skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a bit of a perfectionistic tendency to 'start over' things over and over and do them again as perfectly as possible; the Windows side of MS feels like a corporate embodiment of this habit.

They've done this sort of thing with app installers(setup.exe, click once, appv, msi, msix) and UI frameworks(win32, mfc, wpf, winui 2, winui 3). It's like the teams responsible for their respective product keep starting over with a shiny new way of doing things every couple of years to achieve the 'perfect' installer/ui framework or anything else for that matter. Infact W11 felt like a way of 'restarting' W10 without building a whole new OS.

Atleast with W11 they're actively updating old things rather than introducing new ones, I did not have a lot of hope when it first came out, but they have gotten my hopes up since the release for sure. I just hope they stick with winui 3 and see it through.
Would you trust US election results if it was produced by some random amalgamation of javascript libraries downloaded straight from npm? I don't think the report mentioned if they even used HTTPS to download the code.

Surely the bar for the process that determines the future of the nation ought to be a lot higher than that. Surely this is not controversial.
A better asyncio sleep for Windows to fix animation
Yeah, it's funny how go does have exceptions, but no notion of exception safety. Manual mutex locks/unlocks are everywhere, and don't even start me on defer, which is just terrible
This was a painful learning for me when I worked for a megacorp: the bigger the customer, the less likely to pay on time.

For me as an engineering manager at the “big customer” it was a constant embarrassment. We worked with small scrappy vendors who I was on a first-name basis with. Megacorp would just never cut the checks. They would negotiate super aggressive terms to start with and then still intentionally not meet the agreed terms. I had close collaborators telling me they really needed the $$ to meet their own bills and all I could say was “I’ll send another email to purchasing and hope for the best!” Hated that so much.
See the problem with operating systems which don't have strict design guidelines and review like iOS is that they don't have a consistent design language which clearly prevents adoption. That's one of the prime reason why Linux on the desktop will never take off. /s
I wrote a similar comment here recently, but this is much more detailed, and it's worse than I thought. Nice to see practically all versions addressed in some detail. Looks like Microsoft does have some kind of UWP (he wrote, not at all resenting the loss of his Windows phone).
Pretty sure some of these screenshots show Windows Vista design.
They were mostly harmless anyway.
Not to disagree, but to be fair modern fp runtimes use data structures that wouldn't have to copy so many bytes as the whole state.

A nice showcase of this idea is in Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente's CppCon '17 talk Postmodern Immutable Data Structures:
https://youtu.be/sPhpelUfu8Q
https://www.youtube.com/@smartereveryday/search?query=farm

Smarter everyday has some videos on practical application of agri-tech
I would prefer for feature to exist and work and don't care if the buttons look the same. I am super salty because I tried to run some old 32 bits qt4 and gtk2 python apps on latest Kubuntu LTS (I am 100% only Linux for years )and I just wasted hours without any satisfaction, at least on Windows 10 year old programs will still work most of the time(probably some old games could fail but might be a driver issue and not a Microsoft stuff).
This is what happens when you ask an engineer to put the bins out.
Amazing how well the old stuff in windows holds up.
As a 25+ year user of windows none of this stuff bothers me. What ticks me off is just the abysmal quality of windows 11 compared to the past. It’s like no one working on it has any pride in their job

Example:

- hate the new notification area. The action center was so much better

- dumb stuff like a window update notification that shows a c# class name instead of windows update

- clicking said notification does not bring up the windows update settings as it used to.

- searching for windows update in the start menu does not show the setting as a result. Even when you select setting.

- every few edge updates, th browser is able to put itself in a state that it takes 5 minutes to start up. In that time most other apps will not launch either.

I could go on and on, but these are just a few of the daily problems that irritate me.
> Uh no, this has been one of his passions for a very long time. It’s the reason SpaceX exists:

How does that contradicts the premise?

SpaceX is primarily (emphasis on is) in the business of reusable rockets.

Musk launched the Mars colonization idea as a self promotional venture.

There are many things Musk said about Mars which are borderline retarded

Starting from the fact that he wants to colonize Mars, I am much more interested in the exploration and I believe it defines human nature much more than simply being a billionaire with a colonialist mindset.

For example

- Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess he believes that his life (and other billionaires like him) must be preserved. I'm not sure about regular folks like most of us...

- “I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me” this is from 2018, it hasn't aged very well

- I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we’re or not. Why???

- Musk said there's 70 percent chance he’ll get to Mars within his lifetime, with plans to permanently resettle on the Red Planet. No, he won't. We all know he wouldn't do it. He's never gonna be an astronaut, at best he can be a Bezos.

