skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Many startups (e.g. Slack) aim to replace email

Whether or not this is an 'aim', chat (slack, texts) is a distinctly different medium than email, in the same way voice chat is.

Voice is synchronous, real-time communication. It's very immediate, but demands 100% attention while taking place.

Email is asynchronous, with an inherent delay from the slow workflow and turn-around time. It takes at least a few distinct actions to read and send a reply, and there's no indication if the person received your message or is replying (unless you're a sociopath that uses read receipts, anyway). You can of course reply quickly back and forth and get close to a synchronous medium, but it's at best awkward and just really doesn't work well for this.

Chat lives in the middle ground where it is kind of both: though it's really async, most platforms have an indicator of online/offline, typing, etc, and the friction to reply is very small, so it works well synchronous.

More importantly, in my mind, is the expectations that come with the medium.

Chat is casual, ephemeral, and has no expectation of response. After some minutes/hours/days (depending on context) a message goes stale and that's just how it is. It's also perfectly fine to reply "sorry, in a meeting until 2" or "not sure, maybe ask @otherperson?".

Email is more formal, long-lived has an expectation of a useful response. This turns your inbox into a todo list where all the items are added by other people as they see fit. The types of deferrals you can do in chat don't really work in email.

There's definitely disagreement on these, and that can cause a lot of friction between people that treat them differently (for example: people that use email as if it's chat drive me absolutely crazy -- let's just chat and finish this conversation in 1/2 the time, or have a voice call and finish it 1/10th the time!).
My desk was near the ping pong table for a while. shudders
> Why don't we just improve air travel?

Unless you go electric, you'll never get anywhere near a carbon footprint of rail.
>"The internet" has never been okay with trolling.

Yes, everyone likes to hear back whatever they already think.

> Nor is trolling welcome on this site.

Right, that's why I'm here. If this place weren't sick, it wouldn't need medicine.
You wait for them to open and eat the seeds or nuts as some people call them. These particular pinecones dont grow in the north, so they are supposed to be some sort of delicacy.

There is a video of a family collecting and preparing them here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH4nSgEIVKo
I don't know anything about politics in the UK, but in Australia one of the big things correlated with conservative politics is growing up outside a big city. Rural and regional communities are under-served in everything from healthcare to transport to job growth. Coming from a working class background can also make it hard to keep up with the euphemism treadmill and know what's politically correct, even if you're on the left.

I also don't think outright racism is the only taboo viewpoint. Example contributions could be "I think male and female should be the most prominent gender options because my grandma wouldn't know how to use this device if she had to scroll through our current alphabetised list", or "do we really want to stick a gigantic Black Lives Matter banner on our website when 37% of our customer base supports Blue Lives Matter and will hate us, and 40% have no strong opinion"? If someone is skeptical about a political message, they'll be able to notice problems that the less skeptical don't.
Yes, they all need to be learnt. How odd that an excuse for failing to reduce complexity?

There are well-documented user interface design guidelines to follow, both vendor specific and general ones made by experts like Jakob Nielsen.

Well-designed user interfaces lend themselves to user experiences where the learning curve is low, not steep, sometimes coming close to flat.

The only excuse I can fathom for those who prefer the learning curve be as high as possible or never be lowered is resentment that their own efforts to scale the same mountain of learning the UI themselves.

I call that technical elitism. It says “I worked hard to learn how complicated interfaces work, everybody else should be held to the same expectation”. No, they should not.
It’s a research field in the UK at least. For the UK’s extensive rail network.

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/railway/index.aspx

Edit:

Further symposium on this subject.

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/mathematics/news-and-ev...
Slack exploded on the scene with a refresh of IRC.

USENET could come back with a proper refresh.
> Funny that they don't mention what "certain, commonplace views" people "stay silent" about. That might put a different spin on things.

The article actually mentions at least two examples, so I don't think there's as much room for spin with this as you might think.

One is Conservative voters, who have been vilified by the hard left since the 1970s, not least because of a sense of betrayal with the erosion of parts of the historic Labour voter base as people from working-class backgrounds moved to white-collar professions and abandoned trade unionism, and this has been particularly apparent in the arts. There is a "Shy Tory" phenomenon that has continued to confound pollsters.

Another is people who voted for the UK to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. Leave voters were regularly presented as ignorant and racist by major media sources from the lead up to the referendum until the final death of the Remain/Change UK insurgency after the 2019 General Election, with variations on Little Englander as well as different flavours of False Consciousness.

I think your reference to a "full 'viewpoint diversity'" is invoking a concept that isn't found within the article; instead, the article addresses

> views that diverge from majority public opinion

and it is saying that these are more likely to be voiced, and to be tolerated without fear of termination or marginalization when they are from people on the Progressive/Labour side of the political spectrum.

