To be fair though, Sprint is one of the easier carriers to work with after T-Mobile. I can't imagine them releasing a phone on AT&T or Verizon, as their process is grueling. I guess since they're selling an unlockcked version of their phone, it doesn't really matter to power users. However, most sales for smartphones are from contracts sold directly from carriers so it'll be interesting to see how they'll do in the market with their current strategy (similar to One Plus One).

Props to them though. It's not just about carrier certification. Releasing a smartphone is a long complex process. Some engineers at Sprint were briefly talking about how great the phone was, so I have high hopes.

Buy an (old) iPhone.

I've got a 5S -- still perfectly fast for what I use it for (email, youtube, brokerage account, general internet, some small games), and is getting OS updates and security patches until IOS11. It's $120 on eBay; a new screen can be had for $13, a new battery for $11. it's solidly designed and there's a gigantic field of accessories and apps.

Maybe titanium and no bezels are worth a price premium, but there's no way it's worth a 5x increase in price.

A few things:

1. If you want to suggest you are doing this as part of an attempt to avoid meritless litigation, you really should give concrete examples of that happening. Otherwise, it comes off as a smoke screen.

2. The assertion is that if widely adopted, it would avoid lots of meritless litigation. This is a theoretically possible outcome. Here's another theoretically possible outcome of wide adoption of this kind of very broad termination language: Facebook is able to use other people's technology at will because nobody can afford to not use their stuff, and no startup that they decide to take technology from, and say "no more facebook/react/etc for you" could realistically launch an effective lawsuit before they died.Assume for a second you think Facebook is not likely to do this. If widely adopted, someone will do it.Nobody should have to worry about this possibility when considering whether to adopt particular open source software.

(there are other theoretical outcomes, good and bad).

It's also worth pointing out: None of this is a new discussion or argument. All of the current revisions of the major licenses (Apache v2, GPLv3) went through arguments about whether to use these kinds of broader termination clauses (though not quite as one sided and company focused), and ultimately decided not to, for (IMHO good) reasons. I'm a bit surprised this isn't mentioned or discussed anywhere.

These kinds of clauses are not a uniform net positive, they are fairly bimodal.

There's a pretty obvious solution to this: relicense React. The fact that Facebook isn't even considering that is a pretty strong indication that they "weaponized" their license on purpose.

> To this point, though, we haven't done a good job of explaining the reasons behind our BSD + Patents license.

I think we already understand the reasoning behind it.

> As our business has become successful, we've become a larger target for meritless patent litigation.

And the solution you chose stops merit-ful litigation as well.

> We respect third party IP, including patents, and expect others to respect our IP too.

Clearly you don't, because you've intentionally designed a license to allow you carte blanche to violate other companies' patents if they're dependent enough upon React to not be able to easily stop using it.

https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react&package=vue&p...

In reality, React is downloaded roughly 4-5x more than angular and 7-8x more than Vue. In August so far, React has 75% market share among these three libs. Interestingly, this share has grown in August compared to both last month (July) and beginning of year (January).

While this thread and the license thread might indicate that React is dying, it's not. It's growing.

If Vue is going to be what React is today, it has quite a long way to go.

In reality these programmers don't want to have the feeling they might have made the wrong choice when they used X instead of Y. The idea that they might have taken the poorer choice hurts so much that they need to defend their decision so heavily while in reality taking ReactJS or Vue.js is like ordering pizza or pasta. You usually don't want to have both at the same time. So you need to explain why pizza is better than pasta tonight. Only that you usually have to stick longer around with Vue.js or ReactJS once chosen. Enjoy your choice and solve real problems, but stop fighting about it, programmers. Pasta and pizza will always both win.

When I first saw VueJS I had a hard time understanding how it would be any better than React, that is until I saw single file components.

https://vuejs.org/images/vue-component.png

I fell in love with the eloquence of being able to separate my HTML, JS, Styles for a single component.. it seemed /right/ to me..

In any case, I've been using VueJS ever since for my new projects moving forward and I'm very happy with it. It has everything I would ever need from React but in what I feel is a more polished and thought-out way.

Just my two cents :)

If you want a full blown huge application to last years, then go Angular... Although who knows if Angular will be there in 5 or so years.

There is no perfect library/framework but I love Vue because Vue does exactly what it says on the tin.

I'd like to see better support for getting SSL/TLS info - why can't I tap on the padlock and get the certificate info (EV, OV, DV?), cipher suite, HSTS etc?

On the browser itself, I launched it, navigate on a URI, closed it, relaunched it, type the firsts characters of my previous URI and it auto completed it. From my history I guess.

So it's not like incognito mode on other browsers. (Haven't retested again)

But alas, the "simple and lightweight" Firefox Focus actually requires a heavyweight 64-bit processor:

> Why aren't older Apple products supported? Safari Content Blockers (which include Firefox Focus) are only available on devices with an A7 processor (64-bit) or later. Only 64-bit processors can handle the extra load of content blocking, which insures optimal performance. For example, since the iPad 3 has an A5 processor, Firefox Focus is incompatible.[1]

Come on, iPad 2's and 3's are less than 5 years old. There has to be some way to keep the iPad 2 or 3 alive if all you want to do browse the web.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/focus

If I want to check Hacker News let's say 5 times throughout the day and feel like leaving a comment, I have to login again, without autocomplete..?

Maybe I'm missing something.

So I'd say its adblocking is still less effective than regular Firefox for Android + uBlock Origin add-on.

It does feel quite speedy, though. Could possibly be what I start using in the future to read HN articles.

The speed of delivery, prime benefits, brand recognition, and willingness to lose money on many if not most items are absolutely brutal to compete against.

I'm glad one click checkout will be more broadly available, but it's probably not going to make much of a difference...

If the one-click patent was a major inhibitor of competition, I'd basically expect to see a lot of two-click check out options. Instead I find myself creating a million redundant user accounts, telling people that my mothers maidenname is "khhsyebg" (she's got some Dothraki blood, it seems) and parsing "don't not uncheck the box if you wish to prevent us from causing the absence of non-delivery of our newsletter and also not abstaining from passing on your details to third parties".

Some days I feel Amazon was not only the world's largest non-profit organization but also among its most beneficent!

Perhaps there is a chance now for SC (and others) to use this? (It'd be interesting to see how often the patent thwarted any business decisions. Also, I wonder if this was considering in the funding round...)

Here is the comment:> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14991938

Here is the parent HN post:> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14990911

I have never used the "buy now" feature, so honestly I think it's impact is a bit overblown.

Here are my reasons I never use it:

1) I do a lot of comparison shopping, so I like to review my orders before the final purchase. (in case I put something in my cart and then later added something better)

2) I want to make sure I don't order something under $35 and get stuck paying for expedited shipping (which is free for prime members over $35 in purchases)

3) I have a few addresses and cards on file, and want to make sure the order will use the right one.

4) I use the cart as a temporary list, anything that looks interesting during my shopping session gets thrown in there (or perhaps another browser window if doing comparisons).

If this gets any traction I will need to fight even harder to opt out.

I yearn for the day I can have one off transaction codes.

Note The more common term is credit card Tokenization, not just Vaulting, and is not required for 1-click if the merchant is retaining CC numbers. - although this is not recommended due to PCI and breach liability.

