skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a consumer, I hope he is wrong. As a producer, I believe he is wrong.

As a consumer with a high-spec PC with multiple large monitors, a good phone, and two tablets, I strongly prefer consuming all content on my PC. It's faster—by a massive margin, easier to navigate, easier to read, easier to simultaneously consume two or more content items (video + text content, for example), easier to pair consumption with production. It's better in every single content consumption metric that matters to me. It has a lot of room for improvement (see my previous rants about monitors), and I feel the lack of innovation in desktop computing is precisely why it's flagging. But that has more to deal with lack of innovation in desktop computing and less to do with mobile versus desktop.

As a producer, there is no comparison. In a pinch, I can produce work product on my Surface Pro or, in an even tighter pinch, on my Venue 8 Pro. But every moment I do so, I will be longing to be back home in front of my desktop computer. Unless of course I am on vacation in some beautiful environment.

Speaking of, I often feel there is a myopic view of computing that says mobile is workable for work production because the people making the decisions are those who can be mobile—they travel extensively and don't produce a whole lot. They may be creative, but they are not the creators. For the rest of us, we spend a lot of time at home or at an office, two locations where we easily can install high-performance desktop computing in one form or another.

Like others here, I don't care a whole lot precisely what is behind the screens, keyboard, mouse; behind the projectors, hand gesture inputs, and so on. I don't care if it's a PC in a big ATX case, a NUC or Brix, or a mobile device that I dock on a charging plate with wireless HDMI. What matters is that I can break free of its mobileness, making it a device with a large screen, a full-size keyboard, and a high-precision pointing device such as a mouse. That is desktop computing, and it will evolve.

Yeah, for me, I hope he is wrong because his model of computing is one that doesn't align with my preferences. Furthermore, in the computing model I long for, all my mobile devices become subservient to a singular "computer" that runs my applications. One of those applications will be a web browser.
I think the PC's Death in the marketplace is due to the PC being given over to more and more web apps and the power of current PCs being nowhere near the bottleneck it once was.

When there are compelling apps and net bandwidth that requires higher performing PCs, we'll see PC sales trend upwards again.
Anonymous? Oh please.
I could sort of get "ease of implementation" but would trade that on behalf of the implementers to keep their secret bullshit out of standards.

Have they got an actual case that says it's easier versus plug-in implementations that would, in real world cases, rely on libraries the content publishers agree to use?
you guys rock!
I believe the same one was available for DOS, though my memories of the details were vague. It was for either Works or Lotus 1-2-3 and was the culmination of a series of spreadsheet training scenarios.
Why do you suppose that EME + CDMs will be a better solution than Flash? What advantages do you expect?
> I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone.

You must be a delightful dinner companion.

Fine, that's a cavil. This is not: Disk is cheap. My time is precious. It's a lot quicker and easier to just dump everything into a big greppable bucket, on the off-chance that five or ten years from now I might need to fish something out of it, than to spend hours or even minutes picking and choosing.

Of course, excepting a reimage after disk failure, the odds that I'll ever actually need to pull something out of my backups are low -- but if the dice ever come up snake eyes, I'll certainly be able to retrieve whatever it is I'm after, while doing things your way has the same low-but-nonzero chance of needing to go fishing, plus a nonzero chance of not being able to retrieve whatever it is because you didn't think it was worth backing up.

You present your attitude toward backups as originating in a need to suppress what must be an extraordinary susceptibility to a swelled head. May I suggest your efforts in that area are perhaps slightly less complete than you fancy them to be? But that's your problem to address, and of course you're free to take whatever chance you please, and waste however much time suits you, in pursuit of that admirable end. Me, I'll just keep shoveling everything into a big cheap bucket, on the off-chance I'll need to fish something out later on.
EME essentially defines a wrapper around a module, which can quite easily be a plugin, that implements the DRM. You can view it as a means to require smaller plugins than NPAPI, PPAPI, etc.
Surveillence of Citizens Is ALWAYS Aimed at Crushing Dissent[0]

[0]http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/01/surveillence-of-citizen...
What's the problem? Don't support companies that distribute any DRM content. Standardizing DRM and propogating DRM aren't the same thing.
I'd agree with you, except for Python... that whole Python 3 mess just seems to have been a terribly turn of events when stared at from Ruby-land.
My wife is like this. We have an agreement where she goes to more of the children's birthday parties. She loves to socialize with strangers, me not so much.
I am assuming then that you are fairly dependent on your current salary level. Painting houses was one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever held. Perhaps lowering your monthly burn rate could open other opportunities outside your current field.
Not everybody owns an idevice.
I don't think the trailers did much in the way of demoing the movie's focus on UI. People just murmured commands, and in the case of the AIs, conversations. I have Google Glass, and the pre-AI UI experience was extremely similar, just more audio focused. The point is that everyone is using this extremely natural interface, and no one really cares what other people are doing.
This depends on your expectations about what a "middle class lifestyle" includes.