I don't think the scope of this discussion was intended to extend to people who "want to kill black people" (as they did in your cartoon); instead it encompasses the type of issues that people have been talking about in the UK over the last few years, which include enacting the result of the 2016 referendum, as well as those pertaining to taxation, immigration, education, healthcare and defence.
To each their own, of course, and if you like it and it helps you then right on! But as an outsider, none of those diagrams are more useful to me because they use UML shapes than a plain box-and-arrows diagram (sequence diagrams excepted, but those predate UML).

Diagramming is very useful. I just don’t see the value of dogmatically following UML-style formatting.
You just described Getty Images
I had a 12" Macbook, wrote code on it, it's a great computer. I had some issues with dust in the keyboard but they replaced it for free and it was fine after that. Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls, which wasn't as big of an issue in 2016 as it is now. That being said, during the time I had it, I spent half of my workday on calls and it wasn't a big deal.

The thinness and smallness of the computer was genuinely a very nice thing about it. You could hold it open in one hand easily, fit into any bag, didn't add any weight. Computers don't have all that much differentiating them anyway, so these things are actually a very good goal to shoot for. I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
To speculate, it seems like the lowest-cost supplier will win and that’s likely to be used drives from data centers. Chia farming uses storage, but not necessarily reliable storage so maybe any drives that start looking flaky could be rented out to Chia farmers, to get a bit more use out of them?

At least some data centers destroy their old drives for privacy reasons, so they would need to figure out a way around that if they’re going to reuse them offsite.
As you can see in the graph, the mainnet network space for the Chia blockchain is growing exponentially fast. Lots of people starting to mine ("farm") Chia using low-electricity proofs of space. The full node count over the trailing 5 days is north of 120,000 which is more than Bitcoin I believe.

Part of the reason for this is because Chia is really easy to farm — anyone with extra space on their hard drives can do it. There are people farming a petabyte with a Raspberry Pi. This was by design to keep the network decentralized and hard to attack — close to the original intention of "one cpu one vote" from bitcoin.

Right now there's no price for Chia since it's not on exchanges and transactions won't start until May 3. But in the short term it's advantageous to buy enterprise-level SSDs because they're the fastest to "plot" with so it seems that in a few markets, especially in China where interest in farming Chia is surging, a few SSD sellers have seen a spike in demand.

For long-term effects on the storage industry it's hard to say what will happen — there's tons of existing storage out in the world already, the storage industry already sells 1+ zettabytes of storage a year, and unlike single-use bitcoin mining hardware hard drives are useful outside of Chia. The Chia company speculates on the impact on the storage industry on page 23 of their business whitepaper: https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...
You forgot nootropics and polyphasic sleep!
As someone who has been a laptop upgrader for 17 years with Apple, and about 7 with Dell, I can affirm what others are saying that the M1 upgrade is a quantum leap forward. It's a pretty big deal in terms of integrated (Battery + CPU + Latency + Responsiveness - every time my Monitor adjusts without blinking I smile) experience.

Not just marketing speak. If they can keep up this momentum with M2, etc... they'll be creating some defensive moats around their laptop/desktop business.
> Anti-white racism [...] progressive anti-white racism

That seriously breaks HN's rule against flamebait. Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It just points the site hellward

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've warned you about exactly this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23453371. Needing two warnings about something like that is an extremely bad sign. Please don't do this on HN again.
> We found that, when it comes to speaking their minds at work, one of these tribes—home of the “Progressive Activist”—is not like the others.

Unsurprising, given that their is the script that conforms to every paragraph of the company HR manual.
Not at all what I noticed. Everywhere I can go with a fast train (expensive) I can go with a slow train aswell, for far less money.
I was disappointed to see the Gmail app on the Pixel actually automatically loads images for emails in the spam folder, with no way to turn them off except to turn off image loading across the board.
DISCLAIMER: To all chat-app haters, my point is that the user experience of these newfangled services is just much better, o course I'm not taking into acct all the very real concerns stemming rom these apps.

Since your talking about user experience, (not mentioning privacy, security, etc.). How is email better in terms of usability than say Telegram or any other app.

Which keep every chat you've ever had.

You can "Save" chats for yourself for later.

You can have usenet-style conversations in huge mega-groups.

You can follow the latest news from channels just like RSS.

All without needing to keep the data downloaded on your device, and backed up in the cloud.

Basically all those separate services you mention (with separate software required to be downloaded to view them) are rolled into in any one-stop-shop chat app. Oh, and it also has phone and video calls too.
Lots of amazing work is being done in Egypt right now most of it IMHO being done by Geologists because they are much less likely to have any attachment towards any established theory. Zawi Hawass seems to have contempt for anyone who comes to conclusions that doesn't align with the gated narrative even when those conclusion are very well reasoned (For example: water erosion around the Sphinx).