Businesses are the customers you want.

I only ask because it seemed to have been general knowledge that this was impossible / couldn't be done up until recently. As a outsider looking it, it seems quite obvious, but that's just due to naivete.

I feel like I have to throw away almost all advice they give us about kids these days. These types of things do a lot to undermine the advice of doctors.

Her clinic is relatively unique, in that it will be offering multi-allergen rapid desensitization. Using this procedure, a person can be desensitized to multiple allergens simultaneously, in as little as three months. She can treat milk, egg, wheat, soy, peanut, tree nut, fish, and shellfish allergies.

[0]: http://wmboit.com

The strange part of the story is that it took so long to download that the next day I went and bought the game (Battlefield 4) from the shop and brought it back home and installed it and started playing it, all whilst the original purchase from the PlayStation store was still downloading.

I ask Sony if they would refund the game that I bought from the PlayStation store given that I had gone and bought it elsewhere from a physical store during the download and they said "no".

So I never want to buy from the PlayStation store again.

Why would Sony not care about this above just about everything else?

Anecdotally, when I switched DNS servers to Google vs. my ISP, PS4 download speeds improved significantly (20 minutes vs. 20 hours to download a a typical game).

Using a local DNS resolver instead of Google DNS helped my PS4 speeds.

The other "trick" if a download is getting slow is to run the in built "network test". This seems to reset all the windows back even if other things are running.

I'm in Singapore and my normal download speed is around 250 Mb/s, sometimes getting closer to 300.

However, I sometimes download from the Swedish store as well, and those download speeds are always very slow. I don't think I've ever gone above one tenth of what I get with local downloads.

That said, bandwidth between Asia and Singapore are naturally more unpredictable, so I don't know if I can blame Sony here. My point is that PS4 downloads can be very fast, and the Singapore example is evidence of this fact.

I hope this is addressed by Sony in the future, or at least let us select if a download is a high priority or not.

The Switch firmware even states that it will halt downloads if a game attempts to connect to the network.

Turns out I was right.

A properly hand-tailored Makefile is a thing of beauty, and it is not difficult.

From memory here's a Makefile that serves most of my needs (use tabs):

 SOURCE=$(wildcard *.c) OBJS=$(patsubst %.c,%.o, $(SOURCE)) CFLAGS=-Wall # define CFLAGS and LDFLAGS as necessary all: name_of_bin name_of_bin: $(OBJS) $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $^ $(LDFLAGS) %.o: %.c $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $^ clean: rm -f *.o name_of_bin .PHONY: clean all

I've work in embedded software for over a decade, and all projects have used Make.

I have a love-hate relationship with Make. It's powerful and effective at what it does, but its syntax is bad and it lacks good datastructures and some basic functions that are useful when your project reaches several hundred files and multiple outputs. In other words, it does not scale well.

Worth noting that JGC's Gnu Make Standard Library (GMSL) [1] appears to be a solution for some of that, though I haven't applied it to our current project yet.

Everyone ends up adding their own half-broken hacks to work around some of Make's limitations. Most commonly, extracting header file dependency from C files and integrating that into Make's dependency tree.

I've looked at alternative build systems. For blank-slate candidates, tup [2] seemed like the most interesting for doing native dependency extraction and leveraging Lua for its datastructures and functions (though I initially rejected it due the the silliness of its front page.) djb's redo [3] (implemented by apenwarr [4]) looked like another interesting concept, until you realize that punting on Make's macro syntax to the shell means the tool is only doing half the job: having a good language to specify your targets and dependency is actually most of the problem.

Oh, and while I'm around I'll reiterate my biggest gripe with Make: it has two mechanisms to keep "intermediate" files, .INTERMEDIATE and .PRECIOUS. The first does not take wildcard arguments, the second does but it also keeps any half-generated broken artifact if the build is interrupted, which is a great way to break your build. Please can someone better than me add wildcard support to .INTERMEDIATE.

[1] http://gmsl.sourceforge.net

[2] http://gittup.org/tup/Also its creator, Mike Shal, now works at Mozilla on their build system

[3] http://cr.yp.to/redo.html

[4] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo

* Colorize errors

* Hide output unless the command fails

* Automatic help command which shows (non-file) targets

* Automatic clean command which deletes all intermediate files

* Hash-based update detection instead of mtime

* Changes in "Makefile" trigger rebuilds

* Parallel builds by default

* Handling multi-file outputs

* Continuous mode which watches the file system for changes and rebuilds automatically

I know of no build system which provides these features and is still simple and generic. Tup is close, but it fails with LaTeX, because of the circular dependencies (generates and reads aux file).

[0] http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

It's when you start having hundreds of sources, targets, external dependencies, flags and special cases that it becomes hard to write sane, understandable Makefiles, which it presumably why people tend to use other systems to generate makefiles.

So sure, understanding what make is, and how it works is probably important, since it'll be around forever. But there are usually N better ways of expressing a build system, nowadays.

 target: cd ./dir; ./script.sh

It has completely replaced Makefiles for me. It can be used to run shell commands just like make, but the fact that it is written in Python allows you to also run arbitrary Python code straight from the Makefile (Snakefile). So now instead of writing a command-line interface for each of my Python scripts, I can simply import the script in the Snakefile and call a function directly.

Eg.

 rule make_plot: input: data = "{name}.txt" output: plot = "{name}.png" run: import my_package my_package.plot(input['data'], output['plot'], name = wildcards['name'])

[1]: https://snakemake.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Make is scary because it's arcane and contains a lot of gotcha rules. I avoided learning Make for a long time. I'm glad I did learn it in the end, though I wouldn't call myself properly fluent in it yet. But there are a ton of gotchas and historical artifacts in Make.

Recently I wrote a similar blog about an alternative app pattern that uses makefiles:

https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/a-non-cloud-se...

The next 90% will be to learn that Make breaks when having tabs and spaces in the same file, and your developers all use slightly different editors that will mix them up all the time.

Simple to use without any magic.

https://github.com/quantos-unios/nrmb

Have a look :)

This works in my cases because I have browserify doing all the heavy lifting with respect to dependency management.

I'd say people would lean towards the former, but time and real world experience has shown that sequential dominates everything else.

Still, it probably would be much harder, if possible at all (doubted for most), to achieve the same with any other tool mentioned here.

Unfortunately the 9 hour in office format constrain me to stay on my seat, so I'll try work on easier things at that time while beeing quite unproductive

How to we bring this fact to companies? It seems only the most ""progressive"" companies like Facebook or Google really understood this

I think some people just inherently have more energy than others.

It's really hard to do justice explaining how amazing modules are. They capture the essence of abstraction incredibly well, giving you plenty of expressive power (alongside an equally powerful type system). Importantly, they compose; you can write functions from modules to modules!

(This is even more impressive than you think: modules have runtime (dynamic) AND compile time (static) components. You've certainly written functions on runtime values before, and you may have even written functions on static types before. But have you written one function that operates on both a static and a dynamic thing at the same time? And what kind of power does this give you? Basically, creating abstractions is effortless.)

To learn more, I recommend you read Danny Gratzer's "A Crash Course on ML Modules"[1]. It's a good jumping off point. From there, try your hand at learning SML or Ocaml and tinker. ML modules are great!

