skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is not a future where iPadOS "wins" and MacOS is slayed in ritual combat, or something.

Well, no, it's not about the Operating Systems; it's about the UI paradigms themselves.

I believe that Apple is worried that the desktop WIMP UI itself is going to be disrupted and fade into irrelevance due to 1. "do everything on the web" devices like Chromebooks, and 2. VR/AR productivity-workflow paradigms that are yet to be formalized; and so they're trying to find a successor to the WIMP UI, one that will still be relevant in 2040, even if/when the WIMP UI dies.

The distinction between iPads and Macs isn't arbitrary, insofar as iPads don't require a keyboard, and Macs do. iPadOS (and iOS) apps have to be designed under the assumption that a keyboard is optional; and that really changes things about how an app can work. You can port apps designed for keyboardless tablets to macOS just fine (and as of the M1 you don't even have to, you can just install them); but fully-featured macOS apps can't just be thrown onto a keyboardless touchscreen. (And you can't say "well, you can't install 'keyboard required' apps if you don't have the keyboard", either; the OS has no idea if the user owns a keyboard but just hasn't bothered docking it.)

You are accidentally correct in the other direction, though — that there's no reason you couldn't run iPadOS as well as macOS on a theoretical "touchscreen Mac" (which would be a different thing than an iPad, precisely because the keyboard would be welded onto it, and so apps could guarantee its presence/require you to use it.) The reason that Macs don't have touchscreens, AFAICT, is because Apple wants to use the iPad — along with everyone who buys one, and every developer who signs on to develop apps for one — as an isolated laboratory to run this "successor to WIMP UI paradigm" experiment. They don't want to "dilute" that experiment by allowing those users and developers to get the advantages of the iPad from any of their other products — because then those users and developers wouldn't be incentivized to use the iPad, and thereby to give them the experimental data they need.

Consider: why didn't Facebook just merge Instagram and WhatsApp into features of Facebook Messenger? And why is it still considered a huge mistake that Twitter killed Vine after acquiring it? Because, like the iPad, these alternate experiences — despite being owned by the same old bigcorp that serves you the traditional experience — are both innovation laboratories, the learnings of which can be folded back into the regular app; and also hedged bets against the market failure of the old-school experience. Vine could have been TikTok if it had been allowed to grow for a few more years. What could the iPad's UI paradigm be if allowed to grow for a few more years?
For the people who are downvoting this, I believe the HN title was edited, and was originally something like "Microsoft layoffs 1000 people". (It's always a bit dangerous to comment on the submission title without saying what the title was at the time of the posting!)
Over the years, I've had many managers who didn't understand what continuous integration was. As a result, I've set up a number of different build machines. Once they saw it in action, the response was typically something close to "how did we live so long without this?"
any android table entering the fray now will need at least a decade of existence before it can hope to challenge the ipad as a tablet. As much as i dislike apple, the ipad is synonymous with tablets.

This process involves eating losses for several years and only the likes of google or samsung are capable of doing so. Samsung have so many models of tablets available with such poor software support that it is a complete non-starter.
>Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors

Considering how long ago that is, they must be pretty old. I mean, I'm 58 and I can just barely remember that time.
I've been writing notebooks about doing DSP and audio processing in JavaScript. It might be a good place to crib off of:

https://observablehq.com/collection/@skybrian/digital-signal...
Bartosz, you're a legend! Thank you for these amazing articles!!
> Not surprisingly, those locals often reacted badly. For example, in northern Malawi, they broke fences and burned a growing forest to get back the common grazing land on which the trees had been planted. In two Nigerian projects, villagers cut all the planted non-fruit trees for firewood, while protecting those that bore fruit.

Recommended reading: "Seeing Like A State" by James Scott. The first section on Scientific Forestry directly applies, and the rest of the book conceptually does too.

In summary, the state seeks to render its resources and populace legible, because local arrangements are very hard to quantify (and tax) from the center. This drive to achieve legibility inevitably distorts the world they are attempting to understand, for example by incentivizing monoculture forestry (easier to count the trees) instead of natural forest growth (providing many communal resources that are impossible to measure such as firewood, foraging, grazing, and so on).

There is a very prevalent idea that "subsistence farmers" know little about the land they work. It's usually the opposite; they tend to have far more practical expertise than the centralized planners.