The official narrative that we were all taught in school of "Pyramids were built 4500 years ago as tombs by Khufu" I would say is understood to be highly inaccurate at this point by anyone outside of the Hawass circle.
Yeah, but if the kids’ parents don’t let them buy a Playstation, then they have to make do with what they have. Gaming on a clunky mobile device is still better then no gaming at all.
I used to think this until I spent some time bouncing around East Asia. Tokyo is not even that dense relative to other high functioning Asian mega cities. Seoul is 3x, Taipei is 1.5x. They're much less polite places than Tokyo and manage to function really well.
I used the term in the sense of the article I replied to said:

> They would file and stretch their patents to try and cover what others invented.

It's definitely what Edison did and what others tried to do to him. Nothing the Wrights did in regard to patents was new.
How do you connect a petabyte of storage to a Rasberry Pi?
I hate Slack. Unlike IRC, it is too much. And it is thick.

Many do not though, your point is good.

I love email because I rarely have to think about it. Thought is action. Same with IRC.
Mmm, pretty colors. Disclaimer: I didn't read the article, but I did inspect some of the elements. I like the graph at the top of the page. It calms me, somehow.
I seem to remember PalmOS/WebOS doing a pretty decent job. My HP Touchpad had a "unified inbox" at least across mail services, although I don't remember if Texts/Tweets/Chats were in it as well.
Tried and true method we learned over time. The leaders that were strong enough to respond properly should be congratulated. This was a gigantic shot to the foot by our public health leadership, most state and federal leaders, and fawning media. And it's not even close to over.
The alternative is expecting companies to make native ports for what would be less than 1% of their userbase - and the handful that have done so haven't done it well, and even if they did it well it wouldn't change any outcomes for them.

Before Wine actually got good, the few "native" ports we had of major games on Linux were poorly optimised and often worse than just running the Windows versions in Wine.

Sometimes you gotta take what you can get. Valve's approach to invest in Wine means I don't need to dual boot any more. Native games are the cherry on top.

>the reason why linux isn't gaining shares on steam anymore

Did anyone ever think Linux had any kind of comparable gaming ecosystem? lol

Valve invests in Linux as a safety net in case Microsoft ever flicks a switch and forces all game distribution through the Windows Store or similar.
Well yes, it's obviously a 'bad thing' but to everyone but the 13% with the least life experience, and who are most likely to arbitrarily reject the views of the other 87%.

It's also keenly hypocritical because it's the same group for whom 'diversity' is a ostensibly an important, defining element.

For most people, losing viewpoint diversity would not be a good thing.

Also - I don't think there ever was a time to 'talk politics' at work, but certainly holding 'commonplace views' was ok, historically.
Towards complete and error-free genome assemblies of all vertebrate species
But that's not what Basecamp management is doing by banning "political discussion". It's not clear what that means, particularly given they take outspoken political positions. There's no go/no go here.
This is awesome, well done.
So many things in Japan are terribly inefficient. They just get some things right that we don't out of sheer necessity. Those clearly marked subway stations are there because of the inhuman rush hour crush that is the Tokyo Metro at 5PM. No Western country would find that acceptable, there would be weekly demands to build more rail capacity.
Do you count in all the efforts of building the rails?
Unfortunately, the money has to come from the national budget. Which means every state gets their say in how it’s spent. So yes, a commuter rail linking east coast cities makes sense. Now, get 17-19 Midwestern states to approve it as well. And that’s where you have the problem. It’s not what makes financial sense, it’s about how can I maximise this politically.
It really depends what your expectations about the environment are. Systemd is a large user of very specific functionality that they have good reasons not to replace with something else. Since it keeps running into those issues, it may be more beneficial for wider community if systemd included the missing shims conditionally. They'd be able to put it in CI and treat musl as first class platform so people don't have to report back with similar issues after the release. Not exactly like, but similar to how openbsd has openssh and everyone else has the official openssh-portable.

Their stance is not wrong, but it's probably not what many people would like to see.
UML only scratches the surface of how useful PlantUML is. I use it a bunch, both as a Confluence plug-in and in VS Code.
> 2. difficult to travel with kids

I'm pretty sure my nephew's first ride on the subway was when he was 3. I don't recall how old I was when I first took the subway, but I think wasn't more than twice his age.

Transit is no harder than any other mode of transportation with kids. Sure, you might have to be schlepping around some duffel bags of supplies, but you'll have to do that anyways at your destination.

