Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview - <AUTHOR> https://deskgap.com/ <comment><USER3> I think it's interesting how debates about Electron inevitably end up with the arguments 'the developer wants X' vs 'the user wants Y'. However, there's one aspect a lot of people seem to overlook in their arguments: pragmatism.

The ideal application:

\- uses almost no memory

\- uses almost no disk space

\- is extremely fast

\- costs (next to) nothing

\- and has all the features in the world

\- presented in a manner that automatically shows the user only the exact features (s)he cares about

In the real world, we have to balance the project/product requirements. In the end, only these things matter:

\- It yields a net profit (monetary or otherwise) for the company or owner

\- It has (and keeps) added value in comparison to similar software

\- It's fun to design and develop in/for

\- It has bugfixes and new features in a timely manner, without taking up too much development time

\- It has a pretty, easy to use interface

\- It's quick and snappy enough to run

Adding that all up, and developing in something like Electron is a no-brainer: mean time between iterations is faster, design and development is more fun and the end user has a product that is fast enough for their needs packed with features. Try that in any low level language or without control over the engine and you'll have to severely hamper one of these goals.

<comment><USER4> > snappy enough to run > Electron is a new brainer

Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. Remember, 91% of the desktop on earth is Windows (meaning regular USD 300 machines). And of them I'd wager less than 10% fit have machines where electron is snappy (1.2K Thinkpads).

What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron.

<comment><USER5> _> > What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron._

I always like to use VSCode as an example. It's a tool a use on a daily basis, and I like almost everything about it. It's also a poster-child for a good Electron application, maybe one of the best around. Add to that I completely understand why it was made using Electron, and why it might not have existed in this form (available, up-to-date, and feature-complete on all platforms, regularly improved, etc) at all if it wasn't because of Electron.

But it's not.snappy.enough.

Even though large performance-sensitive parts of it like the editor buffer data structures etc are (AFAIK) implemented natively, the whole user experience is actually quite bad. It's sluggish, inconsistent, it's full of random glitches, and everything feels like an insane amount of effort went into putting more and more lipstick on various parts of a pig to hide that the whole thing is like a house of cards and sluggishness and instability hides around every corner.

I feel a little sad that so many developers defend Electron so vehemently, pretending that it's 'ok', 'fine' or even 'very good' for end users, because it's not. I fully agree it's great for the people (and mostly the companies making money off the people) who develop commercial stuff with it, because it obviously saves a shit-ton of money if you want to deploy something across the 3 major platforms.

All of this is completely unrelated to the end-user experience though, who typically uses just one platform at a time and couldn't care less if the application they are using is also on some other platform. Or if they use it across multiple platforms, how many extra UI devs where needed to make native UI's for each of them.

Any developer who knows how freaking fast modern computers are and why should, when completely honest, should feel ashamed that something like Slack or VSCode is made in a way that makes it so sluggish and memory-hungry, and that we now all accept this because it's cheaper to develop that way, and the applications are (supposedly) 'snappy enough to run'

<comment><USER6> >But it's not.snappy.enough.

I was following you until this line... In general I agree about Electron though probably not to the same degree as you. But for me VSCode runs amazingly well; I think the only thing that tops it is Sublime (and I vastly prefer VSCode's interface and features). Not saying that what you said isn't your experience, but you should know it's not everyone's experience.

<comment><USER7> VSCode is worlds faster than Atom. However, relative to any native editor (Sublime Text, Gedit, GVim, Notepad++, Notepad itself, ...), VSCode ranges from anywhere between "sluggish" to "... is it frozen?". Now, I agree that how big the difference is, and how big a problem that becomes is subjective, but the presence of the difference itself is not.

A good example being opening a new window. This is something I do semi-often to edit something out-of-context that shouldn't taint my current workspace. Under anything from Notepad to Gedit or Sublime Text, this task has no perceivable latency. Under VSCode, however, it is so uncomfortably slow that I actively try to avoid it, and instead use Gedit for these editing tasks. This is a significant downgrade in workflow compared to Sublime Text.

So, why do I use it? Well, features. However, what must be made very clear is that _none_ of the features I use in VSCode exist as a result of Electron. Terminal panes and the better Go/Rust integration has nothing to do with Electron, and are within areas of difficulty that I could have added it myself over a weekend had Sublime Text been open source. But it's not, so I can't.

Electron is cancer.

<comment><USER8> I wish we could stop calling software we don't like "a cancer". It's hyperbole and detracts from the conversation, IMO. The phrase "x is a cancer" is a cancer. :)

<comment><USER7> s/is cancer/is an awful framework that significantly and irreparably degrades user experience, stability and performance of any application written with it/g

I find the term to be quite fitting here. The use has spread to an absurd degree, meaning that there is a large change that everyone is running one or more instances of this framework at any given time, and use of this framework not only harms UX, but also brings down the machine it runs on through resource consumption. Well, maybe "pandemic disease" is better than "cancer".

When everything uses something like Electron, you the ability to simple chose to avoid it. Like a disease, Electron is that you involuntarily get subjected to, and as such, would prefer to see eradicated.

(And yes, yes, we should improve the experience of making cross-platform native apps, but due to Electron, no one is even trying anymore outside of mobile.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2].

And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores.

[0] [https://github.com/pojala/electrino](https://github.com/pojala/electrino)

[1] [https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark](https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark)

[2] [https://deskgap.com/#faq](https://deskgap.com/#faq)

[3] [https://squoosh.app](https://squoosh.app)

[4] [https://github.com/patr0nus/Pym/](https://github.com/patr0nus/Pym/)

<comment><USER9> Howdy, can you compare the system-side webview with [https://github.com/zserge/webview](https://github.com/zserge/webview)? Specifically, what control do you use on windows, MSHTML or have you incorporated the recently-freed-from-UWP (I think) Edge API?

EDIT: Appears the latter [0]. Great work. I wonder how this affects bundling...does this make it a UWP app?

0 - [https://github.com/patr0nus/DeskGap/blob/master/core/src/win...](https://github.com/patr0nus/DeskGap/blob/master/core/src/win/webview.cpp)

<comment><USER10> What happens if you run an EdgeHTML-using application on Windows 7 or 8? I noticed that the EdgeHTML control in WinForms and WPF is not a drop-in replacement for the old WebBrowser control (i.e. it isn't a subclass, so you must use one or the other, but Microsoft didn't document the best way to switch between controls based on feature-detection).

