skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
System76 has a variety of options that ship with Ubuntu:
https://system76.com/laptops
So when you are an entrepreneur, generating demand for your product after the initial penetration to early adopters submarket is more an issue of understanding the sociology of your overall market and the risk aversive inclination of the later adopters. This is similar to "selling" a programming language or a library of useful functions. It seems some kind of analysis of historical behaviour by people is an essential part of successful demand generation. Is there a science of this?
Caato Time Tracker+ for Mac, iPhone and Watch
Why was this flagged? I don't understand why it was submitted in the first place, so I did not upvote it.

However it is no different than submitting new MacBook Pro page. It is OK if it would not gain upvotes, but flagging seems out of place.

Is flagging used instead of non-existing downvoting?
This sort of surface-y anger makes the rounds every time apple does _anything_ to their hardware.
> Considering that Apple revises their hardware builds about every four years, it makes sense to move to strictly USB-C now

This would make a lot more sense if Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C as well. That way, you really could just use one cable for everything. Instead, you need three separate charger for your iPhone, Macbook Pro, and Apple Watch. Oh, and the iPhone comes with lightning-USB-A cables, which means you can't even connect a brand-new iPhone to a Macbook Pro out-of-the-box without getting a dongle.

High-end Android phones like the Nexus 5x, 6P, and Pixel already use USB-C, as do some non-flagship Android phones. It's brilliant - it means I only need to carry one charger for both my phone and my computer, and that charger also can be dismantled if I want to connect my phone to my computer.
> If you're using vim and reaching for the escape key you are doing it wrong imho.

So generations of Vim users are doing it wrong but you have the right answer?
It's a terrible post, and a terrible site (did it break anyone else's back button?)

I gave up on Mac as a development platform back in 2012 when they removed expose and replaced it with that terrible Mission Control garbage. Then I went back to Linux and discovered tiling window managers and haven't looked back. (and yes, I realize there are some good ones for mac now).

But I will say on this post that the escape key is a good point. I use it all the time. Sure you can rebind it, but it's not a useless, SysReq/ScrollLock type key. Most developers will have to rebind it if it doesn't appear on that touch bar thingy.
I've been happily using Macs for 14 years. I routinely do things like burn DVDs, plug in USB and FireWire devices, use external displays, transfer photographs from cameras, etc.

I may be content with a current Mac, but it seems to me that the path Apple is on is moving away from what I personally want. I remain presently undecided, but I am starting to consider non-Apple alternatives for my next computer.

I'm not mad, though. Things change. I wish I could still realistically be using Commodore Amiga computers, but I'm not.
"New technology usurps romanticization of older technology" is not a new and surprising concept. One could replace "pill" and "spring of fresh water" with any technological advancement which took over some earlier activity that a subset of the population found and still finds enjoyable to do. Typewriters and computers, bicycles and cars, making a fire using sticks verses using a stove to cook food even.

In my experience no one who treats that idea as novel ever seems to offer a litmus test to tell if the value of technology trumps the potential enjoyment in doing something manually. Does rimantas use stone or metal tools to cook? But the feeling of spinning the tree branch in your hands against the kindling! How greatly rimantas has lost in their fervor for convenience...
Well, you can survive on Soylent alone, but I'm fairly certain you couldn't survive on milk alone.
I couldn't agree more, this kind of stance is embarrassing from a professional standpoint. It's ridiculous to act like this one special arrangement of plastic on a computer is so crucial to development.
All 'real' developers remap their own modifier keys.
All 'real' developers use full cherry-mx mechanical keyboards.
All 'real' developers write assembly with pen and paper and then print their stack of punchcards once.
etc, etc.
Also, Apple seems to think it has an escape key (see the header pic which clearly shows esc as an option):

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

I don't think it would be very hard for terminal.app (or other apps targeted at developers) to show esc f1 etc along the top when it is open, and it can strictly have better function keys because instead of f4 etc they can be customised to say what they'd actually do.

I agree the fuss over the touch bar is overplayed.
I see another reply saying you can but I've never done it

At one time, back in the Xcode 4.x days I believe, they did support development over WiFi. It didn't seem to be very well tested at the time and got pulled out soon after. They seem to have given up on the idea for some reason but it would be nice to go that route again.
> Where "without any ill effect" includes tooth decay, obesity, and death from kidney damage among others.

