skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How will my plan to build and sell aluminum unibody laptops fail?
* Aluminum unibody

* Normal scissor-switch laptop keyboard

* Off the shelf high resolution IPS panel

* Large glass trackpad

How hard could it be?

# Design

Laptops don't need a lot to be a world apart from plastic laptops that flex and creak and overheat. Apple seems to be the only manufacturer that knows this, apart from IBM with the ThinkPad which Lenovo is now diluting (RIP) and Microsoft lately (shoutout). Key is a sturdy unibody bottom piece made of a material with good heat conduction (aluminum). Run the fans only when you have to, avoid filling up with dust. Basically get "inspired" by Apple's Macbook Pro. Copy it's airflow design.

Make it have a simple, attractive shape with flat surfaces and rounded corners. Taper off the edges to make it seem thinner and also to allow it to be picked up from a flat surface.

Get a good off the shelf high resolution IPS display.

Have a large glass touchpad.

Sacrifice 1-2mm of "thinness" and put a proper normal scissor-switch keybard in.

75-100 watt-hours of flat lipo batteries.

Put in a couple of key ports that are sorely missing from the MacBook. Don't go overboard, save yourself from the cost and complexity.

# Execution

Hire one or two highly experienced electronics design and manufacturing professionals. Hire a core team of highly motivated and moderately to highly experienced engineers. Start with only one model: the 15 inch. Go for a price around $1000-1500. Market at small scale to developers for the first couple batches of laptops. Iron out potential quirks in product, supply chain, and customer support. Then, if all stars align: launch at $999, same hardware features as a MacBook Pro plus some ports minus the touchbar. Create and ride the Macbook killer media hype and simultaneously run a quality "hip, cool, and happy people use this laptop" marketing campaign to build the brand. Get more funding and run more marketing campaigns. Sell a lot of laptops to people who want a great aluminum unibody laptop. Profit.
Firebase is great, but covered under a separate agreement with Google, and its terms aren't as friendly to corporate users. For example, they still aren't encrypting tenant data at REST. Nothing is COPPA compliant.
Avoiding recurrance.
Multinational corporations
Another Bad/Ugly: impossible to remove AppEngine data and application without removing the whole project, shame on you GCP :(
This is a great article!

I've used AWS extensively, and GCP moderately.

If you take the thoughtworks style approach, I would classify AWS as "Adopt", GCP as "Trial".

Google is investing very heavily in GCP, both internally and in sales and marketing. But, it still feels very much like patchwork. At least when you compare to AWS - which, while complex, is very consistent, very well documented, very stable, and performs very well. GCP is also, I believe, a combination of acquisitions, and this bleeds through with differently skinned UIs and URLs.

I'd say the big exception to this is GKE. If you're happy with a managed K8S, there is no comparison to GKE right now. GLB+GKE and you're pretty much set to handle anything with little ops work, and probably more affordable than AWS+Kops. Although, I'm not sure what the support story is like.
My hunch on why it is considered to be the 2nd in the cloud provider market is due to the most Enterprise size companies already being in bed with Microsoft with a lot of other products and there are a lot of incentives being thrown around to commit to using Azure. Also, there is the "Azure is not Amazon." or "Azure is not Google." Some Enterprise size companies simply won't do business with AWS because they are Amazon. That doesn't meant Azure is a good technical product and this maybe why you are seeing GCP vs AWS more often in technical comparisons.

For example, Azure was a consideration for our "not AWS" cloud provider until we tried to use custom Linux images with at rest encryption on the root volume. It's simply not supported and there was no viable work around. There was also no ETA for adding in support for this non-negotiable customer requirement. This is why we moved onto evaluating GCP. So far it has been pretty great and it is checking a lot of our requirements that Azure either fell short with or flat out didn't support.
Peeking Under the Flutter Covers
Easy peasy.

