skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At a guess the list of questions showed Hotz just how far away he really was from having a shippable product and since the 'fun' bit was over it caused him to throw in the towel. Prototyping stuff and proof of concepts are fun, productizing much less so. Moving to China will not really change that.
As another FS person, I was looking around for bay-area jobs and saw an ad for Soylent. This was probably in 2013. They were looking for someone w/ a FS background to bag product and other general work like this and I was shocked that they weren't using a co-packer.
Google teaches “AIs” to invent their own crypto and avoid eavesdropping
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815948.
I bizarrely think dell currently is making the best laptops in the market. The surface book is "sexier" and both that and the Macbook pro has better industrial design than the XPS's ... and the XPS's had some quality problems to start of with... but those screens, specs and connection to what professionals need without doing trippy things like removing USB ports has pushed them to the forefront.

If Dell just could gain a tad more "design soul" and shake some our horrible memories of the stodgy Dell of the past I think they're in a prime position ... then again the PC market is apparently shrinking so who knows. There seems to be an ever widening divergence between mainstream consumers and professionals, and the companies haven't quite figured out to react, or they have and we don't like it.
I got the 1st gen Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and it didn't hold up great. The balance of weight, power, battery life, and Linux support were huge for a traveling programmer. By the end of year 2, though, I had replaced a broken screen, and the battery life was down to 30-60 minutes (from about 6 hours).

I decided to give them another chance on the 4th gen X1 Carbon, and I've been very happy so far. The build quality seems much better, and they've nixed some of the annoying "innovations" from the 1st gen one (ironically including a touch bar at the top; they reverted to normal keys). That said, I've only had this one for about 5 months, so I might change my mind by the time another year or 2 passes.
In what way is this more "humane"?

Programming languages by design are for human consumption. In what way is this "special" or "designed" for them?
How would you interact with a rest api with this?
CTRL-[ (of course if you're not using a QWERTY keyboard, it may be hard to hit)
I had to change my layout to dvorak to learn to touch-type. Also, not mandatory in Spain and most of E.U.
What they could have done (one or more):

1) Bezel-less display

2) Full Touch screen

3) Detachable Screen - IPad Pro +

4) Stylus input (from Apple Pencil)

5) 15-20 hr battery life

6) NVidia Graphics

7) 64 Gb Ram option

8) Kept the HDMI & SDXC port

What they did do:

1) Gimmicky Touch bar - Useless when you close the MBP & Dock; Hard to do for touch typists

2) Hiked the prices by crazy margins

3) Pegged the RAM at 16 Gb Max

4) Battery is not much better

5) All in on USB-C - Get ready for Dongle-o-rama

Feels like a pure greedy money grab with nothing to justify it. Steve must be spinning in his grave.
Native ahead of the time compilation in Java
I agree with that. Guiding your fingers by sight rather than by feel is not as good. I don't think it's because you're redirecting your vision, since it's not moving much, but the lack of tactile feedback is still problematic.
I hear all this talk about no more ESC key, but couldn't they potentially just put one up there on the bar, albeit not a real clickable key?
If I copy and paste ruby code in to a word doc, can I program like a human too?
Classical economics usually take as assumptions that all actors have complete information and unlimited computational resources and are perfectly rational. In the real world, we have decision fatigue and may engage in regret avoidance and end up not taking Uber at all if it's perceived as more difficult.
All these arguments were also said when Apple replaced Firewire/mini-DVI/... by Thunderbolt, a fantastic new standard, and we all had to buy the adapters that we'll now throw away.

It seems that USB-C will be more successful than Thunderbolt 1/2 have been, but Apple really isn't helping it with the way they're doing the switch (some devices USB-C only, some devices USB-A only, Lightning headphones...).
I feel like we've been waiting for this product for almost ten years now. When is it coming?
Two things: firstly I think most teaching devolves to a cargo cult, unless the culture explicitly tries to keep this from happening.

Secondly, this quote: "Admittedly, a tenacious commitment to improvement seems to be part of the Japanese national heritage."

I wonder if a missing phrase might be "collective and individual improvement".

Anglo cultures seem to lack this, because they seem to be more about authoritarian displays of power than about striving for collaborative competence.

It's not that individual teachers are necessarily authoritarian - although many school boards seem to be. It's more the political subtext is 'Shut up, listen to my authority, obey, and repeat."

A culture based on "Think, explore, explain, discuss, debate, experiment, and fact-check" works very differently.

When teaching looks more like the first than the second, *it's not really teaching STEM fundamentals" - it's teaching a robotised cargo cult version of STEM that doesn't truly promote STEM principles.

