Only Nixon Harmed a Free Press More - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/21/obama-the-media-and-national-security/only-nixon-harmed-a-free-press-more <comment><USER2> The article is biased and, from what I gather from the comments, factually incorrect. However, the comparison with Nixon must be done, because:

a) Nixon and Watergate happened, so it is plausible that Administrations feel the pull towards excessive surveillance and illegal actions. I.e. It happened before so it will happen again.

b) If Watergate happened today, would the Administration get caught? I'd wager a sound "No, it wouldn't". With current powers and control structure, the Watergate objective could be secretly achieved, while controlled by secret courts all the while having any whistle-blower incarcerated under perfectly legal reasons.

Lastly, this is not a Dems vs Republicans issue. Both parties have failed. Bush set the ball rolling while Obama gladly let it roll...

</comment><comment><USER3> This is easily much worse than Nixon. Nixon was a paranoid president with a cadre of political flunkies willing to do whatever it took for him to stay in power. Once the bozos were thrown out, that game was up.

This is a systemic problem, not just one president. Obama's just the first guy really seeing how far he can push things. You can bet that the next president, no matter which party, will keep pushing.

This is much worse than Nixon. Nixon was a scandal. His own party deserted him. With Obama you still have millions standing by to make apologies for whatever has been done -- and whatever comes next. A very bad situation.

What we're going to see now is what the world would have looked like if Nixon had gotten away with it.

<comment><USER4> Nixon was also operating at the height of the Cold War, when there _may_ have been a legitimate right to more control over what the press can and can't say or release.

Obama is operating at the height of what? Asymmetric warfare where we're basically beating third world peasants into submission. Or maybe the War on Drugs where we're basically beating first world peasants into submission and slavery, whilst turning a complete blind eye to what's only comparable to genocide in a country we share a boarder with.

What our government is trying to do is on par with returning us to serfdom. I keep hearing that things are supposed to get better, but it's important to remember; freedom comes after the blade of a guillotine. No one in power is going to stop abusing it, we only have to look at the repeated introduction copyright legislation, time after time after time it gets submitted until it gets broken down and submitted piece by piece and slips under the radar. This will stop when its forcibly stopped, and the longer it takes the greater chance it will be done by violence.

<comment><USER5> How about the less inherently violent Pareto " _history is a graveyard of aristocracies_ ". We've got something akin to that in our ruling class, and we need a Pareto style circulation of elites to fix it. That doesn't inherently have to be ultra-violent, then again, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of limits our ruling class has in what they're willing to do to retain power.

As you specifically note, " _on par with returning us to serfdom_ ", which does not strike me as hyperbole.

<comment><USER6> > ... there doesn't seem to be much in the way of limits our ruling class has > in what they're willing to do to retain power.

I disagree. There are strong limits on what our courtier class is willing to do. Those limits are not even particularly objectionable. The problem is that the limits are beyond what it takes to provoke a strenuous response from the average person.

Our government is unstable. If it were to move one millimeter beyond public toleration, a vicious cycle of escalation would start. The last straw would be something seemingly trivial, like a flippant speech about how hungry Americans could just eat cake. (A scenario that is actually plausible, given Washington, D.C.'s obsession with paying their cronies to turn corn into transportation fuel.)

The most disturbing thing about the courtiers' obsession with espionage is how careless they are being with operational security. They are using espionage to score PR points but neglecting the basics of opsec: mandatory access controls, cryptography, competent background checks, etc. If some Booz Allen yahoo could rifle through NSA documents, then other countries already had everything.

<comment><USER4> What's worth pointing out with the corn->ethanol issue is that it would take 1 acre of prime farmland to run your average F150 for 5 weeks. That acre would be damn close to perfect nutritionally (IE mixed diet, animals actually use more land but can feed on relatively infertile but pasture-able land) feeding one person for a year.

However, in actuality one bushel of corn averages 50 ears, the national corn harvest average per acre is 123, which means 6150 ear of corn, which means ~16.8 ears of corn a day. 110 calories for your average ear of corn, meaning 1800 food calories a day for a full year. On one tank of gas for your average commercial vehicle.

I do not get why anyone would want to turn corn into fuel, because even fuelling a statistically insignificant portion of the market would literally mean removing hundreds of thousands of peoples food from circulation. And it _is_ food grade corn that goes to make ethanol, because unsellable ears of corn are already spoken for and sold for animal feed.

One of the main reasons I want to buy land is so I can become as close to fully self sustaining as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr "President Obama wants to make it a crime for a reporter to talk to a leaker"

Worth reading it in full.

<comment><USER8> I don't get it. How can someone make such a drastic 180 degree turn on his principles and in such a short time? If there ever was a civil rights activist in him, how can he so easily go ahead with trying to harm US' historical press freedom so drastically by trying to make it illegal for a reporter to speak to a leaker, and prosecuting twice as many whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all presidents in the past 100 years?

I really don't get it and I don't see how a person could change so radically in only a few short years. Unless the whole initial campaign was just a major joke played on the American public, and it was all a set-up, saying that he'll turn things around from the Bush era, while he was actually plotting to continue his surveillance policies all along.

There's also the blackmail possibility, but would the US president really be that dependent on a blackmail to change his policies 180 degrees and also continue the charade for so long? I think the second possibility, that he was lying the whole time, seems more realistic than this.

<comment><USER9> While I have no personal insight into Barack Obama, I have dealt personally with several politicians; and while there are many earnest politicians dedicated to public service, there are also those who conflate public service with their own personal interest.

I do not mean they are cynical; that they are lying or have abandoned their principles, but that their principles are directed solely to getting themselves elected. Any form of lie-detection or telepathy would reveal they truly believe they are doing the best, most moral thing by getting themselves in a position of power. I find this attitude hard to describe; imagine "I am a good person", "anything that is good for me is good for everyone", "I should be leader", "anything that makes me leader is good", "anything that restricts my leadership is bad for everyone" all merged together into one single thought. Perhaps "I am the state" is the best summary.

This is how you get civil libertarians restricting others' civil liberties, homosexuals getting elected on anti-homosexual legislation, and drug-users campaigning for harsh penalties for drug use. These people do not see any contradiction between their words and their actions; it is as if words and actions are the same thing to them. If I campaign for civil rights, then I am a civil rights leader, my actions are irrelevant. They do not seem to understand that other people can be good, that they themselves can be evil; or how restricting their own power could possibly be good. They do not seem to understand that arrests, investigations, or invasions, whether of privacy or of nations, which do not harm themselves could harm other people.

<comment><USER10> There ought to be a DSM classification for this type of disorder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Worth a read: [http://www.rcfp.org/reporters-field- guide](http://www.rcfp.org/reporters-field-guide)

Generally: the First Amendment protects the right to publish news, but not to gather it; when it comes to newsgathering, the law generally doesn't favor reporters over any other kind of person. There are (according to RCFP) some jurisdiction-specific protections for newsgathering, but it's hard to read RCFP's guide and leave with the sense that the Constitution permits reporters to commit felonies in the interest of getting stories.

So, James Rosen. James Rosen (allegedly; for brevity, add "allegedly" mentally to everything else in this graf) received secret information from Stephen Kim, a counterproliferation analyst at LLNL. Kim passed information to Rosen about the proximity of a North Korean nuclear test. Kim's response was that the information he shared was harmless. The DoJ's response was that it wasn't, and that aside from the direct details about the DPRK nuclear test, the specificity of the information shared threatened sources & methods, and that regardless Kim was criminally liable for sharing top secret classified information.

(FAS, as always, does a great job of keeping up with the paperwork of the case: [http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/kim/](http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/kim/))

It's not at all surprising to me that in a case where an analyst leaks counterproliferation data to a reporter, the DoJ would have an interest in ensuring that the reporter wasn't an accessory to the crime of leaking the information. Simply hearing a leaked story isn't criminal, but coaching an insider to do so is. DoJ has a valid interest in figuring out which happened with Rosen.

James Rosen has not been charged with any crime. Stephen Kim, the leaker, is dollars-to-donuts going to prison; his defense seems already to have conceded the leak occurred, and posits that his prosecution is political.

As I've said on other threads, I'm ambivalent about counterterrorism. When I think about it in the context of signals intelligence, I'm fine with it. When I think about it in the context of the TSA and electronic strip searches, I'm not. But this isn't a terrorism case.

I am not at all ambivalent about counterproliferation. Just 40 years ago the US was locked in a standoff with an adversary with enough nuclear weapons to end life on the planet. Today, that adversary is a shambles, split into countries of varying competence and openness, any of which might have enough nuclear materiel to end a major world city. Meanwhile, the world's most evil country has a functioning nuclear arms program and is thought to be arming dictatorships around the world for money.

