skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So strange. I posted this exact site hours ago and now it is on the top of hacker news. Not sure how that happened since it is the same url. I guess the algorithm doesn’t like me.

In any case, I have been a Mac user my entire life. I too have one of the 2016 MacBook Pros and I have to say I hate it. I previously owned an iBook, two PowerBooks, a MacBook Pro, and a MacBook Air. This is by far the worst Apple laptop I have ever owned. My parents needed a new Mac laptop and I recommended the 13 inch air cause it is the only usable one in their entire product line now.

I was thinking of writing a similar post about all the issues I have but the main thing is the keyboard. What good is a computer that you can’t type on. One spec of dust or one crumb and your keyboard is done. My space bar sometimes inserts two spaces and sometimes inserts spaces between letters. My left command key doesn’t register half the time which is insanely frustrating since I use keyboard shortcuts for everything. Some days I feel like throwing it out the window. The sad thing is I actually prefer the FEEL of the keyboard and the travel to the old one, but the issues with keys not working correctly are too much to overcome. In addition I have talked to a lot of people who have a new MacBook Pro and I haven’t found one person who hasn’t had an issue with the keyboard. I’m honestly shocked there hasn’t been a class action suit yet. It probably wouldn’t matter anyway cause Apple would just give me a free can of compressed air and blame me for eating over my keyboard.

I previously had an 11 inch MacBook Air and it was perfect just missing the Retina display. Apple went ahead and did all this stuff they thought people would want without understanding that no one cared, and they ruined a perfectly good product.
I slightly edited my comment. It's a valid claim and I totally agree that the keyboard is atrocious for me as well.

But products aren't just made overnight. I can almost certainly guarantee that these issues came up before release, but they decided that the cost to fix it wasn't justifiable enough. I personally see a lot of problems with that but I'm just letting you know from my experience working at an OEM, Google, and a huge Electronics company.
I use tab suspender with a 10 minute timeout and tree style tabs. It's amazing. I usually have over 100 tabs open, and I can collapse the tree branches I'm not using and only 10 or so tabs will actually be using resources. Performance is night and day compared to before I started using suspender. It's not everything I want though; I too feel the need for something in between a tab and a bookmark and it's frustrating that there aren't any options. I'm considering building one myself but I already have a dozen other projects that are more exciting than browser tab management.
I think it depends on what your profession is. The article read more like a list of minor annoyances to me, but I may have a very different usage compared to the author.

The problem to me is, that if I want to switch from the Mac, I have no where to go. I have yet to see another laptop in the same build quality or and OS that just let me do my work to the extend that MacOS does.

Apple is far from perfect, and the Mac is moving in the wrong direction, yet they are currently still the best offer out there.
Edit: The below is incorrect.

The weight reduction surprisingly doesn’t have a lot to do with battery capacity.

https://www.cnet.com/news/macbook-pro-october-2016-battery-l...
Album available on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0cGWC9bhEJA4l7jAaV7cqR
So I bought a MBP 13 Mid-2017 Non touch bar. The left shift key started failing about 2 months ago. Went to Apple, and they replaced the key which seemed to have fixed it. It started failing again this week.

I noticed there's a bit of correlation with how hot the machine is running. Ironically, I bought this upgrade to my previous MBP (another 13" from 2013) to run docker better -- but for anyone who runs docker for development knows, the machine runs hot.

The keyboard isn't so bad once you get used to it (I type fairly fast at 120-150 wpm), but the keyboard reliability issue is really something that bugs me as it affects productivity. If you're a programmer, needing to train to use the shift key on the contralateral side is a pain -- especially give all the muscle memory that's been trained over the years.
I'd like more regulations on securing / deleting consumer data, accountability for data leaks, public disclosure of political advertising, clear labeling of friend's content vs ads and organic trending content, and anti-monopoly regulations to promote innovative competition.

