skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The nice thing about this question for old-timers is that we can recycle the answers we already heard about using Java for cross-platform desktop development from 20+ years ago. Or the rationale for using a cross-platform toolkit with C++ from 30+ years ago.

You get substandard desktop applications that tend to frustrate people who are deeply immersed in any one ecosystem and expect native applications to have deep integration with each platform and comply with each platform’s design sensibilities.

But history shows that applications written against cross-platform toolkits have done just fine, as have applications that completely embraced “going native” on particular platforms.

I’m left with the thought that either strategy works if you go “all in,” the mistakes come from:

1. Going cross-platform but then doing ridiculous back-flips to try to make the app feel really, really native. Just take what the platform gives you, and accept that you’re giving people a web-like experience that happens to have some native affordances. Learn to live with the few complaints from retro-grouches.

Or, 2. Going native, but skimping on deep integration and fully embracing the look and feel of each platform. This is one of those “penny-wise, pound-foolish’ strategies: You ship faster, but you lose the big benefits of a cross-platform tool, and you don’t satisfy the users that appreciate what a native app offers in look, feel, and integration.
/me hangs up javascript phone https://www.bonequest.com/5546
Deming wrote very accessible books. Out of the Crisis is a general audience book but it covers statistical quality analysis in enough depth to understand how it works.
The "cute" parts didn't help, at all.

>Perhaps the petrification business became too wearying; perhaps they wanted the good life, and now make tasteful little animal sculptures in a cottage by the sea.

>He was the mortal half-brother of the hulk, or hunk; yes, he was powerful, but he couldn’t hold a candle to the Zeus-born elder brother.

I think many people know this is pushed to the front page of HN because of the Hades game (which is great). But you're right, this word salad is just someone trying to fill content in a dull pointless way.
I'm on a B&W grayscale e-ink device ... and I feel your pain.
They are porting the codebase to WebAssembly, not developing a Google Docs type SaaS product.

It shouldn't be difficult to see that GIMP and LibreOffice can run on this runtime with similar privacy.

We typically download native executables over HTTP.
Then check for application updates over HTTP.

Privacy respecting WASM apps can do the same.

This is the new Java, not the new SaaS.
What if it’s too late to save our planet without geoengineering?
This is exactly what I made last night so I hope not!
Gay News.
Someone needs to build a true BSD phone to free FLOSS from the monopoly of Linux.

Then a Haiku phone to break the monopoly of UNIX.
Naive question, is freebsd actually a big factor in this capability (compared to linux)? I'd imagine that erlang(/beam) is the biggest contributing factor. But this is coming from someone who hasn't used freebsd
Reddit has already implemented mass arbitrary censorship of subreddits for no good reasons. Stuff like gun subs, r/shoplifting (which I mention not because I like shoplifting, but because it was legitimately informative to learn what they do and why they do it), all sorts of politics subs, plenty of satire subs, and even r/wateriniggas just for the soft nword. They’re ridiculously strict and while it’s good to not ban one, let’s not act like they’re good faith actors here.
not quite as good a deal, but you can get $15/month with mint mobile, which sits on top of t-mobile's network. supposedly low priority but i've never had a problem in the past twelve months: http://fbuy.me/siAKU
That colored squares from canistilluse.com are not not "all you know" considering your original quote was pulled from the same page I pulled the above Firefox/Safari signals+timeline and spec PR link from: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/hTOXi...

Also canistilluse makes no claim about whether the deprecation matches standards or not. For reference the standards change was actually approved back in February, per the link in my above comment, so it is actually according to standards.
It is similar to why we chose gold to use as “gold” as humanity. Not all elements are suitable to be used as a store of value and physical currency.

Let’s look at the primary and secondary colours.

Yellow: Bad contrast.
Red or Green: Action colours, would be bad to see them everywhere. Plus there might be accessibility concerns.
Orange: Mostly used as “Not as urgent as red”.
Purple: Not as neutral as blue, yet it is the second best option, that’s why visited hyperlinks are purple I assume. It is the logical choice.

We are left with the colour blue. Also, a plus that it is a primary colour; I would assume it is easier to display primary colours in earlier tech.
Not really. The vast majority of CPU design is just logic in Verilog/VHDL, similar to software.
At the end of the day even if all devs collectively decide they won’t implement these features (which already is utopian), there will be someone in a more desparate position who would just be too glad to take the job. You may have to go looking in other countries. Or raise wages. But it will get done.
What is the larger issue? The entire chain starts off with a prediction of what will happen in the future. It sounds like the trend is the proposed larger issue.
This.