[1]: https://jozefg.bitbucket.io/posts/2015-01-08-modules.html

If you think about it so many of our problems are a direct result of representing software as a bunch of files and folders with plaintext.

Our "fancy" editors and "intellisense" only goes so far.

Language evolution is slowed down because syntax is fragile and parsing is hard.

A "software as data model" approach takes a lot of that away.

You can cut down so much boilerplate and noise because you can have certain behaviours and attributes of the software be hidden from immediate view or condensed down into a colour or an icon.

Plaintext forces you to have a visually distracting element in front of you for every little thing. So as a result you end up with obscure characters and generally noisy code.

If your software is always in a rich data model format your editor can show you different views of it depending on the context.

So how you view your software when you are in "debug mode" could be wildly different from how you view it in "documentation mode" or "development mode".

You can also pull things from arbitrarily places into a single view at will.

Thinking of software as "bunch of files stored in folders" comes with a lot baggage and a lot of assumptions. It inherently biases how you organise things. And it forces you to do things that are not always in your interest. For example you may be "forced" to break things into smaller pieces more than you would like because things get visually too distracting or the file gets too big.

All of that stuff are arbitrary side effects of this ancient view of software that will immediately go away as soon as you treat AND ALWAYS KEEP your software as a rich data model.

Hell all of the problems with parsing text and ambiguity in sytnax and so on will also disappear.

I was mildly curious why Graydon didn't mention my current, mildly passionate affair, Pony (https://www.ponylang.org/), and its use of capabilities (and actors, and per-actor garbage collection, etc.). Then, I saw,

"I had some extended notes here about "less-mainstream paradigms" and/or "things I wouldn't even recommend pursuing", but on reflection, I think it's kinda a bummer to draw too much attention to them. So I'll just leave it at a short list: actors, software transactional memory, lazy evaluation, backtracking, memoizing, "graphical" and/or two-dimensional languages, and user-extensible syntax."

Which is mildly upsetting, given that Graydon is one of my spirit animals for programming languages.

On the other hand, his bit on ESC/dependent typing/verification tech. covers all my bases: "If you want to play in this space, you ought to study at least Sage, Stardust, Whiley, Frama-C, SPARK-2014, Dafny, F, ATS, Xanadu, Idris, Zombie-Trellys, Dependent Haskell, and Liquid Haskell."

So I'm mostly as happy as a pig in a blanket. (Specifically, take a look at Dafny (https://github.com/Microsoft/dafny) (probably the poster child for the verification approach) and Idris (https://www.idris-lang.org/) (voted most likely to be generally usable of the dependently typed languages).

Amen!

I've been using Typescript a lot recently with union types, guards, and other tools. It's clear to me that the type system is very complex and powerful! But sometimes I would like to make assertions that are hard to express in the limited syntax of types. Haskell has similar issues when trying to do type-level programming.

Having ways to generate types dynamically and hook into typechecking to check properties more deeply would be super useful for a lot of web tools like ORMs.

Here is some more info about Nim's effect system: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#effect-system

I am interested in genuine and objective replies of course.

(Yes your joke is probably very funny and I am sure it's a novel and exciting quip about the state of affairs in 2006 when wordpress was the flagship product)

Curious and can't find anything: what's the most complex golang program out there, and how long does it take to compile?

I also think that eventually we may see a truly common semantic definitional layer that programming languages and operating systems can be built off of. It's just like the types of metastructures used as the basis for many platforms today, but with the idea of creating a truly Uber platform.

Another futuristic idea I had would be a VR projectional programming system where components would be plugged and configured in 3d.

Another idea might be to find a way to take the flexibility of advanced neural networks and make it a core feature of a programming language.

Not-so-obvious point #1 is that the presence of cancer-associated mutations in blood != cancer. You find cancer-associated mutations in the skin of older probands, and assumedly many of the sampling sites would never turn into melanomas. A more subtle point is that cfDNA is likely generated by dying cells, i.e. a weak cancer signature in blood might also be indicative of the immune system doing its job.

Point #2 is that it's not necessarily about individual mutations, which are, due to the signal-to-noise ratio alluded to above, difficult to pick up. One can also look at the total representation of certain genes in cfDNA (many cancers have gene amplifications or deletions, which are easier to pick up because they affect thousands of bases at the same time), and the positioning of individual sequenced molecules relative to the reference genome. It seems that these positions are correlated with gene activities (transcription) in the cells that the cfDNA comes from, and cancer cells have distinct patterns if gene activity.

NIPT is a non-invasive blood screening test that is quickly becoming the clinical standard of care. Many insurance companies now cover the entire cost of NIPT screening for for at-risk pregnancies (e.g. women of "Advanced Maternal Age" (35yo+)). The debate is moving to whether it should be utilized/covered for average-risk pregnancies as well.

[1] http://capsprenatal.com/about-nipt/

[2] https://www.genomeweb.com/molecular-diagnostics/aetna-wont-c...

Metafilter user blue_beetle first put this idea online when he said "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold" in response to the Digg revolt of 2010. The idea apparently existed for a few decades prior regarding TV advertising. I prefer to think blue_beetle was the one who brought it into the zeitgeist.

http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/

Edit: Alex3917 posted a similar idea on HN on 6 May 2010, beating blue_beetle by a couple months. Gotta give credit where it's due: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15030959

First, for privacy concerns. FB, specially was getting to creepy for me. I felt, every action I did was being analyzed and filtered, I felt like I was a lab rat. The fact that these companies know so much about us is pretty scary, I felt like I needed to regain my privacy, fight the system somehow.

Second reason was because, I wasn't getting anything substantial that could improve my life overall. All I saw was dumb-ass posts, ignorant comments, the passive aggressiveness, the "look at me doing this really mundane thing, but please like my picture so I can feel validated", etc... feels like a mouse-cat race to see which of us has a better life or something. I honestly feel bad for how much time I spent there when I could apply that time to learn new things.

After more than 6 months without FB, here's what I've learned:

- I still keep in touch with my closest friends, we chat on slack/iMessage every day. It's actually a good way to know who really misses you, during this time, only about 5% of my FB friends reached out to me through message or phone to ask how were things in life. The other 95%, I really don't even remember most of their names anymore. Just ask yourselves, why do we have to share so much of our lives with so many "friends"? I know we can filter, and create groups, etc.. but damn...do you really want to spend your life "managing" relationships, to see who sees what? I find that tiresome.

- I don't feel left out of anything, because I keep track of local events using other sources, I read news from faithful websites, and if I need to share anything I just use the old email or show face-to-face any pictures I need of my latest vacation from my phone without having to share anything with anyone.

- I gain more time, less stress, I don't feel overwhelmed to keep track of every social media update. I just don't care. If something important happens I will know it sooner or later.

- I no longer have this need to constantly keep posting photos of what I'm doing outdoors or whatever. I don't have the need to feel validated by anyone but myself.

- But most importantly, I regained my privacy, or at least my social footprint is bare none at this point. I'm using uBlock, Firefox, DuckDuckGo and other tools to keep trackers at bay.

I may never completely win this war, but at least my habits aren't being recorded and feed to any ML algorithm.