I'm glad DoJ isn't playing games in cases involving proliferation.

<comment><USER12> I don't mean to be sarcastic in my response, but the "most evil country" could be any number of countries, even given the context. Who are you referring to?

<comment><USER11> North Korea is the most evil country in the world.

<comment><USER13> Number of deaths due to US wars of aggression since 2001 [1][2]: 400,000 - 1,000,000

Number of deaths due to North Korean wars of aggression since 2001: 0

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_cas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_war)

<comment><USER11> Sophomoric comments like this are why we'd be better off if all politics stories were kept off HN, wholesale, like the guidelines suggest.

<comment><USER14> From the guidelines:

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

<comment><USER11> If you reread my comment I think you'll see that I wasn't in fact calling anyone a name.

<comment><USER14> Really?

> Sophomoric comments like this ...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_calling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_calling)

> Name calling is abusive or insulting language referred to a person or group,

If I squint in a half light, I might consider you have obeyed the literal letter of the guidelines. So, congratulations.

But seriously? You want to defend that comment as not insulting to the poster?

Also, at what point did you reply to the argument?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> But he paid the price. The current president will never face the same punishment.

<comment><USER16> Nixon wasn't punished for what this article is complaining about, though. He wasn't impeached over his handling of the Pentagon Papers case, but because he paid some people to break into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters.

I would guess that if Obama got caught running an operation to break into the RNC headquarters, Congress would be pretty quick to impeach him, too. And conversely, had Nixon not organized the Watergate break-in, he wouldn't have been impeached over his (and Kissinger's) hardline view on prosecuting leakers and those in their vicinity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why is the title like that? The article makes it obvious the brunt of his criticism is on Obama.

<comment><USER18> because the NY Times cannot call him out completely having bent over backwards to support him. Simply put, its no different than Obama claiming he was no Dick Cheney.

What is going on now is far far worse than Nixon. I am referring to NSA and IRS activities brought to light over the last few months. I am not sure which is worse, nah strike that, what the IRS is accused of is worse.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure what kind of inside-the-beltway myopia it would take to think that controversy over who gets 501(c)(4) status is worse than dragnet surveillance.

<comment><USER5> Let's just quote half-reformed Obamacon Peggy Nonan ([http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732441260457851...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578515673945731506.html)):

" _What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights._ "

Note, _it doesn 't matter a wit that you don't believe this_. Because _we_ do, and it's at least a debatable point, _YOU HAVE A PROBLEM_. A potentially country killing one. I suggest you work to fix it, either by convincing us we're wrong, or by fixing it---at this point, one necessary ingredient is clear, completely revising our tax system to eliminate the IRS's discretion.

<comment><USER16> It's usually the case that half the country thinks the federal government's revenue-allocation is biased against them. If indeed 501(c)(4) status is allocated in a biased way, that's functionally equivalent to government subsidies being allocated in a biased way (because a targeted tax exemption is equivalent to a targeted subsidy). This is quite different from police intimidation, surveillance and similar things: it is solely an argument over whether _subsidies_ are being allocated in a viewpoint-neutral manner.

Controversies over whether federal subsidies are being given out in a biased way _are_ important, I think, but not a novel or apocalyptic matter. Sometimes the right alleges bias (as with funding going to e.g. NPR, and climate-science funding), other times the left alleges bias (as with the bill explicitly excluding Planned Parenthood from funding, or the tax exemption given to political organizations organized as church branches). It's worth investigating, but nobody is being shot for raising their heads.

Compare, say, COINTELPRO, which was not a dispute over whether federal tax exemptions or funds were being allocated fairly, but direct state intimidation of political organizations. _That_ is what I think we need to be most wary of.

Now, there is some contingent of raving loons who already have it in their heads that IRS=UN=jackboots=Waco=helicopters, and certain opportunists (e.g. Glenn Beck) and politicians (some Tea Party groups) like to egg them on. I am not as sure what to do about them, but I don't think they are responding to any particular set of events based on any attempt at rational analysis of the actual events. And percentage-wise, they're closer to 10-15%. If you ask people to agree with particularly strong interpretations of the IRS scandal, which involve paranoid fantasies of violence by jackbooted government thugs, you don't get anywhere near 50% agreeing.

As for your proposed solution: I do think it's prudent to reform the tax- exemption laws to remove subjective categories. Some subjectivity is difficult to avoid, e.g. in the definition of a 501(c)(3) charity, but clearly 501(c)(4) is one of the more problematic categories. I would support just eliminating that status entirely, rather than attempting to have the IRS determine who legitimately belongs in it vs. who doesn't; an organization aimed at "the promotion of social welfare" but not necessarily a "charity" is just too subjective a catch-all.

<comment><USER5> Geeze, you simply have not been paying attention, this goes _way_ beyond 501(c)(4) denials (while Obama's Organizing for America -> Organizing for Action was waived through), to the minor detail of 501(c)(3) denials, to leaking of application data to 3rd parties (as admitted by Pro Publica, one recipient), to the campaign calling out major Romney donor as evil people, _to all of the above getting audits_ ... and that's just counting the IRS harassment.

And characterizing these as "subsidizes" is flatly wrong. Money donated for political action is _not_ tax deductible; rather, it is the question, why are political efforts organized as non-profits? It's not like any of these organizations are trying to make monetary profits, their objective is of an entirely different kind.

Without a level playing field and with particular, focused harassment of donors ... well, many asked in 2012 what happened to the "TEA Party" that was so powerful in 2010 ... well, now after all these revelations, our side believes we know.

You may consider half the country to be "raving loons" ... even if it's only "10-15%", _YOU_ still have a very big problem, history suggests only 3% are necessary to successfully prosecute a hot civil war (we're already in a cold one), and at least on my side we believe we're sliding towards one, since peaceful means of engaging in politics have and are being foreclosed by these actions (none of this has stopped), and no reform seems to be on the horizon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll just leave this right here:

[http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK- Speeche...](http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK- Speeches/American-Newspaper-Publishers-Association_19610427.aspx)</comment>


GitHub Security Bug Bounty - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1770-github-security-bug-bounty <comment><USER2> The one obvious flaw is the "email us for our PGP key" \- distributing the public key in private and over an insecure channel makes it vulnerable to replacement.

Has anyone written a "best practices" guide for designing a security page ?

<comment><USER3> Why don't they just publish the key on the site?

<comment><USER4> Probably because security@ emails are routed through their normal helpdesk system which doesn't handle PGP properly.

<comment><USER5> I doubt that their security emails do that, but even if they do, changing how you get the key wouldn't fix a PGP compatibility issue, since once you have the key you'd still be emailing them using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey githubbers, could you please stop repeating the tired "responsible disclosure" meme?

Full disclosure is not irresponsible and attempts to frame it as such are bordering on malicious toward the exact community in which you are attempting to engender goodwill.

<comment><USER7> I disagree that "responsible disclosure" is tired, nor a meme.

Software development is hard. Most projects are developed by teams- not single contributors. Consequently, part of reporting bugs is enduring the back and forth of communications with teams. Reporting bugs is not an all-or-nothing game.

<comment><USER8> It certainly isn't tired, and "responsible disclosure" policies are absolutely preferred over any sort of free-for-all distribution and posting of PoC code to the world before the vendor. I think most professional security researchers have always subscribed to the general idea of responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities, even before things like RFPolicy [0] brought the concept to a wider audience.

However by any reasonable definition [1] it _is_ a meme, being a "unit for carrying cultural [...] practices that can be transmitted [...] through writing [or] speech." Remember that memes existed as a concept long before LOLcats and formulaic GIF images with amusing text macros on the Internets...

        [0] http://www.wiretrip.net/p/libwhisker.html
        [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

<comment><USER6> My problem is not with companies preferring advance notice, or with people who abide by what is called "responsible disclosure". Indeed, it is often the Right Thing To Do.

The problem is that use of the phrase "responsible disclosure" FRAMES anything that does not conform to that narrow definition as "irresponsible disclosure", when in reality it simply is not. (It is not irresponsible to pull a @homakov, for instance.)

It's "framing": a way that use of language shapes our thinking about the world and events therein, sometimes and usually without our explicit conscious consent to such bias.

Please stop using the term. "Advance developer/vendor notification" is a suitable replacement if you wish.

<comment><USER7> If we were playing table tennis, I would comment on the tremendous amount of english you put on that ball.

On the one hand, I concede your point. I think your phrasing is certainly more accurate. However it isn't quite as expressive to the layman.

