Why 'Friday' just might be the future of pop - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/04/21/apop042111.DTL

<comment><USER2> If every song you make can be classified as "the worst pop song in history", I guess that must be some kind of rare talent for which you can get paid.

In other news, tomorrow is a holiday, so technically today is Friday Friday - time to get down on Friday. Just had my cereal, gonna take the elevator to get down to the first floor, walk to work, get some codin done on Friday Friday.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty interesting article. Apologies for going off topic.

I choose not to have Adobe flash installed at all. Yes, this can be a hard road on the Internet, but I think recent flash 0days at least give some weight to the approach.

One bright spot in an otherwise plugin filled world is youtube. I use chrome, an html5 video compliant browser, and youtube lets me opt in to their html5 trial.

Most of the time, this works great. The videos look good, stream well, no problem. But sometimes, like in the case of this friday video youtube insists that I need the flash plugin. Why? It's not that it isn't encoded correctly - as far as I know it's that it has an ad. And google has decided it'd be too easy to skip the ad with html5 or it can't play it so it just doesn't let me watch it. Of course, if I can't watch the video I'm not seeing the ad anyway.

Here is the kicker though. To watch the video I picked up my phone and opened the youtube application. I don't have flash installed on my phone either, but the youtube app is happy to just play the basic h.264. The kicker? Well, youtube didn't show me an ad there either.

Sorry for the rant. Is youtube ever going to start treating their html5 video as a first class citizen?</comment>


Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition) - <AUTHOR> http://mcsweeneys.net/2008/7/30schmelling.html <comment><USER2> Hamlet for IRC: <http://web.mit.edu/jcb/humor/irc-hamlet>

</comment><comment><USER3> "Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float. "

I still have tears on my eyes from laughter :D

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a great piece of writing... I wish McSweeney's had an RSS feed.

<comment><USER5> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/mcsweeneys> ?

<comment><USER4> Doh! (smacks forehead)

And thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Polonius is no longer online."

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey look...someone found that ordered announcements of events can communicate the plot of a story and created a short demonstration on a classic example. Isn't that a totally amazing and newsworthy breakthrough!?

<comment><USER7> Kind of snarky... but I agree, more or less. This wasn't a particularly witty story. This was a re-enactment of Hamlet that used Facebook terminology. I mean, it's stupid nitpicking (dead people joining groups? Laaaaaaame.), but it was more-or-less drab and really only funny if you're willing to look at it with a wholly uncritical eye.

And I also agree with you that HN stories are slowly turning less interesting. It's a shame, but hopefully the tide will ebb soon.</comment></comment>


Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic, with extra bonus goodies - <AUTHOR> http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibly-Go-Wrong <comment><USER2> Don't miss the response in thread from ST developer Yoz Grahame.

[http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot- Possibl...](http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibly-Go- Wrong#3435156)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have the Windows 95 DVD version with all the extras, including the 176-page Official Strategy Guide (from the back cover: "UNCENSORED PHOTOS of DOUGLAS ADAMS in the VERY ACT OF WRITING!", "DESCRIPTIONS of natural language parsing engines and object-oriented programming by people who ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT!"). Even with the guide ("SOLUTIONS so complete we despise you for needing to use them!"), I found the game a bit slow-going, and eventually gave up on it. I bought it for my kids, but I'm not sure if they ever finished it, either.

</comment><comment><USER4> My brothers and I, big adventure and Adams fans, hotly anticipated this game at the time. Unfortunately it was no where near the epic levels of awesome set by the Infocom game. So much meh and so buggy that we didn't even finish it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Be sure to read the comments on that thread. Awesome post and really nice to see this, after all that N stands for Noel.

Merry Christmas everybody and thank you Anigbrowl!

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome. I've been looking for a way to run this, and tried to get info from any current copyright holders (no replies at all), and haven't been successful at all.

Now I just need to wrangle whoever holds it now, and beg them to let me / someone re-write it for modern systems.

</comment><comment> DanI-S I remember playing this when it came out. It was intriguing, but incredibly difficult! I was always curious about what happened in the end, since some bug prevented me from finishing it. I may just have to watch the video.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a Windows version. I don't know if it runs under Win7 but I think emulating Win95 is easier for most people than emulating an old Mac platform. If anyone is interested, let me know.</comment>


Apple Tried Charging the Price of a New MacBook Pro for a Screen Replacement - plow-tycoon https://luketully.ca/macbook-screen-replacement-costs-as-much-as-a-brand-new-model/ <comment><AUTHOR> They've also quoted me more than a whole new pair to repair some AirPods Pro that I accidentally washed in the laundry. They didn't tell me that was the case when I was on the phone with them.

Apple uses a lot of customer hostile behaviors nowadays. Recently:

* I canceled the Apple TV+ year trial that came with my iPhone. While, I believe, they require other apps to allow access until the trial ends, they ended my access immediately.

* Apple Music pulls up a _slow_ interstitial almost every time I open it up to try to get me to pay. I have like 4 albums on my phone I listen to, it's incredibly annoying how they've broken the music app to upsell their services.

I'm trying to get rid of most of my Apple devices in favor of anything else at this point.

<comment><USER2> I just swapped from Android to an iPhone for privacy concerns. The other side of the fence is pretty user hostile as well. Google makes you disable a lot of functionality on the phone if you try to get out of their invasive tracking. And they are constantly nuking apps that I use like Google Play Music and Google Inbox.

Maybe check out PinePhone if you're interested in hacking something together!

<comment><USER3> Fun fact, Google allows end to end encrypted backups, but Apple - due to pressure from the FBI - decided to keep access to your iCloud backups.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud- exclusiv...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud- exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi- complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT?il=0)

So if you use their cloud services, both Apple and Google have access to your photos, but Apple has access to all of your whatsapp and signal conversations, while Google does not (if you decide to password protect your backups).

And you have to use iCloud if you want to keep your 3rd party chat history safe, unless you jailbreak to extract it from the file system.

iMessage is of course purposefully flawed to allow for MITM.

<comment><USER4> This is not true for Signal, the conversations are safe as they are stored on device only, not in iCloud.

[https://support.signal.org/hc/en- us/articles/360007059752-Ba...](https://support.signal.org/hc/en- us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> About 4-5 years ago, my MacBook Pro's trackpad would randomly stop working and I would have to restart my laptop a few times to get it working again. Sometimes it would work for a few hours, sometimes a few minutes. I also dual- booted Linux at the time and the funny thing is the trackpad never had an issue under Linux. After quite a bit of researching, it led me to believe that the ribbon cable connecting the trackpad to the motherboard was faulty due to macOS never trying to reconnect to the trackpad if it loses a connection for even just a moment.

I brought it to the Apple store and explained that I had tried everything possible to resolve the issue without opening up the laptop myself, such as resetting NVRAM, completely reinstalling macOS completely, etc. I explained that I think that the ribbon cable is simply faulty and that it probably just needed a replacement. The Genius said that they're going to bring it in the back to do every single one of the things I mentioned that I already did.

I come back 4 hours later to pickup my laptop and they tell me that the issue is the motherboard and that replacing said board would cost $800. I asked how they determined it was the motherboard and not simply a faulty ribbon cable to the trackpad, but they wouldn't answer the question directly. After requesting their superior and restating my question a few more times, they told me that they don't have access to replacement ribbon cables and that my only option was a motherboard replacement, which itself would take about a week because they needed to order the board. That was enough for me to take my laptop and leave, even though they still didn't answer the actual question of how they determined what the actual issue was or even confirm my hunch that the issue was with the ribbon cable.

I bought a $5 replacement cable from Amazon, took about 10 minutes to swap it out using an iFixIt tutorial, and I'm still using that laptop as my main machine years later. In other words, they spent 4 hours to quote me an $800 fix that would take about a week to be done for something that was actually only a $5 fix that would take no more than 30 minutes. I've been hesitating to buy a new laptop for years because of that experience as well as the downhill quality of MacBooks as of late, such as the keyboard (although fixed now), touch bar, initial Catalina bugginess, etc.

<comment><USER6> I believe Louis Rossmann had a video of something similar, where a loose/unseated display cable was quoted by Apple as a motherboard replacement.

<comment><USER7> He also has a video where the apple store person didn't plug the battery cable all the way in after looking at it and just blamed it on the machine being broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Recently my iPhone XR stopped working after only a few months of usage. I thought it shouldn't be much of a problem since the device still had warranty. But I was very wrong... dealing with Apple Support (Germany) was one of the most frustrating customer support experiences I've ever had.

My local Apple Store sent the phone to the repair facility 3 times but it always came back with the comment "Couldn't replicate issue" although the issue was clearly documented and reproducible by me and the Apple support staff.

After a lot of phone calls, email back and forth, the manager of my local Apple Store said there's nothing they can do about it, the only option that I have left is to trade-in the defective device to get a gift card and then use it to buy a new iPhone 11. Since I need a iPhone for my job (software- testing), that's what I did. I was tired to fight for my right to get a replacement device or a repair.

It's completely ridiculous. Apple's "warranty" is basically useless. But somehow they can get away with it.

<comment><USER9> Did you try going via your consumer rights instead of their warranty?

Completely anecdotal I know, but I had a Apple Pencil fail on me outside of warranty. On the phone they refused to fix or replace it. Once I mentioned my consumer rights (which cover 6 years in Ireland [https://www.apple.com/ie/legal/statutory- warranty/](https://www.apple.com/ie/legal/statutory-warranty/) \- I'm sure it's similar in Germany) they put me through to a separate phone line and sent me out a new pencil.