<comment><USER11> When you try to call the API, it will fail as it's not there. The precise failure mode will depend on the application. One possibility would be to crash outright. Another would be to try the EdgeHTML control, then fall back to MSHTML. Yet another would be to try EdgeHTML, then complain in an alert, notifying the user of the requirement for the new version of Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it amusing that the opening paragraph describes it as a "framework for building _cross-platform_ desktop apps" and then shortly below that in the "Supported Platforms" section it lists _one_ Mac OS and _one_ very specific version of Windows. No Linux at all. Even native Windows apps are more cross- platform than that! (I have written a few which will work on any version of Windows starting at Win95...)

<comment><AUTHOR> I shared your concern before I started the project, and talked about this in the readme's FAQ[0].

[0] [https://deskgap.com/#faq](https://deskgap.com/#faq)

<comment><USER13> The majority of Linux users use a GTK desktop, IMO WebkitGTK would be preferable.

<comment><USER14> I use a GTK desktop on my Linux desktop computers (Ubuntu/Debian and Kali). However, I prefer Qt applications. They look very well on my GTK desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm glad to see how this debate has matured from focusing on the technical downsides to focusing on the business and end-user benefits. But at the same time, whenever I have Blender open, effortlessly displaying eight different 3D views and UV mappers and the Spotify app, almost crashing my system by playing music, I can't help but wish that more developers would walk the extra mile for the user experience.

<comment><USER16> Some of the apps like Spotify, or more recently Microsoft Teams are completely equivalent in their web version. The browser is better at preventing system crashes from a tab than a single encapsulated web app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These projects completely overlook _why_ people choose Electron over the system view.

\- Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019.

\- Nobody wants to wait for a vendor to update their implementation when Chrome has the feature available almost immediately.

Edit: Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app- authors, I'm just going to link to the comment from the guy who actually migrated Slack away from WKWebView.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18763449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18763449)

Blows my mind we're still debating this.

<comment><USER18> > Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in > 2019

Yes, lots of projects want multiple, competitive rendering engines.

It used to be that Windows was the only viable target OS for commercial software. Firefox and Safari gave IE competition and gave developers who wanted to target Mac and Linux a way to get a foot in the door. That kicked off the whole generation of web apps we've just lived through. If developers give up on Gecko and WebKit, then they allow a monopoly again. And since Electron is made by GitHub and is now owned by Microsoft, Microsoft will again have the monopoly (with the caveat that Google has primary influence over Blink).

Render engine competition keeps web standards relevant, which keeps the web open. Take away competition & we'll be back in a world where people build to IE6 for a decade instead of targeting standard HTML/CSS/JS.

<comment><USER19> I'm going to disagree. Over the two decades I have been programming I have come to appreciate the benefit of Open Source Collaboration vs competition. Competition between platforms is good, but it's not the best. Because those who produce content waste millions of hours collectively trying to address every little quirky difference between the platforms. And the standards only help so much, whether it's POSIX or WHATWG.

The real reason MS and IE were not so good is because they were a closed source monopoly! And moreover the copyright was enforced by the government.

Now even M$ switched over to WebKit / Blink.

Collaboration beats competition in the end.

Wikipedia beat Britannica quite handily. And it beat Encarta, too.

Open source beat closed source over time.

The Web beat AOL and Compuserve.

Science beat secret cults and alchemy.

Today Pharma is using patents and competition. People are prevented from building on each other's work in microbiology but not in other sciences. Isn't that wild?

I would rather have lots of people adding to one snowball platform, than having competing platforms. AS LONG AS that platform is open source and anyone can use it for any purpose. If your commits don't make it into the core, just market them until they get popular enough. Compatibility is the goal, though.

<comment><USER20> Chrome/Blink may be open source, but it's controlled by Google after Blink forked from WebKit. It's hardly collaborative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've seen a day ago a recording of a presentation from last week FOSDEM where two other libraries, Lorca[0] (Go + HTML5) and Webview[1] (C++/C/Go), were described that are similar in scope to this one.

From the _webview_ project page: _It supports two-way JavaScript bindings (to call JavaScript from C /C++/Go and to call C/C++/Go from JavaScript). It uses Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and MSHTML (IE10/11) on Windows._

[0][https://github.com/zserge/lorca](https://github.com/zserge/lorca)

[1][https://github.com/zserge/webview](https://github.com/zserge/webview)

edit: the link to the video [https://video.fosdem.org/2019/UD2.120/godesktopapps.webm](https://video.fosdem.org/2019/UD2.120/godesktopapps.webm)

and the presentation slides [https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/godesktopapps/attachm...](https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/godesktopapps/attachments/slides/2994/export/events/attachments/godesktopapps/slides/2994/slides.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER22> There was about a year and a half worth of security work done on Electron (particularly targeting the Node integration and how Node APIs were exposed). I worry that not a lot of people know just how insecure Electron apps used to be, and would generally worry that new Electron frameworks not designed specifically to be secure are going to recapitulate a lot of that.

<comment><USER23> What is the attack vector that this protects against? Electron apps don't usually just run user-provided code off the internet? They just run the code provided by the app vendor?

<comment><USER24> XSS in the app or things it displays/depends on end up being RCE on the client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a user, I don't like Electron; "webapps" always feel clunky and alien compared to native apps and the rest of the OS.

As a developer, I can appreciate Electron's utility in targeting multiple platforms, but one has to wonder:

Why isn't there a good, open, cross-platform UI library already, that compiles to the native UI of each OS?

Has there even been an initiative to make one?

You'd think the global developer community would have come together to tackle this problem by now, consider how it's such a pain point for all of us and users as well.

<comment> c-smile > Why isn't there a good, open, cross-platform UI library already, that > compiles to the native UI of each OS?

It is either "good native" or cross-platform. But not both in reality.

In principle can do something very basic using stock platform widgets - <USER2> application that uses _only_ basic widgets: buttons and plain text textareas - all others are too different on different platforms.

If your app is slightly more than that you will have problems even with basic stuff. Consider this native UI example (Notepad++) : [https://i.kinja- img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_lfill,w_...](https://i.kinja- img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_lfill,w_768,q_90/ba6wdcpkmlgrb1qgd9gm.jpg) and something like Sublime Text

Notepad++ is a disaster even native platform API. Sublime Text uses custom non-native renderer - consistent UI styling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> BTW for those looking for interesting cross-platform focused UI systems, Nuklear is pretty cool: [https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear](https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear)

<comment><USER27> Cool, thanks. I'm tempted to make a Node binding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm a little bit confused, why would the executable be larger than packed with Electron? One would assume that if you don't need to pack chromium the executable size should be comparably smaller

</comment><comment><USER29> I feel like there should be an option that lies between either "Install a new webview with every app" and "completely trust a previously installed webview".

I guess the downside is that that would be just a new .Net Framework, where an app requires you to install the Whatever Webview 2.5 in order to run, but it'd be neat to dodge Safari, while still having leaner Electron apps.