Any service online, where you do not explicitly pay money for goods/services rendered, you can rest assured that you are paying with data or influence (advertisement).

HN is no different. They control the news, and how the news is displayed. They run the YCombinator venture capital fund. You do not pay them, but they control influence (advertising). I would expect different if I paid YC for news access... But I dont.

Thats how you make another AmigaOS, or Be, I'm sure Atari still has a group of a dozen folks playing with it, too.

The OS's over the past 20 years haven't shown much advancement because the advancement is happening higher up the stack. You CAN'T throw out the OS and still have ARkit. A Big Bloated Mature Moore's Law needing OS is also stable, has hooks out the wazoo, AND A POPULATION USING IT.

4 guys coding in the dark on the bare metal just can't build an OS anymore, it won't have GPU access, it won't have a solid TCP/IP stack, it won't have good USB support, or caching, or a dependable file system.

All of these things take a ton of time, and people, and money, and support (if you don't have money, you need the volunteers)

Go build the next modern OS, I'll see you in a couple of years.

I don't WANT this to sound harsh, I'm just bitter that I saw a TON of awesome, fledgling, fresh Operating systems fall by the wayside...I used BeOS, I WANTED to use BeOS, I'da LOVED it if they'd won out over NeXT (another awesome operating system...at least that survived.)

At a certain level, perhaps what he wants is to leverage ChromeOS...it's 'lightweight'...but by the time it has all the tchotchkes, it'll be fat and bloated, too.

Yes, if you run the popular editor Atom on Linux, you're running an application built atop Electron, which incorporates an entire web browser with a Javascript runtime, so the application is using browser drawing APIs, which in turn delegate drawing to lower-level APIs, which interact with a window manager that in turn relies on X...

Yes, it's complexity atop complexity atop complexity all the way down.

But the solution is NOT to throw out a bunch of those old layers and replace them with new layers!!!

Quoting Joel Spolsky[1]:

"Theres a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: Its harder to read code than to write it. ... The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and theyve been fixed. ... When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work."

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1]: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/

[2]: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/escher/

[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smar...

[4]: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/sysui/#important-armadillo-...

[5]: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/mondrian/

He contradicts his core assertion (OS models are too complex and layered) with his first "new" feature.

Nearly everything on this manifesto has been done before, done well, and many of his gripes are completely possible in most modern OS's. The article just ignores all of the corner cases and conflicts and trade-offs.

Truly understanding the technology is required to develop useful and usable interfaces.

I've witnessed hundreds of times as designers hand off beautiful patterns and workflows that can't ever be implemented as designed. The devil is in the details.

One of the reasons Windows succeeded for so long is that it enabled people to do a common set of activities with minimal training and maximizing reuse of as few common patterns as possible.

Having worked in and on Visual Studio, it's a great example of what happens when you build an interface that allows the user to do anything, and the developer to add anything. Immensely powerful, but 95% of the functionality is rarely if ever used, training is difficult because of the breadth and pace of change, and discovery is impossible.

It's hard but not that hard; tons of experimental OS-like objects have been made that meet these goals. Nobody uses them.

What's hard is getting everyone on board enough for critical inertia to drive the project. Otherwise it succumbs to the chicken-and-egg problem, and we continue to use what we have because it's "good enough" for what we're trying to do right now.

I suspect the next better OS will come out of some big company that has the clout and marketing to encourage adoption.

Also:

> I know I said we would get rid of the commandline before, but I take that back. I really like the commandline as an interface sometimes, it's the pure text nature that bothers me. Instead of chaining CLI apps together with text streams we need something richer [...]

I can't agree with that, it is the plain text nature of the command line that makes it so useful and simple once you know a basic set of commands (ls,cd,find,sed,grep + whatever your specific task needs). Plain text is easy to understand and manipulate to perform whatever task you need to do. The moment you learn to chain commands and save them to a script for future use, the sky is the limit. I do agree with using voice to chain commands, but I would not complain about the plain text nature and try to bring buttons or other forms of unneeded complexity to command-line.

(It's painfully naive, poorly reasoned, has inaccurate facts, is largely incoherent, etc. Even bad articles can serve as a nice prompt for discussion, but I don't even think this is even good for that. I don't we'd ever get past arguing about what it is most wrong about.)

> Bloated stack.True, there are options which author hasn't discussed.

> A new filesystem and a new video encoding format.Apple created new FS and video format. These are far more fundamental changes to be glossed over as trivial in a single line.

> CMD.exe, the terminal program which essentially still lets you run DOS apps was only replaced in 2016. And the biggest new feature of the latest Windows 10 release? They added a Linux subsystem. More layers piled on top.Linux subsytem is a great feature of Windows. Ability to run bash on Windows natively, what's the author complaining about?

> but how about a system wide clipboard that holds more than one item at a time? That hasn't changed since the 80s!Heard of Klipper and similar app in KDE5/Plasma. Its been there for so long and keeps text, images and file paths in clipboard.

> Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem?Hard links and soft links??

> Filesystem tagsAre there!

What I feel about the article is: OSes have these capabilities since long, where are the killers applications written for these?

Edit: I believe the state of the art in this area is the UI Automation API for Windows. In case the author is reading this thread, that would be a good place to continue your research.

Well. Then you get Spotlight (on OSX, at least) - system-wide file/metadata/content search.

It's great! It's also quite slow at times. Slow (and costly) to index, slow to query (initial / common / by-name searches are fast, but content searches can take a second or two to find anything - this would be unacceptable in many applications), etc.

I like databases, but building a single well-performing one for all usages is quite literally impossible. Forcing everyone into a single system doesn't tend to add up to a positive thing.

While I agree with the author that more innovation is needed on the desktop; I think that the essay is very disinformed.

For example, Squeak can be seen as an OS with very few layers: everything is an object, and sys calls are primitives. As user you can play with all the layers, and re-arrange the UI as you want.

So why the idea didn't took off? I don't know exactly (but I have my hypothesis). There are many factors to balance, those many factors are the ones that makes design hard.

One of those factors is that people tend to put the wrong priorities of where innovation should be. A good example is what the author mentions as priorities for him. None of the items mentions fundamental problems that computer users face today (from my perspective of course).

It is very tempting to see all the complexity of an open system and wish it was more straight forward; more like a closed system. But this is a dangerous thing to advocate. If we all only had access to closed systems, who would we be seceding control to? Do we really want our desktop operating systems to be just another fundamentally closed off walled garden?

Autodesk Inventor and Blender are at opposite ends of the "use the keyboard" range. In Inventor, you can do almost everything with the mouse except enter numbers and filenames. Blender has a 10-page list of "hotkeys". It's worth looking at how Inventor does input. You can change point of view while in the middle of selecting something. This is essential when working on detailed objects.

On top of this, the trade-off of creating an entirely new OS is enormous. Sure, you can make an OS with no apps because it's not compatible with anything that's been created before, and then you can add your own editor and your own web browser and whatever. And people who only need those things will love it. But if you need something that the OS developer didn't implement, you're screwed. You want to play a game? Sorry. You want to run the software that your school or business requires? Sorry. Seriously, don't throw out every damn thing ever made just to make a better suite of default apps.