No tradition or culture can claim to be purely from one place. Everything has mixed in the world by now. All of us are immigrants.
I'd take a bet that the email chain that began the process to send Groovy the C&D started with one of the companies who license music to YouTube.
> Again whatever native apps can do, web apps do all the time.

This isn't true. Yes, web apps have tons of telemetry, and every web request is logged server-side. But native apps do MORE:

- Native apps can look at what processes you're running. Web apps can't.

- Native apps can look at what software is installed. Web apps can't.

- Native apps can accurately determine exactly what operating system and browser you're using, while web apps either have to rely on a User-agent (which is trivially spoofed), or perform fingerprinting in order to come up with a guess.

- Native apps can see exactly what hardware you have. Web apps can't.

- Native apps have read/write access to every file on your system, subject to user-level permissions. Web apps require explicit selection from the user for file access. A native app can easily send your /etc/passwd file to a remote server, and can enumerate the local users.

--

Look, nobody is disputing that web apps have tons of telemetry, yet you keep responding as if that's what people are arguing with you about. What we're disputing is the exact statement I quoted. You implied that the telemetry of a native app is a subset or equal to the telemetry of a web app, and that's just plain false. It's very much the other way around. The telemetry of a web app is far less than a native app.
I've never met anyone who could estimate with any degree of certainty how much a given climate policy (e.g., a $15/ton tax on carbon with border adjustments) would affect a given product or service (not even gasoline, which is a straightforward derivative of oil) because supply chains are so opaque. No doubt there are economists and other academics who try to get in the right ballpark, but even then the error margins are enormous and economists account for a minuscule share of voters.

> Human nature would have given us the same result

Lobbying is human nature. Human nature already gave us this result. Banding together to overcome special interests is also human nature. Everything we do is human nature, so this isn't very meaningful. The meaningful question is whether or not we might have implemented carbon pricing by now were it not for corporate lobbying and disinformation campaigns, and I'm thoroughly convinced that the answer is "yes".
Because of the laws around new buildings, rent control advocates have an incentive to prevent old buildings from being redeveloped: if they are redeveloped then there will be fewer rent controlled units! This does regularly play out in the politics of development in the area[0].

Then when rent controlled unit can be redeveloped, there's a desire to allocate various percentages to different income levels. This means that some units have less income for the same cost so it's hard to balance meaning fewer projects get off the ground.

Now there's even further issues about development as a right vs requiring a use permit...

So, there's a lot of contributors, but the political impact of the politics of rent control is significant.

[0] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/07/28/uc-berkeley-settleme...
Four marines are confirmed KIA. Biden needs to step the fuck down today.
The amount of value extracted by the person mining reduces as more compute power starts mining, but that's actually a negative feedback loop that will reduce the total spending on chips for crypto mining.

The amount of security provided to the network is constant in the number of GPUs. As you add more GPUs, the network gets harder to attack. Does the network need as much security as it's paying for? Nobody is really sure, it's an open debate in the crypto industry.
It can still be unethnical to have policies and laws that have 50.001% approval. I agree though that I think the word "coercive" here is a bit confusing.
Yeah. But Reddit already censors the shit out of its communities, both with thousands unnecessary subreddit bans and a comically incompetent “Anti-Evil Operations” site wide censorship team staffed by barely literate Zambians or something that randomly removes benign comments and suspends people for ridiculous reasons.
And the timing of the last post coincides with her arrest.
Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection
Thanks for chiming in! Nice to see a new account understanding this issue and joining the fray.

It has been fascinating to me to watch the disbelief evolve. One aspect of this is that negative reporting has been basically allowed and encouraged by miners because they didn't want competition on their cheaper renewable/captured energy sources.

So, for years, many investment groups would discourage their renewable or captured energy activity to be citable source of what is happening with bitcoin mining, because they didn't want others with deeper connections to make partnerships with sites faster.

Its really funny, to me, watching people have to redo their understanding but trying to make that understanding conform to the negative energy impact idea that they were intentionally led on with.
> cooking is much more like music than engineering. There isn't one right way, yet there is no upper limit on the quality of the result.

Absolutely agree, I didn’t mean to imply that this was some kind of patentable solution; more like
me discovering the intricacies of a new musical genre, and in my excitement, desperately trying to communicate what I (probably wrongly) think is the essential parts (to be mixed at your discretion)
When I say petroleum products are a requirement for modern life, what I mean is that more than 80% of the energy driving modern society comes from fossil fuels. It probably doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. You definitely can’t say that for cigarettes.

I think that you raise a valid point, but also that you’re far too optimistic about renewables.

