Apple Said to Plan First Pro Laptop Overhaul in Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/apple-said-to-plan-first-pro-laptop-overhaul-in-four-years <comment><USER2> I'm a software developer who focuses on operational automation, and this brings almost nothing to the table which I could want. Especially replacing the function keys with a touchpad; why would I want to replace dedicated keys with muscle memory attached to them with soft keys that can change on whim?

Better graphics may be nice, if it's enough to allow me to drive a pair of high-resolution displays in addition to the laptop's screen itself. I'm not hopeful, though, due to the power and heat requirements.

As for thinner, at what cost? Battery life? Active cooling? A nasty keyboard like those in the new macbook? Losing even more ports?

Here's what I want in a MBP refresh: More power. Enough battery life to allow me on a hangout all day long; or at least enough battery life that I can have Chrome running and still be able to code all day long. A strong enough graphics card to smoothly drive a pair of 4k monitors in addition to the internal monitor. No loss of existing ports. More CPU power for compiling code. A touch screen.

<comment><USER3> Why the touch screen?

That seems like an odd addition to the list.

<comment><USER4> I agree, a touch-screen on a 'pro' laptop (unless it's a 2-in-1) is useless.

Also: Please don't ever, ever touch my laptop's screen.

<comment><USER5> I had a co-worker who made threats against anyone whose hands came close to his screen. Even pointing at the screen was enough to get a look of death.

<comment><USER6> I can't stand fingerprints on my monitor, but I don't even notice them on my phone or tablet. Before I got my first touchscreen phone, I was pretty sure the dirty screen would drive me bonkers, but that never happened.

<comment><USER7> That's probably because phones and tablets usually have oleophobic[1] surfaces.

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

<comment><USER8> I seem to have oleophobic-proof fingerprints then. I'm constantly cleaning phone screen (swipe on jeans these days now phone is not spanking-new).

You could easily see my swipe or pin pattern from prints and smudges, even from one use, which never happened with actual keys.

<comment><USER9> The oleophobic coating does vanish with use over a period of time. That's why you wouldn't see fingerprints and such on a new device, but would on an older and well used one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All I want from a new MBP is to easily replace the: battery, ram and SSD. My current one is several years old and has only lasted this long because those parts could be substituted.

I'm guessing it's a lost cause, their ideas aligned with mine for a short window and then they decided to turn it into a gadget rather than a user serviceable computer.

<comment><USER11> This is going to sound cynical and overly negative but I don't understand why people keep posting about replaceable parts on new MacBooks. It'll never happen, as you admit.

<comment><USER10> I am going to replace my laptop this year. I mentioned it in a last gasp hope that it will be an Apple one. I suspect it will be something else though.

It's a pity, but I can't justify spending that sort of money on a professional tool that feels more like it was designed for the consumer market.

<comment><USER12> They sell more in the consumer market than professional market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The real question...what is going to be soldered to the frame, and what will be replaceable.

I bought a 2012 MBP last year because I wanted the ability to swap out its guts at will. I doubt this new version will have that capability.

<comment><USER14> This comment being the top one, my friends, is why our discussions here on HN are completely irrelevant in the great scheme of the consumer hardware market. This is an opinion shared only by a meager minority of the market that may have a big voice, but basically no power in determining the direction of what we'll see shipped in the future.

<comment><USER15> Thank you Captain Obvious! ;) Developer-oriented machines (where beefy hardware, specialized requirements and ability to upgrade parts are still taken as granted, and loss of those is quite mourned) and generic consumer- grade machines are most certainly different markets. Although I'm not sure how MBPs are classified those days.

(E.g. ThinkPads used to have a fame of great programmers' laptops and now they became quite less of that... the very same could easily happen to MBPs as well.)

<comment><USER16> Bit of a shame - the MBP is already pretty expensive, and it would be nice if that had more user replaceable parts (memory, drive mainly) precisely because they're "pro" machine (hence the P). Macbook and Airs - fine - consumer level - soldered, non-replaceable. But for the premium charged... making it easier for me to upgrade/swap my drive would be nice (it's not impossible, I know, but not as easy as it used to be).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The sad thing is that there is so little competition. Apple can afford to be lax with updates to their pro line, because there is no other combination of hardware+software that gets the job done without being a huge time sink.

Before you mention laptops from Lenovo and the like, running Linux, please consider that I have been using Linux since 1994 (that's pre-1.0), and that I switched to mostly Mac sometime around 2006. And I've just installed a fresh Ubuntu on a PC right next to me. So I do know what that option is like. And it isn't even close.

I wish there was a strong competitor to Apple.

<comment><USER18> I've got young kids. Any laptop without a magsafe power connector is going to be starting at a _huge_ disadvantage, as far as my deciding to purchase it. That includes the USB-C-only Macbook.

Add being the only manufacturer (and software company—actually that part's probably more important) that gives even half a damn about battery life, and getting something unixy without the pain of Linux (also a long-time Linux user, so yeah, I know how it is), and my not caring about more than Intel graphics (discrete graphics in a laptop: _always_ a mistake in my experience) and anything _remotely_ close costs just as much anyway, so I'll just go with Apple. Competition would be great, but there's just... none.

<comment><USER19> You can get MagSafe clones for USB-C: [https://griffintechnology.com/us/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c- po...](https://griffintechnology.com/us/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c-power-cable)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've loved the MacBook Pros that I've had in the past. But Apple & I are heading in different directions. Their "Pro" devices are now consumer status symbols, not machines for getting work done.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, the phrase I've heard that I think atly describes the phenomenon well is that Apple is moving into developing Appliances rather than devices for power users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They seriously need to work on the Macbook Pro's cooling. Too much throttling/overheating/heat issues.

The thin strip vent below the LCD simply isn't large enough and the fans not powerful enough to cool a Radeon R9 M370X and the i7.

And, sure, they can direct some of that excess heat to the aluminium body, but that hasn't been effective up until now so I struggle to see why it would start being effective in the future.

<comment><USER23> Agreed, when running VMWare Fusion my 2014 15" MBP runs not only hot but hideously loud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wish they would stop with this obsessive, compulsive need to make everything thinner.

<comment><USER25> I don't. One of my coworkers has a Lenovo X1 and that thing makes my mid-2015 Retina MacBook Pro look chunky by comparison. Thinner, lighter, faster, stronger are all what I want in my next laptop.

<comment><USER26> I'll take "faster and stronger" over "thinner and lighter".

I already carry it in a backpack with other things; I'm not interested in shaving ounces at the expense of power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Apple is using one of AMD's "Polaris" graphics chips

Huge disappointment. MacBook Pro used to have NVIDIA GPUs and was an excellent CUDA development environment. They switched to AMD around 2012. I suspect the change was more business related than technical.

<comment><USER28> AMDs Polaris architecture is also much more power hungry than NVIDIAs Pascal architecture, at least on the desktop variants we've seen so far.

The RX480 (Polaris) trades blows with the GTX1060 (Pascal) performance-wise, but the 1060 uses about 30% less power at load:

[https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1060/...](https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1060/24.html)

<comment><USER29> The RX480 Polaris is about 30% faster than the GTX1060 running DOOM4/Vulkan. Apple's Metal is very similar to Vulkan, so it's quite possible that nVidia Pascal and AMD Polaris have similar power usage while using Metal.

<comment><USER28> Doom 4 is an outlier, the RX480 doesn't consistently gain that much from Vulkan or DX12. You could just as easily point to Tomb Raider DX12, where the 1060 beats the 480 by about 20%.

According to Guru3D the two cards perform almost identically in Ashes of the Singularity and Total War: Warhammer, both AMD-sponsored DX12 games.

<comment><USER29> Tomb Raider doesn't use async compute.

And whether Doom 4 is an outlier or just an example of the difference between Vulkan and DX12 is yet to be determined.

My conjecture is that the big difference between Vulkan and DX12 is that nVidia has put more of it's driver engineering magic into DX12 than it has into Vulkan.

Metal won't have that nVidia driver engineering magic, so I believe that DOOM4 is the best benchmark we have of performance and power consumption for Metal. But one benchmark can be misleading for a wide variety of reasons.

<comment><USER28> Tomb Raider had async compute implemented for GCN and Pascal in a post-release patch, and benchmarks on that patch still pegged the 1060 as ~20% faster than the 480:

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nvidia...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nvidia- geforce-gtx-1060-review)

And conversely, the developers of Doom said their async path is currently only tuned for GCN and will be enabled on Pascal in a future patch.