If instead of planning these projects centrally, they were planned and executed by locals in collaboration with central funding sources, you'd be much more likely to get good results. The local farmers can usually tell you what trees will grow, where they will survive, what the village needs more of, and so on. To be more concrete -- why not provide a centralized program that subsidizes villages to plant trees, but does not specify which trees to plant? If the incentives are high enough you'll get people to plant anything (as the OP shows). But at a lower level of incentive, they will only do the work for something that they actually value. That's the sweet spot.
What about something like Jetbrains Fleet where its all done on a remote computer but the IDE is local?
As someone getting into the technology behind VR and VR-adjacent content creation (vTubing, motion capture, sensor fusion, etc) … meta is a god damn fucking joke… not because of any technology failure, they are working their asses off to make good technology. It’s a joke because it’s Facebook, it’s a joke because the only way Mark Zuckerberg could be less human than his already uncanny valley self is in real life is with the weird VR avatar version of himself. It’s a joke because they are on the back foot with old grudges some hold about what they did to Oculus, because of people rejecting the hubris in the Meta rebranding. Plain and simply they had no damn fucking clue how to pioneer a hardware vertical, institutionally speaking. No matter how much the former Oculus engineering and business teams gave them confidence they could, Facebook upper management does not at all know how to pioneer anything.

Facebook has grown defensively by acquisitions like WhatsApp and instagram, they have an thousands of people working hard at sanding down the rough edges on global online interaction funded by the ability to shove targeted advertising at people.

NONE of this is conducive to a massively simultaneous online collaboration environment where people might want to “hang out” or let’s use the low bar “want to hold a meeting”.

If they actually wanted to do things right they should have pulled out the big piggy bank and bought what’s left of Linden Labs and renovated the ever loving fuck out of Second Life. But they thought they could build a cozy corporate modern art style bubble behind the visors, where no one could potentially be offended by what’s going on, in order to maximise potential global market size … and you know what that is … (excuse the shouting) … ITS FUCKING BORING!!!

Duh!

I mean seriously, Facebook is not in a position to be offensive, and if you can’t give someone the finger in VR what’s the fucking point? It’s a muted beige apathy that does nothing to encourage anyone outside the most die hard circles to want to use it.

The most valuable thing I’ve ever heard is that it has slightly better latency than video … that’s not something most people or organisations (who have lots of physical offices they want to get people back to… yet another layer of wtf are Facebook doing) are willing to spend over a thousand dollars per employee on.

I’m watching closely the Apple hardware rumours because I believe the market itself has a future… but Meta’s VR efforts with Horizon Worlds look firmly set for the Virtual Boy shelf of irrelevance, and hopefully for the existing customers it doesn’t drag all of Meta’s Oculus hardware with it.

Once again to counter the negativity I’m throwing around, I’m bullish on the market I just think, for all the outlined reasons, Meta are institutionally incapable of success in this market.
Rosetta Stone for Unix
I wonder why they went with WebKit? It is nice to see another WebKit browser and not just a Blink/Chromium spinoff. Still it is a surprising choice, even if there's really only WebKit and Blink available for wannabe browser makers.
User Interface Software and Technology (free online book)
People cant see 4k resolution from normal sofa viewing distances. Why do we need 8k televisions? Besides the tv industry needing a new resolution to sell more TVs?

Viewing distance calculator
https://stari.co/tv-monitor-viewing-distance-calculator
They mention it 4th post in the thread.

I never heard of it though, what's so good about it?
Is anybody hooking up a keyboard and mouse to their ipad pro and using it as an interface to a remote desktop running in the cloud? If so, what software stack?
So they only support Apple Pencil Gen 1, but remove the Lightning port which it requires for charging, so they sell you a dongle, but the environment is important to Apple. Okay.

What's the point of the flat edges if you're not going to support the Apple Pencil Gen 2? I get that a company like Apple deals in massive scale, but this seems so off-putting as a consumer. Just merge the iPad Air and iPad lines already, they're doing some sad technical gymnastics trying to differentiate the lines.
> What's your take on theory that the plane had a fire and the pilot maneuvered the plane to a high altitude to snuff out the fire, then away from populated areas, then he himself passed away and the plane drifted on its deep ocean course until it crashed?

Seems busted:

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-26640114.amp
My daughter is 16 and has used an iPad for school for many years. Latptops are foreign to her. Same for her cohort. They are the next generation of adults and have replaced desktops and laptops with iPads and iPhones.
It happens in hospitals. Treat the human first, treat the chart once they're stable. Speedbumps in the process are fine, because we shouldn't be bypassing protocol all the time, but flat-out roadblocks aren't, because sometimes we really don't have time to worry about all that.
I think people overrate TSMC are the primary motivator for the PRC, who have basically maintained the same posture toward the 'renegade province' since 1949. This is unfinished business from a civil war which never officially ended.
These are several inch thick pipes encased in a foot of concrete. And they made 4 holes IIRC. So we're talking probably a ton or so of explosives.

That's not drag a hose behind a commercial drone. That's specialized equipment with trained operators. I just don't see Ukraine being able to pull that off.
I'm slowly switching over for server-side, and next time I try a free OS desktop it'll probably be freebsd. Only thing I miss is docker, which I mostly just use as a package manager and service manager so I don't have to screw with distro-specific trivia for those things, and that's less of a problem on FreeBSD anyway.