The public has benefitted from placing those regulations on traditional media, it should serve as an example for regulating massive tech corporations. If anything, I'm in favor of more advertising regulations on traditional media (eg banning deceptive advertising, especially in medicine).
Multinational businesses relying on Indian consumers face disappointment
Haven as in people join JUST for their visas and green cards. This also means they'll leave once they meet their objective.
Damore's lawsuit included screenshots of a high-level manager boasting about blacklisting employees who say the wrong thing about social justice. That makes for a toxic environment, regardless of what mailing lists you happen to be on.
I'm well aware that is it impossible to please everyone but do new MBs really please anyone?
The comment you're replying to told you why you're banned.

I didn't notice that you said anything about Coinbase, nor would that make a difference.
300 developers who got their first tech job in their 30s, 40s, and 50s
I concur.

1) Every time I talk with a recruiter, salary is the first thing brought up. It saves so much time to go through an interview process only to find out they're going to pay you 30% below market value.

2) A recruiter brings you an job position that you did not know about in the first place usually. There are thousands of companies in an area, and not all of them post to the job boards you're looking at.

3) Using the recruiter means the company is motivated to filling that position. They need someone now and the usual means of getting people in to interview in that company is broken.

4) Developing a relationship with a recruiter is valuable, because they know what's hot, and what companies are willing to pay.
The "employee" word is not mentioned in Google's post a single time.
>My default editor is vim and don't have issues with escape

if you are using vim, it is more efficient to use ctrl+[ instead of the escape key. This way your hands are staying where they mostly are.
The removal of the Magsafe port alone conveys someone stopped believing in what they believed in strongly before. [1]

Now that Apple has taken a controversial stance on the design of the newer Macbooks (no Magsafe, fewer ports, no ESC key, etc.), I think it's going to be hard for them to fallback to their previous design as that would be an admittance of their failure. And this alone means to me I wouldn't be buying a laptop from them for the next couple of years until they admit they screwed up, or come up with a better solution. This is a classic example of don't fix something if it ain't broke.

At the same time, I can't imagine myself using a HP or Lenovo either after being used to the MacOS ecosystem. All one can do is just hope, I guess.

For the record, I own a retina 2014 MacbookPro, and I think it's the perfect machine for any programmer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hzseCyqr4s
How to Think Like a Medieval Monk (2017)
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That's what media articles would have you believe. How else would they get clicks?
Considering they partnered with facebook, they don't quite see it that way, instead looking at it as a way to bring good e2e crypto to millions of people.

It's a tradeoff.
God yes. I—personally, just an opinion obviously—detest Windows. I viscerally hate it.
My biggest issue with the MPB is that if you accidentally press Option+[Any touch bar icon] the System Preferences will open.

This happens quite a lot for me on a keyboard with Swedish layout, where it is easy to accidentally rest my right pinky on the touch bar when when writing chars such as { and [.

* "(" is Option+8
* "{" is Option+Shift+8
I have no complaints about the MacBook Pro I got from Mid 2014. It's been used with OSX, Ubuntu and now with Manjaro Linux. It's a very solid machine, pretty awesome hardware.

But since I'm not going back to OSX, if I were to renew my laptop I wouldn't get one of the MacBook's newest models, I'd just go for a good machine from Lenovo or something.
I'm using my MacBook Pro with an external mouse, keyboard and screen both at the office and at home. Haven't opened it in months now. Perhaps Apple had that in mind when they thought of adding "Pro(fessional)" to their MacBook?

No complaints here!
Not this news site I bet...
Yes, life sciences is very different. We've been funding life sciences companies for several years now, so we've learned how to adapt our advice. We've also made tweaks to the YC batch cycle to fit companies with longer development cycles.

It's still not perfect, though, so the things we're trying in this experiment, like providing lab space for companies, are the next step.
Inside Otis Redding's Final Masterpiece
Or map Esc to `jk`. Gold.
Mega is awesome and also end-to-end encrypted.
> The military refuses to answer Congress

My understanding is that properly cleared representatives and their staff can absolutely get information on what they need and speak candidly about all the sensitive details in a SCIF.

