skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's basically nothing new here. This is a similar aftermarket case to Kodak [1]. Like the Epic case, this too will fail.

A key element of Kodak was a bait and switch. If Apple had monopolized the aftermarket for iOS app distribution after customers were locked in, you may have a case against Apple (if you satisfy the other elements, like switching costs). But that was never true. From day one, the App Store was the only way to legally obtain iOS apps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak_Co._v._Image_Tec....
thanks for proving my point.
What I find ironic is Google actually goes to extreme lengths to protect your data. Compare that to all the third-party trackers loaded by random-etailer.com.
Payment Processing Giant TSYS: Ransomware Incident “Immaterial” to Company
The article was interesting, but is certainly biased differently than my outlook on the world is.

Here's some thoughts I had:

1) I really wish they'd given some stats from other countries. With the pandemic raging, what are mothers of young children doing in other countries? It seems that if daycares are closing, it is a moot point at to where you have access to a daycare outside of a pandemic. (Beyond that, are their economies doing better? Is the well-being of their populace higher)?

2) "Beyond being stressful and exhausting, [covid] has forced millions of parents, mostly mothers, to make tough decisions about how much to work, if at all." To which I've got to say, "excuse me?" Watching children absolutely is work, it just doesn't pay.

I wish they'd considered that angle -- what if we could pay a parent to stay home and watch their own children. [If you needed an economic justification, I've heard that economic growth tracks population growth, just delayed twenty years.]

3) They talked about a "child-care desert":

"In a glaring instance of market failure, the supply of child care simply has not kept up with the demand. More than half of Americans live in a so-called child-care desert, with little or no access to quality care, according to the Center for American Progress. That means what’s available is rarely affordable. It’s not uncommon for parents of infants or toddlers to pay more than $1,000 a month in child care—equal to more than 17% of median household income."

"[A preschool program in Portland] mandates better pay for child-care workers, putting them on par with teachers—a bold attempt to strike at one of the child-care deficit’s root causes."

It sounds to me that we have:
A - child care is too expensive for families to use
and
B - child care is doesn't make enough money to be viable business for the service providers

This doesn't sound like a "glaring ... market failure" to me.

4) Lastly, is percent of GDP being spent a good measure for comparing countries? I can see it as a good starting point, but I don't think it is enough for a good comparison.
From 2017 - still hasn't happened.
Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight
I assume it's just because Amazon's e-retail share is under 50% most of the time, and their overall retail share is under 5%.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
The deep integration of social media and virtual assistants with the Internet of Things, resulting in social appliances. Basically everything you own will either have its own AI personality, or will be controlled by a "hub" that does, and these will also have their own constructed social media presences on the web, which you will be required to interact with.
> captures depth information and you can use it for 3d reconstruction, refocusing etc

That’s crazy cool! Got any good links for reading about how to do those things that way; 3d reconstruct and refocus?
New LinuxFoundation to Host OS Initiative to Address Climate Risk
> That's because they're astronomically hard and they only take the very very best people who are at the top of their fields.

I would disagree with that. It's because coding problems are a very specific skill. It's essentially being good at riddles with extra esoteric knowledge thrown in.
They bloated the app so that it wouldn't be slow. The whole twitter thread is about that.
I get the idea that the device can only know about one account at a time, but it's absurd that you can't do a factory reset on the hardware and then revoke the credentials from your FB account. ("I no longer own this hardware...", or "my Oculus was stolen".)
Thanksgiving and Christmas are then some of the quietest times in terms of outages. Of course, the interval right after then is usually worse, since all of the backlogged changes from the holidays land at once.

“Diff”, not PR.
I have had similar odds of stuffing working out of the installer on Ubuntu and Debian.

The main difference is that in Ubuntu the fix usually involves removing some program that is messing with everything. While in Debian it usually involves adding some program that isn't installed by default for some reason.

(Debian would gain a lot by making an installer with the backports kernel, by the way.)
Off the top of my head, Sequoia did back The Melt, there was a time a few years ago when VCs did dabble in restaurants.
Thanks for the answer!

I'm not saying Zood isn't safe to use, but security isn't binary, and a centralized service is always a more lucrative target than a self-hosted one just because there is more data there. And it's also not just a technical question - what stops you from being acquired by $MEGACORP, pushing an update which removes the E2E and start mining the data? That (the acquisition, not the E2E removal) actually happened to me before[1] with a location tracking app.

[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/facebook-acquires-fitness-trackin...
> wise developers are going to (ultimately) _demand_ Clojure.

Lol. I guess your definition of wise developers is very different from mine.
I think my point emphasized aesthetics too much to the detriment of the main argument, so let me rephrase: aesthetics are also important if you want a of majority enterprise users to enjoy using your product (ask anyone who has had to deal with SAP). There will always be a few who love the brutalist or "power user" UI, but I think we're in agreement that visual appearance does matter.

