skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Reading this makes me wonder who is still using Visual Studio. That IDE is so bad it's beyond believe

Eh? Although I prefer Rider, I don't see how you can make that claim. Yes, it has perf issues, and at least in the past has had some stability issues too, but it's absolutely crammed with features and offers a great dev UX for everything from source control to debugging.

> Why the hell do Windows developers need to install an entire new IDE in order to use the latest version of the .NET runtime? It's ridiculous beyond belief.

To be clear, this is only for existing Visual Studio users. Microsoft has done this for major versions of dotnet core too, and while it's a minor inconvenience, I have believe there is a good reason for it. "ridiculous beyond belief" is a bit strong.

> Really shows that Visual Studio Code is the future.

VS Code and VS are like chalk and cheese - I'm a big fan of VS Code, but for developing with C# I much prefer the features of a full IDE, Rider or VS. Like a debugger, and applying changes during a debug session.
I imagine they all are made with 16Gb on and the ones that are broken get sold as 8Gb.

What worries me is my desktop has 64Gb of RAM which cost 1/3 of Apple’s usual upgrade mugging.

I think I’ll walk away from this.

Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb.

8GB of RAM for £200 is “get fucked” territory. I paid £240 for the 64Gb in my desktop.
I guess the cooling let’s them tweak the CPU clocks accordingly? Wonder if we can hack the Mac mini with water blocks and squeeze higher clocks. The memory limitation makes it a dud though.
Universal apps have existed since the transition from PowerPC. For most apps it's simply recompiling in Xcode and it creates a fat binary with both architectures.

Any apps that rely on specific intel libraries will have a bit more work to do.
Heh, I have no intention of being in the initial round of beta testing! I explicitly upgraded to an ice lake machine this summer in order to get the best Intel Mac while waiting for the dust to settle.

But I do believe the dust will settle, and I'm optimistic about the future of Apple Silicon.
Which actually sounds like a good fit for a dev machine, where you only compile once in a while, but do not sustain high loads
It's the Intel i7-8557u, which is pretty good. Twice the performance though? Likely in very specific benchmarks.

Still, this is pretty impressive, and I say this as someone who will never buy Apple hardware.
what is interesting to me is they all use the same chip but don't reveal their operating frequency. I am hoping I am just overlooking this.

I expect the Pro to run faster as it has a fan to support it but how much faster than the Air would it be?
Let's think about that a little bit. If the RAM is fast and the SSD is fast and the virtualization options are limited, then this is good enough?

Or, inspire me. Which processes really require occupying and allocating bigger blocks of RAM?

I personally don't want to purchase another machine with 16gb RAM but that's mainly because I want the option of having a powerful Windows guest or two running at the same time. But if you take out that possibility, for now, what if the paradigm has changed just a tad.
Especially if you need to spin up some VMs and do compilation there.
Great post to highlight what has happened in the last year in GoLang and what is up for the next year! Very concise and to the point.

Even without having used much GoLang this last year it gave me a very clear view of what to be looking for!
I hate apple marketing. They say all these things about it being faster and better and stronger and smarter and BS and then you look down at the footnotes and it's compared to a like 2 generation behind Intel macbook i7, so something that barely could even reach it's stated performance.
Since about 2-3 years back, the film professionals I hang around with are all starting to dump Apple hardware in favor of PC workstations now, as they are tired of paying large amounts of money for something that can be had cheaper and with less restrictions. Especially when it comes to price vs quality for displays and hard drives that Apple sells.