We've seen from 3DMark Time Spy that Pascal does benefit from async compute, so there's performance being left on the table there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Coming from the same company that proclaimed "can't innovate, my ass" in 2013, I'll believe it when I see it. I've been very frustrated with the lack of direction and the lack of flexibility in the Mac lineup.

I'd like to see a complete and modern revamp of the entire Mac lineup, but it looks like Apple, with a lot of money (even considering the U.S. alone), is not capable of focusing on Macs anymore. Or more likely, Apple decided that the sales of Macs wasn't worth spending more on them, while all along requiring app developers for all its platforms (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) to necessarily build their apps on Macs.

It would be nice to get all the Macs being actively improved, but the Buyer's Guide on Macrumors doesn't give much hope. :(

</comment><comment><USER30> Still will have horrible GPUs. I at least want to occasionally play a game and not just code. My ancient 2009 Mac Pro won't run Sierra but at least I could sometimes update the video card. The Mac Pro is way out of date. Only the top iMac is vaguely decent.

<comment><USER28> Hopefully Apple will at least support Thunderbolt 3s external GPU profile, so you can attach something like the Razer Core.

<comment><USER31> I wouldn't expect Apple to make it that easy given their history of extremely overpriced video cards and custom BIOSes for them. I would be shocked if an external GPU solution on Macs were supported and sold for less than $700 and Apple-approved GPUs go for less than 30% mark-ups from aftermarket retail pricing. So at that point I'd honestly expect an Apple GTX 1080 solution to cost well over $1500. For that price almost anyone would just buy a dedicated gaming machine and not bother with the Apple ecosystem that's hostile to PC gaming by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would simply like MacBook Airs, 11 and 13 inch screens, which 1080 screen resolution, and slightly thicker to accommodate the larger battery that would be required.

I am not the typical user since I do much of my development and long calculations on beefed up remote servers.

I am almost to the point of being able to use a tablet when I only need one SSH shell and a Chromebook when I need many shells open and visible reference material on the screen. My 1080p Chromebook and my iPad Pro are so useful for getting stuff done that I may never buy a conventional laptop again (I have 3 very functional Linux laptops, which should be sufficient for years).

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems like the addition of the keyboard screen will make things a bit more complicated if you ask me. I just want a Macbook Air with a retina display... ugh #IfSteveWereHere

<comment><USER34> Do people even use function keys? The only shortcuts I've seen people use are Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. I think this is a step backward because it'll make it harder to touch-type and there's a possibility that the word processor can remove your volume controls.

<comment><USER35> I use F3 to search everywhere. Also my byobu actions are all tied to the F keys. I hate those laptops that default to Fn instead of F and provide no toggle between them.

<comment><USER36> > _I hate those laptops that default to Fn instead of F and provide no toggle > between them._

Agreed…Apple don't provide a simple toggle, thankfully there's a free third- party widget for this (called "FunctionFlip").

<comment><USER37> Yes they do. There is a checkbox under System Preferences > Keyboard. Though, function flip seems to work on a per key basis. While the apple toggle will toggle all of the F keys.

<comment><USER36> Oh, I wasn't aware of that, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I hope they let us configure it with 32gb ram and a 2tb ssd. Also hoping that they release a new external display at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the loss of the ESC key. I use Vim and touch that key all day long. Replacing that with a touch button sounds like a terrible idea for usability. Clearly nobody in charge at Apple is also a vi user.

Beyond not removing the ESC key, I want 32-64 GB RAM, a 2TB drive option (or more), and no more weight.

<comment><USER40> Typing with my splinted-for-carpal-tunnel hands: for the love of God, if you're using vim all day, then map Esc to CapsLock or something else near your home row, or one day you will be wearing these things too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> USB-C finally becomes a standard. Hopefully, the PC market joins in so we can make this a quick transition.

<comment><USER42> It will take a while (keyboards and the lot are gonna be usb2/3 for some time) but the newer asus mobos (and I'm amusing others) have a USB-C jack on the back.

Luckily, usb-c has usb2 pins right in the middle of it, so I don't see it taking longer than a decade.

<comment><USER41> 10 years? It won't take that long. Samsung is already starting the switch with the Galaxy Note, and there will be a billion phones within a few years. Every new Mac will be USB-C. PC's will push it over the edge when they include C and legacy ports. Two small additional ports shouldn't be that hard to include.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> From the outside I think it is fine as it is right now, no need to be thinner, fix cooling, bump up the hardware and expand battery because of stronger hardware. Those touch fn keys and everything are again gimmicks and something that should attract wide masses, for which MB PRO is not!!! It is a machine for professional work, and Apple should listen to people from industry not average consumers. For average users there is MB.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm kind of surprised by the surprise generated by MacBook Pro resilience on the market. What were they expecting? That everybody would buy an iPad? Mom and Dad sure, but professionals? More and more I have the feeling that the MacBook Pro is the go-to laptop not only in startups but also in more established companies. That's what I've been given at my past 3 companies, and almost all devs were using that.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder how a thinner model and more powerful graphics will affect heat in this generation.

I realize this entirely personal, but as long as Apple keeps ignoring heat in hand areas, I'll keep doing my programming on something else.

<comment><USER46> Like an external keyboard / screen so you won't get back problems due to unhealthy posture?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Hopefully they'll release a line of either MacBooks, or MacBook Airs using the iPad Pro's processor (or similar ARM offering). It's more then up to the task of most users needs, plus far more power efficient then Intel's offerings.

I've been waiting for Apple to make this change for years. It's seems only logically as it is their processor, in their ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER48> Looks like these changes in design will make older MacBook Pros more expensive and desirable commodity. "Oh dude - that familiar keyboard for Vi, they are not making those anymore, and look how many ports". Buy the old one while you can, these new changes are unwelcome from many perspectives.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sadly it seems Apple keeps putting design/looks above actual functionality (i.e. letting Jony Ive make decisions). I can (and do) use that top row just fine right now without looking at it. Changing that to a screen that I have to look at does not save me time or make things simpler.

</comment><comment><USER50> Glad to hear it won't have a tapered design. Not sure if it really needs to be thinner or lighter than the current rMBP but I'm fine as long as it keeps a keyboard that actually has some depth. Typing on the MBA and new MB is not a good experience.

</comment><comment><USER51> I just hope they don't use the absolutely terrible keyboard design from the new Macbooks in this. There's virtually no key travel in order to shave off a few mm. It sort of makes sense in the Macbook segment, but definitely not in a Pro machine.

</comment><comment><USER52> What's with this fetish of hardware manufacturers making keyboards as terrible as possible these days? It seems I'm going to be using X220s until the end of time.

(Not to mention Apple's departure from any sort of replaceable hardware components)

</comment><comment><USER53> Hopefully the omission of mentioning HDMI/Mini DisplayPorts means they are staying...

<comment><USER54> Leaked pics of body parts had only five pors:

\- 4x USB-C \- Minijack

So I would assume apple goes hard for 4 multi-purpose USB-C instead.

<comment><USER55> USB-C can be electrically compatible with Displayport. So a cheap 5-dollar adapter should do the trick.

<comment><USER22> Seems like every time an Apple product is release I wind up with a dozen more adapters...

<comment><USER56> Adaptors really are a stop gap. But yeah, in the short term its a pest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> TouchId coming to the MacbookPro will bring the secure element from the Iphone with it.

I'm hoping they also use the secure element to implement SecureBoot of only signed software. Ideally this could be disabled like in a Chromebook

</comment><comment> vladimir-y I wonder will functional touchpad keys work on non Mac OS (Linux, Windows) since I guess some custom drivers are involved. I'd consider macbook pro buying, but for Linux. Thunderbolt 3 support is a must.

</comment><comment><USER58> The touchpad function keys seem a bit gimmick-y to me. I guess I'll have to see it in action. I quite like the tactile feel when I'm trying adjust volume, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER59> There is also the unaddressed issue of how terrible OLED displays are for anything persistent (they burn in), consume power when idle and offer no tactile feedback.

I hope this is a hoax.

</comment><comment><USER60> Geez people here are talking about power and I'm using a 12" Macbook running Windows 10 to do .NET development without issue at all.