Now try troubleshooting it.
Just for your information:

https://www.uth.edu/media/story.htm?id=1692785a-5886-46e8-81...
Do you mean "not a full-blown word processor"?
EDM Meets Ballet: The Dancing Producer
Slices from the ground up – Dave Cheney
You did a great job of inspiring me to understand something I have, literally, not even the foggiest iota of a clue about. I finished your article in awe at the human species.
Removing individual lightbulbs or hanging flags as light barriers ... I hope you are seeing that your original suggestion is deeply unrealistic.
Infrastructure as software vs infrastructure as code.
Custom Printer Creates Complex Structures Using Type of Sugar – Design News
"You can now even search for words on Bing through Notepad by simply right clicking on them to get a new option"

That's what the world waited for... I am curious about the politics involved in the prioritization of this feature...
Why go through the effort of evalin' the result of pastebin.com/raw/XLeVP82h? Why not just put the resulting code from pastebin directly into the suspicious file?
I left Mac for a Surface Book a couple of years ago. It was a challenge at first. Largely because of WSL speed, but that has been mostly fixed now (test suite may be a few seconds longer, but it isn't 10x longer)

I am browsing the thread out of FOMO and don't feel any urge to switch back.
> Microsoft is also finally adding in ctrl+backspace support

#1 feature right there.
Well, let's see. A TR4 mobo can host 8 dimms. Say you want to max out in RAM that's a minimum of $1100. Add at least 10% if you go for ECC modules. Eventually you end up paying for RAM more than what you pay for the CPU. That's why a lot of people are conservative with RAM when they build a new rig. Somehow it doesn't feel right to pay that much money for memory. So you buy the bare minimum and then wait for prices to normalize, which seems like taking forever in this freaking industry.
"Web Application Architecture" by Leon Shklar is a good read for a detailed description.
> The only thing is it's harder to open the control panel than it used to be

<trys> [WinKey] "con" [Enter]

Nope, still just as easy.
You open implying that the original commenter's grievance in untrue outside of "throwing up some code," but at the end you say the opposite, and agree that it's "no excuse for being rude to them." I think you agree the original comment basically represents the truth, but you want to offer an elaboration on the complexities -- that's great, but why present your comment as a rebuttal?

I like your point about 'payment' not being a magic excuse for switching from not-rude to rude.

I don't accept the food analogy. You need food to survive, and you might need it free if you get stuck in life. You don't need free software - it's a bonus.

You mentioned the food-poisoning suing example - IA(also)NAL but if you put free software online without everybody's favourite "AS IS" block at the top, I believe you're on the hook if your software doesn't behave properly, so it looks to me like the law agrees with your notions.

Personally, I find the expectations over people offering software for free to be, broadly speaking, obnoxious - I definitely have a chip on my shoulder about it and I know that's coming out in this comment, so, apologies for the out of the blue railroading; your comment is the one that got me to articulate all the above, so, thanks.
I too am in great need of things like that.

I'm a mobile dev developing an app that I think I'm going to quit my job for to work on full time. I'm 33 and in over a decade of doing mobile (and front-end web) programming I've never worked on a personal project that showed as much promise as this one has for me, both financially and from a fulfillment standpoint.

However the prospect of wrangling the back-end and all the new things I need to do around deploying, scaling, containers, separation of services: cache, API, queue, DB, and making it all secure on top of that is giving me pause and making me less confident the more I read :(
> There is a "HIPPA" law

HIPAA, actually.

> Presumably it really only applies to interstate insurers,

It applies to all public and private health insurers/payers and healthcare providers in the United States. (Source: over a decade working in roles with some involvement in HIPAA compliance for a large, public, intrastate healthcare payer.)

Specifically, relating to the protection of information after death, the HIPAA Privacy Rule protects information for 50 years after death, but does give full control to the decedent's “personal representative” as determined by applicable law during that period.
> ctrl-a and ctrl-e

what the hell does ctrl-e do?
My girlfriend runs an independent video rental store. I've been thinking of ways to implement a streaming service for our extensive collection of physical DVDs from the store to customers in the local area, perhaps to a proprietary TV box. I have the skills to do this.

