skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple's losing its mojo in a slow steady drip and there's going to be more of this if they don't get it together soon.

Apple used to be synonymous with premium equipment an a "It Just Works" experience. It made it really, really easy to just get the Apple version of anything knowing it was going to be good.

My parents need equipment, I get them an iMac, an Airport Extreme, iPhone, iPad, etc...knowing it's all just going to work.

And then somebody in the business unit started getting involved. Airport extreme is basically dead. They started trimming their product line so that they no longer have an option in every category like 17" laptops. They remove features that people don't want removed like the headphone jack and leave you with no other option aside from buying attachments or more expensive battery powered headphones. They started building in batteries in slices on the laptops they do sell, welding parts to boards so you can't open it up and change things out without paying somebody at an Apple store.

They started making design decisions that are almost purposely irritating like the new Magic Mouse. Look, it's got a rechargeable battery built right in! battery dies flip it upside down to plug in the charger and just wait until you can use your computer again. God forbid you put the charger on the front so people could use it as a wired mouse if they wanted/needed.

Let's not forget using $30 USB cords to charge your phone/mouse.

The combination of all these little decisions is what is finally driving me away after being nothing short of a fanboy for about 10 years. I'm just tired of having a company that I tend to disagree with lately trying to make decisions for me so I'm starting the slow exit from Mac life.

Laptop first (waves at Dell). Then a new router (waves at Asus probably). Then a new phone (waves at Samsung/Google).

And then, because the geeks in your friends lives tend to get asked for recommendations on what they should get for themselves...that stuff is probably going to spill over. I don't seem to be the only person feeling this way lately, so I hope whoever started making bottom line decisions at Apple is happy with the long term side effect.
Are you a manager in Japan?
Interesting that your wifi experience sounds terrible, but you've given it a "decent" rating. For me, wifi concerns are among the most important. Thanks for the feedback.
I have a second generation X1 Carbon and I absolutely love this computer!
I meant more as a concept, I agree that Flash was a large detriment to its success.
I wonder how the pro Apple blog sites, where no news is bad news, will spin this.

"Apple to focus on quality not quantity"

"Apple to give its workers extra time off for the holidays"
"It just works"
These look nice, I'm only able to afford like the first generation but I look forward to buying that.

If only they were fanless.
These are cool! Have already pushed out a fix for the first one. There's a toggle checkbox now for that. I've added your feedback here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/139IKt9Y_ubvLnU3ITLHH.... Thanks so much!
I guess our experiences were different. I definitely applied, and was definitely shot down. Guess it depends on what you want to do? Or maybe they loosened up over time.

When they stopped saying 'no' and just saying 'here's the non-compete doc, you figure out if it's allowed or not', I just stopped trying.

On the bright side- hey look, you're a person who actually got permission! I can no longer say I've never met someone given permission.
I think it was obvious. I remember being in college during the acquisition and thinking it was obviously a smart deal. And Instagram was pursued hotly, so many tech insiders thought it was a good deal too.

People on Hacker News are only now just coming around to Snapchat, but I thought Snapchat was obviously going to succeed 4 years ago when I was still in college - 70% of the people I knew in college were using it.

You might object to this and claim that other apps (which are not guaranteed successes now) like Yik Yak should have been similarly "obvious" to me at the time - but that's just not true. I didn't know anyone who used other social media apps (like Yik Yak, etc.) at the time as much as Snapchat (if they did, they kept it to themselves).

But when it comes to social apps, there's just something about Hacker News being particularly closed-minded. Even in the face of overwhelming usage, I still see a solid plurality of cynical HN comments about any given social app.
> Confusion about roles can lead to conflicts.