This recurring narrative that intelligence agencies are holding back is not good, because it makes it seem like representatives are being misled and are tricked into voting for these authorities, deflecting accountability, which is far more convenient than the truth of them being well-informed and still choosing to support it.
I'm thinking of building an AMD dev box. For enterprise consumers, if they're using 1U or blade servers, they could make the choice to switch to AMD for future nodes.
I absolutely agree. I have the 2015 15' MacBook Pro and is so much better than the newer "pro" (touchbar) laptop I use at work.
I, for one, love my 2016 MBP a year after buying it.

> Typing

I got used to the new keyboard after about a week and going back to my previous-gen MBP the smaller keys and extra travel just feels awkward. I type at a speed of about 120WPM, fwiw.

> Touch Bar

Maybe it's because I keep decent posture, but the touch bar is always in sight for me, and I've learned where all the standard buttons are situated by heart anyway. Plus, it's neat when apps have touch bar controls.

> Track Pad

Again, switching between the prev-gen MBP and this one the difference is massive. I never touch the larger track pad accidentally (I'm 6'1" and have relatively large hands, again, maybe it comes down to posture). He's right about the shitty cursor keys on the new gen.

> Power supply

Although I miss magsafe, I don't miss the shitty chords they came with (I think I went through about 10 chargers because I'm prone to moving my laptop while keeping it charged, and that damages the chord in magsafe chargers). I much prefer being able to plug the charger anywhere over magsafe, however.

> Battery Life

The battery life is as good or better than my old gen's was when it was new. Compared to my old gen now, it lasts about 2-3x as long based on the workload.

My only real problem with it is the increasingly shitty software, but the prev-gen MBP doesn't fix that. :)
Interesting. The 2017 Macbook Pro is the first Macbook I've ever had, and I find the keyboard terrible. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but I just struggle to type on it, often finding letters missing from the words I've typed, and the keys never being where my fingers expect them to be. The key travel just feels wrong too.

By comparison, I also have a very cheap Asus netbook (13", I think) - it was about £100 compared to about £3000 for the MBP, and it actually has a better keyboard!
never thought about it! Thanks!
So it's the best trackpad based on sample size of 1, or what?

Lucky you have gotten a keyboard that works. My WPM suffers from having to go back and correct stuff all the time. Of course, now it's almost ingrained that in order to make a space, I have to press the spacebar, and then backspace to remove the extra space.
Carrying around the two laptops, the newer one’s slightly smaller bezel, significantly thinner case, and weight reduction (overall, it fills 22% less volume and weighs 13% less) make a pretty big difference in portability, without the sacrifices that go into the Air laptops.

If you leave it on a desk all day, then it doesn’t really matter, but if you’re constantly taking it on the go you’ll likely appreciate the change (even if you don’t think it’s worth the trade-off in keyboard button travel distance, elimination of some ports, opportunity missed for a larger battery, etc.).

Personally I wish they had allocated an extra millimeter of depth for the keyboard.
Despite some critics, e-learning is important for Afrika
I am a former new MBP owner who concurs with all of this.

I would have actually considered looking past everything in this author's list with the exception of the keyboard. At first I thought it was just my fingers adjusting to the new keyboards after years of a previous generation. But after almost 6 months of not adjusting I gave it up and sold it.

You have to bank pretty hard on the keys and they have this horrible cheap "plastic-y" feeling to them. The old thick rubber keys were one of the best parts of the older MBPs.

The new keys give the sensation that they are sticking or perhaps something has become lodged under them. I found it to be truly a deal-breaker and could not fathom how Apple thought this was in any way an acceptable experience or an improvement.

If you are considering buying one I would suggest bringing your old MBP to an Apple Store and trying them side by side. And then realize that the keyboard on the new MBP will always feel that awkward.
My personal laptop is a 2012 15" Retina MBP, and my work one is a new 15" with the TouchBar. This is, by far, the longest I've kept a laptop and I'm sorta dreading having to replace it (it is having some reliability/battery issues lately) for pretty much the reasons the author described - they match my experience with the new MBPs.