On the other hand, there are so few people out there who truly can grasp the nuances that you're focusing on, I am wary of propogating your valid point.

I still think "responsible disclosure" is a better (albeit damaged) descriptor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't $5000 ridiculously low compared to the black market value of a GitHub exploit, or the time required to develop it?

Assuming a company thinks it's pretty secure, putting real money on the line (the same money you'd normally pay an expert to pentest your system) would get some more prolific minds involved.

<comment><USER10> No, it is probably not. People have weird ideas about how much random web bugs are worth. Big ticket bugs are easily monetizable, and/or attack a huge install base with a very slow patch cycle. People hear about 5-6 figure bugs, but those are typically reliable browser clientside RCEs.

<comment><USER11> Github also has slow patch cycle. Enterprise edition

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great to see Github recognizing processes for security researchers between the ages of 13-18 in the FAQ. In the new age of crowdsourced skills, it's good to see age not playing a part as a barrier.

</comment><comment><USER11> Now there is nothing to hax.

<comment><USER6> You should ask them to apply it retroactively.

<comment><USER11> I dont need anything. I was saying now you need some good 0days because it is hard to find silly xss on github these days

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great news. I'm happy to see this program in "public mode" now. GitHub launched this program already as private beta in May 2013.

[https://twitter.com/totally_unknown/status/42899282447475916...](https://twitter.com/totally_unknown/status/428992824474759168)

Don't expect to earn easy cash here. :)

<comment><USER14> I wonder if the reward values have changed since the beta? I'm sure it is much harder to find anything now than it would have been back then, assuming they got a good turnout from really experienced people and 7-8 months of headstart.

<comment><USER13> That's from the private beta:

"We are using a simple severity ranking scheme: Low - Medium - High - Critical. Rewards range from $100 up to $5000 and are determined at our discretion based on a number of factors. For example, if you find a reflected XSS that is only possible in Opera, and Opera is only 1.64% of our traffic, then the severity and reward will be lower. But a persistent XSS that works in Chrome, at 59.53% of our traffic, will earn a much larger reward."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You just have to wait for homakov to put himself at the top of the leaderboard.

</comment><comment><USER16> This looks great.

I especially like that they have 'rules for us' and also they have a section at the bottom which discusses discretionary bounties for their properties not covered in the main list.

</comment><comment><USER17> We recently launched our bug bounty program for Commando.io as well [https://commando.io/security.html](https://commando.io/security.html).

</comment><comment><USER18> So the Firefox UI is much like the Chrome UI minus border radius.

<comment><USER19> If you're referring to the browser screenshot I think it's Opera (which is now based on Chromium) rather than Firefox. That will at least explain some of the similarities.</comment></comment>


YC Facelift: Flutter - <AUTHOR> http://kyrobeshay.com/post/20950516669/yc-facelift-flutter

<comment><USER2> Cute and fun. I'd try the app if it had this page.

As a working designer, there's a few things I love about this guy's approach:

* use real language, not lorem ipsum. Text is half of the design.

* branding is just as much about giving personality as it is choosing a visual treatment, like "playfully nerdy with Jedi references" here or "sleek VIP club" like with Exec. The people that ripped on last week's mocks don't get it - design is a conversation-starter. Don't like the exclusivity of the previous mocks? Cool, then let's hone in on what you do want and guess what, some stuff from previous iterations might carry over.

* go straight to high fidelity, none of this nonsense of wireframes and personas and other deliverables that many PMs and designers are obsessed with. If you want low fidelity to quickly brainstorm, it's what paper, whiteboards and Starbucks napkins were invented for.

* speaking of high fidelity, don't be afraid to use real textures and take a stab at the logo too while you're at it. Designers that swear they love Swiss minimalist grids as their style usually turn out to be like the bad contestants on Top Chef that get weeded out early on because their style is "rustic". Riiiight, it's not because you don't have the knife skills to do Asian cuisine, sauce skills to do French, or baking skills to do desserts.

* and the thing I like the most is that he took the initiative to just put something out there. Even when you're working in-house, sometimes you have to grab ahold of the conversation and ship something real, something people can sink their teeth into instead of spinning out into orbit with conversation. It's also very common not to know what you do or don't like until you see some alternatives. Hey, it's called being human.

And trust me, you can cool it with the disrespect angle. None of the targets of these redesigns feel disrespected, since everyone's dying for design help and even just a few spare cycles from experienced pixel pushers. I tried an experiment of holding office hours for just one YC batch (S11, because I'm friends with Jason from Ridejoy) and my last two Saturdays have been booked completely solid. And Justin reached out to me a few weeks back about helping Exec's visual design and we haven't been able to get together, probably because of post-Demo Day craziness, so how happy do you think he was to see the free mocks from last week? Justin didn't ask for any shady spec work, some guy was just fired up to help out on his own dime. Right on.

(thankfully there's less naysayers on this thread so far compared to last week's one about Exec, just a boatload of feedback on possible alternatives. Yay HN, reminds me of the days of old :)

Like I said, love it. This is the quality of work I get paid to deliver and if I had to break into design or the SF startup scene all over again, I hope I'd be smart enough to do a series like this. It worked for Dustin Curtis with American Airlines, Metalab with Zappos and even 37signals did it way back in the day when they were a design shop. They did some unsolicited redesigns of FedEx and other brands that led to a lot of client work for them. I read Jason Fried saying somewhere that it was a smart move for them and didn't get why more designers don't do it.

[edit: added the paragraph about unsolicited designs not being disrespectful]

<comment><USER3> Realized I was so busy I didn't get a chance to respond to last week's Exec redesign, but in general I was happy that Kyro took a shot at it and thought he surfaced some interesting ideas, and that it definitely looked much prettier than what we have today.

Unsolicited designs are definitely not disrespectful and are very much appreciated: I love to get other people's thoughts on what we can do better in all aspects of the business.

<comment><USER4> Since it looks prettier, are you going to buy the design off kyro?

<comment><USER3> No. Prettier != better, as one other commentator pointed out. I think there were many things that Kyro did better than the current design, but his design wasn't something I'd be comfortable putting on the site in it's current form.

To address some of the points in the other thread: Yes, the current Exec design looks like something that was done by a non-designer in an hour. That's because it was, by me, the night before we launched. And I'm comfortable with how it works; when we have a full time designer in house they will iterate it based on achieving specific goals.

I don't believe in changing design for the sake of changing design or just having something prettier. I believe in design that achieves specific goals and functions, and that defining those goals and functions are actually the most important parts of the design process. Because of that, I do not believe that it is possible for us to use an outside design without first coming up with new goals for the front page. I don't want to invest my own time in doing that right now, because my time is extremely valuable and I don't think our crappy front page is our current bottle neck on Exec (actually, I know it isn't). So, any effort we made in improving it at the moment would wasted. So, I'm not changing it.

<comment><USER4> word. let me know if i can ever buy you a beer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would change the tagline at the top. "Welcome to the future." is _way_ too generic. Maybe try "Wave hi to the future." or something like that. It makes the graphic to the left look like a giant hand wanting to give an iMac a high- five. Some specificity would be helpful.

Also, the CTA should give some indication of what will be expected out of you on the next page. I would say something about it being in alpha and how it's free.

<comment><USER6> I personally like the "Welcome to the future" tag even though it is generic. It immediately grabs me, peaks my curiosity, and makes me excited that I'm about to see a new product that doesn't exist yet.

But the image could use something to convey this is an audio product. Something more clear than an angled shot of a music app. Maybe some headphones next to the comp, or subtly work some music notes into the header somewhere. Just spitballin, but it would be nice if the header communicated music a little more clearly

<comment><USER7> "Wave hello to the future" also captures the connotation of welcoming to the future, as well as providing a more concrete indication of what the app does. I think one of the biggest challenges with copywriting is hitting all of those notes at once, the visionary, the concrete, the solution, the problem, etc. And like other forms of art, some pieces just come together better than others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kyro - you rock. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to give Flutter a facelift. We appreciate it..

</comment><comment><USER9> One thing that impresses me is how the OP has clearly learned from the feedback on the Exec design. Even if nothing comes out of his YC Facelift project, he'll become a much better designer for it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for all the feedback, guys. I take it all to heart and it's all appreciated. Hopefully you'll like what's to come!

<comment><USER11> As one of the naysayers from last week, I can say this one is a lot better. It's much more on target, and you didn't use any made up quotes/content. Great work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> YC should hire this dude as their designer in residence. This and the Exec facelift he did last week are gorgeous.