With all that out of the way, the example I _wanted_ to raise above (but neglected to, apologies) with the "kool-aid" drinkers is that corporate users are absolutely aware of how fast and responsive something is _in addition_ to how it looks. I think many folks have been in a screen share or training session where the presenter has to awkwardly wait for an application they're "selling" to load or respond to input. Is the presenter oblivious to this latency? I'd say they are even more aware given the audience, if not flustered. That was the thrust of "people are not idiots".

WRT why people continue to use this software, I think you underestimate the impact of top-level purchasing/procurement and the captive enterprise audience. Those making purchasing decisions are less likely to use software after the sales demo and thus are not exposed to any UX or latency issues. Again. there is no idiocy or mal-intent here either, it's just an artifact of how bigcos operate.
It's in closed form
I had similar questions.

Having a large number of engineers is fantastic for making the company valued higher.

Directors love having more engineers under them.

Overall I've been highly speedy with 4 engineers, and slowly adding a 5th. Sure there are limits, but I think limits makes us think about being more efficient with how we build. It is an entirely different mindset.

Once you decide to "go big" you end up in this situation where you usually literally throw a dozen engineers at the problem and the problem goes away. I've seen designers spend 6 months on a _single page_. Because they can. and they get paid crazy money for it.
Deno 1.6 lets you compile TypeScript to a single executable
Patents are already open information.

What you argue is that there should be no trade secretes.
Former Uber engineer/EM here: I worked on the Rider app.

The “there are only a few screens” is not true. The app works in 60+ countries, with features shipped in the app that often for a country, and - in rare cases - a city.

The app has thousands of scenarios. It speaks to good design that each user thinks the user is there to support their 5 use cases, not showing all the other use cases (that are often regional or just not relevant to the type if user - like business traveler use cases).

Uber builds and experiments with custom features all the time. An experimental screen built for London, UK would be part of the app. Multiply this by the 40-50 product teams building various features and experiments outside the core flows you are talking about (which core flows are slightly different per region as well).

I worked on payments, and this is what screens and components are in the Uber app:

- Credit cards (yes, this is only a a few screens)

- Apple Pay / Google Pay on respective platforms

- PayPal (SDK)

- Venmo (SDK)

- PayTM (15+ screens)

- Special screens for India credit cards and 2FA, EU credit cards and SCA, Brazil combo cards and custom logic

- Cash (several touch points)

- AMEX rewards and other credit card rewards (several screens)

- Uber credits & top-ups (several screens)

- UPI SDK (India)

- We used to have Campus Cards (10 screens), Airtel Money (5), Alipay (a few more), Google Wallet (a few) and I other payment methods I forget about. All with native screens. Still with me? This was just payments. The part where most people assume “oh, it’s just a credit card screen”. Or people in India assume “oh it’s just UPI and PayTM”. Or people in Mexico “oh, it’s just cash”. And so on.

Then you have other features that have their own business logic and similar depths behind the scenes when you need to make them work for 60 countries:
- Airport pickup (lots of specific rules per region)

- Scheduled rides

- Commmuter card functionality

- Product types (there are SO many of these with special UI, from disabled vehicles, vans, mass transport in a few regions etc)

- Uber for Business (LOTS of touchpoints)

- On-trip experience business logic

- Pickup special cases

- Safety toolkit (have you seen it? Very neat features!)

- Receipts

- Custom fraud features for certain regions

- Customer support flows

- Regional business logic: growth features for the like of India, Brazil and other regions.

- Uber Eats touchpoints

- Uber Family

- Jump / Lime integrations (you can get bikes / scooters through the app)

- Transit functionality (seen it?)

- A bunch of others I won’t know about.

Much of the app “bloat” has to do with how business logic and screens need to be bundled in the binary, even if they are for another region. E.g. the UPI and PayTM SDKs were part of the app, despite only being used for India. Uber Transit was in a city or two when it launched, but it also shipped worldwide.

And then you have the binary size bloat with Swift that OP takes about.
Yup, the only valid complaint I've seen about OpenSuse is the lower support window, "at least 36 months" for any major release.

I think most of the complainers don't realize how easy it is to upgrade OpenSuse compared to CentOS. It's like night and day.
SLES also has kernel updates with no reboot and an immutable root version. Basically / is read-only and all patches are applied to a new snapshot that is mounted at next boot.
> The higher percentage he mentions for past years is likely based off the total rejected ballots (here) which can not be compared with 2020, as this information is not available.