</comment><comment><USER61> I can probably live without some of the bells and whistles, but please give us an option for 32GB of RAM (even if it is soldered to the mobo).

<comment><USER29> Most Intel laptop CPU's are limited to 16GB. A few Skylake CPUs support 32GB if DDR4 is used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> And please, allow me to open it up and put new/more RAM and an m.2 ssd in there. (One may hope)

<comment><USER63> But then the laptop will be half a millimeter thicker and you will see some screws on the bottom. The horror.

/s

<comment><USER64> If you don't give a shit about design, get one of the other million laptops that are available. The MacBook doesn't try to be everyone's everything. That's part of what makes it such a good device.

I don't understand why people fail to understand that thinner, lighter and better looking are things that millions of people want. If that's not you, you seriously couldn't have more options available.

<comment><USER65> You make a good point, and for those people the Macbook should be a great machine. The disappointment is for the "Pro" market, as in Macbook "Pro".

<comment><USER66> The "Pro" stands for "Problematic".

But yeah, my next machine purchase will not be an Apple. If I need OSX support, I'll look at the current Hackintosh install lists and go VM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Not sure if I am that excited with this overhaul. I guess Touch ID is a nice addition.

<comment><USER68> It's great on smartphone, but useless on laptop. PC laptops have had fingerprint scanners since forever.

<comment><USER64> That's ridiculous, it's not useless anywhere. What's useless is how shitty fingerprint readers were before TouchID.

TouchID isn't just a reimplementation, it's a massive technological improvement that elevates consumer fingerprint readers from gimmicky afterthoughts to a core part of UX.

"PC laptops had it and it never took off" is a horrible metric to judge anything. If the technology and implementation is trash, then of course it's not going to take off. That's why being first to do anything is a meaningless milestone. Be first to do it well, and you might as well have invented it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Is the LED strip likely to be blue light? That would be very bad for night use.

</comment><comment><USER70> > AMD

Literally all I want for my pro work is CUDA calculation....

</comment><comment><USER71> "PRO Laptop" means PROfessional use. PROfessionals work in environments where wireless bandwidth is a premium. PROfessionals use gigabit ethernet. Please include it. Please stop the War on Ports™ in your PROfessional lineup.

Consumers use wireless. A dongle is a good choice for them since they won't likely use ethernet. Here Dongle Driven Development™ is the proper methodology.</comment>


Groundbreaking discovery could pave way for use of stem cells in medicine - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Groundbreaking-discovery-could-pave-way-for-routine-use-of-stem-cells-in-medicine/articleshow/29559517.cms <comment><USER2> I am a bioinformatician working on regeneration. Two interesting observations here aside from the primary observation that stem cells can be made from stress:

\- This only worked with differentiated cells from newly born animals. It didn't work with adults. They should investigate further to see what kind of epigenetic changes occurred throughout the lifetime of the animal to inhibit this stress response. This reminds me a bit of the aneurogenic limb experiments in salamanders. Is this a difference between development and regeneration?

\- The stem cells can make placental tissue. How did they determine this? Are they suggesting these cells are essentially totipotent?

</comment><comment><USER3> In many ways what's most interesting about this from a biological standpoint is that it explains why stem cells have been found all over the body in previous experiments. This "stress-induced" pluripotency suggests a general mechanism that the body uses to deal with stress. In effect cells are made with the intrinsic capability to respond to injury, by simply turning into stem cells.

<comment><USER4> So our bodies might produce a low PH environment for 25 minutes in response to stress?

(I don't mean that to sound sarcastic but I couldn't seem to get the phrasing right)

<comment><USER5> From a short glance at the paper it seems that they don't know yet what the mechanism is that triggers the conversion. It might be that it is not triggered specifically by low pH, but by some downstream mechanism that can also be triggered by other kinds of stress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Offtopic: Just curious why this submission is beating out mine: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143500)

Is BBC frowned on, maybe?

<comment><USER6> There's an experimental algorithm on HN that determines how much is a user concerned with karma. Apparently, your karmic anxiety is more prominent than the competition. Hence, the penalty.

<comment><USER4> I'll admit to having "karmic anxiety", actually.

I'm trying to get to 500 points so I can have a "seat at the table" so to speak. (I think that's when you get a lot of new voting privileges and such?)

<comment><USER7> Here's a vote to help you with your karmic anxiety. Although are you sure when you hit 500 you won't find a new karmic anxiety threshold? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not only is this groundbreaking with respect to the potential ease of harvesting stem cells, it could also likely change the 'debate' on stem cells. If all we need to harvest them is some ordinary cells and acid, then the whole 'embryo' debate should no longer be an obstacle.

<comment><USER9> As another poster says, there was not ever a substantive "debate" with regard to ordinary stem cells, only ones derived from fetal tissues and discarded fertilized embryos from IVF.

One of the things about the embryonic stem cell debate I always found maddening is that none of the proponents of using them had a solid answer to overcoming immune rejection problem. If you're going to make new organs from someone else's tissue, you have a lot of heavy lifting to do to make sure those things don't cause the recipient to attack the cells/tissues that you've transplanted. This is a _massive_ problem with organ transplants generally, and I see no reason why stem cells wouldn't be in the same category (though I'd love to know if my knowledge is outdated/wrong).

Even assuming that there are ways to get around the immune system (e.g. taking anti-rejection meds). It is likely far easier and safer to work with pluripotent cells from an adult who is also both the donor and recipient. Even if there's a genetic defect that needs to be "patched" prior to re- implantation, that is _far_ easier than trying to make a foreign cell look like it's from you or being on meds for the rest of your life so your body doesn't attack that new liver.

<comment><USER10> Two words, Therapeutic Cloning. From the center for Bioethics and Human Dignity([http://cbhd.org/stem-cell-research/overview](http://cbhd.org/stem- cell-research/overview)):

6\. What is the relationship between embryonic stem cell research and "therapeutic" cloning?

Another potential obstacle encountered by researchers engaging in embryonic stem cell research is the possibility that embryonic stem cells would not be immunologically compatible with patients and would therefore be "rejected," much like a non-compatible kidney would be rejected. A proposed solution to this problem is to create an embryonic clone of a patient and subsequently destroy the clone in order to harvest his or her stem cells. Cloning for this purpose has been termed "therapeutic" cloning—despite the fact that the subject of the research—the clone—is not healed but killed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Did I read it correctly -- that they actually transformed blood cells into an entire mouse _fetus_??

<comment><USER12> Yeah, that's basically what they did. They took the stem cells they created and put them in a blastocyst (a very early form of a fertilized egg) and a mouse developed.

It's actually a pretty impressive discovery. They took a spleen sample, separated out the lymphocytes and exposed them to a pH of 5.7 for 25 min out comes a stem cell!

<comment><USER13> Here's a video of the mouse embryo, with a beating heart and all: [http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/jan/29/mouse-e...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/jan/29/mouse- embryo-beating-heart-stap-cells-video)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently the scientist responsible for this discovery is a 30 year old Japanese woman that struggled for 5 years to convince her colleagues that she could be right.

She was told more than once that what she was proposing was wrong and that she should give up.

A young Japanese woman going against the status quo in Japan for 5 years is a very hard thing to do.

I congratulate her courage - I might benefit from it one day.

<comment><USER15> This might be a totally stupid question but I couldn't find the answer on the web and all the other comments are from yesterday. But are conditions in the womb acidic? I'm just wondering, that if DNA works at all like computer code, then maybe cells have programming to work a certain way in certain conditions and maybe it's not so much that a cell undergoes a permanent change when it matures but that the old programming just doesn't run anymore?

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r Any reason to believe this is real? It seems slightly impossible, like cold fusion.

<comment><USER5> It is published in a very high profile journal, and it looks to be rather easy to replicate these experiments. I would guess that everybody in that field is setting up similar experiments right now.

Trying to fake this result would be rather stupid, it would be almost inevitable to be caught. That doesn't prove this is not fake, but I expect that we'll know reasonably soon how well this can be reproduced in other labs.

<comment> mark-r Thanks for taking my comment seriously. The lack of technical detail combined with the simplicity of the method just set off my BS detector. "Miracle cures just around the corner" is a constant distraction. Didn't notice that it was being published in Nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> yes pls ... turn my skin into knee cartilage.</comment>


Show HN: Lightweight Torrent Search Engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.nexxus.io/

<comment><USER2> This is a great site, but one thing bothers me - your policy when it comes to DMCA takedown requests.