I think today's presentation is just confirming what we've known for a while, Apple is pivoting away from professionals.
256 GB is perfectly adequate for many people who store their data in the cloud or don't create much of it in the first place.
It’s pretty nice that the stats don’t list the CPU’s clock rate. We can finally enter an era of less misleading indicators of performance, in the sense of what the overall experience will be. That’s what really matters.
The logic board probably isn't the same, but the SoC [probably] is identical, and with it a lot of the surrounding features/implementation. My own speculation as well of course :)
Not an aviation geek. You'd be surprised how nitpicky people will get when it comes to their family's safety. Between when the MAX problems came out and the fleet was grounded, I cancelled my family's vacation at substantial cost and inconvenience because the airline had 737Maxes in the fleet and I saw that my flight had been flown by Maxes previously.
One for each CPU. Maybe it's a code...?
So I have to assume that the GPU is another PowerVR offspring?
The Apple M1 is an Apple chip design. It uses the Big Little model and Apple designed the Big (Firestorm?) and the Little (Icestorm?). So it probably isn't related to ARM chip design.
This is not a universally held belief.
> Once the ballot is in the box, disassociated from the voter then there is no more secrecy concerns.

There are plenty of towns where "everyone knows everyone" and a system that requires trust on poll workers in this aspect is a bit alien to me. For example, one system I am familiar with the ballot itself is not special, the envelope is (it has signatures from the poll workers, which is also problematic because they can potentially surreptitiously mark the envelope in a special way to associate the vote to a specific person), which makes it unnecessary for poll workers to ever be in contact with the ballots themselves.

Overall, my qualms are minimal and am more concerned about the use of computers for the vote than anything else in the process.
I'm curious, are higher-quality cameras even available that fit into the thin lid? (At a reasonable price?)

I was always under the impression that the built-in camera is so much worse than your phone's front-facing camera simply because the phone is thick and has room, while the MacBook lid is much thinner.
So if I understand they have the exact same chip in the Air as the Pro? Will better thermal make that much of a difference? Is there really that big of a reason to get Pro over Air at this point?
HN thread for that is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049253
I think their hope is that the Mac's anemic game ecosystem will be filled in by iOS games which run natively. I hope they're right, and I say that as someone who has a gaming PC and still hasn't found many quality core games on iOS.
Oh indeed. Disregard my comment then, I've mixed something up.
I'm curious to know why you expected 2k. With more vertical integration, the cost normally goes down. Why would the cost go up for apple here?
It was to be expected because they save a lot of money that they were paying to Intel. It was estimated that they could shave something like $100 per computer by switching to an in house chip.
It definitely would have been a way to differentiate the Pro and the Air rather than giving them identical SOCs.
Main threads:

on M1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049079

on Mac https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049528
The canonical URL is gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/11/10/2020-Election-worker.gmi
MAUI is relying on the community to provide Linux support, just like with Xamarin.Forms. I worked with Xamarin.Forms, it doesn't support hardware acceleration in its GTK backend, making it unusable on HiDPI displays (consumes too much CPU). Why would MAUI be any different?
FHE can be made IND-CCA secure in practice (i.e. for specific systems), please stop spreading misinformation. It's impossible in the general case for obvious reasons. Also, TFA isn't about FHE, it's about iO.

I know and have worked with the organizers of RWC and they've done a lot of the kind of work that you're dismissing here (which would be like telling Diffie and Hellman to piss off in the 70s because public-key crypto isn't IND-CCA2 secure without additional assumptions).
Right, but

> For better or worse, HN is a SF Bay Area centric forum. U.S. centric beyond that. All the discussion of whats normal needs to be understood through that lens.
they haven't given up on the touch-bar yet, which is a bummer.
The wording in the event supports this. Particularly when speaking about the Mini's fan "unlocking" the potential of the M1 chip.
"I wonder if there is a good way to measure documentation quality"

I would start with a checklist:

- is it complete and consistent

- is there a description to every important piece

- working examples

... and if this is complete, you can measure all you want, but I would start with the basics.
That's an Intel MBP, not an M1 MBP.
An intro to the DDraceNetwork game source code
Userspace networking had been around for quite a few years, yet didn't seem to have taken off, despite all the great benchmarks... I think the main blocker is that you cannot make apps use it without hacks. It looks like Snap requires a custom library that probably doesn't even have to implement BSD sockets, since that's something you don't have to care about at Google.