Tooth decay: giving your dogs something hard to chew on is essential if you don't relish the idea of brushing your dogs' teeth. If they're not gnawing on actual bones, their teeth aren't get cleaned. Hard chew toys are a good substitute. The only dog I've had with tooth troubles didn't like chewing hard things.

Obesity: that's not a result of an unvaried diet, that's a result of eating too much and/or not enough exercise for the amount of food being given.

Kidney damage: I find it's surprisingly hard to find unbiased information around this that isn't published by pro- and anti-commercial dog food organizations. Even within that subset, documented facts seem rare, and articles read more like scare advertisements to encourage $PREFERRED_FEEDING_METHOD[1]. Anecdotally: after six dogs and three cats that have all lived somewhat to significantly longer than the breed average life span while being fed largely the same food for their entire lives... kidney troubles have never been a problem for us.

1.The closest to consistent info that I could find were statements that high vegetable protein content can cause kidney troubles in older dogs. Even these only showed up on a) "Feed your dog all natural" blog-type-things, b) specialty dog food sellers/manufacturer sites, c) copy lifted from these places largely verbatim and deposited onto other sites.
But it uses C-g as cancel, not Esc.
I am a developer and I have a mechanical keyboard hooked up to the rig, so I seldom use the mac keyboard anyway. My main complaint would be the hardware doesn't seem to get better. The USB-C ports I do see them coming, but given my 2014 MBP is still running strong, I will hold on to upgrade for a little longer.

Nah, I am completely out from Linux around 5 years ago. Had spent my fair share of time and effort (~10years) using Linux, solving some corner cases that hit me along the way. To me, using Linux is just like driving on a highway with sink holes sprinkled along, the ride will be gay and smooth _until_ you hit those holes. Either you fix those yourself (It is open-source remember!?) or hope for some kind souls to help out.

Thanks but thanks...
The killer is that the lack of feedback on that bar would probably make it difficult to touch type the "buttons" on that classic layout
> or an USB-C to Lightning cable.

How is that different in any way?
Lots of people point out about touch bar being context sensitive. Why cant each app have context sensitive widget bar. Or why not just have another context sensitive menu bar which each apps can customize. Are we not getting the same user experience but with a mouse/trackpad instead of a touch bar ?
Edit locally and copy the file?

Or you could use nano.
I do some programming (Xcode and VS Code), I do some 3D art (blender, substance), and I do some photography (Lightroom). Not all of those programs will support it at launch, but I expect they will sooner or later. And the new screen sounds fabulous (I have a wide gamut external screen already, though it's AdobeRGB instead of P3, the MacBook will do better in reds and not quite as well in greens). I wish it were cheaper, sure, but this looks like a fantastic computer to me.

Yeah, you need some different cables. You might need to rebind some hotkeys. It might take a while for some pieces of software to support the touch bar properly.

If you don't want to be an early adopter or you can't get over your Vim muscle memory, pick up a refurbished 2015 model and the rest of us can buy a few new USB cables and move on with our lives.
That's not _the_ problem, it just means Soylent isn't for you. Which is cool. I love Soylent 2.0. I'm very happy that I can get a decent chunk of my calories from a vegan source with little effort and lots of convenience.

Maybe it's the way Soylent markets itself, but I don't understand why people are so _personally_ offended by it. Just... don't eat it.
At first I was ornery about the touch bar thing. Then I remembered I'm using a Kinesis Advantage that has soft function keys, which I've touched about 3 times in the past year.
How easy is it upgrading the RAM? I like the look of T560, but it only comes with 8GB.
Browsers and web is frankly getting ridiculous. The modern web has a lot going for it but when moving the web forward people seem to completely forget about the efficiency argument. I wonder how much of the worlds power we waste casually like that.
A lot of non-command-line developer apps use Escape though, like all Jetbrain's IDEs.
On a side note, disregarding experts is most certainly not what Rob Rinehart is doing. They specifically only regard expert, peer-reviewed literature as authoritative sources for formula changes. Trying to depend on your own analysis is a poor substitute for standing on the shoulders of giants.
> True developers used MacBooks?

Yes, three out of four tech companies I've been employed at and many more I've visited have been mac shops.

Your made-up justifications don't even touch on the real reasons people prefer macs a lot of the time; it's UNIX, it's easy to use, and the hardware is high-quality.

I think this might just be bait, but I do hear comments like this all the time off HN, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Depends on your budget:

$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.

$1500 - Dell XPS.

$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)

If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.