Admittedly, a lot of the things come down to personal preference. I've met a lot of people who like the new keyboard (I slightly prefer the old one, but I hate hate hate the arrow key configuration on the new ones), use the TouchBar a lot (100% useless and annoying for me), and enjoy the extra space on the new touchpad (I really dislike how big it is - I accidentally click a lot).

The really worrying thing, though, is how unreliable the new keyboards are, and how difficult they are to replace. Repairability is pretty terrible with Apple. I'm not holding my breath for Apple to change any of the design decisions they've made with the MBP lately, but hopefully they can at least address reliability issues with the keyboard.

Given all that, plus how unreliable OS X has been for me lately, it is tempting to consider non-Apple alternatives, but it is hard to say if any of them are actually going to be any better. Either way, I don't feel the same about them now as I have from the early 2000s until 2012.
You can map ESC to CAPSLOCK in settings.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I write this as an overall Apple enthusiast. I used to say this every year but I haven't been able to say it for years: "I want the latest MacBook Pro because it's the best yet." It's just not anymore. :-(

Have several MacBook Pros. Favourite is still 15" mid-2015 with Iris Pro. Would buy again.

Previous to 2015, my 2009 and 2011 MacBook Pros are still loved and will likely receive maintenance and use for years because they have easy to upgrade RAM, SSD, and a somewhat easily replaced battery.

None of the new offering turns my head, and they wouldn't even if they were cheaper. So what a perverse trend this is. I think it's truly a design failure of the entire MacBook Pro product line.
Can anyone precisely describe TensorFlow in a single sentence?
From what I recall, the creative professional market has always been their intended "Pro" market. It's unfortunate that they are unwilling to offer a MacBook Pro Developer Edition, but it's not surprising given Apple's history.
Although well-written, I wonder why people buy laptops when they seem inherently poorly suited for their requirements. Most of the complaints seem to be things that are obvious. I've been using MBPs since 2000. But 6 months ago bought a ThinkPad Carbon X1 and lovin' it. Always seems to have battery all the time.
If your laptop is still under warranty and you can wait a few days while they ship it back and forth, Apple will replace the keyboard for you free of charge.
Still a douchebag company.

In essence, they got its users (me included) to sign away our sovereign data before we knew its value. I feel the equivalent is colonialists in Africa getting African chiefs to sign away their land for a bottle of whiskey. I would go as far as to say Facebook is a neo-colonialist land-grabber - except its not your land you've given away, it's your most personal information. Zuckerberg = world's biggest douche. A modern day Cecil Rhodes.
New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ electronic devices
Social Media: Making Us Dumber?
In my company all developers work on MBPs and none of them says even a positive word on the new generation.
To add to the article: Ethernet over USB-C is sluggy at best. We had to change two devices over GPU failures (never happened before).
I found myself playing around with the Surface Book and it felt like cheating on my wife ...
I bought about 100 MacBook Pros for me and my company and it feels like this is the last generation in use.
I still can remember the joy I felt when I opened my first MBP and I think I will not forget the disappointment from the current generation.
A solar sail and a bit of patience?

It would take some serious engineering chops to pull it off, but it's not totally implausible.
See how much you love that keyboard a year from now once it's built up enough dust under there.
It's not uncommon for a company to take a look at the equity incentives it's given to employees, in whatever form and realize it's not worth very much and try to make good by giving replacement incentives. I've been at companies where they replaced underwater options at $N a share with at money options at $M with $M being much less than $N (of course the stock continued downward and I left for other reasons before anything vested); for a not yet public company, poorly priced options being replaced with RSUs makes a lot of sense, because the company may not be able to increase its valuation, but it doesn't want to decrease it, and options issued under FMV don't qualify for exciting tax programs.
I couldn't accept this as an excuse when you have possibly the worst CPU bug in x86 history, or perhaps all CPU history, with ample of man power and resources, along with 6 months time frame.

