Ask HN: An idea that you could not implement? - <AUTHOR> We haven't had an idea thread in a while. Can you share what  project you wanted to implement but you couldnot for some reason.
What ideas and projects will take over communities and in turn the world in next 3 years?
I personally think- adtech is very saturated. DSP have become commodities with each company coming up of their own. There is a good chance for innovation in this space. <comment><USER2> Bubble burster bot. Identify cliques with few "outside" connections, that talk about politics on a social network. Start engaging both groups with content "acceptable" to both of them. Continue until direct connections are formed and move on. "Content" can be trivial - like finding a link posted by one person and responding "similar to this, right? <link to other person's post including related link>"

Potential risk: choosing bad content could cause more conflicts than new connections.

Why not done: just came up with it, also unlikely to be profitable unless you get a research grant for it.

Trigger: this idea is similar, right? [https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/796845589254275072](https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/796845589254275072)

<comment><USER3> like Correct The Record?

> but not like that

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Inverse Commerce -

Customers simply type what they want. GPS locates the customer. Companies submit reverse bids both manually and algorithmically. Customer accepts what suits them best. Yay, money saved, time saved, customer happy.

Specifically, I don't have enough experience building android apps to make it as slick as I would like. Happy to talk with anyone about it. Can build back end, will travel, etc :).

<comment><USER5> This is something I also have been thinking about... specially because I am useless around fixing the house.

I would love to be able to write somewhere "my backyard aluminium door has problem closing/is stuck" and get quotes from whoever is the indicated person/profession to fix that.

I started learning React Native to do that, but darn I just don't have enough time :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The recent election should have made it clear to everyone that many communities, centered around industries like manufacturing or fossil fuel energy, have been decimated in the last few decades or so. These are obviously large trends, but in our technological and economic progress we should figure out how to make sure these communities are not left behind.

I would like to see a larger effort for the SV community to expand into some of these communities and help give some of these communities a much-needed economic jolt.

<comment><USER7> a) Doesn't actually answer the OP's question whatsoever. b) Drones on uselessly and in a negative tone about the election; get over it.

<comment><USER7> Right. Downvote me because I react against someone who thinks that commenting about the election on a completely unrelated topic is appropriate. Good job, HN.

<comment><USER8> Fixing the issues of our countries is not only related but also should be a priority for all of us because they slow down progress in all other areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think these ideas would take over communities neither the world, but they are awesome:

1) Some kind of crawler that goes through YouTube videos indexing them and its subtitles and then when a user searches a word or idiom the web app would show some part of a video that speaks exactly that search term. I know there are other services that does that, but I want something more natural since these services use some kind of text to speech with a robotic voice and not a real life situation.

2) An old school open world MMORPG with modern graphics and a mix of Ultima Online (PVP) and Diablo III (Dungeons) gameplay. Nowadays every mmorpg is a copy of World of Warcraft with a different story. There is no innovation...

EDIT: add another idea :)

<comment><USER10> I researched building this a few years ago. YouTube has this data indexed but didnt seem to expose a reasonable programmatic search interface for it. Indexing and providing the search myself seemed far beyond scope (would YouTube even allow harvesting all that?).

<comment><USER11> Use a chrome extension that piggybacks off of existing YouTube users to crawl YT (similar to RECAP for PACER), push to S3, process with Lambda to build your index and throw away the raw data after processing.

Bonus if you can finagle all of this with free AWS credits from their startup incubator offers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An idea I've had kicking around for a few years now is an app that presents famous artworks in the context of time and place.

For people like myself who like great art but have very little knowledge about the relationships or even chronology of the various movements, it would be great to have a broad range of artworks representative of the various movements placed on a map. Together with a slider type interface to choose time periods I think you could get a really good idea of how and when the different movements evolved and how they relate to each other. You could easily see for instance that there wasn't much happening in city x in a particular decade but a lot going on in city y. Move forward a decade and while y might be in decline, you can easily see that city z is becoming active - and that the newer works have clearly been influenced by what was happening in city y a decade earlier.

I have a fairly clear idea of how something like this could be monetised, together with how to get the necessary content. Haven't given much thought to how it might be marketed though. You could call it 'Art in Space and Time' (artisat).

I like that it presents a great challenge from a UI perspective - it could be done really well or really badly.

Anyhow, work keeps getting in the way...

If anyone likes the idea, go for it. Get in touch if you'd like to hear a little more - I might even be willing to get involved.

<comment><USER13> try cuseum.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We should have a regular "Suggest HN" or "Ideas for HN" post where people suggest ideas or projects for other hackers to make, similar to the SomebodyMakeThis subreddit [1].

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been dreaming of creating a platform that used crowd sourcing to map concept & procedural masteries to higher level masteries and to occupations. Basically, a giant graph database mapping concepts, procedures, systems (versioned), and occupations. I think such a database could be used to improve learning management systems for school faculty and autodidacts alike. It could also serve as the basis for a performance/competency evaluation system that could replace resumes eventually.

<comment><USER16> That's very cool. I've been thinking about "detailed" prerequisite structures (e.g. [1]) for a long time, but I never thought about connecting with occupations/jobs/competencies. In addition to replacing resumes, it could also replace exams (e.g. mastery-based grades).

[1] [https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/conceptmap.pdf](https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/conceptmap.pdf)

<comment><USER17> I like the idea, which is work for autodidact/professional who want to master their craftmanship. There is always something to learn. By giving mastery path as a guide would help on self-improvement.

We've seen it in Pluralsight or FreecodeCamp where they made the paths for their users. Now, if we can turn it around by making it crowd sourced and to a wider skills, that'd be awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A couples' reading list.

Step 1: My wife and I both download an app.

Step 2: We link our accounts.

Step 3: We each find and read articles in the app, Pocket-style.

When done with an article, swipe right if I think my wife should read it. Swipe left if I don't want to pass it on.

Step 4: Open the queue of articles that my wife thinks I should read. Read them. Swipe right if I want to chat about it with her. Swipe left if I don't.

Step 5: On the weekends, as we're going for our walk, talk about the articles we both found intellectually stimulating.

<comment><USER19> A friend and I implemented a similar interface for picking a place to eat with your partner / friend. We felt the Tinder-style interaction led to a really nice UX, but didn't gain any traction. It's good to see this interaction being applied to areas other than dating!

<comment><USER18> Is the app available on iOS? Does it have data for London restaurants? wife and I would use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have wanted to build a chat bot that acts as a counselor. I am quite sure it could be created with enough training data or at least be used for training. But it is difficult to convice anyone else that it's a good idea.

Here is an outline of the technical requirements and how they could be achieved.

[https://github.com/andrewt3000/DL4NLP/blob/master/carl.md#co...](https://github.com/andrewt3000/DL4NLP/blob/master/carl.md#counseling- and-machine-learning)

</comment><comment><USER21> A Reddit alternative where the ranking for posts was personalized to each user. The ranking would be based the similarity between the voting history of the people who've voted compared to your own voting history. Think Netflix recommendation algorithm for Reddit.

<comment><USER22> Couldn't this simply exacerbate the very problem of echo chambers in social media?

<comment><USER23> It might not be great for political discussion, but just fine for people looking for discussions on their favorite TV show or programming language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg I always wanted to build an indoor navigation system for a phone. Large office buildings, hotels and especially department stores can be hard to find stuff in and you have to rely on navigation signs of inconsistent quality.

I couldn't build it because I a) lack hardware expertise to figure out tricks to navigate without GPS or/and map buildings and b) never figured out a realistic GTM for this.

<comment><USER24> I've always wished there would be just a simple tablet at the entrance of grocery/supermarket stores to search for a product's location.

<comment><USER25> the reason this doesn't exist is because stores make money off you wandering around, looking for what you want, picking up other stuff along the way.

<comment><USER24> A man can dream

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alan-crowe I'm intrigued by the Futamura projections and the possibility of getting a compiler for a programming language "for free" by using partial evaluation to specialize an interpreter. It appears that fully automatic theorem proving technology isn't powerful enough for this to work well enough to be interesting.