Agree. Accountability is the key here (this is not about authority). If things do not pan out as expected, the PM must be answerable, and to be in that position, [s]he must have the ability to make the final call in most situations.
I was assigned one of these (the 2015 model) as my office laptop, and I hate the thing for five reasons (two dealbreakers on top):

- It is huge and unwieldy, like a cafeteria tray (and comes with a sizable power brick)

- The touchscreen doesn't have an oleophobic coating, so it becomes a smudgy mess within hours (unlike my iPad, which looks pristine for weeks despite being even more heavily used)

- The screen seems dim or washed out no matter what I try (then again, I have a retina MacBook at home...)

- Battery life is poor(ish) on the i7 model. I can only partially blame all the corporate junk we have installed.

- Wi-Fi seemed flakey at times (and you need a proprietary dongle for Ethernet)

I've seen the 2016 models (which don't improve on the above) and they share the good bits:

- Very decent (if somewhat mushy) keyboard, with lots of travel (perhaps a bit too much)

- Relatively lightweight (considering the size)

- Pretty decent touchpad (not on a par with a MacBook, but good enough for three-finger gestures, although maddeningly imprecise at times)

- Despite the color/brightness issues, the HIDPI screen is sharp and readable under Windows 10

- The fingerprint sensor actually works (but doesn't hold a candle to TouchID)

- DisplayPort or HDMI output (depending on model, mine has both, and I use my Apple dongle for DP->VGA)

I disabled TrackPoint within a month due to RSI (I used original IBM laptops for years and it was a recurring issue for me).

TrackPoint is much more precise than the trackpad for accurate positioning, but I'd rather carry a Bluetooth mouse and retain the use of my fingers (whereas I'm perfectly fine with the Mac trackpad for drawing diagrams and pixel-level positioning).

Edit: Oh, and I run Linux on it through Hyper-V and Docker, since I need to run Windows 10. Had no trouble booting a couple of Ubuntu/Elementary Live USB drives for playing around, most of the hardware seemed to work.
People do it within Instagram even, known as "finstagrams":

>Finstagram (Finsta) is student's fake (or second) Instagram account. Students, usually girls, get a second Instagram account along with their real Instagrams (Rinstagrams), to post silly pictures or videos.
Never once pulled an all-nighter in college (ECE). I also never studied for more than 2-3 hours in succession. I always took a nice break between study sessions to let everything sink in.

On the other hand, most of my peers consistently stayed up through the night during examinations. Most of my peers studied in groups. I sat in on a few sessions and discovered that for every hour of study, an hour was spent on petty discussions. I stopped attending them since.

I'm now doing a PhD, so that may all change. I did fine during my first semester, so we'll just have to see.
The 13.3" Clevo is pretty much an unbranded Macbook Air (Google for Schenker S306 or https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/lafiteII/)
I think that there is definitely a culture problem in a lot of the retail-side of Amazon, but in my experience AWS has treated its people very well. I work at AWS and work a standard 40 hour week, have had a great experience, and Google refused to match my compensation.
As someone who is considering moving from a MacBook Pro 2015 to a Linux laptop, the keyboard and, in particular, the trackpad on PC models are the biggest disappointments. Apple has spent so much effort on the tactility of their laptops, while PC manufacturers still seem to be stuck in an earlier decade. I was a little bit shocked to discover that Thinkpads still have that terrible little mouse nipple, which I hadn't seen in about 10 years.

The laptop with the most promising keyboard/trackpad combo, that I have found, is the Dell XPS (it has physical trackpad buttons, but at least they're located at the bottom), which is probably not accidental; it looks a lot like a MacBook, too.
I saw a brief demo on this on MDN and it's super neat. It was basic just layers but cool nonetheless.
In general, when folks talk of white privilege it's more nuanced than "all white folk are privileged". I recommend going through http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explainin... , which explains privilege from the POV of someone who felt that they didn't have any. It touches on intersectionality -- privilege depends on more than one thing, and you may have privilege due to one aspect of your life that gets negated due to others. This does mean that someone in your exact situation without that aspect might be worse off. This doesn't mean that you will be universally better off than folks who do not share that aspect.