Let's take NYC. The fact is that in New York City, the median household income is about $50k/year. (Last year it was $50,895.) So if we define a "middle class lifestyle" as that which those in the middle can afford, well, by definition you're going to get by very well following that lifestyle while making $100k/year! Even if your household has 3 people in it.

But if you define "middle class lifestyle" according to the way you think that you peer group is living, well, I've known people making $200k+ who experience "trouble getting by".

Now I can understand making more, choosing to live better, and running into financial trouble because of it. But if you do that and blame anyone but yourself, well, I've got nothing in the way of sympathy for you.
Britain's World War I diaries go online
I once read a quip in an interview with a sci-fi author. He said something like: "No one writing about the present day would spend paragraphs explaining how a light switch works." It's easy for sci-fi to fall into the trap of obsessively detailing fictional technologies, to the determent of making a vivid setting and story.

Edit: I'm not saying that sci-fi shouldn't communicate some understanding of the future technology or shouldn't enjoy engaging in some futurology. Just that it's difficult to do in an artful way.
> The majority of the W3C membership is staying pretty quiet about it

As gsnedders said, it doesn't matter. The EME spec is written and pushed by Google and Microsoft, and Apple is on board. Those companies have a strong financial interest to do what hollywood asks here, and together they account for a large majority of the browser market.

The only possible thing that could stop this is pressure on those browser vendors by users of those browsers - which means, for users to stop using them. So far, the public and even here on HN there is little interest in doing that.
I don't think there's any WG which includes all W3C members — most members simply don't care enough to wish to dedicate resources to every WG, not to mention the extra obligations it makes them take on via the patent policy. The situation isn't at all unusual — just a more contentious subject matter!
Very good article. It is not possible to build a product if cashing out is the first thing in the CEO's mind.

We always hear and talk about only two exits IPO (getting rare now) and Acquisition (the $B glamour). However there is also a third valid way of investor exit which is 'Management Buyout' (never heard in tech circles)

http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/10/how-to-choose-an-exit-stra...
Can someone explain how Minority Report dominated UI design? (serious question)
Ohg vfa'g vg yvxr gung va erny yvsr? V xvaqn rawblrq vg orvat gung jnl. Vg znqr zr qb n yvggyr rkgen yrtjbex gb znxr fher V qvqa'g neerfg na vaabprag zna.
first of all, I agree that my message was too short and didn't have any arguments to positively contribute to the thread. Sorry about that.

Now, let me explain how did I come to this comparison (even if it seems rogue). To make it more specific, let's consider Raspberry Pi, which is one of the most open ARM boards and, at the same time, practices DRM. For example, its hardware video decoding capabilities might be unlocked, if a separate digital license is acquired in the store [1].

I am perfectly fine when people voluntarily agree to access encrypted content or "premium" functionality. The problem is that the need to put this DRM to the chip, has led to the decision of the manufacturer to make its GPU core a supervisor. GPU starts to work ahead of CPU, initializes its firmware and starts CPU at some point later ([2]). Additional GPU firmware (provided by a binary blob) may be loaded to support OpenGL and other related stuff [3].

Effectively, even if the user does not want to access an encrypted content or use the "premium" functionality, he is being kept in a jail to make sure this premium stuff is not used. Moreover, the supervisor capability of the GPU chip combined with a binary blob updates, makes it possible for the manufacturer to reduce the amount of allowed to the user.

The user of the device is treated as a customer, and it's the manufacturer who is the owner of the device, not the user.

Given these capabilities of the manufacturer over this aspect of the user life, we may start looking at the definition of slavery [4]:

"""Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation."""

At least half of the definition applies:

1. The customers are treated as property to be sold or rented. There're video dongles/boxes on the market which stream content to the TV. They would often allow only a subset of the video services to be used, even if these services are freely available on the internet. The manufacturers of this devices may actually sell the access to the users of this device to the content providers.

2. The customers may be shown ads against their will and their user experience may be altered by the manufacturer w/o their consent or right to refuse.

Again, that does not happen to the people, it happens to the customers, which appear as a virtual entity applied to the devices, but I really see some similarities.

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16317623/how-does-raspber...

[3] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
IIRC at first they had an entire Microsoft stack (I may be mistaken on that).

But nowadays, from what I've read here on HN by SE devs in other threads, they're using lots and lots and lots of Linux: HAProxy, Redis, Nagios, etc.

I just double-checked the slide and although I didn't notice it at first, you can see that 'HA Proxy' and 'Redis' are mentioned.

The core Q&A is in C#/MS-SQL so that's probably not going to move to Linux anytime soon.
I think it came down to luck.