Does anybody here know if this has ever been done, or is legal? I'm in BC, Canada.
It's also more limited in some ways. People like integrating with Akamai/Cloudflare for instance, in which case there is little point to GLBs.
Equator P2 Xcursion Electric Amphibious Airplane Makes Maiden Flight
The world doesn't need to be as hard as it is. Or what I should really say is, we spend more time/energy dealing with things than we shouldn't really need to, taking away from the time/energy we should be spending on other things.
Why are the products labelled Tapioca Flour and Cassava Flour different?

It's the same tuber from the same plant, isn't it?
The fact that 4 out of 5 choose to leave ... makes me wonder why they left. Also makes me wonder why one person stayed. When people leave in big numbers like that it says something.

The impact is determined by what lifecycle stage the product was in and how well it was documented. If it was poorly documented then it was doomed from the start.
You've expressed a concern about having a second screen, but the concern seems to be unfounded. The parent is dismissing you because it appears that you're manufacturing a reason to hate on the touchbar and have already stated that you believe you don't even need to try it out to determine whether your concern is valid.

If you're not willing to consider that your concern is unfounded, then you shouldn't be offended when other people dismiss your concern.
NPM revoked all tokens. How is that irresponsible?

https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/dn7c1fgrr7ng
Indeed. That's why Google has SRE and Facebook has Production Engineering, and so on.
Heh... the current plan is to hold onto it as a backup (in case windows decides to rise up and ruin me in a couple months) and just use it with an external kb.
"npm has revoked all access tokens issued before 2018-07-12
12:30 UTC. As a result, all access tokens compromised by
this attack should no longer be usable."
This is such a golden opportunity served to Google on a platter. Even MS realized that they can get more sales by putting linux (wsl) on windows, and yet chromeos which is linux had no aspirations other than showing ads on chrome. At least they are trying to change that with crostini. Hopefully, they'll have some sensible hardware options in the future.
Moving forward NPM should require 2-factor authentication for popular packages.
org.simplify4u.plugins:pgpverify-maven-plugin works well for me. But here we are. There's multiple ways to verify package authenticity with maven. There isn't even signatures in NPM. NPM is belligerently against end user security. They won't even accept a pull request if you do the work for them.

https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/4016
It doesn't say "well planned".
I definitely recommend you check out the Dell XPS 15. I just picked one up and it has plenty of ports, an excellent display, and it’s super fast. As an added bonus, the one I got (core i9, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) was $1100 cheaper than the equivalent MacBook Pro.
It's handy in C for guarding parts of the language, as you often have to check return values anyway.

if(malloc(10000 * sizeof foo) == NULL) {
// Error processing
} // No need for an else branch here.
Ah. I wasn't referring to end user choices, I was talking about publisher design choices.

Medium.com is a platform, where your control is negligable. Earlier hosts, such as blogger, allowed you to theme your blog, you magazine, just like a completely owned site would.

My comment has nothing to do with end user, or in-browser themeing.
> IA(also)NAL but if you put free software online without everybody's favourite "AS IS" block at the top, I believe you're on the hook if your software doesn't behave properly

That's a complex question about implied warranty that probably is affected by whether or not you are meet the legal standard to be considered a merchant of the type of good/service provided and other factors (and the AS IS block definitely discourages people to sue, but you may not actually be able to disclaim the warranty involved, so it may not get you off the hook.)
Until a couple years ago Maven didn't even use SSL... The Node ecosystem has its fair share of issues but I think it takes a disproportionate amount of flak.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/08/Maven-SSL-Default
> Well, many embedded compilers will never move beyond C89 unless vendor is forced to do so.