However, both seemed to end up with the same fundamental flaw: he's either underestimating or understating how absurdly difficult most of what he's suggesting is. It's all well and good saying that we can have a standardized system for email, with everything being passed over messages, but what about everything else? It's extremely difficult to standardize an opinionated system that works for everything, which is exactly why so many operating system constructs are more general than specific. For this to all hang together you would have to standardize everything, which will undoubtedly turn into an insane bureaucratic mess. Not to mention that a lot of software makers actively fight against having their internal formats open.

Maybe by starting to build command-line apps and see how good the idea works (cross-platform would be nice). I guess that the resulting system would have some similarities with RxJava, which allows to compose things together (get asynchronously A & B, then build C and send it to D if it contains not Foo).

If an app would talk to a data-service it would no longer have to know where the data is coming from or how it got there. This would allow to build a whole new kind of abstractions, e.g. data could be stored in the cloud and only downloaded to a local cache when frequently used, just to be later synced back to the cloud transparently (maybe even ahead of time because a local AI learned your usage patterns). I know that you can have such sync-things today, they are just complicated to setup, or cost a lot of money, or work only for specific things/applications, also they are often not accessible to normal users.

Knowing how to interact with the command-line gives advanced users superpowers. I think it is time to give those superpowers to normal users too. And no, learning how to use the command-line is not the way to go ;-)

A capability-services based OS could even come with a quite interesting monetization strategy by selling extra capabilities, like storage, async-computation or AI services, beside of selling applications.

Having use the newest iPad Pro 10.5 ( along with iOS 11 beta ), the first few hours were pure Joy, after that were frustration and anger flooding in. Because what I realize, is this tiny little tablet, costing only half a Macbook Pro or even iMac, limited by Fanless design with lower TDP, 4GB of memory, no Dedicated GPU, likely much slower SSD, provides a MUCH better user experience then the Mac or Windows PC i have ever used, that is including the latest Macbook Pro.

Everything is fast and buttery smooth, even the Web Browsing experience is better. The only downside is you are limited touch screen and Keyboard. I have number of times wonder If I can attach a separate monitor to use it like Samsung Desktop Dock.

There are far too many backward compatibility to care for with both Windows and Mac. And this is similar to the discussion in the previous Software off Rails. People are less likely to spend time optimizing when it is working good enough out of the box.

I really do think applications should try to zero-in on a few standard configuration file formats - I really don't have a strong preference on one (although avoiding XML would be nice). It makes the system uniform and makes it easier to move between applications. Of course, applications can add extended sections to suit their need.

Another related point is the location of configuration files - standard Linux/Unix has a nice hierarchy /etc/ for and /usr/local/etc and others for user-specific configurations (I'm sure Windows and OS X should have a similar hierarchy too) but different applications still end up placing their configuration files in unintuitive places.

I find this lack of uniformity disturbing - especially because it looks so easy (at least on the surface) to fix and the benefits would be nice - easier to learn and scriptable.

A last unrelated point - I don't see why Linux distributions cannot standardize around a common repository - Debian and Ubuntu both share several packages but are yet forced to maintain separate package databases and you can't easily mix and match packages between them. This replication of effort seems more ideological than pragmatic (of course, there probably are some practical reasons too). But I can't see why we can't all pool resources and share a common 'universal' application repository - maybe divide it into 'Free', 'Non-Free', 'Contrib/AUR' like granular divisions so users have full freedom to choose the packages they want.

Like other things, I think these ideas have been implemented before but I'm a little disappointed these haven't made it into 'mainstream' OS userlands yet.

Mail.app supports plugins.

> Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem?

Soa hardlink?

> Why don't my native apps do that?

Dynamic text lets you do this, but it's mobile-only currently.

> have started deprecating the Applescript bindings which make it work underneath

Since when?

Let's assume for a moment there weren't the problem with JavaScript performance (because, for example, web assembly can replace it).

Then electron is a platform everyone can build his applications on. And once that happens, operating systems are free to shed the library cruft.

This is just one possible migration path, and I am not saying it's going to happen or that it is even a good idea.

But if you have to write cross platform apps it seems, that this has clear advantages.

 Window Managers on traditional desktops are not context or content aware, and they are not controlable by other programs.

What does this mean? Some can be via IPC

we can already do this with virtualization (and i make use of it extensively)

First would be to forget the whole idea of resizable windows. Windows should only tile automatically. A tab interface have shown that a simple task bar is just enough.

File explorers would have their columns be resized automatically... I can't believe how both OS X and windows 10 still have this wrong.

Ultimately I would let applications use hardware directly instead of relying on how the OS do things. This would increase cross compatibility and developer freedom. Good bye Qt and all those horrors of the past.

Not to mention how there are millions of small utilities and functionalities like windirstat, foobar2000 that would be ideal to make the OS a little more useful.

That's because of Open Source OSes though, which vendors don't care about and volunteers aren't enough and able to match the work needed for all things to play out of the box. Nothing about this particular example has anything to do with OS research or modern OSes being behind.

>Here's another example. Atom is one of the most popular editors today. Developers love it because it has oodles of plugins, but let us consider how it's written. Atom uses Electron, which is essentially an entire webbrowser married to a NodeJS runtime. That's two Javascript engines bundled up into a single app. Electron apps use browser drawing apis which delegate to native drawing apis, which then delegate to the GPU (if you're luck) for the actual drawing. So many layers.

Again, nothing related to modern OSes being inadequate. One could use e.g. Cocoa and get 10x what Electron offers, for 10x the speed, but it would be limited in portability.

>Even fairly simple apps are pretty complex these days. An email app, like the one above is conceptually simple. It should just be a few database queries, a text editor, and a module that knows how to communicate with IMAP and SMTP servers. Yet writing a new email client is very difficult and consumes many megabytes on disk, so few people do it.

First, I doubt one of the reasons "few people do it" is because it "consumes many megabytes on disk" (what? whatever).

Second, the author vastly underestimates how hard it is handling protocols like IMAP, or writing a "text editor" that can handle all the subtleties of email (which include almost a whole blown HTML rendering). Now, if he means 'people should be able to write an emailer easily iff all constituent parts where available as libraries and widgets', then yeah, duh!

>Mac OS X was once a shining beacon of new features, with every release showing profound progress and invention. Quartz 2D! Expose! System wide device syncing! Widgets! Today, however Apple puts little effort into their desktop operating system besides changing the theme every now and then and increasing hooks to their mobile devices.

Yeah, and writing a whole new FS, a whole new 3D graphics stack, memory compression, seamless cloud file storage, handoff, move to 64-bit everything, bitcode, and tons of other things besides. Just because they are not shiny, doesn't mean there are no new futures there.

>A new filesystem and a new video encoding format. Really, that's it?

Yeah, because a new FS is so trivial -- they should also rewrite the whole kernel at the same time, for extra fun.

>Why can I dock and undock tabs in my web browser or in my file manager, but I can't dock a tab between the two apps? There is no technical reason why this shouldn't be possible. Application windows are just bitmaps at the end of the day, but the OS guys haven't built it because it's not a priority.

There's also no real reason this should be offered. Or that it should be a priority. If every possible feature someone might thing was "a priority" OSes would be horrible messes.

>Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem? Why is it fundamentally hierarchical? Why can I sort by tags and metadata?

Note how you can do all those things in OS X (you can have aliases and symlinks and hard links, can add tags and metadata, and can sort by them). And in Windows I'd presume.

And it's "fundamentally hierarchical" because that's how we think about stuff. But it also offers all kind of non hierarchical views, Spotlight and Tags based views for one.

>Any web app can be zoomed. I can just hit command + and the text grows bigger. Everything inside the window automatically rescales to adapt. Why don't my native apps do that? Why can't I have one window big and another small? Or even scale them automatically as I move between the windows? All of these things are trivial to do with a compositing window manager, which has been commonplace for well over a decade.

Because bitmap assets. Suddenly all those things are not so "trivial".

There are good arguments to be made about our OSes being held back by legacy cruft (POSIX for one) and new avenues to explore, old stuff that worked better than what we have now, etc.

But TFA is not making them.

I've always thought the next evolution of the OS was to be a hypervisor for application containers that can communicate via a common message bus.

There's a lot of interesting experimentation in OS-land. BeOS (and it's successor, Haiku [1]) are called out explicitly by the author. BeOS/Haiku use this idea of apps as modules to expose functionality across a message bus. Redox OS (A Rust OS), is built on the microkernel concept. These are both kind of on the fringe at the moment, so let me bring up one more platform that many of us use daily: the modern web browser.

Chrome (and Firefox, ChromeOS, etc.) actually do take many of these concepts to heart. Now, I know more about Chrome than Firefox or ChromeOS, so let me set those aside for a moment.

- "Everything done via a message bus." This is Chrome extensions in a nutshell.- "Dockable tabs in any window."- "A CLI with structured data." Sorta Chrome debugger+JS. With some effort, this could be a lot more powerful. The author's desire to pipe a video call to an analysis service is a fairly tough requirement here and obviously wouldn't fly in Chrome either, but that isn't to say that it'd be impossible.- "A built-in document database." (IndexedDB)- "Working sets." Chrome profiles -- try them!- "Apps become Modules." This is more of a miss, but if you squint enough through a powerful enough lens, the APIs exposed by Chrome to extensions/webpages are a lot like this. That said, given that everything on Chrome is more site-centric vs. computer-centric, things are namespaced vs. Spotify being able to execute arbitrary queries for MP3s.

Now, I'm not going to say that Chrome is IdealOS. There is much from that vision that's missing. And I'd also say that webapps just aren't always an acceptable substitute for native applications. Through massive wastes of computing power, we are getting closer (see: Slack, Atom, all things Electron). We aren't there yet. I'll always take a native app if it's written decently.

It seems to me like in general much of this vision is being expressed through disparate efforts, but only a few are tackling the idea of replacing the full OS. Chrome seems best poised in many ways because it's already on your existing OS. Yes, it's having to use the underlying OS' APIs and such, but you can argue it's just one more layer. ChromeOS seems to do a pretty good job of eliminating even that.

In general, I'm excited to see discussion on operating systems. The OSes used by the general public are already here: Android and iOS. It's up to us to build a better future for those of us using workstations

Disclaimer: I do not work on Chrome, but do work for its parent organization. My views in no way reflect that of my employer's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_(operating_system)

A lot of other things author talks about keep the ecosystems going. The ecosystems, esp key apps, are why many people use these desktop OS's. Those apps and ecosystems take too much labor to clean slate. So, the new OS's tend not to have them at all or use knock-offs that don't work well enough. Users think they're useless and leave after the demo.

The market effects usually stomp technical criteria. That's why author's recommendations will fail as a whole. "Worse Really is Better" per Richard Gabriel.

> https://joshondesign.com//images2/lift-window.png

Is this a sarcasm? Because it is complete garbage.

Sell one oxycontin and you're drug dealer; sell a million and you're a C level.

https://www.opendoctor.io/opioid/highest/

The article is pure speculation. They did not correlate the payments made to doctors with the prescriptions those doctors made, nor even more broadly with national prescription rates.

This article just makes the implied assumption that doctors push pills onto patients. I don't discount that at one time doctors may have been incentivized to play it fast and loose with pain pills, but those days are LONG gone now.

I would like to see research on the population in terms of predisposition to addiction and susceptibility to chemical dependence.

A 46 yo M with diabetes, hypertension, a 30 pack year smoking history, and low back pain that has been treated with oxycodone ever since a failed back operation 1.5 years ago presents to your office for routine follow-up. It's 10am, the hospital allots 15 minutes for routine appointments, and your next patient is in the waiting room. You are his physician -- what do you prioritize?

Smoking, diabetes, and hypertension are a perfect storm for a heart attack in the next 10 years, so how much time do you want to spend optimizing antihypertensive meds and glucose control? You could talk to him about quitting smoking, which is pretty high-yield since it would lower his cardiovascular and cancer risk. On the other hand, he doesn't seem particularly motivated to quit right now.

You would like to see him exercise more and eat better, since his blood sugars are not too bad yet, and you might be able to spare him daily insulin injections. But, his back pain is so bad that walking is difficult and exercise is out of the question. Tylenol and ibuprofen only "take the edge off". Oxycodone is the one thing that seems to really help. He asks you to refill his prescription, especially because "the pain is so bad at night, I can't sleep without it".

His quality-of-life is already poor, and it would become miserable if you took away his opioid script without providing some other form of pain control. You believe that he might benefit from physical therapy and time. He is willing to try PT, but he is adamant that he will not be able to "do all of the stretches and stuff" without taking oxycodone beforehand.

You now have 7 minutes to come up with a plan he agrees on (you're there to help him, after all), put in your orders, and read up on the next patient. How do you want to allocate your time? What if you suggest cutting down on his oxycodone regimen and he pushes back?

I don't know if there is a good answer. But these situations happen all the time, and someone has to make a decision. Most doctors are normal people. The different backgrounds, personalities, willingness to engage in confrontation or teaching, and varying degrees of concern for public health vs. individual patient needs, etc. lead to a variety of approaches. In the end, I think that pharma payments have a marginal effect on most doctors who have families, bosses, insurance constraints, a full waiting room, and are faced with the patient above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...

My father broke his thumb a few weeks ago, while operating a woodchipper. After getting a cast, he went to see a specialist, who recommended that K-wires be surgically installed - small metal rods that go into his thumb, until it heals, at which point they will be pulled out.

He got local anesthetic, got the wires installed, and got sent home. Because he lives in Canada, they gave him nothing for the pain. Two days later, the pain died down, and he's now waiting for the bones to heal.

In America, I can't imagine that doctor would get many positive reviews from his patients, for not prescribing painkillers. Market forces would push him towards over-prescribing... And statistically, some of his patients will become addicted.

Does anyone have an insight into this?

Looks like Github's last valuation was at 2BUSD. That also seems high, but I can understand this somewhat better as they have revenue, and seem to be much more widely used/accepted than Docker. In addition to that I can see how Github's social features are valuable, and how they might grow into other markets. I don't see this for Docker...

My second reaction was incredulity at how ridiculous my first reaction was.

We were able to get the environments set up and the app running, but the networking is so slow to be pretty much unusable. Something is wrong with syncing the FS between docker and the host OS. We were using the latest Docker for Mac. If the out of the box experience is this bad, it's unsuitable for local development. I was actually embarrassed.