What if some "greater fool" came in and bought Everpix for $50 million, like Yahoo, or AOL? Then we wouldn't be coming up with all these reasons why they failed, but instead would've congratulated them on their hard work, smart strategy and success (funny how these things work, huh?)

If Facebook didn't buy Instagram, they would've had the same outcome as Everpix eventually. If eBay didn't acquire Hunch, they've flunked eventually. If Google didn't acquire Blogger, they would've sunked too. I'd love to see Foursquare survive for 4 more years without an exit.
So, why have that discussion inside a standards discussion, especially if it brings in confidentiality requirements? Let the publishers talk among themselves and write their plug-ins.
This seems to be a really important question out there and I'm somewhat scared by the silence on HN about this. The silence makes me think that folks are going "oh shit!" with frozen fingers.

It does looks like the incentives are aligned in the direction laid out in the article. Companies can better control their user experience on mobile through uncrawlable apps. You hear "mobile first" a lot these days. These things are with users for longer than desktops/laptops. Anyone can carve out a section of the web where content gets created, but cannot be linked to.

The two gaps I see are -

a) mobile devices are good for _consumption_, but are not yet on par with *tops for _creation_, and

b) reputation systems on the internet (currently) require linking, and there's nothing to replace that in the mobile world.
>Being "tied" to Facebook is the best thing that can happen to PHP. I stopped taking PHP core devs seriously since the PHP6 fiasco.

The "PHP6 fiasco"? A major featured release was too much, and had to be scoped down. Since then most stuff has been released as 5.4, 5.5 etc.

Did it break anybody's code? No. Did it divided the community? No. Did it halted PHP development? No. At worst, it make some prematurely released PHP6 books obsolete. Big fucking deal.

Compared to Perl 6 (still MIA for actual production development) and Python 3 (only 10% adoption or less after 5 years for an update that doesn't even offer that much), I'll take the PHP6 fiasco anytime.

>At some point , every big open source project team must make tough choices to make the project "future proof". Python team did it, Ruby is doing it,NodeJS will to be compliant with ES6 modules.

Python 6 did it badly, Ruby didn't do much, and NodeJS will have the ES6 modules "update" happen automatically by virtue of them being based on V8.
That's a 1990s definition of the term "remote", but 51% of Wikipedians now disagree with the whole software security industry, which uniformly considers browser drive-by vulnerabilities to be "remote".
I don't really have a lot of motivation, so what I do with my spare time is to waste it. I am naturally talented musically, but have little formal training, and I can't feed my family with that. I don't have enough money to lie on a beach for an extended time without fucking my savings.

Good advice about trying to let go of the things that are holding me back. I've thought more about going back to school, but not sure what I'd want to study.
On the contrary, I find it far simpler to say that I have Ubuntu 12.10 installed rather than... actually, I honestly don't know what that one's called. But whatever one comes next, I know it's called 13.04 and... some other arbitrary animal name.
Ask HN: What bug tracking tool are you using for mobile apps?
We are working on a new bug tracking tool optimized only for mobile apps (bugs are only logged from the app itself through a SDK instead of manually log them on the dashboard). I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
> pesticide

Herbicide, not pesticide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbicide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide
Using Python to Code by Voice [video]
If an application has hung, command Q won't work. Happens to me with Mail sometimes. Also, all the helpful suggestions to use Command Q to close the Force Quit window will work - thanks - unless you first command tab to another app. At that point, the Force Quite window becomes inaccessible from the keyboard (it has no entry in the command tab app switcher), even though the window itself is still sitting on top blocking view of other windows. At that point, I believe, it's back to the mouse.

Edit: Thanks arrrrg, just noticed your solution - alt command esc to reactivate the Force Quit window, then command W.
Does anyone still re-watch TNG episodes and find that the queries they do to be profoundly limited in power, other than the feature of having the universe's knowledge to query across?

If UIs are taking cues from entertainment, they might act as a nice bridge, but are just as likely to be stifling
I don't care how it gets done, but if we need this to finally kill off flash than I am for it. This problem is solved technically so let's just get it done. Yes, every DRM will eventually be broken, but at least it satisfies the executives enough, so what's the problem?

I don't understand why purists on the email list end up holding up something that will ultimately be a positive thing from a number of perspectives. Security, battery life, and script-able/touch friendly controls.
Yes, Google Voice as a separate product is definitely going away. Its functionality will be subsumed by Hangouts, but nothing about that transition is clear to users.
This seems like a non-argument. Most apps are used to access the web in some manner. It's like saying cars will kill roads.
I thought the perl 6 implementation was actually complete.
I believe with the rapid advancements in mobile frameworks and responsive design the desktop and mobile
web will converge. Not every startup needs a native mobile app.

