skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at the various missing keys and the touch strip, I couldn't help but laugh and cry. Less is more, right? I think we all know this is aimed at casual users, but it's still fun to poke at it.

The first thing that came to mind is any time now that I walk into a coffee shop, if I see someone passing themselves off as a programmer on a new Macbook, I'll know they are just screwing around or otherwise extremely angry (and should not approach). I guess carrying around your own keyboard is going to be more of a thing for people who like to work outside the home/office. As an Emacs user and someone who spent at least some time in Vim and Vi over the years, wow, I can't imagine the inner rage of some people I know if they tried to use this.

The other thing I thought of is hasn't this quite often been a problem for other people who tried similar approaches? For example, we tried the UI with not looking at the main screen with things like the WiiU, did we not? Obviously gaming is different than productivity, but still, the screen is the primary focus. Could we also not just throw dynamic UI like this on in other ways?

A few I've seen/heard of or could be a future tech:

* Remapping an icon or otherwise minimal custom glyphs/text per key.

* Remote style. Ex: Second display like they had with Vista or other things, but via iPhone or other devices - put it next to you, in front, whatever, boom - extra contextual touch screen. Apple even does this for many apps like Logic Pro X.

* Perfecting tactile response better and using a full dynamic keyboard like on some laptops out there right now (but with more mechanical response). Obviously easier said than done.

The problem with all this is I wonder who is looking down so much or wanting to look down. If you have time to look down, is it really such a problem then to use the OS UI to get the same thing done?

Probably the only time most people I know that can actually type decently tend to look down at a keyboard is to orient themselves again in some way. I know sometimes when I switch languages/locales on my machine to type in some other languages, it takes me a second depending on the language. But this tech doesn't help at all with that except giving me a button to flip, that is already a keyboard chord anyway.
Reminder that Apple has a solid history about lying regarding maximum RAM in their hardware.

Wait 'til it's out to get people's actual feedback. ;)
The non-Touch Pro is perfect... except for the lack of ports. If it had 4 USB-C and/or USB/HDMI/etc posts it'd be awesome.
The Highly Sensitive Person
I think Apple is prepping to do away with the keyboard entirely. Within a couple years they will release a refined version of this http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/9/2/12769094/len...

All the keys will be virtual, and they will have haptic feedback. The shallow key travel now is to prepare people, similar to the coke <> new coke conspiracy.

Then they will make the keyboard half of the laptop an ipad. Then they will release two ipads that hinge together. Then they will figure out that ios/macos dichotomy is causing problems and finally go through with some hybridization.
>> If they had "offered a touch screen instead", the users would have to hold their hand horizontally which would get tiring in about 5 minutes and unbearable after 10.

Why do so many Mac users think the presence of a touch screen all of a sudden means using it full time?

I got a Surface Pro when I was still a predominantly Mac user and I only used the touch screen when appropriate, which was for a fraction of a second every now and then. And it worked great.

Using a touchscreen is definitely better than a touchpad in a lot of scenarios because of the ability to directly manipulate content instead of having to navigate to it.
I'm already looking forward to using the touch strip in the "professional" apps like Photoshop, but I really spend a lot more time with IDEs and specifically with Emacs.

One of the frustrating things about my various keyboards is that the function keys are located in slightly different places. I already have to look down to use a specific function key.

Emacs, by default, uses so many of the possible key chords using control and alt and even command modifiers on the Mac keyboard that users are expected to bind their own functions to some of the function keys. I'm wondering if the touch strip will be capable of simplifying my interaction with a complex interface like that presented by Emacs.
> Microsoft really hit it out of the park yesterday.

Did we watch the same event? Microsoft introduced a $3,000 desktop PC in an era when nobody uses desktops anymore. It introduced a minor update to the Surface Book that starts at $2,300 with dual-core CPU, only 8GB of RAM, and last-gen graphics hardware.

