skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.

Yeah, intentionally or not, it does happen. In light of the latest Apple 'innovations' I would also look at Grey's law (just look at what a piece of shit ITunes is). There have been numerous class action lawsuits in the past years, which I agree, don't prove anything except for the fact that consumers do notice that their older devices often degrade to not being usable.

Anecdotally this is how I lost my 2012 MacBook Pro. The hardware was excellent but software upgrades made it almost unusable. Browsing was ok-ish but I ended up using it mainly in 'terminal mode'. I couldn't find a Linux distribution that ran properly on it so one day I decided to go with El Capitan because of it's focus on 'performance' and that it's hardware requirements were compatible - MacBook Pro Mid/Late 2007 or newer. It worked fine but two days later I fried my video card while reading a PDF in Preview. I'm not saying the upgrade fried my computer but I was really frustrated I only got 3 years of use out of a superb (and expensive) piece of hardware.

And yes, after using an Asus for a few (awful) years, I bought another Macbook on which I'm writing this now.
That's exactly the problem I used to have. So I decided to just publish an MVP and then iterate on it later if a) I have something more to add, or b) the post starts getting a lot of attention. In this case both are true, so here I am touching it up on the fly.
A cloud-optional system for storing, tagging, and sorting family photos, videos, and documents. Maybe with a timeline or optional integration with family tree services. I've been spending the holidays over the past few years scanning, digitizing, and sorting these things, and an easy-to-use sharing system where other family members can add information is completely eluding me.
John sort of skated by the point that these phones were designed to have this problem. Spontaneous shutdowns with aging batteries are not a standard feature of all smartphones. Apple made a trade-off in the phone design that caused this hardware problem and then used software to try to workaround it but didn’t tell people that this would slow down their phones. My wife has an iphone 6 with this problem and was considering a new iphone to fix her performance problem. Whether apple meant to or not, their lack of full disclosure caused people to needlessly replace their phones. To say apple did nothing wrong is fanboyism.

Was the reporting bad? Sure. Was apple in the right? Definitely not.
It depends on lots of factors; but the degradation can be a lot more than that if you really abuse your battery. And unfortunately most devices don't make it easy to avoid being hard on your battery - you just kind of need to know what not to do, and play a guessing game. Apple specifically isn't one to burden the user with unnecessary mental load - so battery-health management is unsurprisingly something I've never seen on any apple device (but it's pretty rare anyhow).
For the technology specifically covered in this article, all they are doing is reading the muscle activation of existing muscles, and then mapping to the prosthetic's actuators. The "twist" in this story is that sensing is done with ultrasound instead of EMG (better signal to noise if you can throw enough compute at it), and I believe some cool deep learning tricks to map sets of muscle actuations to prosthetic motion "better".

In order for this approach to work, a nervous signal has to travel out of the brain, and at least into the brain stem. In these cases, they actually have to get all the way to a giant amplifier (your muscle) in order to detect it.

When your talking about your brain imagining to flap your wings, unless your brain has mapped your swings to your lats, traps and delts, you're not sending any actual motor signals out of your brain and we can't read it. If it is mapped to your lats, traps and delts, then you're actually moving those muscles right now. If we used a system where we tried using your lats, traps and delts as points to control prothestic wings, then you run into the problem of what do you with your wings when you're not trying to use those muscles as a wing controller. In other words, you'll get a modal system... which are tricky. You'd basically have to switch off parts of 'baseline human' functionality at a time to get your 'human+' stuff.
> Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries?

That’s how Apple tends to handle almost all warranty issues. Either that or you can mail it in.

iPhones are not exactly designed to be easily opened and messed with by normal people. It’s part of how they get them so thin (insert various other theories that may or may not apply here).
Wow, that is an amazing story. Thanks for sharing.

It really hammers home how hard it is to disentangle good & bad advice and how easy it is for an outsider looking into to really underestimate the depth of someone else's expertise in a given domain.
Microsoft is seizing on the opportunity. Windows 10 is a great platform for developers fleeing from Mac OS. With Powershell, HyperV, Bash + Ubuntu for Windows (with a 1-click install from the Windows store), on top of the existing best-in-class Visual Studio tools, Windows 10 is an awesome developer experience.

And considering the power and diversity of hardware to power your development workstation, there are few reasons to stick with OSX.
> well, the public is not tied to ones identity.

And yet your title is "Public key as Identities"

> It is just a theoretical concept that public key acts as an actor.

And yet you are talking specifically about using a Public Key in practice.

> ... the thing what you are talking about is related to anonymity which is a different concept.