If you believe the desktop web is dead... Throw out all your desktops/ laptops and give everyone in your company iPads and see how productive your company is. It won't be pretty.
This is something I like about message board writing; there's a feeling of time pressure to it. You have to think a little bit faster than you would writing a long-form blog post.
On the contrary, get ready for the Google Home Security System!
Keep in mind that it was released in 2002, well before the iPhone and multitouch became the dominant form of user interaction. A lot of the swiping, pinching, and rotating gestures can be found in the first scene of the movie.

For a long time after Minority Report was released, there was massive interest in futuristic UI's that featured gestures (both touch and non-touch). Minority Report really romanticised the idea of manipulating computers in a way that resembles conducting an orchestra.
So pong and snake where already in SMW?
This Wikipedia article has an overview of the film's approach to technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technologies_in_Minority_Report
Don't get me wrong but I disagree badly with the way this was writen. Mainly the selling a company part.

Sometimes there are no other option other then selling your company.

You can become outnumbered in the board and become a one men army due to different views of the future or other complications ( try that... it's fun like hell). You can work for your company for 40 years and realise YOU are not needed anymore and you should sell it and enjoy your last years.

And so many other variations to that "Why?" question. I found that statement aimed to make people that sold their company look like they gave up. And more often then not. This is not the case.

Thinking like that is just to simple.
In what world are you paying 13k per developer for year to use Microsoft products? Top of the line MSDN sub is like ~3k, and we get good desks and monitors and keyboards and computers too. Most places don't even buy MSDN, I do fine with a <1k in software to develop on .NET.
>>> Theo’s phone in the film is just that–a handsome hinged device that looks more like an art deco cigarette case than an iPhone. He uses it far less frequently than we use our smartphones today; it’s functional, but it’s not ubiquitous. As an object, it’s more like a nice wallet or watch. In terms of industrial design, it’s an artifact from a future where gadgets don’t need to scream their sophistication–a future where technology has progressed to the point that it doesn’t need to look like technology.

This article really makes me think of the neo-Victorians from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.

...which is kind of funny, because in many ways Snow Crash exemplifies the other ("Minority Report") style of design the article talks about.
You press Esc
Does Minority Report dominate UI design? I think it has dominated the movies' potrayal of future UI, but that is not the same thing.

I think if you look at the actual UIs being designed and sold today, their clearest entertainment ancestor is Star Trek the Next Generation.
Great. DRM. The best example of shooting yourself in the foot ever.

Give customers encrypted content and the keys, try to prevent them from freely using the two together, undermine copyright fair use and first sale doctrines as you go along.

Intended effect - No Piracy

Actual effect - Paying customers get crippled products, pirates carry on regardless

It's crazy. And the more they try to lock it down the worse their products become and the better piracy looks in comparison. Pirates don't only beat the legit industry on price, they beat them on quality and availability. How can the industry allow this to stand? Let alone continue down the same path with their fingers in their ears shouting LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!?!
> What are they thinking? The majority of the W3C membership want this work done, and the W3C is ultimately bound by its membership.

When they accept organizations like MPAA on their board, no surprise this is the sort of decisions we get, and the sort of decisions we can expect for the web standards from now on.

W3C has been corrupted, and it's only going to get worse for the web if people keep listening to them.
>PHP is a server-side language as you might now, so you are not replacing anything of it with Angular for the frontend, that's just an addition.

Not really. Perhaps you've missed all the "front side templates" thing. You can for example remove all PHP templating code, and just send JSON to be converted to HTML client side.

Besides, your dichotomy is invalid in general too. You can do lots of backend stuff in the front end too, if you want. E.g if you have a PHP script that converts a POST text variable into Markdown, you can opt to do it in the client, with a Javascript Mardkown lib. You can do calculations, you can use the canvas to generate images you used to do with GD, etc.
I think Python 3 offers more than you think it does. I'm not going to try to convince you, but having used it steadily for the last month or so, I really think it does.
When an implementation is complete in the forest, and nobody cares and even fewer use it for production code, is it complete?
Very fun and unique. I enjoyed it a lot! My solution (spoiler alert): https://gist.github.com/lost-theory/8412918
So the system the way they intend it won't work, which means you won't get the content anyway.

Let's not get lost in semantics here.
That's true ... but this is a most fundamental issue. I'd have expected that the companies that have benefited historically from the Open Web would be at least a little concerned. Like Google. Oh, wait.
> Yes, every DRM will eventually be broken, but at least it satisfies the executives enough, so what's the problem?

Executives are never satisfied, and the world doesn't revolve around them. Should we allow tapping of our communications because it satisfies our leaders.

> Security, battery life, and script-able/touch friendly controls.

And what do any of these have to do with DRM? In fact, I can guarantee DRM will offer more vulnerable entry points, require more battery on mobile devices, and not be script/ux friendly.