For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen, twice the RAM, and a quad-core CPU, and it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park?!
Not anymore. 4 TB3 ports + headphone. (but you can plug adapters into any of the TB3's)
Seems like the mac mini is dead.

I rather liked that one :(
How many people were actually fired or laid off from this? There was a bit of a kerfuffle with temporary unpaid leave and some people working without pay for a bit(they got back pay latter) but nobody lost their job.
538 had an analysis of Bonilla's contract recently:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bobby-bonilla-was-more-t...

They concluded that, by the time his contract is paid off, he'll have received total compensation in line with the market rate for a player of his caliber. The deferred payments also opened up payroll space immediately, allowing the Mets to make successful roster acquisitions.
The most exciting and practical product of the announcement was squeezed in at the end, the oddly named MacBook Pro replacement for the Macbook Air. And when I say exciting I am speaking relatively.

There was no mention of battery life, which is hugely important to me as a notebook user and which I guess I will have to find out from the Apple website once it refreshes.

I just found the whole thing to be kind of weird and underwhelming. Maybe the TouchBar is mind blowing in person. We'll see.
I'm a bit confused. I thought the event showcased a setup with two 5k displays attached to one 15" macbook pro.
Precursor is now open source
I see a headphone jack, that seems downright cowardly.
I wonder what all the people complaining yesterday about Microsoft not using a 7th gen Intel processor instead of a 6th gen are going to say now...

Ultimately, neither one of these product launches could line up their supply chain with Intel's newest processors and nVidia's newest mobile chips. They just weren't ready yet.
Seriously, no 32gb ram option?
I'd like to see some thoughts on "unlimited vacation." How many of the ladies work at companies with this policy, and how do they decide how much to take?
Code dependencies are the devil
13 inch only 8GB? Wat...
-No Mac Mini Update.

I was hoping to get one that supported multiple 4k displays. With the title of "Mac Event" I was anticipating at least 2 Macs updated, not just the MBP.
>Why do so many Mac users think the presence of a touch screen all of a sudden means using it full time?

Who said full time? Full time it would be unbearable in 1 minute. I said unbearable in 10 minutes with casual use in mind: raising your hand now and then to click this or that button.
... Unless you do it via the TESLA NETWORK platform, paying an X% cut of your revenues to TSLA.

This is sharecropping, and is extremely anti-consumer.
I never used Vine myself, but I suspect many eyebrows will be on half-fleek in mourning tonight.
And the better price. I think most 13" Pro and Air users will get this option.
An aside, but I just watched the "design video" on the Apple site. Does Apple and Microsoft use the video production team? The exploded device views and the exploding color dust bombs made it seem like the Apple video and the Microsoft Surface Studio video were made by the same people at the same time. Very much the same look and feel.
> Merkel may not say it directly, but a very serious risk is if Google, Facebook or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others.

Amusingly enough, Europe already does this through their 'right to be forgotten' laws. Criminals routinely use it to hide their past indiscretions.

People can also use internet search engines to determine when the German government is lying to them, scandalous!
You know ED heavily dramatizes stuff right? (It's in the name) They also have a huge hate boner for Wikipedia in my experience. Anyway, I think it's unfair to call the community cancerous when in this case archive.is was spamming Wikipedia with bots. Spam from any website is spam, regardless of how useful, and in this case it's a severe breach of the community's trust. Anyway, archive.is was recently removed from the blacklist, so it's silly to paint the whole community as "cancerous", which is also a juvenile term to use.
Well, you -know- the Surface Studio doesn't have an emoji keyboard.
I'm still using a 2008 Macbook for most of my development. You'd be surprised how much OSX can do with little resources.