<comment><USER10> 6 years? This is amazing!

In Germany, it's 2 years of statutory warranty (Gewährleistung), but there's a shift in the burden of proof (Beweislastumkehr) after 6 months, so if the retailer insists, it's up to you to prove that a defect was actually present when you bought the item.

We talk a lot about the throwaway society and about planned obsolence, but six years of statutory warranty could actually change something.

<comment><USER11> Most of the UK also has similar statutory protections (6 years in England and Wales; 5 in Scotland), but after six months you have to prove the defect was present at the time of purchase too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw a video by Louis Rossman the other day that's relevant to this. He owns an independent repair shop that repairs Apple products, and he said that Apple has basically won the fight by locking down their supply chain.

Independent repair stores now cannot get Apple parts anywhere, so your only repair option in many cases is to take the thing to Apple and pay the predictably just-below-used price to get it repaired.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFA3szW9nWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFA3szW9nWk)

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't you also in theory be able to get a donor part from someone's laptop which is otherwise busted?

<comment><USER12> He addresses that in the video as well (I think he said it wasn't economical).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> With the declining repairability of MacBooks (and other slim notebooks), I always have to think about this Pokémon comic:

[https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED127/56473bf64a6...](https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED127/56473bf64a66a.jpeg)

<comment><USER15> Original: [https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/hotspital](https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/hotspital)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm currently having to go through a home insurance claim for a similar reason. I stupidly took one of the keys off and bent a bit of plastic getting it back on. The damaged part of the key is on the keycap itself, rather than the mechanism underneath. Silly mistake but I imagine not super uncommon.

Took it to an Apple store and was quoted £700 to fix it which is equivalent to almost half the cost of the laptop. For a single key. Absolute insanity.

<comment><USER17> Damn, what a rip-off. Why not stop giving them your money and stop buying any more of their products and services? Hit them where it hurts, their sales and bottom line.

Just complaining about it doesn't get you very far as long as you still keep shoving money in their pocket.

These days there are plenty of quality alternatives that are not Apple and lowering their sales should send a clear message to their board.

<comment><USER18> It will send a message but I'm not sure it's clear at all.

I always see the suggestion to vote with your wallet but how does it even work with a product with usable lifecycle of 5 or even 10 years? By the end of 2025 Apple will see a sales slowdown over the past few years. At that point I'm not sure it's even possible to pinpoint specific reasons, like "customer couldn't replace keycap on a 2017 model computer" which may or may not have been solved for years already.

If you have complaints and you want them to be fixed, tell them ([https://www.apple.com/feedback/](https://www.apple.com/feedback/)), unless you've given up completely on the company and won't ever return to it. Simply voting with your wallet is the equivalent of ghosting in commerce.

<comment><USER19> They do already see their sales figures. They also know what their own repair policies/budgets are. I absolutely believe that they're looking at what effect changes on repair policies have on repeat sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't wrap my head around Apple customers, most of the people I know that use mainly Apple products had a surprisingly amount of major issues with them but continued to buy Apple stuff only, it's like an addiction.. For example screen stopped working in a 3-year MacBook so what did the guy do? Bought new one because fixing was too expensive. Another one had a problem with the keyboard in MacBook which is one of the most important things in a laptop, his solution - do not part with a can of compressed air and wait to buy new one. Next example - brand new iPhone was randomly loosing WiFi connection so the guy sent it for a repair and had to wait 2 months (note that this was in eastern Europe but anyway) to get it back.

I could go on and on with such examples and I can't believe that people pay so much money and don't see a problem here. I never had any major problems with any devices I use and they all cost several times less than Apple equivalent.

<comment><USER21> The problem is that everything is just awful. Pick your poison.

Apple is the most expensive but also the least... bad.

Android is fine I guess. I still prefer iPhones. They have a much nicer app experience. Android feels subpar and inconsistent.

Windows... is just awful. I deal with Windows every day on machines much faster than my macbook and it's just slow. Opening Explorer randomly slow. Settings that are randomly forgotten. Sound and network settings spread out over 5 config screens. One laggy app can easily make the whole system feel unresponsive. Oh, and "this file cannot be opened because it is in use by another program". Thanks. What program? I dunno.

<comment><USER22> It's not an excuse and I'm not saying windows can work for you, but there are quite a few horrible ways to configure windows and corporate IT has figured all of them out. The state of windows in most enterprise deployments is disgusting to me.

Huge progress has been made on consolidating settings in the last couple years, unfortunately that means everyone is unhappy right now because old settings are constantly being moved to more consistent locations but you still need to know both the old and new ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This price looks incorrect. Tier 4 damage would only be accidental damage that the customer caused. Delamination of the screen doesn't count. Tier 4 would be liquid damage. I think the rep was new to the internal tools that apple provides.

A cracked display in a MBA retina 13in 2019 cost the customer $489.94 total.

<comment><USER24> Phew! Thank goodness someone finally mentioned this. The next step is to ask to speak to a manager and I bet this conversation would have gone a lot better.

<comment> plow-tycoon > The numbers Joe suggested in this conversation are either entirely > fabricated, or belong to the cost of replacing the entire machine if its > experienced catastrophic damage. But, after clarifying numerous times about > what the numbers actually represent and comparing to previous repair bills > for the same issue, my belief is that the rep used a false and obscured > repair order to persuade me to replace my girlfriend's minimally damaged > screen with a new computer.

<comment><USER23> I have misquoted a repair before. Either I clicked the wrong box. Because either I didn't do my do diligence or because I was scatter brained and copied and pasted the wrong number. Regardless this is still a reflection of the way apple trains the agents and QC team not catching this agents mistake.

You might want to call back and mention the delamination repair program. If you're still within the 4 year purchase period it should be fixed for free.

<comment> plow-tycoon I definitely accept that mistakes could be made, and do plan to follow up. It's not within the repair window, but I'll see what can be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I hope Luke Tully is around and reading these comments, the only contact he has on his site is the twitter and he looks inactive on it.

But his 2015 MBP delamination is covered by an Apple Recall from many years ago! He doesn't have to pay a dime to get that issue fixed.

I first took my 2015 MBP to Apple a few years ago for the delamination problem and was told it was covered under a recall notice, but at the time I didn't have up to 2 weeks of service time to be without my MBP, so I just dealt with it. This Spring I finally called up Apple and told them I wanted to get my delamination issue fixed. The Apple rep was completely lost about the recall I was talking about, but about 15 minutes of looking around he found the recall information. 1 week later I had my MBP back from the service center looking b-e-a-utiful :)

<comment> plow-tycoon Yep. I haven't updated the site much lately, and quit twitter years ago.

Oddly, in the interaction with customer support I posted, there is one comment missing, and that's where the rep says the laptop is outsode the repair window (4 years).

On my personal machine, I used the repair program multiple times because the screens are just so vulnerable to delamination and damage.

To elaborate, when I experienced the issue on my machine in 2018, I also couldn't let them ship it out for a week. I believe they made a note on my file, which worked out in the end, but no subsequent technicians were able to rely on that note and had to do their own inspection

<comment><USER23> I just saw this. Even if you are beyond the 4 year purchase window. The repair should only be considered a "display only replacement" I suspect if display somehow got "fried" and failed the repair wouldn't not be a tier 4 repair.

You also have an option of just removing the anti-reflective coating using solvents like 90% ISO or stronger.

<comment> plow-tycoon I've seen people literally scrub off the coating, but it's not quite at that point yet. Thanks for the suggestion though. I was just expecting to either be told whether or not it's in the repair window, or what the display replacement and battery would cost, if it did become unusable. Oddly, the one comment where the support person confirms that it's not in the window was removed from the transcript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The title and initial blurb of the article makes it sound like the rep tried to somehow disguise the cost or downplay it.

But if you read the transcript, it's the exact opposite. The rep warned them the repair would cost more than a replacement before he even quoted them a price, and tried multiple times to explain why. He acted completely professionally, and the situation itself is totally unremarkable too.

<comment><USER27> Does it matter if you're being told to fornicate yourself in a professional manner? The tone of the conversation is irrelevant if the matter is ridiculous. And don't try and frame it as though it wasn't. An independent repair shop would be able to replace a screen for far less. That is of course, if the screens were available for purchase freely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In the last +5 years Apple has been very busy securing their monopoly on every bit or screw their machines have.

In certain models you simply cannot plug another ( Apple original ) screen, it will not work. Also many "regular/mundane" chips are not available to anyone but Apple.

Apple not only doesn't support any repair initiative, it actively sabotages anything they see as a threat. Their Authorized Service Provider Program is a complete joke done in a way to keep other people busy but set for failure and to give Apple lawyers some leverage they can work with.

</comment><comment> awinter-py the right to repair movement is fascinating because it has no political alignment (it includes city folk + farmers, for example), has passed legislation in a lot of states, and implicitly comes with a bunch of other digital rights (because repair is power)

it's also easy to understand -- there's no generation gap. Unlike privacy, the harms are immediate and most people have experienced them.

repair.org is IMO doing as much good as EFF / ACLU on a way thinner budget

<comment><USER29> Unfortunately, going by Louis Rossmann's latest video, the right to repair means nothing if you don't have access to the parts you need to fix Apple products. And of late, Apple have been preventing their suppliers from selling parts to third parties.

<comment><USER30> The notion of ip is so deeply ingrained in the US, that I doubt you'll see the kind of Chinese bazaar that you really need. The US will only adapt when China gets significantly ahead.