The concept of intersectionality is pretty well known and most of the folks talking of diversity seem to be aware of it. Partially the communications breakdown is caused by terminology; someone who understands this will interpret the term "privilege" to include the nuanced nature of intersectionality. Folks unaware of this will interpret it the straightforward way and feel slighted. Such terminology discrepancies are nothing new; an in-group usually will understand words differently from the outgroup.
China's effort to reduce shark fin soup consumption was incredibly effective. I hope this will be equally successful.
Funny, I've found cargo to be one of the major negatives of rust.

Is there anyone out there saying "builds only when connected to the internet so it can blindly download unauthenticated software ... SIGN ME UP!"
I get it and use an adblocker to fight off the more egregious ads (autoplay, overlays, popups, etc), but most websites are ad supported and I don't have an issue with standard banners.

The irony seems to be that ad companies are overcompensating for adblockers by offering more intrusive ads, which then inspires more adblocking, which then inspires even more intrusive ads, and the cycle repeatedly escalates.
It is almost perfect. I would love real 4 core i7 with 8MB L3 cache CPU for laptops, instead of the 2 core (4 threads) with 4MB.

Edit: 6th generation of mobile Intel CPUs have models with 4 cores and 8MB of L3 cache (i7-6970HQ), using 45W [1]. However, in 7th generation there are only 2-core models [2].

[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88392/6th-Generation-In...

[2] http://ark.intel.com/products/family/95544/7th-Generation-In...
They do not take all of the circulating money (That would be nonsense because the circle would stop) but in Austria approx. 42%.
Since national economy is a circle that money is not lost as an expense but is again invested in the economy and is coming back. ROI is a term of business administration and not national economy and therefore not applicable to the economies of Cities.
I was able to negotiate a blanket exception for existing projects. They are open to it.

Feel free to email me if you want to chat more about my own experiences on AWS
Amazon's Airborne Fulfilment Center Patent
How do you feel about the odd placement of the camera? I'm considering it but a couple of design choices always make me doubt I'll enjoy it as much. Camera is one of them (I use videochat a lot)
More like Hirohito than Stalin.
Not really. Windows 7/10 should be up and running in under half an hour in most circumstances.
There are a lot of ways to dice up performance as a developer, and while some are clearly bad, like LOC counts, others are merely different from each other. Is it better to ship a feature faster? All things being equal, sure—but all things are rarely equal. All bugs aren't created equal, nor features, nor design requirements. Nor are the skills needed to handle any or all of those things distributed equally amongst developers.

I was on a team once where my diagnostic skills put me near the top of the stack for being given hard-to-find bugs. What that meant was that sometimes I would ship one commit a week while tracking down several difficult issues. Does that make me a bad developer? A slow developer? Or are those even valuable distinctions in this context?

Rather than trying to be better than everyone (anyone?) else, try to be better than you yourself were last week, or last month, or last year. That's the only consistent variable one has across all the kinds of tasks we are called to perform in this role.
So income inequality comes to hedge funds?

In tech there is an interesting phenomena I've watched emerge several times; A new technology or process gets going, it has lots of players, the market grows until the technology matures and then it splits where the high end gets more high and the middle dies. New players keep appearing but they can't jump the void between new player and high end player.

So for semiconductors there were dozens of chip companies and they all had various things they made. Then the market matured and only the people who could reliably fab chips remained at the top. The good middle companies were absorbed into the top, the not great ones died, and now you've got some boutique small ones (fabless) and the big guns.

For "personal computers" or the PC space same thing, lots of companies, then fewer and fewer, and then just a handful.

For Web companies same thing, lots of companies, then fewer and fewer, and then just a handful.

(and interesting to see technology that sort of fizzled like personal robotics and 3D printing)

Given that the incoming administration is pretty friendly to wall street I would expect at least some boost for the industry.
As far as I'm aware laptops of new generations practically never ran Linux well out of the box from day one. It always took some time to adjust stuff to the new chips of a new generation. Only after some time you can just stick Linux into it and it'll just all work.
Phone tethering tends to eat through the battery, also, there's just a difference in how you use it and how it feels.