None of what I've said is related to anonymity.

Your title is "Public key as Identities", which oddly enough leads me to believe that you are talking about using a public key as an identity. But if you do that, then your identity is the public key, because that's what you've just set up.

But keys get compromised, and so it is occasionally critical to be able to repudiate a key. But if it's your identity, you can't do that.

In short, everything in that article seems to be vague speculation without addressing some very real problems with the concept it's espousing.
> is that the people who are best positioned to capitalize on an emerging technology wave are the ones who started working on it before anyone realized it was important, just because it was interesting to them

Its not just “interesting” there is also happenstance

There are going to be college kids working on “XEM Smart Contracts” for some ICO consultancy startup just because they had more java classes across semesters

And they will be heralded as pioneering geniuses just because some fortune 500 starts looking for the word smart contract on linkedin
I kind of never thought too much about the moon landing until SpaceX hype and the book The Martian got me interested in the skies. Someone here recently posted http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/ which is a collection of video, audio, and data streams synced in real time of the landing. It's so exhilarating and amazing. And it was the 60s! It was just so rock and roll, an incredible feat.
I think for me it's more like:

One of the fundamental duties of a middle manager is to worry about group dynamics, team effectiveness, group communication, etc.

If the engineers are now doing all of that as well, what's middle management doing?

("Nothing, same as always" is of course the snarky answer)
>the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable.

Were the phones really slowed down by that much?
> MIT Just Created Living Plants That Glow Like a Lamp

The implications of this clickbait title don't match the reality of what MIT achieved at all.
> My old 5S would shut down randomly under 20% without warning. Sometimes it would make it all the way to 1-2%, but most of the time it was between 5-15%.

"avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE[...]we recently extended the same support for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus"

They did not apply the change to the 5S.
My most useful insight/takeaway from the book was about leverage and what activities you choose to do as you progress in your career: in six months you could ship 1x engineers worth of output (or maybe 2x or 3x if you are really great) -- or you could help hire and onboard 10 engineers and create 10x worth of output.

Thinking more strategically about the most effective way to spend my own time and energy was easily worth the nominal cost of the book.
I totally agree with you. I'd rather have a slightly bigger laptop with the ability to replace the battery easily.

I slightly disagree with this though:

> but thin to the point where batteries are barely functional?

My previous MBP (mid-2014) was still very usable after 3 years of intensive use. Overall, I can't say I suffered from not being able to change the battery easily. (I passed the problem to the next owner...).
I agree "leverage" is further down the spectrum of being prone to meaningless usage (than most words), but I don't think it is as far as "synergy".

It's a more precise concept: put x in, get more than x out. The more you get out for each input of x, the greater the leverage.

Synergy is the idea of "greater than the sum of the parts", which is a useful concept but much more nebulous, in my view.

Not that this is a particularly important debate :)
You make this seem like a bad thing, but as someone who doesn't drink a lot, I would prefer to pay a surcharge rather than deal with a 2 drink minimum.
I have seen projects where people created scanning thermal cameras, repurposing one of those IR thermometers I believe, such as - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v61Kuaxab0

As far as I know the sensors used in thermal cameras don't use silicon due to the long IR wavelengths they're detecting and instead use something like InGaAs iirc, so I assume making your own sensor would be very difficult.

However possibly you could make your own thermopile array instead - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopile ? I'm not sure how they compare to the sensors normally used though.

Edit: Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbolometer seems like you can use silicon + another layer to handle the IR
Questions like this always perplex me. People aren't asking for apple to do something. They're asking for them to not do something.
Stanford electric buses are BYD. It is right under the nose of Tesla :) (on the med school route the buses even pass right by the Tesla headquarters)
"...Once basic needs are met, most people would choose a poorer but fairer and more loving community than a society richer through cold utilitarianism. Many if not most people who choose the opposite aren't really happy..."

Original commenter here - But I don't see how this is at all true when current reality, if not history, tells us the exact opposite.

For for democracy being undermined. Well, this is a language problem we keep making. That is, if it has been undermined to that extent then it is no longer a democracy. I'd add that it might not have been one in the first place. That is, something inappropriate must have allowed the undermining.
Even if they took publications to court, the public opinion would not change for the better because people stop paying attention to any story within two weeks of when it's revealed. The damage has already been done. The only potential reasonable argument to do something like this is for Apple to scare off other publications from publishing damaging headlines in the future. But the benefit of this strategy would be little when balanced by the negative PR hit it would take by every other news publication writing articles and OpEds on Rich Big Corp vs small, struggling, important-for-democracy news organizations. There's no faster way to torpedo your public approval than to go after news publications.
> What kind of filter do I want my employees or coworkers to have at work? Should we systematically favor bravado over vulnerability? My gut feeling is that we should not.