That being said I wouldn't buy a new laptop without a quad core.
Try touch typing on phone before you start to believe that.
The 15" is quad core i7, the 13" is dual core i5.
kinda reminiscent of the 12 year old Nintendo DS display. and in that I suspect developers will by constantly trying to find a purpose, never to much avail beyond some hotkeys, that only hunt and peck typists could appreciate. remember the uber lusted, and uber expensive optimus keyboards?
i think we need a policy where people start to understand problems as human issues, that ALL humans can experience and not issues related to a particular group. e.g. "but that's simply not possible if the managers or HR personnel are religious conservatives".
Yeah, I would consider retiring my Air for one of the new Pros, but I'll have to spend ~$300 replacing power cords (home, office, backpack), monitor adapters (backpack, around office, at home), while still having to keep the old chargers and adapters due to my old work computer. That dissuades me.

At the office - this now means that the conference room adapters, power cords, etc will have to be swapped out as soon as a new employee starts.
From a business perspective, you're right enough. Academic research is not business oriented -- and Thompson was saying that it should not be.

When discovered, there was nothing particular monitizable about quaternions, and they were not found as a consequence of any business enterprise looking for new tools -- but Hamilton didn't starve to death because he failed to capitalize on them. 80 years later, suddenly we rediscover the fact that we've solved gimbal lock and can easily describe quantum states.
They did.
Re: the wide gamut display

I really really hope there's proper sRGB emulation for those of us who want to make content for the 99.99% of users out there.

Edit: not every app is color managed
Installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the EULA. Sure, Apple don't seem to care about it at the moment, but it's still technically something you can be sued over.

Downloading macOS in the first place is also a violation of copyright law if you don't own either a Mac or a copy of OS X 10.7. It's also probably a violation of the Mac App Store TOS if you don't own a Mac, which I guess could lead to getting kicked out of the Apple Developer Program if they ever start cracking down on Hackintoshes.
Apple catered to power users for years with the MBP. That was the entire point of the device and why many programmers said it was the best laptop on the market. I'm not saying it was necessarily a good market decision (though you'll see no shortage of MBPs in the bay area) but that was the strategy. Now that's clearly changing.
I'm sure it's a great machine, but disappointed that it's still capped at 16GB (since there have been lightweight machines like the XPS15 that support 32 for a bit)
The issue is there that an uneducated person cannot know if an 'expert' is actually an 'expert'.
No USB-C port? That's I call consistency!
how about less about what you're going to do, and more actually doing it.

you're all idiots.
Ask HN: How should I dive back into Rails after a long haitus?
Background: I've always worked in operations. I dug into RoR years ago, when it was the exciting new technology. I learned Ruby, worked through the rails tutorials, and made a few projects using Rails at that time (mostly for personal and internal use). I learned enough javascript to get by as well.

None of this was ever my core job responsibility. After a while I moved back to Python. I did a few things with Django, before basically being pushed into a pure operations role.

Over the last five years, my career has stagnated. I still do some python scripting for operations-y tasks, but I'm woefully outdated when it comes to the modern web.

My employer has an opening for a rails developer. I know my resume is thin on this front, but I think I have a shot because I'm an internal candidate who is generally well respected based on my other work in the organization. I might be able to convince them to take a chance on me in this role.

Based on reading HN, Rails seems like a bit of a dinosaur now, but then again, so am I, so perhaps we're made for each other? So if you're me, and you want to ramp back up fast (like, in time for a job interview...) what do you do next? What is it that I need to know, right away?
Three Myths about Sales
If it was a dig at climate research, it would have been 30 years, not ten.
Yes, I've never once thought about my MPBr "This beast, it's just too thick!" Honestly the only improvements I would like are the following:

1. Stop making new power connector standards.
2. Stop making power adapters that fray after a year.
3. Increase battery life.
4. *Add* at least one standard USB port.
5. Decrease display bezel.
6. Increase RAM and HDD to 32G and 10TB.
I hadn't even thought that far yet. All of my Apple cables would need Apple adapters. Every future Apple cable is going to need an adapter back to USB 2.0... facepalm
Wow. I never thought I'd have to write an AppArmor profile for tar.
I think I was a bit bit sleepy this morning, what I meant was "Foreign Affairs". I always mix them up. You're right about FP.
Because then people would complain that Apple isn't innovating.