But what about proof assistants? It struck me that using a proof assistant to guide the theorem prover inside a partial evaluator offers an opportunity to repartition the coding task. The idea of "end user programming" always fails because we cannot sufficiently separate the idea of a program that serves as specification (here is what we want done, its a shame that this specification isn't really runable because the implied algorithm is too inefficient (think about PROLOG, where a naive program may well be logically correct, but backtracks itself an exponential runtime)) and a program that describes a tolerably efficient algorithm. The poor end user has enough trouble with writing code that specifies the computation correctly without worrying about computer-sciencey stuff about how the computer should actually go about computing it.

If only there was some way the person rewriting the code to make it go fast could do so at one remove. He works with the end user programmer first time through, but subsequent revisions by the end user get rewritten automatically...

This was the vision I tried to articulate in [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/5p8oVP5dGbU/V...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/5p8oVP5dGbU/VSbp0zBLnaYJ) but my health has failed and I've not got any further forward :-(

</comment><comment><USER26> Yesterday I got myself enthused for personalized intelligent agents, user- controlled systems that would be a generalized filtering and mediation point for communications. A concrete example is to take a user's Facebook feed and automatically detox it: scrub it of the ads, content marketing, and fake news, and reprioritize the remaining content in a way heuristically believed to aid user well-being, rather than engagement metrics.

A polished, credible implementation of that would mark the beginning of a new marketplace centered on agent services that prey on existing Web companies and tear open their data silos and adtech, one user at a time.

But what ultimately stops me from further consideration is that the level of AI know-how needed to do this is not a commodity at this time - you'd need a full team of top talent, and it probably wouldn't be cheap/fast/customizable/secure enough for users if done now. I think it will happen though, the signs of it happening are gradually emerging, and when it does, watch out!

</comment><comment><USER27> I had an idea a few months ago that I liked a lot - a drop-in service for Amazon-style recommendations for your web app. It was going to be Stripe-like in ease of use, where you could just drop a lib in and start getting recommendations immediately.

On the service-end, it would have basically been an Apache Spark instance doing collaborative filtering as data comes in. It seemed like a pretty sweet idea, but I couldn't find the time to work on it.

If this seems like a cool idea, you should definitely steal it and start working on it.

Related to this -- I wrote a blog post about a lot of my random ideas I haven't finished and why you should steal them. Complete list and blog post here: [https://kristianfreeman.com/post/steal/](https://kristianfreeman.com/post/steal/)

</comment><comment><USER28> A mouse droid.

In more detail, an innocuous autonomous droid that reminds me of meetings and takes me to the right location. Intelligent enough to correct for diversions to the wc or coffee machine, and stay out from under foot.

</comment><comment><USER29> Natural language understanding. This will open Pandora's can, sort of, because really intelligent surveillance and ad targeting becomes possible. Combine a neural network and a lexicon and map an uttering to a graph with probabilities where the graph nodes are entries in the lexicon.

Note that this is partly independent from speech recognition. Perhaps speech could be translated to a string of word alternatives with probabilities, and language understanding gives a hint which alternatives make more sense.

In other words, language understanding could help speech recognition.

<comment><USER23> > Perhaps speech could be translated to a string of word > alternatives with > probabilities, and language > understanding gives a hint which alternatives > make more > sense.

This is already done, but probabilities are used to determine the best alternative.

So basically we ask

        if p("which" | "Ding dong", "is dead") < p("witch" | "Ding dong", "is dead")
        then print("witch")

Or basically, which of the alternatives have the highest probability given the context and we find a way to measure similar contexts.

This generally doesn't give us an understanding of the text.

<comment><USER29> Yes. I didn't mean to propose that. I know that speech recognition already considers alternatives and probabilities.

The main focus of my proposal is something different: a more intuitive «understanding» using neural networks and lexicons. This is somewhat orthogonal to speech recognition.

Then I suggested that this «understanding» could help make speech recognition more reliable by adjusting of some probabilities.

You see, I have an important insight as a Deaf person. Lipreading only offers a small part of what a person could understand by hearing. But I am often still able to understand what a person says by guessing and using the discourse context to fill in the blanks. I am sure that we all do that to some extent, or we wouldn't have homonyms in the language.

This insight tells me that perhaps a disrupting innovation would be a more natural «understanding» of text (in written form) with the help of neural networks and a lexicon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> For me, it was a brain for my brain. I slung a lot of code to get what I wanted, but at the end of the day the encryption options are just not robust enough - or do not fit with other toolings needed.

<comment><USER31> Yes, I get this. I've been trying to code a virtual factory so that I can replace my actual factory and the overhead that comes with an actual factory. Just can't quite get there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'd like to be able to mod comment sorting methods for various sites to mimic other sites. ie. Sort Facebook comments based on HN's comment sorting method, & vice-versa.

</comment><comment><USER33> iPlantTrees - kind of tree sharing. You want a plant, post location. You know how to plant or have money, go there and plant a real tree. 8 billion people and counting. If every 8th person plants 1 tree, we can have a billion trees.

<comment><USER34> _" iPlantTrees - kind of tree sharing. You want a plant, post location."_

the secondary market here is you search by tree and find fruit/seeds/nuts. A more generic, iPlant would also show vegetables/crops and hook this up to seasonal sales.

<comment><USER33> That's brilliant. Would definitely add it. Thanks for the suggestion!!

<comment><USER34> _" show vegetables/crops and hook this up to seasonal sales"_

I've been noticing the market for local _fresh_ food is pretty big. If you have a system that decentralises the growing it could used as a peer to peer sales or arbitrage where people buy others and re-sell.

As for the iPlantTrees, yes... This is what has been done in my hometown, Melbourne ~ [http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au](http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au)

<comment><USER33> The Melbourne site is fantastic. Lot of useful data presented in the a very digestible manner. Haven't seen such info on any US ones so far. I have reached out to them to see if there is room for knowledge sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A dating app where after a first meetup, each participant rates each other on how accurate/truthful their profile was. If you misrepresent yourself too many times, you are suspended from the platform until you update your profile/photo.

My single friend tells me of dissapointing dates where the profile photos are years old. She especially dislikes guys who lie about their age to date women in their 20's.

</comment><comment><USER36> A mood indicator for every person within a nation. Takes into account technical know how and intent to thwart. Think of everyone from people who dont even use phones to a SF techie. The goal is to share in parseable data what is important to you on a daily basis (or as often as you like) so that sentiment is not a surprise to fellow countrymen or governments, advertisers, entertainers etc.

<comment><USER2> Sounds like an origin story for the series Psychopass ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho- Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass)) Just tune for mood=disruptive/angry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Images are so hard to search for. So many times I've tried to rediscover a hilarious gif I saw the other day and failed.

</comment><comment><USER38> A self-hosting static Linux distro, with pacman. It's bloody hard to bootstrap a Linux userspace from scratch in general, but when you add that you want everything to be static it just gets stupidly difficult. I'll try again at some point with another strategy, it'll be the fourth such attempt.

<comment><USER4> Not certain I could implement.

Certain I'd like to talk with you about your strategy and see if we can get any closer than you did the past three times.

<comment><USER38> This is my current best effort: [https://gogs.sr.ht/SirCmpwn/sconix](https://gogs.sr.ht/SirCmpwn/sconix)

I was trying to build a clean static system I could use as a bootstrap to build clean packages from. Ran into trouble with things like coreutils, util- linux, and fakeroot. Making things harder is that I'm building everything against musl libc because glibc doesn't handle static linking well (and also because I don't like glibc).

I'm thinking a better strategy might be to use some other host system with pacman to build a base system of clean static packages, then use pacstrap to get this system up and running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Back then I wanted to implement an internet provider, since my country sucks on providing it with a proper plans

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea. I still think we have a long way to go for wireless peer- to-peer network that can act as transreceiver with something cellphone like device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> An algorithm that takes two downscaled images of different resolutions and rebuilds a higher resolution image.

</comment><comment><USER41> Reputational Review Network - A review network where users can rate local restaurants, services, goods and other reviewers' credibility. Ratings are personalized based on your own reviews and who you find credible - this gives a user an incentive to keep their reviews honest.

