skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings?

As a long-time vim user who doesn't use the power features (except search/replace patterns) i've found micro to be a very decent alternative to vim/nano to teach to people new to CLI land. Select text with shift, save with ^S, quit with ^Q, find with ^F... it's just like windows notepad, but with colors/indentation out of the box.

There were also some conversations a few years back in emacs mailing list about the choice of defaults. Some people argued emacs defaults should try to accomodate people who've never used emacs before but are familiar with other key bindings and UI paradigms, because power users will always find how to configure their favorite workflows but newbies will leave if they can't accomplish the most basic tasks without reading a 50 page manual.
Nah, it's because Apple and Google are a cartel with respect to app fees.

Like, 30% is a crazy amount to take, at the scale they operate at.
For a company in the west, it would be nearly suicide, to discriminate women. So based on this assumption, I think there are other reasons for the 'pay gap'. Actually to really measure it, you should create a sample of companies and go from company to company analyzing any 'pay gaps' including all the factors, like reduced work time. Would not wonder if the graph flips after analyzing it this way.
In the article it's also mentioned that it's a second / ski home. They still have a duplex in the city.
How do you decide that %30 breaks the business but %15 is fine? Can I see your math please?
> We could never have closed our borders in a meaningful sense for any meaningful length of time

I've been traveling in and out of the UK throughout the pandemic, and my observation is:

- You don't have to close borders to have strong controls. The 'PCR test before travel' + 'test on day 2 and 8' would have been pretty robust if implemented at the right time.

- These measures were consistently implemented at the wrong time. For instance, when the delta wave was starting, there were no restrictions. When it was peaking in the UK, there were strong controls, even when you were coming from a country with a low incidence rate.

My general opinion is that the UK did the right measures[0], but consistently with the wrong timing. It's generally been the case that border controls have been harsh when they were most unnecessary, and weak when they were most needed. It's stupid to have to quarantine for ten days when you're traveling into a country that has multiple orders of magnitude higher infection rates, and no mask mandates - but that's what I was doing last year.

[0]: across the board, not exclusively in regards to travel.
Thank you for your info! That's extremely helpful and accessible! I already made the purchase and look forward to more of your awesome product!
Ask HN: How can some Android apps hide their (poor) ratings on Play Store?
I noticed that a lot of "low quality" Android app seem to have millions of downloads and being able to hide their rating.

For example, when visiting the app at the link below called "Secret Chat (Random Chat)" on my Android device, I can neither see any general star rating, nor any reviews at all - it say "No reviews yet".

When looking at the app through a web browser I can see a lot of poor reviews, but still no star rating.

What's going on here?

The app in question, but there seem to be many like it:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kr.jungrammer.secretchat
We realized our competitors were copying us at a company long ago. We geofenced a/b tests so they wouldn’t see what we were testing and intentionally made the web app worse for that area (mostly as a “fun” 20% type project). Interestingly, the “worse” version starting doing really well even though we were giving them “control” for all older features. We ended up rolling back several months of changes to the entire product and we saw a huge burst in revenue.

It wouldn’t be until years later until I understood the Simpson paradox and that a/b testing improves the mean of whatever metric you’re trying to improve, usually by decreasing some important segment and improving some unimportant segment.
> Shitty managers like you

That's rude and against HN guidelines. Don't make this personal. I'm not attacking you.

You think I'm taking an extreme position ("Managers should measure developers by their LOC"), which I am not. Are you actually taking the opposite extreme position, that a developer's LOC tells you absolutely nothing about their productivity? That there's not even a correlation or a hint of a connection, in the general case?

As a manager, if one person on the team is committing several times a week, and their code is, even at a glance, non-trivial, meanwhile another developer merged 3 times in the last month and the git diffs are 20 lines each, would you say that the 15 LOC a week (or whatever small number) shouldn't be a major concern that I should look into? And when this developer has been saying in every team meeting and 1:1 the last month that they've been working on tough problems. I'm not going to put them on a performance plan over their LOC, but I'm sure going to dive in if I notice a small number there, and we're going to have a conversation about it if it turns out they're not delivering.

PS: above is not hypothetical. It's happened many times in cases when I take on a new team or a developer moves under me. A couple of cases were great turnaround stories, with the developer extremely grateful that their manager was actually helping them improve their engineering. In one case the guy was let go, because he refused to accept the concept that he needed to deliver more than a couple of trivial python commits a month to justify his $250K/year salary (long story, I didn't hire him).
It's very likely that EU laws will not allow this type of tax anyway.

EU is specifically drafting legislation for gatekeepers in Digital Markets Law.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?qid=16081168...