<comment><USER13> Do you know if YC has ever or will ever have that position? I've always wondered if they would have an in house designer to help.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure he's a partner now, but Garry Tan used to be a resident designer for YC

[http://mashable.com/2011/01/14/posterous-founder-leaves- star...](http://mashable.com/2011/01/14/posterous-founder-leaves-startup-goes- to-y-combinator-as-design-guru/)

<comment><USER8> Garry Tan is a partner and a rockstar. He's given a plenty of amazing pointers and w/o him (and other partners) we would've gotten plenty of other things wrong.

That said, Garry can guide us. His job isn't do design for us... that onus is still no us! Hence, please blame us for poor design.;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is a much better redesign than the Exec one - because it actually is a _re_ design for the product as it stands - rather than a _new_ design for a product with a substantially different message and positioning, which is what the Exec one read like to me.

Kyro is, from the post, a fan and a user of Flutter, which probably helped with that. The hardest design work to do is when you're a long way personally from the market the design is built for.

If I was wearing my design critique hat I'd be asking Kyro this though:

* Why is "Welcome to the future" - which tells you nothing about the product - pushed above the "Control iTunes and Spotify Using Gestures" sub - which does. The former is tone and mood setting device - why am I not picking up that tone and mood from the visual design? If I am is it necessary? What is it's purpose?

* Why move the video and social proof so far down the page - are they really less important?

* Is the navigation bar at the top really necessary? (home == your there. features == this page should convince, download == pretty darn obvious). Are there more useful things we can use that vertical space for? (see previous point)

* The logo is still a bit "meh" to my eyes - but I suspect Kyro already knows that and it wasn't the focus of the changes done.

* The background noise on the main image is a little bit strong to my eyes and pull the eye away from the content a bit

* Is the "Flutter in the news" headline necessary? If you take it away will the reader be confused?

* The move lines on the hand don't quite work. "Why is the hand sweating" was a comment from my partner :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the overall layout and color palette is great.

I'd like to suggest some improvements to the marketing message, however, since you've included that in the purview of your proposal this time.

I'm not crazy about the Jedi-themed language in the official copy, as it distracts from what the product actually does. My mind wants to be learning how the product works, not wondering how it cleverly relates to futurist mythology (as much as I am a fan). However, I think the Jedi themed testimonial is entirely appropriate, as it is of lower weight in the informational hierarchy and is an individual's statement, not the company's.

Lastly, the "Yes, master" blurb is not appropriate as official marketing copy, even if it is intended as an ironic reference to the Jedi master-apprentice relationship. It is too easy to mistake it for a reference to a master-slave relationship, which is not a good association in any respect. It's just not an issue you want to draw association with even in the slightest most oblique way. The lesson here is that all copy must be screened for any kind of irrelevant connotation.

I do like the direction in which you're going with the copy in the left hand column below the main section. That's starting to develop a fun, snappy voice, and the fish graphic is pleasantly quirky.

Lastly, to maximize the "throughput of information" about the product that one gets by just looking at the page "above the fold", I would make the main graphic more explanatory (possibly with little blurbs like you used for "yes, master"). The main graphic on their existing page <https://flutter.io/signup> was good in that regard.

Kudos to you doing these designs every week. I think it's a great exercise. Just remember that it's not just about the pixels, it's the total message and then of course the whole UX after you interact with the page.

</comment><comment><USER17> dear Flutter people. i actually downloaded and installed your software because of his landing page. if i had just stumbled on your landing page the same may not be true, it doesn't feel nearly as professional.

that said, there is obviously more than just a landing page going on here (a blog post, a discussion, etc).

love the product!

<comment><USER18> Same here. Very neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me, or this guy should do this for a living? Like, we make sucky homepages, he improves, we never even need to talk to him.

Just take my money! (I'm kidding, I have no money)

</comment><comment><USER20> Really like the redesign. Great, great work Kyro! My one feeling, as a non- designer and merely as a user, is that the product itself is so much fun, I wish there would have been a bit more of that vitality infused into the design. Just experientially, I feel like using the site should closely mirror the experience of using the product. So something a bit more dynamic, maybe in color or vibrancy, might have punched it up a notch. That's a small quibble. Overall, really solid.

<comment><USER8> Great feedback on redesign and product Adahm. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree his designs are lovely. Flutter needs a redesign a bit less than Exec does, but his is an improvement nonetheless.

Main concerns with the current Flutter site: The video is front and center. I get why companies do that, and it's smart to make the video and have it there. But I almost never watch product videos until I'm already intrigued. Videos take waaaaay longer than reading, so a focus on intriguing me in a sentence or two first goes a long way to getting me to watch the video at all.

The second is that annoying little popup at the bottom. I can't stand those things, they're very distracting. Irrational level of turnoff for me.

On his redesign, one minor comment about copy. Probably can't make "Jedi" part of your official copy without triggering the Lucas machine. Having it in a testimonial is probably acceptable.

As a final thought, the name Flutter and the product are one of those rare natural matches. That's good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe it's just me, but when I see a product that claims to do something seemingly impossible without explaining _how it works_ , I tend to be highly suspicious that it doesn't, and I feel a little bit patronized. I think the main description should at least give a hint.

I see "webcam" mentioned in the testimonials now, but I would make it more prominent.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great redesign. Now they should just add skip/forward/back + voice recognition, charge $5 for it and be happy :)

</comment><comment><USER24> This isn't about the redesign, but I just downloaded Flutter and I can't find anywhere that lists all the controls... Does it just do Play/Pause? Can you skip songs?

<comment><USER25> After downloading it, Flutter appears to only Play & Pause in iTunes and Spotify (on Mac & Windows). I imagine (and hope) that they're working on supporting more gestures and more apps!

<comment><USER8> Hi Guys, we just do play/pause right now and only on iTunes and Spotify. It only works on Mac for now too. Yes, we will be adding support for more apps/gestures/windows in near future.

We will also communicate things more clearly when we implement our own facelift. ;-) Thanks for your patience with us in the meantime!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Brilliant way to self-promote while also servicing the community. I love this approach, and the design.

</comment><comment><USER27> I love this concept, 37signals way back in the day used to do these UX teardowns and rebuilds via <http://37signals.com/better> and that had a lot to do w/building their rep for UX expertise

A couple of notes from conversion side:

a) Better - Your inclusion of a visually descriptive image is an improvement vs. pic of the girl - maybe as a keyframe since the vid is an important visual demo.

a) Draw - Original site compatible w/1024x768, your new one less so. Their audience is probably tech savvy and not @ 1024x768 but as a rule better safe than sorry and 1024 requires an element-economy that can sharpen your messaging anyways.

b) Worse - Your headline is more entertaining, but less on point. You've incorporate their original as a sub-headline but you'd be surprised how many people will simply overlook that.

<comment><USER28> 1024x768 is no longer the standard experience for the majority of browser users.

Also the design seems flexible enough to support percentages, so "a" won't be much of an issue.

<comment><USER15> _1024x768 is no longer the standard experience for the majority of browser users._

Indeed. Many are looking at much smaller windows :-)

Overall screen resolution of the majority of users on the internet is a pointless number to worry about. Worry instead about the available browser size window of the user group that you're actually interested in.

<http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/> is a nice reality check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love the idea of the facelifts! Good job keeping to it!

</comment><comment><USER30> Works. Awesome.

Gesture seems to be the next frontier.

</comment><comment><USER31> These are great! Would love to see a screencast of your next facelift.</comment>


Statement by DNI James R. Clapper on Allegations of Economic Espionage - <AUTHOR> http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/60712026846/statement-by-director-of-national-intelligence

<comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: Whatcha gonna do about it?</comment>


Surviving the New MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/surviving-the-new-macbook-pro/ <comment><USER2> I have a mostly maxed-out 15" new MBP. I love it. Now that I'm used to the new keyboard, I can type much faster than with the older ones and it feels far less mushy. I never have problems with stuck keys, audio, etc. From time to time, I see some graphical artifacts around in the window shadows when I first open it up after sleeping, but they go away after a moment.

The biggest annoyance, to me, is the placement of a touch bar hotspot above the delete key. I hit it all the time. At first, by default, Siri was there. I switched it to be the "show desktop" button, but what I really want to do is to shift everything to the left so that nothing is above the delete key.

Even with that, however, I've adjusted my typing so that I rarely hit the touch bar above the delete key.

I've never had battery problems, the USB-C ports don't bother me because I rarely have anything plugged into the laptop other than the power cable, and in my work environments, we use Apple TVs for conference room televisions, so I can just connect wirelessly to show presentations.