<comment><USER42> One complaint I've heard is people looking for restaurants and finding 4-5 star rated McDonalds. Seems ripe for PCA or something. There are a ton of examples of this sort of analysis too, especially since Netflix made their datasets available. Here's the first paper I found: [http://www.lkozma.net/mlsp09binary.pdf](http://www.lkozma.net/mlsp09binary.pdf)

<comment><USER43> I think absolute ratings for restaurants in general tend to be garbage, since a rating is skewed to the average expectations of the guests.

The 5-star McDonalds may be a really good McDonalds that's very clean and consistent, but the $50/meal ocean-side bar only has 3-stars because the steak is sometimes rare instead of medium-rare. People are rating relative to their expectations of the restaurant, so someone who doesn't share those same expectations will be confused that a dollar cheese burger is 5 stars but a prime rib steak is 3 stars.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, that's why I recommend PCA. It works by finding groups of agreement. You can then classify people by how much they resemble each group and predict how they will react to a new thing by how their groups have reacted to it. One criticism is that using it can easily lead to constructing echo chambers, but that's exactly what you want for reviews. If you care about how a steak is cooked, here is how other people who care about how a steak is cooked review this restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> An open hardware FPGA. Limiting factor: building integrated circuits costs a fortune.

</comment><comment><USER45> I want to build a meta-layer that sits on top of basically every cloud platform be it dropbox or facebook. The best one sentence pitch I can come up with is "A dashboard for your online life" it should ideally do things like present all your storage as a single filesystem, present all your social networks as a single feed, and beyond that allow interactions between services like saving an image from your social network to storage as easily as moving a photo from one folder to another on a local machine. I want to commodify all these web sites and make them as easy to script as bash.

<comment><USER46> I think that is a great idea, and perhaps not unlike what the Semantic Web was possibly intended to enable. But it seems not to have been very successful. Or am I mistaken?

<comment><USER45> I think I'm thinking of a more limited scope than the semantic web. The semantic web needs everything, I just need the top 100 services people use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I would want to have something like Wikipedia that takes account of the user's context and knowledge to present transformed text that is customized for the user so it's easier to digest.

</comment><comment><USER48> Check [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems)

</comment><comment><USER34> good question, going through these ideas I keep in mind: _" The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring."_ [0]

1/ So the idea I haven't done is build a hacker search engine. I'm not sure what this would look like, but I'd bet being able to search through source code at high/low levels might be interesting.

2/ Another idea is I noted on the the Amazon/NES classic thread, arbitrage by Amazon/users resulting in instant sellout. Could this idea be used somehow?

[0] [http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html](http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html)

<comment><USER49> _being able to search through source code at high /low levels might be interesting._

It was called "Google Code Search". 2005-2013. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search)

<comment><USER34> yeah I saw that. Was/is it any good? Is that all hackers search for? I'll take a look at this. Might be some gaps I might find interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Machine/deep learning based github/gitlab/bitbucket issue bot that auto label issue with "bug", "enhancement", or "question" label. Currently implemented machine learning(no tuning yet) part but no time implement bot part.

</comment><comment><USER51> An augmented reality app that changes other people's appearances on the fly.

Actually, anything AR. I'm fascinated by it and I can see a ton of possibilities for it, I just can't afford to invest the time and money.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm currently cannot implement my own programming language with dependent types, because there is no fully formalized type theory in type theory itself. And nobody didn't formalized it for 40 years.

</comment><comment><USER41> SimVillage - A building simulation game of of a village of up to say 1,000 villagers. Like Simcity/Skylines, but with the emphasis on detailed human simulation rather than on large scale.

<comment><USER2> So dwarf fortress with human village setting?

<comment><USER53> Perhaps Banished is more in line with what he's describing.

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/)

<comment><USER41> Thanks, that's very interesting to me but not quite what I had in mind. I'm thinking modern era, where the sims have links to an outside world - so some sims would commute out of the village for work each day, some would go to the nearby city for nightlife at weekends.

<comment><USER53> Look at Clockwork Empires, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> A platform where random people are collaborating with each other to bootstrap startups. Not difficult from a technical point of view. But it's not clear whether anybody needs it.

<comment><USER55> I'm convinced this exists - or at least used to exist, but can't seem to find the site now. The idea was sort of like bountysource, where tasks were defined and some sort of currency reward assigned to the task. The currency was related to parts ownership in the final product/company. Maybe somebody else knows what I'm talking about?

<comment><USER54> Was it assembly.com [1]?

[1]: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/assembly](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/assembly)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> mobile ad-hoc ephemeral groups : you are at a concert/conference, and someone launches a group , others with the app are notified based on the various criteria (geolocation, interest etc.) . you can subscribe and unsub as soon as an event or session is over. This protects privacy etc. as only an avatar is shared with others, you can message and talk with them, but disconnect once done.

Can be used for announcements, notifications, 2-way comms etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> Drone with a camera which flies and indexes physical world (like your house) automatically. So that you can find your stuff :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> a stair climbing/hauling robot - most households have indoor staircases and lugging heavy stuff up/down is a big pain point with rapidly aging populations.

</comment><comment><USER57> I can't implement an asteroid mining program now because the cost of space launch for the preliminary/prototype mining equipment would be prohibitively high.

If I had access to a space launch capability for less than $100/kg, however, I could bootstrap the whole business from my basement with an investment of ~$100-200k from some friends. [0]

From SpaceX's perspective, they can put ~5 tons in lunar orbit for a cost of $200k in fuel [1]. $40/kg is great, but it's not what they charge their customers, and it's not what they'd charge me - demand from comsat operators with a much higher willingness to pay means that I have no access to the market, and SpaceX needs to make a profit.

Give it 10-50 years, and I'd expect real asteroid mining will become economically viable. [2]

[0] assuming zero NRE for mining robot fabrication and a single person salary.

[1] ignoring actual launch costs, personnel salaries, and assuming the whole booster stack is paid for through infinite perfect recovery.

[2] see also Planetary Resources, and why they should be in hibernation mode, not burning $2m/year developing camera sats. but hey, VCs have money to burn.

<comment><USER58> Why not burn some vc money yourself?

<comment><USER57> moral/ethical reasons, having better things to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> A voting system for websites based on "liquid democracy"[0], where a pagerank like algorithm is used to let a person assign votes to others. The catch is this system would deliver personalized scores so each person sees a personalized ranking based on the votes they cast rather than an average of everyone's votes.

The idea is that people get a "bubble" but that when people vote, hopefully they take into account both quality and how similar the post is to their own. So people get a better version of their own views, which hopefully also allows them to see similar but non-identical views.

You can see that sites like reddit which tend to have high quality posts, but many subreddis have very strong biases as well. Letting people live in their own bubble means that people can write the best quality posts they can without worrying if their bias matches the subreddit they are writing in.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy)

</comment><comment><USER60> One JavaScript framework to rule them all

<comment><USER14> Personally I would love for Swift to take over the place of JS.

<comment><USER61> Won't happen. If Apple added Swift as a sibling language alongside JavaScript, most people would still use JavaScript because of its wider support. If Apple replaced JavaScript by Swift, that would be suicide for their platform.

What, IMO, will happen is that WebAssembly will replace JavaScript, creating a level playing field for all languages. JavaScript will no longer be the only language you can on both server and client, so we will see all-Python, all- Javascript, all-Java, all-whatever frameworks in the browser (potentially each with its own GUI library, but I think that won't happen). All-Swift could be something that Apple could provide, and chances are they are already working on it.</comment></comment></comment>


Police say don't use *77 to block robocalls on phones, You'll reach 911 instead - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2019/02/07/77-how-dial-911-alternatives-mobile-without-calling-wrong-number/2806961002/ <comment><USER2> It's been few years since the first time I read about robocalls. I think there's no way we can stop these spammers from bombarding us with those robocalls. I just read an article that might be useful at [https://www.whycall.me/news/consumer-wins- massive-229500-rob...](https://www.whycall.me/news/consumer-wins- massive-229500-robocall-lawsuit-against-time-warner-cable/). However, it will only work if you get the robocalls from legit businesses.</comment>


The PS4 can now emulate PlayStation 2 games - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/the-ps4-can-now-emulate-playstation-2-games/ <comment><USER2> Wonderfully vague on details. Two of the harder issues to emulate are the weird floating point and the gpu. Floating point on the PS2 is slightly different from ieee754 (no infinite, different rounding), and emulating it using a standard Intel/AMD cpu is extremely slow. (I have an idea to speed it up using doubles, and I'm curious how Sony has solved this). The SPU's on the PS3 have the same weird floating point, so this made emulation easier.