If this becomes well-known, you'll get so many DMCAs that there'll be nothing worth downloading. Is that just there to keep the movie/music industries happy, or will you actually be responding to every takedown request?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had it in my mind to try and respond to every takedown request, but I have very specific instructions that should hinder mass takedowns.

Also, if there is a flood of takedowns, response time will take longer.

And, there is nothing stopping from someone uploading the same file under another torrent. (although this will hurt seeders/leechers)

But we will see. I don't think this will become too popular so hopefully I don't have to worry to much

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do you keep your magnet link database fresh? Do you crawl the web for those links or do you rely exclusively on people uploading them? Sorry if the question doesn't make sense, I'm not very familiar with how BitTorrent works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I am pulling from other sources like Kickass and other torrent sites to ensure I gain new torrents along with uploads. Right now there are 6+ million torrents that are being scraped/updated with more being added

<comment><USER4> What do you mean with updated? Are you scraping the individual pages for all those torrents on Kickass (and others)? Some more technical details would be lovely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Several sites provide apis or daily dumps of their torrents, so I am loading them, indexing them, and then scraping the trackers for their information.

How technical do you want?

<comment><USER4> As technical as you're willing to get :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Daily dumps are pulled from torrent sites. I grab each hash and title and store those. Then all the new torrents, I grab the hash, and scrape the demonii tracker to get seeder/leecher information.

Also at the same time, I am constantly scraping the demonii tracker for seeder/leecher information for older torrents based on age.

It currently takes 5 days to update all the torrents, but I will be implementing an auto-pruning system for torrents that are dead for so long, negative votes, etc etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does clicking on the username do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Gives you the hash that generates your user ID. This is only important if you upload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> s/dcma/dmca/

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks! Can't believe I missed that....</comment></comment>


Create HTML5 Games in the Browser with PixieEngine - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pixieengine.com/

<comment><USER2> This has been shown off a few times at SuperHappyDevHouse lightning talks doing livecoding demos. The ability to pause the game you're working on, edit attributes and resources, and resume the game is neat (and needs to be shown off better).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, major props to everyone at SHDH and South Bay Game Jam for all the feedback. We're still working on improving the systems, especially the documentation and livecoding libraries. Thanks for your feedback we'll be making more tutorials and demos and releasing them on the blog and the forums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've used this for a few small games I cranked out at the South Bay Game Jams. Being able to edit the code in the online IDE and see the changes immediately in the running game makes it really easy to tweak the gameplay.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks pretty good. A while back I purchased a license for ImpactJS and that is a bit more polished than this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, ImpactJS looks really nice. The main difference is that PixieEngine doesn't require any download or dev environment set up, so it's easy to get started. Additionally all of our libraries are open source and available on github. We hope that this ease of getting started and open collaboration will more rapidly lead to higher quality platform.

<comment><USER4> Yep, getting into the hosting business is a smart move. Games are bigger files, so even something like AppEngine can be expensive to host if you have a lot of users. There's definitely going to be a market for dedicated HTML5 game hosting environments, and by open-sourcing the libraries your platform is going to be very attractive to developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. And there are obvious paths to export games for mobile devices so this could be the best cross-platform development environment for 2D games.

The hardest and most time consuming part of game development is iteration and livecoding makes that so much easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget 3D thanks to WebGL, which has a native export path to OpenGL ES. Though truth be told we don't have the 3d libs in place yet, but they will be coming.</comment></comment>


Thinking in Datomic - <AUTHOR> http://pelle.github.com/Datomic/2012/07/08/thinking-in-datomic/ <comment><USER2> The temporal aspect seems to be somewhat ignored by mainstream db development - in some fields, e.g. BI you'll have slowly changing dimensions; and the event sourcing pattern promises a time-machine view on data.

Since I'm writing a history-aware application at the moment, I recently looked into different patterns for this and trying a mixed strategy at the moment (SQL DB used as document store and a single event log, that accumulates changes - a lean approach though, a few hundred lines python for the data access layer; what always gets ugly is the validation, which your application must take care of).

I wish, there was more hands-on material on the subject (some resources dive depth into bi-temporal modeling, but I feel your schemas can get complex (= expensive) very fast).

<comment><USER3> Big Data by Nathan Marz is a Manning Early Acces book (i.e. not fully written yet) that explains how to hand-roll your own custom Datomic style DB in Hadoop/HBase.

It might be of interest to you given your current project.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the tip, will take a look at it. Probably after this project, the current app _must_ be lean (no big dependencies, just install a database scheme, pip install and go).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There have been numerous triple stores. Mozilla/Firefox even used one as its core backend for a while before ripping it out and replacing it with SQLite. Why do you think those failed, and how is Datomic going to avoid the same failures?

That is, I've seen this pitched as the solution to all our data woes numerous times now, why is this time different?

<comment><USER3> It's not a triple store. It's closer to an OODBMS focused on persisting large object graphs with an immutable append-only datastructure, thus maintaining full history and being quite scalable with a single-writer many-reader configuration.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is actually implemented more like a triple store than an oodbms. Just with time added as a 4th parameter.

Their Entity class makes it feel a bit like an oodbms though in that it kind of acts like a hash map.

<comment><USER3> Could you explain how it's more like a triple store with a time parameter?

My previous explanation already papered over a ton of fundamental differences in order to make a somewhat understandable generalization, but I can't make the jump to triple-store from my understanding of Datomic.

I basically see it as "just a single-writer many-reader distributed fully persistent data-structure."

<comment><USER4> I'm sort of sorry to turn this around on you, because it's generally poor form, but given the contents of the linked article which describes Datomic exclusively in the form of timestamped triples, can you explain how it's _not_ a triple store?

If it's because you store objects as many triples with the same subject and different adjectives... err, well, yes, that's how you store objects in a triple store. Not remotely new, and still subject to my initial question.

<comment><USER3> The article leads people to confuse the chosen view (triples) with the model (versioned object graph.)

The main difference is that in Datomic the timestamps don't identify a single fact but the entire object graph at that point in time.

To make an analogy; saying that Datomic is just a triple store is about the same as saying that git is just a store for lists of diffs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Couldn't you just model your data in a traditional RDBMS with a time stamp as well? In fact for mutable data that you'd like to keep old versions of, this is pretty standard. A simple design would be to have a separate table for person_locations that mapped a person to a location.

With everything else, the standard RDBMS table could be considered as having a 'snapshot' of the Datomic values.

I'm still not sure what benefit this has over a traditional DB. Perhaps I'll just have to wait for the next post.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can do it all yourself if you want, but Datomic does it for you without you having to do anything.

Also as it does it on a datom level it is a lot more efficient than versioned rows.

Interestingly one of the early selling points of Postgresql was this time travel functionality. But it was yanked out in 6.2

<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.3/interactive/c0503.htm>

<comment><USER5> Yes, but you also loose the flexibility of _not_ doing it. I'd rather work in an established RDMBS and configure in the design I'd like to use rather than use a database that requires a specific configuration.

I'm sure that Datomic has it's place, but the examples you gave in this post aren't that convincing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you this is not on its own necessarily a good reason to switch to Datomic.

I will be getting into more detailed examples later. My real point with this post was more to talk about how to model the data using datoms and not specifically the temporal aspects of it.

I made many mistakes in my original data models in datomic based on many years of rdbms thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Datomic is so different than regular databases that your average developer will probably chose to ignore it."

Playing to the _Well I'm obviously above average_ gut feeling. Cute.</comment>


How To Get Press For Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstudentunion.com/2011/11/09/lessons-learned-from-fetchnotes-press-push/

<comment><USER2> All great notes for noobs or the seasoned pro.</comment>


When One-Way Latency Doesn't Matter - <AUTHOR> http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post2353_when-one-way-latency-doesnt-matter

<comment><USER3> There has been a long debate in Special Relativity over whether the one way speed of light is even measurable in principle, with some claiming ingenious experimental setups are able to gauge it while others criticise those for making some assumption about synchronising clocks that presumes the result.

Then: if one accepts the one way speed of light is indeed not measurable and that only two way speed of light need be homogenous, it will follow that any one way speed is a result of convention in synchronizing clocks and we thinking in terms of 2 way speed is unphysical.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light>

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish the article would at least point out the cardinal rule of time duration measurement: always use the same clock to measure the "start" and the "end". There's a lot of verbiage but the key point is lost.