I was skeptical when I bought it, due to all of the moaning that shows up here on HN, but all in all, I'm really enjoying this computer and I'm glad that I replaced my old MBP with it.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious to see how the keyboards hold up. I have a 2016 12" rMB. I believe that's the same keyboard as the new MBP. It's less than a year old and some of the keys are starting to become unresponsive. Admittedly I'm a very "hard" typist, but still.

I actually quite like typing on this keyboard, although it was weird at first, but I wonder how these things are going to hold up.

<comment><USER4> I was actually warned by the Apple Store when I got it how fragile the keyboard is and that if even small amounts of stuff got on the keyboard it would interfere with the keys due to the lack of any space below the key cap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've bought a new MacBook pro. It works reasonably well, but :

it is seriously bug-ridden. For instance, at times the Finder won't allow any drag and drop operation (you need to kill it). Access to network shares is hit and miss. Globally the OS X Finder has been a pretty poor piece of essential software since... Developer Preview? :/

The absence of at least one standard USB port is really annoying, you need an adapter to plug in just about anything, a thumb drive, a phone, a mouse... any of the bazillions of USB gizmos and cables everyone has lying around in his house or at work. Wherever you are, you need to have this stupid adapter at hand. It's incredibly annoying; in practice you have to carry your nice, sleek laptop with a constantly dangling white protrusion on a side.

<comment><USER6> Finder really needs some attention beyond adding features like tagging that add complexity without, as far as I can tell, bringing any real benefit.

I want a Finder that's keyboard-accessible, that lets me easily restart it when it crashes, that doesn't frustrate my efforts to view certain hidden files. I'd still take it over windows explorer, on balance, but only barely, and that's pretty damning.

I've recently started using fman [0] which seems a promising alternative.

[0] [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

<comment><USER7> _I want a Finder that 's keyboard-accessible, that lets me easily restart it when it crashes, that doesn't frustrate my efforts to view certain hidden files._

Forklift 3 would also meet those criteria.

[http://binarynights.com/forklift/](http://binarynights.com/forklift/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disagree almost completely. Just came back from a trip and charging was much better than before. Between us we had:

       1 new MBP, 1 MB 12"
       2 iPhones
       1 iPad
       1 Micro-USB device (Neo Smartpen)

We only needed 1 charger and 3 cables: 1 USB-C/USB-C, 1 USB-C/Lightning, 1 USB-C/Micro-USB. (We carried a second charger just in case).

We could charge either of the laptops, any of the devices directly or any of the devices via the charging MBP (or from the battery of either non-connected laptop).

On all our previous/recent trips, keeping devices charged was always a problem, this time it was completely effortless.

While I don't have the problems with the TouchBar the author describes, so far it has been largely uneventful for me (and yes, TouchID is _great_!). However, I think the _potential_ is fantastic for integrating textual input with controls in ways that just hasn't been possible before.

I implemented a very preliminary version of scrubbing inline numbers in my CodeDraw live coding/graphics environment and it makes a _huge_ difference. Before, you had to select the number, then either (a) fiddle with some gestures combining modifier keys and the mouse or (b) move the mouse to a separate on-screen widget. With the TouchBar, just select and scrub. Yes, it seems like a subtle difference when described in text, but the difference in actual interaction is YUGE :-)

<comment><USER9> I am not familiar with your software, but would a standard keyboard shortcut work for your common case of adjusting a number? j/k or some such mnemonic for up down?

<comment><USER8> Not when you're inside a text editor, just hitting j or k would replace the selected number with j or k.

Of course you can use command/option or some such, maybe with arrows, but still the problem is that it's incredibly cumbersome compared to scrubbing using a slider. Much greater range and finer control when you have visual feedback.

I do think that the common use of the TouchBar as a set of function keys is not particularly useful.

<comment><USER9> Got it. That makes sense. That is a pretty neat use case if it is sensitive enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _I just want a computer that boots up reliably, plays audio and video, allows me to work for more than a couple hours before dying, and has a keyboard that doesn't freak out on me._

You had one. You gave it to your brother.

<comment><USER11> So he should use that computer for the rest of his life? He had to upgrade _sometime_.

<comment><USER12> You don't have to upgrade. Lots of still functional pre-courage Macs you can buy.

<comment><USER13> "pre-courage", I must admit, while accurate, I had a chuckle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is definitely a stumble for Apple, that much is beyond debate.

But as someone who uses both 2012 MBP and new HP Win10 laptops every day for work and play, let me say this: the Windows world might seem suddenly enticing, but you will NOT find greener pastures there, on average. That ecosystem is still a mess.

<comment><USER15> I think it's very personal which platform you prefer. I also spend equal time on windows and mac and lately find myself preferring windows more.

One thing that's definitely terrible on windows 10 are the updates. Stuff breaking after forced updates is normal now. This week a whole bunch of colleagues got a forced update at 10 am which broke their laptop keyboard. Apparently our IT dept is to blame for the unlucky timing, but microsoft are the ones that broke the keyboard. Every win10 device I have has had something break after a forced update. I can always fix it, but I don't know how non- technical people deal with this.

<comment><USER16> I've heard MS is shoving ads into various parts of the OS. Is that something you notice?

<comment><USER17> I've been reasonably happy with a laptop I've had running Windows 7. Then it stealth-updated itself to Windows 10. I turned off most of the ads, but the lock screen still had ads. I had to turn of some service with an incongruous name to kill those but Cortana still shows up on the lock screen telling me to talk to it. Like I'm going to do that?

Also, the start menu is all fubared. I end up using search from the start menu, which works but is really slow. I'll get the search box and type something into it and it's 30 seconds to a minute before my text shows up there, usually missing the first 2-3 characters I typed... but not always.

Microsoft needs to have a good hard look at why they had so much trouble moving people off of XP. It's like they hit an inflection point there with the least amount of suckage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's no power button. Lip flip is your new button except when your computer is stuck in some kind of sleep mode and won't wake up. Flipping g the lid doesn't wake it up. Tried multiple times. Tried force quit keys.. nope. Tried attaching power... Nope. About 20 minutes later it decides to come back to life.

Luckily this only happens to me in the morning while working from home. But it could happen before a big presentation, meeting, etc. It's terrible.

<comment><USER19> the touch ID button is the power button

<comment><USER20> No _hardware_ power button, then. Which is a problem if the software locks up, as my 2014 MBP does occasionally.

<comment><USER2> The Touch ID button is a hardware power button. It clicks down like any other old MBP power button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Its 2017 and we developers still don't have an OS/Laptop combo that delights us. Its a series of compromises, particularly with linux.

I'm wondering why there isn't a linux on laptop combo thats just great. Lack of resources? Demand? Is linux so fragmented that it can't martial the dev effort on laptops?

<comment><USER22> Driver support. App support. Which form a vicious cycle together with demand.

EDIT That's not to say that there aren't options that aren't great for given use-cases. E.g. as a developer I'm very happy with my linux-on-laptop. But if someone sends me an Office doc I am in a position to tell them to send me plain text or pdf or I won't be reading it. Not everyone is.

<comment><USER9> Libre office generally just works. I have real Word in Wine that works fine too.

But yeah apps can be tricky. I am happy with my laptop as well (Linux).

<comment><USER13> if Libreoffice works fine, why have "real" Word at all?

<comment><USER9> For viewing. For most things. Once in a while libre will mangle a file or subtly change formatting. For viewing 100%. For editing 90%. For the other rare times Real Word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I stand with OP on the bugs. I own top of the line 15in, and can confirm audio freezes, glitches and ffs sometime also random reboots.

<comment><USER24> maybe it's broken? mine works fine. Might be worth a call to the genii.

Edit: Why the downvote?

<comment><USER25> _Why the downvote?_

Because Apple-bashing is all the rage right now on HN. Even if Apple were to achieve "five nines" glitch-free manufacturing, which is very hard to do, there'd still be problems with 1 in 10,000 units sold. And that's considered _excellent_ quality. I used to work in the hardware space. Software people don't often appreciate you can't simply crank out perfect replicas of a design.

<comment><USER26> _Apple-bashing is all the rage right now on HN_

More like _< insert anything here>-bashing has been and always will be all the rage on any internet forum_? At least to me HN looks quite diverse and I don't have the impression there is a big undeniable bias towards a single platform/tool/... and all seems fair. Which of course might mean in some cases where some product is actually not top notch the 'average' of the comments will be towards the negative side but that is exactly what should happen and the opposite should be true as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Windows laptops are hit and miss as well, nothing new, move along. Maybe when windows becomes Linux fully, I'll switch.