Some years ago I recall looking into this, and it looked kernel had limitations in higher speed ethernet (must had been 50GbE at the time), and it came down to single-threaded nature of the TCP/IP stack in the kernel at the time. So that's been one of the drivers for experiments in userspace. Looks like that might now be the case now [1], but if someone has more specific info I'd be quite curious to hear.

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom...
(This isn't a new design, FWIW.)
It was a long time ago MacBook Pro meant "MacBook for Professionals", as other makers have now equalized and sometimes even passed Apple when it comes to producing quality hardware for reasonable cost.
The performance improvements here are astounding. I can’t even remember when we last saw a 2x improvement in CPU perf, much less 3-5x and with better battery life to boot!
Give me the 2015 model any day
Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon Mac
RAM on MacBooks hasn’t been upgradable for quite some time. I’d say at least 2 or 3 generations.
A note: As you are probably aware, "verbiage" implies excessive or unnecessary language: "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content".-

You are probably thinkinng of "language" or "copy" :)
InfluxDB 2.0 Released
Especially since it’s unified memory between the CPU and GPU - no wonder they were showing off mobile games on a desktop device
Not exactly revolutionary. I'm typing this on a fanless Intel 7th generation "Kaby Lake" laptop where the CPU's TDP is only 6W.
The Intel 13" MBP with 2 TB3 ports also topped out at 16GB. They're actually still selling the Intel 13" MBP with 4 TB3 ports, which is the model that can be configured to 32GB.
Oh yes you'd definitely get booted for using F# in a C# shop. I love F# but would never use it at my current job because nobody else on my team knows anything about FP, even though the language itself can be learned in about a week since it's so simple.
I doubt the logic board is the same. It’s just that the M1 integrates so much.
I'm be happy to move some electrons above the nuclear binding energy(~6MeV). Not sure about specifics, but picojoule laser driven particle accelerators can generate MeV+ energies in some very small spaces.
- 16GB RAM

- 1TB SSD

- 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7

- 2 Thunderbolt

- 2 USB B

- Headphone jack

- MagSafe power

- HDMI

- SD Card Reader

- Physical function keys row

MacBook design peaked in 2015.
For all the crap that Apple, Java and other open-source people have piled on Microsoft over the years, their developer documentation has always been very good. Yes, there are rough-edges.

Back in the day, when Sun was still in-charge of Java, I had my 1-person consulting company partner with Sun and become an official "Certified Java" organization... Great, I thought - now I can get some better documentation...

Sure, Sun replied - but first you have to buy a $30,000 server... Thankfully, .NET hit public beta about then and I have never looked back.
No, it never did.
But you did receive a literal crash course on non-Newtonian fluids :)
Read the fine print at the bottom, the claims they are making seem very..... not backed up by their testing. They chip they say they beat that makes them the best in the world is the last gen mackbook with an i7
I agree with this completely.

Apple recently required that anyone using 3rd party authentication (google, fb, etc) in their iOS app, must also provide support for Apple ID signin. That is not an unreasonable request. I was able to implement the signin without too much difficulty. However, when it came to doing a server-side validation of the signin via the Apple API; it was an absolute POS blackbox.

Their documentation and server responses provided no indication of why the validation failed. I searched the docs and forums; it was clear that a ton of other people had the same problem with absolutely no clues into resolving the issue. So I just gave up on it. Total waste of time.
If you compare the M1 Air and Pro, the only difference seems to be the addition of the Touchbar, 10% better battery life, and a "studio" speaker/mic on the Pro.

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/

I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.
Bash: Throw Better Online Events
By making it so that people can securely receive it.

If Qubes ISP is malicious or compromised they can intercept http connections towards Qubes' servers. This allows them to trivially obtain a SSL cert for keys.qubes-os.org, etc.

Armed with a valid SSL cert, they MITM traffic. When a target downloads qubes they give them a tampered version, when a target downloads the master key, they give them a lookalike key.

The user can happily verify the tampered qubes with the lookalike key.