Who is the author of aufs or overlayfs? Should these projects work with no recognition while VC funded companies with marketing funds swoop down and extract market value without giving anything back. How has Docker contributed back to all the projects it is critically dependent on?

This does not seem like a sustainable open source model. A lot of critical problems around containers exist in places like layers, the kernel and these will not get fixed by Docker but aufs or overlayfs and kernel subsystems but given most don't even know the authors of these projects how will this work?

There has been a lot of misleading marketing on Linux containers right from 2013 here on HN itself and one wishes there was more informed discussion that would correct some of this misinformation, which didn't happen.

 struct Point { x: i32, y: i32 } fn main() { println!("Hello, world!"); let pt = Point { x: 1, y: 2 }; println!("{} {}", pt.x, pt.y); let v = vec![ pt ]; let vpt = &v[0]; println!("{} {}", vpt.x, vpt.y); }

Even more weird is that if I add a type declaration to "let vpt" (specifying the same type that would be inferred), then completion works.

That sounds like a really basic scenario... I mean, type inference for locals is pervasive in Rust.

try this in your editor

 let x = 4; if x = 5 {}

The more I see interpreted languages being compiled for speed purposes, and compiled languages being interpreted for ease-of-use purposes, desktop applications becoming subscription web applications (remember mainframe programs? ), and then web applications becoming desktop applications (electron) the more I realize that computing is closer to clothing fads than anything else. Can't wait to pickup some bellbottoms at my local target.

> So, a joint team from Mozilla and Facebook decided to get started working on a novel mechanism that we believe can dramatically improve the speed at which an application can start executing its JavaScript: the Binary AST.

I really like the organization of the present article, the author really answered all the questions I had, in an orderly manner. I'll use this format as a template for my own writing. Thanks!

Personally, I don't see the appeal for such a thing, and seems unlikely all browsers would implement it. It will be interesting to see how it works out.

(I understand I could use elm, cjs, emscriptem or any other transpirer but I was thinking of ours spent around improving the js vm.

Also, theres immense value in text formats over binary formats in general, especially for open, extendable web standards. Text formats are more easily extendable as the language evolves because they typically have some amount of redundancy built in. The W3C outlines the value here (https://www.w3.org/People/Bos/DesignGuide/implementability.h...). JS text format in general also means engines/interpreters/browsers are simpler to implement and therefore that JS code has better longevity.

Finally, although WebAssembly is a different beast and a different language, it provides an escape hatch for large apps (e.g. Facebook) to go to extreme lengths in the name of speed. We dont need complicate JavaScript with such a powerful mechanism already tuned to perfectly complement it.

[0]: https://github.com/syg/ecmascript-binary-ast/#-2-early-error...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree

> This method would return something like "[sourceless code]".

Sciter contains source code to bytecode compiler. Those bytecodes can be stored to files and loaded bypassing compilation phase. There is not too much gain as JS alike grammar is pretty simple.

In principle original ECMA-262 grammar was so simple that you can parse it without need of AST - direct parser with one symbol lookahead that produces bytecodes is quite adequate.

JavaScript use cases require fast compilation anyway. As for source files as for eval() and alike cases like onclick="..." in markup.

[1] https://sciter.comAnd JS parsers used to be damn fast indeed, until introduction of arrow functions. Their syntax is what requires AST.

My suspicion is it's going to be marginal and not worth the added complexity for what essential is a compression technique.

This project is a prime example of incorrect optimization. Developers should be focused on loading the correct amount of JavaScript that's needed by their application, not on trying to optimize their fat JavaScript bundles. It's so lazy engineering.

You can add the bookmarklet or browser extension. It will let you save complete articles and webpages to your email inbox. If it cannot extract useful text, EmailThis will save the page as a PDF and send it as an attachment.

No need to install apps or login to other 3rd party services.

[1] https://www.emailthis.me

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/547

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/683

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/678

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/675

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/770

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/747

Edit: Formatting

For instance, recently did some CTO interview screenings via phone. It was really easy to set up a Trello board with a card per candidate, drop them in the list matching their current position in the pipeline, attach a resume, recruiter notes, due dates etc. The interview itself I threw as a bulleted list into Workflowy and just crossed things off as they were covered. Took notes in notepad and uploaded to the Trello board at the end. Invited stake holders to view the board and sent out a daily email with progress. Interviewed 8 candidates this way in a total of about 10 hours, including all the time spent prepping and scoring and communicating with the hiring team.

It's great!

I have a free evernote account and don't use it very much but I find it handy for some things such as cooking recipes and walking maps. I think it would also be great for Dave Allen's GTD technique if I could ever be disciplined enough.

If evernote removed the free tier I think I would pay up, the pricing for the personal plans is very reasonable. I'd probably make more use of it too. Humans don't tend to value free stuff.For someone like me I think they'd have had a better chance of turning me into a paying customer if their model was an initial free period followed by having to pay up.But I will never pay up if I can get away with paying nothing.

So if it needs to be mobile, I am using onenote, but have to use the web app in Linux, and search is useless on the web app. So for desktop only, I use Zim. Cross platform, lots of plugins, stores everything in a file system with markdown. I haven't been able to get SVG to render in the notes though, which would be awesome, then I could just edit my diagrams and pictures with Inkscape. I can read the notes on mobile devices as they are just in markdown, but a mobile app really is needed.

Thus, last year I subscribed to Evernote (which provides both features), and I must say that I am extremely satisfied. Moreover, Evernote's integration with Firefox and Android allows me to quickly save web pages for later reading (this might be possible with org-mode, but not as handy as with Evernote, which just require one tap.)

I think that Laverna is interesting for users like me: it provides a web app with a nice interface, it implements the first feature I need (easy photo taking), and if really an Android app is on the way, integration with Android services might allow to save web pages is Laverna using one tap like Evernote.

But for the love of god, why did they make link colour orange instead of the default blue? And why cant it be changed via preferences? They had one job

For simplistic notes, well Google Keep is enough.

Still looking for alternatives :)

It doesn't work so well across devices (especially mobile), so I tend to carry around a small notebook, and then when I'm back at my computer I type anything useful that I'd captured in my notebook into org mode.

Sometimes I just take a picture of my notes in my notebook and then use the inlineimages feature to display the image inline, that works pretty well too although there's no OCR.

It seems to work OK.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gzmd36qe58h0wnw/Screenshot%202017-...

The other alternative sync method offered is Dropbox, and if it's also using the remoteStorage library as the interface as I'm assuming, it would have to depend on their Datastore API, which has been deprecated for more than a year now AFAIK (https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2015/04/deprecating-the...). Is that aspect of the app still functional? If anyone knows any other user-provided data storage APIs like Dropbox Datastore or remoteStorage that's more actively developed and supported, I'd love to hear about them.

The concept of apps built on user-provided and user-controlled data-sources, envisioned by projects like remoteStorage and Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/), has always been immensely appealing to me. If users truly controlled their data, and only granted apps access to the data they need to function (instead of depending on each individual app to host user data in their own locked-off silos), then switching to a different app would be a simple matter of granting another app access to the same pieces of data. Lock-in would no longer be a thing!