One other problem is the slightly unique gpu in the PS2, called the Graphic Synthesizer (GS). The gpu in the PS3 was not able to emulate it, just because it is so different. (More specifically, the GS has 32 bit z index, and scissoring is different.) Sony had to include an actual GS in the PS3 for PS2 emulation. They took this out to make it cheaper, and this is when they lost PS2 emulation. I believe modern GPU's are flexible enough to emulate the GS, especially since Sony has access to the complete GPU.

</comment><comment><USER3> SSX, the original and "Tricky" titles! I'm off to find old PS2 disks now.</comment>


How to Turn DNA into Music - <AUTHOR> https://0x0f0f0f.github.io/posts/2020/04/how-to-turn-dna-into-music/ <comment><USER2> For those interested in the topic, data sonification of DNA goes back to at least the 1980s. "Electronic Music for Bio-Molecules Using Short Music Phrases" has a summary, at [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yiyu_Cai/publication/24...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yiyu_Cai/publication/249562758_Electronic_Music_for_Bio- Molecules_Using_Short_Music_Phrases/links/00b7d5275c5ab8bb17000000.pdf)

See also [http://www.petergena.com/docs/gena-strom- DNA.pdf](http://www.petergena.com/docs/gena-strom-DNA.pdf) , which is one of the references.</comment>


NASA's Kepler Discovers 11 Systems Hosting 26 Planets - <AUTHOR> http://www.naturenplanet.com/articles/1826/20120324/nasas-kepler-announces-11-planetary-systems-hosting.htm

<comment><USER2> The amazing thing about the amount of discoveries to have been made with Kepler, is that our ability to observe the Universe is only limited by our technology. Imagining what we will be able to see and discover with the next generation of telescopes makes me giddy.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree! As much of a clusterfuck as the James Webb has been, I'm really looking forward to seeing it launch. I can't even begin to imagine the things we will see with it.

<comment><USER4> 7+ billions eggs in one unserviceable fragile basket that needs to plunder all other projects? I'm not optimistic on Webb. And if the rocket fails or that unfold mechanism from hell doesn't work it will all go up in smoke.

It would have been great to spend the money on Webb on several smaller missions like Kepler, and leave the Mars missions alone.

Whatever science Webb can do is unlikely to make up for the opportunity costs lost in these other missions.

<comment><USER5> >>It would have been great to spend the money on Webb on several smaller missions like Kepler, and leave the Mars missions alone.

Better yet, take some of that military money and transfer it to the smaller missions. Considering what has been spent on wars 7 billion is peanuts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The coronavirus is exposing the arbitrary, cruel realities of America's rules - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-tsa-liquid-purell-paid-leave-rules.html <comment><USER2> It's darkly funny seeing TSA agents pulling out water bottles, which may be filled with highly volatile liquid explosives, and chucking them five or six feet on a parabolic trajectory to a trash can surrounded by people.

<comment><USER3> The point of terrorism is not the immediate killing and destruction. The point is the terror, the state of fright and panic, which makes the victim lose their mind and do stupid, self-destructive things. This is the real, large- scale, lasting impact.

By this metric, 9/11 is the single biggest and most resounding victory of terrorists since August 1914 when a terrorist attack provoked WWI.

So it goes :(

<comment><USER4> it was in June.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not convinced by this article that because we are able to put a moratorium on evictions and student loan interest during a once-in-a-century crisis that it means it's all bullshit and we don't have to do it.

Loan interest helps cover inflation over time (and makes up for the fact that the government's money could have been used somewhere else that would generate interest). If there's no interest, then the loan becomes a better and better deal for the student over time and worse and worse for the government over time. We want the system to remain solvent, not run out of money.

Now an argument could be made that the interest rates they are charging are too high, but I doubt most people (and the person who wrote this article) have enough information to make a good case for that. I imagine if nothing else there's also administration fees and accommodating for students that either default on their loans or go into forbearance or other situations.

As for no evictions. If people can't be evicted, then there's no incentive to pay rent, besides wrecking your credit, which a lot of people don't have great credit to begin with, and a decent amount of people decide to stop paying even when not in a pandemic until the landlord goes through the (sometimes long, like 90+ days) eviction process.

Maybe we could have some sort of insurance put into place that allows for some hardships like disability, but I think that's one thing disability pay is supposed to be used for anyway, so it already exists. It's not super easy to evict people to begin with in most places, so a landlord might be willing to work with you for a month or two if you can make the case that it is truly a temporary situation.

Of course it's not a temporary situation for most of the people affected right now. We have massive unemployment, and very few companies hiring, so of course people are in trouble, and in trouble long-term. Making millions of families homeless all at once is a recipe for disaster and total civil upheaval, so it makes sense to put a moratorium right now.

Although the government isn't doing enough to keep it going (and GOP has 180'd and decided screw everyone, we're not helping anyone anymore) and looks like we're going to have exactly that horror scenario play out within the next few months, most likely.

But that doesn't mean that evictions are bullshit when we're not in a pandemic scenario.

Also, I don't think the article's premise is bullshit, and I agree with the TSA example mostly, I just think some of its examples are poor, and poorly defended.

<comment><USER6> The way we do student loans, with the educational institution having no negative effects when the student fails to get a job that pays it back - it's terrible. The students can't expunge the loan in bankruptcy, and colleges have a lot of financial encouragement to make costs such that they go as high as the loans do. These loans actually greatly retard the financial growth of society because the trillions owed mean people delay buying a house, can't spend money on other things. Separate from interest rates, student loans are terrible for the economy. Not in theory, but in clear and easy view.

<comment><USER5> I would agree there are serious issues with student loans, just that charging interest isn't necessarily one of them (again, the rate might be too high, I do know people that have been paying for years and owe more now than when they started, that's screwed up).

I am still under student loans myself and have been paying them for over 10 years at this point. I was on track to pay them off by the end of the year, but decided to stop paying when they paused interest and allowed pausing payments, to give us more money for other things, since my wife is currently only working 2 days a week and making 40% of her income right now anyway.

But in order to actually start making head way on my loans I had to start overpaying by about 25% what they required every month. Before that I wasn't making much progress. Not everyone can afford to do that (in fact my wife is stuck under a much heavier student loan burden than I ever was).

Again, if there is no interest, the incentive to pay them off drops quite a bit, like what both me and my wife are doing right now.</comment></comment></comment>


FB buying Waze for 1B? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/09/reports-facebook-is-buying-social-mapping-and-traffic-app-waze-for-up-to-1b-to-court-more-mobile-users/

<comment> jack-r-abbit Nooooooooooooo! I love Waze. I don't want Facebook to screw it all up.</comment>


#AGDQ2014 - <AUTHOR> http://gamesdonequick.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Speedrun marathon raising money for Prevent Cancer Foundation.

(Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just like the idea and the speedruns)</comment>


Why I Don't Like Stock Buybacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/why-i-dont-like-stock-buybacks.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 <comment><USER2> _But I don't view that stock buyback as successful.[...]But we let the cash sit in the bank and worse we gave a lot of it back to investors in a manner that did not do much for the company._

Cash for investors? But doing nothing for the company? That's a good thing and more companies should do this.

The sole purpose of the company is [1] to _increase shareholder value_. If reinvesting in the company would bring above-market returns, then it's a good idea to do. If not, corporate leadership should increase shareholder value with cash rather than building an empire with other people's money.

[1] I ignore nonprofits and corporations with special clauses in their charter.

