skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I need a new laptop are the new M2 MacBooks worth the price?
My beloved 7 year Ubunutu XPS 13 is starting to show its age. Its struggling to run pycharm and docker and I'm lucky if its battery lasts more than 1 hour. It's time to get a new laptop.

I've been looking at what Dell and Apple have to offer and they're both very expensive. I want my next laptop to perform even better than my XPS 13 has.

At the top of my list is the 32GB M2 14" Macbook Pro, it costs ~ £3000. Am I wrong in thinking that a with a machine like this I should get at least 10 years out of it?

I'm very interested to hear what everyone else is using for there personal laptops.

N.B

My employer provides me with a M1 Pro Macbook but there is no way I'm using that for anything but work.
Agree with Article to some extent.

To mention what good software without bloatware looks like, go checkout https://nirsoft.net website. Small size and absolutely wonderfully working tools made by single dev. Its epitome of craftmanship.

PS: Also System internals tool made by Mark Russinovich
This is happening over concerns that the US government could require Google to hand over data, but the EU and the US are reasonable actors who realize that data sharing between the continents is necessary for free trade and are incentivized to come up with a solution. Doubtful this ends up mattering.

Case in point, the article acknowledges the new Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework (https://cdp.cooley.com/european-commission-approves-trans-at...) signed in December which will (attempt to) cure the deficiencies under the current agreement. You should expect that the EU and the US will keep pumping these out until one of them sticks.

No one is going to ban Google Analytics, and the fact that this article was written by a competitor did not go unnoticed.
Reverted now. Sorry!
Sorry! I switched it back.
> just copy the steam apps folder from one PC to another

Ironically, in 2023, this still isn’t a solved problem.

I have a MacBook and a Linux PC at home, my work laptop is under Windows and I have a Steam deck my phone is an iPhone (but an Android wouldn’t change anything).

Let’s be honest : sharing a file between those computers is never easy. I still manage to do it but it’s only because I’m "good" at computers.

I’d be totally unable to explain to my mother on the phone how to exchange a file between multiple computers. This adventure always prematurely ends with one or multiple emails to herself.

And to be honest it’s a shame in 2023. Maybe 15 years ago, we had some standard file transfer protocol via Bluetooth which maybe was flaky but was kinda universal and which could have been improved, for example by allowing some standard upgrade over Wi-Fi for compatible devices.

For this I blame Apple who decided to go alone on this path, and the Android stupid UX which somehow decided that disabling Bluetooth and NFC was so useful that you needed to be able to do it with one tap while people didn’t even knew what Bluetooth and NFC meant just because they learnt somewhere that it saved battery juice (spoiler : it hardly saved anything).

tl:dr; long rant about file transfers and the shameful state of standard protocols, sorry I needed to vent my decade long frustration :)
N = 23. And "benefits of exercise" = specifically lowering of systolic blood pressure.

Interesting and surprising result that I expected to be complete BS, but reading the abstract made me do a double take. I'm still doubtful though, especially since they found such a large difference (60%). I wouldn't say it warrants any kind of reaction beyond "huh, cool" until it's replicated ten times over with much larger sample sizes, however.

Then again I don't personally use mouthwash and always assumed it was a gimmick (unless it's for a specific treatment).
Credit and compensation. It's a straightforward copyright question.

Getty Images is suing Stability AI for exactly this reason:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-...

Getty Images will win.
Strong cryptographic keys should never be input using a keyboard and fingers, there are much better interfaces for that (security keys, passkeys, password managers).
Surely it’s not racist to make fun of every ethnicity?
> No one is going to ban Google Analytics. The fact that this article was written by a competitor did not go unnoticed.

It is already non-compliant with the GDPR according to EU data privacy regulators for precisely that reason after the Austrian data privacy regulator declared it illegal. I had customers scrambling to remove google analytics because they feared visitors/lawyers suing them for that GDPR violation. Also fines up to 4% of the concerns world wide sales volume might not be a joke to your company.