All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.
The touch bar is customizable. Surely they will allow users to add an esc key on their touch screen, right?
If it's anything like their existing dynamic stuff, I worry it will be too slow. There are far too many cases where I search for something, see it pop up, go to hit enter, and as I'm hitting enter, Spotlight decides to shift focus to something else. So for their magic toolbar thing to work, they'd have to do something they haven't been able to do in my experience.
> Can they issue rules? Can they prevent deployment? Is it for cars and trucks?

Yes. They are a federal regulatory agency.
Isn't that the problem with Internet discussions in general? It's so rare to find a person whose opinion has changed after reading a different perspective on the Internet.
Two dongles at 49.99$ each make 99.98$ LOL xD
This article is terrible. I am not pleased with the new MBP models but the reasoning in this article is beyond stupid.

1. No Esc and Function keys? They are available and I'd wager you can change the settings on the touch bar to make them available. They demo'd the customizability of the bar. I'm not keen on the bar but it's not because it takes away options, it's because it's unnecessary complexity and will encourage bad application design.

2. No RAM improvements? The RAM is faster. The included RAM has increased. This is just factually wrong.

3. Judging CPUs on clock speed? What is this 1995? Clock speeds have been constant for a decade. The performance still increase and the power consumption improves as well. Come on.

I'm bent out of shape about the new MacBooks because they've gotten rid of one of my top 3 reasons for choosing MBPs for the last 10 years; MagSafe. MagSafe has saved my laptops dozens of times, literally. Removing it means that if I got one of these new machines I would never be able to use it plugged in on my couch. I'd be putting it at too much risk. It means any time you have it plugged in you have to be super conscious of where your power cord is and who's walking by it. They got rid of it I assume just to save a few mm's of thickness?

On top of that the TouchBar is a gimmicky feature I'd never ask for and have no use for. So much of my work is web based and cannot (as far as I know) take advantage of it. It adds tons of unnecessary complexity. Plus I'm sure it doesn't do any favors for battery life.

My rMBP is four years old and for the first time in a decade I'm finding myself not excited to upgrade. The addition of TouchID is nice. The loss of MagSafe and addition of the TouchBar are terrible decisions by Apple and make me question if they know what they're doing.
Ubuntu Phone – new app switcher
While I understand people's frustrations. Couldn't the escape key be on the toolbar when in Vim?
Agree on the speed. I routinely run a bunch of VMs and docker images without any sort of impact.
The reality is also that the quality of users' search results is directly correlated to the skill of the searcher and consequently the quality of their searching process.

Our two statements are not mutually exclusive.
nah it's not bad. Sometimes you just need to reinstall the same audio kernels, etc (depending on your hardware). There are many guides to find compatible hardware
And now you have yet another thing to carry around with you. Making the laptop thinner sure made things more convenient...
I don't believe you can sideload or debug applications over wifi, the comment I replied to was specifically talking about development.
> But the entrepreneur admitted that there were limitations to the data in that sentiment around social media posts is difficult for the system to analyze. Just because somebody engages with a Trump tweet, it doesn't mean that they support him.
How? I just tried it: Made my phone discoverable, paired to it using the Mac's bluetooth preference pane. Xcode (8.1) doesn't list the phone in the "Devices" pane nor does it offer it as a deployment target.
AI Body Scanners Could Solve the Worst Thing About Airports
You should go talk to some surgeons during residency. There are systems in place to mitigate the possibility of mistakes, but they do happen during the learning process for new surgeons.
I really feel most Linux distros were made for developers and development. Whenever I try to do things on Windows and OSX I get insanely frustrated with the amount of friction. It's nice to have an OS that trusts you and lets you make mistakes.
Oh, the exact purpose of forcing married women out of the workforce varied depending on whom you asked. But the wikipedia article does explicitly give

> Marriage bars provided more opportunity for those whom proponents viewed as "actually" needing employment, such as single women.

as a claimed reason for marriage bars, which is actually quite similar to "firing for the purpose of hiring younger people", though it's being spun as for people's good, not to decrease salary expenses.
Not sure if there will be TouchBar user interface toolkit for java applications, but I spend a lot of time in IntelliJ. It would be great if the TouchBar rather than having to remember mappings, could have sets of labels [Step In, Step over...] during an active debug session or a different set during editing or presentation modes. Currently, the solution is to have myriad toolbars and icons bespeckle the window frame, which can be distracting and confusing, and all together take up some valuable laptop screen real estate.
The root zone has always been publicly available.