<comment><USER29> > I doubt you'll see the kind of Chinese bazaar

The point is that that's what you had (admittedly on a much smaller scale) in the US, but that it's now disappearing, seemingly in response to the push for Right to Repair. Watch his latest video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I must say that all the Apple products my wife and I have used so far, have been very reliable. They're expensive but when you consider the quality and durability they usually have better value. But their repair service can be utterly rubbish sometimes. A few years ago my wife spilled some beer on her MacBook Air and the keyboard stopped working. She took it to the Apple Service centre and told her that it was a faulty motherboard. They asked for nearly 60% of the price of the laptop. She then took it to an independent repair shop and they did it for a fraction of the cost.

<comment> plow-tycoon I've been using MacBooks for 10 years, and while they've recently been less reliable, I have had good experiences for at least 60% of the time. So if you can get them repaired for a reasonable price, and they don't break that often, I still don't see many good alternatives. Especially if you still like the OS

<comment><USER31> very true. I've used several other brands of laptops, mostly because they're cheaper. None have lasted more than 2 years. I've had Compaq, Fujistsu, HP, Asus and a ThinkPad. Only the ThinkPad still works. I had one of the early Intel Core 2 Duo Macbooks and it lasted 6 years before I sold it. It was still working. My wife's Macbook Air is 6 years old and has only 4 gigs of RAM and it still supports the latest OS and works. Even the battery last 4 to 5 hours easily. I've tried working with Linux on some other laptops but I'd to deal with a lot of support issues. Macs just work. I'm using a 2017 model Macbook Pro with 16 gigs RAM, from work. The keyboard is not the best so they gave me a Magic Keyboard. It's just a stress free computer.

<comment> plow-tycoon I can feel all of that. I went from a custom gaming PC, which was ok aside from having to re-install windows once every few months, then to a 2009 MBP 13" which lasted 4 years until I sold it for a ridiculous sum, then a late 2013 13" MBP which I used until 2018 until it was stolen. I then went to a 2017 non-touchbar model, which was just... fine, but had the keyboard issue, delamination, and an insanely hard to troubleshoot deep-sleep/wake from sleep issue which led to it being replaced by Apple under warranty (when I finally re-produced the issue 100% of the time) for my current 2019 MBP 13" w/ 16gb of ram.

Other than that, my impression of Thinkpads is that, while they seem a bit clunky for me, they are at least in the top tier of non-MBP laptops. Likewise, my brother just picked up a 2019 XPS 13" which has earned some praise from HN folk and seems to be pretty solid. I'd personally like a gaming rig of some kind, but if I'm realistic, I won't get that much use out of it until the rainy season.

<comment><USER31> I know what you mean. ThinkPads are definitely chunky and are in the similar price range as Macs. If I didn't have the Macbook pro (16gigs with core -i5) from work, I'd probably buy a Macbook air. I feel that the Air series offer a lot of value for money. I have the touch bar Macbook pro. It's great. I use the touch bar sometimes but all I really want is the finger print sensor. Great feature. I'm wondering if Apple will ever open up the iPad OS a bit and allow terminal access and enable installing compilers and dev environments like the Mac OS. I wouldn't mind switching to an iPad in that case. The ARM Macbooks are going to be just non-touch iPads with MacOS X on them anyway. I don't do a lot of gaming. Mostly play casual games on a Nintendo Switch. So my desktop PC has been barely touched in the last three years.

<comment> plow-tycoon I'd love to see iPads become more versatile. The iPad Pro seems like a pretty nice device, particularly because of the high refresh rate screen. But it's very heavily consumption and illustration oriented. My iPad 3 has been passable since it was new, with some degradation in performance, but I haven't found a more interesting use for it besides YouTube and Pocket. I imagine that it could be a great device for interactive systems or 3D modelling, but I'd really be trying to justify the purchase at that point. I do also agree that the fingerprint sensor is a nice addition, but along with it they made it almost impossible to recover data in the event of catastrophic failure.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, absolutely. IOS is very restrictive in terms of what you can achieve on it as a developer or a power user. But it's an amazing device for artists and content creators. Packs enough CPU power for their needs. My wife has been considering buying one for illustrations etc. Now with the new iPad Air supporting Pencil 2, the choices are even more confusing. She is torn between getting the pro or the new Air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not sure what's newsworthy, here. This is quite typical of any place, that both sells and repairs stuff.

The cost of repair is calculated to be just below, or at, the cost of replacement. It's unusual, but not unheard-of, to have it more than the cost of replacement.

I've encountered this with TVs, phones, VCRs, stereos, non-Apple computers, cars, and I have heard stories of this applying to buildings and homes, as well.

And I find that infuriating, as it leads to waste.

<comment><USER33> Not sure this is all that typical. While repair costs can get to a fairly large percentage of the purchase price and thus not making sense in some situations, it's not always the case.

I recently repaired a Sony soundbar system for about 30% of the purchase price, so definitely not "at the cost of replacement". Replaced a phone screen for 10% the cost of a new one etc.

<comment><USER32> Depends on where the repairs are done.

Today, I'm returning a leased car. I had a small crack in the front bumper (trailer hitch in a parking lot). It isn't one of the new sensor-packed bumpers; just a vanilla one.

It cost $1,000 to repair, because they replaced the entire front bumper, and the paint cost more than the part.

It also had to be done at the dealer, because of the lease requirements. The body shop down the road would have done it for half that. I have since found out that the dealer sends the car to a body shop anyway, and they probably only charged half, so the dealer pocketed the difference.

I am never leasing a vehicle, ever again. This was my first, and last time.

<comment><USER34> Which brand did you lease? I've leased Toyota's before and had no such restriction. I could go to any auto body shop they just had to use genuine Toyota parts for the repair. With my last lease I had to have the rear bumper replaced Toyota didn't care where I got it done.

<comment><USER32> It was a Subaru. The lease was very cheap. When I went to the body shop, they were the ones that told me it needed to be done by the dealership.

All in all, it was quite cheap. I probably saved a lot of money, but I don't like surprises. I'll gladly pay more, for no surprises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Had the same issue with delamination and because they admitted to it being their fault, took it to an Apple store just to see what they'll say. They said that it is a known defect but, wait for it, not for my model and so in my case it's my own fault by default. The person literally said yes it's delaminating but it's a different type of delamination. There was another comical scene involving googling by the employee which I will spare. It's not a big deal because I wasn't in my hometown anyway and couldn't leave it for longer than 3 days, but still. That company is simply ridiculous, and I hope I don't have to deal with them too much in my lifetime.

<comment> plow-tycoon The first time I experienced this, I was travelling through the U.S in 2018, in what seems like a similar event. I almost didn't get them to agree to do it, but it was up to their discretion and they obliged. However, the kicker was that they had to mail it away and it'd be gone for at least a week. I tried numerous Apple stores on our way up through California. Some said they did do MB repairs in store, but their hands were tied, they'd have to mail it away. Insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For what is worth, I had an iMac 27" out of warranty and Apple replaced the screen for free.

It had started having an issue (condensation) after 3-4 years of use and apparently the part number was from a run that could display was issue and had free repair even if out of warranty.

The iMac cost like $3500 (corresponding local price), and the repair part was listed as costing $750 but given for free.

Another good experience is when they fixed a MBP (charging adapter) from free in a totally different country than the one purchased. Bought in Europe, fixed in an Apple Store in the US.

That said, the first case is 7 years ago, and the other is 6.

<comment><USER27> It's cool that you've had a good experience. Maybe if more people spent 3'500$ on a computer, they'd get similar treatment.

<comment><USER36> You'd be surprised. Thought that should have been 3500

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm sure they will argue that they are protecting consumers by preventing potentially untrustworthy repair shops from buying authentic replacement parts.

This is what an anti-competitive monopoly looks like. You cannot even choose where to get your laptop repaired, so there is no possibility for anyone else to offer, for example, a cheaper price for the labor. And the consumer pays the forcibly higher price. Those shops that attempted to offer cheaper repairs were retaliated against by Apple...

</comment><comment><USER38> This is not surprising at all, the retina screen is one of the most expensive parts of the laptop.

Lots of household appliances are similar to this too. If you have to repair one of the main parts of a washing machine or a dishwasher a new one will be a cheaper option.

Same for a car, a friend of mine flooded his engine by driving through water that was higher than expected. His insurance company just wrote the car off as it was much more expensive to replace an engine than to get a new car.

<comment><USER39> How do you figure? The screen costs Apple roughly $200. So they don't have to hire skilled technicians, they replace the whole top of the laptop, so some backlight, cover, wiring, case...still well under $500.

The _actual_ reason is they don't want Macbook components floating around on the grey market, so they make the pricing for significant repairs impossible to justify.

<comment><USER40> I wonder if the actual mission of their "repair" shops is to boost purchases from pigeons who have self-identified as maybe needing a new one. Repair is not at all in Apple's interest. It's certainly not for customer goodwill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> There was also a CBC documentary two years ago that investigated similar complaints about Apple repair practices: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XneTBhRPYk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XneTBhRPYk)

Essentially, this blog post reinforces the findings from the CBC and indicates that little has changed over the past few years regarding Apple's repair practices.

</comment><comment><USER42> iFixit sells the screen for $599 if you want to repair it yourself.