FTFY
That’s one takeaway. There isn’t an alternative, though, so this isn’t actionable.
A malicious change could have already been published somewhere else, couldn't it have? And we just haven't found it yet?
Just tried it in cmd, powershell, and cmder, and it worked in all three. Don't have putty.
I've only worked in a couple of open offices, and management was not willing or able to make those adjustments in either case. Wish it was different.

I believe your comment is overly optimistic in most cases.
> There's never a reason to not use a password manager

Sage advice. Right until the day that there is a major exploit of a popular password manager.
Not really. Good middle-brow, relatively low budget films do come out of the festival circuit (Cannes, Sundance, etc.) but to my mostly mid-brow eyes, there aren't a huge number of super obscure undiscovered gems hiding in corners and deserving films, even if they're fairly low budget, tend to percolate up.

I've long been a pretty avid film watcher, including of classic films, but my tastes are pretty mainstream. If you're looking for new views, I'd just suggest Googling using terms like "Most underappreciated science fiction films" and things like that. Some good channels on YouTube as well.
The Spiral Language
If you find yourself needing to set up a VPN, do yourself a favor and use OpenBSD and IKEv2 (until WireGuard gets mainlined / becomes more prominent/widespread, at least).
There's a reason I picked numpy/scipy as examples. Among popular Python packages, they're among the genuinely hardest to build from source. You need several non-Python dependencies, including multiple language build toolchains, to get a working build, and need to dive into notes on things like ABI compatibility between different FORTRAN compilers in order to make sure what you're doing will work.

So, setting up something like a PyPI -- again, because that's what I'm familiar with -- that "just" adds the feature of building the packages on machines owned by the package repo is not exactly a simple thing. And PyPI currently hosts over 1M different released packages, so take that number into account when figuring the complexity of all the different things it might have to support.

Or, to put it another way, is it possible that working hard is not a good explanation for other-than-optimal solutions when other options are known?

Or, to put it another way, is it possible that people who leave drive-by "helpful" "suggestions" in comment threads about package repositories vastly underestimate what they're asking for, and often don't even really understand the problem domain?
> If Ben and Jerrys left a bunch of ice cream on the sidewalk and a bunch of people ate it and got sick then there would be zero liability on Ben and Jerrys.

Citation? That doesn't seem right, based on my anecdotal knowledge that restaurants take care to throw leftovers into a garbage bin rather than leave them out somewhere where someone could eat them and expose the business to liability.

I looked up this claim myself. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act into law to limit liability for those who donate food. [1] The majority of restaurants still discard leftover food due to concerns over liability, though. [2] Clearly, liability was a real issue at some point in the past. I don't know enough about the current law to know how easy it is to take advantage of the new protections; I can understand why people are still concerned.

In summary, liability issues vary by country and are not clear-cut. As an analogy for this open-source situation, they don't clarify matters.

[1] https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...

[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurants-that-dont-d...
This is an old thread, but to square your circle, the lower level employees probably knew that any upgrade wouldn't benefit them, so they "loved" the open office that everyone else was stuck with.
For one, they've marked the issue as resolved before they've completed any forensic analysis to discover if additional compromised packages were uploaded with stolen credentials during the window in which they weren't revoked.

This gives the false sense that its safe to install packages again.
I used Peapod for a period when I had a broken foot. Maybe I'll give them another shot one of these days.

I don't get Amazon Prime. I can get Instacart but not for Whole Foods.
You /really/ need to talk to a copyright lawyer in your country about this.

I am almost positive it'll run against SOME stupid copyright law even if you do an ethnically correct thing similar to having a human insert a disk in to a real video playback device and streaming the output to a merely a single very long distance connected display device.
> because everyone can fix it

Nope, not everyone can. And not everyone using it can fix it. And certainly not everyone can fix something to the standards that maintainers might demand.

> Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them.

If I'm bothering to try to help them with their project, they owe as much 'politeness' and 'gratitude' back to me as is expected of them. It's a (minimum) 2 way street.
https://github.com/reactstrap/reactstrap/blob/master/package...

