skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder which is worst for health. I’d say tobacco, but social media probably causes more obesity than Coca Cola itself. Also causes people to procrastinate instead of engaging in intellectual activities, especially school or work, so the cost to society might be enormous. I wonder whether this is quantifiable, but it is definitely visible.

But if it slows careers, we also have to reckon it creates careers and side-jobs (« Instagram model », « journalist », ...).
I believe that's different because the shoe fits.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but as an outsider, it's hard to judge exactly why Google (and other major offenders like Facebook and Apple) have lost the plot in recent years.

I suspect a big part of it is believing your own hype. You have a goose that has been laying golden eggs for more than a decade, as a result of which you have an army of staff paid astronomical salaries and effectively unlimited budgets to do anything else, as long as the goose is protected. This removes any need for efficiency, effective feedback loops or any kind of meaningful customer support or service standards.

And notice that the goose is always protected. Google's search UI is still very similar to the money printing machine that launched it all those years ago. Facebook's whole UI is still built around a news feed and the concept of keeping up with people you know. Apple still operates a mostly closed ecosystem with expensive but relatively good and prestigious devices and strong control over the software ecosystem that has grown around them. No-one is going to risk undermining the foundations any time soon. And the rest, frankly, doesn't matter.

This wouldn't be such a problem except that the immense financial power and network effects that these huge tech firms can bring to bear are enough to move national economies or to create or destroy whole industries, industries that might be supporting millions of users and providing livelihoods for millions of people (or, tomorrow, might not). While the success or failure of a new moonshot project might not be here or there to the senior executives preparing for their next quarterly call, it might accidentally crush a startup that much better people had spent many years working on and done a much better job but without the unlimited budget and free publicity. While shutting down the latest adventure into social networking might be a footnote on the annual report, it might inconvenience millions of people who had invested their time into getting set up on it. While breaking email as we have known it for decades in the name of fighting spam (badly, of course) might be a little "oops" for Google, it's screwing up communications between friends and between work colleagues and between businesses and their customers all over the world.

These tech giants are a plague on society, managing to limit or even reverse progress across the whole tech industry and undermining the efforts of millions of people to make the world a better place with all the amazing things we know how to do today. It really is long past time they were broken up, and all the other things they do forced to stand or fall on merit instead of leeching off the goose's golden eggs. The broken UIs are just one small symptom of a much more fundamental problem.
Fwiw, I use discord.com, slack.com, and teams.com. So at least some folks prefer chat in browser to Electron. I do this to preserve system resources, but because they somehow seem to work better for whatever reason when run from within the browser.
Can you define "well respected" in a bit more detail? It seems that by definition, everybody in the cryptocurrency space is still fairly new at this, reputations can be built quickly, and identities are less transparent than elsewhere.

There is a lot of shady business going on in traditional banking, but I can be reasonably sure that e.g. Deutsche Bank is not just one guy keeping all assets on his personal laptop who may or may not have died in India last week.

As for "outsourced", I thought that was supposed to be BAD? "Not your keys, not your coins", wasn't it? "Insured" by whom?
There was a recent conversation between my aunt and I about her being able to video call my 86-year-old grandmother. Because we need video calls to just "pop up" for her, expecting her to accept an invite from her email (which she forgot exists...) or open a new tab for a new chat app (which she won't remember either...), isn't an option.

My aunt is pretty locked to Google platforms, she is the person who trains their platforms at her work... and you know what, the idea that she could "just use Skype" didn't even strike her mind:

It's already installed on my grandma's Windows PC, she already has a Microsoft account anyways, and it "just works", popping up a "[aunt] is calling] dialog when she gets a call. Skype worked great, and it's available on every platform.

It really starts to amaze me that Google doesn't understand the importance of that level of integration and simplicity considering their supposed market being "everyone". My aunt had been considering buying a Google Home/Nest/whatever it is today or an Android tablet, just to use one app to call my grandmother.

But my grandmother already has her PC open, and Skype "just works". It rings like a phone and it has a big green button to answer it.
That's why there's a vesting schedule and stock compensation for engineers.

Unless you are Netflix and can attract and afford world wide talent, if you have no bonus or stock compensation you are much better hiring contractors for software.
The movie is very, very good too. Richard Burton is outstanding in it, and his laughter is unmistakable. Too bad we barely get any Smiley at all, and what little there is, is totally forgettable.
> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be

you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.

Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
From the first link's abstract:

> Phytoestrogens were detected in all foods analyzed; bread contained the highest amount of phytoestrogens-many as isoflavones-with an average content of 375 +/- 67 microg/100 g wet weight (excluding soya-linseed bread with 12,000 microg/100 g).

This is what I'm saying. You are comparing 375 and 12,000 and saying the difference doesn't matter. It's a two orders of magnitude difference.

So no, what you're saying is not true. Soy products have significantly higher levels of phytoestrogens than other foods.
So it needs to be turned on. Is anyone going to turn this on other than bros? "Bros" like me with a VO2Max that is firmly in the "high" category for oldsters (or, to brag, probably any age group), but because we're narcissistic we turn it on knowing full well (or at least hoping) we will never get a notification?

Or do there exist actual people with really low VO2Max measurements that need to be told by their watch that they're out of shape, rather than letting huffing and wheezing up two flights of stairs being their guide? IOW, is this feature going to tell anyone, in shape or not, something they don't already know?

Thing is, I hate to poo-poo what can be a useful feature. I look at it from time-to-time (VO2Max has been there for a couple of years(?), the notifications are new). Went in literally Christmas Day last year for surgery, the feature has been useful for measuring the road to recovery as I dragged my VO2Max out of the basement of sitting on my butt for a few months. But I suppose that if one is out of shape, it will be encouraging to watch the number go up. I just question the usefulness of notifications.
Reddit is an example of a product I'd pay for less of. Give me basic functionality, simple UI, and no growth hacks. I'll give you an annual subscription.
This is an awful idea lol wut. That limits the free flow of information as well as ideation.
Seems like intentionally randomizing this would be a good way to mass produce fingerprinted copies - in addition to any variants in the media.
> Continuous feedback of mood

That's very black mirror.

Also, didn't facebook get busted basically manipulating feeds to see how they affect people emotionally?
If you zoom out then you'll be able to see an X in the upper right hand corner.
> 1) The First Amendment says nothing about which content companies must produce, promote, or allow with their resources and on their platforms.

It's not just that it says nothing about these things. It says the opposite of these things.

Any legal or social norm that attempts to enforce what content is produced, promoted, or allowed on private resources and platforms is fundamentally authoritarian. This includes the "principle of free speech" from your 2nd statement. The first amendment is a protection against authoritarianism. Using the ideas behind it to coerce private parties into hosting or promoting content they don't want to is a bit perverse.
My favorite copy protection was on some games I had (I want to say they were Microprose games? But I could be wrong) where they would cut the hole in the disk just slightly bigger, and then take advantage of the fact that in DOS you could talk directly to the hardware to convince the read head to go just a little too far. Then it could read the magic 41st track to load the game, but no disk copy program could copy it.
ok will do! do you have a twitter handle? i never use HN :-D

I'm twitter.com/stephanieblack
It's ok for them to think like machines and never become Apple.
Getting Started with Automated Testing Using Jest for JavaScript Applications
I had to adjust the contrast on my monitors to see the boundaries of Google+ posts and UI elements, because light gray on lighter gray has been Google's favorite UI pattern for ages...
So I like social media, and get a lot of benefit from it. I like that it's free and supported by targeted ads, rather than a paid service.

Since we disagree, and I imagine there are many people with the same opinions as both you and me, why not make it opt-in, so you only encounter social media if you choose to make an account, and then still only see it if you go to it and/or install it intentionally? Wait, that's how it is now...
The problem is that for the sake of diversity they stack the graphic department with women because they can't find enough women engineers. Women are more sensitive and also not very good with initiating changes so you get stuck with two problems.

The only solution is to bring more men into those UI/UX roles if they want any change to happen but even that might not help because Google is just too big now and it is hard to do those changes in such a big organisation.

The usual way big companies deal with those issues is to let a startup do this job, startups are not confined by big company politics and diversity requirements so they can just employ mainly men and do the job. But that is good for a whole product, not sure how they can apply it for a design change.
Yes. That’s why piracy was a big draw for BBSes.
There was no support for devs, but the bones were good and they didn't make any changes, so I managed to make it work.

I used both the OAuth and Shelves APIs.
Sounds like a solid information security incident response mechanism!

The only missing piece is making sure that VP+ level folks are not incentivized in any way to suppress incidents. However, that’s beyond infosec—in that treacherous area between information security, shareholder interests and organizational politics.