This is also the same style of reasoning that helps people explain away the abnormally high voter turnout in WI. Please understand I mean no disrespect in this - I just think changing definitions to cure the abnormalities isn’t necessarily correct (and is frighteningly Orwellian in the bad way).

If I had ever turned out 90% of voters measured as (votes/total registered voters) I would have more money than Elon. The way these shocking statistics get diluted is by placating to people with no experience in the process. The goal is to make them feel better by offering an alternative (however misguided) representation, that will stop the line of questioning.

So when confronted with an extremely implausible voter turnout, people say the real turnout is votes/total eligible voters... which is very different than every other time
I’ve experienced voter turn out
The diffraction bands are approximately the Fourier transform of the slit function.

Is this correct from a physics standpoint? Feynman had a lot to say about light in his book (QED https://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/06...) and never framed it this way. At one point he remarked that the explanations in the book were related to diffraction, and the explanation there was very different from the Fourier transform.
In my opinion, the best books are the one of Brealey and the one of Damodaran both on Corporate Fianance.
It’s always interesting when I see HN on the verge of grasping the importance of worker solidarity. Ironically by following political philosophies of “self” empowerment, tech workers have ceded all real power to their majority investors.

You’re both right, but your argument is one logical jump away from “they were just doing their jobs”
At that point you could probably sideload one of the alternative app stores and be all set, unless FDroid like hooks into google services for things
I doubt that the truly best engineers work there. But certainly at their scale you need really good ones at least.

They also have a huge need for speed. Shipping faster and winning a market is worth 10s of million in annual revenue and billions in valuation.

A lot of this is resume driven development as well. Solving a hard problem, even if it's an invented one, looks good on your resume. So does using the latest and greatest tech stack instead of a boring but functional one.
There is no cohesion or elegance at those kinds of head counts. There are just too many cooks, too many different perspectives, most toolchains allow you to solve problems in too many different ways.

IMO and contrary to what people say, making good software is not a team sport.

You could try to offset that by some combination of keeping head count low, optimizing for technical homogeneity when hiring and/or using intentionally spartan toolchains (Golang for example) but the odds are still against you.

Also, US business culture is maximalist and land-grabby in nature so no one is going to let you actually apply any of those constraints. The people who write checks don't actually care if the software is "good" because in almost all cases it doesn't have to be.
Which one was the least productive language, Java or Clojure ?
Yet, the last time I was throttled to 2G speed due to a problem with my carrier, the Uber app couldn’t even start (getting to the first interactive screen) in like five minutes. What’s the point of distributing the entire world’s data, which gotta change from time to time, when you can download the tiny requisite piece each time, especially considering that a relatively high speed Internet connection is required to use the app anyway?

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 goes into more details.
> But the written bible needs to exist or the religion will fade out, correct? No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.

Despite the extinction of their civilization and our inability to translate their language, we do know quite a bit about minoan religion through the study of artifacts and the accounts of their neighbors. Contemporaneously the Homeric epics were carried on in oral tradition for hundreds of years before the greeks wrote them down. And yet despite ready access to greek mythology you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive today who believes it to be true. The absence of a text does not eliminate the idea it conveys, nor does conveying an idea lead automatically to its adoption.
They've largely left the licensing for Virtual Box alone, but I also find it difficult to trust Oracle.
Large Swift apps are easy to find; companies would invariably use it as a marketing point on their engineering blog. Even if not, people open up apps all the time, any large app that uses Swift would be found and discussed.
ALL online account requirements for hardware need to be investigated. Speakers, televisions, doorbells, watches, freaking weighing scales. If you purchase something, it should work as advertised without having to sign over your life via a lengthy ToS, and shouldn't become a brick when the company decides to shut down a random server.
Devs might consider something like FPM (https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm) to make DEB/RPM/whatever packages that are a lot easier to install and manage.
> - Make value proposition clear. Just because they reached the signup screen doesn't mean they're already convinced to sign up.

I've sat at the signup/register/purchase screen so many times and muttered to my computer, "but I don't know what this thing does, why would I sign up?"

Playing coy was maybe cute in high school. Grownups communicate with each other, and nobody wants to do your job for you and pay you for the privilege (in cash, credit, or PII).
Yeah, Boeing (can't believe I'm citing them positively) had two tracks for engineers: management and technical fellow, with the latter basically being a researcher. Tech changes much more quickly than aerospace (which hasn't fundamentally changed since the '30s) and so I don't how a "tech researcher" would make sense, unless you're in a rarefied elite like Yann.
The latest version of Neverwinter Nights Enhanced runs without issue on Linux Mint 20.

The Beamdog Client no longer seems to work (pango lib issue), but GOG installs just fine. I like Beamdog and appreciate their ongoing support for Linux and have in turn purchased NWN gift keys for many people, but man - fix the Linux client please.