The people of HN are indeed very tech focused, and I believe that such optimism about energy transformation with renewables may be more difficult to foster if this forum were called “Engineering and physics news” simply because technologists tend to suffer from the “Law of the hammer” problem.

There are very real engineering challenges with renewables that may very well preclude the kind of dramatic progress you’re referring to. Solar and Wind for example require huge amounts of land, and have a fairly high materials throughput as their lifespan is typically only 15-20 years. All of that effort is spent gathering a diffuse source of energy. There are very real physical limits to how much energy you can gather per square foot, per kg of silica, concrete, or steel.

I think your sentiment is correct about nuclear though, which makes me wonder how much big oil has been funding groups like the Sierra Club et al. who have spent nearly half a decade campaigning against nuclear energy.
The situation with Windows is nothing like this. When I upgraded my shitty netbook from XP to 7, magically my audio started working again (and I didn't have to touch a single driver) and it actually ran faster, even compared to a clean install of XP. The driver situation was huge and 7/10 perform very well. OS X on the other hand, I have no idea what they are doing that slows older computers so much while adding very little value.

Microsoft actually has a performance and user experience incentive to make their OS work well on older hardware. With Apple they can just force you to upgrade, consequences be damned.
I would buy a face mask or sunglasses today that produced known collisions with popular facial recognition CV software.

A novelty for sure, but it would be a fun product.

Perhaps it's more realistic to buy sunglasses with powerful IR emitters with a discrete design.
You're missing that there doesn't need to be a SaaS server side.

HTTP is simply the delivery mechanism for a self-contained WASM application. Just like it is the delivery mechanism for most native binaries now.
Well, yeah...anything that depends on a third party API will last only as long as the API owner is OK with it.

10 years ago, back when Windows Phone was a thing, Google wouldn't make an official WP app for Youtube. So somebody created MetroTube, a native YT client. Incredible app, with a completely seamless experience.

Then Google changed its API rules and it was dead in under a year.
Bitcoin is a force multiplier for ransomware.
From Vacillation to Vaccination
That just disrupts the profit incentive of competitors.

The entity that manufactures the product is compensated for it, meaning the money isn't being siphoned off by a random third party. Price controls grant a wind fall to consumers who are in no position to build another semiconductor plant. It's basically a wealth transfer away from the semiconductor industry into the consuming industries. If you want semiconductor prices to drop then either grant a subsidy or let the government build a plant that produces way more than the market really needs.

A single shortage plus price increase might not be able to pay for a whole plant, but any plans to expand capacity will be shifted forward rather than be delayed. If the profit motive exists the construction of the new plant will happen one year sooner and it will be bigger in anticipation of future shortages.
Yeah sorry I didn't explain it. I'm old enough to remember, but perhaps a lot of HN readers aren't.

It's just that $15 billion may seem like a lot of money today to most people and even to most corporations, but for Apple and Google, it's a footnote.

And yet, at one time in Steve Jobs' second tenure at Apple, just 1% of that quantum was the difference between Apple's survival and Apple's demise.

Here's a better telling of the story that provides context

https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/

and Walter Isaacson quoting how Jobs told it

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/03/01/steve-jo...
I don't think this is an entirely apt comparison.

You actually mention that even Google Maps has problems. I live in the Bay Area and have constantly experienced problems with it, including it directing me to a block or two behind the actual destination, directing me to more congested routes, etc.

I think when Apple Maps first launched it definitely was not good at all, but at this point they're roughly the same. Neither are perfect and that's fine, but comparing them as being drastically different levels of quality seems a bit far-fetched, to me at least.
> Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable.

This I agree with 100% but is generally not something people have been keen to do. They want to drive more, air condition more, eat more animal protein, fly to more places, etc. The last 80 years of prosperity have been driven by increased consumption. And nobody seems keen to be the generation of "less is more".
Apple know that just setting up fabs without all the infrastructure to package, test, and then manufacture products with the chips doesn't really solve anything.
The last time Apple tried to do any manufacturing in the US the project failed because they couldn't find anyone to manufacture the screws: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...
People have been trying to make quick money since the invention of money.

"The easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one."

It has nothing to do with Bitcoin energy consumption, which is only a real problem because we're not pricing carbon as we ought to be.
In many cases, the existing product is not designed to serve the needs of all countries/demographies/races/genders etc., so there's value in provided a better user experience for a specific niche, especially one that's growing.

