This is incorrect. The oligarchs took vk.com away from Pavel Durov (the founder of vk.com and later Telegram) by force with some help from FSB, then banished him from Russia. Both Pavel Durov and Telegram are now out of the reach of these oligarchs, and Durov has no desire to aid people who robbed and exiled him.
Oddly enough, your exilee friend Pavel has been a regular sight in St. Petersburg despite supposedly eluding the reach of the Russian authorities
https://tjournal.ru/52954-durov-back-in-ussr
>Durov has no desire to aid people who robbed and exiled him.
It seems strange to think that he'd have a choice.
And anyway, Telegram is designed in a manner which allows its operators to easily read ~99% of the conversations between users. The same is not at all true of Signal or Whatsapp. Do you think that's a coincidence?
It's cute that you link to lenta.ru as if it's undoubtedly a reliable source. Wikipedia says:
"On March 12, 2014 the owner, Alexander Mamut, fired the Editor-in-Chief Galina Timchenko and replaced her with Alexey Goreslavsky. 39 employees out of the total 84, including Director-general Yuliya Minder, lost their jobs. This includes 32 writing journalists, all photo-editors (5 people) and 6 administrators. The employees of Lenta.ru issued a statement that the purpose of the move was to install a new Editor-in-Chief directly controlled by the Kremlin and turn the website into a propaganda tool. Dunja Mijatović, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, referred to the move as a manifestation of censorship."
I'm not sure what your point is, but to me this makes it more likely that this is an article made to smear Durov than anything else considering it's literally a government mouthpiece.
Fusion propulsion would be very beneficial to any space operations beyond the Earth's orbit. I think NASA have a project investigating this technology.
Was it bad enough to abandon all investments made into its development and jump to the less successful competing platform instead of incrementally improving MeeGo/Maemo?
Yes. It suffered from the same problem as all of Nokia's home grown software. The performance was shockingly bad - in an era of jelly scrolling, it was still using janky scroll-bars.
It was clearly made by disparate teams who didn't talk to each other. The design language was all over the place, the radio performance inadequate, and there was no sensible way to develop or release apps for it.
Nokia made brilliant firmware, and amazing hardware. But they simply didn't have the ability to design beautiful, usable software.
Personally, I'd have gone with Android. But you don't hire a Microsoft guy for anything other than getting in bed with MS.
I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.
As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.
The N8 wasn't their last hurrah with Symbian, far from it. There was a massive difference in usability between that and the later Symbian Belle releases, and they were on a pretty rapid upward trajectory. Those last versions never reached the N8 (not enough memory?) but later Symbian models like my 700 did get them.
Symbian was always likely to be clumsy, but I was surprised how well they made it work by the end. (I should say, my Nokia 700 was my first and only Symbian phone, and I came into it expecting the worst, having heard a lot from other developers.)
I'm sure the N8 lost them a lot of fans though. I had some friends who were positively angry about it.
The choice to go with Microsoft was reasonable; a way to distinguish themselves from all the other (unprofitable) Android manufacturers. But the whole execution of the plan from both Nokia and Microsoft was terrible.
Nintendo and Sony are a tiny insignificant speck of the market compared to all the OpenGL ES compatible devices available. I guess every smartphone vendor not called Apple is ran by Khronos idealists. Besides, the latest Nintendo device officially supports Vulkan.
I thought "serious" meant at least one million error-corrected qubits or so, and it seems to me that we're at least two decades away from this. The article is talking about the 50 qubits milestone without proper error correction.
Why do you think so many qubits would be needed in order for it to be serious? The article quotes quantum computer researchers as saying 50-100 qubits could perform computations that are intractable on any classical computer. I'm inclined to believe them, the state space grows way faster than linearly as you entangle more particles.
I presume you are talking about ScriptX created by an Apple spin-off Kaleida Labs? I'm reading about it right now, and I don't see any specific features useful for language-oriented programming, not even Lisp-like macros. From what I can see it doesn't seem to encourage this approach to software development at all, it looks like some kind of Smalltalk derivative with multiple inheritance bolted on.
"Discussions about race/gender" is also political discussion, it's very strange that the author doesn't understand this unless he has some implicit intentions here and separates these topics on purpose.
A good example of the Hacker News reaction to gender topics (and no relation to partisan politics whatsoever) is what happened when a YC engineer launched a online community for women: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159808
Political discussion should be understood to mean discussion about the activities and policies of governments. Discussions about race/gender are far more often about tech companies internal policies, and thus a separate (but related) category.