PowerBook Medic will replace the screen on a 15" Retina Pro for $449 USD. I'm sure smaller shops would do it even cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sadly, this kind of thing with Apple has become the norm. I've experienced similar myself and heard anecdotal similarities from friends and family. My next mobile will likely be a PinePhone, and my next laptop will be from System76. I'd rather roll my own private ecosystem anyway, as I don't do anything in the "cloud". Between teaching my children on the Raspberry Pi and mucking about with this and that, it's far less expensive and more sane to stay out of anyone's ecosystem. I get that for a lot of people, it's all about the apps. I guess I'm one of those odd, rare people who don't use a single app. I just can't be bothered and I see no value in giving up what little privacy I have remaining.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have a iPhone 5s that I only replaced because of battery issues. It's been sitting in my drawer for a couple of years and thought it would be good to hand off to one of the kids as a mp3 player or something. When Apple was running a deal on battery replacements I sent it in for that. I got a call saying that it has water damage and the main board was inoperable. I could have it repaired for $600 or they could recycle it for me for $25. Sending it back to me was not an option. It took 2 escalations to get someone who could authorize returning it as I was unwilling to pay for either of those options. It's now back in my desk.

</comment><comment><USER45> This reminds me of the old mechanic's trick of providing an overinflated quote to do work that they didn't really want to do.

<comment><USER46> They they should allow someone else to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Had similar experience with Apple watch. For a broken screen replacement, they quoted more than the cost of a new Apple watch (same model and color). I pointed it out and called it ridiculous. They kept repeating the same bullshit with forwarding me to 3 different teams for 1.5 hours. Finally I got fed up and ended the call.

</comment><comment> plow-tycoon Thought I'd add here that all the values are in CAD, and that the one comment missing from the official transcript is where the rep states that the computer is out of bounds of the repair program window. It's an odd ommision, but that's how it was downloaded.

</comment><comment><USER48> There are literally hundreds of repair shops that cropped up the last few years. Problem is you never know if the shop is actually good. Apple guarantees quality- at an absurd price.

Lesson: treat your expensive electronics well. Or be like my brother with a permanent cracked screen on his iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER49> Apple claims on privacy is a joke, they only use that angle when it suits them and especially to get one up up on Google.

Apple fan boys are very vocal and therfore help amplify the "Apple and Privacy" message way more than it is in reality.

</comment><comment><USER50> the url should be: [https://luketully.ca/macbook-screen-replacement-costs-as- muc...](https://luketully.ca/macbook-screen-replacement-costs-as-much-as-a- brand-new-model/)

<comment><USER51> We changed to that from [https://web.archive.org/web/20200914113323/https://luketully...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200914113323/https://luketully.ca/macbook- screen-replacement-costs-as-much-as-a-brand-new-model/). Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> At this point it's as if Apple is begging to be regulated. Absolutely disgraceful. To be clear my issue is not with the price of the repair but with the lack of alternatives due to Apple's replacement part policy. I'm pretty sure if the EU were to regulate them they'd still enforce their customer hostile policies onTo their other markets.

<comment><USER53> What Apple is doing isn't different from what manufacturers have been doing for centuries. Expensive repairs and parts have always been a way to earn more money at the expense of the consumer. I'm not saying their behavior is acceptable, just that it's very unlikely that laws are a solution to this problem.

<comment><USER52> I think the issue is that faulty hardware isn't actually that common. I have more than 20 Apple devices in my family circle without any issue. But if there were to e failure it would going to be costly and strenuous to repair. So I don't think customer choice will solve this issue. We need lawmakers to protect the few unlucky ones from these customer hostile practices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> You should be able to request refund. Call AppleCare.

</comment><comment><USER55> A colleague of mine recently got a MacBook Pro, whenever they plug in an external monitor the fans are pretty much fully on when doing not much at all.

They now loathe using it. These computers are so expensive. They seem to have a ton of issues with ridiculous repair costs.

What's going on? The keyboard issue from before is another example. Clearly they have the profit margin to ensure their products work well. And not charge unreasonable prices for repair.

<comment><USER56> Something is wrong with your colleague's machine, or something else in his toolchain, because that's not normal.

The keyboard issues were really jarring precisely because Apple had, up to that point, a really great reliability reputation - in my experience, on par with the super-overengineered late-90s ThinkPads (IBM, not Lenovo).

I retired several PowerBooks and MacBooks at 6 or 7 years old that were still physically _fine_ , but no longer appealing to use for Moore's Law reasons.

My wife's using my old 6 year old 13" Pro, and while I now find the keyboard weird, it's utterly capable of anything she needs to do with it -- which is pretty much a regular human duty cycle (ie, she's not running virtual servers on it like I was in its initial life).

We then passed on the small Air she'd been using for like 8 years; it's in daily use at a friend's house now as a spare platform (which turned out to be a big deal, given quarantine). My guess is that Intel Macs are about to hit a gate with the shift to ARM, and you won't be able to get 8 years out of one purchased in 2020, but I could be wrong about that. (I mean, I definitely am if you have relatively simple needs -- even if you get stuck at the last rev of Intel-friendly OS X, there's software for you there that will keep working.)

<comment><USER57> Actually, loud fans are a regular occurrence when using external displays with current high-end 15" MacBook Pros. It gets hot fast, especially when driving a 4K display and charging at the same time. The 13" MacBook Pro on the other hand is basically silent in most circumstances.

<comment><USER56> I have a high-end current 15" Pro, use a high-def monitor, and do not have this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've also recently had some issues with Apple chat and phone support. Seems like some of them are poorly trained.

</comment><comment><USER59> "Greed is good!" #sarcasm

Now serious... first company with $2T valuation. Investors should be satisfied somehow.

I'm long time Apple user and fan. But their latest products are went to other direction are too fragile. Previous generations was undying!

</comment><comment><USER60> Be careful.

If you have "infinite" prices in your mind (e.g. a Mac is always better than a Dell) a rational Apple is going to soak you for all your are worth and try to get you go into debt too.

</comment><comment><USER61> There are two completely separate issues here, and they need to be disentangled to have a productive discussion.

First, there is the question of the right-to-repair and to what extent Apple is hostile to the existence of a viable second-party and third-party repair ecosystem, neutral to it, or actively supports it.

Second, there is the question of the relationship between the costs of the product and the costs of the things needed to repair the product, like replacement screens.

The two are not entirely orthogonal, because many strategies for reducing the costs of the product or increasing the utility of a working product have consequences with respect to the costs of components and the ease of third- party repair.

An example discussed on HN many times is the choice between user-removable batteries and building a battery in. When it's built-in, engineers have more options for miniaturization or increasing battery size and product life. The consequence, of course, is that batteries are now expensive to replace, and the batteries themselves are harder to get in a third-party ecosystem because there is little standardization: Every device might have a different battery optimized for that device.

If batteries were standard sizes as they are for many consumer devices with removable batteries, engineers have less flexibility to increase battery life, reduce weight, or reduce device size.

The same reasoning extends to replacing screens and keyboards. Supporting a vibrant and viable third-party ecosystem means making engineering compromises that have a distinct effect on the product's price and competitiveness in a world where every review discusses device weight, size, battery life, &tc.

The very best thing for a third-party repair ecosystem is to have fewer device-specific parts, fewer proprietary connectors, fewer components hard- wired into place, fewer components that change from device version to device version, &c.

The more different parts there are, the more that are introduced for a model or two and then discontinued, the harder it is for the viability of a third- party ecosystem with affordable options.

I feel that there's a deep and challenging tension between repairability and the immediate, out-of-the-box product value. In some industries, consumers value the ability to wrench their own product higher than in others. In bicycles, for example, there is a great deal of conservatism around engineering.

For all the bragging about new technology, the bicycle industry doesn't really advance very quickly. What do we have now, twelve-speed rear clusters? Whereas when I raced in the 80s, there were seven speeds back there. Whup-dee-doo, where are the internal gearboxes? And the other big innovations are disc brakes and electronic shifting? Compared to the advances in telephones, this is nearly nothing. When I had a mechanical seven-speed rear mech, I also had a physical phone hard-wired into my car. That was "mobile communications" back then.

I'm not defending Apple, it's up to everyone to decide for themselves which choices they think Apple should make. But we should accept that any choice for making things repairable has an impact on the out-of-the-box value of the device itself.

And if we want right-to-repair to be a viable and profitable business choice, something has to change about the marketplace itself, namely:

1\. Get consumers to repair their devices far more often than they replace them, and;

2\. Regulation.

I prefer regulation, personally. Yes, it's the bogeyman of "regulated marketplaces." But it also creates a level playing field, so that repairable devices do not have to suffer product reviews complaining about their price, weight, size, lack of differentiation from other devices sharing common standards, &c.

</comment><comment><USER62> Well, dont buy apple...

<comment><USER63> I agree, but if you are a fortune 500 company, you don't quite get to say "no".

You need to provide it to users anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> No one know why this is in the webarchive? Solved? Or...

</comment><comment><USER65> I wonder if we should be surprised at this. Modern devices (phones and laptops) are designed to be small and cheap to produce in bulk in countries with cheap labour.

Very few people will buy a more expensive, larger device that might be easier to repair or extend in a few years time.

Doing bespoke repairs in high labour cost countries is always expensive. More so when devices are small. It's probably cheaper to get a lower skilled worker to replace the whole board than a higher skilled worker to fix a board involving soldering that could cause further issues. Do we really think that it's going to be cost effective to take apart and fix airpods?

If you want something that is more easily repairable, extendable, and recyclable then a desktop/tower is the answer.

<comment><USER66> That a repair of a modern device can be expensive is one thing, but here they charged more than the machines worth for the replacement part. That is just silly. The quoted labor costs were 150, which is still a lot but reasonable. But more than a few hundreds for a new screen sounds off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I don't see a problem with this. Lunar retro reflector is $1000 part but replacing it would cost the same as new lunar mission.