Also, there are function keys if you hold down the function button, just like the default behavior of the function buttons on the current macbooks
Thats not the same thing, at all.

The only part that's similar is the key faces can change. They're still physical keys that press individually. It's not multi touch, a key can't suddenly become a slider.
So, finally caught up to the original Barnes & Noble nook with it's ribbon display and touchscreen.

http://cdn.toptenreviews.com/rev/prod/ce/48731-barnes-noble-...

(Just kidding!)
It looks like I'll be waiting for the 2nd gen of this.

Gen 2 wishlist:

- Something more than 16GB RAM

- Nvidia GPU (always had issues with ATI)

- Cheaper option with no Touch Bar

- MagSafe power
I'll take that for a yes!
Is the Touch ID sensor the new power button?

When I buy it, how am I supposed to power it up?

I feel stupid and old just for asking this question :-(
If you can work at work with a sick child, you can work at home with a sick child.

(For the record, I've had to stay at home with my sub-year-old kid for several days, and I cannot work from home even if she's well. I can't imagine getting anything done with her at the office, either.)
* two colors, yay!

* model with physical keys is shit (2x less USB-C, way worser CPU etc)

* no physical keys for 15"

* http://i.imgur.com/1Y0Elul.png :)

* jack 3.5 in all models - not brave enough
Have you ever heard of "Windows Defender"? They got more than 96.2% of detection rate according to AV Comparatives in September 2016[1].

Have you ever heard of "Windows 10"? They got less CVE vulnerabilities reported in 2016 than Android, Debian, Ubuntu, Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Mac OS X, The Linux Kernel, iOS, even Chrome and Firefox[2].

If these are not examples of "adequate or even reasonable protection", then you got really unrealistic expectations or you're simply hating Microsoft for the sake of hating them.

As I said, it is not possible to deliver bug-free code, and you learn to live with it or you die hating every software vendor in the world.

Just remember, falling in the "I don't need AV, I don't use Windows" fallacy will bite you, and will bite you hard[3].

[1] https://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php

[2] https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php?year=2016

[3] https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/the-kernel-org-hack...
My guess is those are Thunderbolt-connected displays
It's strange that they killed all the port options, but choose to keep the one port that was removed from the iPhone (the headphone jack).

I appreciate that Apple kills off older tech to push the market forward. But, Thunderbolt, USB3, SD cards, nor HDMI strike me as legacy plugs needing a swift transition. I've yet to encounter a USB-C plug in the wild, so this port killing is a misstep.
a great idea
> What do you call a ribbon display that no one has ever done before?

A hindrance, to power users and touch typists.
Admittedly not my phone, but I can touch type on my iPad. Not quickly (is there a way to switch it to dvorak? haven't checked), but it's doable. Probably 50-60 wpm with decent accuracy thanks to autoincorrect.

It feels weird as hell, though. Not getting any sort of finger travel as I press the keys.

EDIT: As well, on my phone (switched to a Nexus, not as familiar with it yet so still feeling it out), I can type pretty quickly without looking directly at the onscreen keyboard. My eyes see it, but my focus is on the text area itself. I imagine this touch bar will be like that for me, it's not so far out of my focal point that it'll totally disappear for me, and glancing at it won't require significant head or eye movement.
Everybody around me (non-devs) just answered they use F5 to reload websites all the time. Are you kidding?
I'm an Emacs user though, so I like it being Control as a modifier/Escape if pressed alone. Just having Caps Lock function as escape wouldn't help.
I cringed when Apple's event started with a video claiming how great their products are for disabled people, just the same as Microsoft did the day before.

I don't recall either of them then going on to build on that with any product/feature announcements...
My single biggest fear was that they would end the MagSafe and that has come to pass. 3 kids, 3 cats, 2 dogs, the MagSafe has saved my existing MacBook Pro so many times.
Where are you shopping?

Florescent microscopes are in the low six figures and others are much more expensive. A confocal microscope is typically several hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially approaching $1M if it has all the bells and whistles. Super-res and high-throughput imaging can also consume essentially infinite amounts of money.