It could possibly be solved by specifying supported webviews in the application.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there anything like Electron from a cross-platform and ease of development standpoint but way more lightweight? I often find applications written in it to be very sluggish and resource intensive even when the web or mobile version of the same application is significantly smaller and faster.

</comment><comment> c-smile Sciter ([https://sciter.com](https://sciter.com)) then, as it is not like Electron - it is not using any web view at all.

But it does use HTML/CSS in the same way as WPF uses XAML for UI definitions.

Sciter allows to use best parts of two worlds: flexibility of HTML/CSS/script for UI definitions and richness, power and compactness of native code as Sciter is designed to be embeddable from the very beginning.

In what UI engine you can create your own HTML element with native C++ (Rust, Go, etc) controller when you need to?

And on all Windows versions starting from XP, Mac OS from 10.7, all Linuxes with GTK3 including Raspberry Pi...

</comment><comment><USER31> I am hoping Microsoft's moving Edge to chromium will allow this project to work on a more Windows platforms. The new Edge will support Windows 7 & 8.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128648/microsoft- edge-c...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128648/microsoft-edge-chrome- chromium-browser-changes)

</comment><comment><USER32> "Older Windows' do not have a modern browser engine, only the one that powers Internet Explorer."

...as if that's an excuse.

</comment><comment><USER33> The main problem that everyone has with electron is the RAM consumption right?! If the webviews are anyway gonna increase the RAM to electron levels while being significantly hard to test and deploy then this will not work out ever. I'm only bothered about low RAM memory usage not the disk space.

<comment><USER34> A simple hello world style app in electron and in my own project [1] show electron using ~100mb while the webview based project ~50mb, so there's that.

[1] [https://github.com/zenakuten/webview- cs](https://github.com/zenakuten/webview-cs)

</comment></comment><comment> a-barpetia [https://github.com/cztomczak/phpdesktop](https://github.com/cztomczak/phpdesktop), same concept without memory leak. Please, check it out

</comment><comment><USER35> A cross-platform native webview could be an elegant way to monetize an application via web ads while minimizing bloat.

</comment><comment><USER36> I still think that first-class support for PWAs will be a more promising alternative to Electron

</comment><comment><USER37> Requiring your Windows users to have the October 2018 update makes no sense.

<comment><USER38> Read the entire article till you get to this part:

[https://deskgap.com/#why-is-the-supported-version-of- windows...](https://deskgap.com/#why-is-the-supported-version-of-windows-so- high-any-plan-of-supporting-windows-7-and-linux)

<comment><USER35> Wish they had more technical details here. IE 9 was an update just like the Windows 10 October 2018 update, but applies as far back as Vista. IE 9 is much more compliant with modern ECMAScript standards than IE 8 ever was.

IE has been available as a COM component in Windows applications for ages -- at least as far back as XP -- so it could be done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What about Flutter? Soon it will be able to run on multi-platform desktops.

</comment><comment><USER40> Will there ever be KDE support, since Qt also provided a HTML toolkit?

</comment><comment><USER41> I embed a Web server in my project, and when the project starts, ChromePortable is automatically launched to open the Project home page.

Simple, stable, good compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER42> You mean IE on windows? No, thanks.

<comment><USER43> According to the website, it doesn't use IE's engine, it uses Edge's. Soon, that will be Chromium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sorry but: zzzzzz. Did I mention that Riot (Synapse client) uses 25% cpu consistently when idle on my windows 10 laptop? This is a beefy Lenovo X1.</comment>


Show HN: 5 P's of Posture – Chrome extension to help you improve your posture - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/5-ps-of-posture/hdfaiijacekhkhmoocdfpclhffioppde

<comment><AUTHOR> I created this Chrome browser extension. The extension replaces five common English words starting with 'p' with 'posture.' The five words are problem, person, part, place, and point.

For example, you could be reading an article with the phrase "point of view." This would be replaced with "posture of view." All of sudden, you are slightly confused, but also thinking about your posture.

<comment><USER2> I liked your extension very much! What I like most is that thinking of your posture becomes automatic. That's the tough part in learning any skill, and for posture this might be the only practical way to remind yourself.

You get to hack your subconscious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could someone explain the Chrome permissions when it says "It can access your data on all websites"?

I have trouble trusting an extension with only one review if it has so much power.

<comment><AUTHOR> The extension needs access to the DOM when the page is loaded to find and replace words.

The extension works locally on the client. It does not send your data anywhere or talk to any third-party servers.

<comment><USER4> Any reason you replace, rather than insert alongside?

I like the sporadic messages, but placing them roughly a minute of reading apart as [posture] reminders would make me more likely to use it ;p

<comment><AUTHOR> No reason. I like the idea of randomly inserting them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting and a lot simpler than I was expecting.

What's the feasibility of hooking into a webcam and using that as a metric for determining 'slouch'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your comment made me think of an idea. There is a device called LUMOback. Integrating LUMOback and this extension coudl generate a slouch metric.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lumoback/lumoback- the-s...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lumoback/lumoback-the-smart- posture-sensor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using this since you've posted it.. It's the most aware I've been of my posture for a long time. Subtle and effective!

</comment><comment><USER7> cool idea; super annoying when you're trying to type an email with words beginning with p though…

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I should include ability for a domain exclusion list.</comment></comment>


Who owns CRISPR – one of the most important genetic inventions of our time? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13857674/crispr-gene-editing-patent-dispute-berkeley-broad-mit-jennifer-doudna-feng-zhang <comment><USER2> Oh humanity you got the gift of science but you can't get over with the $$ curse.</comment>


Will there be a "Who's Hiring?" post this month? - <AUTHOR>

Hoping to see if there will be a who's hiring post this month...thanks! Would like to submit a job posting to it. <comment><USER2> It comes out on the 1st of each month. Maybe you can add to this thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913997>

and add again on June 1.</comment>


Researchers uncover the art of printing extremely hard steels flawlessly - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-04-uncover-art-extremely-hard-steels.html <comment><USER2> For those who may be unaware: martensitic steels encompass all standard tool steels, e.g the ones used for knives, springs, dies, files etc. martensitic means hardenable.

Being able to 3D print these into arbitrary shapes vs machining them will likely be of the most value for parts that need to be light.

I'm curious that they mention wanting to print low alloy steels, since low alloy steels tend to be relatively easy to machine. I'd have expected more interest in higher performance steels. Can anyone comment why people would want to print in low-alloy martensitic steel?

The article doesn't address this, but, the martensitic transformation typically changes a part's volume by ~4%. that can make it difficult to make precision parts unless final finishing happens at full hardness. I wonder if this process results in direct production of martensite, or if the parts still need heat treatment.