As an example of a discussion where someone made much ado about what turns out to be a clock issue:

Original article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5146508>

My comment (which reflected the essence of the article): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5146805>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right, although keep in mind that 'start' may not be 'when the packet was sent'.

For example, when you measure the difference between two paths (e.g. A->D vs A->B->C->D), the 'start' is one arrival time and the 'end' is the other arrival time.

There's actually a few simple consequences I didn't mention in the post. Maybe in the future I'll try to include more.

For example, I mention that it's a good thing we can model games as 'all players seeing the same time'. This is probably how most players actually model the game in their head! If it didn't work, online games would be a lot harder to understand, differ more from reality, and generally be less fun!

<comment><AUTHOR> Correction, what's important is that the skews from each clock are cancelled. Doing both measurements on one clock is a special case.

For example, if you measure the skewed time for A->D as (arrival time on D) - (send time on A) and then later measure the skewed time for A->B->C->D in the same way, you can get the non-skewed path difference by subtracting the two skewed times.

<comment><USER4> That's actually incorrect because of drift (if D's clock is faster than A's clock, if you don't correct for drift the measurements can't be reliably compared). You'd have to correct for drift for every step (A->B, B->C, C->D) before you start.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I was assuming negligible clock drift between when each measurement was performed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In networked realtime multiplayer games you will never see the exact state the game world currently is in, but you will see a very close (based on your latency) approximation of it. In reality, between the network packets you recieve you use alot of tricks like client side prediction and interpolation/extrapolation to make a very good guess at the current state of the game world.

If your latency and that of the other players is reasonable you dont feel the very minor corrections taking place all the time. Getting this right from an engineering point of view is easier said than done though :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I ran into this in the domain of networking.

Trying to deduce one-way path latency from the round-trip time ("ping") is impossible without further assumptions. You basically cannot understand if you are on a wire connection or if your uplink is via a sat by looking at just the ping output. You can try an bounce ping off multiple servers, relay pings and gather RTT properties over any graph path that includes your node and test servers, and yet you will always come one equation short for solving the linear system you'd end up with.

\-- However --

If you make an assumption about some property of some path, then - boom - <USER2> _can_ find the one-way latency for any edge on the graph. For example, if you have two test servers that sit on a backbone, you can assume the path latency between them is about the same either way. This gives you an extra linear for the system and this in turn lets you calculate the one-way latency between you and either of these servers.

It's a pretty neat problem. Makes you think, laterally.

</comment><comment><USER7> The puzzle overstates the importance of figuring out the protocol in practical applications. Why does it matter whether or not you are in a 2:2 case versus a 3:1 case in something like games (their example)?

The problem of networked games isn't strictly timing. The actual problem is the illusion of real time play. We want networked players to feel like everything is happening in real time. But their changes to the shared world might, due to latency, be mutually incompatible.

The puzzle is not making a system that is accurate—that's trivial (it involves a lot of waiting). The puzzle is making a system that appears to be in real time.

<comment><AUTHOR> If there was a way to distinguish 2:2 from 3:1, it would affect how networked games played out. It would affect how ordering violations were resolved, which is pretty important in games ("Did I block before that punch landed?"). It so happens that the cases can't be distinguished, so it "doesn't matter".

As an analogy, what would the world be like if the speed of light wasn't invariant with respect to velocity? It happens to "not matter" because the speed of light is invariant in that way, but it's still an interesting question.

<comment><USER7> It certainly matters to adjudication. But perhaps the question players care about is not quite, "Did I block before that punch landed?" (a very important question), but, "I just blocked, but he hit me for some reason anyway."

That is to say, players get upset (1) if something seems to violate their own worldview, due to adjudication. Naively, we could solve that case by running the timesteps of the simulation slower than the greatest latency (or more accurately, when heartbeats from all players have been received for a given timestep). That would introduce us to another reason players get upset: (2) if the game is really laggy.

I'm glad you bring up relativity as an example. The best method games have for improving the real-time illusion is locality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slightly off-topic, but what was made to make those animated diagrams?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm more comfortable animating with code than with a tool like flash or after effects, so I generate animations myself with custom code.

I use the RenderTargetBitmap and GifBitmapEncoder classes (plus GIMP afterwards to fix the frame delays and repeat count, and cut down the file size a bit) to translate what's showing in a WPF app into a gif.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> OK, it's 4am, so presumably part of my brain is asleep, but I'm missing something here. If the latencies were unconstrained, I would agree that it is impossible to solve the initial riddle. However, since it states that there are only two possibilities, 2s:2s or 3s:1s, it sure seems solvable to me. You have two equations and three variables, but you don't need to solve for the three variables. You can eliminate the skew and end up with a single equation and two variables - the two latencies. That allows you to solve for the difference between the latencies. And since the possibilities are constrained, that is sufficient to solve the problem.

Of course, in a real world scenario the possible latencies would not be discrete, so indeed the problem would not be solvable. But that's not how it was presented. So either the puzzle was poorly constructed as an analogy for the real-world scenario, or (more likely) my sleepy brain is missing something fundamental. Somebody help me out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pick some simple protocol. Draw a sequence diagram of what it does for the 2s:2s case, using a clock skew of 0s. Now draw sequence diagram of what happens for the 3s:1s case, using a clock skew of 1s or -1s (depending on which direction you put the asymmetry in).

Both diagrams contain the exact same interactions. The protocol will return the same thing in both cases.

<comment><USER9> Ah yes, and looking at it in the morning, my resulting single equation is degenerate. I had a sign wrong last night, which suggested I'd solved for the difference between the two latencies. Actually (of course) I'd solved for the sum of the two latencies, which as the article mentioned, is all you can really determine. _facepalm_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article misses that unequal lag gives less lagged game players the edge

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no advantage to having different one-way latencies, as long as the round trip time is held constant.

A player with all delay on sending TO the server will have to wait for their actions to be received, whereas the player with a large delay on receiving FROM the server will be reacting to 'old' states. These two situations happen to be indistinguishable.</comment></comment>


Apple File System - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/APFS_Guide/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016999 <comment><USER3> > Flash / SSD Optimization

I.e., a "unique copy-on-write design"

> Space Sharing

Basically, ZFS datasets.

> Snapshots

If those can be sent: Finally Time Machine done right.

> The AFP protocol is deprecated and cannot be used to share APFS formatted > volumes.

Interesting.

> An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to > document and publish the APFS volume format when Apple File System is > released in 2017.

Yay!

Limitations: [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/docum...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/APFS_Guide/UsingtheAppleFileSystem/UsingtheAppleFileSystem.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016999-CH4-DontLinkElementID_24)

Edit:

> encryption models for each volume in a container: no encryption, single-key > encryption, or multi-key encryption with per-file keys for file data and a > separate key for sensitive metadata

Nice. I hope they also include checksums for each block.

Famously missing, but not the hardest thing to add considering all the features above: Compression (which HFS+ supports!)

<comment><USER4> __> The AFP protocol is deprecated and cannot be used to share APFS formatted volumes. Interesting. __

That is really interesting. I recognised with El Capitan that it already defaults to SMB instead of AFP when you don 't give a scheme.

<comment><USER5> AFP is also a security disaster. Check out the spec for "DHX2" [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Networ...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Networking/Conceptual/AFP/AFPSecurity/AFPSecurity.html)

<comment><USER6> Can you provide some details about what's wrong with it? (Not a security person, no idea how to evaluate such a claim)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The spartan description of APFS certainly sounds like the (partial) feature list for ZFS--the comparisons made in the comments here are on-point. ZFS though took around 5 years to ship and, arguably, another 5-10 to get right. I say this having shipped multiple products based on ZFS, writing code in ZFS, and diagnosing production problems with it.

On-disk consistency ("crash protection"), snapshots, encryption, and transactional interfaces ("atomic safe-save") will no doubt be incredibly valuable. I don't think though though that APFS will dramatically improve upon the time it took ZFS to mature from a first product to world-class storage.

Some commenters have opined that (despite Apple distributing ZFS for Mac OS X at WWDC nearly a decade ago) that ZFS would never be appropriate for the desktop, phone, or watch. True ZFS was designed for servers and storage servers, but I don't think there's anything that makes it innately untenable in those environments--even its default, but not essential, use of lots of RAM.