- in 2021 he said he would send humans to Mars by 2026, now it's become 2029 (it's always five years away). He also said that by 2050, there will be 30,000 to 50,000 people who choose a one-way trip to Mars to begin a new life. Everyone's free to form an opinion on this, I simply call them BS.
Dell will be shipping SOC ARM computers before that happens.
One of the first things I installed recently on my first Win11 computer was StartAllBack[1]. It’s not perfect but the standard taskbar is so bad that I had to fix it somehow.

[1] https://www.startallback.com/
Little bit like advice to an alcoholic: "only buy the single serving bottles, then stash them all over the house."

It may or may not help some people, but it seems like a lot of activity for very little gain, more of a distraction from the central problem (the addiction) than an honest effort to address it.
It's not great for wild Salmon though, currently.
I was also ignorant about this so I googled. It said it means "Thanks for Asking" or "The fucking article". The second meaning sounded correct but I found it weird.

"The fine article" also sounds weird to me.
> Yes and no, while IBM owns Red-Hat, it doesn't dictate how Red-Hat does their own business decisions.

Even that's true, it's now IBM's money that gets invested.

> Not in what concerns ISO C++ support, and if it was up to IBM, trigraphs would still be supported.

I know about the trigraphs. That they were fighting for that shows imho exactly that IBM is heavily invested in C++. They have a shitload of old but hightly important code that can't be migrated realistically.

So IBM will keep throwing money on C++ to extend its live infinitely, I guess.
Again, we're arguing about Musk more than about the technological challenges. The article makes that very point - that Musk's approach to technological questions is to distract and make people argue about his character. Which we are doing.

> The author essentially dismissed SpaceX...

The article also makes the point that keeping people alive in space for years is a very different and unsolved and underestimated challenge than is building rockets. SpaceX builds rockets. It does not do the other thing.
As a Brit I'm a bit skeptical about anything below a well done burger. We were taught that you should always fully cook ground beef as the mincing process can mix in pathogens from the surface of the meat. I suppose this doesn't apply if the beef is safe to make tartar with or maybe if you sear the outside of the cut you're going to mince before mincing it.

That said a number of mid-range burger chains offer rare burgers here, and in such cases I tend to go medium which typically nets results on the less overcooked end of well done anyway.
I never would've thought religion will be a thing in programming.
I was promised 10 would be the final version and I will make sure to keep it that way, one way or another.
A dozen year old PC with ECC ram and a low-performance video card.

It would make sense to replace it with something that uses less electricity, but the requirement for ECC ram limits the options.
> Without cheap space access they are not even worth properly researching.

On the contrary - these are all useful technologies to the goal of preserving human life. If we had the ability to create self-sustaining colonies in the most extremely harsh conditions on Earth (a necessary step to being able to colonize any other place), we would have a much greater guarantee that humanity would survive a disaster like a huge asteroid/super volcano/deadly plague/etc. We could probably also use the technologies developed for other uses - better homes, more sustainable agriculture etc.

We could also work on miniaturizing the things and then start thinking about sending them in space, perhaps even with currently existing rockets.

> None of that is as big of an issue if you can launch often and a lot of stuff. In the limit you don't need to recycle anything and everything has multiple spares. You can also launch outside direct constraints of Hohmann transfer orbit. Again, payload limitations and time are the main reasons we use Hohmann transfer orbits.

It's far less likely that it's possible to reach the level of cheapness you talk about at all, given the hard physical constraints on rocket masses and available fuels.

> We will not avoid contamination. It's impossible to do. Where humans go our microbiome will follow.

Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.

> Going to Mars can be a suicide mission and you will still find people who will be willing to go.

What would be the goals of the mission? Why do you think people desperate enough to accept certain death will be able to achieve said goals or even care about them once they reach the surface?

> First things first.

Exactly my (and the article's) point. First you send robots to Mars while developing colony technologies on Earth, then you start thinking about sending humans to Mars.
Not fully open-sourced. There are bunch of pieces that are available only in compiled form - .obj/lib files. Like math.h functions.
Costs money.
Nearly 20 years ago Bruce Sterling wrote:

> I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”

> On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004...
Microsoft seemed intent on removing settings and features that only a small segment of their telemetry showed enabled, probably because of some code cleanup efforts. This is despite their earlier attempt to convince everyone to use the weird 3D image editor instead of MS Paint.

A real shame, because they showed with Windows 7 that they can redesign the OS UI without giving up features from earlier versions if they want to. Bugs like "the task bar is 20 pixels taller on my second screen" wouldn't have come up if they'd stuck to restyling their old code base.