<comment><USER3> _The sole purpose of the company is ... to increase shareholder value_

The root of all evil, right there.

I prefer companies whose sole purpose is to act as an engine of change for a better world. Even Drucker's (?) "sole purpose of a company is to get and retain customers" is better.

My real problem with your quote (from Friedman is it?) is that when a majority, or even a vocal and persuasive minority, or people adopt that attitude it throws out a lot of the social constraints in place to keep people running the companies from doing things that harm us as a society. That is, "he was just acting in his own best interest" can be used to justify many acts that are selfish and short-sighted, because there are no social consequences of this. Even people of high personal moral standards are willing to give a pass to evil deeds because "he did what he had to do."

I disagree.

<comment><USER4> You are conflating the words value and revenue. Change is a type of value. Time is a type of value. Happiness is a type of value.

<comment><USER3> You are absolutely right. I was referring specifically to financial value. I bet I'm not the only one who makes this unconscious substitution, but you are nevertheless correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think he's missing the point. When a stock is trading below its tangible book value each share of stock bought back delivers increased value per share to the remaining stockholders.

The only reason _not_ to buy back shares if they're trading below tangible book value [1] is because you have investments available that will yield greater returns, or do not have sufficient cash to do so.

[1] Factoring in a margin of safety, of course.

<comment><USER6> He realizes your point- he remarks "We just gave back a lot of cash to the investors."

His point is that companies that can't find better ways to use capital than a buy back aren't innovative enough to succeed in the long term

<comment><USER5> No he doesn't. From the article:

 _Stock buybacks are very popular with some investors as a way for a company to transfer value from the company back to the shareholders. It is like a dividend, except it is taxed as a capital gain, not ordinary income._

He's approaching it from the opposite direction; ie returning value to investors who are selling their stock. But if the company is truly worth more per share, in terms of tangible book value, than the price the shares are trading at then anyone who is selling up is getting a bad deal. These people aren't getting value. It's the people who retain their stock who are getting value because they're managing to buy slices of a company worth $(X+Y) for only $X.

A simplified example:

FictionCorp has $200 million in the bank and 100 million shares outstanding. For some reason, the shares are trading at $1, despite the $2/share sitting in the bank.

If FictionCorp manages to go and buy back half its stock at $1/share, it now has $150 million in the bank but only 50 million outstanding shares. Each share now represents $3 worth of cash in FictionCorp's bank account.

Hence, the remaining stockholders are better off because they've managed to buy a larger portion of FictionCorp at a discount to its actual value.

<comment><USER2> It's highly unlikely that FictionCorp will manage to buy half it's stock without moving the markets. Most shareholders who sell will get significantly more than $1/share.

<comment><USER5> It's a simplified example. Of course it will move the markets, and buying back half the outstanding stock is highly unlikely in any case. I just used those figures to make the math simple.

<comment><USER2> Lets assume you are correct. In that case, you should do the following:

Go buy shares at $1.01 during the buyback (people will sell to you rather than FictionCorp, since you are the best bidder), then sell them at $3.00 after the buyback is finished. This is a moneymaking opportunity whenever the share price is below $2.00.

Come back when you are rich and I'll believe you found an inefficiency in the market. Until then, I think you are wrong.

<comment><USER7> Look, I understand that this wont persuade you. From other threads, I know you are a hardcore proponent of EMH. But someone else might find this insightful:

Buybacks work in theory, but they depepnd on a lot of factors.

Essentially what you are trying to do is shrink the existing share count, so that EPS goes up which presumably drives your share price up in the longer term.

E.g.:

$10 in net income / 10 shares = $1 EPS. Lets say right now you are trading at a 6x multiple, the market is nervous about your prospects. You think your shares are undervalued and that you are probably worth 10x (perhaps your industry average).

So you buyback 20% of your shares, existing share count decreases from 10 to 8. EPS goes up to $1.25 per share.

But, one of the uncertainties behind a buyback is the fact that you never know when or how much management will actually buyback. They will sometimes announce a plan that would buyback 20% of shares, but only do that over maybe 10 years. Thats why your bit about timing the buyback just doesn't work.

Let's say somehow you do manage to buyback the 20% in just one year (the market hates your company). So with an EPS of $1.25, if the market keeps giving you that 6x multiple, in theory your shares should be worth at least $7.50, not the $6 before. Moreover, if the buyback signals enough confidence in the company, maybe the market will realize it and you will return to the 10x multiple you had before, so your shares go to $12.50

But see nobody can time when the market works or when the market will catch on to the value of your company. Benjamin Graham said that is one of the great mysteries of the stock market when he testified before congress.

It is during that lag time when the share price does not move that investor confidence can waiver and maybe they will sell -- ultimately not realizing the value that eventually comes from the buyback and reduced share count.

<comment><USER2> _From other threads, I know you are a hardcore proponent of EMH._

I don't know where you get that idea. I work for a hedge fund, which would be really dumb if I believed markets were efficient. That would mean my expected bonus is $0 [1].

When a rich person tells me "markets were inefficient, and now I'm rich", I often believe them. When a person tells me "look, a whole bunch of idiots are throwing their money away, but I'm not going to take it off their hands", I'm a little skeptical. And when someone says "look, the markets are inefficient _in a manner that is extremely obvious and easy to exploit_ ", I'm also a bit skeptical, since most such inefficiencies have already been arbed away.

Lastly, my trading strategy doesn't require the buyback to complete. All it requires is that philk's claim actually occurs: that the buyback transfers money from sellers to shareholders. Using his numbers and my proposed buy price of $1.01, the moment the buyback has transferred at least $0.02/share from sellers to shareholders, the strategy has become profitable.

[1] Not strictly true, since a bonus behaves like a call option on profits, but you get the picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _[A]fter the market broke in early 2000, the stock was trading below its cash value... I don't remember the exact details of the buyback at TheStreet.com but we started buying the stock and it kept going down. We kept buying it. But we were losing money on each buyback because we were overpaying for our own stock as it kept going down._

If you're buying a dollar bill for 90 cents, and someone offers you a dollar bill for 80 cents, you didn't lose money.

I disagree with this post. If TSCM was trading at less than net cash, a buyback meant that they were _getting paid to own more of it_. That's an incredible deal. Also, they did something that would gave the business a temporarily negative market value (i.e. cash plus business is worth less than cash alone)--and they thus should have invested more cash in the business? That doesn't make sense.

Either the stock market was right, TSCM was worth liquidation value, and the buyback was a way to gradually liquidate the company... or the market was wrong, the TSCM business was worth more than the stock's market price, and buying back the stock was a great move.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand this point:

> _I don't remember the exact details of the buyback at TheStreet.com but we > started buying the stock and it kept going down. We kept buying it. But we > were losing money on each buyback because we were overpaying for our own > stock as it kept going down._

It seems to me that if your stock is trading at under book value, then you would be _underpaying_ if you are buying it. Especially if it keeps going down.

Isn't the idea that the stock is undervalued? Why not buy low now and even consider selling high at a later date?

</comment><comment><USER10> Companies perform stock buy backs when they don't have any ideas in how to invest their cash. A recent example is an Australian company called "CSL". A year or so ago it held a massive share raising and was proposing to use the cash to buy out a US pharmaceutical firm. The US regulator thought it would give CSL too much market power and stopped the deal from happening. What CSL did was initiate a stock buy back to return the cash to investors. Link: [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wealth/upside- for-c...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wealth/upside-for-csl- investors-share-buyback/story-e6frgacx-1225715690408)

It's not necessarily not good.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you assume no more profits and a fixed cost to winding the company down (you can't actually get all the cash back) then buying back stack reduces the cash to required expenses ratio, so it would make sense for the stock price to go down. At the point where cash equals the remaining expenses then the stock is worth zero. But this shouldn't happen for a profitable company, even if they are "out of ideas".

</comment><comment><USER12> Dividends are much better. Once the market speaks a formerly mighty stock can drop very quickly. I'd rather have the cash now then a slow reduction in supply. After the "great recession crash" we saw how demand can change and even with less supply see huge drops in stock price.