Reactstrap has a dependency on Bootstrap, which as GP mentioned - uses jQuery.
ROI on Corporate Wellness Programs
Every time I hear "democratize" financial system from a FinTech or blockchain "company" it immediately raises alarm bells. Usually it's a euphemism for democratizing investor exploitation.
And the fact they don't get this is incredibly disconcerting.
There's a short but somewhat interesting post about notepad's maintenance here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=...
Absolutely. Ideally, we want to be able to integrate with 311 online services which cities are using so that we don't duplicate it.
Yikes. I wouldn't want to work with you.

I think your comment is ironic considering your previous comment:

>but there are plenty of idiots who turn off air conditioning, open the windows or pull up curtains regardless of everyone else's comfort.
For external 4K displays is it the same as before with the 13" supporting 2 at 60Hz with the 15" supporting 4 at 60hz?
I hear you. The little annoyances are far outweighed by the positives. Even the display seems crisper which I didn't expect over a retina display. WSL is not amazing performance, but it's probably about the same (the machine itself is faster, phoenix under WSL is not. Perhaps that's the perf issue at play)
There is no such thing as no I/O.

If you're latency bound by the round trip to main memory then SMT will still have a noticeable benefit. The most important thing it can't help with is if you are compute bound.
I'm not sure if you are playing or just didn't read the law very carefully, but disturbance of remains is not prohibited by what you linked.

>wantonly disturbs
* eslint gets compromised, and 3.7.2 is published

* eslint user FooCorp also gets compromised, and a similarly-malicious version of foolib-js gets published that includes the _same code_ to steal tokens

* npm invalidates all tokens

* you decide to use foolib-js, and your newly-minted token is now compromised

npm are fucking this up, and royally.
https://www.wired.com/2011/08/zediva-shuts-down/ - Zediva tried that previously and it didn't end too well for them. Was and OK service but tech wise it was a bit clunky and not as good as netflix.
Same here, the busier I get the deeper the pile, and its pretty deep right now.
But that would be the point of using an email host with your own domain, right? Be it Protonmail, Fastmail, or any other, you only need to provide the domain, and they provide the actual hosting.
pg asserted that downvoting is fine to be used for disagreement in Feb 2008, when HN was less than a year old:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
How is it Kafkaesque?
Python has open-braces in the form of colons. If you use emacs, you can use the PASS statement as a close-brace and everything will auto-indent properly. Python purists have conniptions when they see this programming style, but I've used it for nearly 20 years and it works for me.
To add to this, maybe your PM can help by getting scope reduced, or additional QA resources.

If they suggest more dev resources, be wary; that almost never speeds up project completion
It's probably not fair, but I've asked similar questions about alien encounters in science fiction shows. Those like Star Trek that have a universal translator hand wave away language issues, but even then, how do they deal with the video transmission itself?

I can imagine an engineer figuring out an analog broadcast, but once either party uses anything digital, all bets are off, especially once you imagine some codec being used to save bandwidth.

Of course, showing a season of some engineers trying to decode a broadcast makes for poor TV, so I get why they never bother mentioning this, but the thought process makes me realize how much I'm standing on the shoulder of giants when I debug a video player issue.
I actually agree with the bit about term conflation as well, but not the rest of the article.

They're comparing literally hundreds of years of architecture to a short 2-3 decade period following one of the most calamitous wars in history, when Europe was struggling to rebuild itself and function was more important than pretty exteriors.

You know this isn't either-or, right? The old building might lack amenities just because of when it was constructed, but you can build new beautiful buildings that have them. There is no reason why modern requirements necessitate godawful buildings.

Modern requirements don't necessitate godawful buildings, budgets do. In those rare situations where the budget is unlimited (i.e., see any building being built around Mecca), you end up with both beautiful exteriors and functional interiors. But otherwise, every dollar spent on a fancier exterior is a dollar that can't be spent on interior features. And occupants (residents or companies) care more about the interior than the exterior.