I've long tolerated Linux but never loved it, and it's moving away from anything I'm interested in with each year, it seems (the competing mostly-bad image-based app distribution systems and the way Wayland's going are... yikes). Glad FreeBSD's there as an alternative.
The 2019 Congress plague was highly likely to have been covid in some cases, a number of attendees were quite ill after the event with respiratory symptoms. Given that covid had been circulating in Europe since at least November 2019, its not implausible.

Other years there were colds... The usual... But the 2019 edition was real nasty.
Yup, I completely agree. I'm fairly new to the ROS community, but even so a lot of the solutions that I've seen for various robotics problems could be solved with cloud/web innovations. Never reinvent the wheel!
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski

A link to all the HN submissions from ciechanow.ski
Trained on the 1926 Underwood (mechanical) typewriter, complete with margin bells.

Always two spaces.

Anyone know where one can get a black ribbon spool for such a typewriter?
Are drugs decriminalized there? What's their policy regarding policing and public health as they relate to drug users?

Just because universal healthcare and higher education are offered does not mean they equate to drug deaths. That's a bullshit conclusion to draw and likely is a result of many other policy/societal factors.

And absolutely they will say society is sick, but wtf does that have to do with offering universal healthcare and higher education? Of course society will always be fucked in one way or another, but measures should be taken to improve quality of life for all in an attempt to make it more bearable and hopefully would contribute to finding solutions to the issues society faces
The travel to a new location is the key for me. Walking around the block and coming back to my apartment isn't going to cut it.

As for locations:
- Coffee shops are noisy and staying there multiple hours is both inappropriate, you could have power issues, wifi issues related to speed.

- Being outside requires some internet device which may not be reliable or fast, power issues again but I guess you could just have a backpack with a USB power bank. The sun makes it difficult to see, you need to find a table, bugs, animals, other people, rain, heat, cold, etc

I've tried these things. My home setup is dual 27 inches with a physical keyboard. This improves my performance greatly, maybe I could get used to a laptop but that would require an adjustment period.
Thanks for this. I'm curious to dig a bit deeper. What is involved in expanding their microchip infrastructure? What would funds be spent on? It seems like hard tooling, buildings, fab lines, and then they need people to build install and run all that stuff. I guess I'm asking - am I missing something, like can they expand their microchip infrastructure without the labor of people? In my experience designing automation for fabs there is a ton of skilled labor that goes into every single fab, both to design and set it up but also to run it.
I appreciate you're not a crypto fan, but must you post something snide under every comment chain in the thread?
The money maker WebAssembly part on the browser is still C++.
I bet that advance auto manager thought real hard about asking anybody else to....sweep.

The thing is, I didn't then, nor do I now, care about what he thought hard about or not. That wasn't the point. I just wasn't going to be the one doing it. What happened beyond that is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned.
This is exactly true. The real problem is that sometimes, we have people who are good at things that aren't important to the value we are driving as a team. For example, someone who really good at whipping up proof of concepts is really valuable in an agency and not very valuable on a team that is primarily tasked with increasing the performance of an application, whatever it takes.

I can't change my project to need more proof of concepts in every case. So, I have two things in my toolbag: I can try to coach someone to know my expectations for this project and help with coaching those behaviors and skills, or I can let them go for being a square peg when we need a round hole.

I wish we had better ways for matching people with the best jobs that rewarded what make them excel.
It’s not software - they can’t just sprinkle some Kubernetes on it and scale. There are complex global supply chains involving extreme cutting-edge technology, engineering, and research.
What sort of change do you mean? Real world changes such as the cashless society and smartphones. There's a whole rant there but I guess you mean software changes. That is because we programmers usually regress software. "You can't do that anymore because we removed the feature to make it easier for us". Firefox and XUL. Firefox and the text encoding menu. Windows and any feature missing in newer versions. FFmpeg and its "-safe" option and protocol whitelists.

What change did you have in mind that you think would make someone's life easier but they refused to accept it?
Is MMT Misunderstood? Going to the Source: Warren Mosler
I agree that the iPads are the best of the breed out there, and Apple does support their hardware longer than most. But once the support stops, the hardware is locked and there's no alternative.

So to answer some of the other questions that my post generated, I basically stopped using tablets. The kitchen tablet was replaced with a cheap Chromebook. My travel tablet was replaced with a MacBook Air 11 2015 that I got on eBay, and installed Linux Mint on it. I believe the 2015 MacBook Air model is one of the last MacBooks with a replaceable battery, and it is still one of the best 11" laptops ever made.