<comment><USER2> If you prefer dividends, sell shares back to the company in proportion the share buyback. It's mathematically equivalent to dividends (you own the same fraction of the company before and after), but you pay less tax.

<comment><USER13> Any references on that? It sounds possible, but I thought I had heard of cases of stock buybacks not increasing the share price.

I guess obviously if a company does a buyback but the stock goes down for unrelated reasons then you're really not gaining anything.

<comment><USER2> Simple arithmetic. If you hold 100 shares of 100,000 outstanding shares, you own 0.1% of the company. If they buy back 5000 shares and you sell 5 shares, you still own 95 shares of 95,000 outstanding shares (0.1% of the company) + cash.

That's exactly what a dividend would do.

Silverlake is correct to point out that this doesn't apply to small investors, however.

<comment><USER12> 95,000 is not correct those 5000 shares don't disappear. They are still outstanding. The only way I know to decrease shares is a reverse split or increase them via an offering

<comment><USER12> Thanks for responding. can you point to me some articles explaining more about retired shares?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fred is just wrong on this. Companies exist to enrich the shareholders. A buyback is very much like a dividend, and should be viewed similarly. Is he saying that companies shouldn't pay dividends? That's insane. A company with too much cash is wasting it's investors' money.

<comment><USER15> Damon

I like dividends for mature cash flowing businesses who cannot find a good use of their cash

Fred

<comment><USER16> Yes, but you're paying a hefty price to get your money that way -- mainly the double taxation on dividends. Stock buybacks can be a more efficient way of returning that cash to shareholders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Personally, I wish they would spend that money on making their email client display html well. It sucks for emailing tabular data to business owners.

They could also greatly improve their web browser. Apple's devices totally eat RIM's lunch when it comes to browsing.

</comment><comment><USER18> "I didn't understand what was going on. We had more cash than it would take to buy back every share in the company and yet the stock kept going down."

Obvious exaggeration. How many companies have more cash than market cap? Only ones that owe the money to someone else and cannot use it to buy back their stock. That made me question the whole article.

<comment><USER7> Screening for negative enterprise value (Market Cap + Debt - Cash) is pretty popular. There aren't a whole lot of stocks that have it, but you can usually find a handful based in the US.

They are sort of an inefficiency. In one sense, you are buying a stock for less than the cash on balance sheet. You could come in and liquidate it, making a profit.

On the other side, sometimes stocks trade at negative EV because management is doing some terrible things. Maybe they are burning through cash at an alarming rate. Sometimes an activist will come in and stop the cash burn.

I would also like to add that you can find negative EV stocks abroad more readily. There was a period when these opportunities existed in Korea (I think around 2004). It was pretty amazing if you were an investor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be interesting to see the writer debate share buybacks with Buffet.</comment>


Return of the Mac (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html <comment><USER2> > The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run > FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

This. I have actually lost sleep since the announcement. I keep going over in my mind alternate hardware, but the fact is that macOS (OS X) is the single best operating system for developers today. I am generalizing "developers". For any embedded development, or HDL stuff, OS X will not be a nice experience. But for web or mobile development (which I anticipate is quite larger than development that could not be done in OS X), it's just better. Things work. If the don't, there is a massive support system in place and worst case scenario you can drive <1hr to an Apple store and let them take care of it. Sure, there are edge cases there as well, but compared to the ultrabook you bought from Costco or any distribution of linux, you have much more support available. I do love my macbook pro (glass trackpad, backlit keyboard, good display), but I absolutely must have macOS. At this point my only hope is that a new distribution of Linux evolves that can seriously compete and works flawlessly on off the shelf hardware (such as the Dell XPS), but we're not there yet. Elementary OS looks promising. Perhaps developers would fork Darwin completely and make a macOS competitor.

I guess I should have seen the warning signs. The biggest was macOS Sierra that offered me no reason to upgrade. Apple seems to be stuck inside of an "innovation" echo chamber. Innovating for the sake of innovating.

Sorry for the wall of text, but if you have any suggestions for me, please share them.

<comment><USER3> I must live in a parallel dimension. I never got why people like OSX to develop web apps, it's a different system from the server, lots of tricks are needed to make it work invisibly (either with a VM or a lighter equivalent), there's the Control/Command non-standard placement, the different keyboard layout, Terminal.app which is borderline unusable (almost as bad as cmd.exe), no package manager and the shell commands which all seem (very) outdated.

I'm not making any comments on the UI itself because it's subjective but I also find the UI a bit strange and not very intuitive myself.

Yeah sure, you can configure all of this and have something which works but why not using a Linux (whatever flavour you prefer?), everything is just there already.

Every time I use my colleagues Macs, I just feel completely powerless and I feel that everything is getting in my way to prevent me to do something.

<comment><USER4> Oh come on. It's not so different from the server ( POSIX ), there are not a lot of tricks and there is a package manager ( homebrew ) & also there is iTerm, that replaces Terminal.app.

Linux on the other hand does not have mature desktop environment, Safari, Sketch, Photoshop and a lot of other really good software that comes built-in with OS X.

As a matter of fact I've never seen a tool that works only on Linux ( except probably some low-level kernel-dependent tools like iptables & others ) and does not compile on OS X.

<comment><USER3> > there is a package manager ( homebrew ) & also there is iTerm

Yeah sure, if you install some tooling it then becomes fine, but you need to install that.

> Linux on the other hand does not have mature desktop environment, Safari, > Sketch, Photoshop and a lot of other really good software that comes built- > in with OS X.

I don't use any design app personally so I can't comment on that. I also forgot to comment on Safari but I also hate Safari as a developer, I find that it lacks in the tooling part and prefer Firefox (I alternatively use Chrome also sometimes). I'm not also a fan of Safari's UI personally.

On the desktop environment part, I also forgot to add that I hate the file manager which prevents you to see the path, maybe there is a way to configure that somehow? When I use my colleagues computers, I always use the terminal instead of the file manager to browse because of this.

<comment><USER5> > Yeah sure, if you install some tooling it then becomes fine, but you need to > install that.

I think you're the only Linux person I've ever met who has a problem with installing things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I honestly hope the Touch Bar doesn't survive longer than one generation of MacBooks. I believe the whole thing is a gimmick (a well intentioned gimmick) meant to drive forward one thing, Apple Pay on the MacBook. Most likely it's internally perceived as a situation where the end justifies the means, if Apple Pay is widely adopted on the MacBook this will look like a genius decision down the line and make a ridiculous amount of money in the long-term. If not, blame the Touch Bar.

Apple should have done a full touch input screen on the MacBook. It might not have been perfect, but it would have been lauded as revolutionary by the mainstream media. By not doing it they have now given their competitors the chance to grab that market.

When Apple does eventually make a full touch input screen MacBook, Apple Pay will be a part of it. The Touch Bar is just a stepping stone to get to that point, but it's a step they should have skipped.

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's just me, but I dislike any sort of touch input on a laptop besides the regular trackpad.

The Touch Bar seems distracting since I don't really understand why one should look down and search for what to press instead of simply using a keyboard shortcut via muscle memory. But I have yet to try one and I understand that for stuff like a video editing timeline overview it may be suited - it's an additional display showing information afterall.

On the other hand, a full screen touch input like the dell XPS feels like the least ergonomic thing. How are you supposed to interact with it? Holding your arms up extended to the screen? [0]

[0] [http://i.dell.com/sites/imagecontent/products/PublishingImag...](http://i.dell.com/sites/imagecontent/products/PublishingImages/xps-15-9530/laptop- xps-15-love-pdp-module-1.jpg)

<comment><USER8> If you've never used a Windows touch screen PC, I can imagine that you can't imagine why you'd want a touch screen. If you have, then you know that after a day or so, you just start reaching for the screen intuitively, and it's a rude reminder of the bad old days when it's not a touch screen. This is what Apple missed: none of them use a touch screen, none of them bother to check out Windows, so they can't imagine how important it can be. The Touch Bar is a poor substitute for it, and calling any laptop "premium" in 2016 without full touch is marketing, not reality.