But isn't it nice that you can cryptographically verify that this is the root-zone with DNSSEC? I'm not sure how you're verifying it using PGP, but I think you mean public key encryption, which is what DNSSEC is using.
not trying to make a fuss out of it, but i feel like assuming the users use of "brah" is gendered is something we should try to avoid. unless you know the poster, in that case disregard this.
I don't understand, this insane hype over the removing the esc key. I use vim on a daily basis, and there are several ways in vim, or in the system to remap the keys. But above all that I'm pretty sure they said yesterday in the presentation that the esc key would just be on the touch bar when the terminal is open. And if that's the case its a simple signal to the OS.
Especially for people who are tied to macOS for iOS development reasons. I guess it is time to look into Hackintoshes again.*

Apple really seems to loath their developers either through active malice or passive indifference. I've wasted too much time reverse engineering Xcode/LLDB/MobileDevice.framework to get automated iOS testing to work (no, XCTest is not adequate). Of course, once my company wanted to move from physical hardware to virtual, we were screwed again by the near total lack of virtualization products for macOS guests. VMWare ESXi seems to be the only player in town for server deployments and that still requires Apple hardware. Sure, go ahead and spend well over $3,000 on their laughable Pro/"server" products that cannot be reasonably placed in a server room. Apparently Apple hasn't heard of the whole "cloud" thing.

* But not really, I would never dream of violating the macOS EULA by running it on non-Apple hardware...
what's so greate about it? Can't tell looking at the home page.
Interesting, but on macOS 10.12.x it must be Karabiner-Elements and at least the UI does not make me replicate this behavior.
I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings.
Haven't we heard this story countless times from projects on sites like Kickstarter before? There is a huge difference between tinkering in your garage and creating a production product.

Whether it's something that falls under government regulations like Hotz's project, or transitioning from a couple of 3D-printed models in your basement to an injection molded factory, making things (at scale and in the real world) is hard.
Yep, ctrl+c is different than esc
Just curious: how many folks can accurately touch-type the Fn-keys? Personally they're too far away from the home row for me to hit accurately, but maybe that's because I use too many different keyboards and they're all slightly different with spacing. The esc key is easy with it being located in the corner, though.

So in my case, I would already look down to hit an F-key, and I imagine functionality such as "compile" would now be represented by a touch button. So no problem there. And point #2 is just ridiculous -- today's MacBook CPUs and Memory are faster and consume less power than they did 6 years ago.
> So when we look at something like this and say "we can't know why the computer did it this way" it almost doesn't make sense. The computer did what it did because it figured out that was the best solution - it doesn't understand the concept of "why".

This idea is what I don't agree with.

At the most basic level, the entire "thought space" of a computer lies within the instructions fed to it by a human programmer. Until we can figure out how to build a general AI, whatever the computer decides to do or ends up doing is completely bounded by the content of the instructions. This implies that, given enough resources, a human equipped with a debugger and an understanding of the instructions e.g. algorithm could reverse exactly why and how a program arrived at a particular result.

> it [the program] doesn't understand the concept of "why"

Oh yeah, it doesn't "understand" the concept, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make decisions (branches) based on some parameters (inputs or intermediate values). In other words, there is in fact a "why"! So if we can step through the sequence of branches executed and their results, we can understand "why" even if the program itself can't do that.
Always the same thing with Apple, you need to pay extra (actually premium) to get the things that used to be standard.
You don't even need to rebind the escape key. I've been using ^[ for years, and it works in basically all standard terminals and vims as the escape key.
Totally agree with you. Ubuntu needs to have a mainstream manufacturer to go big. MBP is perfect so far because of the combo of UNIX and Office products and support for various softwares.
The dude is brilliant no doubt... But this space requires brilliance and a lot of spine. That is what makes someone like Musk so unique. Someone thats willing to risk it all, and won't let doors closing in their face and public opinion hinder them. I hope Hotz can put his ego aside and go work with someone that can handle the bureaucracy and red tape. He is surely a prodigy and it would be a shame if the world can't benefit from his ideas.
Wouldn't it be even nicer if you had an Insert/Cmd mode key instead, which showed which mode you were currently in and let you toggle?

The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.
You may never use the Fn and ESC keys (I hardly do either), but this does add to the list of events developers now need to handle in order to develop cross-platform compatible software.