Kids have three options - they can either obey, which will get them good grades but no deep understanding. They can fail - which is a popular choice, because rote learning is harder than learning by deep understanding. Or they can fail and rebel and decide that math is a waste of everyone's time, because who the hell cares, and would you like fries with that?

So math teaching is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a culture that's more geared towards top-down competitive hierarchical classroom dynamics - with the teacher as top dog - than to promoting non-competitive collaboration and sharing of individual insights, with the teacher as inspiring facilitator.
They can't, but there's a big display in front of me that can show these things and I can see it without looking down. And yes, mapping game controls can be as simple as you describe or extremely complex, especially if you involve software outside the game such as the drivers for most gaming boards.

You seem to be far too hostile for a conversation about a piece of glass on a computer. You should take a break.
How about the company itself taking their product out of the market because it's making people sick?
See if you can find sales numbers for your elitist 5 button vertical mouse vs. the trackpad.... Then we'll talk about who the 'rare bird' is. Grow up.
Lovely hackery. If I understand right, line 92 is reading and evaling commands off a private named pipe. https://github.com/MakeNowJust/bashcached/blob/master/bashca...
In their presentation, Terminal had some contextual functionality mapped to it, including a tray which slid out and hid the escape key.

So no, by default, you will not get the F keys when you open Terminal.
I'm not a fan, but the touchbar will end up being accepted just like the dock eventually was.
I guess you're lucky, or generally have a good connection. There's a dev in my office who's bluetooth keyboard has a latency of around 100ms. Two of us get instantly sick when trying to type on it, but no one else in the office can detect the latency.
I don't think the "shift your vision" part is a big deal, since it's right next to the screen. I do think there is a disadvantage in not having tactile feedback all the same, and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. As it stands currently, the presence of tactile feedback for those keys doesn't do me any good, because I don't use them. If the touch bar ends up being useful for me, it'll be a net gain even if the experience of locating the controls is worse.

For people who actually use the function keys, I sympathize and I can totally understand how this is likely to be a huge step backwards. But "developers" does not equate to "uses function keys regularly."
Yeah, just "become a criminal" and enjoy life in one of our nation's beautiful, gleaming prisons.

This kind of faith in the system is highly disturbing to me.
Hey thanks for responding! What parts are misinformation?
Only if the Word document presented a Turing test.
People below are saying their poor Scottish ancestors didn't seem that unusually smart. Immigration restrictions have changed who comes to the US. Pre-migration parental socioeconomic status/educational achievement is one of the best predictors of educational success among children of immigrants. Your trick is simply an observation that Asians immigrating legally to the US come on certain visas which bring a non-representative socioeconomic mix to the US, and their children (who are now Asian-American) do very well. The people who stayed in Asia are not the same as the people who could afford to fight for a US visa.

The "immigrant advantage" fades in three generations, at which point achievement by children reflects the US average. This is the influence, if you like, of American "ethnicity", which is often quite anti-intellectual.

The intro here is an interesting read:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3442927/
Not to mention the Mighty Mouse with the lint-magnet scroll ball, their entire server strategy, and countless software decisions like the iTunes UI, multiple generations of cloud services which were clumsy and confusing, etc.

Jobs was good at what he focused on and other things tended to languish. For the last half decade, everyone has been focused on iOS. Cook seems to be getting the blame for basically doing roughly the same thing while not being Steve Jobs.
The ability to search on a map or at least within a radius of a given location is very important, especially outside of major cities. Sometimes companies nearby are located in small suburbs I've never heard of. If I see that the job is in Nowhereville, TN, I don't know if that's 20 minutes away or 2 hours away.
You don't need to customize your vim keybindings if you map Caps Lock to ESC at the OS level, which is a builtin preference as of macOS 10.12.1.
My impression was that the Soylent products are based on certain assumptions: 1) every human body is about the same, differences don't matter 2) a human body doesn't change much during its lifetime and 3) it's only the average that matters in nutrition, within-diet variance doesn't matter at all.

