Windows 2000 to be peak Windows UX. It was all downhill from there.
There are certainly various more nuts-and-bolts certification programs out there, but if you want to do software stuff and you're going to an "elite" school you'll tend to major in some variant of CS--whether it's located in the math/sciences or the engineering school.
[OP/article author here]

No, not really.

Remember that Windows 1.0 was a primitive sort of tiling window system, because Microsoft was afraid of being sued by Apple and did not dare implement overlapping windows.

What you are seeing is a strip of the desktop background, which contains icons representing running programs. The tiling algorithm leaves a strip of "desktop" visible so that you can get to the program icons. This is how you switched between programs.

Windows 2 reintroduced tiling windows, but had no desktop icons as such -- again, it was afraid of being too like classic MacOS. This meant that you could rearrange windows, and so see the desktop. That in turn made it clearer that programs minimized to the desktop, as nothing else could be on the desktop.

This can be seen clearly if you look at screenshots of the work-in-progress test versions of "Windows Chicago", e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/chicagowin95/index -- this is what was to be Windows 4.0 but was renamed Windows 95.

For instance, in this one:
https://sites.google.com/site/chicagowin95/index/chicago40

... you can see some running program's icons sitting _on top of_ the prototype taskbar.

There was no separate container for program icons. The taskbar was invented _de novo_ in Windows 95, and subsequent to the invention of the taskbar, icons representing running programs were moved into it.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, that you don't need formal education to do software engineering?

I mean on the one side I agree with you because there's so much you can learn online right now, but the same is true for other branches of engineering and STEM as a whole.
I'm sure their deployment process is way more complex than mine. I'm also sure that unlike me, they have engineers dedicated to managing the complexity. GitHub is a company that has blogged about how easy they have made deployment and how they deploy many times a day. I don't believe there are any compelling reasons why that ease of deployment shouldn't also extend to re-deploying previous versions of their service, so they don't need to leave a bad version up for hours.
They're definitely right of centre, if that's any help?

Their decisions are almost all ideology and spin over practicality.

Or, as is presently being demonstrated by Jenrick, just wholeheartedly corrupt.
I always find it funny to see 1-2 people on hn defend russia, that killed thousands of people, kids in moldova, georgia, ukraine, syria.
You are just braindead or paid russian troll.
The Ten Commandments of UX
Thou shalt not skip such a hilarious article on UX
It's not a perfect comparison but with the most recent easily google-able quarters:

Samsung Q419 net operating profit: KRW 7.16 trillion (US$5.92 billion) [1]

Apple Q220 services revenue (net cost of sales): US$8.6 billion [2]

1. https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-announce...

2. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY20_Q2_Consolidated_Fin...
Microbes Write History: Plagues Leave Societies Permanently Altered
They do exist. Even Oxford has an MSc in SoftEng.
Disinfecting Against Coronavirus
Seems reasonable at first glance to me:

1a. satellite company with products goes bust
1b. Government wants different type of satellite but prohibitively expensive to pursue
2. Govt speculates in 1a in order to reduce cost of 1b

What’s the smoking gun i missed?
changes = downtime. Has been since the advent of computing
Samsung's net income would only be overstated if their capital spending was unsustainably low. I don't know if that is actually the case.
So my original comment was really just offering up the mindset behind why Americans are averse to services "costing" money.

While I think your comment may have been imbuing a value judgement on my original comment where I wasn't making any.. it does bring up a good point. Obviously this mindset doesn't hold true across the board for all services.

The one that immediately comes to mind is farming. I think more people are averse to the idea of farmers/farming operations going bankrupt. I think most people would be fine with a pure wealth transfer to that industry to help it get through a massive downturn. But why does that industry get a general pass?

My guess is that food production is perceived as more of a core need than mail/package delivery. Even when mail/package delivery is an important part of a modern economy.
Hard Truths about Users
When I learned coding, CS wasn't really a "thing." I came up from the hardware end of things (EE).

Today, the only downside of this seems to be that I never learned all the binary tree stuff (BTrees haven't played any role in the type of coding I've been doing for the last three decades), so I don't fare well in employment exams.