Who knows... maybe Apple have spent the decade since killing their internal ZFS port taking this new filesystem though the paces. Its level of completeness though would suggest otherwise.

<comment><USER8> Between the ZFS-like features and the advertised "novel copy-on-write metadata" scheme, I would not be surprised if it was partially based on DragonFly's HAMMER/HAMMER2 filesystem.

<comment><USER7> It would be a strange kind of NIH that excluded ZFS but welcomed HAMMER...

<comment><USER9> Licensing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Siracusa will finally be happy. ;-)

Sounds an awful like like ZFS (zero-cost clones, read-only snapshots) but could it be? I would imagine they'd start from scratch to due IP issues.

Clearly this is immature technology they want to get out for testing/evaluation before it's fully adopted even into their own products. (See below.)

\- - - from the release notes - - -

As a developer preview of this technology, there are currently several limitations:

Startup Disk: APFS volumes cannot currently be used as a startup disk.

Case Sensitivity: Filenames are currently case-sensitive only.

Time Machine: Time Machine backups are not currently supported.

FileVault: APFS volumes cannot currently be encrypted using FileVault.

Fusion Drive: Fusion Drives cannot currently use APFS.

<comment><USER11> "FileVault: APFS volumes cannot currently be encrypted using FileVault. "

This one is confusing, because this is a logical volume feature. Not sure how or why APFS would ever care that some layer above it is encrypting stuff.

<comment><USER12> Err, per [1]

> APFS supports encryption natively. You can choose one of the following > encryption models for each volume in a container: no encryption, single-key > encryption, or multi-key encryption with per-file keys for file data and a > separate key for sensitive metadata. APFS encryption uses AES-XTS or AES- > CBC, depending on hardware. Multi-key encryption ensures the integrity of > user data even when its physical security is compromised.

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/docum...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/APFS_Guide/GeneralCharacteristics/GeneralCharacteristics.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016999-CH2-SW1)

<comment><USER11> I wonder why they went this route.

Most apple volumes are already logical volumes (check diskutil list).

FileVault itself is, right now, implemented as part of corestorage (see diskutil cs for the encryption/decryption commands).

I assume they decided they just wanted to go the entire ZFS route and get rid of core storage in favor of a pool model, but still ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > It is optimized for Flash/SSD storage and features strong encryption, copy- > on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, > snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, and improved > file system fundamentals.

\o/ Hallelujah, something modern!

<comment><USER14> I was excited to until I read the limitations section. Can't be used as the startup disk and doesn't work with time machine.

Hopefully this with change in the next macOs release.

<comment><USER13> Sure, this is a developer preview. Final release in 2017 will surely make this FS the default.

<comment><USER15> That's what people were hoping for with ReFS from Microsoft, which released years ago, but that still hasn't happened yet.

<comment><USER16> Apple is far more willing to switch to more newer technologies than Microsoft is.

<comment><USER17> ... and Microsoft is far more willing than Apple to put effort into backwards compatibility.

<comment><USER18> I don't know about that. Apple switched processor architectures twice, and both times software written for the old arch ran on the new one. And when they replaced their entire operating system, they not only made it so you could still program against the old API—just recompile and go—they also made it possible to run the old OS inside the new one so you could still run apps that hadn't yet been recompiled.

<comment><USER19> And before that, when Apple made the 68k -> PPC transition in the mid-90s, they ran the whole system under a crazy, bizarre emulator that allowed for function-level interworking - 68k code could directly call PowerPC code, and vice versa. Early PowerPC systems were in fact running an OS that was mostly composed of 68k code; it wasn't until 1998 or 1999 (around the release of the iMac) that most of the Toolbox was ported to PowerPC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just saw a comment in another thread, stating Apple had slipped in improving their Unix layer, and here comes this. New file system is not a joking matter: Microsoft failed to deliver their new FS; Linux took years to go from ext2 to ext3 to ext4, and btrfs is in forever testing; most of *BSD still use their old ones; zfs took decade to become mainstream...

The information currently is very scarce on this one, but I hope they would at least test it REALLY WELL.

<comment><USER21> Didn't Microsoft introduce ReFS with many modern FS features?

<comment><USER22> Yes, and the list of NTFS features it dropped was just as long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm going to be very cynical and say that based on their track record of major OS overhauls I am _not_ looking forward to the bugs and issues that will sneak past their QA. I still have nightmares of all the bugs with their wifi & USB stack changes in the last couple OSX releases. Please Apple, for your own good don't 'move fast and break things' with the filesystem. At the very least it's time for everyone to make sure they have a good backup system in place before touching this thing.

<comment><USER24> Compared to how risky and problematic HFS+ is? It may still be better.

<comment><USER25> Exchanging problems you know for problems you don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> While I am happy that Apple have at last committed to replacing HFS+, I'm wondering why they didn't use ZFS rather than reinventing the wheel. It's not like it's a particularly easy wheel to reinvent either; the amount of effort which goes into a filesystem like ZFS is non-trivial. Why not build on top of that?

I would have greatly appreciated being able to use ZFS with MacOS X, for datasets, snapshots, sending them to remote pools for backup etc. It would have made it directly interoperable with a lot of pre-existing and cross- platform infrastructure. (I couldn't care less if it didn't scale down to the "watch". Filesystems are not a one-size-fits-all affair.) I find it great that I can take a set of disks from e.g. Linux, run "zpool export", pull them out, and then shovel them into a FreeBSD system, run "zpool import" and have the pool and datasets reassembled and automatically mounted. Perfectly transparent interoperability and portability. While Apple like to do their own thing, this is one place I would have definitely appreciated some down to earth pragmatism and re-use of existing battle-tested and widely used technology.

<comment><USER27> How does AAPL feel about the CDDL?

<comment><USER28> Given that there are other companies shipping ZFS without Oracle's blessing, I am curious why Apple could not do the same? (honest question)

Is it that Apple is a much bigger target? Patent issues?

<comment><USER29> Many of those companies probably started using ZFS before Oracle acquired Sun. After Oracle acquired Sun the risks of using ZFS skyrocketed legally and Apple had the option of just not taking on that risk since they hadn't shipped it yet.

Given what we know about Oracle that was probably the right call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I read the link and have a pretty good understanding about how computers and file systems work but can someone "explain like I'm a decently intelligent programmer" what is different about this file system? Thanks you.

<comment><USER10> They simply started from scratch with an aim to

* best support modern hardware technologies,

* start from the state of the art in file systems (like ZFS and btrfs, old as they may be), and also

* emphasize security.

<comment><USER31> Sounds a lot like what Apple did with Swift.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hopefully this will be the end of .DS_Store and the crazy unicode normalization issue that causes mixups when rsync-roundtripping a directory structure between ext4 and HFS! :)

<comment><USER33> Doubt that. .DS_Store are created by the Finder.... not the file system.

<comment><USER32> Maybe Finder could stash that stuff elsewhere if the new file system accomodates metadata on directories, or such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Uh interesting thought:

With Space sharing and multiple logical volumes there will probably be a shift to encrypting users home directories separately.

Probably even an unencrypted System Base, which is read-only and protected by rootless anyway, so the system can boot without user interaction.

This also finally allows the most user friendly implementation of file encryption: Encrypted Folders, supported by the OS.

Sounds cool, Id be willing to help with a rust port once the source is available :) (case sensitive only - naturally)

<comment><USER35> The point of encrypting the base system image is mostly to make it part of the Secure Boot chain. rootless is a policy control to stop processes from modifying the OS from inside. An encrypted system image stops things with hardware access (but not the unlock key) from modifying the OS from the _outside_. You can trust any disk whose blocks you can decrypt with key X, to have been only written to by someone with key X.

<comment><USER34> thanks for mansplaining rootless and encryption (/s).

Encryption is not authentication, so it does not prevent unnoticed modification.

And secure boot only really depends on authentication and not on encryption, so you are conflating two different concepts.

No you cant just trust the data, replay attacks over time and space are still an issue.

<comment><USER35> I'm not the one conflating them; it's the Secure Boot people who think this is a good idea. Full-Disk Encryption is the defined "OS" stage of the Secure Boot chain-of-trust today, acting as an "optimization" (heh) over signing disk blocks.