Macbooks are made in factories mostly by robots in large volume. Replacing part requires hard specialized manual labor and doesn't scale.

Thirdly, they are only asking for what people are willing to pay. My latest computer cost €205.

<comment><USER68> Except if you actually read the transcript and article, most of the cost is billed as parts, not labor.</comment></comment>


Line2 / Toktumi signin broken due to expired ssl certificate - <AUTHOR>

The Toktumi Line2 desktop app cannot authenticate due to "The certificate expired on 11/30/12 2:38 PM." for www.toktumi.com<p>Seems like the sort of thing a service with that many users would keep on top of. <comment><USER2> How did you solve this issue. I am experiencing the same thing now with both IE and Chrome. I can use the Toktumi client on my PC and the Line2 app on my iphone but can't use a browser to access any of the online functions due to the cert issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Peter Sisson here from Line2 - I cannot replicate your problem, but I'll certainly have our ops team take a look right away.</comment>


The $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE - <AUTHOR> http://qualcommtricorderxprize.org/

<comment><USER2> This sounds interesting at first (I thought they must have some hardware kit for you), but I'm thinking 10 million isn't very much money for a 'tricorder' independently developed. If they were offering up some new qualcomm sensors or whatever, ok, but this just sounds like wishful thinking.

Probably be better if they did a Tricorder YC and gave a bunch of different teams a few thousand bucks to try and develop pieces of technology for something like this. Just a heartrate monitor for a phone would be amazing, and I mean one you could just point at someone, not a separate device. Extra wires just wouldn't make it a tricorder imho ;)</comment>


March 2010 Browser Market Share Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.favbrowser.com/march-2010-firefox-chrome-opera-safari-share-goes-up-ie-down/

<comment><USER2> Seems like Chrome is hurting IE more than Firefox, which is good news for everyone I think.

I think it's misleading to lump IE6 together with IE7 & 8 as they're used by different people for different reasons. And Firefox 3.6 looks well on it's way to being the most used browser version (a previous Firefox held this title briefly at the turn of the year, before they released the newer version).

</comment><comment><USER3> Not very helpful without it's counterpart chart which shows browser versions:

[http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qp...](http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=3)

IE6 continues it's downward decline, but it's still sad to see it at ~18%</comment>


Cancel Billionaires - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/cancel-billionaires/599587/ <comment><USER2> I disagree with this article. Without Billionaires, we wouldn't have the power of a computer faster than an entire desktop PC from a decade ago, at a price that almost anyone can afford, in our phones.

Sure there might be wealth inequality, but everyone's wages are increasing. Even Amazon is now paying the majority of their factory workers over $15/hour.

If we take away money from billionaires and distribute it through the government, it will be a disservice to humanity.

The government is just not nearly as efficient at creating jobs, new technology, or things like life-saving drugs.</comment>


Is Klarna the new PayPal? - T-A http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/16/technology/mobile/klarna-sequoia-michael-moritz/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Klarna is heavily into Erlang, btw:

[https://klarna.com/jobs/engineering- product](https://klarna.com/jobs/engineering-product)

 _Every day, thousands of merchants and customers use Klarna's services. The task of making it all work is far from easy. Our system is built in Erlang and handles real-time transactions 24 /7, with no downtime for upgrades._</comment>


Gizmodo Unveiled [2002] - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20021010115538/www.nickdenton.org/archives/2002_08_01_archive.htm#85344422 <comment><AUTHOR> "Most importantly, this is a low-risk commercial experiment. Most media companies suffer from overblown editorial, an ad sales force with padded expense accounts, and overly complex publishing systems with a team of primadonna sysadmins to maintain it. By contrast, Gizmodo will be a couple of hours a day of Pete's link-picking skills, some automatically generated Amazon.com links, and $150-worth of Movable Type. Media has never before been this lean."

Beautiful...</comment>


Why Microsoft will fail to do anything significant with Powerset - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/18/next-years-headline-microsoft-fails-to-do-anything-significant-with-powerset/

<comment><USER2> I am thoroughly convinced Microsoft will botch up this acquisition, but that's only because it's usually a safe bet that Microsoft will botch up anything internet related. They just don't get it.

This article is based largely on the assumption that priority number one will be to port everything to Windows and I think this is an absurd assumption to make.

Are we to believe that Microsoft is willing to risk throwing away $100M+ in order to migrate this thing to Windows?

Don't forget that Microsoft ran Hotmail on Unix for years. I imagine by the time they got around to porting it to Windows they were about ready for an upgrade anyway. (Plus, Windows was finally getting to the point where a project like that could even be considered.)

My guess is the meat of this deal was about bringing in some new IP and some bright engineers- not about running some search engine that almost no one has heard of. In that case, the platform it runs on is largely irrelevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference between Hotmail and Powerset is Microsoft has said that they will have some sort of integration with Live search by the end of the year.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/02/interview-with- barney-p...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/02/interview-with-barney-pell- and-ramez-naam-about-microsoft%E2%80%99s-powerset-acquisition-integration-to- begin-this-year/)

Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about but having half of Live search running off Windows search and the remaining part being handled by Powerset's unix boxes sounds silly. Or at least I will think I am seeing pigs fly if it every happens.

<comment><USER2> I did see that Microsoft had said they will have some sort of integration by the end of the year, but that doesn't necessarily imply that they will need to port the Unix stuff to Windows. Maybe a mix of Live Search on Windows and Powerset on Unix sounds silly to some, but you could also make the argument that dumping a bunch of time and money into porting a working application after a $100M acquisition is silly.

The article you linked to mentions that only 5% of searches contain natural language elements. This integration they talk about could be as simple as identifying these searches and passing them off to the Powerset stuff in the background.

I don't doubt that Microsoft will eventually want to port everything to Windows, but I think it's a false assumption that this is going to be a top priority. They've made repeated statements about their desire to see this put to use quickly and speculation about a lengthy and complicated port seems to directly contradict that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do BIPOC and/or non-male employees look for at potential employers - <AUTHOR> Curious if there are things BIPOC and/or non-males look for at potential employers to help them gauge how equitable they are? <comment><USER2> A job offer. Seriously.

More verbosely, if no one's willing to hire BIPOC or women in the first place, then how can one ever expect to find experienced BIPOC/women devs in the candidate pool? And while that experience Catch-22 is generalizable to White/male/Asian devs, the lack of diversity in tech spaces speaks for itself in terms of implicit hiring bias. I, myself, have had spotty employment, absurdly hostile bosses and coworkers who have forced me out of otherwise technically interesting jobs, and have been unemployed since the pandemic started. After such a rocky start, I'm not sure that I will be able to secure another job in this field. (And sorry for the bitter tone here, but repeatedly getting my work evaluated on the basis of who I am, and how it must therefore be wrong, rather than on the content of the work itself gets very frustrating very quickly.)

<comment><USER3> Are you sure the lack of diversity is all hiring bias? I also noticed a lack of diversity in undergrad and in some demographics for graduate school. It would make sense that if the requisite degree programs are lacking the diversity, then the candidate pool and workforce will be lacking too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I look to find my "Power Rangers" team.

When I enter the room I expect to see all colors, genders, moods and fashion of people on the room.

Then I Shout and we all transform in a big Robot and crush bugs and conquer defect land.

If that fails..

As a latino having tacos nearby is good too or Coke with real sugar.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is an overwhelmingly male space and the culture here skews heavily "White upper class American male" in spite of being highly multicultural and international in membership. You aren't likely to get much in the way of good answers here because it doesn't feel like a very welcoming space for the types of people you are hoping to get answers from.

If you really want to know, there are some good things happening on Twitter in discussing such things, if you can find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the thoughtful and honest response. I've seen some great discussion on Twitter. Hopefully HN picks up on some of these discussions and can become a more welcoming space for dialogue from those with different backgrounds and perspectives

<comment><USER5> HN has its good points. This is just not the best place to try to get this kind of information, for a variety of reasons.

I wasn't actually trying to be negative. Just informative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bipoc?

<comment><USER7> People who aren't whites or asians.

<comment><USER8> The POC in BIPOC includes Asians, even if in the context of the tech industry East and South Asians aren't underrepresented groups.</comment></comment></comment>


Tracking down my strange program killer - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/chrisparnin/status/1229927063295057920 <comment><USER2> I wonder how many widely used github projects rely on cryptic "random small packages from a pull request" that possibly introduce backdoors.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that when you try to not do so, there's a bunch who comes at you with knifes at your throat: "it's not our job to code and maintain this".

Even something which would require 5 lines of code, they would install a package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who have been living under a rock in the past few years, relying on a maze of dependencies has led to issues before:

* The event stream incident ([https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/26/npm_repo_bitcoin_st...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/26/npm_repo_bitcoin_stealer/)), where are a very popular npm repo was maintained by someone who didn't want to do it anymore and handed the keys to the package (both on github and npm) to the first person who mailed with an offer to take over. That person proceeded to put in some bitcoin wallet stealing code. In a very creative way - if you haven't heard of it, I recommend reading a little more, it's an interesting story.

* The leftPad debacle ([https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/)), where a one-liner repo was removed from npm by its author, breaking almost all node.js projects. The solution feels... insufficient (you can now no longer just delete your project).

* This pull request to remove a one-liner dep: ([https://github.com/moxystudio/node-cross-spawn/pull/102](https://github.com/moxystudio/node-cross-spawn/pull/102)) shows exactly what happens when you try to fix such problems by removing one-liner deps.