Is that correct? If so, aren't those assumptions.. uhmm.. sort of delusional?
Hey! That "for humans" crap worked really well for making my grid system popular! :^)
In the Configurations section (where you see the first 4 models), you have to push Next until you are at the end of the list. The last 3 models mention Ubuntu (last 4 in the US).
I feel like I can boil this post down to:

1. There's no escape key!
2. It has roughly the same specs as existing MBPs

ergo now totally useless for developers

Anyone sw developer that cares about the escape key remapped it to the caps lock key years ago
The only issue with pasting Ruby code into a Word doc is that word can't run the resulting program
Three points: The escape key is not where it is normally. The escape key is not present in all contextual operations (that is, you can open up a menu on the touchbar which causes the escape key to disappear in favor of a "close" button). There is no physical feedback that you've hit escape.
There are a few things to note about this parole. I'm copying this from a post I submitted to HN a few days ago[1]:

1. Your startup would have to have raised $345k from 'qualified investors' or $100k from federal/state grants (difficult for bootstrappers to leverage this)

2. Should have created 10 jobs for Americans in 2 years

3. This parole will be granted for 2 years, and then extended by another 3, but after that there's no provision to let founders stay.

4. You need to have at least 15% stake in your company (which can be easy initially but could get diluted going ahead, specially with multiple founders)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624180

(edit: formatting)
I think the issue that many readers have difficulties with is that rulings like this show how arbitrary and potentially political the regulations are. For instance, many heavily regulated professions in the USA (and probably the UK) could be classified as government employees by this definition, but they are not. Taxi drivers could even be seen as employees of their cities, as I know that London taxi cab drivers suffer conditions 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, and 13 at the hands of their local government.
How I see it, languages are only one projection of what a program is. The missing part is what confuses "normal" people (unlike people who spent long hours learning how to map things in their head). This project reminds me of AOP, old IBM multidimensional orthogonal concerns projects. You can go back and forth between different views of the program, that helps tremendously.
Well, matte screens should always be optional, people are divided over the issue.

For me, right now the screens appear like mirrors, if I have anything behind me besides a wall then I constantly adjust the angle of the laptop to minimize reflections.
Yes.

> Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce — compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. — are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....

The idea that we can understand each food as just the sum of the macro and micronutrients it contains is, as understood today, false. While it may be true in the future when we have a greater understanding of what food is made of and how the body works (it's trivially true that you can break food down into something and then sum that thing up to get the same food), right now that's outside the understanding of science.
American Academy of Pediatrics Edits Screen Time for Toddlers in New Guidelines
I've been cross compiling OpenWRT for Mips in my WSL, which is very handy!
Programming is not regular touch typing. There are all kinds of punctuations and weird key combos you have to do frequently that are not on the home row. And yes, I hit function key combos without looking many times a day. I will not be buying this laptop.
1-4 is simply providing them with a copy of the instructions. 5, 6, 8 and 9 are incredibly obvious questions that should have been answered during the development. 7 is surely something you know just from the business end of things.

I have no idea what FMVSS is but that there are regulations here should be obvious, no doubt this would be something you'd become aware of after a little bit of research. As a consequence you should have an answer to that. This covers 10-12.

13 and 14 he should have known at the top of his head. 15 it seems you could just say you've nothing to add or drop whatever else you have on hand.

Nothing about this strikes me as unusual, unexpected or hard to answer. There is no way this is the reason Holtz gave up unless the product is a complete failure, he hasn't run any safety tests whatsoever or he's using this as an excuse to cover up something else.
If it's a key you use frequently, and no longer have the other option, muscle memory isn't that hard to retrain.
> Ive and his team no doubt knows industrial design

That's the conventional wisdom, but I dispute it. Ive and his team seem to have lost sight of some of the most basic principles that made the Mac great in the first place, like: it should be easy to tell what parts of the screen contain things that you can click on.

I'm still running Mavericks because I want buttons to look like buttons. Is that really too much to ask?
Which materials?
Wouldn't it be unfair to offer a deal that's significantly different in structure than the one that's offered to other types of knowledge workers?
No, this technique is different. What cell-phones do is rely on pre-mapped databases of wifi and cell tower locations to do trilateration to get a position.

The technique the article describes is basically using any stationary RF source as a reference point to tell if your position estimate is drifting. (It's not unlike using a mountain as a landmark for your direction and location while hiking; you don't have to know precisely where the mountain is, you just have to be able to see it and know that it's not moving.) As you point out, it's dependent on what RF sources are nearby (this is the "opportunistic" part of their SOP signal acronym) but can be used to help compensate for the drift that inertial navigation systems have without having to have a pre-compiled database of RF transmitter locations.
maybe another AI system do crypt-analysis and break it. and nobody will know how it was broken.
"Because it will pull investors" is a perfectly valid response around here. :)
Guys.

You can configure the touch bar thing.