It's certainly _more secure_ (indeed, it prevents replay attacks) to just keep a big block-hash table, update it when blocks change, and then hash that table and sign it on fsync—but it's costly in a few ways over just trusting unauthenticated encryption, and was even moreso five-to-eight years ago when Secure Boot was being formulated.

These days, you see a lot of wholly-signed _read only_ OS images—the OSX recovery partition is signed; CoreOS signs its OS images; most firmware is signed; etc. But I don't expect the unauthenticated-encryption on most computers' read-write rootfs will be replaced by a signed-but-unencrypted filesystem any time soon—if just for the fact that consumers really seem to hate the idea of separate OS and data partitions, especially when the OS partition is "stealing space" they could be using for data. (The only thing I can think of that might finally kill this making the default install on some consumer-OS create a thin pool, such that an OS partition that only contains 5G of data only "steals" 5G of their "space.")

Or, y'know, authenticated encryption. Do any block-device cryptosystems support an AEAD mode yet? LUKS maybe?

<comment><USER34> > "You can trust any disk whose blocks you can decrypt with key X, to have > been only written to by someone with key X."

No you can not. That is your sentence not from Secure Boot People.

Also I assume that APFS will support encrypted and unencrypted logical FS in the same space sharing FS instance. So the separate OS partition is just a logical FS which is unencrypted. - Which I meant in my original post.

GELI and the AES-GCM are authenticated. Not sure if GCM has equivalent properties to the GELI HMAC feature but probably good enough.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois/Counter_Mode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois/Counter_Mode)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow! This makes me feel good, maybe Apple gets it that many of it's users use it's devices because they present proper UNIX desktop environment. And that environment needs to be cherished and it needs to evolve.

This is not a small thing. We had nice visual overhaul 2 years ago, now Apple needs to pick it up on under the hood level.

</comment><comment><USER37> It would be really nice is there was a modern file system that "just worked" regardless of device. I'm tired of having exFAT/FAT being the only filesystem I can reliably use on multiple different OS-es painlessly, and even then I can't use it for all the functions of those OS-es (No time machine). Hopefully this will be open enough to enable that, though who knows how it will shake out.

<comment><USER38> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format) ? That looked hopeful last I was juggling with this sort of thing, but that was long enough ago that WinXP support was the killer.

<comment><USER19> From what I understand, UDF is primarily targeted at one-time-recordable media. (It's used in DVDs, for example.) It's unclear how well it works for primary storage, but I suspect it's clumsy at best.

<comment><USER38> It's only got to beat FAT. That's a pretty low bar.

<comment><USER39> One that it doesn't meet. Try to read and understand the UDF spec sometime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > You can share APFS formatted volumes using the SMB network file sharing > protocol. The AFP protocol is deprecated and cannot be used to share APFS > formatted volumes.

AFP deprecated too.

</comment><comment><USER41> I didn't see any mentions of check-summing. Please tell me this brand new filesystem won't be susceptible to bitrot?

</comment><comment><USER42> Much like other modern filesystems such as ZFS and BTRFS it supports multiple filesystems in a shared storage space, snapshots, copy-on-write and also has encryption built-in as a first class feature including multiple keys and per- file keys.

There are _many_ limitations in the developer beta so this is clearly still very much a work in progress. Getting these file-systems right is traditionally difficult and can take years (see ZFS, BTRFS) so it will be interesting to see how well it does.

<comment><USER43> It's the transparent compression I'm using btrfs for. Only that, ZFS and NTFS support it, so not much choices for that scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> No snapshotting yet, can't boot, no migration tools for existing setups (time machine, filevault, fusion). It'd be interesting to see whether their permission changes introduced in 10.11 will travel further down the fs. Also, I don't see any mention of compression like lz4. Lots of work until release in 2017!

<comment><USER24> Is compression really that big a deal any more?

<comment><USER45> While they're still shipping machines with < 1TB SSDs (read: for a long time), yes - why not take the relatively free space and I/O savings?

<comment><USER46> On the other hand, people (sample size: my family and friends) tend to fill up their drives with already-compressed video and photos, which lz4 and similar cannot really compress further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Case Sensitivity: Filenames are currently case-sensitive only.

Sanity, at last! (even if temporary)

<comment><USER48> But Photoshop!

<comment><USER49> Adobe has to get their shit right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is a huge feature. I have no idea why Apple didn't include this in their keynote.

<comment><USER51> Probably too technical for a typical keynote watcher

<comment><USER52> Typical World Wide Developer Conference watcher? If so, that's a shame!

<comment><USER53> Opening Keynote is really for the press, it'll probably be mentioned more prominently in the State of the Union keynotes and in its own session.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> No checksumming?

<comment><USER55> Can you implement COW filesystems without some kind of checksumming? Or have I been in ZFS-land for too long?

<comment><USER56> Yup. Nothing intrinsic to it that needs checksums.

        zfs set checksum=off rpool

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> If you create a ZFS filesystem on a non-macOS, you have to be careful about Unicode mapping in order to use it safely on MacOS.

I have no idea if Unicode is an issue for Apple File System.

Emoji file names, you guys.

<comment><USER58> > Emoji file names, you guys.

But are they 3x bigger?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This should've been in the keynote.

<comment><USER60> The keynote was for consumers and the press. The 2 PM PT Platforms State of the Union is for developers and will likely go into this more, and if not there is a session tomorrow specifically about it.

<comment><USER59> Still... Marketing fully-encrypted snapshot-featured filesystem with focus on SSD / Flash, would make much more impact than having "native-tabs" for apps on an event like that.

Anyway I'm not a specialist, just another IT guy, so maybe I'm too opinionated to argue more.

<comment><USER61> The press understands "apps" and "tabs". The press doesn't understand "filesystem snapshots".

Part of the reason Apple has historically gotten much better press from WWDC than most tech companies do from their big developer events is that they laser-focused their keynote on being Press-digestible and not full of incomprehensible tech terminology that bores non-geeks to tears.

As evidenced by this thread, the people "filesystem snapshots" can be marketed to _didn 't need it to be mentioned in the keynote to get them talking about it_. Hence, using precious keynote time for it would have been a waste of marketing resources.

<comment><USER62> > The press understands "apps" and "tabs". The press doesn't understand > "filesystem snapshots".

That's a limited view of the press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'm notoriously skeptical of anything from the local-filesystem world, and I'm no Apple fanboy, but this looks pretty cool. I look forward to hearing how some of it works, especially what's new about their version of COW and why end-to-end checksumming wasn't mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER64> Paging @siracusa

<comment><USER65> And he said it would never happen!

<comment><USER66> Actually, he said he thought that it would happen next year (2017).

<comment><USER67> It's not happening until next year, the docs say it's coming in 2017, so I guess a macOS 12 point release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Give me case sensitivity and file dates that go past Feb 6th 2040 please. :D

</comment><comment><USER69> I cannot see anything on my Android mobile S:

</comment><comment><USER70> Website doesn't work at all on my Nexus 5x. Any other company would get lambasted for that kind of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER71> Forgive my ignorance, but what benefits would an average user experience with this new file system?

<comment><USER72> In theory (the practical side is tricky to get right):

\- More resilience against data corruption for one due to copy on write and likely checksumming - so in theory power failure should not harm the filesystem and you can roll back to a last known state and only lose data for the last few seconds if at all.

\- Snapshots, before installing updates you can snapshot the filesystem and roll back instantly. You could also create a readonly snapshot to have consistent backups. This should also allow seamless rollback of OS updates. There are also clones supported e.g. multiple diverging versions of a file tree - think something similar to git branches on a filesystem level.

\- Native encryption at the filesystem level

\- Possible better handling of metadata. Faster access to directories with lot's of files, more files on a volume without slowdown.

\- Sparse files - you can create huge files instantly and fill them later, guess it's important for various types of software e.g. virtual machine images.

But as nice as these properties are in theory history showed that that in practice a lot can go wrong.

<comment><USER71> Thank you for the explainer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I hope they don't patent it and go after Linux implementations, as Microsoft did with exfat.

<comment><USER74> Well the issue was that was a closed file system owned by Microsoft and used on Linux for Flash Drives and SD Cards.

If you sue closed technology you get burned. I didn't have a problem with Microsoft doing what they did. We should have used an open file system for those devices. I personally have used ext2/rfs on my drives and it is a pretty light security system ;)

<comment><USER75> I would expect Apple's driver to be open source, so someone could just port it. Their HFS+ driver is open source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Could anyone outline advantages and disadvantages comparing to ext4 or other file systems?