So yeah technically nobody is going to ban google analytics, because they already did..
2,200-year-old flush toilet unearthed at palace in China
Would it be possible to provide free trial / demo code for HN?

The $9.99 hop from basic blog to micro blog, polaroid, poster is to high. I don't know what exactly I'm getting for that price. Even if there was a credit card gated trial, that would be too high friction for people.

Especially given there is no transparency about the team, investors, customer success stories to help with trust.
Check out Building A Library (and related programmes) on the BBC's wonderful classical station Radio 3:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tmtz/clips

Record Review:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrtty/episodes/player

More to explore here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3cjHdZlXwL7W41XGB7...
Twitter Deleting Tweets for Auth
I don't know if it's esoteric filesystem week on HN, but I love it.

[1] Yesterday: TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611

[2] The day before: Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34818040
We switched the url from https://github.com/WICG/direct-sockets, to the post it points to which seems to have the most information.

There's also an explanation at https://discourse.wicg.io/t/filling-the-remaining-gap-betwee....
I lose track of time when I program; I guess I just get into "the zone"... it makes it even tougher to estimate quotes for freelance contracts!
Gas is cheap because it is not carbon taxed. Which it absolutely should be.
Safari 16.4 Beta Release Notes
On the other hand:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-repressiv...
Yea I think they shrink the model size for sure
> everyone who worries about the Sea Peoples is a warmongering racist

If the climate and seismic disasters which appear to have displaced the Sea Peoples hadn’t happened, isn’t it plausible that peak tin wouldn’t have happened? There was plenty of tin on Iberia and the British Isles.
Important to note that plenty of other companies will carry the inventory and ship goods out for you (Amazon did not invent the concept of third party logistics) - however if you go to a third party warehouse it is difficult to get certified as 'Prime'.

(Seller Fulfilled Prime is a thing, but in reality is currently closed for sign-up and is really only for the large sellers)
> Twenty-three healthy adults were asked to run on a treadmill for a total of 30 minutes on two separate occasions, after which they were monitored for two hours.

a tiny study
Does really how the error comes into life matter more than the magnitude of the error?
https://archive.is/FMo6r
Finisher: Free Animated Headers
Isn't it already banned in these 5 countries, or the ban isn't being followed? https://www.isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com
Right, no self-respecting gamer would use anything other than a mechanical keyboard, and even then the type of key switches amongst aficionados is critical.

Similarly, buttons have to be obvious and provide consistent tactile feedback. So often they do not.

It seems that when the membrane switch came into vogue some decades ago we forgot about the rules of ergonomics.

It's time we brought them back.
It was a positive trait in my country (Slovenia) after WWII! My grandparents’ generation! (Same reason)
Good for them! Citizens should be able to interact with government without being tracked.

I'm not against the idea that government uses analytics, or even outsources analytics operations, as long as there is enforceable regulation preventing that data from being used for other purposes and a reasonable amount of money is being exchanged. When you pay nothing, or next to nothing, it becomes obvious that the underlying business model is, at least partially, based on selling ads or personal information.
Yeah, but that would never happen unless a more inclusive title instead of "Switch Bitch" is invented. Or, in the words of Chat GPT:

"Switch Bitch" is a title of a book by Roald Dahl, which is a collection of four short stories. The term "switch bitch" is a play on words that has a vulgar connotation, and it generally refers to a woman who is promiscuous and willing to engage in sexual activity with multiple partners. However, it's important to note that using this term to describe someone is considered disrespectful and offensive, and it's not an appropriate way to refer to anyone.
To be honest, this is more like a bootcamp copy paste developer who needs libraries to do basic things, hence the rage. Good riddance.
> file tabs going somewhere