There's a fundamental misalignment at work here: An open source maintainer thinks (and probably rightly so), that they don't owe you a thing, if they prefer keeping a one-liner dep, that's their prerogative, and it's not their job to ensure their library is secure. If it is easier for you (the user of a library) to ascertain safety if the one-liner dep is removed, that's nice but the maintainer of the library doesn't care about that.

And at the same time, users of open source libraries, possibly buoyed by statements such as Linus's Law ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law)): "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" generally do think they can rely on the maintainer for security.

Which one is it? We can't have it both ways.

You'd think in a language where monkey patching is somewhat common, such concerns would be _more_ important, and yet it is npm where the community as a whole is by far the most extremist in the sense of adopting dependencies, compared to other ecosystems such as java (mavencentral) or ruby (rubygems).

</comment><comment><USER5> Surprise: "small random package" caused an issue in a Node project, and "replacing [it] with simple init logic" solved the problem.</comment>


Curvilux, the first smart nightstand - <AUTHOR> http://www.curvilux.com <comment><AUTHOR> Curvilux, a connected nightstand radically changing the way you interact with your furniture. Is a modern, minimalist and connected nightstand that will take your home and lifestyle to a whole new level. Keep your devices organized and fully charged, secure your personal items, wake up every morning with a sunrise perfectly synchronized to your sleeping cycles and more!

</comment><comment> leonfhl-co Great concept and awesome product, worth backing!</comment>


Elixir obsoletes Ruby, Erlang and Clojure in one go - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@qertoip/elixir-obsoletes-ruby-erlang-and-clojure-in-one-go-605329b7b9b4#.l8ykiv2va <comment><USER2> Not an Elixir user. I have investigated previously. Decided on Golang. But I have to reconsider Elixir for some cases.</comment>


Skute app: The underground social network that's bringing city streets to life - <AUTHOR> http://www.thememo.com/2016/04/21/skute-app-skute-founder-dan-lewis-physical-social-network-social-media/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. So is the content stored in the tag? Is there more privacy, in the sense that the tag shares the content rather than a username? I wish they had these details.</comment>


Kubernetes 1.2 release is out - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/releases/tag/v1.2.0 <comment><USER2> A link to a page with some information might be interesting, but this essentially is only a link to downloads and the words "Release notes coming..."</comment>


Middleware, Composition, and Monads - <AUTHOR> http://nickelcode.com/2010/07/22/middleware-composition-and-monads/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately I haven't gotten far enough in Real-World Haskell to have fully understood the parts about Monads but as I've been learning the language, I'd often wondered how common it was to use functional languages for pipeline processes like middleware. Seems like a great fit.</comment>


SSD with New HSDL Interface Boasts Gobs of Bandwidth - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/Reviews/OCZ-IBIS-HSDL-Solid-State-Drive-Preview/

<comment><USER2> The single port version is akin to a dedicated RAID card with 4 Sandforce-1200 SSDs.

The main benefit of this connection is the 4 port version in a single PCI Express x16 2.0 slot. Anandtech predicts it might reach 2.5GB/s

Hopefully, if this takes off OEMs can drop the internal SATA RAID going on inside the device for even further gains.

EDIT: also very encouraging is the internal garbage collection that goes on when the disk is idle. Trim does not work on RAID and it is great to see performance can still be regained after prolonged use.

</comment><comment><USER3> SSD technology is a game changer for data centers. Traditional hard drives generate loads of heat and being able to outfit a whole data center with them reduces cooling significantly which directly affects the bottom line (cooling is the #1 expense for the vast majority of data centers).

Now I'm just waiting for our broadband to inch up to 740MB/sec :)

<comment><USER4> Acutally this SSD in particular consumes about as much power as a 10k RPM Raptor desktop drive when active ([http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard- dri...](http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive- charts/Power-Requirement-Video,1026.html)), although having served requests quickly it can then go back to its idle state much faster.

In terms of online gigabytes per watt, SSDs will lose out badly to traditional hard drives. IOPS per watt, of course, is a whole different story, and hard drive IO bottlenecked servers will run potentially an order of magnitude faster.

So rather than outfitting whole datacenters with them, both technologies will live side by side for quite a few years to come. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if spinning rust lives on longer in data centers than mainstream PCs and laptops.

<comment><USER5>
      >In terms of online gigabytes per watt, SSDs will
      >lose out badly to traditional hard drives.

Incorrect. You forgot time. Think about it this way (with very rough numbers); The traditional Raptor drive will move data at 70 MiByte/s. These new SSD's move data 700 MiByte/s. Assuming that they both consume equivalent power, this new SSD will have a gigabyte-per-watt rating TEN TIMES BETTER than traditional drives.

<comment><USER6> I think the parent poster is talking about the amount of storage, not the rate of transfer. And in that metric, seeing how you can get 1TB hard drives for $70, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Of course, it seems wasteful to need insanely fast access to things like movies or media/archival data in your home library.

<comment><USER5> If even if reitzensteinm was talking about capacity-per-watt, he's still wrong. The specific drive he mentioned was the "Raptor" model but that's an old, slow, small (150G) and power hungry (9.5W) disk. The newer WD "VelociRaptor" 10K RPM disk is more likely what he meant, and is a more fair comparison. The new Velociraptor only has a 600 GB capacity. The highest capacity OCD IBIS drive is 960 GB.

<http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=821> [http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid-state- drives/hsd...](http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid-state- drives/hsdl.html)

OCD IBIS Power: 6.6 Watts Idle 9.5 Watts Active

WD VelociRaptor Power: 4.30 Watts Idle 6.20 Watts Active

Now we do the math. A total of 9600 GB would be 10 OCD disk or 16 VelociRaptor disk.

16 x 6.20 = 99.2 --WD VelociRaptor

10 x 9.5 = 95 --OCD IBIS

Similar is true for idle.

If we were not limited to VelociRaptor, when you get into some of the very slow but very huge disks (1-2 TB), sure, you could beat the rather specific OCD IBIS models on Capacity-Per-Watt. But it is very unfair to open only one side of the rotating vs. ssd comparison to every disk made, and there are higher capacity SSD's with even better power consumption numbers than the OCD IBIS.

As you noted, the metric of Cost-Per-Capacity is often 10 or more times more favorable for rotating disks. If you don't have a valid _need_ for the speed offered by SSDs, they are certainly not worth the added costs.

<comment><USER4> I honestly don't think we'd disagree on much if we sat down over a beer and discusse the issue. I'm as excited about SSDs as you are, and it seems that, from your above post at least, you agree that speed is the primary driver in SSD adoption right now.

It was not my intent to be argumentative - I just read your post and thought, power consumption as a benefit, are you sure you've done the math on this?

By the way, I couldn't find any 2 TB drives that were not PCI-X, so I do stand by my original analysis. With 1 TB SSDs, you'll still need 2x the servers. If you can piece together an SSD solution, ignoring cost, and including server wattage that can beat out an array of 2 TB drives on wattage, I will retract my original statement. You can use the idle power as the active power for the drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is it better to have the RAID controller integrated on the disk instead of connecting several (cheaper) disks separately and use motherboards or software RAID

<comment><USER8> Faster throughput due to less busses to pass through. It likely also has something to do with why it appears to be so fast, using the RAID to spread the load across multiple groups of Flash chips.

In addition by using the SI3124 chip I think this thing will 'Just Work(tm)' with recent Linux kernels -- its the same chipset in the SATA card I use for SW RAID. I'd be happy to test my theory if someone would send me a drive ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why not give them a window right into memory (ala himem or EMM) and then SSD can also have "execute in place" ability someday when they are fast enough.

<comment><USER10> Intel's looking at doing this, with an interface from the southbridge and probably soon from the CPU itself. I think eventually for low-end PCs and netbooks, CPUs will just have big L3 (DRAM) caches, and flash behind that, and no system DRAM at all.

<comment><USER11> If they can get the power of the CPU down low enough, they could probably bolt on a DRAM layer, right on top of the CPU die, and connect them with through- silicon vias. Your L3 cache could have the same die size as the CPU, and the connection to the CPU could be very fast, both in bandwidth and in latency.

Actually, these "low-end PCs and netbooks" are sounding like speed demons, the more I think about them.

<comment><USER10> On-die DRAM cache is a solved problem (though IBM probably owns the patent). DRAM itself is not that power intensive that it would present a problem for the CPU TDP.

<comment><USER11> I checked, and apparently they've now invented on-die DRAM that doesn't require extra processing steps. Nice! Die stacking would still have advantages in reducing wire delay (thus reducing the L2 miss penalty) and increasing the yield.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is utterly bonkers. I badly want one.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 240GB model offers up to 740MB/sec max read throughput and 720MB/sec maximum write throughput. Of course, blazing fast SSD technology like this also comes at a premium, as you'd expect.

<comment><USER13> For some perspective:

        cat /dev/sda | pv > /dev/null

Reads 188MB/s on my new Thinkpad's Samsung SSD

<comment><USER14> cat'ing and piping into pv is a poor way to benchmark as the CPU overhead is too high (the buffer size for a pipe kernel object is 4kB, forcing a high number of context switches). Try "dd bs=32k </dev/sda >/dev/zero" and monitor with "iostat -m 1", you will see a higher throughput.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the tip!

<comment><USER15> what was your result?

