skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has document writing or spreadsheet creation changed much since the 90s? Word and Excel 6 were significantly faster than current versions and were running on PCs with 8 or 16MB of RAM and, at least for my use cases, did effectively the same job they do today. In some cases they did it better.

How has document creation changed in two decades that justifies two orders of magnitude more RAM and CPU performance, 10x power draw, etc.?

If your house was built with 100x the resources and consumed that much more power, and it took longer to turn on the lights or cook a meal would it be justified because the building process was easier and you could add new light fixtures more easily? That would be lunacy, but for some reason we think it’s OK in software to avoid the craftsmanship the profession demands while treat users like fools who should just accept that computers are faster so their apps should be slower. It’s garbage reasoning. The ergonomics of developers should always come second to providing the best for customers.
I remember our local library got a digitized index in the early eighties ( was card based before? I was very young ).

The digitized index was a couple of touchscreen terminals, which were plenty fast.
I don't know about you, but I never want to fly on a 737 MAX no matter what they rename it. Every time I have booked a ticket online the website tells me what kind of aircraft I would be flying on.
Not if you go back far enough. Ultima 8 Pagan, whenever I switched "maps" on my 386 it literally took about a minute to load the next area. When I got my next computer it was a Pentium 100 Mhz. That thing loaded the next map area in about 1-2 seconds. Both of those computers did not use SSDs.
Last July:

>A Boeing 737 Max due to be delivered to Ryanair has had the name Max dropped from the livery, further fuelling speculation that the manufacturer and airlines will seek to rebrand the troubled plane once it is given the all clear to fly again.

>Photos have emerged of a 737 Max in Ryanair colours outside Boeing’s manufacturing hub, with the designation 737-8200 – instead of 737 Max – on the nose. The 737-8200 is a type name for the aircraft that is used by aviation agencies.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/15/boeing-737-...
Reading between the lines of hype, this is the most important fact in the article:

> [Norwegian Air] delayed general shareholders meeting on Tuesday and on the same day Boeing started re-certification tests for MAX aircraft
Except that in practice, getting your refund back is not easy at all. Tesla marketing and Tesla reality are often far apart.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/tesla-refund-and-return-prob...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/tesla-wou...

https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/deposit-refund-3
Ok, looks like I live still in 2010.

Make it 40 years :D
Well the key is that there is no one person making this call.

Some middle manager instructs a bunch of peons to look for places to cut costs. One of them finds that doing X costs Y when doing it another way could cost Z. This all gets packaged to a higher up who just sees it costs Y to do X, and writes a report noting that X is a result of W. This goes up the chain to someone who needs to evaluate whether to cut U,V or W and they recommend W because it ultimately costs Y. This goes up another level to someone who approves a budget that cuts W to save Y and packages this into some nice talking points. The CEO then presents these talking points to the board and is congratulated for saving Y and then move on to questioning why X isn't being done any more.

Every individual is making somewhat reasonable decisions from their myopic perspective but in aggregate they are incompetent. No one is deciding to let millions die, they simply don't take the time to understand what effects their actions have.
This kind of exaggeration surely doesn't help the cause either.
To be honest this rule is for a reason. Onboarding people without price, then telling them about price certainly will increase your retention, but not the best case from consumer side.

From twitter they say:

“ We've experimented with auto-charging trials in the past and they lead to (1) fewer users trying the product (2) a huge number of refund requests by users who forget to cancel and (3) complete disbelief from those users when we explain that Apple won't allow us to issue refunds.”

By they are also not showing any pricing in the beginning. If they would show try for 15 days free then it is X usd / month. It would be more honest.
Turkey has been a democracy for almost a century now.

However, it all comes down to this, what happens when people of a democratic country elect a president that has totalitarian tendencies?
I'm not sure you can call bullshit on someone's "perception". It's an opinion - if he sees it as slower, then he sees it as slower. Nothing you can do will convince his brain to see it faster.
Some real kickers in here:

* Beijing will establish a new security office in Hong Kong, with its own law enforcement personnel - neither of which would come under the local authority's jurisdiction

* This office can send some cases to be tried in mainland China - but Beijing has said it will only have that power over a "tiny number" of cases

* Beijing will have power over how the law should be interpreted, not any Hong Kong judicial or policy body. If the law conflicts with any Hong Kong law, the Beijing law takes priority
Spaces versus tabs? /s
Types of Financial Independence Early Retirement
What... lol this is totally BS. Why do people make such absolute statements.
Constant hardware upgrades.
I don't know the costs of data egress for Glacier, but standard S3 is around $.09/GB. Considering that most backups are never used, the cost of data egress is usually pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.
This reminds me of something Joel Spolsky said awhile back[1] "Never Rewrite from Scratch". I stand by that too.. even if it's a legacy mainframe app it's probably better to use strangler pattern if you really need to extend it an the development platform doesn't suit the need.