Let's give it a try before raging over it? Otherwise this and the other recent HN threads may be this year's version of the famous Slashdot "Apple introduces the iPod" thread.
Next thing you know, we'll be marketing it as a "fresh, humanely designed, organic, farm-raised" programming language. ;)
We no longer think of people whose ancestors showed up in the 19th century as immigrants, unless we're trying to make a point about indigenous peoples' rights. In 2005, 22% of immigrants to the US came in on an employment-related visa; the only larger category was family reunification. Immigration patterns "back then" are very different than they are now.
What do you mean by that last line? Well for one thing the bar is customizable by each app, but still, from the examples, they show very clear icons of function.

This is already far superior than just F1, F2, etc, which are far far more cryptic than a descriptive icon.

That's the thing, most apps already do use F keys for custom bindings, but you have to manually memorize them for each different app. Here, you at least get to see the correct icon in each program you're using.

And as a bonus, you get variable size buttons, sliding input, colors, and much more that just isn't possible with simple buttons.
Don't think of it as a replacement for javascript. Think of it as a replacement for excel.
You, sir, are absolute rigth.
http://datasciencemasters.org/
That's because the premise of the article is completely wrong. There's a venerable tradition on Wall Street of generating unmaintainable code and not sharing your knowledge with anyone else. If you're lucky enough for the code you're writing to be mission-critical, you can write your own check and never get fired.
In order to add lightning support to a device of yours you need to be part of the MFI program which comes with NDAs, influence on functionality through Apple and, of course, a license fee per unit you ship.

If lightning was purely about the technical advantages it provides, they would have made it an open standard or at least documented it.

There were some technical reasons for not going with MicroUSB of course, but don't tell me that their MFI licensing model isn't a huge reason for a proprietary connector.
This is a false assertion (and possibly a straw-man); Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations" as a study of the way things actually worked, not a thought experiment. Classical economists (such as Smith) did not assume perfect information, and everyone knows that there is never perfect information.
"MirOS BSD is a secure operating system from the BSD family for 32-bit i386 and sparc systems"

OpenBSD dropped 32-bit sparc support. And 32-bit Intel CPU support only? MirOS isn't interested in supporting any modern hardware. So yeah, why bother with SMP...

OpenBSD's hardware support back then wasn't bad. It's just that you'd definitely want to check that what you were buying was supported before you bought it rather than just assume everything's going to work.

The OpenSSH fork was based off the last BSD licensed release of SSH. SSH authors decided to adopt a more restrictive license. Within 5 years 90% of internet facing SSH servers were running OpenSSH. The deal with OpenBSD is that it's great if you do the same things as their developers. If not then you're out of luck. Apparently they like building networks and closing the lids of their laptops.

Regarding different operating systems SMP support and your question of interrupt handling, you should consult OS architecture books. In a nutshell for SMP:

How well the kernel's scheduler can make userland processes and threads run concurrently on different CPUs or cores is a big deal. This isn't easy, because you have situations where certain cores may share cache and others don't.

How well the kernel can run itself concurrently is also a big deal. If the kernel can only run on a single core at once then even if user processes can run on different cores there will be contention when they make system calls. For the kernel to be reading data from a network card, while writing data to a filesystem, while comparing a packet against the firewall ruleset, while executing the scheduler, while allocating memory to some process, all at the same time on different cores requires fine grained locking. (Or possibly lock free data structures where possible) With only a single CPU the kernel can just assume its memory is consistent. Once the kernel is running concurrently great care must be taken to prevent accidental corruption. Mistakes result in deadlock, kernel panic, or worse.

Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Solaris for example, have all solved this problem much better than OpenBSD has for a long time. OpenBSD has only begun to address this quite recently.

In a nutshell for interrupt handling: Say you're routing frames between several Ethernet interfaces. Nevermind a proper firewall which would be much worse, you're just bridging like a switch.

When a frame comes in on a port you get an interrupt and context switch into the kernel. Then you have to read at least the destination address into main memory so you can compare it to your MAC table and know how to handle it. Then you need to copy the whole frame to the appropriate outputs. This is very slow compared to the CAM table lookup that dedicated switch hardware uses. Even though a general purpose CPU can do some really impressive things, if you add enough network interfaces and a high enough packet rate to a PC it won't keep up.
Aside from cost, is there any reasonable technical reason to not have 32/64GB options available? My desktop in 2000 had 2GB of ram, and I'm shocked that 16 years later my laptop maxes at 16GB. I remember in 2009 building a server with 32GB and the memory was only a few hundred for decent ECC RAM.
But apple fanboys will keep buying it

It's extremely patronizing and dismissive to insinuate that only "apple fanboys" buy macbook pros. There are plenty of reasons to buy an apple laptop without being a "fanboy". Searching for the best laptop leads many to apple simply because of logistics/price/ease-of-use.

That said, most of the other stuff you say is true.