skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Further, I would say that developers/enthusiasts comprise a very high percentage of macbook purchasers."

And you base this assumption on?

Every action from Apple in these last few years have gone towards the wishes of the average developer/enthusiast.

Worse keyboards, useless gimmicks, gimped CPUs, fewer ports, less repairability/configurability.

If they consider developers/enthusiasts as their main audience, they have a really weird way of catering to them.

And since Mac sales have been at least steady over the last years, developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent.

https://bgr.com/2018/01/14/mac-sales-2017-marketshare-pc-dec...
I think the dividing line is deliberate communication - a dog barks because it "wants" to communicate. But then the counter-argument rejects the will, and comes down to "aren't all our actions because of basic chemistry?". I reject that assumption - not because there's a some sort of supernatural element, but just because a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. There's a massive rift between "sun makes tree grow, preventing other trees from getting the light" and "I'm trying to sell my wares by expressing concepts of value, numbers, and desire".
When we heated the pot it didn’t become less cold, it became more hot. Could anyone even blag that “cold” is real? Like
> C has all these different kinds of control flow and all these built-in operators, whereas everything you would want to do in OCaml is just plain old functions and expressions.

OCaml does have for and while loops, to be fair, although they don't support break or continue (you can simulate break by throwing in the loop body).
All things considered you have a pretty amazing life if someone walking behind you constitutes "stress."
Which password manager is the most secure / robust / potentially long lasting company out of: LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane, Keeper (or others?)?
Someone should make this!
There's a big difference between the AfterEffects guys and the writers. Rogan's complaints were as someone whose career requires massive amounts of writing and understandably wants a keyboard to have feedback.

I'm in complete agreement with him. In their obsession to make the thing thinner and fancier they have rendered it less usable. They've locked themselves into a marketing pattern that precludes them from having a "if it ain't broke" mindset.
I prefer the trackpad on my (personal) X1 carbon to the trackpad on my (work) Macbook Air
A viewpoint: charity is power. These companies have control over where this money goes, and are likely to spend more on things that make them look good, or provide long term benefit to the company over things that don't.

Another approach might be to take the charity money away from the companies, and have those funds distributed to worthy causes by a democratically appointed body instead: giving the money to causes that benefit everyone, not just the company's PR department. You could call this system 'taxation'.

A case study: Flint water. Nobody's done anything about it for years. Now there's a PR opportunity so Elon's going to fix it. The people of Flint will get drinkable water (hopefully) and Elon will get another PR lift. This problem could have been fixed years ago (and perhaps should never even have happened), but the people who decide when these big social problems get fixed is no longer the people (almost all of whom think it's an unacceptable travesty, especially in a rich, developed nation), but the billionaire class, who require something back in return.
1. You can protect against problems like "a subdependency's patch version automatically bumped to something bad" with a lockfile, either yarn.lock or package-lock.json. Of course, that doesn't help if you chose to update your lockfile in the handful of hours this attack was live.

2. It seems to me that, accordingly, a client-side command to only download packages/versions that have been live for more than n hours/days would decrease the likelihood of downloading malicious code substantially. The community is large and folks tend to find the bad stuff.

3. If independent third parties had to audit code _before_ it could be released, we'd get a lot less code a lot slower.

4. We do have a trusted third-party publish new packages – NPM. They remove malicious content as quickly as they can.

5. Yarn operates a mirror, and there are several CDN's with everything on npm - unpkg.com, cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm, bundle.run. Perhaps one of them will let you download everything for examination.

I wouldn't be surprised if NPM, Inc. would help you audit the rest of the ecosystem if you reached out.
Thank you! I'm going to hunt for some 3M peltor optime III ear defenders on Amazon right now.
Wow, makes the whole thing much more pleasant to use. Pretty bad that I only discover this now, after a year and a half.
Ooo, interesting! I'll definitely look into that when I go into one of my next "optimize my workflow as a form of procrastination" mindsets I tend to end up in
I don't mind about touchbar being there or not, just make escape key physical again :-(

It's not that hard, I mean, esc takes half the size of a regular key. Right below it in old Macbooks we have a full sized key just for ~` they could make the space of this full sized key contain instead two half sized keys.