My other laptops are a bunch of Dell Latitude 7000 series and Dell Precision series laptops, running Ubuntu MATE or Linux Mint. All of those have replaceable battery, upgradable RAM slots, and replaceable SSD or NVMe slots. I cannot bring myself to buy a laptop with a glued-in battery.
I'm not sure of that for a variety of reasons. Labor is more expensive in higher cost areas. Elevators in a skyscraper are built to a much more stringent code than elevators in a three story building. Building codes in general may be higher. Quality of materials and fit and finish may be higher with higher maintenance costs. There may be more regulatory hurdles to making any new construction or renovations. HOAs may include real estate/other taxes and mortgage interest payments in some cases. Tons of little things can add up.
Metaverse is a good example of how "we gotta do something to get growth in our business" is a really bad idea when the something is worse than what came before.
China recently tested a hypersonic missile that circumnavigated the global and then marginally missed its target
The Android Firefox, formerly known as Fenix, has a separate tracker on Github. However I wouldn't say that it's radically divergent in habits—more of a different take on the same problem that Mozilla has very limited resources and its own vision, whereas the hordes of users have thousands of their own wishes. E.g. the Fenix' tracker finally clears out stale bugs, at least occasionally, instead of letting them ferment for many years.

Anyway, personally I came to terms with the fact that open-source devs aren't my bitches, and just accept with gratitude what they offer to the world, while abstaining from polluting the trackers even further. However, I'm not above a hopeful whisper into the noosphere.
What you're describing is true for the absolute majority of the US population. We're living in a capitalist system which restricts access to resources to different people.

Consider this, how much of the world population has access to running water? a computer? medicine? English is their first language or has a US visa? So how many of these can realistically study at one of the world’s top universities?

Consider this and you will understand that even this one kid that studied in the high school with gang violence is so called privileged, and so is any citizen of the US.

Think about it and you’ll see this is just a way to shift guilt to some magical top 1%, while anyone born in a western country has a significant advantage, and the way Capitalism is structured, anyone has an "unfair" advantage on some other person
Apparently M2 Pro will launch in November, not October https://www.tomsguide.com/news/new-macbook-pros-with-m2-pro-...
I agree fully. It's quite nice on mobile, though. I especially like being able to automatically hide the status bar while in landscape mode to maximize vertical space. There's also the advantage that, as a Chromium-based browser, the Assistant command "read aloud" works.
I’m not too fond of the “separate Product and Engineering organizations” model… The whole idea of having one branch of the org chart telling another what to do is kind of flawed. I think it’s often better to divide up the product over many separate small teams, each with a product focused “mini CEO” and a tech focused “mini CTO”.
I have an iPad mini 2 (released 2013) that I still use every night for watching YouTube videos in bed. It also got a security update like a week or 2 ago.

It doesn't perform great, but it gets the job done for watching videos.
So I think you would agree that the law should address the outputs of learning, rather than the inputs.

It should be illegal to reproduce copyrighted material, but not to “read”, “view”, or “consume” it.

Luckily this is what the law already says.
You have gone off the deep end, please return to sanity.

The court system is the method of enforcement for copyright.

If you want the "right" in copyright, you have to sue people.

To sue people, you need to find infringement. That infringement must be above fair use.

However - if the infringement you find is so minor that you have no loss of revenue or reputation, a court will not award you damages, and may even dismiss the case.

Nobody has any copyright without suing people, there is no copyright police in the general case.

Microsoft has no special rights from its size. Its size makes it a target, it's not beneficial. It's why they have so much trouble with internal rules about GPL. If I infringe on your copyright, the damages will be zero or low, if Microsoft infringes your copyright, the damages could be millions - with the same burden of proof.
Nord Stream pipeline damage captured in underwater footage
Seems to not be tabs in the style of a tree, which is exactly what I'm using Tree Style Tab for ;) Vivaldi just does grouping which is not enough for me. Also should be on the side rather than keeping the tabs below/above the content.

See the following image for an example of a tree of tabs: https://imgur.com/a/fEWp9h0
I agree, but I think TSMC has also assumed a geopolitical importance it didn't have previously.
A-GPS aka A-GNSS still uses GPS signal. The only difference is that metadata is downloaded via fast link (cellular or wifi) instead of slow satellite link. IIRC all mobile devices with A-GPS can download that over satellite link if needed, just takes longer.

The real issue here is that it's integrated into a cellular modem, not that it's A-GPS.
I read Industrial Society to my parents, and we were all shocked how cogent it came across as. the bits about AI were especially chilling, very ahead of his time. I disagree with his conclusions about leftists (I am one), but I have to hand it to him for an excellent take.
I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human spaces - what good did any of it do?

If the increased focus on mRNA vaccine research due to the COVID outbreak leads to successful new anticancer therapies, we could make up for the COVID death toll in a hurry, and benefit enormously from subsequent availability.

In no event is "don't research this, it's too scary" ever the right answer. The question is how to do it safely. For instance, I don't understand why gain-of-function research is less regulated than, say, nuclear research. The work needs to happen, but our risk assessments are hopelessly out of whack.