I'm also reminded of the SABRE rewrite that had similar issues where agents got massively slowed down by the removal of the 10key navigation that ruled the old system and they had to add it back as emulation.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
The only perceptually faster feedback I can vividly recall my 1983 8-bit computer giving is "Oh, I know it took my input because now it's frozen."
I suspect a lot of the lawsuits will outlive the airlines filing them.
Website migrated from VuePress to Gridsome posting from Forestry
This is really cool. I will purchase this next month when I have a bit more free money.
We do a lot of work at Clubhouse to keep things fast.

We have alerts set up that fire if the p50 or p95 of certain actions spike and we treat it as a bug if things are headed in the wrong direction.

We still see a lot of random cases of things being slower though (shakes fist at random browser plugin upgrades).

It's a hard problems, but if you don't design (and monitor) for this from the beginning things are going to slow down over time as you scale to hundreds of thousands of users.
One thing I really wish database would focus on is online schema changes and metadata only changes.

I know this is not an easy problem to solve, and there are a lot of performance reason say changing a 4 byte int to an 8 byte int requires a data migration rather than just a metadata change.

However I think with enough thought even that could be done and still be performant. Maybe a hit as a hidden secondary column is added and data slowly migrated to it then the old column finally removed.

Although maybe just going to variable length number storage would be better just like strings (varchar) then min and max values are just constraints not a storage issue.
I think I can give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this one -- it kind of seems like they just didn't even think of this particular use case (not auto billing at the end of a trial period), since almost all companies would prefer to auto bill at the end of a trial.

That said, they should definitely allow this, especially if (as claimed in the twitter thread[1]) they don't allow apps to refund accidental subscriptions.

[1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/downdogapp/status/127804886274623...
> To understand how to maintain the desirable goals of a technical interview (e.g. measure time and correctness)

There is the assumption that underlies the rest of the article, but with which I somewhat disagree. I certainly do care about a candidate's technical chops. But I also care that they can communicate and deliver under pressure. I do not claim that whiteboarding interviews are the best answer - they aren't. But before you propose a different answer, you need to understand what value they give.
"At Cisco, the unnamed employee reported Iyer to human resources in November 2016 for outing him as a Dalit to colleagues. Iyer allegedly retaliated, but Cisco determined caste discrimination was not illegal and issues continued through 2018, the lawsuit states."

If this is accurate, that's pretty messed up. If a private company, especially one of Cisco's stature knew of any form of harassment and then decided that this type of harassment is fine because its not technically illegal they should be punished. Harassment at work for any reason is never ok, work should be a space where you are judged on your productivity level and attitude, not on the place of birth of your ancestors.
Growth is irrelevant unless you're a net-contributor. The EU really doesn't need more underdeveloped economies to support, it needs to get everybody to a similar level and deal with the tax havens, not do some SV-hypergrowth model where the issues will magically resolve themselves if only you can have 15% population growth by acquiring more members.
This is awesome. What a concept, identifying the variables in the equations and providing diagrams to show the geometric meaning of the equations. Really wish wikipedia (or some sort of companion website) would similarly present an explanation of the practical meaning of variables and operators in the heavy math pages so that people with an understanding of algebra could understand the formulaic descriptions in addition to the qualitative descriptions after landing on a random page with heavy math.
Thank you for your books and websites! After reading 1,000 sites explaining that async/await is just "syntactic sugar" [hint, it's not], you're the only one who explains it correctly.
The word anglosphere sounds a little bit racist. black people are also here in america since the beginning.
I don't think this passes the sniff test - if their trial doesn't require providing a payment method, how is Apple possibly protecting anyone?
The other religions in India haven't given up on casteism - https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/Focus-on-quota-...
Rebrand when it’s past certification. If it is rejected, then the new brand is contaminated.
> misuse

That doesn't mean what you think it means.
If the people you gave the deposit to break their side of the contract, why not?
1. We ensure that the compound is pure using analytical methods like NMR and LC/MS. In our Moonshot project, the assay cascade comprises biochemical assays against the main protease (2 different assay methodologies, run in Oxford and Weizmann Institute) and live virus assays, thus we should be able to infer whether the activity is caused by impurities killing the virus. In addition, we also perform high-throughput x-ray crystallography to determine the structures of all the protein-ligand complexes, which serves an an orthogonal assay.

2. Yes, our algorithm does factor in the yield when it decides which reaction to use.

3. You're absolutely right. It is very ambitious but we've realized that even if we don't get our compounds into human trials (currently aiming for in-vivo testing in next few weeks) that we will still have generated a lot of useful data that is there in the open for when the next pandemic comes around. This has been a real weakness from prior pandemic where research wasn't continued and certainly wasn't stored in clean accessible ways. As I'm sure you know SARS has super high genetic similarity to current COV-2 so having prior data accessible and cleaned would have given researchers a real head start.