I'm going to guess this is the "preview" misfeature, where if you open a file in certain ways (e.g. by jumping into it with one of the go-to-something commands) it gets opened in a weird transient state and converted to a normal tab on edit or closed on navigating away. You can turn that off.
Emacs was written in a time where security wasn’t a positive consideration but a nuisance. So it was made using the belief that the editor should have complete access to any function within the editor program. trust isn’t something that scales well and if eMacs were to lose that trust within its community it would become more akin to a full blown operating system with security levels and protocols between different functions
THe data protection officer is the least of the costs they avoid. Medical staff, prevention and protection officer, union representative, ... The list goes on and on. I've heard that a company of 99 and 110 people de facto have the same amount of people doing work, the 10 extra people are all the extra laws that go in effect at exactly 100 employees. SO

There is also impact on worker protection. If your people go on strike, or if you want to do mass layoffs, you just dissolve a few companies.

I presume board requirements are a lot smaller for such tiny companies, too.
“I think editing classic books is wrong even if it is covering up something like hate or bigotry. History forgotten is history bound to repeat itself.”

I’m afraid that earlier editions will be unrecognizable, and/or signal your values, and/or create such backlash emerging a new culture war
It kinda seems like a 13 inch tablet with a mouse and keyboard would give you a better experience, better battery life, better screen, be lighter, and so on.

This thing looks just as heavy as a really cheap 13 inch laptop, except that it's missing most of the important parts and you must supply those by connecting a phone.

So, am I missing something? What's the point of this? Assuming it had a better screen and good battery life, would it be useful?
Also curious about your tech choices.

Why did you opt for Supabase instead of headless CMS like Netlify?

Why did you opt for Atomic CSS instead of Tailwind?
> No

There's no point to having further factual discussion if you aren't going to read the referenced papers. From the 2018 study I referenced you can see that DXA-positive and BMI-positive correlation was 2,668/2,778 (Table 3), or simply look at Figure 2.

And if you say "No" and then link to a 2004 paper using bio-electrical impedance, I don't really know what to say, since BIA is one of the least accurate methods and there's plenty of research comparing indices to gold-standard DXA already.

Nickerson, Brett S. “Agreement between Single-Frequency Bioimpedance Analysis and Dual Energy x-Ray Absorptiometry Varies Based on Sex and Segmental Mass.” Nutrition Research (New York, N.Y.) 54 (2018): 33–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2018.03.003.

In fact, here's a paper concluding recommending BIA shouldn't be used clinically from ... 2004:

Buchholz, Andrea C., Cynthia Bartok, and Dale A. Schoeller. “The Validity of Bioelectrical Impedance Models in Clinical Populations.” Nutrition in Clinical Practice: Official Publication of the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition 19, no. 5 (October 2004): 433–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0115426504019005433.

If you've used a BIA measuring scale at home, you'll see that it fluctuates wildly and serves more of a measure of how dehydrated you are during the day than any other health metric.

Ultimately though, I think you're splitting hairs/missing the point. There are tons of bio-markers anyone case use to track their health progress directionally at home. Just pick one and use what you want and stop worrying about what other people are doing. Most people who argue the most against BMI or whatever as a marker already know that they're not as healthy as they should be. And if you don't want to measure anything, if you're an American adult, you can probably just safely assume that you're not (only 12% "metabolically optimal" from 2009-2016 NHANES data):

Araújo, Joana, Jianwen Cai, and June Stevens. “Prevalence of Optimal Metabolic Health in American Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2009–2016.” Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders 17, no. 1 (November 27, 2018): 46–52. https://doi.org/10.1089/met.2018.0105.
But we don’t know whether davinci still maps to 175B anymore.

Realistically speaking, in order to offer ChatGPT Plus, they will have to have more model instance running concurrently. Because the promise is no wait time, but they can’t magically increasing number of hosts over a short period of time. DC took months to ramp up.

So the realistic solution is to shrink model size so one instance can serve two models, 3 models or even 4 models

And label it as Turbo mode
and you have all that GPU processing power for compressing & decompressing :)
http://archive.today/7s39v
Yes! I noticed that, too.
It would. But if it happens, then they don't care that people would know. Now we know, does it change anything?
There are DIY mini-split systems that require only a couple of wrenches and drill.
Installed one myself in garage last year. Only paid to electrician to run 240v
Was this really a secret? Or more like an open secret?