You could probably get a usable brightfield microscope for around a $1,000 but realistically, you're not publishing much with that alone.
Chef Antoine Ware’s Mirliton Crab Cake
and the 15'' is $2299 rip my wallet if I choose to get one and still on 16gb ram
Apple is being run more and more by marketers, rather than by techies.

As a developer, I don't want to see "emojis" on my keyboard, but I do want to be able to plug in any device I need in that exact moment, without looking for a right dongle.

Apple needs to stop sacrificing usability for "looks".
Have you looked into BitLocker?
What do you need 32GB for? Not saying you don't, but what's the use case vs. using someone else's cloud machine in a datacenter?
Sadly I have to agree. I wonder if Jobs really was that much of a visionary that the company is lost for ways to innovate without him.
> I don't see how German or U.S. news media are more under government influence than Google and Facebook.

Remember it was only a couple of decades ago that the CIA was caught mass infiltrating news networks (e.g. Armstrong, etc) and that since then a number of intelligence officials, family members and military allies have filled their board positions and editorial positions.

There’s also the ‘trade’ for access to off-the-record context and stories, suggestions for story edits by the intelligence community on everything related to national security (e.g. Dilanian), the collaboration between the intelligence community and journalists to break stories important for policy positions even if they are specifically disinformation (e.g. Judith Miller and justification to invade Iraq), broadcasting influence centered in the BBG (for instance the hundreds of advertisements in US news supporting the Iraq war that were out of the Kenneth Tomlinson led BBG), the membership of the National Security personnel on the curators of the domestic and international news wire service, and the huge amount of money from US government press centers to news organizations to report on specific items (‘free press’ means press on whatever you can get paid for), and media imbedding rules that prevent journalists from reporting freely on war (rules that we would criticize where they practiced by any other nation).

Josh Earnest, the Press Secretary for President Obama, has bragged about creating echo chambers in the domestic media.

Propaganda protections are widely overestimated in this country. When you look at the legislation and you look at the practice you begin to understand how the law is interpreted and practiced.
> Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do long ago.

I like to imagine where would we be if Wintel never happened. Would we be running multi-core RISC machines running Unix-like OSs since the mid-90's? Would computers be completely different? Would we be running something inspired in Plan 9 or Smalltalk or Lisp Machines?

> It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.

It's because they were so successful we only got consumer-level 64-bit CPUs in 2003 and multi-core ones in 2004 and it took longer for those to become mainstream.

If you see what an Amiga could do in the mid-80's, what Atari was doing with Transputers, you realize Microsoft was not leading - Microsoft compatibility actually held us back.
>The disease they bring home may be something you were exposed to but it will mutate in the child and infect you anyway.

Not true, viruses do not mutate at such a rapid pace. If they did vaccines would be entirely ineffective.

>And there is a reason you can't come back for 24 hours. Many diseases are still contagious after your symptoms have cleared. If you throw up and feel better, it doesn't mean the disease is now gone.

With influenza and the common cold children are no longer contagious after the symptoms have faded. Anything else that is infectious should be treated by a doctor and you should ask him.

"How long can I spread it?

About a week. You’re contagious from 1 day before you have any symptoms. You stay that way for 5 to 7 days after you start feeling sick. Kids may be able to spread the virus for even longer, until all of their symptoms fade."

http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/how-long-flu-contagious
Linux is not my favorite operating system, but it seems like we're stuck with it. I'm very happy for all these improvements. Once you got used to a system with a quality and functional tracer, Linux was hard to get back to. But Linux tracing is getting better and better now. I am very satisfied.
I wonder how this compares to an app like YikYak. I checked out YikYak for a few days (really a weird feeling with a bunch of random anonymous people posting messages). This seems similar except maybe only one-to-one rather than message thread based? Also YikYak seems to have about 5 mile radius zones (8km) rather than 1km.
Are women not empowered to talk on HN? I feel like it's pseudo-anonymous.