<comment><USER13> The same - my CPU was about only about 50% saturated on the pv command (if the disk was twice as fast, I guess the CPU would become the bottleneck)

<comment><USER14> So your SSD is slow-ish... FYI most achieve ~280MB/s these days (which is the practical bottleneck of a SATA 300MB/s link).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good book recommendations? - <AUTHOR> Can be technical or non-technical. Looking for a few things to read while taking some time off. <comment><USER2> I've recently finished _Ready Player One_ by Ernest Cline which is an enjoyably nostalgic novel based on computer games and 80s trivia.</comment>


Physicists Demonstrate How Time Can Seem To Run Backward - <AUTHOR> http://secondnexus.com/technology-and-innovation/physicists-demonstrate-how-time-can-seem-to-run-backward-and-the-future-can-affect-the-past/

<comment><USER2> Ah, the headlines.

"Time moves forward; things exist in only one place at a time;"

I am not a physicist, so I'd like to ask one: Does it even make sense for time to 'move'? I don't know, but I imagined time to be some kind of - for us invisible - expansion of space (or... spacetime).

<comment><USER3> It's more of a philosophy question, or metaphysics, asking where time does objectively exist firstly and secondly, what it is. In physics we define it to be something convenient which works for our models. Within these models time can move forward and backward.

We may not even have a strict definition of time, and have to rely on our intuition. For example there's no way to define what reality is.

My grandpa contends that time is just that which we ascribe to motion in space, and if there were no motion, there would be no time.

<comment><USER2> That already explains a lot, thank you very much! I've read so many different definitions of time in physics - that was very confusing.

What your grandpa contends is exactly what I thought, too. I love the simplicity of that thought. But after reading about the relativity of time, I noticed that something must be missing. That's why I tried to imagine that space expansion I mentioned. In the end, it doesn't really make sense, but again the simplicity and thus the ease of imagining it is beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this differ from the delayed-choice quantum eraser ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser)), which also seems to exhibit this sort of paradoxical behaviour of "later choices affect earlier events"?</comment>


Show HN: Material Kit – Open Source UI for Bootstrap, React, Vuejs, React Native - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/creativetimofficial/material-kit <comment><USER2> I'm an enthusiast of early 20th century architecture schools like Art Deco, Prairie Style, Streamline Moderne, and Danish Modern (for furniture & housewares) because the clean lines and geometric shapes can function as a design philosophy in a variety of areas.

And obviously, web aesthetics like Material Design already reflect the ideas of Bauhaus and other schools.

But has anyone tried to replicate the "feel" of specific architectural approaches in their web design? For example, how would Frank Lloyd Wright design a website? Is it possible to incorporate more organic approaches like Art Nouveau without producing too much distracting visual clutter?

Put another way, what architectural/design movements could provide inspiration for the next evolution of web design?

And as further food for thought, wouldn't widespread use of AR/VR would serve to strengthen the link between architecture and human-computer interaction? Your personal computing environment could become an actual space - in the architectural sense - in which to do work. The first thing I'm going to do, of course, is replicate the Johnson Wax Factory's Great Workroom.

[https://goo.gl/PF665e](https://goo.gl/PF665e)

<comment><USER3> Architectural movements such as Brutalism are already making their way into web design - not in a good way, imho.

They're distractions.

Web-design in my view should follow Swiss layout and typography which is widely considered to be the most objective, neutral, clear and universal theory of graphic design. Some parts of Swiss layout already permeate in everything we do - Grid system(Brockmann et al) for example. Or Helvetica and Univers in typography (Frutiger et al).

Everything else is decoration. Obviously, if you build a website for a music band, then all bets are off. My view is about common web design.

<comment><USER2> Decoration exists on a continuum, and I don't think it's bad as long as it's not overdone - which is a subjective judgment call, of course.

Decoration exists for comfort, beauty, and usability. I particularly like this fantastic essay that explains the rationale for decoration in architecture, and how the current design preferences for stark simplicity came to be.

[https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate- contempo...](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary- architecture)

An excerpt: 'A few obvious stylistic changes characterize postwar architecture. For one, what is (now somewhat derisively) called "ornament" disappeared. At the dawn of the 20th century, American architect Louis Sullivan proclaimed the famous maxim that "form follows function." Even though Sullivan's own buildings were often highly ornate, adorned with elaborate Art Nouveau ironwork and Celtic-inspired masonry, "form follows function" was instantly misinterpreted as a call for stark utilitarian simplicity. A few years later, architect and theorist Adolph Loos, in a 1908 essay called "Ornament and Crime," dramatically declared that a lack of ornamentation was a "sign of spiritual strength." These two ideas quickly became dogmas of the architectural profession. A generation of architects with both socialistic and fascistic political leanings saw ornament as a sign of bourgeois decadence and cultural indulgence, and began discarding every design element that could be considered "mere decoration."'

<comment><USER3> I didn't claim Decoration and creativity is bad and said that when it's required for cultural, aesthetic or media appeal then it makes sense, for example a music band website.

But a web framework should adopt the most neutral stance and designers can modify as they see fit. In other words, decorative frameworks as proposed by the OP that are based on an Architectural movement are not appropriate for majority of the webpages on the internet. They distract. _Decoration_ distracts. Doesn't mean it has no place in society.

Also, Dieter Rams proved that design can be un-decorated, yet inviting, comfortable and human centric. As a direct legacy to Rams, just look at the success of Apple and it's stance on design. Personally, I argue that Decoration is shallow and doesn't solve the fundamental goal in design : to make products and services that interface with humans easy to interact, understand and use. Instead Decoration distracts, deludes and creates confusion. It steals clarity and intent in design. In some cases, Decoration is not honest. Can you imagine Casinos built by Tadao Ando?

<comment><USER4> > _Decoration distracts._

This is the principle that lead to the abhorrent and unusable flat design. Sometimes, lack of decoration distracts. Because it is this "decoration" that makes things look familiar. Without the decoration people have to stop and think and figure out things.

iOS 6 and below is an example of decoration making things more familiar and intuitive. As Steve Jobs designed it, the world inside the iPad screen was a seamless extension of the world outside the screen. When you went inside the iPad, everything looked familiar. But now we have a hard boundary at the device, and different rules apply inside that boundary. You have to learn and memorize new rules because the outside rules that you are already familiar with are of no help inside the screen.

<comment><USER3> I think you're confusing skeumorphism with decoration. Decoration is adding elements to design for the sake of aesthetic ornamentation. For example, Geocities websites had all kinds of blink tags and fireworks going on inside a webpage. That is decoration.

A save button icon that looks like a floppy disk is not decoration. It is a use of skeumorphic semiotics that takes advantage of historic familiarity - which is what you're referring to. I agree with you that it has its place in design. The original discussion of this thread is whether we should _decorate_ websites with architectural motifs whether it is art-deco or brutalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still don't understand what's so good about Material Design, I absolutely hate it.

But props for the effort.

<comment><USER6> Materials Scientist/Engineer who also codes here:

1\. I highly dislike material design as a programmer and as a consumer.

2\. Google and others using "Material Design", Polymer, etc is really annoying and can be confusing until the context is clear. It makes searching about EITHER physical material design or coding material design a painful experience.

I was searching for job openings around the SF Bay Area and the fact that they've made stuff like this and "product design engineer" very hard to filter through between hardware and software is just nonsense.

There's a reason we define specific words and terms for specific fields and it's totally understandable that different fields would accidentally mess this up before we had the internet and global connectivity. However, now we have no excuse to not make things clear and distinct. When I say "Polymer" you should thing "long noodly chain of repeating units, aka many mers" not "a web component library."

When I search for "materials design/er" I should NOT see something programming related unless it's computational materials design software (simulation, analysis, etc).

Still, barring the complete confusion created by this stuff, I don't like Materials Design. It's ugly and needs to go away. Amp can do that too. We need to keep Amp about current.

<comment><USER7> > When I say "Polymer" you should thing "long noodly chain of repeating units, > aka many mers" not "a web component library."

I'm sort of with you on some of your complaints (e.g. job titles), but this one doesn't stand. Do you want to ensure when we talk about amazon that we're talking about a river? That when we talk about googol we're talking about 10^100? Words are frequently reappropriated for company and product names, and that's fine.

<comment><USER8> TBH yes. I wish search engines had an "exclude branding" modifier to search terms. Too many products appropriate too many terms from other domains these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, the UI kit comes also in Figma, Sketch, Photoshop and Wordpress, you can check more about it here: [https://demos.creative-tim.com/material- kit/presentation.htm...](https://demos.creative-tim.com/material- kit/presentation.html)

You can use it for commercial or open source applications as it is released under MIT License.

If you have feedback please let us know.

<comment><USER9> This is an amazingly comprehensive project. What about your architecture lets your support so many frameworks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love that people make and share things, and I hate to pour water on announcements. I admire the effort that went into this.

That said, it makes me sad to see more fragmentation in the Material space. When Material launched, it was a set of design guidelines. A bunch of open source teams (like Material UI) stepped up and put together libraries that implemented those guidelines for specific view frameworks. This project looks like one of those efforts.

Since then, the Material Components for the Web project has formed. It's staffed by Google engineers who collaborate with the designers who write the Material Guidelines. They faithfully implement the Guidelines and makes updates as necessary to keep pace with design changes. The project is designed to be wrapped by other libraries to work with specific view frameworks.

I'd hope that any Material library for the web that's put together in 2019 would leverage that work. It will more faithfully follow the guidelines and be easier to maintain over time, because there's already a team of people responsible for maintaining the underlying framework.

If you haven't already, take a look at Material Components for the Web. You might have a better time if you back Material Kit with it.

[https://github.com/material-components/material- components-w...](https://github.com/material-components/material-components- web)

</comment><comment><USER11> A little off-topic, but I'm learning CSS and this seems like as good a place as any to ask: What are the alternatives to material design (which I think I understand is a certain aesthetic that incorporates shadows and textures)? Is flat design the only main alternative in modern web design, or are there others?