<comment><USER77> It's not HFS. That in itself is a pretty huge advantage.

<comment><USER78> That's not really a useful statement. HFS+ has worked pretty well for many years and is really well tested. This will be a completely new filesystem, which means it will have lots of new code that can have bugs or incompatibilities with current apps. APFS sounds like it's going to be great, but I think not being HFS is a disadvantage rather than an advantage.

<comment><USER79> Come on. HFS+ has been a shame for 15 years now. It's been the laughing stock of the filesystem community for ages. They got the developer of BeFS on board to patch the thing until it may apes a modern filesystem for a couple of days at a time, and that's about it. It deserves to die an ugly death, strangled in a back alley without mercy. It's about as good as LINDOS/FAT32.

God, what a relief, we're almost done with this monstrosity of HFS+. Didn't you hear the collective sigh of anyone having to _work_ with this flea-market antique FS?

<comment><USER80> Technically under the covers HFS isn't anything great. But from a users point of view apple has extended it in ways that it hasn't materss to customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Oh I forgot, you can't read Apple documentation on a mobile chrome browser.

<comment><USER82> Even on Chrome desktop, if you turn on Mobile emulation and switch it to appear to be any Android device w/ phone display size, it fails in the same way - yet switch it to 'iPhone 5' or 'iPhone 6' and the same compact layout works fine. They're pointlessly sniffing and special-casing 'Android' user- agents and botching it completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Another proprietary filesystem? I was really hoping they'd adopt ZFS fully.

<comment><USER84> Apple says they intend to open-source the file system in the docs.

 _Open Source_ : "An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format when Apple File System is released in 2017."

<comment><USER85> Just like they promised to open source FaceTime and iMessages? Apple has a history of making false promises in regards to open sourcing products.

<comment><USER86> My understanding was that FaceTime and iMessage weren't open sourced because of issues related to a patent troll (VirnetX IIRC). I'd be interested in hearing from others that are more familiar with the situation.

<comment><USER87> Or perhaps concern with having to deal with 3rd party iMessage/Facetime clients while at the same time trying to maintain a high level of security. Apple doesn't want anything to tarnish the security reputation of these products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> What about case sensitivity?

<comment><USER3> > Current Limitations […] Case Sensitivity: Filenames are currently case- > sensitive only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> This is interesting because just yesterday I saw a discussion here on HN about how sad people were that Apple was doing nothing to improve OSX and was putting all the focus on iOS instead. Heh.

</comment><comment><USER90> I had been nervous that if and when Apple finally got around to making a new file system, they would follow the trend and neither open source it nor document the on-disk format. HFS+ itself has always been open by virtue of being included in the open-sourced core xnu kernel, but Apple's CoreStorage volume manager (the basis for FileVault and Fusion Drive) and DMG disk image format have always lived in closed-source kernel extensions and are not officially documented; Microsoft has acted similarly with its NTFS, ReFS, and exFAT file systems and Storage Spaces volume manager.

The result, of course, is that nothing can access anything else's file system, at least well. Most of the formats I mentioned have been reverse engineered to some extent, but there are limits, especially when you're scared of corrupting data by misinterpreting the format and therefore limit your implementation to read access. If you want read-write access to NTFS from Linux or macOS, a filesystem which is old enough to drink, you have to rely on either a relatively slow FUSE implementation or some proprietary software. If you dual boot Linux on your Mac and want access to the Mac partition, make sure to turn off disk encryption (and hope you don't run into any evil maids) unless you want to use a read-only FUSE tool, and I hope you don't have a Fusion Drive because I don't think anything supports that at all (could be wrong).

To be fair, this situation cannot be blamed entirely on lack of openness. Lack of interest matters too; as I said, HFS+ has an open source implementation, yet Linux's hfsplus driver doesn't support journaling, a feature added in 2002. But if anyone tries to improve the situation, that implementation makes their job a lot easier: for one thing, since filesystem support is in the BSD- based portion of the xnu kernel, it may be possible to port the HFS implementation to other BSDs with relative ease - like the NetBSD rump kernel, which can run in userspace, from which FUSE support wouldn't be that hard... Alternately, if they chose the path of enhancing the native Linux driver, at least they could consult Apple's code to be sure they weren't missing any obscure corners of the format that could cause their driver to corrupt data.

Anyway, what we got with Apple File System is this:

> An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to > document and publish the APFS volume format when Apple File System is > released in 2017.

That's pretty good! Open source plus documentation would be ideal, but documentation is _much_ better than nothing[1], and the text of that paragraph doesn't exactly rule out the possibility of the final release being open source too. (I haven't installed the beta yet, but am I right in guessing that APFS is implemented in a kext?)

While there's no guarantee, I hope that that documentation will also come with information about the Core Storage format APFS will usually be wrapped in, so that proper interoperability can be achieved. Rather than my fear coming to pass of one of the last vestiges of openness in proprietary OS storage formats disappearing, the situation may actually be improved compared to today. Maybe in a few years I'll be able to install Ubuntu on my Mac and have full access to the OS X partition out of the box. I can hope...

[1] whether it's better or worse than open source alone is debatable - <USER2> can be harder to understand, but it's also never wrong, unlike documentation...

</comment><comment><USER91> Does anyone know if Dominic Giampaolo was involved with the design?

<comment><USER92> He's still at Apple so I would assume he had a major role.

<comment><USER91> I hope so, though I kinda miss the pervasive use of metadata as in BeFS. That was before its time and such a nice concept. Coupled with saved queries, it's unmatched to this day in mainstream, general purpose file system semantics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Arrogance... Instead using ZFS they build new file system from scratch (APFS) Instead using Vulkan they build new Graphics API from scratch (Metal)

Keep this up and they will end like MS.

<comment><USER94> I'd be more interested in understanding why they chose to implement their own file system instead of adopting something like ZFS.

No doubt there is reasoning in there besides the "we are an evil company" logic - Apple developers are people too...

<comment><USER93> I just do not understand rationale. File systems is hard stuff, instead taking something that is probably best file system around they decided for long and painful road. Note that they worked before on OpenZFS in Apple ....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Shipping in 2017? So it won't even be ready for Sierra?

<comment><USER96> It's present as a developer preview in Sierra, but isn't the default filesystem and can't be used as the boot drive.

Which is probably how it should be. I'd rather not lose data to a new filesystem because Apple rushed the thing out without proper testing.

<comment><USER84> Seconded. File systems are hard and specs need to be finalized. Plus the grandparent post reminds me of the old Slashdot meme: ``No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.''

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> I hope finally a filesystem that allows me to unplug a USB drive (while it is still mounted) without potentially corrupting it.

<comment><USER98> Any filesystem that doesn't cache writes will basically have that property, unless you're talking about unplugging _while write operations are happening_ , in which case all bets are off.

<comment><USER99> The point of journaling/soft updates/COW/etc. is that all bets are _not_ off; they're intended to prevent the fs from being corrupted in those sorts of situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I wonder if Apples acquisition of acunu.com is finally paying off. Is this file system based on stratified B-trees?

</comment><comment><USER101> It seems to be a b-tree based file system that isn't zfs or btrfs. Neat.

<comment><USER26> Note that ZFS doesn't use b-trees; it uses Merkle hashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> I don't see any mention of data integrity...

Unless you use multi-key encryption.

I find that a bit odd.

</comment><comment> Black-Plaid > Case Sensitivity: Filenames are currently case-sensitive only.

Dominic, lol.

</comment><comment><USER103> I hope this comes about unlike the ZFS fiasco.

</comment><comment><USER104> Any guess if AFS is written in Swift?

<comment><USER34> Probably C++ like the rest of IOKit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Kit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Kit) [http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-3248.20.55/iokit/](http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-3248.20.55/iokit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> I wonder how APFS compares to IPFS. [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)</comment>


Making an Agile coach redundant in 6 months with Scrum - <AUTHOR> http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/peterstev/making-myself-redundant-6-months <comment><USER2> I could do it in a second.</comment>


The New Age of Astrology - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-new-age-of-astrology/550034/?single_page=true <comment><USER2>
      You likely know your sun sign... It's based on where the sun was on your birthday.

No, it isn't, for the vast majority of dates in the calendar.</comment>