<comment><USER9> I've had Windows touchscreen laptops for ~2 years and the only time I even remember it's there is when trying to point at something in conversation and accidentally clicking on it. Are there really use cases that matter for a touchscreen on a standard laptop? I understand it on a convertible, but not your standard clamshell.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how common these use cases are, but I find touch support useful while doing some web dev stuff. For instance, in Chrome, pinch to zoom is more precise than ctrl-scroll / ctrl-+. It preserves the existing screen dimensions (ctrl-scroll / ctrl-+ makes the actual font size larger and alters dimensions).

I'm not so vision impaired that I need to do this on a day-to-day basis, but it's great for zooming in to see if I need to adjust a CSS border by 1px or something.

I haven't tested this thoroughly but I believe Chrome also supports the same set of touch events it does on Android. So if you want to make sure the mobile version of your site is touch-friendly, having a touch screen is less clunky than trying to emulate it with a mouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the negative reaction to the new MacBook Pro seems excessive. The only real objections I have are the increase in price and the new keyboard though I'm open minded that I'll get used to that.

Apple like to make slim, light products. And that's a good thing! There's always a compromise between size/weight/power usage and performance, and I don't think the choices they're making are bad ones. I'm sure if they could have put 32Gb in there without sacrificing some other aspect of the design they would have done so.

The negative reaction to touch bar seems to be mostly from people who haven't used it, the press reaction was positive. I use vim but the escape key is horrible to reach on a Macbook Pro anyway so I rebound it a long time ago. I've read bizarre complaints that developers 'need function keys for single step debugging' as though that's not going to be possible with touch bar.

But then I never really got the 'Apple software quality' meme either so maybe I'm not representative.

<comment><USER12> A wild rant appears.

The negative reaction is not because the new MBP is terrible when viewed in a vacuum, it is because people who would like (or actually need) more powerful hardware than the one-size-fits-all approach that seems to be Apple's current course are no longer catered to, or so it seems.

Personnally, I don't really care about the touch bar one way or another, but what I do care about is that I would like to have one machine I can do all my work on, which involves a wider range of things one a daily basis than is typical (e.g. video/image editing, GPU powered number crunching, coding, and sitting in moving vehicles plugged into a bunch of stuff). In the past few years, the 15" MBP has been the machine to do it all, but in it's newest incarnation(s) I am no longer sure it would still be the best tool. It seems like gimmicks are added, but useful extras are stripped away. Maybe it's just in the uncanny valley of progress with USB-C, but for the moment the way they went about it all or nothing seems like a major inconvenience, with all the "legacy" hardware I need to attach. And there's minor things like removing the power brick's cord.

As such, my first instinct is also to bitch and moan, as now it looks as though I need to find a new setup in the near future, and damn Apple for building something for the median user, but not for me. I, too, like to think that though I have an atypical usage pattern, what I do and how I talk about it benefits Apple enough that they should at least invest a bit of effort to try and keep me on their platform.

<comment><USER13> But it is more powerful hardware. The CPU is upgraded. The SSD has read/write speeds that smoke most competitors. Graphics got a big boost (though people found an excuse to rant about it not being Nvidia). The only thing that's not better is the ability to upgrade to 32/64GB of RAM. That's really it. And the problem here is the Intel's lack of support for LPDDR4. Apple was faced with choosing two out of three between thin/lightweight, good battery life, and support for up to 64GB of RAM. I think the decision Apple would make here is more than obvious. Look at the existing market for 64GB capable laptops and all of them are either bulky or just suffer in battery life performance. And the whole deal with only Thunderbolt 3/USB-C is way overblown; just buy the 1-2 cables you need and your problems are solved. The only genuinely valid complaint I see is the price. I don't know how much of that is attributed to more expensive components (CPU/GPU) vs the cost of the TouchBar itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a longtime PC user, I'm very thankful how the excellent Apple offerings really propelled the PC laptop market over the past decade to focus on both build quality and high-end specs, most notably Dell XPS and Lenovo/Thinkpad X1 series.

<comment><USER15> Intel also invested in Ultrabook and 2-in-1 reference designs to help PC OEMs compete with Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's key about this is that Apple didn't make a laptop for hackers. It was a nice confluence of factors that made Macs attractive to hackers, but Apple never set out to court them. You should keep that in mind if you're a hacker and you feel 'betrayed'. I've been seeing a lot of cringeworthy takes lately which basically amount to trying to guilt a corporation into making your ideal laptop.

I can't find the link to it but one of them said something like "I'm an influencer too so you [Apple] should care that I'm switching!"

<comment><USER17> When they went with a Unix based OS, they did.

<comment><USER16> Which is why it was a happy confluence of factors. Unix wasn't a call to action though, just an implementation detail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For what it is worth, no Apple fan I know was seriously disappointed by the Touch Bar on the new macs.

They (myself included) are disappointed by:

* A pro machine with underwhelming specifications * Connectors that now few people know which is what. I feel bad for the amount of arguing and screaming workers in Apple stores are going to get over USB vs USB C vs MagSafe vs Lightning vs HDMI vs Thunderbolt vs Headphone jack -- Heck I own macs and I'm not even sure what all you need for a new iPhone and a new MacBook Pro

As a great example, someone I know that describe's himself as an "Apple Fanboy" spent a half hour talking about what a flop the new MacBook is while wearing his Apple watch. That really makes it sink in what a lemon people think the new MacBook is

</comment><comment><USER19> Money quote:

 _" 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."_

Today, hackers are leaving Apple.

</comment><comment><USER20> > the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker's computer.

Yeah... not really. Never happened.

In the 90s, the canonical hacker computers were Amigas and Ataris. And soon thereafter, Windows PC, during the Windows 3 -> 95 transition.

Or if you want to go back another decade, Apple ][ and C64. Now these were the ultimate hacker computers.

Macs at the time were mostly used to create newspapers, slideshows and graphical assets. We're talking MacIntosh and Mac+, here. You never saw these in LAN parties, trust me.

</comment><comment><USER21> I laughed at the dig about Intel and Microsoft stickers. They're much easier to remove that the giant glowing billboard ad built into the Mac chassis.

<comment><USER22> Well, supposedly you like the logo of the product you buy, especially if it's tastefully done. No one tries to remove Lenovo from their thinkpad, right? The "Intel inside" and "AMD graphics" are crumby stickers your wrist can feel and add nothing to the design.

<comment><USER23> > No one tries to remove Lenovo

Cerainly they do. Black electrical tape is an effective logo-hider for laptops and cameras.

It is also great for suppressing those bright blue LEDs that feature on many devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The new Macbook Pro supports max of 16GB RAM while Thinkpads support 32GB. This makes it hard to justify getting a Mac.

<comment><USER25> Phil Schiller, their marketing chief said:

> To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would > require a memory system that consumes much more power and wouldn't be > efficient enough for a notebook.

ref: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook- pr...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pro-16gb-ram- battery-life-phil-schiller)

Nice to get a reply from the top as I was wondering why it was 16GB max too. I can't comment on the veracity.

I'm a Windows user, if that makes any difference.

<comment><USER26> It'll be interesting to see if & when this starts to influence desktop software design. Since the early 90s, it's largely been considered a waste of time to optimize client programs for speed or memory usage, because a new machine will just come out in a couple years with double the memory and double the processing power. There's a _lot_ of low-hanging fruit in application- level performance, optimizations that could be done but aren't because the user won't perceive a difference. Now that Moore's Law has largely stalled out, I wonder if we'll start seeing innovation in software platforms (languages, frameworks) to optimize for speed & space instead of ease-of-use, to try and recover that performance that the hardware isn't giving us.

<comment><USER27> Bill by milliseconds (AWS Lambda and the like) is going to push us into that direction. The 100 ms billing unit could become a benchmark. It will punish languages with a long startup time. Luckily for Java it's introducing ahead of time compilation. Many scripting languages are going to suffer. Too bad because they are usually the ones that make programming easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I got a new computer relatively recently. It's a modest looking plastic Dell Inspiron; but it has a 4k touchscreen display, an i7 CPU, a GTX960M GPU, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD. It cost ~$900, on sale. I, frankly, can't imagine paying the Apple tax, especially now.