> 5. have to check time schedule

This is only true if your city has a bad transit system. And, yes, every city in the US (including NYC!) has bad transit. That's one of the main themes of the author--if you actually look at how transit works in other countries, you'll find that the American experience with transit is unusually bad.

> 1. do not directly bring you from point A to B

This is mostly a result of bad urban planning. When you have a transit system in place, you want to focus development around the accessibility of transit so that all of the desired origin and destination points are actually near enough to transit to you allow you to go directly from point A to B. When cities cross the hurdle and stop making every other block be a parking lot, then the nonavailability of parking means that it's driving that has the problem of not getting you directly from point A to B like transit would.
Think through the implications. Hypothetically if you had the right to not be killed then that would imply that others would be required to do everything possible to protect you. Obviously that would be absurd.
One of the weirdest things about going hiking around Kyoto is coming across valleys of identical trees spaced evenly in neat rows. Absolutely eerie feeling, I was so creeped out I didn't even stop to take pictures.
" If you want to unconditionally love the mission of your company, chances are you have to set aside your own personal opinions."

This research is not about 'company viewpoints', it's about 'workplace diversity of individual viewpoints'.

In fact, the article is very clearly about 'political' viewpoints etc. and doesn't refer at all to pro/anti-company thinking etc. which frankly deserves study but would represent a different kind of social artifact.
> You're living in a dream world if you think $600K household is the norm in Silicon valley, even for FAANG employees.

For married couples above 30 with one high TC earner - it's extremely common. You're not marrying a barista in SF if you work at FAANG. I haven't met anyone who is married, above 30, who also works at FAANG, the spouse can legally work in the country, and the household income is below $500K. I know that seems like a lot of qualifiers but basically a married couple that both have working abilities - if one is at FAANG, the other is likely at FAANG or similar (or a doctor or a lawyer or an executive or whatever - very common).

I'd have to really stretch to find anyone who I've met with high TC that isn't also married to another with high TC (besides SAHM/SAHD - where the one earner is usually an exec, so homes are still not too expensive for them).

I'm not talking about non-FAANG employees btw. If you work somewhere that doesn't pay well - then ok. You have to suffer like every other American does. I'm saying that if you work at FAANG - it's a bullshit excuse to commute an hour each way. (I mean - FFS - a lot of them have shuttles where you can clock in on even if you do live further away) It's a choice at that point. They pay you a lot so you can be close to their campus. High earners typically marry high earners. It's financial suicide to do otherwise. (Bye-bye 1/3 of your income for 18 years when you inevitably get divorced)
Agreed, even the title seemed like a dog whistle to me.

Their subsequent bashing of The Progressive Activist confirmed it.

Then when they compared discrimination based on political views (which you pick) with discrimination on race (which you don't get to pick), I wasn't even surprised.

Who the hell are these "Ethical Systems", and why the hell should anyone listen to them?

(I guess we could believe them because an unethical person would never call their org Ethical Systems /s)
They can be, but they aren't required to be. An email that contains all the resources to display itself doesn't leak user information. An email that contains a 1x1 tracking pixel, loaded when the receiver opens the email, lets the sender know that it has been received. In view of email spam, this is an unacceptable breach of privacy.
Maybe it didn't happen then?
>The key difference is that there is a lot of overprovisioned storage out there currently sitting idle

From where? Individuals or enterprises? With the direction we're headed (SSDs and cloud storage), it's hard to imagine many people with a few terabytes of hard drive space. On the other hand you can get around cheap hard drives at around $15/TB if you buy external, then shuck them so you can put it in a backpane or something. At that price, it's hard to beat the price of a new drive, especially if you factor in the time it takes for the individual to set it up. Enterprises might have better economies of scale, but I'm skeptical that executives would sign off on running arbitrary code on production servers just to earn some cryptocoins.
This is normal. If you are an IC or middle manager you are there to execute (do what your boss says). Defining process and culture is not your job. Whether your process is better or not is besides the point. Fighting this will only lead to political pain.
Blackberry had so much right.

All they had to do was keep focused on their actual demographic (high-end office workers), allow their other demographic (drug dealers / buyers), and let everyone else worry about consumers.

Always refine the keyboard, unquestionable notifications, ignore the “single pane of glass” trend, and definitely not even a single phone with Android.

Their user-base would be “small”, but so what. Noone needs 8 Billion users. 100M is plenty to sustain R&D.
Knowing Reddit, they won't announce it. It'll just slowly stop working until it's unceremoniously removed.
still an amazing delivery. He did it literally from scratch, in one week, and that week included a break on the 7th day.

Must be a programming god.
Me to, exactly this and going into the office a few days a week has really helped me in the last few weeks.