Rush isn't a word I would use.
Devils Advocate Response to this:

If the keyboard is failing on a 2016, take advantage of Apple's stores and get it replaced under warranty and with far less hassle than say, Dell with an XPS 15 and failed motherboard. (From experience with both.)

Battery life is typically quoted at 5 hours doing something relatively intensive, and 6-7 in general for the 15 inch. 4 hours must be heavy, high CPU and GPU use. I'm not sure what other pro laptops achieve in this area, but I doubt it's much higher unless they use the absolute newest GPUs and CPUs. It is a step back from the 2015 Gen, at least with the 2016s. I think this is actually partly Intel's fault for not supporting LPDDR4.

Touch bar is eh, maybe not a pro feature, although it seems like it would be nice for sliders when editing photos? No ESC key can be an issue, although many "pros" apparently map this to caps lock anyway.

I agree on the trackpad, it's too large.

Ports is a tricky one. No normal USB or Display ports is a giant pain, but 4 Thunderbolt/charging ports is super nice and will attach to some really high speed, expensive pro stuff. No SD card is perhaps, a missing pro feature. Then again, the very highest end cameras now use XQD or CFast. And the built in card reader has never been fast compared to a good external reader. Would a real pro machine have this port? Probably. Does it make the macbook pro not a pro machine? Doubtful.

The charging light and other power supply issues are USB-C trade-offs. People yelled at apple for using a custom, non-accessible port, then got angry when they used a standard port. I love my magsafe port, but I also like the idea that I no longer have to but expensive apple power supplies to replace a failed one.

And on the display and no glowing apple logo, I think they removed the logo because they couldn't make the display thin enough with it and not comprise the displays uniformity. And 4k OLED would result in a 3800$ machine with worst battery life, that's a lot of light to power and pixels to drive...
Fine comment, but you can't make an account with a trollish name, even when it's the local superego you're trolling. If you want to participate on HN in good faith, that's great, but then please really do so. Continued abuse of HN will eventually get your main account banned too, so please just don't.
It's hard for any large organization to be nimble and quickly change direction, eg. the government, military, unions, religions.

If anything, stock options incentivize longer term thinking. Instead of quarter to quarter goals, stock options reward goals years in the future.
Viewing and editing 4K video would be a pretty common use case on the largest MBP.
I agree with everything that is written in this article. Same experience and same impressions. I have to use new mbp at work. Who would have thought that too much of track pad can be bad, not me. And how many times I accidentally pressed stupid touch pad and lowered lighting, thinking that machine is shutting down on me.

Only thing I didn't have a problem with, battery life. Works fine for me.
It is a mess. I suggest that you and anyone else asking these questions pay attention to Microsoft a little bit, to receive all of the information that there is to be had on this.

Microsoft has been telling people about problems with the mitigations up-front. There are, for starters, Microsoft KnowledgeBase articles detailing problems with older AMD CPUs and with anti-virus softwares that behave like rootkit viruses resulting in systems that will not boot, and web log articles discussing the performance considerations for server systems.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076660
And I've already provided these data. Vietnam being my favorite example as a nation now pulling far ahead of us. The reason I mention that country is because I'm quite familiar with it, and even Houdini level mental gymnastics are not going to spin them ahead of us socially or economically in any way whatsoever. And they're not cherry picked. We rank 40th internationally in math now, far below even the OECD average. There are plenty of other examples to demonstrate that our problem is not money.
A company I work with wanted me to have a corporate laptop. I said I would only accept an original 15" rMBP, with keys and magsafe. I waited an extra 6 months until they got one for me. It's used but I don't care. As a vim user with kids and dogs, the new MBP is dead to me.

Jony Ive needs to get out more.
Here's a visualization I made of the top causes of death in the USA. We've got a lot of work to do! Fortunately, the mechanisms of aging underlie many of these illnesses.

https://www.infino.me/mortality/usmap
Ahh, you might be right, it rings a bell