The top would be esc, the bottom would be ~`. If you notice the Macbook already has this, for the up/down arrows. They are two half sized keys taking the footprint of a single full sized key.
Just wait until you see Apples own instructions for removing the sand.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/ht205662
'Were no,' not 'was,' it's the subjunctive tense.
Breakthrough in construction of computers for mimicking human brain
People who want functional keyboards is the majority of MBP users. Even non-technical blogs like The Verge and The Outline are complaining about major failures with the keyboards. This problem isn't developer-specific in any way.
Ex-Apple Engineer Arrested for Stealing Self-Driving Car Secrets
This is certainly a good point and part of the reason why I just deal with the noise. Desk segregation based on noise levels rather than teams is actually a pretty good idea. Not sure of the implementation of something like that.
>> The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated...

Yeah, they say it promotes more collaboration because you may overhear something where your input is relevant and join in. Or something like that. While that may be true, the increase in UNwanted distraction completely overwhelms any benefit. So then they tell us to be respectful of people around us and keep things quiet - we don't want people to overhear you. Wait wasn't that the point?
I believe the price increase is purely based on the profit-maximizing strategy. If people will pay that much then Apple has no reason to ask for less. Unfortunately, I can not imagine myself switching to a Windows-based laptop. This is just another example of why monopoly is bad.
I'm so confused since crypto means cryptography but these shills seem to use it to mean "cryptocurrency"
The thing is that this working-from-home people significantly impact the efficiency of your office. It's a trend (could be the open-office space started it) but resulted in people easily working 2 or more days from home. That implies that any desk you have is empty about 40% of the time. Or: your entire office is not being used for 40%...

So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people.

That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results...

For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.
>None of this is new. There’s been an endless stream of studies showing that the open-plan office is a source of stress, conflict, and turnover. And yet it’s still the default in tech. An almost unquestioned default. That’s a fucking travesty.

No, it's the other way round: you create conflict and turnover by introducing an open-plan office. That way, your codebase remains maintainable since handovers happen regularly.

Imagine the opposite: a productive coder from a silent office leaves after 30 years. There is a very high probability that it takes months until new recruits can make meaningful changes since nothing has been documented. If you enforce regular handovers you can be sure that some documentation has accumulated somewhere.
The niche is not developers themselves; the niche is a (vocal) sample of the developer community. I'm a developer and I like the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard with touchbar.

In particular:

What we want is a functional keyboard.

This is your opinion, but it's not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, I would rather Apple focus on other parts of the computer than the keyboard. The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me, and I'm just as productive a developer without whatever platonic ideal of a keyboard Apple could put on the thing.

I think a lot of people vastly overestimate the number of Apple customers who have an opinion about this, because it's relatively easy to see complaints on HN, blogs or tech journalism.
What kind of development are you doing on it? Have you found a good workflow yet?

I've given up running Linux natively on my computers and I'm trying to find the best Windows 10 workflow
been using vim for almost 10 years now, never remapped esc to caps, because remapping caps to control is a lot more comfortable for me.

i could do the tap -> esc, hold -> control, but every solution i tried has some delay that makes it super uncomfortable.
The non-touchbar model didn't get any updates, its the 2017 model with the 7th gen processors.
What proof is there that this isn't just an urban legend?
its a horribly lazy click-bait article with no references.
If the malicious JS code is already running in node, there is no need to exploit a RCE bug.

edit: to expand, an underhanded js bug might be a path traversal bug, xss bug, leak of session cookies - any of the familiar js security bugs that occur as honest mistakes too.

(But while on the subject, Node API's are historically quite unsafe and do have lots of memory safety vulns, search results are in 3 digits in the issue tracker for queries like segfault. Node API's are not really written with hostile code in mind.)
I thing I like the macbook for is the longevity. My refurb 2014 Mac Pro still boots up faster than my new XPS from the same year with equivalent hardware. Also, almost no loss in performance as opposed to the XPS. I hope the newer windows machines up their ante in that regard so when my mac pro kicks the bucket, I have something good to go to. With the ugly touchbar and no magsafe charge, the new macbook has lost its appeal for me.
New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova keeps winning at poker
I’d be willing to bet a big part of the base that buy the MacBook pros are the creatives. Most consumer consumers are happy with iPhones and iPads.

As someone who was a massive fan of Apple MacBooks and recommended them to other people, I don’t do that now. I highly unrecommend them nowadays. I’ve personally in fact bought older second MacBooks since they last longer and work better than the new ones.

So it slowly adds up. Microsoft surface is already making a good dent in what was a loyal Mac Pro market.
In many cases, the reason they need constant growth is because they're not profitable. They're just burning through cash in an attempt to become profitable in the future, which requires growth.
Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain!