Gatekeepers like Apple will have specific obligation according to Article 5:

(b) allow business users to offer the same products or services to end users through third party online intermediation services at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper;

(c) allow business users to promote offers to end users acquired via the core platform service, and to conclude contracts with these end users regardless of whether for that purpose they use the core platform services of the gatekeeper or not, and allow end users to access and use, through the core platform services of the gatekeeper, content, subscriptions, features or other items by using the software application of a business user, where these items have been acquired by the end users from the relevant business user without using the core platform services of the gatekeeper;

And Article 6:

(c) allow the installation and effective use of third party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, operating systems of that gatekeeper and allow these software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the core platform services of that gatekeeper. The gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking proportionate measures to ensure that third party software applications or software application stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system provided by the gatekeeper;

(k) apply fair and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application store designated pursuant to Article 3 of this Regulation.
I've written a lot of C code and to me Go is like a high level C with some sharp corners removed and a GC. Maybe I don't see the limitations in Go as a problem because of this. Have done quite a bit of C++ as well. I prefer simpler languages that I can keep in my head and like C and Go for that reason.

Do I prefer it to rust? I've not bothered to learn rust yet. I think I would like it better than C++ but it's a bit large for my taste. I like to see the language level as an abstraction level that I want to be able to keep entirely in my head. I fear that rust (just as C++) may have too many features for that.
Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it.

Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into.

It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.
This is not an argument made in good faith so I will ignore it.
Play audio only on YouTube and save bandwidth
If you have a slow connection, or you want to hide NSFW content on YouTube there is Music Mode for YouTube™ a Chrome extension that blocks the video and plays only the audio on YouTube and YouTube Music. Additionally, it skips the ads and hides the thumbnails (optional). So, you can convert YouTube into a music player. It helps you a lot to save bandwidth while you work or play games listening to music on the background and also reduce the use of RAM, CPU and GPU since there is no video. Finally, it helps you focus on your work and spend less time on YouTube clicking on clickbait thumbnails. Give it a try!
EU is specifically drafting legislation for gatekeepers in Digital Markets Law.

TL;DR Apple and Google will have to allow to install third-party app stores trough their stores.

This type of private taxes will become impossible to enforce.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?qid=16081168...

Gatekeepers like Apple will have specific obligation according to Article 5:

(b) allow business users to offer the same products or services to end users through third party online intermediation services at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper;

(c) allow business users to promote offers to end users acquired via the core platform service, and to conclude contracts with these end users regardless of whether for that purpose they use the core platform services of the gatekeeper or not, and allow end users to access and use, through the core platform services of the gatekeeper, content, subscriptions, features or other items by using the software application of a business user, where these items have been acquired by the end users from the relevant business user without using the core platform services of the gatekeeper;

And Article 6:

(c) allow the installation and effective use of third party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, operating systems of that gatekeeper and allow these software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the core platform services of that gatekeeper. The gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking proportionate measures to ensure that third party software applications or software application stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system provided by the gatekeeper;

(k) apply fair and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application store designated pursuant to Article 3 of this Regulation.

Following articles, like:

- article 7: Compliance with obligations for gatekeepers

- article 10: Updating obligations for gatekeepers and

- article 11: Anti-circumvention

Give the EU Commission quite a lot of maneuvering power to ensure effective implementation.
I tried YouTube on Android and found this additional nuance

you CAN seek to any arbitrary point on the timeline...but you have to tap AND DRAG a little. (facepalm)

Not sure why a simple tap was deemed not enough to skip to that point in the video ...seems straightforward and intuitive UX that way.
Side note, looking at patents to identify #breakthroughs doesn't really work as

1. It requires quite a large investment which disfavors smaller institutions

2. The distribution of patents that actually make money is so incredibly skewed that university patents should considered such a bad investment, that it wouldn't be a good metric anymore.
In many companies software got so specialized devs won't ever get close to infrastructure stuff.

They ask for a VM or a DB to the DevOps / SRE team, wait a bit days and get a URL. If a team uses CI/CD and K8s, they will write a yaml file from a template, wait a few minutes and app will be deployed.
As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively double what it actually was.

Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.

The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.

So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
This! I did not explicitly ask for my entire feed to contain "threads" of startup advice from random people.
A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment.

They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on.

It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new designers on the idea that there isn't that much of a difference between software users and chicken in a farm.
You can still offend a friend. Either way, you sitting here deciding what she needs is probably offensive to her; and you are still suggesting the only thing in life for her is baby, yet that is only your opinion
>I personally wouldn't encourage people to think of the trades as a stable income, especially in Germany. A new technology (say, PVC pipes) can be extremely disruptive, and these technologies come out all the time, rendering entire skills and categories of skilled workers invalid as they enter the workplace.

Funny example you chose. How is that different than SW devs? Actually, I think tech makes you obsolete way faster if you don't actively keep up. What you get taught in university is mostly obsolete from what's hot in the filed by the time you join the labor market so it's mostly up to the workers to keep up with the latest trend if they want to be employed long term.

I met way more unemployed old-aged former sys-admins and DBAs in Germany that couldn't find work because their obsolete skills weren't needed anymore in any private company who instead proffered to hire youngsters for the new tech or has offshored their jobs to a sweatshop callcenter in Eastern Europe, yet I have never met an older plumber who can't find work regardless of his grasp of new plumbing tech. In fact, the older the buildings are, the more maintenance they need, and the more archaic the technology they used is. It's a win for the gray beards.

>In Germany, techniques and materials are very archaic (flax for pipe-seals, etc) so I suspect there's even more risk of disruption there than elsewhere.