Secondly, the online course I am doing is using fluid grid but I understand that flexbox is another option. Am I better off focusing on one or the other? Thanks.

<comment><USER12> There are others like the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) from Apple. The ones that are in the open are more like full design systems meant for internal use and prestige. You can find a list of systems on this page: [https://adele.uxpin.com](https://adele.uxpin.com)

To use shadows for the z-index and layers is quite common these days though, many systems use them. Flat could be just a step after "inset" and before "raised" within a system like that, something you use for normal backgrounds and stuff that are part of the background.

The most basic element in a design system is essentially just an empty frame/box that could hold a shape and color, and optionally a shadow on a shape. This frame could become anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Using Material design always feels so sluggish. Is it the shadows? Can someone with more CSS knowledge speculate about what's causing the high latency?

<comment><USER14> It's the shadows and the unnecessary animations for every single interaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is yet more div soup judging by the examples in the Repo and the Wordpress theme.

I am struggling to find anything that is using HTML5, CSS Grid, CSS variables and other niceties of evergreen browsers the right way. It is almost as if web development has forked into two paths, one path being div soup bloat and the other being increasingly more complex build tools to arrive at the logical arrival of css in js.

I want the sensible features in modern evergreen browsers without these options of increasing div soup or increasing complexity. We can now have a true separation of content from styling and scripting with design being content first rather than visual mockups and placeholders.

The problem is that to start using the modern good stuff requires unlearning the bullshit that has gone on ever since the browser wars, nobody is giving up on the hacks, the frameworks and the complexity to do it properly with succinct content, succinct styling and straightforward scripts. Everyone is telling themselves they work on a team building products that are far too complex for any chance of going forward to more sensible document markup.

The days of div soup are not over - as exemplified by what we have here - but, once the good stuff has been discovered and the evergreen friendly stuff learned there is no going back to div soup and the working methods that go with it.

<comment><USER14> > It is almost as if web development has forked into two paths, one path being > div soup bloat and the other being increasingly more complex build tools to > arrive at the logical arrival of css in js.

css in js will not save you from div bloat.

Div bloat exists because CSS+HTML are horrendously bad at actual layout. For any sufficiently complex component you'll have div soup, and newer CSS features reduce the bloat only ever so slightly.

> nobody is giving up on the hacks

New frameworks have very few if any hacks leftover from the browser wars. The framework discussed here uses flexbox almost exclusively. It doesn't mean you don't need dozens of other hacks to display anything more complex that text.

> once the good stuff has been discovered and the evergreen friendly stuff > learned there is no going back to div soup and the working methods that go > with it.

Yeah, no. Div soup is here to stay, because it's literally _the only_ foundational layout element of HTML.

<comment><USER15> I think that there is an alternative and the likes of Rachel Andrews are speaking my language when it comes to document structure, no div soup and CSS grid for the layout.

At school or university you have options regarding who you are going to copy to get that assignment done. You can spend hours plagiarising with a lot of work put into rephrasing things slightly so that your work will pass as your own. Or you can spend a lot of time second guessing what everyone else is doing and emulating what you think the solution is. Or you can actually ignore what everyone else is doing and roll your own solution, learning the fundamentals, copying nobody. Then when done you can have a look around and see what you missed in the other ways the problem has been solved. By going original in your thinking you might have missed a trick or two. Or got something wrong. But, with a foundation of original work you can confidently patch up what you have got to be best in class, all defects removed.

I think the web is like that. Sometimes you look for a simple aide-memoire on Stack Overflow where once upon a time all the answers were seemingly brilliant. But then you realise that you have moved on from that, your own code is better, you aren't just copying and imitating, you have this understanding thing going on that is lacking in some of the other answers.

Then there is the hamster wheel of forever having to learn the latest and greatest, that panic and fear of the unknown latest framework. So another round of copying and imitation goes on, the mountain top of confidence and knowledge never reached as there is always another extra thing to add in to the build chain to make it better.

But then you realise you are working on a second rate website to sell hair care products to care bears. And it doesn't need the latest trends in visual design or the convoluted ways of cooking up yet more div soup that nobody is ever going to notice.

I beg to differ on your attitudes towards your staple diet of div soup. Concise, content first actual content is not the same thing as bullshit written by people that can't spell force fed into some content blocks that rightfully should only ever contain the lorem ipsum text the visual mockups demanded of them. It is time people started with the raw manuscript and got the copy right without applying a single style. When this is done styling with CSS grid and lovely HTML5 elements works beautifully. This is no marginal gain in bloat, it is a whole new world of maintainability and awesomeness. If you ain't doing it right you are doing it wrong and some mastery of CSS grid is needed, it ain't just something you sprinkle in div soup like it is a fifty bucks Wordpress theme.

Content is king and there isn't any div soup needed. Maybe a div for holding that Google ReCaptcha button but I am struggling for bona fide instead of lazy ignorant uses thereafter. You have got to get the document structure right, accessible and good for modern CSS.

Of course this falls apart if you need to support 32 bit iPads or that person struggling along with Internet Explorer 6.

<comment><USER14> > content, content, content

Yeah. If by content you mean text and images. And HTML + CSS can hardly handle that.

And here's what I said, and it's true as ever:

> For any sufficiently complex component you'll have div soup

> Div soup is here to stay, because it's literally the only foundational > layout element of HTML.

No amount of grand words about hamster wheels and ad hominem attacks like "people who can't spell" will change the sad reality: the web has moved on beyond simple texts with images, CSS and HTML have not.

Here's an example of a component that puts content first. Developed with modern CSS with no hacks (each css class essentially represents a single CSS property, everything is flexbox etc.): [https://tailwindcss.com/docs/examples/cards](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/examples/cards)

Do enlighten me how you get rid of the div soup. I'm especially interested in the "lovely HTML5 element" called "a card capable of displaying an image and text".

<comment><USER15> Flexbox is old hat, use your favourite search engine to see how easily it is done with CSS Grid - grid not flexbox.

You can nit pick on any example tutorial but do the research and you will find it all works great with CSS grid, you just might have to learn how it works rather than copy and paste.

The class bloat is another problem with div soup, also sometimes you need to put aside the mentality that everything has to be sooo complex, simplicity is hard, anyone can make everything complex and buy into the myth that everything has to be complex.

There is always a better element than 'div', the exception to the rule is where you need something that would have been an 'object', e.g. a Google 'recaptcha' needs a 'div'.

The same goes for 'span', unless you really need to change the colour of the second letter of a word there is always a better way, e.g. psuedo elements.

<comment><USER14> > There is always a better element than 'div'

Please show me a better element for "a card to display an image and text".

It would also be nice if that element used CSS grid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this kit any better than [https://material-ui.com/](https://material- ui.com/) when using React?

<comment><USER17> Sorry to be rude, but simply no. I used both (inherited a Material Kit project and moved it to Material UI), and the quality of MUI is simply astonishing:

1\. Releases are very thoroughly cut 2\. The APIs are very well designed 3\. The result is incredibly professional

<comment><USER18> The React version of this Kit is built on top of MUI so I'm kind of confused about this comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, such negative comments. Nobody cares that you don't like Material Design. /rant

This looks awesome! As a designer and engineer, it's always frustrating when I design something that turns out to be next to impossible to do with the component library we've chosen to use. Having such a comprehensive set of design platforms and web frameworks covered here solves that problem for us. Thank you for building this!

BTW, if you haven't tried Figma, you really should. It's cross platform and even runs perfectly smooth in your browser.

On that note, @axelut - it would be nice if there was a link to _open_ the Figma UI Kit, so I could preview it in browser, rather than having to download it first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback, glad that you see this useful. I agree that Figma is getting better and better, that's why we started to work with it. Please check this link: [https://www.figma.com/file/bvQEB3MNOzDx5KrBWLZmmIre/Material...](https://www.figma.com/file/bvQEB3MNOzDx5KrBWLZmmIre/Material- Kit-Free?node-id=0%3A1) and let me know if it is fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This isn't following the latest Material spec. For example, see the text inputs; they went away with the underlined fields style (for some good reasons). I'd love to see that updated, then I might consider using it.

<comment><USER21> People _could_ just import the individual Material web components, rather than trust any number of 3rd parties to keep their own remake of Material design up to date.

[https://github.com/material-components/material- components-w...](https://github.com/material-components/material-components- web)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I came across the Vuetify dashboard the other day for a side project I'm spinning out ([http://www.sweephq.com](http://www.sweephq.com) \- may or may not open source, haven't decided yet).

There are some fantastic themes/UI components here. Great job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thank you for the kind words and congrats for the product. If you do it open source we can let our users know about it, maybe somebody can use it. We should keep in touch as we are working on some email templates that will also be release under MIT license. Ping me at email@example.com :D

<comment><USER22> The e-mail templates also sound like a logical fit - will certainly drop you an e-mail if I decided to release OSS!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Material Design ain't got that cosy feel to it.

</comment><comment><USER24> On the product pages, what's used to collect, store and display the customer reviews? e.g. [https://www.creative-tim.com/product/vue-material- kit](https://www.creative-tim.com/product/vue-material-kit). Just curious as social proof like this is really useful when you're trying to sell products.

</comment><comment><USER25> So you have to upgrade to Pro to get documentation and SASS sources?

</comment><comment><USER26> Feels really sluggish.

</comment><comment><USER27> This looks really nice, thanks for building it.</comment>