To me, this is a very interesting process, but doubly so given the possibilities of generative design. For those who want to visualize why you might want to 3D print steels vs machining them, think more about brackets and support structures than turbines, and take a look at some generative design parts.

<comment><USER3> Turbine blades, impellers, valves are good candidate for printing.

Machining creates chips and I think you need to have variety of metal stock to spin on lathe, with different dimensions.

So if you've simply a bucket of metal to form any shape you want, it might be favourable to avoid uncessary wastage, cleaning, or stocking.

For example, in 3d printing plastic you just need a roll of plastic or pellets.

<comment><USER2> Actually, I'd be surprised if any of those were good candidates. Turbine blades in jet engines aren't even machined now - they are grown out of inconel. Valves are highly dependent on surface finish and frequently multi- material setups - e.g. o rings.

Not to make light of matching costs, but in the scheme of getting a part made, even of tool steel, the overall contribution of the materials is usually not super high. Machine time, tool bits, and design work are all MUCH more costly.

<comment><USER4> Huh, from the hangout and hack stuff all day at the maker space perspective this is flipped completely on its head. I have plenty of time to design things and operate machines, and even the cost of the machines (bits included) is shared to the point that it's almost free as an individual. It's waiting on those gosh darn materials budgets to appear that holds up all my projects.

<comment><USER2> I should clarify, in production projects, materials may end up being a much greater overall part of the process, especially if the production is heavily automated. However, 3D printing of tool steels seems like it is aimed at lower volume parts where the automation will be lower, so paying a machinist to load/unload, finish, debur etc might be a relatively larger portion of the time.

For us hobbyists, the CAD time is free, so it tends to cost less :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me that the ideal pattern is to 3D print the rough form, but it is likely to take some machining to get it finished to the final shape and surface treatment you want.

Or am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER6> They discovered the science, not the art? Haven't actually executed on the science: they don't have a 3D printer that works this way?

<comment><USER7> I don't understand your second question — they printed a bunch of martensitic steel tensile specimens with a pretty common laser melting technique, then ran a bunch of mechanical testing. Where's the lack of execution?

I think the art/science thing is just a bit of editorializing, it's sort of accepted that a lot of the fundamental science behind metal additive manufacturing is just not established. I.e. it's far from trivial to just set up shop and print an alloy that hasn't been printed before.

<comment><USER6> I read it again. They 'developed a framework'. I'm thinking they 'printed' a few microscopic samples in a lab? A real printer could print a car hood, or at least a gear. If they didn't get that far (with all the associated problems of delamination, gaps, vibration defects etc) then they don't have a real 3D printer. The 'art' is in the delivery.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Patents Wraparound Edge-Mounted iPhone Displays With Virtual Buttons - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/13/apple-patents-wraparound-edge-mounted-iphone-displays-with-virtual-buttons/ <comment><USER2> Haha cool. They patended a Dribbble trend!

See the 'infinity screen' that was a bit of a thing on Dribbble a while back:

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1190633-iPhone-6-Infinity](https://dribbble.com/shots/1190633-iPhone-6-Infinity)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1188123-Adventurous-Reader- Mobile...](https://dribbble.com/shots/1188123-Adventurous-Reader-Mobile-Site- WIP)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1191226-Iphone-6-Wrap-Around- scre...](https://dribbble.com/shots/1191226-Iphone-6-Wrap-Around-screen)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1190796-Side- Screen](https://dribbble.com/shots/1190796-Side-Screen)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1192384-Iphone-6-infinity- screen-...](https://dribbble.com/shots/1192384-Iphone-6-infinity-screen- Social-App)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1191824-Translucent-Infinity- scre...](https://dribbble.com/shots/1191824-Translucent-Infinity-screen)

<comment><USER3> And yet they can do this because it's first to file now in the U.S., not first to invent.

<comment><USER4> A picture of an idea or feature is not an invention. This is why the move 2001 is not "prior art".

The methods to bring an idea to fruition are an invention and are patentable.

They're quite different.

Unfortunately, most people here on HN seem think that patents are on ideas, not inventions.

<comment><USER5> _Unfortunately, most people here on HN seem think that patents are on ideas, not inventions._

Unfortunately, the Patent Office and the Court Of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the patent court) agree with the people who think patents are on ideas, not inventions.

The PTO and courts actually prefer nothing but an idea in software, semiconductor, and user interface patents. "As a general rule, where software constitutes part of a best mode of carrying out an invention, description of such a best mode is satisfied by a disclosure of the functions of the software. This is because, normally, writing code for such software is within the skill of the art, not requiring undue experimentation, once its functions have been disclosed. * * * Thus, flow charts or source code listings are not a requirement for adequately disclosing the functions of software." [0]

But that's the state of patent practice in most subject areas now. And plenty of videos like 2001 have been used as prior art against user experience patents, since the patents usually include little or no technological content. Apple's billion dollar slide-to-unlock, rubber band, and various other patents don't describe even the kinetics of behavior in the patents much less the implementation.

[0] [http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-federal- circuit/1229938.html](http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-federal- circuit/1229938.html)

<comment><USER6> Let's be honest now: how often do you see a patent and think to yourself, "Gosh, this patent is really complicated and the text is just not explanatory enough, I really wish I had some code or flowcharts to make it clearer!"

Most patents (software or otherwise) are of a complexity where a person of ordinary skill in the art can re-implement it from scratch with a fair level of fidelity by reading _just the abstract_. Triviality of implementation is not the same as obviousness. And just because software makes it very easy to go from idea to implementation does not mean it's not an invention.

<comment><USER5> _how often do you see a patent and think to yourself, "Gosh, this patent is really complicated_

Never. Software patents are almost always intended to monopolize some trivial and obvious function in such a way as to make the established users of that function pay a grifter who juked the Patent Office. There's no reason to patent anything complicated in software because you could just work around it.

 _Triviality of implementation is not the same as obviousness._

No, triviality of implementation is a superset of obviousness. There are obvious things that are nontrivial to implement, but there are no non-obvious things that are trivial to implement.

<comment><USER6> _> There are obvious things that are nontrivial to implement, but there are no non-obvious things that are trivial to implement_

Diffie Hellman key exchange

RSA

They both have 1 or 2 liners in various languages, google them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Like this?

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Samsung_Youm_C...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Samsung_Youm_Concept_Device.jpg)

<comment><USER4> The difference between features and inventions should be easy to grasp- there are different ways to implement a feature.