I think structural/procedural solutions can be very helpful to encourage honest discussion. For example, rather than asking "when do you think you can have this done by?" you can ask "let's try to estimate this story in a timeboxed way, as a group, using planning poker". I know it may sound silly to those who have not done it before, but it works really well. It's difficult to explain the real reason why this helps so much without revealing more than I'd rather reveal in public.

Also, and relatedly, to the extent that you wish people to be more open and take ownership of problems such that they can honestly discuss their work-related problems rather than trying to keep you happy and play office politics, you can try to exhibit servant leadership. But you can't really be a servant leader when it comes to some issues, like hiring and firing - and by consequence, performance review. There you have to be firm but fair.
I never said I did. What on earth are you talking about?
Would this be a good tool for finding air leaks (i.e. cold air coming in during the winter) in an old house? I might drop the $200-300 for one of these if it will help me find all the leaks.

Even better if the $40 Adafruit one mentioned elsewhere (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3538) worked just as well, once configured/programmed adequately.
Pisces Sun-Sagittarius Moon Personality – Astroligion.com
Well, can you return the two new phones?
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of masters programs (in ML) that are tailored for working professionals.
Well it is still mostly JS. Claiming JS is crap (often stated as "beyond repair") and TS is good just because of (arguably) light addition shows some serious cognitive dissonance. But nevermind:

> The fact that it can be transpiled to Javascript is irrelevant

It has nothing to do with JS, right? :)
The low-speed maglevs being built in China seem a little more interesting.

https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/construction-low-speed-magl...

Getting people from point A to B faster on mass transit will get them out of cars and cabs.
A uniform answer to that question isn't possible. There are many different environments that batteries operate in and those environments produce wildly different results.
Framing this in terms of “hate” is really dismissive and juvenile. Your comment is in part a comment on the tone of internet discourse- consider that you are not helping.
Apple is right that this is a fundamental battery issue. Other phones must have SOME way of dealing with it.

Does anyone know how Samsung phones (for example) deal with low battery voltage issues? Do they simply adjust the battery meter so that it reports zero percent by the time you might start having these issues? Does it slow the phone down The way Apple did? Does it issue some sort of warning that your battery is getting bad?

Or does it just shut down if you overtax things?

It must be possible to figure out how other vendors solved this issue.
So street lights that shed their leaves in the winter? Or that die during a drought? Relying on the variable metabolism of trees to prevent car crashes doesn't sound like a good idea. Something like large columnar tanks filled with cyanobacteria or algae, that can be recolonized quickly when thrown out of equilibrium, would make more sense.
How long has this been happening?

I upgraded from iPhone 4 to the 6S due to the declining performance.
I've been preaching this for years... if MS adopts Linux, ups their GUI effort to create something useful atop Wayland, while providing a seamless way to run Win32 apps until the world migrates to Linux on the desktop helmed by Microsoft, they will completely destroy Apple on short notice.

It would be a major, revolutionary move for Nadella to do this and I doubt he has the heft or charisma to sell this to the board/shareholders, but if Microsoft goes full steam ahead on Linux and dumps Windows, it's buh-bye Apple and everything they ever produced. They can probably even eat into Google's droid pie.

Ditch Win32/NT, port the cash cow called MS Office to Linux and polish a Windows-like GUI atop Linux/Wayland in the best way they can, be it via Qt, GTK, I don't care - just get it done... and set the world ablaze and free.

Bet you they could probably deliver something in under 3 years.
Reportage: Apple secretly slows down your phone.

Reality: Apple secretly slowed down people's phones.
It's a legitimate question. Frankly, the idea of a phone's performance drastically changing over the course of one(1) version upgrade should aggrivate someone more than this. How can it be acceptable for a single release to "slow a phone to a crawl"?

This response makes sense. They screwed up communicating the issue of battery life to the masses that apparently don't know batteries wear out. They're fixing it, they're biting into their revenue with a mea culpa price cut, and they're making the OS more communicative of this nuance of phone performance.
They always release a new OS when a new phone comes out, which puts more strain on the old phones, causing them to perform worse because they have old batteries. It's pretty similar to planned obsolescence that has a good technical explanation.
Lying definitely works really well at work, however. I recently had to work with another team that committed to do a portion of the work on a feature, they blew it off for 5 weeks, then at the big meeting about it lied and claimed they never agreed to do any of it. Every person on the team lies and swears that never agreed, even though there are Hipchat logs of them working on it for a couple days with us before they punted it without telling us and went radio silent. Since they chose lying, however, it's impossible to ding them on peer feedback since they'll just claim miscommunication on the part of the reporter. So they insulate themselves from any bad feedback by lying their asses off...
The outrage doesn't seem overblown to me. For years I knew that my iphones were becoming obsolete not entirely from the passage of time but instead from upgrading the OS. Apple insisted they were not slowing down devices. Now they claim that they started this in iOS 10.2, without notification.