Otherwise, I'm actually thrilled at the way my software development education has gone. My hardware background has stood in good stead, in developing things like drivers and async stuff.
Is the social status of computer scientists zero, or do computer scientists choose not to go into politics or other leadership positions? I suspect it's the latter [anecdotal; opinion; citation needed].

CS people are a tribe on their own (if I may generalize); I've not met anyone with an interest in participating in politics. They have strong opinions on politics, but not to the point where they're willing to represent.
To develop the thinking. Rigorous algorithmic and mathematic thinking. Studying physics is also good.
I was in a meeting just this morning regarding how we measure the performance of something which ended up with reading a paper on queue theory to help with the design. CS and SE are very related. Also, Civil Engineers do learn physics as part of their course.
Personally, I don't ever really find myself needing to back up a tree, or find myself encountering something unexpected (outside of the code itself). In my experience Git is extremely reliable... but only if you enter its weird commands with no typos whatsoever. Hence: this enormous dotfile I maintain that is half Git shortcuts: https://github.com/RobertAKARobin/dotfiles/blob/master/.bash...

It makes me think of an old car that only the owner can drive, because it'll break down for anyone who hasn't memorized all its quirks (e.g. my own bumper-sticker-covered, manual-transmission 1996 Toyota Corolla, fondly named Sharon).

Again, though, I have the same relationship with virtually all frameworks, tools, and languages (looking at you, Bash).
I'm ignorant on the topic, but I'm really surprised the US wouldn't share that "equivalent access" to GPS with the UK?

Certainly seems like we'd be happy to sell such access to a close ally for less than the $600+ million investment referenced here...
Yes, I have seen this recently. Google is so unsatisfied with BLE in FIDO2 so they removed support for it from the Chrome browser.
I'm not sure if you read the article you linked. It clearly refers to easier smuggling. If it was possible to just "ship" heroin then those profit margins wouldn't exist. The heroin would be bought for $6k and sold for say $6.5k. The reason why it sells for that much is because a substantial portion of the margin is spent on smuggling.
The Web Is Getting Old
Mainstream isn't always as inclusive for things as it might want to be. There could be economic reasons for suppressing the biodynamic movement.

Agricultural-science is fraught with misdeed.
Vendors who write system level software (security, backup, operations, management, batch scheduling, middleware, databases, transaction monitors, etc) do a lot of that you are classifying as “niche”, but for which Metal C is one of the few available options.

Application level stuff, nobody should use Metal C for that. Use Language Environment C/C++. But at application level, C and C++ are not very popular languages for z/OS. COBOL and Java are.

On IBM i, IBM used C++ heavily as a system programming language, especially as a replacement for PL/MP. By contrast, C++ has always been relatively niche on z/OS.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I just kinda wish we had that level of private interest/investment with similarly lofty goals. Not just "eat the world".
How much downtime could it get? They might redesign the homepage a few times and break it accidentally, then it's done. They're not gonna redesign it again and again every week forever.
I get that some portion of the population cares about social status when selecting a degree, but a lot of people do want steady, enjoyable jobs that pays well, regardless of the social status it confers. Doesn't really explain why the percentage of CS majors went down.

I do know CS majors went through a huge boom in the 90s and then a shakeout happened after the dot com bust.

As for CS majors in Congress, well, I would not expect them to start popping up until another decade or two goes by, given the average age of a Congressperson and the relatively young age of CS as a discipline.
Greatest Java apps
Ten years ago if you'd predicted that trump would be in the White House and Johnson would be in No 10, you would have been laughed at...

Nobody's laughing now because the reality isn't funny.
Show HN: Goto: A dynamically typed interpreted programming language built in go
My First Year of University
Thankfully I've never worked or applied to a company doing that kinda thing; at best it was a fizzbuzz. They mostly do practical in-your-own-time assessments - prove that you have the hands-on know-how to build a feature representative of the work you will be doing in the company.

Few companies will rebuild B-trees in the day to day job. Interview for the job your candidates will be expected to do, instead of giving them a college/uni exam question. Have them validate a form field and yeet it through a REST API into a database, like 99% of their job will be [1].