They are codependent in a way and AAPL seems to have the upper hand, currently.
It's pretty easy to find out - go pitch some approximate vote counting algorithm (say, 50% random subsampling to get 2x speed? or whatever) to random people on the street, and ask them if they would care if the government decided the president that way.
> why are we not paying them enough so that they can uplift themselves from poverty?

Short of credible threats of Western military intervention, I don’t see a solution.

We don’t employ those kids. Paying more just lines the pockets of middlemen and warlords. Absent a forced sociopolitical shift combined with a Marshall Plan-scale subsidy regime to elevate the country’s health, education and infrastructure, to make the change sustainable, those kids will be in a bad place.
>It’s fantastic and exciting that you’re learning this.

It’s fantastic and exciting that you’re responding...

>The very idea of dynamically and blindly sucking third-party code into your project is insane.

Agreed -- but in some cases/situations/circumstances it may be necessary...

>Is it good to eschew NIH syndrome and rely on mature libraries from experienced maintainers? Often so!

Linux being the prime example of this...

>But the NPM-like dependency culture of libraries depending on libraries depending on libraries ad infinitum makes it effectively impossible to actually know what code is running in your project or who to holds responsible for its failures. No one performs code reviews on their nth-order dependencies, and hardly anyone even does so for their first-order dependencies.

Most Linux Package Managers -- with respect to the nested sub-dependencies that they import -- are the prime example of this...

>That’s not an engineering culture. That’s a “move fast and break things” culture, and what it leads to, by its own very explicit proclamation, is broken things.

Any technology where the people who must maintain it, can no longer understand it due to spiraling and out of control complexity, is broken by definition...

>Thankfully, we seem like we’re finally starting to find our way out of it.

You and other enlightened thinkers like yourself might indeed be starting to find your way out of it -- but if I have observed one persistent truth it is that as time evolves, technology becomes more complex (with more nested dependencies) and thus more difficult to understand/control -- albeit (again, over time) provides many more conveniences to end users...

But, the main point of my post was about linguistics...
> The Bible? The Torah?

Funny examples you list there, where reinterpretations still happen after 2000+ years.

The approach in your comment is very pop culture or mainstream religion view of this, not an actual, historical one.
Google Meet rolls out 360-degree virtual backgrounds for video calls
I assume you're tongue in cheek, but just to make a serious point, it should never make sense to swap from cheap RAM to more expensive RAM. The whole point of swap is to move rarely used stuff into storage with a lower cost per GB. Otherwise, you would just buy more RAM in the first place.
Uhm, I do take off my shoes specifically to avoid contamination with filth and bacteria, which I take may include feces. After all, cats and dogs shit on the street and sometimes it's not picked up.
Are you using opencharka[0] then? I investigated that a while ago and was not very impressed or happy with any code that it generated, but curious to see if you've figured something else out.

[0] https://github.com/premieroctet/openchakra
So, if the publisher changes a single word in a new copyright, and the old one expires, can the publisher sue someone who shared the old version? It'd only be one word off, so they could argue it's effectively infringement...
No, it's because of CAP forces to make a compromise. If there was a way to be available and consistent there would not be overbooking. But they chose availability because losing sales is worse than dealing with overbooking.

Exactly same with Amazon, they will not bother checking that the product is actually available because then you will miss the sale when the warehouse service is down or slow, which it would be all the time because it has to be a single place of failure. Its better to refund orders for non existent items than to miss sales.