For instance, there are more than one type of internal combustion engine, and each type has been (quite legitimately) patented:

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

<comment><USER7> Just like there are different ways to implement slide to unlock. Yet, I think Apple was claiming ownership over all the ways to do it (finger moving from one point to another to unlock the device, or something like that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Again: read the claims. From a quick glance, it seems a single flexible screen is used _within_ a case, and the same screen presents the main display as well as the side display through a window in the side of the case (presumably the flexible display is bent at the sides.) That seems like an interesting approach I have not seen discussed before, and I can see some advantages (fewer components at the cost of potentially wasted screen real estate.)

Also, that should make moot the discussions so far on this thread about fragility of the design and validity of this patent.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe they have something more specific... but haven't we seen stuff like this every January for the past few years or more? I recall at least two major manufacturers demoing this.

</comment><comment><USER9> And now you can break your screen whichever way you drop your phone.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, basically, any phone case can't be used.

Hopefully the unobtanium glass screens will be in production by then so it won't matter so much.

<comment> k-mcgrady When people _need_ a case to protect your product from breaking you have a problem. Until the iPhone 5s I never had a case I rarely dropped my phone. The 5s is like a bar of soap. If I were to use it without the case I doubt I'd get more than a few weeks without a smashed screen. It's a major usability issue imo.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that essentially what bumpers on cars are for? To prevent the product from breaking?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but they come with it.

It's not something you have to remember to pick up and install yourself on the way home from the dealership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wrap around screens have been speculated about for a long time, how is putting buttons on it non obvious?

<comment><USER14> It may be obvious, but the thinking is, surely, that if they don't patent it someone else will.

<comment><USER15> And so the circle is complete. From patenting something because it's not obvious to so things being so obvious we'd better patent them.

<comment><USER14> I'm not defending the practice, just explaining.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Sedona Cult of Bentinho Massaro - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bescofield/tech-bro-guru-inside-the-sedona-cult-of-bentinho-massaro-a56314f830ef <comment><USER2> I kind of hoped that we were moving towards an age of rationality and reasoning where people will finally be able to think for themselves but it seems that the opposite is happening.

Literally everything these days is a cult. Including companies (e.g. Apple), and money itself (e.g. cryptocurrencies).

It makes me think that there must be some really powerful evolutionary processes in place which make it so that irrational idolists have more children and live longer than rational people.

<comment><USER3> This is a big source of existential dread for me.

At one point about a decade ago, not long after college, I had this conviction that over time with more available granular information about the world, people would start to be more epistemic [1] about how they viewed the world. In fact what I found though, was that more information seems to have led to the opposite. That people's interpretation of the same information seems to reinforce already held beliefs about the state of things rather than update their beliefs.

Not sure where that leads the zeitgeist with ever increasing barrage and availability of information, skewed or otherwise.

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

<comment><USER4> "Most people" don't care why they know what they know, they just know it. I imagine it's a less stressful existence.

That said, every age, every transformation, has its dissidents. Counterarguments for that are Utopia and "global unity" type sentiments, but history tells us those aren't realistic goals. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is just a guy with a cult. It's similar to a startup/technology company in only the most superficial ways. The guy who runs this cult plays ping pong and wears sunglasses indoors? Oh what a scathing indictment of Silicon Valley culture.

<comment><USER6> The NYT seems to be finding several of these new New Age cults:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/technology/silicon- valley...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/technology/silicon-valley- esalen-institute.html) (the Esalen Institute)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906754) (the rationality cult related to Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong)

<comment><USER7> The NYT hardly "found" Esalen. The thing is around since the early 60s. And has been home to people like Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller, B.F.Skinner, Virginia Satir, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez...

It's a rather well-known home of counter culture. Silly Valley simply hopes something rubs off on them. Because the realization is starting to set in that you, after all, really cannot take your toys with you.

But really, "finding" is a pretty strong word for writing about one of the major touch stones of 60s culture.

<comment><USER8> > The NYT hardly "found" Esalen. The thing is around since the early 60s. And > has been home to people like Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller, B.F.Skinner, > Virginia Satir, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez...

> It's a rather well-known home of counter culture.

..which makes it both sad and amusing that it has become a place for a bunch of Silicon Valley executives to go try to "find themselves" and look for affirmation that their advertising and surveillance companies aren't detrimental to society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This appears to be Massaro's response: [http://www.bentinhomassaro.com/read/our-first-official- respo...](http://www.bentinhomassaro.com/read/our-first-official-response-to- the-cult-accusations)

It contains a sentence that may be the most perfect thing an "Instagram guru" could ever write:

 _I have modeled many different jackets, teachings and examples within a short period of time._

<comment><USER8> I couldn't get through it. Rarely have I seen more words used to say absolutely nothing while completely avoiding actually addressing anything in the article supposedly being addressed.

"Love and Light,"

It looks like this guy might be getting his ideas from a certain show on Hulu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't figure out whether to upvote this to expose this person, or downvote it to avoid giving this person exposure.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many fools are out there just waiting to fall for something like this. It's terrifying. Instagram douche meets cult leader has got to be the worst personality combo I've ever seen in my life.

On another note, this stuff makes scientologists sound completely reasonable and sane by comparison.

<comment><USER10> I agree. But despite the bizarre fact is that there is a real market for these kind of "Gurus" to fill, but unless someone is forced to join or kept in the cult by force then what's the problem? he chooses to lead and followers choose to follow.

<comment><USER11> They are forced to stay in the cult through coercion. Members join willingly, and the cult slowly isolates them, encourages to shut out family and friends, takes all their money and makes them financially helpless. By the time they realize what's going on, they have no safe way to leave the cult. That leaves the members vulnerable to all sorts of abuse. That's why joining a cult should be seen as a problem, and not just as someone's preference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quite a terrifying read, but not unexpected.

These types of cults pop up in America, and usually at least once in a generation there is one that somehow captures peoples imaginations (People's Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, etc). I don't include Scientology in this list - no matter how insidious that organisation is, it's never lead to a mass suicide.

The people who follow these leaders are lost, usually from broken background - some run away from home and fall in to it.

The leaders tend to be diagnosed (mostly after the fact though analysts) as narcissists. Polyamory is usually a feature of their style, as well as mental and physical abuse of their followers. They have no problem in "breaking" people for their own sick fantasy.

<comment><USER13> _no matter how insidious that organisation is, it 's never lead to a mass suicide._

Neither did the Davidians, to be fair

<comment><USER14> Standing up to the ATF in Waco was nothing short of a suicide mission; dozens of people died as a result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _"My vision is to buy a large piece of land and start a new city with all of you…As with everything I will succeed."_

Run roh, bit of a flashing red warning sign with hints of Jonestown.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's hard to get the appeal from these videos. He's... not a strong presence.

<comment><USER17> Especially the early ones where he just seems to be making shit up on the fly and taking really long pauses to think about a good answer. Then again, maybe that makes him more relatable to the average person?