These described MBP glitches sound bad but don't sound like a trip to the neighborhood Apple Store couldn't fix.

</comment><comment><USER28> I survived my rMBP by trading up to a Lenovo X1 Carbon (with XUbuntu). The hardware is great and it's close to indestructible. Curiously, my biggest beef with the rMBP was Mac OSX and some of the custom hardware wouldn't support Linux.

</comment><comment><USER29> The worst part of the new laptop is the damn keyboard. Keys keep getting stuck, which severely slows down my typing. And it's intermittent. At any given time I have about 1-2 keys stuck, but it always changes.

<comment><USER30> I would definitely take it in if this is the case. I have had no problems with the new keyboard and have come to vastly prefer it to the old MacBook Air keyboard I had been using. I feel like I type faster on it and with greater certainty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really dislike the new keyboard and it might be the reason I end up returning my new MBP. The key presses feel inconsistent (escape/arrow keys need a harder press for no clear reason), the tactile feedback isn't great... I wish I waited until the next MBP generation while they fix it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Having an x86 laptop that Just Worked between 2006 and 2016 was the anomaly, not the experience of a laptop owner described in this story.

I'll happily wait out this first generation while they iron out the problems until the next iteration of it. Seems like my maxed out 2015 was a great buy after all.

</comment><comment><USER33> It blows my mind that it is not even an option to buy a computer built by another vendor.

<comment><USER13> I'm noticing this also, there is somewhat of an accepted "uniform" and "toolset" for the SV life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have had the same experience; the Bluetooth stack is awful, the touch bar locks up constantly (or displays nothing at all), glitches often, crashes far more than my previous model and... is just awful in general. The switch to USB-C is actually a non-issue for me, and I find it quite convenient now that I have all the right cables, but the machine itself, while the hardware is well refined, is just awful

</comment><comment><USER35> "Surviving"? Really? It's a notebook. It's better than last year's. It's better than 95% of all currently used notebooks.

You will not die. You will live to gripe about another non-issue next year.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wait, there's no charging light anymore? That's actually pretty sad. I like that on mine.

<comment><USER37> There's no need for a charging light because it's USB-C, so you know whether it's plugged in or not. Whereas with the MagSafe it could be only partially connected, and the only way to know that was the light. You still need to know whether the plug is actually plugged into the wall, but you can just look at the menu bar for that.

<comment><USER38> The charging light also tells me whether or not my laptop is done charging by means of an orange or green light.

<comment><USER39> There's no charging light on the iPad or iPhone either

<comment><USER40> Yeah, the difference there is that you have to crack open your laptop or power it on to know if it's charging if there's no light. iPad? Press a button. Now you know if you're good or not.

Audio feedback isn't too useful either

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have the previous generation 15 inch MB Pro and it is an amazing machine. But despite its maximum (for air travel) sized 100 Wh battery, it can have run times below 2 hours - that is, if a process loads the machine. So, if you are getting really bad run times with your laptops, check the system load. Even rather inconspicuous processes can drag your battery down. Be it a web page or something else. Safari should throttle webpages shown in hidden tabs, but check it. For Chrome, there are tools like the "big suspender" which can save memory and cpu resources.

<comment><USER30> I would love a utility that watched for fast battery drops and then alerted me or automatically killed a process based on rules. The few times I've had battery issues with the new MBP I've checked Activity Monitor to find that something like iTunes has become unresponsive and is pinning a core at 100%, but often not before losing 30% of a charge.

<comment><USER41> I keep the cpu monitor part of the activity monitor running in the dock icon and keep an eye on it. It should be completely zero when I am not interacting with the machine. Maybe I am too old, but watching the cpu monitor on any machine I am working on is as natural to me, as watching the rev counter of my car when I am driving :).

<comment><USER42> Ovetime the activity monitor also consumes significant battery...

<comment><USER41> The activity monitor when run as an icon should consume no noticeable energy, it is <1% power usage - a single "nasty" tab can load the cpu 10-30% or more. I think this is a good trade off, especially when the run time does not match the expectations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I had a 2012 MBP that was dying and I replaced it with a Windows10 laptop (Spectre from HP). After setting up bash on here, I'm pretty happy and in some respects happier. There's some weird things still (pasting into a terminal is one), but I can no longer justify the 2x cost for a Mac that is buggy, limited, and has crap I don't want forced on me.

</comment><comment><USER44> Truly this is a terrible laptop. I use a USB dock so the awful keyboard, oversized mousepad (with attendant accidental bumps) and pointless touch bar (oh, hey, I accidentally bumped mute again) don't matter that much.

However, at least once a week, when switching between the dock and home, my mac goes into flicker mode, requiring a hard reboot. Insanity.

To make matters worse, the power key (the Touch ID key) is unlabeled and doesn't look like a pressable key. And now that apple has removed its boot up sound, for no good reason, I don't know if I've successfully rebooted until seconds after I press the power button.

The audio occasionally craps out and randomly decides not to select the right output when I plug in to my dock.

I've been a mac guy since college in 1994. This may be my last mac.

<comment><USER45> > However, at least once a week, when switching between the dock and home, my > mac goes into flicker mode, requiring a hard reboot. Insanity.

Discrete graphics, or Intel?

<comment><USER44> Intel Iris Graphics 550 1536MB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have the new 15" (after using the 2013 version almost since release) and I haven't noticed a disparity in bugs - both have been extremely reliable machines.

That touch bar thing has never happened to me. Still hate it, though. :)

This sounds like you should just take it in for a replacement to me.

</comment><comment><USER47> I also have audio/mic glitches. More often when I airplay to my av receiver or after I plug/unplug headphones.

But whatever, every mac had some problems. Previously I had wifi problems, now I do not have those.

</comment><comment><USER48> I hate it for all the reasons you describe. The power connector and excellent battery life were some of the best things about the old MBP, and I can't stand the new keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER49> In my experience, the double login issue seems to happen when restoring after having run out of battery. It happens on my ~2013 macbook as well.

A completely unscientific assessment is that the first login is to authorise restoration of the session. Unfortunately it seems like that authorisation can't be passed onto the session itself, so that also needs unlocking.

<comment><USER50> This happens if you have full disk encryption enabled. If the laptop goes into hibernation, the disk is no longer mounted. So you need to enter your password to mount the drive which then drops you into the lock screen to enter your password again.

Ideally, the computer should be able to know you just woke the computer from hibernation and skip the second lock screen but I don't think the systems are integrated enough to do that right now. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The most annoying thing with the new power connector is the lack of a light indicator showing that your laptop is charging.

</comment><comment><USER52> One of the biggest announces is lack of operability w. the previous Apple LED display. I've had to cycle through a few cable dongles at this point to then find out none connect to the LED display.

Instead, I ordered the Dell P2715Q 27" monitor and then purchased a DisplayPort to USC-C cable. It works perfectly and decently priced at $530.

</comment><comment><USER53> Whats been frustrating lately is that Apple has by far* the most profitable PC Hardware business on the planet, yet they seem to put less and less effort into it.

The battery life on the new MBP is apparently limited because the fitted sealed battery didn't pass testing, so they had to revert to a more standard (smaller) battery. Supposedly they also kept a 16 gig ram limit because they can't get the newest Intel CPUs needed for a better memory controller in enough volume.

Thats been a constant refrain the last 4 years, their volumes are now big enough that they are highly dependent on Intel release cycles and volume ramp, and Intel is always late. So they are always delaying new hardware, and in this case, releasing them in sub-par form because they decided they couldn't wait any longer.

But if you are the worlds most successful maker of laptops, it seems like you can have multiple development teams for your key products. Essentially why wasn't the old MBP being revved every year with faster CPUs so they could wait until everything came together for the new design? Instead they let the lineup get stale and forced out the new one prematurely.

Why can't they rev the Mac Pro with updated GPUS and CPUs at least every 15 months or so? Why can't they rev every product from Mini to iMac like that? What's the point of having the highest margins if you can't keep your offerings up to date? It just doesn't seem that expensive to keep an extra design team working on each multibillion dollar product so you can have more iterations.

Unfortunately Occams Razor is telling me that Apple's Mac margins aren't so good anymore, and that the finance department is tightening the screws in a misguided strategy to try to maintain them at historic levels. Their mac revenues actually declined over 2014-2016 ($24B -> $25B -> $23B) so maybe that's evidence of margin compression as well as the stale products.

It's obviously hell to be a PC maker if you aren't Apple. Margins are almost zero and now your OS maker is competing directly with you. But the downward trend continues there doesn't seem to be any hope of bottoming at any stable reasonable profits/margins, it's worse than the Airline business at this point. Maybe Apple's Mac business just gets dragged farther and farther down as well.