4. Yes Derek is aware of COVID Moonshot and is also of the opinion that is it both ambitious but sadly necessary. We continue to follow his posts as healthy skepticism particularly in the area of AI for drug discovery is always helpful.
I think the real issue today is the unpredictability of delays even though computers are overall much faster.

When the same action can have such variable response times depending unknowable variables, your brain begins to believe that you're working for the computer and not the other way around. It just changes your relationship with your computer in a subtle yet fundamental way.

If you hired a professional cutlery expert to feed you it would be faster but it's no longer mechanical -- they might occasionally get distracted by a text message and 1 in 100 bites are completely missed. Now there's a gatekeeper between you and your meal. When it's working it's way more efficient and awesome, but your brain now understands that your meal isn't really guaranteed anymore.

Our relationship with computers is fundamentally different in a way that our subconscious immediately grasps despite being somewhat irrational.
Google is good at search and ads. Best in the world, historic achievement etc.

You can think of everything else they do as a hobby for a rich person. They don't really need the money and they don't really care about it. Sometimes it turns out well, and sometimes not. It doesn't matter either way.
Probably true!

That said, Wikipedia's mathy pages have proved repeatedly useful to me as a reference, e.g., whenever I remember a mathematical concept only vaguely or intuitively and just need to find a detailed formalization to implement it in code. My browser is always open, so Wikipedia is often the "reference of least resistance."
This is true, obviously, but I can reassure you that the actual proof is very technical and long. Back in college I took a logic class that spent almost the entire semester going over this proof, in its shortened form i.e. using Rosser's trick. By using Rosser's trick one can prove a more general Incompleteness theorem (based on Q) and more elegantly. It ends up stating very concisely that a theory cannot be all 3 of (any 2 or 1 or 0 is fine):

* axiomatizable extension of Q

* consistent

* complete

(where Q is a minimalistic arithmetical theory that can do addition and multiplication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_arithmetic)

It's true that the "main idea" of the proof is "everything is a natural number", which is obvious to us programmers (it possibly wasn't obvious to anyone in Godel's time). However, this is by no means the only trick that's used in the proof.
I don't have anything informative to add, but wanted to comment that I liked reading your story. Well done.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-03-17/money-...
short form - i started doing FCC in nights and weekends from Nov 2016 - Mar 2017, then quit and went all in in Jun 2017 and went to an NYC bootcamp to top up my FCC knowledge and also get my first dev job.

here's the long form story - https://medium.com/hackernoon/no-zero-days-my-path-from-code... - ive been harangued over this before so i should be clear that i have done programming prior to starting FCC - just that it was basic self taught data munging stuff, not web dev. i definitely did not start from zero, but i also definitely felt very out of my depth learning the JS/Web stack in 2017 and it took me a year to get to the point where I could credibly apply for a frontend dev job.

thanks!
There are in fact preumption-of-validity ("prima facie" evidentiary) laws outside of India. In the case I'm considering these don't directly apply to civil or criminal law, though they operate closely adjacent to these.
One of my friends is an anaesthetist dealing with Covid patients day in day out in India. She works for a Government hospital and they started trying Remdesivir 3 days ago. She said all three patients that they have given the drug to have died of arrest - she does insist though that its not because of the drug but she was saying that it isn't improving things if the patient is in late stages of Covid.
Depends on what the goal is of course. A c64 started and dropped you into the interpreter in under a second.

Input latency being another absolutely astonishing difference.

But modern computers have so much more computational throughput that they’re many orders of magnitude more useful as tools.

I think the author is just saying that we lost the feel of immediacy for the common case, which I agree with, sometimes I press something and there’s either a sub second delay (text input) or a large pause (clicking an icon) before the machine seems to be doing anything.

Back in the day, you press a key and your computer is displaying it before the key has risen; you press enter and your hard disk churns immediately and a flashing light would blink merrily indicating work. That’s what perception is.

(Also, you could use a c64 with a floppy or Hard-disk which was obviously much faster than tape)
Advocating for Hong Kong independence can also earn you a life sentence:

"Crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces are punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison"

I'm not sure if criticizing Chairman Xi or the CCP would qualify as subversion.
Yes, we were indeed pretty active on Google+, it seemed like the mathematics community took to it fairly early on, and we found it to be a useful place to be. How times have changed!

If you'd still enjoy following us, we're pretty active on Twitter, and to a lesser degree on fb/linkedin.
Is it really that they are forcing them to implement auto-billing, or that they are forcing the trial to go through standard App Store mechanisms?