Knowing Germany, the archaic things are usually in most demand and Germany in generals is skeptical to new technologies and processes that do any disruption of the status quo. Like I said, the older the building, the higher the maintenance work they need, and the more archaic the plumbing is, the more value people familiar with the older tech have.

I'm not saying plumbing is better than SW dev, I'm pointing out job security for those who aren't up to date on latest tech.
There was "immense value" in every monopolist that was rightfully broken up or restricted. There's "immense value" in every monopoly / duopoly market. So what. The richest company in the world is swimming in money, pays little taxes, and gouges every developer who made its products successful. They are nothing without the developers, they're simply in a good position to abuse them, a position that they carefully crafted for themselves.
Instant messaging in 200x was based on "naked content" that could be parsed by anyone, so there was a lot of different programs supporting various forms of communications. If you weren't a programmer you simply relied on 3rd-party software and that worked quite nicely.
This is a relevant insight, I do not understand why it got downvoted.

Even though Amazon has a history of such events, we should care about the bigger picture, yet be skeptical about the individual claims anyway!
Musi.sh my friend.
I use a standard web for banking. Works on anything.
> Turns out that "where to put code" is one of the hard things in software engineering

This is essentially "naming things" (from "There are only two hard things in Computer Science..."), applied to namespaces.
I just tried it now (a year later), same compiler error (using msys2):

# github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-msys/10.2.0/../../../../x86_64-pc-msys/bin/ld: cannot find -lmingwex
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-msys/10.2.0/../../../../x86_64-pc-msys/bin/ld: cannot find -lmingw32
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

The go-sqlite3 GitHub repo has tons of Windows-related issues, one just opened yesterday in fact. I'm not an experienced C programmer, I'm not well versed in compiler/linker toolchains, I know it's super tricky (especially on Windows) but I don't expect my clients to be experts either. I actually spent a few hours trying to solve this last time, time I could have spent coding.

It's not a problem with Go, per se, but it does create non-trivial requirements toolchain setup on Windows, which ruled out Go for me. The whole toolchain just feels a bit... flakey, setting up GOPATH and such (although, that seems to no longer be the case?). Rust's crates, just as an example, are amazing, I've never had a single problem with them (more than I can say for npm..) I know it's just one example, but sqlite3 is brilliant. This immediately ruled out Go for me for that project.
Right on the money. This was established fact back in 2009 (https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/public-policy/hr-public-policy...). Evidence has only become stronger over the years.

Unfortunately certain activists continue to argue that there are no innate behavioural differences between men and women at the social level.
Slackware 3.0 in the mid 90's was where I got started too.

I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.

Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.
The message however is this: An organized software development process kills innovation

That’s true for startups as well as big companies.

A company of four people could have a dead software process just because it’s super organized, with jira, tickets, sprints, user stories, CI/CD, testing deployment and monitoring.

The more organized your software process, the more dead it is, in terms of creativity and innovation.
> If you are a talented software engineer, not just a developer and generally know how to navigate around managers, you can hit senior engineer or manager levels quite easily,

How do you “navigate” your way around an 11:30 PM email that contains a 5:30 AM deadline, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread?
There's an excellent overview of the US Federal court's 180 page decision on Youtube, but it's rather long. The diction is good, so it's still understandable when set to run at a faster speed.

The first 15 minutes is a summary and the balance of the video is a more detailed look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43CMV8KIs3E

TL;DW, the judge makes it clear that Apple can still charge a cut even if developers use someone else's payment system.

She also hints strongly that Epic screwed up by not challenging the size of Apple's cut instead of challenging their right to take a cut.
It doesn't work on iOS.
Thanks for the clarification! I see how I got confused.
I don't think the model fits the data.

Tax and state expenditure are relatively constant everywhere in the world[1], and there is no definite downward trend anywhere. If everyone were truly ideologically brainwashed into reducing government size, wouldn't have they done a better job at that?

[1] https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm#in...
A couple of years back I bought a microbit (in fact I bought two). "it's just a microchip" was the response.

I think he might be a future product owner as he was more than happy to give me requirements for a simple game, but had no interest in how it worked.
Consumers might start to care if it means every app is 20% cheaper.
And when companies fund science, they control it.

So who should do it then?
There might be ageism but you won't be affected by it, that's for sure.
It’s interesting to me that the OS market in two separate generations of tech has naturally shaken out to become a duopoly.

Desktop computing for decades has been just Windows or MacOS (For 98.5% of people, yes I know Linux exists, but quit being cute).

Mobile computing took only a few years to shake down to iOS and Android.

Are OS markets inevitably always going to mature into duopoly? To me this is the core issue here.

Since computing is now the basis of the modern economy, the 3 companies that are in the OS business across desktop and mobile (Microsoft, Apple, Google) are basically the wealthiest companies on earth due to their ability to extract rents from all of computing.

I get that these companies built the market (although you could argue the tech was inevitable, so many teams were working on it in the early days) but once you become one of the winners and most valuable company on earth, extracting 30% rents starts to feel like a drag on future innovation.

It’s also interesting to me that Jobs originally courted John Scully from Pepsi to run Apple way back in the 80s—-what a bizarre choice. Did he know the market would inevitably always be a duopoly like the Cola market, already back then?