"The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1]

[1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html
Looks like they incrementally improved the three biggest gripes about the last generation. You can now have up to 32GB RAM, the keyboard is better, and battery life is slightly better.

Apple seems to have a "tick-tock" release cadence these days, at least with laptops. If you want the best machine maybe wait for the "tock?"
predator–prey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
I slack and email co-workers who are within spitting distance of me. More often than not they are busy and I don't want to interrupt their flow with something that does not require immediate attention. So I'll shoot a Slack or email their way and let them get to it when they get to it.
The price point just doesn't make sense any more. The 15 inch model starts out at $2800. You can get a much better machine, hardware wise, from competitors at the same price.
Yeah, `npm publish` should just – on npm's servers – fetch a github repo and run a build command. This would be more secure, convenient, and less prone to silly errors (like forgetting to build before releasing).
And risk getting pilloried by the community for being divisive? Or worse, for triggering someone?

Zed has taken a way-out-of-proportion amount of heat (and mostly people just trying to bait him) from people for his confrontational style. Even then, the social climate is much less receptive to that sort of thing now than it was then.
> In the article they cite the MBP as being the most popular notebook for developers so this niche must be important, otherwise why list it?:

Marketing 101. The majority of smokers weren't cowboys.
Where is this quote from? Was the original link to something other than the Apple release?

The linked Apple release just says:

> an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing
X is a rotated cross, so x-ing is read as cross-ing, which makes more sense. X for trans- is also pretty common, like xfer for transfer.
Don’t Be Afraid of Pain
No, it's a joke making fun of the "IFLScience" people who mindlessly parrot back what they read on social media as gospel truth. There's been a resurgence in science-as-politics for the political class, so people who have no idea what they're talking about have decided they're scientists, by virtue of their politics.

The Earth is obviously round, but the reaction is really, _really_ funny. I don't get why that isn't obvious.
In their defense aerospace is a sector where governments and state-linked mega-corps are probably the largest customer base, especially for high-end gear.
Well it's nothing new, if running a script an DDoS websites pretty heavily, then making it more powerful with the AI, you can bombard the website with requests even more. Scripts were already made in a pretty smart way though
IIRC the keyboard has hardware problems and dead keys are common
A lot of people ask techie friends for advice on what computer to buy.

As argued by Paul Graham:

"So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world."

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html
I worked for a supplier to the industry for a little while heading an electrical department, but spent some time in hardware maintenance as well. I saw plenty of those things nearly bleached white if they lasted long enough.
The thing is it'd be easy to have a functional keyboard. Just give back the one they had been using. Doesn't need focus.
9 Podcasts for first time founders
I think the Unity dock concept is a lot more approachable for naive computer users: commonly used applications are always availabe, it’s clear which applications are open, and it’s clear which windows are open within those applications.

Older relatives of mine have taken to it immediately, Gnome’s equivalent has an appreciable learning curve. Also, I recently installed 18.04 on a relative’s three year old laptop, and it was really really fast, faster than my vanilla Gnome installation, although that could be because I’m using more applications at once.

Ubuntu’s ideas of usability are valid for some use cases, even if they’re not mine.
One observation about communicating would be : the information transfer should be voluntary. Trees should be able to kind of shut up and speak up without threatening their own existence.
Yet people have done and are doing it on a daily basis.
I like to remind people that it's not "you versus AT&T" it's "you versus a quarter million experts in their respective domains."

I would expect any average individual to lose against AT&T in whatever their issue is unless AT&T willingly concedes to them.

Picking on AT&T for no particular reason.
rot13'd to avoid spoilers

Vf vg ol erzbivat n pregnva ahzore bs yrnirf naq nfxvat sbe gur gbgny pbhag ntnva, gura fhogenpgvat obgu naq pbzcnevat gur qvssrerapr?
Smallest-ever magnetic vortexes mark step toward new digital memory
Are people really moving their iMac around so much they require a bag?!
My 30 year old copy of "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister has a chapter entitled "Bring Back the Door".

And yet the battle still rages.

If you haven't read the book, I'd recommend it. If only to realise how little we've learned.
To my recollection, after discovering tap to click, I've not once accidentally clicked. That would be, hm, maybe 15 years now?

The extra effort required/friction added to click really annoys me now.
Interested in trying out the new Black Magic eGPU. I freaking love Black Magic products and the price of this is very reasonable, like most of their products.
Even something like checking a phone number just means that you're limiting the number of legitimate "bots" or alternate accounts people can have.
Man, reading the comments makes me think I'm the only one who loves open offices. After switching from a cube I never want to go back. I found being locked in a cube all day was depressing and created a culture of working zombies. With an open office in my experience people seem much happier.
>If independent third parties had to audit code _before_ it could be released, we'd get a lot less code a lot slower.