<comment><USER16> The shit-eating grin must work for a particular kind of audience. It counter- signals hard to me.

I know some real narcissists, and I think there's a moment before their narcissism is confirm-able that their "power" has more currency than it will later. I guess we can call it "charisma", but once it turns... it can feel rancid. I guess for some people, that rancid-ness doesn't show up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "It means that we reach a level of maturity to where we as a collective are > able to be contacted openly without us freaking out anymore, without it > needing to be kept secret anymore, we have become > _are_ < own government."

Apparently being god means you don't have to use the right words when communicating.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know what a "dharma battle" would consist of?

<comment><USER19> It's kinda like a rap battle, just with more incense and meditation.

/s

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm still not 100% sure this is for real. It's just so utterly insane.

<comment><USER8> It does seem almost like he started off just trolling people, then decided to run with it when he realized people were willing to pay and/or have sex with him in exchange for that trolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am surprised he is not running for President of the United States.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems like the people who follow him are already predisposed to believe in fanciful ideas like gods and other supernatural beings. Doesn't seem so hard to fool people who already are willing to accept beliefs beyond evidence.

> I've watched him control the weather a lot of times. We'll be at a party and > I'll be like 'Bentinho these clouds are not good, it looks like rain. Within > ten minutes they're gone.

That's a laughably low standard of proof to accept for anything. Let me guess, he can turn invisible too when there's no one looking.

</comment><comment><USER23> Smells like Scientology redux. Meh.</comment>


Ask HN: Where should one go to discuss the higher topics of CS/programming? - <AUTHOR>

I know there are a lot of obvious answers to this question but so far I don't like any of them.
The biggest seems to be Stack Exchange: don't like that because it's totalitarian and only handles precise questions with specific answers.
Next is IRC which is great except you've got everybody in one big room all talking over each other and it keeps interrupting you because it is realtime and not offline.
Mailing lists seem to be full of good programmers but I don't really like the way everything is delivered to you to be stored locally and there's no distinction between conversations you are involved in and the rest. On a busy mailing list that is a big problem. This seems to just be an interface problem so maybe there is a good client for mailing lists out there?
Then there's newsgroups. My ISP doesn't provide newsgroup servers any more so I have to pay to access these now. And aren't they all full of spam?
Lastly you have normal forums which are my favorite in terms of their interface but seem to be full of novices now. Is there a web forum for programmers who want to discuss design, methodology, programming language design, computer science, etc.? Or has that era of the Internet ended now? <comment><USER2> There are mailing list clients that will (try to) thread conversations for you. The Google Groups based ones display that way, you can (generally) read them without signing up. And doesn't Gmail attempt to thread conversations? Nothing says you have to use one mailbox for everything ... I use three, a main Fastmail one, a backup Hotmail one that gets one type of traffic that tended to not get through Fastmail or whatever vendor I used before them, and another Hotmail one for a thinly disguised _nom de guerre_.

Serious newsgroups of the sort you'd be interested in should be covered by [http://gmane.org/](http://gmane.org/) , and when I last subscribed to a professional newsgroup service, they and the general netnews community were good about blocking most spam. Look at this one I just picked mostly at random: [http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.prolog.swi](http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.prolog.swi)

Don't know about forums, but presumably there _might_ be some out there. Spend some quality time with gmane and you might find links to some.

Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities. And of course you'll be able to engage some of them in their comments sections.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the useful reply. I'm giving MailMate some serious consideration depending on whether the smart mailboxes feature can distinguish between threads I'm involved in and threads I am not.

> Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities

Yeah that's quite a good point. Twitter too I guess. The trouble with blogs and twitter is that you can't ask a question unless you have a blog or a twitter account that is popular.

<comment><USER2> The latter for blogs would depend on patience, and effort and/or luck. I.e. find a relevant blog, and either the blogger brings up the subject you're interested in, so you can ask a question, or---and this is probably the most important thing you can do, whatever forum type you do it in---become part of that blog's community. After a certain point you'll be able to ask the author directly and perhaps have it become the basis of a blog positing.

If you can find a community you'll be a long ways towards being a position to get your needs satisfied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I mind Lisp meetups to be astonishingly good: [http://lisp.meetup.com/](http://lisp.meetup.com/)

I imagine meetups for other languages are proportionately as good relative to how little they fall short of Lisp as a language. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I want to learn Racket and my Haskell is very slowly advancing so I'm definitely down with Lisps etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems to me that your question is quite precise and that you are asking for specific answers.

So why did you post it here rather than on [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/) ??? According to you it is the perfect place to find venues for discussing CS topics.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never said Stack Exchange websites were "perfect" for anything. I've just been using it today and I hate it. Stack Exchange websites use competition to achieve answers to questions a paradigm that is completely at odds with collaboration and understanding necessary to actually have conversations in which multiple opinions can coexist and learning can occur.</comment></comment>


Internet Encourages Delusions of Persecution, Schizophrenia - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/fashion/13psych.html

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid they put this article up as part of a plot to persecute those of us who really see what is going on. I think people are delusional when they don't think the government researches mind control on civilians. All stopped when MKULTRA ended, and the mind controllers all went into advertising? No those same people kept doing the same jobs under different names.

Suppose the government was doing mind control research on civilians, and were getting sloppy. Planting stories like this in the NYT would represent an instantiation of a well established mind control technique to marginalize the group you were experimenting at controlling. Associating them with other mental illnesses in the general population, so as to induce associations when reports from your failed experiments come out is textbook mind control. It's the exact same technique your favorite store uses to market you your favorite product.

Of course, it's also true that many people first feel powerless, then become paranoid to disown responsibility for being a powerless loser. It's a fine line. Personally, I think the idea that there is a many-one relationship between mind control agents and controlled people is ridiculous. They don't need to have many agents doing mind control on one person, because TV gives a mechanism for few agents to control many people, with a higher degree of precision and less resources. Yes, your reality is likely completely programmed by institutionalized sociopathic personalities, euphimistically called corporations ("no it isn't," the reader thought, sipping the mountain dew), but it's narcissistic to think it takes many of them to control one of you. It takes a few of them to control millions of you. I think the root of this kind of paranoia is narcissism and ignorance about how easy mind control and mass manipulation are.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone Willing to Review a Resume? - <AUTHOR> I hope this is an acceptable HN request - I've seen a couple of submissions like this over the last few years, so here goes.<p>I'm trying to make a bit of a career change into tech, specifically AI/ML (I'm especially interested in the Google Brain AI residency, so I'd love to hear from anyone out there involved with that), and have had a hard time getting any responses. I'm wondering if my resume is to blame, and so I'd like to ask if anyone out there would be willing to provide a candid review of my resume. If you're willing to donate a little time - thank you so much, and please PM me so I can share my background with you privately. <comment><USER2> My contact info is on my profile page, ping me.</comment>


How Facebook could solve "Missed Connections" right now, if they wanted to - <AUTHOR> http://concertwindow.com/6793/the-solution-to-the-missed-connections-problem

<comment><USER2> "It stands to reason, therefore, that Facebook's algorithm could scan any photo from any of its 800 million members, and recognize you if you're in it. So, let's take that one logical step further. Imagine you take a photo of someone and upload it to Facebook's servers. Facebook can analyze the photo and tag that person's face."