My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time. Whether intentional or not Apple would not acknowledge the issue. The phone shutting down at X% charge has always started after an OS upgrade.
>If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead.

Why is apple the only company with this problem?
> You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums ...

Err... that thread seems to have 21+ pages (at the time of writing this comment), including many "Me too" style of comments. Doesn't seem like an isolated problem. :/
All Apple would have had to do is enable a "Battery Saver" mode in some deep nested menu and turned it on by default, and this would have never been an issue in the first place. The fact that they hid it and denied it is going to cost them. It signals a deliberate misleading of consumers, and is a legitimate scandal.

You can't hide the bad intentions in good ones and call it a wash. "Extending the battery life for consumers" isn't a good enough reason to do what they did. A menu option ticked by default would have given the 80% who didn't mind this the same exact experience and the 20% that did the freedom to run their battery to the ground. However, doing so would have forced them to admit that the battery life was going to degrade over time given normal usage.
So even Apple has now recognized that their price was unreasonable and bad for customers. https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/

"Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com."
Some of this seems the inevitable fate of all large tech companies.

Apple / Amazon / etc compensates highly to retain engineering talent -> overweight tech salaries -> engineers burning out / leaving for more interesting startup opportunities -> successful startups being reacquired

Unfortunately, doesn't work so well for things like operating system codebases (NeXTSTEP acquisition aside).
Yes, from typing to opening apps, I would say anywhere from 500ms to 5s latencies were added to regular things I do. Opening games and such, forget it, I gave up playing games on it.
man... i literally just got my battery replaced. Wish I saw this an hour earlier
What does "locked in the Apple ecosystem" imply? Apps that don't have a satisfactory equivalent on Android, integration between Apple devices or general usability/user experience?
I’m assuming this slowness started immediately when upgrading to the iOS version that introduced the throttling?
> What happens when the only housing available is for drug addicts and you just happen to be poor?

The same thing that happens when the only parking available is reserved for the disabled and you're not disabled?
I really hope this price drop is also available in Europe. It's currently 99 EUR at Premium Resellers, but it should also be 29 EUR.
tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you."

Yes. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, as well as some R & D businesses. By far our most useful way of finding clients (apart from referrals) isn't even marketing, precisely: it's our blog: http://seliger.com/blog . We write about whatever we notice in grant writing, and since we're basically the only people writing honestly and directly about the field, we get a lot of traffic, and a lot of people who're interested find us that way.

It's both more effective and cheaper than Adwords. Adwords used to work really well for us, but it declined in effectiveness three to four years ago.
Is there anything that has a drink minimum besides comedy clubs?
How about be more open and acknowledge problems sooner?

While Apple always eventually gets to the right response, they can sometimes take too long to do so. In the case of these iPhone batteries, I think Apple's response was relatively timely.

But there have been cases where well known problems took over a year to acknowledge and remedy (like the early 2011 15" Macbook Pro GPU problems).
I had a very similar experience with my 6+ but instead of buying iPhone I finally jumped ship and bought Essential Phone (Android). (I also changed my Apple Watch 1 to Nokia Steel HR as a result of ecosystem change)

If only I knew that replacing battery would make my 6+ usable again I would remain iPhone user.
> I think Apple's response here is great.

I have bought a device of a certain performance, fully expecting that the battery will degrade and hold a smaller and smaller charge, but NOT expecting the performance of the device to suffer. I was given absolutely no warning that, come a certain age or use-pattern, the performance of the device will degrade. Apple went behind my back and installed software that prevented device lockup, and gave me no info about it.

What if I was entitled to a warranty replacement of the battery, but the software hid that from me by devaluing my purchase? This is not 'great', it's sleazy. Apple is essentially getting away with installing lower performance batteries and/or reducing it's warranty costs compared to competitors. The behavior itself is good from an engineering point of view, the communication was deceptive and fraudulent; the feature should be made optional, enabled at the user's discretion to extend the life of terminals that are outside of warranty and start to lock up, or the customer should be thoroughly informed at the time of purchase that the performance of the terminal will significantly degrade.