Consistency requires single source of truth which implies single place of failure. There is tremendous cost to it, it's not done for no reason like you say.
Disposable (unlike a Rust borrow) doesn’t give much in terms of guarantees though. You aren’t forced to dispose at method boundaries. But perhaps in C# you could use some locking token and make it one of the types that can’t leave the stack?
Unfortunately it doesn’t work so well with some larger games. I tried backing up a 120GB up-to-date game, uninstalling and reinstalling steam (to a newly purchased drive), and reloading the game from backup. It still wanted to download 90GB.
Time for Stallman to step in and give a speech in Europe!
The Minoans beat them to it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/533456a

https://daily.jstor.org/the-early-history-of-human-excreta/
A few thoughts:

Scopes: Beware of entry level digital scopes, they can hide things such as overshoots, ringings, etc, and their effective real bandwidth at which they don't distort what they measure is often a lot smaller than the one advertised. If you can buy a good digital one, then go for it, but if all you can afford is a cheap one, then I would keep an old analog one next to it just in case.

Multimeters: the problems with cheap Chinese multimeters isn't much accuracy but rather consistency and reliability over time, and of course safety if you use them for critical measurements; some can even rival much more expensive ones during the occasional readings, but they may fail sooner due to contacts corrosion and other problems the good ones wouldn't suffer.

Solder wire: I have a life time stock of leaded wire and use it whenever I can. I tried lead free some time ago and didn't like it. However I'm old and solder mostly for hobby, so YMMV of course.

Solder iron: I've used for ages my two 1980s old solder guns (25W and 100W), then one day decided to go for a stylus and bought a Hakko 936 clone, and suddenly my solder joints couldn't even come close to the clean ones I did with 20-30 year earlier irons, The problem I later discovered was in the hand piece, namely reduced thermal mass and isolation between heater and tip. I was used for years to soldering guns in which the tip and the heater were the same thing and they also had much higher thermal mass, so touching a pad with the tip wouldn't dramatically lower its temperature ruining the joint. That became a problem with that cheap stylus that I couldn't solve by replacing first the heater and then the entire handpiece. So at the first chance I bought a used Weller TCP (now I have two) and all problems disappeared. If you can't find a used good quality solder iron, I've been positively impressed by the Pinecil by pine64.com (yeah, the same people behind the Pinephone) as it works incredibly well for its price.

Parts inventory: depending on how much time you spend on the hobby it may be from useless to invaluable to have parts at hands for repairs/tinkering/etc. If you need them, please stay away from some of the cheap ones sold online: they're mostly crap, especially electrolytic capacitors, transistors and chips. I didn't experience problems with low power resistors (aside thinner leads) and ceramic/poly capacitors assortments, but be careful with everything else, as the chances of ending up with fake relabeled parts is very high, in some cases 100% certain.
Some great parts can still be sourced at HAM conventions or shops selling surplus parts. Flea markets too can be a source of parts otherwise almost impossible to find or too expensive: I've found over the years bags of ex TV repair shop parts, big spools of enameled copper wire, panel voltmeters, semiconductors, ferrites, capacitive trimmers etc. Most even brand new.
The one thing that might prevent you from using it for 10 years is the OS, specifically its lack of support for your device beyond a certain point.

Btw if you'd like to spend less money, you could opt for the M2 Macbook Air which should perform similarly for most workloads (exceptions being video editing and AI/ML). That's what I have and I can highly recommend it
If I understand it correctly, the version entering the public domain would also include the author's own editions (as the limit to copyright of an author is 70 years). In Dahl's case, he had removed some elements that were offensive already in the 60s-70s - think Oompa Loompas as slaves from Africa paid in cocoa beans in his first version. So you would have the still colorful and probably somewhat controversial author versions go into the public domain, and the sanitized versions remain on the publisher side if authored by someone else with new copyright running etc.
I agree with the prediction that both types of versions would probably find an audience, and would also predict that kids would probably gravitate towards the version that is the most lively and colourful.
I’m wondering if there is such a primitive like assert_lock() or similar, which will let me do that.
This too shall pass. It’s the latest diet. Won’t work with everyone and critical thinking is still king. You shouldn’t believe everything you read/see/hear, even this very comment.
Why haven't Intel and AMD did that then?