I find Microsoft's modern designs very comparable to the GNOME designs, in that they're eager to remove common features to build an overarching operating system theme. I like GNOME's design, much more than Windows 11's, but I don't think taking directions from a heavily criticised DE is the right move.
Writing DOS games and demos with modern tools
so?

if len(items) == 0:
return [p("no items")]
else:
ul(
[
li(item) for item in items
]
)

I am also not a fan of convoluted list comprehension (in python) so powerful is not necessarly a good thing.
I do prefer the unpolished form. The structure you give it today isn't the one that's going to help you tomorrow
We can see FP as a tool to for us to express a functional thought so that the computer can understand it and will translate it into something the computer itself can run.
Can you explain what you mean, about unsafe friendliness in the standard library?
With those 8 or so (partial!) redesigns I do not feel the overwhelming urge for consistency here.

(in fact they broke this and that along the road, the latest and most crucial for me is the taskbar, and I am not talking about the alignemnt, not at all, but all the other possibilities gone, starting with the option of grouping/ungrouping, but not ending there)
The other side of the cash flow game is that you can be cash flow positive most of the time... but go out of business if you face occasional, large often complicated fixed costs. A robust accounting and pricing model is needed to plan for those fixed costs. It's like picking up pennies in front of a steamrolller if you only focus on short term cash flow.

The other interesting example of cash flow games is Warren Buffet's focus on insurance. He really likes picking up people's premium payments and collecting interest on them until the claims hit. My limited understanding is that Buffet looks for those situations specifically.
+1.

"...not because it's easy, but because it's hard."
Broker’s fees, first and last month’s rent can be common in big cities. It still doesn’t match what I’ve seen in first hand accounts of renting in Tokyo. I can’t remember about how much of the renting fees are refundable or not, where in the U.S., typically only the broker’s fee is non refundable. And I certainly don’t hear anyone saying places with these policies are surprisingly cheap.

The person I responded to said that Tokyo is surprisingly cheap if you compare it to California real estate in the major cities (read as LA or San Francisco) and be willing to take major cuts on space and standard of living. That’s sort of a weird argument. Additionally comparing it to NYC doesn’t make it less weird.

Of course living in Tokyo is cheap if you throw out standard of living, ignore the initial capital required to rent, and then compare it to some of the other most insane real estate markets.
I'm German of Turkish origin and I just now realized that I love how Slovenian sounds. What a densely colorful continent, perhaps only matched by India (Or perhaps Africa dunno).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-c4FviUf_A
> A blockchain does not magically solve security issues.

No, but staking is certainly an improvement over "pinky promise", and it requires a public blockchain.

> issues

I'm fairly sure those are features, not issues. You are free to disagree.
I am still baffled by the whole Windows 8 drama. All they did was they replaced a menu with another one. Everything else was the same or better. Supposed power users freaking out about something completely inconsequential. What the hell is wrong with people
But then Star Wars and Marvel would be public domain. Oh, the tragedy!

I think AI/ML will be a forcing function. More new media will be created every year than all of recorded human history.

They copyright office will cave under this pressure. They'll either say none of it can by copyrighted, which will be complicated -- who wants to prove which parts were AI-assisted? More sensibly, they'll just contract the copyright TTL. That's easy to calculate.

If this happens, it will have very interesting implications for Disney, Universal Music Group, et al.
Correctly? I could be bullshitting the heck out of it. I think I could teach anyone to pass such questions, if not vetted. It seems to boil down to: initial estimate, then multiply by a fraction for each narrowing specification in the question (how many red-haired, left-handed, gay piano tuners are there in New York), dependence between factors be damned, if it doesn't matter if the outcome is 1 or 500.
> All wheel drive helps zero with winter conditions, except for going uphill or some other acceleration-equivalent action

What are you on about? Living in Montana, AWD is dramatically better than 4WD. And winter tires are great. We never used them on one of our AWDs because the AWD is so dang good. Snow tires were absolutely required on our 4WD and 2WD cars. AWD or snow tires, I am mindful of stopping distance.

I will always choose AWD for the snow. Then add snow tires if needed.
Indeed. Releasing FCP X as an MVP (a concept no-one outside of software dev understands), without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect, was a bad idea. I know a couple of filmmakers that switched to PC, partly due to the cost of Macs but also because of FCP X.
Retro-compatibility is one of the reasons that Windows is still used in industry.
Well actually... 4x4 is worse for going downhill on ice. If one axle loses traction (which would be much more likely on summer tyres), the other can initiate a slide.

This is the exact reason people dont like 4x4 on ice. AWD (usually) lessens the problem - which is why i said they absolutely help with the correct tyres.