Imagine that! We could have a healthy and highly competitive app ecosystem where users choose apps by their own merit instead of by the size of their moat built on nothing but network effects. Newcomers could unseat incumbents by simply providing a better product that users want to switch to. Like a true free-market meritocracy!

Sadly, this is a distant dream because both newcomers and incumbents today realize the massive competitive advantage lock-in and network effects afford them. Incumbents will never give up their moat and allow the possibility of interop without a fight, and newcomers all end up racing to build up their own walled-off data silos because they have ambitions to become an incumbent enjoying a moat of their own one day. Even products that are built on top of open protocols and allow non-trivial interop tend to eventually go down the path of embrace, extend, extinguish, once they reach any significant scale.

I'm starting to think strong legislation around data-portability and ownership may be the only way a future like this could stand to exist, but the incumbents of today and their lobbying budgets will never let that happen.

In Syria outlets like Sham News Network have posted thousands upon thousands of clips. Everything from stories on civilian infrastructure under war, spots on mental health, live broadcasts of demonstrations.

Everything.

Including documenting attacks as they happen and after they have happened. Some of the effected accounts were ones that documented the regime's early chemical weapons attacks. These videos are literally cited in investigations.

All that is needed to get thousands upon thousands of hours of documentation going back half a decade deleted is three strikes.

Liveleak is not a good host for such outlets because it is not what these media outlets are about. Liveleak themselves delete content as well so even if the outlets fit the community it would not be a 'fix.'

If they fucked up something by automation, contacting to human support is hopeless unless you have very influential SNS status or something.

The US position on child pornography comes from the Meese Report during the Reagan administration.[1] The Reagan administration wanted to crack down on pornography in general to cater to the religious base. But they'd run into First Amendment problems and the courts wouldn't go along. So child pornography, which barely existed at the time, was made the justification for a crackdown. By creating ambiguous laws with severe penalties for child pornography and complex recordkeeping requirements, the plan was to make it too dangerous for adult pornography to be made commercially. But the industry adapted, filling out and filing the "2257 paperwork" as required.[2] After much litigation, things settled down, porn producers kept the required records, and DoJ stopped hassling them about this.

So that's how the US got here. That's why it's such a big deal legally in the US, rather than being a branch of child labor law. Japan doesn't have the same political history.

Federated systems are stuck with the basic problem of distributed online social systems:anonymity plus wide distribution empowers assholes. That's why Facebook has a "real name" policy - it keeps the jerk level down.

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015058809065;vi...[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protection_and_Obscenity...

- My users can still talk to its users and see posts from people they follow.

- Posts from that instance don't show up on my "federated timeline" (which is a timeline of all posts made by my users and by the people they follow on other instances; great way to find new interesting people).

- I don't cache any media sent from that instance. The default is to cache images locally: if a user on a tiny instance has 10,000 followers on a busy one, the busy one don't make the tiny instance serve up 10,000 copies of every image.

So again, my users can talk to their users just like normal, but no one on my instance sees anything unless they specifically opt in to, and any content I dislike never travels through my network or gets stored on my server. I'm happy with that arrangement.

I've never seen why child porn should be a exception.

That I would think poorly of somebody for enjoying certain categories of child porn is beside the point.

I mean, I have an iOS app that has about that many MAU, and I consider it to be basically a failure.

> After the enforcement, there will still be high school girls out there who are going to want to earn pocket money, and the men who target these girls wont disappear, either, said an official from the Metropolitan Police Department.

> The police come inside, so there are no more real JK girls at the shop. Most of the business is being arranged over the internet, through enko (compensated dating) services.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-...

Global Internet morality is unworkable.

Edit: sorry for the brevity, pfooti below explains it well.

If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of the city centers? It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.

This example is a bit on the fringe, but it does illustrate the daily struggle of many normal people. 2+ hour commute is insane. And before someone comes in with the "why doesn't she get a new job closer to home?", you know it's not that easy - not to mention unfair to suggest that someone should change their entire life because their profession isn't flavor of the month.

This woman seems to have a really peaceful existence. It would be nice to have such relaxing routines in my own life, especially in the face of stressful realities like a long commute on public transit. It makes me want to develop the fortitude that this woman exercises every single day.

[0]: http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

Sure, traffic can be an issue, but I'd imagine train delays are roughly as big of a problem.

In this case, it looks like her 3hr 20min commute could become 1hr 30min with a bus that goes from Stockton.

Why has nobody done this?

In the 10 years+ before Github, I never even tried to contribute codeeach project had its own workflow, and sending an email somehow felt intimidating. Today, spending an hour here or there to improve it slightly has almost become a guilty pleasure.

So, I guess what I'm saying is: Thank you!

Just a theory, perhaps they bringing in a new professional CEO for an IPO?

I just wanted to mention https://gigalixir.com which is built to solve exactly this problem.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder.

I have not started looking into phoenix as I'm still exploring elixir, but I'm happy to have started learning elixir with koans along with official elixir guide.

"Gos goroutines are neither memory-isolated nor are they guaranteed to yield after a certain amount of time. Certain types of library operations in Go (e.g. syscalls) will automatically yield the thread, but there are cases where a long-running computation could prevent yielding."

goroutines also take up about 10 times the memory.

Flutter looks pretty different from React Native on one side and Cordova/webview based frameworks on the other side. Flutter is not based on webviews, but is also not using the native widgets but instead rendering custom widgets.

To me, this is a little weird. One of the downsides of Webview based apps is that it's harder to align with the native OS look and feel. React Native solves this problem, but Flutter clearly has the same problem.

Thats a pretty serious, and surprising, limitation.

but for other use cases, flutter seems nice (for 90% of app use cases?)

Does anyone have an opinion on whether Flutter would be a better choice? Why?

I also looked at Xamarin but that seems a little in-depth for what I need, which is basically some data-input screens (using standard Web-style controls) and then to upload the data to an API.

Acidophilus generally produces D-lactic acid, while e.g. L casei shirota (Yakult) does not. It pays to take a hard look at the strains in a probiotic.

I don't know why they are so surprised. Given that some sources say the gut constitutes up to 70 percent of the immune system, it should be fairly obvious that improving gut health will have such effects.

Furthermore, you can infer a fairly direct relationship between gut health and lung health based on what happens in the body at altitude: You start urinating more to compensate for the thin air reducing your ability to exhale wastes. The body starts clearing them out of the blood by shunting them to the kidneys.

[1]: https://www.generalbiotics.com/orders/new/

[2]: https://www.generalbiotics.com/science/

I remember the last page article - Stop Bit. One particularly memorable one described how various professionals would search for an elephant. Some I recall are.

- A C programmer would start at the southernmost point in Africa and travel east until they got to the ocean and then move north and head west to the opposite shore, repeating until they had covered all of Africa. An assembler programmer would follow the same strategy but do it on their hands and knees.

- A college professor would prove the existence of an elephant and leave it as an exercise for the students to actually find one.

- A marketing executive would paint a rabbit gray and call it a desktop elephant.

I wonder if I could find that article. I'll have to see if Archive.org is searchable. Or maybe I can find it by searching today: https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/elephant.htm :D

Shit, it's not working...