* The math is that Apple has a 6-7% world wide share of PC sales by units, but it's average sales price is around $1200 vs. the rest of the market's $500, so Apple gets around 15% of world PC revenues, making it one of the largest PC vendors by revenues ($23B in 2016). But Apple makes around 15-20% margins while the other PC venders are stuck at 2-3%, so Apple makes as much in profits as the rest of the market combined.

This obviously ignores MSFT's Windows revenues, and whether it includes the Surface business doesn't matter because it's not profitable yet.

</comment><comment><USER54> Battery life is nowhere near 10 hours, sometimes I can barely get even 4-5

</comment><comment><USER55> I have a 2016 pro and only annoyance is touch bar glitch and accidental touches sometimes. The issue with ports isn't an issue if you just think about it. Is like having 4 USB 3.0 ports and complaining about it

</comment><comment><USER56> Apple audio especially with Airpods is full of glitches..

</comment><comment><USER57> Why deal with these issues when there are great Windows 10 options from many vendors?

<comment><USER58> The real stopper is the unix-like environment. With MacOS you have (or used to have) a very good UI environment, but could just open a terminal and have all the unix goodness.

I know windows have a terminal too, but apart from being black, they are completely different. PowerShell was promising but cannot (IMHO) replace the old fashioned Bourne Again Shell.

All this makes sad, because my MBP is quite old and the prospect of having to deal with windows again just makes me cry.

<comment><USER59> Windows 10 has a bash shell now via WSL (Windows subsystem for Linux): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux)</comment></comment></comment>


Exclusion of Blacks from Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/politics/exclusion-of-blacks-from-juries-raises-renewed-scrutiny.html

<comment><USER2> This could easily be solved by making a random selection of jurors and alternates from the available pool. have everyone reporting for selection draw a numbered ticket from a hat.

No names, no faces, no questions about what you do for a living, nope, none of that. You get who you asked for, and without the bullshit at the beginning where the lawyer and da (and their jury consultants) work to stack the jury in their favour.

You want peers? Well, any random 12 out of the "random" pool selection ought to about cover it.

And think of all the time it will save. I've been called and ended up sitting there for hours on end. It's a foolish waste of everyone's time. Everyone should report, draw their number, hangout for a bit until they know the total of jurors and alternates they need for each trial, and Bam call the number and send the rest home. I figure it should take a couple of hours at most before there's no more bored disgruntled crowd sitting around.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> >"When the Supreme Court hears the death-penalty case from Georgia, Foster v. Chatman, No. 14-8349, it could reshape the ways juries are selected.

The case arose from the 1987 trial of Timothy T. Foster, an African-American facing the death penalty for killing a white woman, Queen Madge White. Prosecutors worked hard to exclude blacks from the jury.

In notes that did not surface until decades later, they marked the names of black prospective jurors with a B. They highlighted those names in green. They circled the word "black" where potential jurors had noted their race on questionnaires.

They ranked the black prospective jurors in case "it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors," as the prosecution's investigator put it in a draft affidavit at the time.

There was no need for that, though. Prosecutors struck all four black potential jurors."</comment>


PuPHPet - Online GUI configurator for Puppet & Vagrant - <AUTHOR> http://puphpet.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> And here's the accompanying blog post about it: [http://jtreminio.com/2013/05/introduction_to_vagrant_puppet_...](http://jtreminio.com/2013/05/introduction_to_vagrant_puppet_and_introducing_puphpet_a_simple_to_use_vagrant_puppet_gui_configurator/)</comment>


Entrepreneurship Isn't Cool - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/live-your-life-network/entrepreneurship-isnt-cool-stop-glamourising-the-hustle-abda504c388a <comment><USER2> I used to be afraid to hire help during my consulting days that new help my take what seems to be a simple and boring process, and build their own business. I was also struggling to find employees who would be as flexible, determined, curious as I was and thought it is me not figuring out how to find ones, how much to pay, train, etc.

I was also preaching "run your idea as a business" to everyone with the idea. I was also confused by how a post about someone's new office job on the social media would get so many upvotes/likes, yet a post about getting through the struggle with something business-related would rarely get any attention.

Lately, I decided for myself (and I bet my view will change many times as I grow older), that entrepreneurship is somehow wired in the brain. I chatted with my mom this year and found out that nor she, nor her parents, nor parents of my dad ever had any hustling inclinations. My dad had it, although it never materialized in anything sustainable and, unfortunately, alcohol was stronger. So it probably not genetic, but random flukes.

Whenever I talk about something-business, be it investing (nitty-gritty details, not self-made bitcoin millionaires), accounting, various laws in different countries, freight - everyone is bored (my lack of being able to engage with the talk about these topics definitely contributes to that too). Grind just doesn't seem to be cool for the most. What is cool - big survivors of that grinder.

Yet to me the grind itself is what makes me interested and excited. Constant acting in the environment of limited information availability, resource and time constraints. Even if the business itself is boring - the grind is not (to me personally). Also - risks, constant evaluation of risks. Everyone who knows me says I am very risk-averse. I can guarantee - I am taking on some ridiculous risks, but I also have hedges, as I have a family. What I think ultimately was a reason for my father failure was wrong risks evaluation (in a very hostile time and environment, so no surprises there). I hope to learn from it and keep going further...

But it is certainly not glamorous - that's for sure. In fact, it can be very much dark. But few may enjoy the ride.

</comment><comment><USER3> it's mostly a slog that hopefully will make some money after a couple of years.

I've known a few people that wanted to start a business and thought they just needed to come up with a few good ideas, find someone else to do the work, and collect the money.

They wanted to partner with me and essentially be my boss/manager instead of a partner. They all ended up getting jobs, while I'm on my second successful business.

So many people are in love with the idea of a business, but won't be able to follow it to success when things get to tough or they need to actually put the work in.

Very few people have the discipline to start and run a business.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Ideas are worth nothing. Only execution matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Entrepreneurship is amazingly cool and arguably the basis of the history of the United States. Sure, it's hard, but it offers many rewards that working for someone else can't touch.</comment>


Data Is a Loaded Gun - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=558 <comment><USER2> I love how in an article describing how data can be manipulated to meet any conclusion, Matt cites that the stock market has on average gone up 10% every year and real estate has gained 1% since the great depression.

Who here has money invested from the original great depression? Anyone?

I get his point, and agree with the entire piece but using one set of data to show how using another set of data can be misleading is ... silly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did Matt even read that Gladwell article? If so, I'm not sure how the only thing he got out of it was the racetrack anecdote. He makes it out like that was the primary focus, and supporting evidence, of the article.</comment>


Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/34066181522/manifesto

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in this way of thinking, check out Bret Victor's talk Inventing on Principle</comment>


UK Health minister says app should roll out by winter - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340 <comment><USER2> Such a confusing message this article and the UK Health Ministry send. The article's title is currently "Coronavirus: Health minister says app should roll out by winter" for me, but here are a number of contradictory quotes from the article:

> A government minister has said the NHS coronavirus contact-tracing app is > "not a priority" and he was not sure it would be out by winter.

> The app, which has been trialled on the Isle of Wight, was initially > expected to launch nationally weeks ago.

> Mr Gould and Mr Lewis had always expected to move back to their other duties > this month, however they had intended for the app to have had its national > rollout by now.

> "We are seeking to get something going for the winter, but it isn't the > priority for us at the moment," Lord Bethell said in answer to a question > about the app.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even known flu's spike in the winter, so the potential for what will be a second spike of covid-19 around then will be high, even with all measures in place. However, we will be more able to limit death instances by then and progress made every day and by then, may well have a vaccine at the rate things are progressing, however we do not know. Will it mutant nullifying vaccines and with that any immune response, is immunity limited. Still learning lots, but app's and tools like this will be needed, not just for the inevitable, but for the next.

Though the shifting towards more online engagement medical wise is a shift that will have more traction going forward. So be many data access debates regarding medical information ahead in many a country.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Way to Get Started with ML Using JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Andrej Karpathy's blog has examples of JavaScript implementation of Neural Networks. [https://github.com/karpathy/convnetjs](https://github.com/karpathy/convnetjs)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you try Tensorflow.js to run ML on the browser. I think is a good place to start</comment>


Beware the self-taught know it all - <AUTHOR> http://blog.acthompson.net/2013/08/beware-self-taught-know-it-all.html

<comment><USER2> I am absolutely overflowing with computer science PhDs from IBM, CA, and academia. I would give away 10 pompous entitled know-it-all Computer Science PhD types for just one single self-taught know-it-all. Maybe the real problem is that your over-achieving self-taught know-it-all types are unchallenged and agitated by your basic curriculum. Maybe the education system in this country is so abysmally broken, that professors waste their time criticizing talented students on the Internet, while those talented students sit unchallenged in boring basic classes they should not have to take in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Chill out a bit. Classes are for more people than the self-taught know-it- all's in the room. Most of those people attend the class because they want to learn the "basic curriculum" and they probably aren't interested in listening to some self-taught guy argue with the professor.