I kinda suspect we're going to see a replay of the long slow decline into mediocrity that Apple experienced before Jobs' return. With higher prices and a seeming lack of product vision going forward, I suspect the shine on Apple products for developers will fade.

I mean, maybe I just don't get it, but the touchbar seems kinda like a boondoggle (and, if it is going to exist, I wouldn't want it to kill my esc key). Then again, I still don't really get the touchscreen on laptops. I have one, but rarely use it.

<comment><USER11> > I got a new computer relatively recently. It's a modest looking plastic Dell > Inspiron; but it has a 4k touchscreen display, an i7 CPU, a GTX960M GPU, > 16GB of RAM, and an SSD. It cost ~$900, on sale. I, frankly, can't imagine > paying the Apple tax, especially now.

Without meaning to be rude, this comes across like a 90s platform wars usenet post. There is no tax - it's two different products with different features and different prices.

If you're happy with your choice, that's great! I like and use computers a lot and don't buy them that often, so I don't mind spending a bit more to get the machine I want.

<comment><USER28> Sure, it may be more fair to compare to an XPS model. But, even so...big price difference.

Admittedly, if you really love macOS, buying a Mac is a reasonable choice, and the only realistic choice for non-technical folks (building a Hackintosh is non-trivial, and a license violation). But, I'd just be installing Linux on it, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Whenever I meet someone who says, "You seem really smart, you must use a Mac," I understand who they are made for.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.

<comment><USER31> Status signalling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So by posting this are you suggesting he writes a follow up article about the return of the PC? I think that might be premature, but definitely Apple has forgotten which group started the surge of people buying Macs.

<comment><USER33> I _think_ I read a later article by Paul Graham advocating thin client netbooks (aka Chromebooks et al).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Everybody seems to complain about a 16Gb max ram, but I've yet to see anyone have a laptop with 32Gb of Ram anyway, nevermind actually needed all those 32Gb. It seems lately people are just trying to complain for a sake of complaining, they don't care about a reason, just to say something negative, find a flaw, I recently watched some podcast after a apple and microsoft event, they first blamed apple that macbook has only 16gb of ram max, but at the same time they found excuse in microsoft studio that it has a crappy 965m in a $3200+ machine saying that it takes a long time to develop a product and it's understandable that Microsoft is using an old hardware.

I love new macbook pro, I think it's great, especially its new touch bar, lighter and thinner form and a longer battery life, not much else I wanted honestly.

<comment><USER35> My 2015 rMBP is currently using 14.23GB of RAM with an additional 14.56GB swap file.

Almost all of it is Chrome on macOS. This is without VMs, video editing, etc. Just standard development tools.

Sure, I may have some untrusted code hijacking my threads, but I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy a MBP with 32GB of RAM.

<comment><USER34> Don't you think it's a bit ridiculous that Chrome is using 28GB of your RAM?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 1\. Apple did pretty good job at popularizing Unix on laptop. 2\. Apple's market share is around 6%. In last 3 years Linux doubled it's market share and went from 1% to 2% [https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qp...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Linux&qpcustomb=0&qpsp=190&qpnp=25&qptimeframe=M) 3\. If Apple will fail with their new products for developers, then they will switch most likely to Linux and serious growth of Linux market share on desktop is quite probable.

</comment><comment><USER37> I popped into the Apple Store on Regent Street in London today, where they have a couple of these on display in plastic cylinders (but can't touch).

They have a constant rolling demo, and two things struck me.

The changing touchbar display constantly distracted me from the screen.

Also, the little square area on the far right for the touch sensor doesn't blend in nearly as well as the photos make out. Worse, presumably for symmetry, there's a square of the same size at the other end - so the display for the 'Esc' key is actually the distance of one key in from the left hand edge.

<comment><USER38> Note that in actual usage, the Touch Bar will only be changing substantially when you switch between apps/contexts or are interacting with it. From the Touch Bar HIG at [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/AbouttheTouchBar.html):

Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display.

Although technically it's a screen, the Touch Bar functions as an input device, not a secondary display. The user may glance at the Touch Bar to locate or use a control, but their primary focus is the main screen. The Touch Bar shouldn't display alerts, messages, scrolling content, static content, or anything else that commands the user's attention or distracts from their work on the main screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've recently thinking about how to submit more stories that get traction, and I have to take my hat off to rocky1138 for capturing the zeitgeist perfectly with this submission.

This essay resonates strongly with me, and I wish Tim Cook saw things this way. But in my heart I realize that it is probably only an accident of history that the most polished consumer computing device company in history happened to make a great Unix developer box.

Although it's undeniable that developers were key to Apple's resurgence, the need for embracing open source and modern free software was only necessary because of Apple's weak market position. We know this because of Apple's failed attempts at pushing their own standards in the 80s and 90s when they got their lunch eaten by Microsoft. Interoperability was something that Jobs grudgingly got on board with when he realized he didn't have the market clout to force standards down people throat. Apple now has that clout. No matter how bad the Mac gets, there will still be developers for iOS as long as Apple keeps delivering on iOS.

Personally I think I have to stick with the Mac for a while because no one else is producing a software/hardware package that is anywhere near as nice overall, but maybe I'll take pg's advice and walk around some college campuses to see what are the kids who can't afford Apple's immaculately overpriced machines are using.

</comment><comment><USER40> Alas, Apple has lost its way and no longer make machines with _real_ performance like those 2005 PowerPC laptops that were so very fast.

Also the old Jobs-era Apple would never have released a machine where you couldn't plug in any of your existing peripherals without adapters... I'll just leave this here: [http://lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/bondi-imac- right.jpg](http://lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/bondi-imac-right.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER41> Ten years (or a bit longer, depending on how you measure it) is a good run.

</comment><comment><USER42> _" And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. [2] And yet Apple's overall market share is still small.

Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary"_

Did PG's prediction come true?

<comment><USER43> Yes - they lost the low end.

Perhaps "lost" is too strong a word - they weren't interested in keeping it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> March 2005 :)

<comment><USER45> I immediately clicked ("return of the Mac" \+ "Paul Graham" = perfect clickbait, given what's been going on these past few days). Got me.

It's a pretty good read though. At the end, there's a mention of % of YC people on OS X. I bet anything that OS X would be the dominant platform in that demographic these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> After some initial thoughts about the reveal, I gave it some more thought. I wouldn't mind revealed MBP 15" if it were the same features in 13" form. That's what it missed, IMO. 15" features feel more like what a 'power' laptop would look like in 13" form, and 13" one is a MBA basically, and 'true' 15" is missing.

</comment><comment> alex- 18th March 2005 APPL: $6.14 Today APPL: $111.49

I hope his father bought the shares this time!

</comment><comment><USER47> The new MacBook Pro's Touch Bar is meant as a halfway point between keys and a touch screen. It may replace the application dock, it may replace the menu bar, it may do more granular things like offer local variables, or word completion.

Typed input is slow. Until USB can wire into the brain, we will continue needing input help. Perhaps the Touch Bar will, with the help of software, make the data channel to between brain and machine a little faster.

The UX of the Touch Bar's software will effectively determine productivity increase and adoption. In a world where Moore's Law has run its course, I believe an improvement of above 20% input speed will make it a success.

</comment><comment><USER48> So did Paul's dad eventually listen to his son's stock market advice?

</comment><comment><USER49> Mods - needs a '[2005]'.

</comment><comment><USER50> How can an posting dated from 2005 with only 19 points (at time of writing) reach number 2 on Hacker News? Does anyone know how the ranking algorithm works?

<comment><USER51> Methinks domain plays a significant role...

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Steve Jobs founded Apple. Apple changed the world. They fired him. They became a joke. They brought him back. Apple changed the world, again. Steve Jobs died. Apple became a joke, again.

<comment><USER33> The richest company in the history of the world could hardly be called a joke, unless you were joking of course. I for one am concerned about their current trajectory, but their R&D budget is $25m per _day_ so I don't think they can be written off just yet.</comment></comment>