--

[1] this may just be representative of my job. Somehow yeeting a form field into a database hasn't gotten much easier during my career. Why is input type number still broken?
Not two thirds of corona virus patients!

One study is named Neurologic Features in Severe SARS-CoV-2 Infection. Severe!
The other is named irium Incidence, Duration and Severity in Critically Ill Patients with COVID-19. Critically ill!

So we talking about critically ill patients. Within the US that's rare. Simple numbers. When you say two thirds, make it clear what two thirds you are actually talking about. Leaving out half of the context will make anything look scary. That is why people on the street say you might be asymptomatic but you get brain damage. Which is BS. First you have to be critically ill from covid19. With all treatment side effects and everything. So no, your asymptomatic friend is not having hallucinations. Pure click bait.
Oh we're still pretty much just as subject to the ECJ as we ever were. All disputes with the EU concerning treaties or trade agreements with the EU are adjudicated by the ECJ, whether the claimant is a member of the ECJ or not. Any legal dispute with the EU over the terms of our leaving will be adjudicated by the ECJ, and the terms of any trade agreement we make with the EU will be adjudicated by the ECJ, as they are for any other country.

What has changed is that as we are no longer members of the EU, we will no longer appoint a justice on the ECJ panel of judges, or have any of our people working there and representing our interests, outside our role as external claimants.
Yes, but if you're happy to do everything by mailing lists, you don't have to worry about github going down.
Many of my projects have a fixed scope and thus are 'done' at some point. If you develop like this, CI/CD is rarely worth the effort. Its better suited for projects that suffer from scope creep or regular upstream breakages.
[OP/article author here]

You could not pin icons to the taskbar in Windows 98, no.

Windows 98 integrated IE4, which contained a feature called "Active Desktop".

This was not a Win98 innovation -- if you installed IE4 onto Windows 95 or NT 4, you got the same features.

Active Desktop included dockable "toolbars" that could be pinned to the desktop or to any edge of the screen. One of these became part of the taskbar, and was called the "quick launch" bar.

It's a separate area for program icons. If you launch an app, you end up with _two_ icons: one in the quick launch bar, _plus_ an icon in the taskbar as well.

The Quick Launch toolbar is still present in Windows 10 today, in 2020, and can be turned back on very easily:
https://mywindowshub.com/add-quick-launch-toolbar-windows-10...

Pinning launcher icons directly to the taskbar was a new feature in Windows 7 and was not possible before that: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/SharePoint/en-US...
This might be due to different naming conventions in different countries. Software engineering is a common degree in Australia. Example:
https://study.unimelb.edu.au/find/courses/graduate/master-of...

Though I doubt the content is that different to courses in other countries
They’ve allowed it since 2011: https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/09/apple_backs_down_...
Exactly. So the implied premise of this article (that we should see loads of CS majors because people want to work in software) is faulty. They can just as easily study physics, chemistry, math, logic, etc.
At least one of the API's listed (requestIdleCallback) is available behind the Experimental Features switch in Safari on iOS13.5

Apple seem to take a more cautious approach but it would be good to see some more of those API's available in Safari

We don't need a battery API but understanding whether a device is in low power mode would be useful
>- Before widespread internet use, say year 2000, all communities were local. News were local + nation wide, people still focused on their physical proximity of 20 miles that affected them the most. Today, none of my friends read local news. Local news outlets are being bankrupted left and right.

I think this is generally true, and don't want to downplay the enormous role the internet has played in demolishing local communities. However, technology has been chipping away at this problem for a long time:

- Radio

- Auotomobile

- Television, then cable & satellite television

All of these have served to break down local barriers and expand a person's sense of community.

I've heard this a number of times, and agree strongly: the internet is the worst of a small town, and the worst of a big city combined: moralizing busy-bodies, also filled with the sort of dregs of humanity you only encounter once the population is large enough to reveal the uglier outliers.
For some reason the people who are most skeptical about absolutely everything else believe anything Russia wants them to.
Maybe becuase industry pays developers so well,it’s hard for Academia to compete and attract quality teachers for computer science - ie is supply constrained rather than demand constrained.