And again - DONT SLOW DOWN when going down hill. Your brakes WILL lock a wheel and you WILL slide. Slow down BEFORE you go downhill. If you havent experienced this truth, then you havent driven downhill on ice (which is preferable).
Companies owning housing don't show up locally to block new housing:

> The role of institutional investors is still being studied, but the popularity of the narrative strikes at something dangerous: People want a convenient boogeyman and when they get it, they often ignore the structural problems that are harder to combat. Housing undersupply is the result of decades of locals opposing new home building. It’s not something that can be blamed on Wall Street greed and the nefarious tinkering of a private equity firm. And that’s a much harder truth to stomach.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22524829/wall-street-housin...
> but until Microsoft et all rewrite their tooling in Rust, there will be enough people to keep C++ going.

At least Microsoft started to do exactly this. They started to touch the Win API even to create Rust bindings. Because MS saw that this is the only way to future prove this stuff.

Other big players, like IBM, don't look like they're moving, though. But OK, IBM moves so slowly as a pitch drop falls. So maybe we just don't see them moving.
He's doing very similar things than what other authortiarians were. Censoring what he doesn't like or doesn't follow his ideology.

Problem is, the people who agree with doing this before are mad because now it's against them.

It's a positive.

As for the NNs labels. Well, it's the typical scaremongering argument that holds no water when you realize that, again, people will be inconsistent about who they apply X labels too and why they should be censored.

As for your ironic comment, it's really not. You can't call out hypocrisy on me because my stance has not changed. I'll give you the opportunity to speak and them. I'll call out your censorship and their censorship.

I would've hoped the guy in the article and many who foam at the mouth about EM and NN realized that "censorship was bad all along, we shouldn't have done it because it can turn against us" but alas, it wasn't meant to be.
There are both kinds.
You are on to something, in that those who 'need' this advice
are those for who it will be hardest to 'walk along the line'.
But still, yes. Those who are still stuck outside the door even after many years, are precisely those that for one reason or another, have no clue where to find the relevant keys.
A few days ago I saw someone lamenting, that their kid had learnt to use caps lock as shift (but never shift itself), and now the kid was reluctant to 'switch to using shift', since his mental mode had formed around caps lock.
People will get stuck in all kinds of local minima, and settle for 'well it's worked that way.. for me', no matter how strange it may appear to a passing observer.

Another angle is that asperger people (I have no idea what I'm 'allowed' to call us) seem to lack some of the normal brain 'wiring' that you use to implement the above.
To the extent we want to learn to ape/mimic those behaviours, yes, we need to be told about them :-/

People are also wired differently. My wife is neurotypical (?) in this regard, but our daughter is wired like me,
and if she's ever going to pick up on any of this,
someone is going to have to walk her through it - a lot.
Preferably at a point when she has realized she is missing a color or two, because currently none of this is intuitive to her. It's like explaining colors to a blind person.
Pretty sure MS has just given up on consistency at this point. The control panel on particular is a writeoff - simple things like setting an IP on a net adapter is an adventure in itself
"It was designed with the properties and the builder knew it would happen"?
Danes simply have to watch this bloody thing every single New Years Eve.
I think you mean, "copyright will be extended to 100 years shortly".
Hardly surprising because I don't think there's even one piece of high-end CAx software for Mac.
Absolutely agree. 2003 was 20 years ago. More than enough time for creators to make their profits several times over.
So does Windows itself.

If you're afraid to or don't want to pay for software then you should probably use some variant of GNU/Linux instead.
And in non-web space, there's Matrix (https://matrix.org).
Ask HN: What was it like to work at a high-functioning team?
Every company in existence would love to have a $38B/year revenue (along with I'm sure great margins) vanity product like the Mac.
Or 0
What a wonderful little language! Can I use it on PC?
> we haven't even solved the kindergarten-level problem of creating a stable living environment on a planet with abundant water, oxygen, natural resources, free energy, and a ready-made (mostly) supportive ecosystem.

Haven’t we? I guess it could always be more stable. Where is the line for you? Is there any point where you’d consider this problem solved?

Besides, if things feel unstable to you, why would that be an argument against attempting to set up a secondary living environment on another planet?

If we had stability issues in our primary datacenter, would this be a reason not to create an offsite backup?
In my experience, AWD with no snow tires is better than 2WD with snow tires. AWD and snow tires is tops. YMMV. Source: Montana.
And people still write FORTRAN today.
Of course. With unchecked exceptions, it's impossible to statically check that this is the case, so for system programming they are not an appropriate error handling mechanism.
Writing a C64 Asssembly Demo (2019)
If you're willing to tweak your installation, you can revert to the Windows 10 taskbar using the free third-party ExplorerPatcher utility. It has an option to not combine taskbar items and a lot of other goodies.