I wish business continuity planning (which would include infosec procedures but has a much wider overall scope) was paid more attention and more widely scrutinized.
You will have to compare them to their contemporaries, for instance moving from Hotmail and GMX to Gmail was great, not only for the free storage but also for it‘s simple UX.

Ironically the lack of display advertising and advertorials was one of the greatest features, little did we all know.
Seems more likely to me that all the overreaction to social media will be what is viewed as silly and old-fashioned. History is absolutely full of very similar examples of people freaking out over how new mediums like novels or bicycles or radio or rock music or whatever are a waste of time and/or are destroying the children's minds.
> One of the big issues is that if people are given the choice between an extra 3rd or 4th bathroom (that they use twice a year) and good insulation, most people will choose the 4th bathroom.

US luxuries. I don't think any person I know in Europe lives in a house/apartment with more than 4 bathrooms. I imagine 90% live in one with at most 2 bathrooms.
If your predicted VO2Max falls into the "low" category for your demographic, it will pop a "low cardio fitness" notification on your watch.

Source: media images from Apple's website (ZIP file download): https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/watch/standard...
The major earlier threads on this ongoing story are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25413053

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25409416
> This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer.

How do you know that? Civil rights and protest movements in general have traditionally not relied on social media or even digital communication of any sort. Couldn't the mechanisms once employed to organize activists still work today? The answer is yes, they can. I know for a fact the Baptist church down the street from me participated in organizing many of the protests in my city this summer.
I think it's worth noting, just because it's kinda crazy: Gmail's desktop UI has and continues to support themes, including dark ones, for like... over a decade. It managed to survive all of their redesigns, while none of their apps had any dark modes at all.

Cheers to the one dude somewhere inside the labyrinth who managed to fight for that feature all these years...
> but these sound like a 1970s-era chatbot.
HA! Sums up my feelings about the reflect back advice crap I've been reading for years.

> Rather, it’s cargo cult advice: it teaches you to imitate the surface appearance of good listening, but misses what’s actually important, the thing that’s generating that surface appearance.

Ok. seriously guys, this is actually a good article.

Color me very surprised!
The original company got bought out by Central Point, they'd been running for a bit before then. They were not quite totally opaque in "API" then, there were like maybe 3 asm examples floating around BBS and net.* era usenet.
My Garmin 245 tracks my runs, rides, and swims. The data is then pushed to Strava- is there any reason for me to buy an apple watch? I take it I'm not the target audience here?

Anyhoo, if it gives folks an accurate and understandable view into their health, I'm all for it.

Edit: More relevant to the topic at hand, it tracks HR and estimates VO2 max for all my activities. IDK if Apple has made a sufficiently advanced update to what the rest of the market provides?
> It's not that, it's inertia and poor incentive structures.

This is the psychological/economics point of view, and I think it's the correct one for this problem. The other tricky issue, besides the CYA prioritization, is that being a dynamic entity requires other entities to do the same. If you start changing procedures in your section, other sections that rely on you need to adapt to these, and they may have the CYA attitude and resist that change.
There is a lot of legacy C code out there.
I can't think of a single Google product, aside Inbox and Google Sheets, where I use it because I like to use it (well, not Inbox anymore). Everything else is either incumbent, utility or free.
Flo = Let Concourse CI Fly with Drone Syntax
> Countless lives have been destroyed because of revenge porn uploaded on these websites.

I suspect you're getting a lot of downvotes for this.

I don't know how one's life could get destroyed just by uploading a sex tape to a porn website. It's more the sending it to friends and aquaintances that causes hurt (and for the vast vast majority this would hardly "destroy their lives", very few people are that fragile), which can be accomplished easily enough without the porn website.
This also came out today:

https://mattermost.com/blog/coordinated-disclosure-go-xml-vu...

It seems pretty likely that SolarWinds' SAML authentication was bypassed or escalated by this issue with Go's encoding/xml, and then used that to generate and distribute the trojaned SolarWind's updates.
So, APPL haven't learned from all the 274 previous times, and will have to start "probes" from scratch again?

Is the same team overseeing suppliers and designing keyboards?
Presumably the demand for weed is already being met (legally or not). Is there evidence that legalization prompts a large increase in demand? Just thinking about myself, I did not use weed when it was illegal, and legalization has not changed that.
I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!

Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610
RAII is a delight when it comes to local heap memory. However, if you want to pair fclose with a fopen call then you need to wrap fopen in a type and make the destructor call fclose. This is totally fine and I like it a lot in C++ and Rust, but it doesn't gel with existing C apis. Therefore I think defer is a good choice for C regardless of what I might choose were I to be implementing a language from scratch.
America's Largest Wildlife Overpass Opens in Texas
> admit liberal enablers...

> Any legitimate criticism of someone's work turns into a personal attack, or worse, "bullying". This is not a reasonable position to take, and will come back to bite liberal people, either in work, government, or policy.

You are erroneously conflating liberal ideology (the western world except the USA) and sensitivity. In nordic countries, people are significantly less sensitive, and more liberal for example.
Given the scope of this product — basically everyone runs it — any chance that this is some sort of hoax will be mitigated by the “too large to be a hoax” thing. Probably some sort of fallacy whose name I don’t know.

See: moon landing. Of course we went to the moon otherwise, what, 50,000 people are keeping a perfect and scandalous secret for half a century?
> you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.

It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder).

At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
They aren't easy to type in all keyboard layouts, in my Spanish keyboard you have to press alt gr+backtick twice (because it's a dead key), that's 3 key presses for a single backtick, you need 14* in total if you are using 3 backticks at the beginning and 3 at the end. Some people have even bigger issues like more keys to press or no backtick at all[1]

Backticks are such an annoyance for me that when I started learning programming I dreaded having to type them and actively avoided languages that relied too much on them.

* 7 per each 3 consecutive backticks if you don't accidentally release the alt gr

[1] https://spaghettidba.com/2011/09/19/typing-the-backtick-key-...
Have you used other maps?

I see this opinion a lot, but Apple Maps is pretty great now. Bing Maps is excellent. HERE Maps has been a big one I relied on for a number of years too.

I mean, their web UI is slow, but MapQuest... actually still does it's job pretty darn well too. I used their API for a program I wrote.
> This all may seem inefficient and crazy and it is. Program representation and execution need a major re-think along the lines of the once-investigated dataflow architecture. Why do and then un-do?

In a world where most code is JIT compiled on the target architecture and/or periodically re-compiled using the latest, optimized compiler once a new CPU comes out – sure.

But is that realistic? Maybe that would work for Android and iOS (with on-device and app store level compilation, respectively), but with Docker, we seem to be moving to the opposite direction again, and runtime hardware-based optimization makes a ton of sense there.
Perhaps the designers in question are not understanding how much people dislike their work? Sounds like a difficult conversation needs to be had about accepting feedback, and making customers happy.
In a world of billions of people, you'll find plenty of everything. The question is how much more difficult it is for those who are don't physically measure up. If some men are winning the lions share, then necessarily some others will have to do without.
I'll be frank: Google's UX blows most other enterprise suites out of the water.

Maybe not as slick as other startsup/apps - but it aligns well with me.

The one major thing I'd suggest to Google is to have a better Drive search.
1) How's landline infrastructure going to hold up to tornadoes?

2) Yes, power goes out too. Cellphones have batteries.

3) Yes, you can dial 911 via "wifi calling". I've done it.

I don't know about "hate" but I do think landlines are overrated. You already have a cellphone. Paying for an extra service and apparatus for the tiny possibility that you need to call 911 when your cellphone can't - why? Who else are you going to call? Do you even know their phone numbers without your cellphone?

I also think you're undervaluing cellphones by assuming they only talk on the cellular network. You just need to get on a data network somewhere and you suddenly have a wide variety of communication options, including phone calls. TCP/IP was designed to withstand nuclear war.
> industry is crying out for more people

At a certain price-point they are.

> Learning to program is more like an old fashioned trade than a profession

Sure. Learning to code is pretty much a trade at this point. Engineering isn't. There's a pretty big gap between a real engineer and someone who "learned to code" in high school.
the second theory seems better in my experience. I pulled a few js benchmarks and ran on native Safari on m1 vs rosetta2 node and the rosetta2+node is significantly faster, suggested the instruction set is not the key.
The translation of that is: "We're Google and we have literally billions of users, therefore we can't be wrong. Shut the fuck up and go back to your cubicle. Your opinion doesn't matter because I have more seniority than you, even though I work in an industry that largely tosses aside such ridiculous convention and had historically lauded and elevated risk takers and rule breakers."

In other words, Google has become thoroughly bureaucratic, which means it will inevitably stagnate and die... it'll just be a very slow death.
It’s very important to still test them otherwise you might break the update mechanism!