(Beamdog, feel free to contact me and I'll fix the broken client for free - seriously).
Our Y Combinator Application that got us an Interview
Templates similar to Datasheets for Datasets but for AI models
hello.

I was looking for a template similar to the Datasheets for Datasets (https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010) but for the model, not the training data.
I hate apps.

I installed this app for Best Buy because I thought it was needed for curbside pickup. Turns out bestbuy.com on my phone has all the same features.

I also have Netflix, Amazon Video and Hulu - but not because I want those apps, but because you can't play their video content in the mobile browser.

But most of the time all apps do is annoy the crap out of me with pointless notifications. And I'm thankful that the latest Android let's me disable notifications for these apps - the entire experience is extremely pro-company, not pro-user. I think apps should die and if you want games get a switch.
The Military Wants to Hide Covert Messages in Marine Mammal Sounds
Yeah, that's a good option if you're ok with not-100% browser compatibility.
...or don't collect user data against people's will. Apparently, that's too arbitrary and oppressive to comply with?

Sad world we live in if that's true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25366484
I think it's not an attempt at absolution so much as Hanlon's Razor.
Consider the quote: "Give me liberty or give me death"

Liberty winning may seem counterintuitive but not everyone sees it that way. Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death.
Basic functionality like windows update was implemented using websites and activex components. You couldn't run that with any other browser.
"Botched introduction, really? Perhaps Apple could have been a bit more upfront about the state of the tooling (which, of course, they never will be) but I think they did a rather good job considering that they moved development out from "total secrecy" to "community-involved" within two years, all the while shipping new features and improvements to the experience at a fairly decent pace.
At a growing massive company it's not about efficiency but total outcome. If 10x the engineers gives you 10% more revenue then that's worth it economically if the pie is large enough. 10% of 4 billion a year can pay for a lot of engineers. Once you're no longer growing then you need to focus on efficiency as more engineers rarely translates to more total revenue in that case.
I've seen a lot of Software Engineering curriculum, and the more serious ones are always CS + Engineering (so semester long projects, projects management) and there was an expectation that the student could build something at the end. Basically, what Stanford/MIT does (and a bunch of others).

On the other hand, I've seen places where the "Software Engineering" is about requirement, methodologies and tools and has no math nor algorithms. That's akin to an aeronautical engineer without a solid background in classical mechanics.
Drones Reduced Crime by 42% in One Town
Gotta love the whole "frontpage of HN 2.0: meta article about getting to the front page" approach many have found success with recently :D

Seriously though, love seeing the actual metrics on how this process went, thanks!
Thank you for all these details. I think it's a good sign when people think your app is simpler than it really is - the Uber app does a good job of hiding this complexity.
Bare in mind back then was before "Web 2.0", there wasn't AJAX, responsive web design and any of the other technologies we now take for granted. And to add to the woes, most computers still weren't powerful enough to handle running Active Desktop. It was a huge resource drain.

Some of the other desktop integration features of Internet Explorer 4 were pretty nice though.

These days most desktop environments allow for desktop widgets and usually there's a web view widget amongst them. So you can still have your web desktop if you wanted. At least now computers are powerful enough, and the frontend tools are useful enough, that there is some arguable benefit.
The OpenSuse community has a pretty good model. They work with Suse, but set their own priorities.
Transformer, the model architecture of the year comes to Computer Vision
It depends on how the Justice department feels, to some extent. GM in the 50s and 60s actually kept an eye on their market share, and sometimes would kill/cutback projects or products that may have threatened going over a certain percentage (around 60%, IIRC.) At that time merely going over that number would have been enough to start an investigation.

Some would argue though that back then DOJ 'cared' more.
A fintech that I am aware of chose Elixir and is a complete shitshow, they're trying to move away from it after being established with it.

Can't hire for it, can't refactor the code at scale, etc.

Be careful with what you read, newer languages are usually trying to sell themselves where established languages have happy people not trying to sell it, or, resume driven
developers trying to sell it as bad.
The stars are kind of aligning.

Conservative wackadoodles, ignoring that reality has a liberal bias, are targeting social media and big tech for this aforementioned bias.

Liberal socialists, ignoring that the founders of these big tech companies have created thousands of jobs and trillions of dollars in new wealth ripe for America to reap, are targeting them for the sin of being successful.

Big tech, being big and filled with a generation of activist workers, is also flexing its social and political muscles after standing mostly on the sideline for decades.

(I hope the sarcasm in this post was obvious)

In truth, Big Tech has done bad things (and good!), Liberals and Conservatives have valid gripes (and some not!), it's been decades since meaningful regulation has been enforced (even if some has) and in the wake of the 2016 election and ongoing chaos, tech is both making itself prominent in the political discussion and being made a target of that discussion.