Is it anti-consumer to make all subscriptions behave the same? Suppose half of apps managed their own trial period and half of them used auto-renewing App Store trials.

Also worth noting it is really, really trivial to cancel an app subscription from within your Settings, and to see much of the trial period is remaining.
>they just didn't even think this particular use case (not auto billing at the end of a trial period)

I don't think Apple's auto-billing practices are predatory, like many other companies are, but I'm not sure I can agree that they didn't even think of this possibility.
Yes, precisely (my background is biophysics). Selection pressure leads to rapid population shifts when one has a favorable mutation. However, you can look at eukaryotes and see that absolute efficiency isn't the metric by which they are being evaluated.
The Dark Side of KPIs
Bankruptcies can take years or decades.
Anglosphere means English-speaking nations, largely those with historical connections to the UK. It has nothing to do with race.
I wouldn't say "slower," but the fact remains that the perception indeed has not improved much, and the reason for this is in fact surprisingly simple: the way it's developed, software is like a gaseous substance - it occupies whatever space it is given. If some action or a response cannot take more than, say, 10 seconds, it will tend to take at least 10 seconds; if a program "expects" to be given a machine with 16 GB of RAM, it will take this much space just to run acceptably fast, etc.
It's hard to say what this government cares about.

My cynical self thinks that this is not a genuine offer but one for the headlines in a time where good news are sorely needed (Leicester lockdown, general covid-19 omnishambles)

I hope my cynical self is wrong
That’s exactly what the rebranding is for.
That’s fair, it probably makes more sense for that usecase than PS. It just feels like yet another DSL to learn
Strategic procrastination: a trick for keeping my perfectionism at bay
I think part of the issue is software becoming mainstream. What percentage of users need to put in ten different postcodes to plot a route that hits all of them? Barely any. So it doesn't make sense to optimise the UI for that use case. Instead it's optimised for traveling A-B, and to my eyes does a great job of it.
Can’t tell if you’re trolling, but I believe Anglosphere refers to countries that use the English language, not ones with Anglo people.
Yeah, I know you're not trolling but that comes up every.single.time. alternatives to RPi are mentioned. We get it: it's cheap. I can get a running Linux board for $30 so kiss off.

There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. So there's no answer to that.

But I know what my time is worth and I'd rather spend $150-$200 more on a Beagle X-15 or Boundary Nitrogen or Toradex Colibri and get the documentation and schematics and all the source I need to make it do things like eMMC and PCIe. If I spent more than 2-3 hours on hacking chips into the board I've already lost.
In the case of Remdesivir, which is hard to make, imagine you're the CEO of Gilead and the government of a country tells you they need it, people are dying without it, they're going to mass produce it at scale, and you're going to tell them how to retool their factories to produce it, since it'll take extra months of trial and error if you don't, during which people are dying and the disease is spreading exponentially.

Now you have a decision to make: ignore your patent and your fiduciary duty to investors, or defend your patent in court and your right to profit from the drug you invented.

Yesterday you were a moral person, today you're faced with the chance to become one of history's greatest villains.

That's the crux of my earlier comment, with which you can now proceed to disagree.

(Note: in reality Remdesivir seems not to be an extreme life & death drug- it only shortens recovery time, so it wouldn't quite fit into the scenario I presented).
To be frank anti-government censorship concerns me less than pro-government censorship, due to the various asymmetries inherent to the concept of government (e.g. the government operates prisons while those who oppose the government do not.)

To be clear, I don't think it's productive. But neither does it make me fearful in the same sort of way.
There is a web version now but it's still missing basic functionalities, let alone the more advanced ones.

I have been using the web version on Linux box for almost half a year (because I don't own a Mac right now) and found it to be acceptable _only_ as a companion to iPad or iPhone version. It's not usable standalone at all (for example, you cannot create recurring tasks, or even move a project into a folder, or even _create_ a project in a folder). I hope they improve the web version, but the development doesn't seems very active[1]

That said, I've tried everything else, including Todoist and even org-mode, but found myself come back to OmniFocus in the end since I found Perspective to be essential to my workflow (even though web version doesn't support Perspective at all, at least I can use it on my iPad). Org probably come closest to fully replacing OmniFocus, but syncing between a Linux box and iOS devices has been... not fun.

[1]: https://www.omnigroup.com/releasenotes/omnifocus-web
‘It Could Be Anyone’: Hong Kong Security Law Sends Chill over the City
The word just means "English-speaking countries."
> probably know more about the flaws in the MAX

The thing is, we do know a lot about those flaws and the only way to really fix those flaws is with a clean-sheet redesign.

The MAX would have flown again, for sure, pre-COVID. However, designs without known fundamental design flaws can handle worldwide airline lift needs for the foreseeable future.. and it's legitimate to wonder what that means for the future of the MAX.