On the one hand you've got a laptop that is online the whole time, on the other hand you've got a situation where you have to have to fiddle with two devices to get online.

Moving onlineness from a deliberate, modal thing to a continuous thing changes the way you interact with the network.
I have already stated that it is quite possibly not a problem for Clojure, although this hasn't stopped all the downvotes I keep getting (which doesn't leave me with a good impression of Clojure users). My point is that, despite the claims of the parent post, TCO is needed for many advanced functional programming techniques.
Woot! Thank you China! Elephants are my favorite animal and it's sad to see such magestic creatures slaughtered for such nominal things. Or any animal for that matter. Shark fin soup? Seriously what a waste of a needed predator.
yea I was excited. All I did was use the Netflix app, which was pretty cool, and just moving around made me sick. I hope they are able to get the tech to a place where I can be able to use VR.
Can you imagine congress passing a meaningful infrastructure bill?
I agree - which is why I, and many others, don't see the need to upgrade. That's the problem Apple is facing.
Machine Dreams [video]
Not the parent, but for me, a reason would be to have a dedicated, company-paid data-only subscription. I work from coffee shops a lot, and my personal T-Mobile subscription doesn't have enough data. Right now I'm considering getting an external Verizon "JetPack" for this, but it's another little device to pack and charge.
So much this, damn. 2016 felt like everybody was just walking backwards.

I share your sentiment about Google. They look like they only do the minimal effort possible for Android not to die -- and since they get a lot of user data and ad revenue, they're not trying very hard since they're not taking hits in the wallet. That's not good enough for me, and IMO many other people. I personally have been witness to 3 tech-savvy businessmen who were excited to support Android finally give up and go full Apple. It was a pretty sad story listening to their motivation but I can't blame them because I found myself in 99% agreement with them.

I have the Exynos S7 Edge which for me is pretty much the one and only Android device which is close to perfect. I plan holding on to it until I see something that really excites me, until the release of iPhone 7s / 8 that is. If I like the 7s / 8 I'll just buy that and honestly call it quits with smartphones for at least 2 years.

Had enough of being milked for money for practically no upgrades at all for quite a while. Only Samsung and Apple are really trying -- mostly in the internal storage space.
interesting. i would have thought they would choose not to enforce
Water isn't the only issue either. Our city has higher levels of lead than Flint does, but it's consumed through means other than water. http://www.pahomepage.com/news/18-pa-cities-lead-higher-lead...
It's more than what you said. Apple is a solid supply chain company and they understand quarter-to-quarter demand changes. It turns out that their Q1 estimates were too high by 10%. The initial estimates already accounted for the cyclical holiday season.
Excellent personal story on finding the right workspace in a remote situation. Home office vs. Coworking space is a conversation I have with other remote works quite a bit, and the answer is different for everyone.
Your link doesn't work since the '.' fell off the end:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur....

And I'd hardly call Facebook a monopoly in 2009 when that case was decided. I think Myspace still had more users at that time.
do you believe one persons happiness redeems another persons suffering?
Sent via email.

Anyone else: Send me an email please. I will send you the ePub.

My non-Amazon publishing partner, Draft2Digital, handles distribution to nook, iBooks, kobo, Scribd, tolino & Page Foundry. They perform the ebook conversion.

I will reconfigure SendOwl so that instead of buying the PDF, you're buying the bundle of pdf+mobi+epub, that way everyone gets all the formats. Thanks for the feedback + inspiration to improve.
As an aside, our most successful projects were similar to this. Right place, right time, and people on HN would probably assume the MVP could be built in a week, which was true at least in our cases.
Instagram was uncluttered. People posted original content. The content was typically once a day and people would spend 5 minutes "getting the right angle" and other 10 minutes picking the right filter. Today my Facebook feed is clogged with people reposting links, videos, or photos that are more click bait than news worthy. Instagram still allows me to see what my network is up to without the political headlines
I just recently bought a ASUS ZenBook UX360UAK with a 7th gen i7, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.