The author of the article is not condemning people for being self-taught; he's condemning them for being arrogant. I would self-identify as a self-taught know-it-all and understand the behavior he's talking about in the article: pointing out minor inaccuracies in things the professor says, answering every question (to the exclusion of others being able to answer), and asking irrelevant "questions" largely just to demonstrate how much better you are than the other students. It's really not that hard to realize that this behavior is disruptive and avoid it.

<comment><USER2> Arrogance is a disruptive personality characteristic whether the individual is an academoc or self-taught, and no one likes a know-it-all of any type. However, the behaviors you describe are extremely common among gifted and talented individuals, and are part of the reason that such individuals often struggle in the general student population (and real life). Often that talent, enthusiasm, and zest for sharing knowledge that these people possess is interpreted as arrogance. It's no excuse for the behavior - clearly quirky talented types must live in society - but it does mean that the education system should account for these individuals and help them down the road. But it doesn't. The system fails miserably in this regard, and the author of this article needs to realize he is part of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's the gaping holes in their knowledge base, reinforced work-arounds in place because they didn't know there was a gap or that it could be bridged, which I find glaringly problematic. Formal training strives to ensure everything has been covered to an appropriate degree, and subsequent self- teaching is done with an awareness that such thoroughness should be sought. The self-taught know-it-all (as contrasted with self-taught humility) does not grasp the vast fabric of knowledge, instead equating "good enough" with "that's all there is".

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, the computer scientist might still be fiddling with trying to achieve the "correct" architecture long after the self taught guy's software is in production, and earning money.

<comment><USER4> _Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.

This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.

This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.

Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. This ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.

The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that there was a hole, and the supervisors, which should have said that the sensors weren't working properly, weren't working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain - which would have enabled it to see the hole - with them._

\- Douglas Adams, _Mostly Harmless_

To wit: gaping holes in one's understanding can be chronically problematic when what should be in the gaping hole includes that which lets one know that there is, in fact, a gaping hole. One may be capable of proceeding nonetheless (resulting in the rest of the quoted-from book), but with great difficulty.

Of course, arguing over whether Stupid A is stupider than Stupid B is stupid. Better to be neither the self-taught dysfunctional nor the fully-trained dysfunctional. TFA wasn't condemning the self-taught, it was condemning the _arrogant_ self-taught who don't, can't, and won't recognize that there may be a better and simpler way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see the same thing crop up on HN so often - this whole "I taught myself and it works, therefore we should abandon universities and all self-teach". Here's one of these threads: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6176222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6176222)

<comment><USER7> I taught myself and I believe it works for me.

My 2 attempts at going to university ended up being noise with little signal and I dropped out after building up some depression due to that. I had the similar issues with prior schooling and turns out building products with others seems to be the most effective way to learn for me.

It may very well not be the case for everyone so universities have their place, but there were many other flaws in the small subset I've experienced that should be fixed before I consider recommending them.

I also still have friends from that university, and most of them had to learn to self teach as soon as they got out.

So I think... in Computer Science, some people going to universities should self teach instead or find a better university. Showing childrens to teach themselves at an early age and having a school system supporting it could also be a good improvement for the future.

In your quote, the 'all' is probably an over-statement. But more people could give it a try.</comment></comment>


Hacking Growth - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fray.it/post/36131983616/hacking-growth

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but i'd call all that good usability instead of growth hacking. They go hand in hand, yet by applying those tips you don't necessarily impact the reach of your product. Correct me if im wrong please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. They go hand in hand, worth considering next time though.</comment></comment>


Aequitas – An open source bias audit toolkit for machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://dsapp.uchicago.edu/projects/aequitas/ <comment><USER2> I find the premise that different groups should expect the same percentage of interventions highly suspect. Imagine we have a program that distributes seeing eye dogs. This toolkit would discover that sighted persons have a 0% chance of getting a dog, while blind persons have a 50% chance. Oh the injustice!

</comment><comment><USER3> FairML [https://github.com/adebayoj/fairml](https://github.com/adebayoj/fairml) and algofairness [https://github.com/algofairness/BlackBoxAuditing](https://github.com/algofairness/BlackBoxAuditing) are some similar, earlier projects in the same space.

</comment><comment><USER4> If the goal is equity of outcome above-all-else, ignoring for any differences derived from the data, then why are we bothered investing so much time, money and effort into this area?

<comment><USER3> See [https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk- assessm...](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments- in-criminal-sentencing) for a well-known example in this space.

This article: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05469-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05469-3) also highlights the issues pretty well IMO.

It's not just about letting the data speak. The data is gathered by someone, containing historical bias we might nowadays disagree with, models are chosen by people, using parameters set by people, using evaluations set by people. It's about making sure models are both predictive, usable, and fair.

<comment><USER5> Predictive, usable and fair. Pick any two!</comment></comment></comment>


Riak 0.11 released - <AUTHOR> http://downloads.basho.com/riak/riak-0.11/

<comment><USER2> The new backend is called "bitcask". Here is an introduction to it: <http://downloads.basho.com/papers/bitcask-intro.pdf>

This will be fast indeed. They mention 5000-6000 writes per second which seems very low to me however. Then again, they do not mention the size of the values written.

I too became enamored with log-based storage engines in December of last year. I created one myself to play around and learn. I moved on before adding in compaction, but the performance was "excellent" (200K writes per second, 5K random reads per second). Granted, the data model is literally just key-value however.

<http://github.com/fictorial/logstore>

[http://github.com/fictorial/logstore/commit/9ffa46a249a62a78...](http://github.com/fictorial/logstore/commit/9ffa46a249a62a78976f457b2de220ef75c98871)

Read a paper by Ousterhout about log-based storage here:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.117....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.117.5365)

Maybe of interest is a somewhat wacky project in which data is stored in sparse files. The big limitations here are that your system needs support for sparse files, you use a number of pre-created sparse files, and each item's maximum size is fixed. Pretty big limitations! Then again, for trivial purposes, it is ridiculously fast since an item's file and location is trivially computed and I/O uses mmap.

<http://github.com/fictorial/sparsestore>

Sorry, I got excited that there was someone else who was interested in wacky data storage engines!

</comment><comment><USER3> Riak & CAP Thereom

Riak's guiding design principle is Dr. Eric Brewer's CAP Theorem. The CAP theorem defines distributed systems in terms of three desired properties: Consistency, Availability, and Partition (failure) tolerance. The theorem states you can only rely on having two of the three properties at any time.

Riak chooses to focus on the A and P of CAP. The choice puts Riak in the eventually consistent camp. However, the window for "eventually consistent" is in terms of milliseconds which can be good enough for many applications.

<comment><USER4> It's also in the Dynamo family together with Voldemort and Cassandra, but notably it has Map-Reduce (with link following) that these other two don't have.

<comment><USER5> Cassandra has Hadoop integration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Basho have an excellent guide that'll get you a decent practical understanding of Riak in about 45 minutes:

<http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/The+Riak+Fast+Track>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In addition, Basho also released their own benchmarking tool which is quite impressive in it's own right.

<http://github.com/basho/basho_bench>

[http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Benchmarking+with+Basho+B...](http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Benchmarking+with+Basho+Bench)

</comment><comment><USER7> So I'd be interesting to hear if anyone is running this in a prod env? I'm currently evaluating NoSQL at the moment (mongo, cassandra, raven etc etc) so would be interested to hear peoples real world experiences with it?

<comment><USER8> This might be of interest: Next week there is a MongoDB conference in London. I'm giving a talk and they've given me the discount code "ocw" that will give 20% off on registration.

Details: <http://www.10gen.com/conferences/event_mongouk_18june10>

<comment><USER9> Yes, this might be of interest if this thread had anything to do with MongoDB.

<comment><USER8> He mentioned he was evaluating MongoDB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Homepage (I think):

<http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak>

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the homepage for Riak: <http://riak.basho.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow they developed new backend. They really generate lots of interesting code..

</comment><comment><USER12> I like riak, and I think it's the best implement of dynamo.

</comment><comment><USER13> Go Basho!</comment>