So? The JavaScript community could stand to slow down a bit.

>We do have a trusted third-party publish new packages – NPM. They remove malicious content as quickly as they can.

They might publish, but they certainly don't audit. Anyone can publish a package on npm in tens of seconds and it's immediately live for anyone to install. It's not even signed. This looks nothing like a Linux distro.
I like UIs that feel premium. Needless to say, Xubuntu and i3 do not make the cut. Left with Gnome 3 (ugh) or KDE (options galore). All other DEs feel clunky (graphical glitches, sub-par design) and are also usually buggy (which is normal for an open source project with such a big scope).
The Air is their best-selling laptop because: (1) it's by far the cheapest and (2) it's tiny. It's also extremely outdated -- people universally love the retina screen but the Air doesn't have that either. Also, rumor has it the Air is being replaced this fall, so we won't see what features make it downstream until then.

The above is to disagree with all of your specific arguments, but I do not disagree with your implied conclusion -- I don't think the touch bar is universally loved. I suspect most consumers do not care about it one way or the other, and I think it was a mistake that Apple should kill.
I'm liking the pricing with you guys, I have a list of contacts currently around 5k that will probably take awhile to grow to 10k that I wouldn't mind paying $10/m to send monthly emails to. Now again I want to send a warm "open" to them to update their subscription settings and whatnot but since many may be a little old (we rarely sent emails except direct correspondence) I'm super concerned about people hitting "mark as spam" and it becoming an abuse complaint resulting in domain blacklists. I did a 2k run on an actual newsletter with mailchimp and 4 people did that. About 19 unsub'd which is fine. Any advice?
I would love a discreet graphics option on the 13" version.
You can set it up so that tapping caps lock is interpreted as escape, while holding it is interpreted as control. It's one of the first things I do whenever I get a new machine.
Radeon, so still no CUDA.
FoundersBelt - Curated resources for every stage of startups
Configuration matters, but so does size. My built-in trackpad is fine, but the larger external one is the real joy.
Learning to Code by Writing Code Poems
I seem some unreliable VPNs here and I'm not even shocked about this. People use VPNs for a reason and want them to be reliable and trustworthy, they don't want their emails and details to be scraped. Also, Google, the most unreliable and unsafe email provider ever
That's an interesting argument, but not one that I agree with. Rights exist without being granted. In an unorganized society, theoretically you have all possible rights. Society limits your rights, it doesn't grant them.
God I just want to run MacOS on a surface book. I hate windows but love the hardware. Can anyone tell me if this is possible ?
I base it on the fact that among developers it is an extraordinarily popular laptop, and that there are a shitload more developers than most people seem to estimate. We are a pretty large "niche" nowadays. I have a Lenova Yoga 720 and I am almost always the single non Macbook user in any developer group.

"developers/enthusiasts have a really weird way of showing their discontent"

If you want to use xcode, you have no choice[1]. If you're in the ecosystem, you have no choice. So you complain about it and hope they change it the next time around.

[1]-I remote desktop to my desktop, but eh.
Obligatory: Once More, with Feeling
Check the first comment on that page https://www.nature.com/news/1.20648#comment-2911888136

> I think that the single most significant property of the adult tardigrade in relation to stress resistance is that its somatic cells are eutelic, that is, after hatching as an adult, the somatic cells do not divide

Tardigrades are very peculiar in this regard: after hatching, they grow to adult size not by cellular division (mitosis), but by growing the cells (hypertrophy).

If that's the key to their ability to withstand radiation (beyond the effects of 'Dsup'), we humans have no hope of using the same trick.

(Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, and haven't read the paper.)
>If the TouchBar really makes it easier for non-nerds to find shortcuts, why only offer it in the top-end laptops?

Maybe it helps the laptop feel more highend/luxury?
s/United States/China/;
# of copies of DNA is just a proxy for probability of propagation.
I agree. But I like slack more than talking because I get time to think and a transcript after. Probably yet another reason I love working from my home office.
> This is overwhelming my biggest problem. cmd+c, cmd+v for copy and paste across all apps. Not all apps minus terminal.

I really wish one of the major *ix toolkits/desktops would make some effort to attract or accommodate Mac refugees or dual OS users. I just wanna type Ctrl-W to erase a word and GUI-W to close a window — consistently.