It's made out of aluminium, has a glass touchpad and costs around half of what a similarly priced MacBook pro costs in Germany.

It's my first non-Mac after 20 years. I've owned it for a good week and so far I'm very happy. It has superb battery life, great build quality and is fast. Only 1 minor con: the fan always runs, but it's not too loud and I can live with it...
> He's not willing to give up the headphone jack.

Give him a couple years. He will.
I think it wasn't left alone at all.

It was turned upside down.

The old main feature: pay-a-reasonable-fee-to-chat-privately was taken behind the barn and shot dead.

I and my friends have now moved almost every group I was a member of over to Telegram (there is one left). And yes I know Whatsapp might have stronger encryption but for us that doesn't matter.
> The phone comes with a 3.5mm to Lightning adapter, so you can continue to use your existing headphones.

Yeah, no. When will I need this dongle? Exactly when I left it somewhere else. Then Apple will need a "Find my Dongle" application next to all the other "Find my*" applications.

I am not going to buy expensive spare dongles just so I don't rage when I realize I left the dongle at work so now I can't listen to music in the garage while I work on my projects. I am not going to carry it around all the time with my phone just in case I need it. The removal of the 3.5mm jack is a failure by Apple.
Buying instagram was a brilliant move. It's a far more enjoyable social network to use. Lately I've gotten into a scene that's basically a parallel universe where facebook doesn't exist. Everyone uses instagram. It's far more entertaining and creative, and far less saturated with anger and activism. I've dialed back my facebook activity heavily in the past year, to the point that I've deleted the facebook app. I have messenger and the facebook events app, but the losing the news feed has been no loss at all.

I can see a future, not even very far away, where facebook is essentially the AOL of our generation and having an account there is a punchline.
They're intended to be folded over to be used in a "tablet" mode, or propped up in "tent" mode. All based around the touch screen, basically.
The Surface Pro 4 type cover, and I'd assume the Surface Book, both have a comparable keyboard and I'd say the trackpad is definitely as good as the Macbooks I've used or better (haven't used the latest of any model, but some older Pros and Airs)
The lack of fans and vents on the bottom of MacBooks Pros is seriously a huge benefit. I can actually use it ON MY LAP!
Ah, "consumer" vs "business" computers. I wonder whether this distinction even makes sense.
In general:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X1_Carbon_(3rd_Gen)

Ubuntu in particular:

https://certification.ubuntu.com/certification/make/Lenovo/?...

When I was shopping for a laptop recently, I was told that to order one with Ubuntu pre-installed I needed to call sales during business hours. Ultimately, I went with a Dell Precision T7510, left Windows 10 in place, added an NVME ssd, and installed Ubuntu on that (Dell Precisions also offer Ubuntu pre-installed and at a discount).
Agreed. I am constantly out and about and much prefer carrying a Wi-Fi hotspot or a secondary phone, for the following reasons:

- I can upgrade the hotspot/phone separately (right now I'm at 150Mbps LTE, which is very nice, and I started doing this in 1998 with the Ericsson SH-888... a few orders of magnitude slower)

- I can place the hotspot/phone away from me (typically near a window), and get excellent mobile signal regardless of where I have to sit

- I can share the bandwidth among multiple devices

Having spent over fifteen years at telcos and mobile operators, I can assure you that this is the sanest option both due to mobile hardware deprecation (you will _never_ be able to upgrade embedded 3G/4G/LTE in the same way), performance (embedded designs are a lot more trouble to get right) and, yes, price gouging from telcos.

Even before leaving the sector, I never saw SIM slots as an advantage in laptops -- they're just a way to charge you more for an effectively worse mobile experience.
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