PGP proves nothing if you cannot verify that you have an authentic copy of the key.

Qubes gives some handwavy suggestions at how to check the key which do not work.

The first item "Use the PGP Web of Trust." cannot be done because the key isn't signed by anyone. The other suggestions are inapplicable or won't achieve anything if the target's network is being tampered with.

This is not some newfangled problem. PGP has the ability to sign keys for precisely this reason. The main Qubes developers should have personal PGP keys which they use to sign the master key. Their personal keys should be certified by other FOSS developers that they've met (maybe the master key too). Then people who are interested in obtaining high confidence in the key can inspect the chain from their own key to the qubes masterkey.

Obviously not everyone will perform careful validation, but if some do then substituting the key becomes riskier. Unfortunately not only is the key not verifiable at the moment, but the current situation is looks pretty similar to what an ongoing key replacement attack would look like.
Meanwhile, this week launch three Apple products that come with a free toolchain and IDE tailored perfectly to the new architecture that supports old and new UI APIs.

On the Windows side, Visual Studio is still a 32bit application, and as you have pointed out, on ARM, it supports basically nothing but the ancient Win32 C API.
Apple Announces M1, MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro
>And the fact that smoking remains legal indoors in prisons.

This is like saying "OMG, <thing that is regulated by the states> isn't illegal in the US". Prisons are run by the states. Jails are usually run by the counties. Banning tobacco across the board for prisoners and staff is common because it becomes one less potential avenue of illicit trade between the guards and prisoners. Just because there isn't a law against doesn't mean it's not usually prohibited in practice.
The argument has been that lack of credible Arm desktop / laptops has held back Arm in the cloud. If you can't compile on your desktop then it's much harder to develop / test etc. Now you can buy a Mac and use that to develop for AWS Arm etc.
Yeah, I was confused at that implication. I don't think these are designed for training!

(If they are or can be, I'm interested)
It's hard to understand, when taken at face value. But, when you add a little context, VCs can do much worse. They can refuse to sell (through approval rights) and let company die on a the vine. They can force out existing leadership and bring in new leadership. They can force an acquisition. They can kill a company in a million different ways.

For a fund to realize that the company can live on, even if it's not the 10-100x they were hoping for, shows class. Listen, it's not curing cancer - but, it shows a level of maturity and understand that we should praise and not take for granted.

The way that fund economics work, they can write off a lot of small bets. However, the way that partnerships work, there are big egos at play. It's a dirty game, but when people do the right thing, it's worth praising.
Classic republican move: defund something until it fails, and then go, "See? It was doomed to fail anyway. Now privatize or kill it."
I like the "3.5x" faster cpu performance figure. Could they be any more misleading?
Oops! Thanks for the correction, I was confused.
While a valid workload for a segment, I would be a bit skeptical of generalizing the extraordinary video editing capability to general purpose computing, as those things are facilitated heavily by hardware decoders.
Since the new MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan while the MacBook Pro does, I’m sure there are some differences that Apple isn’t admitting right now. The battery life claimed by Apple is also higher on the Air compared to the Pro. Maybe the Air is throttled or runs at lower clock speeds.
> Considering the fact that the RAM won’t be upgradeable (it’s part of the SoC)

While I agree that RAM won't be upgradeable (as it hasn't been in all new models the past few years), are you sure that the RAM is part of the SoC? I believe what they labelled with "DRAM" in the M1 schmatics is very likely the L3 cache instead.

Adding RAM to the SoC would make little sense from a cost and yield perspective. I also believe that 16GB of DDR4 memory are much larger than the "DRAM" part of the SoC.
> Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.

If they're "only" claiming 2x over anyone else' integrated, then it's not going to be all that interesting to compare integrated vs. discreet. By comparison here the 2060 Max Q is around 4x faster than the Vega 8 in the 4800U.