I like using products that were created keeping me in mind as the primary customer. Wouldn't you too?
Artificial Intelligence to Help Predict Arctic Sea Ice Loss
1 year old account and you've contributed nothing of substance to this platform at all. Take your trolling back to reddit, it's not welcome here.
as opposed to market-allocated
Fantasy consoles have filled that void for me, but I totally understand if you want to push beyond here.
It structurally pays less per GPU as you add more GPUs, because the security budget is a zero-sum budget. (though, that's only if you ignore extrinsic effects, and some people argue that more security = higher coin price = higher security budget).

Even if the security budget is zero-sum, the amount of actual security added to the network with each additional GPU is constant.
What a load of bs! If they have any issue with your project why not just open an issue?
I don't think it's specifically an HN thing. You just shouldn't argue with people on the Internet. We all do it, but it's widely a waste of time. Especially when you have domain knowledge to share; everyone is an armchair expert.
Reddit takes a teach-the-controversy approach to pandemic and vaccines
This misses the point that overengineering takes longer to do, so it adds costs to the initial development process. Unsurprisingly there’s less cost later - you’ve already paid a lot of it!
Blue-green.

Check standard phosphor types section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor
My first response was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- but I dug some more and found out that P2 is a Blue-Green color used in oscilloscopes, but it doesn't look like monochrome computer monitors were ever made for it though [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_typ...
You can use

https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent

for those cases.
WiFi is hard to support, it's very complex from a signal processing and timing perspective.
Client-side code can be verified.

If it's in your browser, you can see the code it's running and the data it is transmitting. And you're only a single uBlock Origin (other other browser add-on) filter away from blocking it.
I agree with the end effect, but I question the intent on companies side. It feels like Hanlon's razer should be applied "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

My experience is companies/leaders are just other overworked people who fell into the same trap and allowed their employees to fall into the same trap, and a reckoning (increased attrition) is on the horizon.
> Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing CPUs

Not for Apple - they have hardware excellence in their DNA, but the web and internet services aren't a core competency (yet?). They have made huge strides from the disaster that was MobileMe, but they are nowhere close to where the Bing or Google search teams are.
Windows 3.11 (1993) was ~15MB once installed.
The requirements for stability being well known do not make them easy to follow. If you really want stability, you basically have to eschew all use of structs, or add struct versioning, to begin with. Then you can't add or remove parameters from functions, but instead must add new functions only. Those are of course just the first two things; in practice, most libraries do not even try to follow them, and just bump the SONAME version with anything besides a minor bugfix release.
I feel like high-end PC gaming, trying to maximize graphics of brand new titles has always been a silly dick-measuring competition.

For me the sweet spot of games is 2-8 years old. Reviews are out, so you can skip the crap. Patches have been released to fix bugs. And everything that has stood the test of time runs pretty well on low- to mid-tier hardware by now.

Dust off those games in your steam library that you never touched before.
Banning what though? What is "misinformation"? Today's misinformation might be tomorrows facts.

This whole thing is really a group of people trying to jam their opinion down everybody else's mouth holes.

It is truly frightening to me how many people are so eager to shut down any kind of debate. The science around covid and it's mitigations are far from settled.
I never said he was fired. I said that he was cancelled. That is a term used for pressuring someone out of a community.
You are 100% right that measuring the process of creating software is a terrible application of statistical process control. See Jira.

One way to look at how Deming/Shewart's work applies to software is to consider what happens when you apply their statistical analysis techniques to running software.
On HN they are not ...
You have forgotten carpeted stairs, and worst, carpeted bathrooms.
For me the creepiest thing about 1984 wasn't the degradation of language or the censorship. What I found most concerning was Winston risking his life for a resistance movement that turned out to be fake. There are two well-known groups of violent protestors that the opposing side believe keeps getting away with reprehensible behavior that the authorities seemingly could stop at any time but choose not to. It didn't click with me until the doc "Social Dilemma" alluded to it with the "extreme center" protests. I think many would-be freedom fighters are falling for that trap.
Personal opinion: I think they were a good idea but in practice they don't work great because they try to pretend exceptions work differently from how they really work.

They bump up against a reality of exceptions in a bad way: once you have a system for throwing exceptions, the set of types your code must handle becomes fundamentally unbounded because any of your dependencies can change at any time. If there are no exceptions and you have a function-call control flow, you can enforce that the only types the caller understands from the callee are the types in the signature. If your language supports thrown exceptions, then at the site of a function call, the value resulting from the call can be the values in the signature or any exception that can be generated by any function called by the callee (and in general, without control of the entire code stack, that set is unknowable).

That's a fundamental truth of thrown exceptions, and trying to constrain it by putting the thrown type in the signature left us in the state we're in now... People just throw and catch very abstract exceptions because they'll have to handle those exceptions anyway, since it's impossible to guarantee a dependency won't try to throw them.