This could work for a mutual friend at a party. But if the face recognizer is given a low-quality subway photo and has 7 million people to choose from (NYC residents) of equal probability, the chance of current technology getting an accurate match is nil.

The author may be a bit confused how Facebook's technology works. Yes, it recognizes faces, but it also eliminates ~99.9999% of members as possibilties by leveraging the social graph.

<comment><USER3> It might still work if it could narrow down the possibilities to, say, a hundred photos or less. The user should be able to go the "last mile" and pick out the one they're looking for.

I'd be curious to see if Facebook's facial recognition technology is this good.

Also, lots of people out in public (especially in NYC) aren't necessarily residents of the given area, which potentially makes this _much_ harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Instead of revealing the individual's identity, FB could send them an automated msg pointing back to your profile with the option to connect (or at least chat). This would leave the decision (privacy protection) in the hands of the recipient.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know if fb face recognition can actually work for all 800 million users or does its tagging do something like nearest neighbor to your friends which I imagine is a simpler problem.

<comment><USER6> It's not nearly good enough for this. While I don't know what they're doing, it doesn't matter -- the state of the art in face recognition is far lower than what this requires.

I would also assume that Facebook's recognition performance is heavily dependent on the fact that everyone has a limited friend circle, because then the requirement is only that you can be distinguished among the few hundred or thousand people you've ever been photographed with, not the 100s of millions of users you haven't.

While not directly related (nor the method they are probably using), here's a project that describes how using others in your photographs can help recognition: <http://lear.inrialpes.fr/pubs/2008/MV08/>

<comment><AUTHOR> So, what if once you upload the "missed connection" photo, Facebook tags it with GPS and filters possible matches against your current location? That would narrow it down quite a bit. I assume they have enough GPS data from other users' photos and status updates to at least place them generally within a state or city at a given time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Worst idea ever. Worst privacy violation ever. This would would be a boon to stalkers, perverts, creeps, serial killers, and I imagine 99% of people would never opt into it.

<comment><USER8> You would opt into it implicitly just by having your pictures on Facebook. Not necessarily just by having an account, mind you; your friends might upload and tag pictures of you.

Yes, it would be a huge privacy violation. Facebook just likely wouldn't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this really a problem? I can't imagine taking a clear picture of a stranger's face rather than exchanging a few words and introducing myself.

<comment><USER10> Yes, that would seem to be the obvious reaction. But that's just because you're a "normal", someone that has, on occasion, interacted romantically in a fairly standard and direct manner with members of the opposite sex.

Now, imagine that you're a forever-alone that spends most of his free time (well, that minuscule portion of free time that's not consumed by LoL, SWTOR, Skyrim, Minecraft, etc. [1]) on Reddit complaining about being "friend-zoned" and fantasizing about that magical girl that looks like a fashion model but "gets you", who likes you just for being a "nice guy" that's "smart", breaking from her natural tendency to go for "bad-boys" because your awesomeness was so obvious to her despite your awkward creepiness and social ineptitude. It's a very different world, one where the idea of semi-passively stalking randoms on the subway without any fear of direct rejection seems a lot more appealing...

[1] I say this as someone that wastes an awful lot of free time on Reddit, as well as playing LoL, SWTOR, Skyrim, Minecraft, and many more, including some Facebook games that I'm far too embarrassed about to cop to on HN (even if I do work in the field and have the ostensible excuse of "market research")...

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Site is down. and seemingly no google cache. Someone have text saved?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, server just melted. Up now. Here's text in case it goes down again:

\- - -

You know those Craigslist missed connections posts? The ones where you're looking across the subway platform at someone, and you wish you could get their number, but you can't really shout across the tracks?

Well, I was in New York City this weekend and I had a sudden inspiration. There's a (hypothetical) solution to the "missed connections" problem. And it's sitting around in plain sight.

Here's how it works. Many of you are probably aware that Facebook has been steadily developing its facial recognition algorithm. It's quite good at this point. It can scan any of your photos and tag you automatically, if you've enabled the feature. That means Facebook's algorithm can recognize your unique face. It stands to reason, therefore, that Facebook's algorithm could scan any photo from any of its 800 million members, and recognize you if you're in it.

So, let's take that one logical step further. Imagine you take a photo of someone and upload it to Facebook's servers. Facebook can analyze the photo and tag that person's face.

I bet you see where I'm going with this.

You're back on the subway platform — you see someone across the way. You raise your phone and snap a quick picture via the Facebook app. The train comes. While you're pulling away, the app has displayed that person's profile. You click "friend."

And just like that, missed connections are a thing of the past.

Interesting, eh? Also, creepy. Obviously, if Facebook enabled this feature it would cause a firestorm of privacy concerns. But Facebook hasn't exactly shown much concern for privacy in the past. And everyone does have a public profile, anyway… and subways are public areas. Given that the tech exists right now, I bet we'll see this within a couple years.

The implications are rather large.

Dan</comment></comment>


A Comprehensive Reboot of Law Enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yudkowsky/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-enforcement-b76bfab850a3 <comment><USER2> Nice post. The contrast with many others, reminded me of a recently-posted Jim Keller interview:

> His [Elon Musk] great insight is people are how constrained. I have this > thing I know how it works, and then little tweaks to that, will generate > something. As opposed to what do I actually want, and then figure out how to > build it. It's a very different mindset, and almost nobody has it obviously.

[1] Short section starting at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=3854](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=3854) . Also liked the longer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=4851](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=4851) , emphasizing self deception and reading.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great post and I think discusses many interesting things. I think there is this dichotomy in how people think what policing is about. One camp thinks policing should be to stop "bad guys" while the other thinks it is to protect and serve, emphasis on the serve. Disclosure, I fall into the latter camp.

I do think we do need to seriously talk about the incentives around policing, justice, and prison systems. They do not have seemed to change much in the last 50 years, but I think many would argue that we've learned a lot, especially about the root causes to what causes people to turn to crime and why they turn away.