Although that 2x faster than anyone else's integrated also has some really big question marks on the claim. The fine-print on that claim includes:

"Integrated GPU is defined as a GPU located on a monolithic silicon die along with a CPU and memory controller, behind a unified memory subsystem"

Which sounds a bit weasel-y like it's trying to specifically exclude what's commonly thought of as integrated graphics like the two-die approach in Tigerlake. Which how the product is packaged shouldn't really matter?
> equally based on its own merits

unless you have a slightly non mainstream opinion on some of the HN dearest, then you get drowned in flags irregardless of merit.
>Plenty of jobs trade their employees' health for money. If they didn't, the economy would literally cease to function. Oil rig workers, miners, lumber workers, fishermen, roofers, pilots, farmers, even truck drivers have significantly elevated mortality rates.

You're completely right.

>The reality is that there are many jobs that require a sacrifice in terms of health and safety. Until we're living in a post-scarcity economy, they always will. We can do things like make those jobs as safe as practically possible. Or make sure workers are aware of the risks before they sign up.

I disagree. The point I am making is that we must make that illegal. We should require the employers to solve that problem. All of these have known hazards that which can be solved. We simply decide that we let employers profit off it. That's wrong.

>But, it's unrealistic utopian thinking to believe that no one will ever be asked to sacrifice their health or safety for their job.

There are some exceptions that obviously do need to exist. Military or law enforcement for example will have harms in their life that are by definition.

I look at your list of examples of higher mortality employers and I agree they exist, I even understand what makes them dangerous. Truck drivers for example is simply the Diesel Exhaust. Electric semi trucks is a thing now, but HEPA filters have existed for how long?

There's a fix for every single one of those industries.
Processor speeds are not necessarily a good comparator anyway given that things like caches and core counts are a thing.
The 13” Intel MacBook Pro only had two ports. It was occasionally frustrating to deal with, and the only reason it wasn’t more so was a USB hub.

Source: I had one up until last week.
Still only 720p FaceTime cam. Too bad it's only TB on one side, and too bad it's not a 14" design.
Apart form that - excellent!
For the first time in a while I'm actually excited to see what is possible when the hardware and software are built by the same company.

These CPUs aren't meant for professionals but 18 to 20 hours of battery without all the heat from Intel CPUs is really nice.

Shame they didn't mention clock speeds
It's not on the same die just the same package which albeit is still space constrained.
Yeah but is this a pro machine? I'd have no problem with 8Gb on an "Air", but for a pro machine to be 16Gb max, it does seem inadequate
> Much like a gardener or builder who doesn't get paid out when the house gets sold

We may also interrogate this arrangement.
I think they want to use something more like an environment contextual config fetcher instead.

For example:

test.appsettings.json

{"db-url":"test.url.here"}

prod.appsettings.json

{"db-url":"prod.url.here"}

Now in the code:

Settings.fetch("db-url");

// Will return the test one if environment variable says we are running under test environment, else will return the prod one.
The bit about $3.7M seems really odd - how is that even legal?

Conrad Black literally went to jail for selling newspapers and taking a personal commission on the side. [1]

When you're selling company value, but taking the money yourself in the form of some kind of arbitrary comp, that's defrauding investors, it's a form of embezzlement.

That the investors 'didn't care' is fine, but I don't see how it could have been arranged in the first place - the acquirer does not get to decide how much the 'founder' is going to get.

Also - the $800K write off seems odd. A million dollars is not nothing, and there would definitely not have been $800K in lawyers fees, far from it.

Something here doesn't seem quite right.

Also - folks - if he is negotiating comp outside of share value, that's not only hosing the investors - but any employee equity as well.

A small team where some other guy has 5% of the company, that's $150, not a lot, but not nothing. If the package was dealt outside of equity, those equity holders were screwed, if in fact there were other shareholders/equity holders.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6897991.stm
I guess we'll just have to disagree. They're a pretty basic data structure that's used quite often to solve a class of problems. And they're not that hard to learn. How they work is pretty simple and the reason to use them is pretty easy to grasp. I would say that there are few good software engineers out there that aren't clear on what they are at a basic level.