I think we also need to revisit Blackstone's ratio[0]. This was an idea from many of the founding fathers. Anyone that is familiar with engineering and failure principles is essentially aware of the topic here. So we need to revisit what failure mode we want the justice system to have. When justice fails should a guilty person go free or should an innocent person be punished? I don't think this is an easy question to answer (disclosure: I believe we should let the guilty person go, because I highly value freedom). This does not mean that we should just let knowingly guilty people go, but means that we know no system is perfect and if we don't design a system with that in mind we are doing a disservice and ignoring an integral part. We always should be trying to improve, but we should recognize that we are not perfect and cannot create a perfect system. We don't design buildings to collapse, but we do design how a building should collapse if for some reason it does (think skyscrapers falling in on themselves so they don't take out other surrounding buildings). Imagine building a bridge and not thinking about possible failure modes. Problem is, a bridge fails catastrophically (unplanned) and a dozen or a hundred people die. A justice system fails thousands are killed, stricken of their rights, or harmed.

WE MUST DISCUSS THIS. While the article discusses topics that essentially say they agree with Blackstone's ratio, I do believe that we need to talk about what we are doing. If we don't then there's no arguing with the other side because our premise is different.

So HN, how do you think failure in justice should work? Do you think should fail so that innocent people go to jail or that guilty people go free? I do believe there are good arguments on both sides, but I also think it depends on what you think policing should be for. So I'll ask that question too.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio)

</comment><comment><USER4> #RebootThePolice is def a better name for the #DefundThePolice movement.

It essentially means the same thing, but doesn't sound like you want a police free lefty utopia.

<comment><USER5> > but doesn't sound like you want a police free lefty utopia

In some ways that's a feature more than a bug - by demanding an insanely extreme solution, you shift the overton window such that a realistic solution looks acceptable by comparison.

(How did we even end up in a place where "police should not be tear-gassing peaceful protests" is a controversial opinion, and we need to reboot people's expectations before suggesting it??)

<comment><USER6> I wonder if that does shift the window, though? At some point I think you appear to be far enough out of the realm of reality that the suggestion appears unserious and is completely disregarded.

eg, if we were talking about climate change one could say that we should just sterilize every human. Certainly that would reduce CO2 emissions. But I don't think it would move the discussion in any meaningful way.

Defund the Police isn't that extreme, but the soundbite version of it may be far enough out there that many people ignore it in a similar way. Or maybe not, I'm just speculating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> haha, I was reading Comprehensive Robo Law Enforcement.</comment>


OS X Yosemite - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/ <comment><USER3> Since nobody has mentioned it yet here, I'm really glad to see AirDrop will finally work between OSX and iOS. It's bothered me for awhile that they have these two different things called "AirDrop" which were not compatible with one another.

<comment><USER4> The lack of AirDrop integration before is probably one of the obnoxious things Apple has done recently. I'm really excited for this simple new feature.

<comment><USER5> > one of the obnoxious things Apple has done recently

AirDrop pre-iOS8 (iCloud Drive, Extensibility) would have been almost totally useless or at minimum required developers to waste time supporting a temporary solution.

<comment><USER6> AirDrop is a end-user feature above all else provided by the OS. It's not true that it would have required developers to support a temporary solution.

My understanding is that on OS X AirDrop was wi-fi only but on iOS it used a combination of wi-fi and Bluetooth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> HandOff is the kind of thing I'm surprised took so long. Honestly, I was expecting MS to get something like it first. After all, your Windows Phone already runs Windows, right?

<comment><USER8> I'm especially shocked this has taken so long because the technology is ancient:

Windows has had a "Use this computer as a Bluetooth Headset" option buried in the Bluetooth preferences for a long time now.

The Address Book in Mac OS 10.0 and 10.1 would also let you send and receive SMSes with compatible phones (no joke):

[http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/11/27/sms.html](http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/11/27/sms.html)

And Linux has had a few projects (like nohands) which do the same thing.

<comment><USER9> >Windows has had a "Use this computer as a Bluetooth Headset" option buried in the Bluetooth preferences for a long time now.

Depends which Bluetooth stack you have installed on Windows.

<comment><USER8> True, like every other Bluetooth feature on Windows.

The stack that I know works is the Broadcom / WIDCOMM one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Widgets, translucency, and animations...

So... OS X 10.10 is... Windows Vista with Aero Glass?

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Windows_Vista....](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Windows_Vista.png)

<comment><USER11> The only difference is that Apple has done it in a tasteful and understood way. Aero looks gaudy af.

<comment><USER12> A lot of people would probably have a different view on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
      > With this new design, OS X...now looks a bit more like iOS 7, but
      > there is still quite a bit of depth. Indeed, more than flat, the
      > design almost seems to focus more on translucency than anything else.

The above is an incomprehensible collection of words to me. I am not sure if this is because of my lack of an intimate connection to Apple products, terrible writing or some combination of the two.

<comment><USER14> When design of an _Operation System_ boils down to just how "truculent" and "flat" (but with "a bit of depth") it is, you know we are talking less about the Operating System and more about the GUI/Window Manager.

<comment><USER15> I, for one, would not like to use a truculent operating system!

<comment><USER16> [http://www.openbsd.org/](http://www.openbsd.org/)

<comment><USER10> I don't think Theo would be too happy about your calling OpenBSD a truculent OS...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Which parts of the front window in this screenshot[0] are draggable? Maybe this is just me, but I don't like how the titlebar and window contents are visually merged.

[0] [https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/images/overview_design_her...](https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/images/overview_design_hero.jpg)

<comment><USER18> All of them — everywhere that isn't another control. Apple stole this design wholesale from GTK[1], but I think it's a superior paradigm anyway, so I don't really mind.

[1] [https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.10/GtkHeaderBar.html](https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.10/GtkHeaderBar.html)

<comment><USER19> Being able to move a window wherever you click is actually pretty old (the oldest example I know of is the Aqua brushed metal type of windows in OSX 10.3 Panther, I believe). Compact window headers don't seem new either. For example iTunes has this since 2010 (version 10).

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/pCv8lV4.png](https://i.imgur.com/pCv8lV4.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm really looking forward to this. Unlike iOS7, the flatter design here doesn't make me feel like a bunch of amateur artists got a hold of a free copy of Adobe Illustrator. I actually like the new look quite a bit. Now, to pray that they've made some under the hood progress on multi-monitor support.

Moving work back and forth from desktop to mobile also sounds really amazing. I get a hint of it when working with gmail or drive, but this sounds much more deeply integrated. Google will _have_ to respond, and this makes me happy.

<comment><USER21> There were multi-monitor updates in Mavericks - fixed most of my issues. What's still an issue for you?

<comment><USER22> This: [http://superuser.com/questions/665004/how-do-you-prevent- the...](http://superuser.com/questions/665004/how-do-you-prevent-the-dock- from-switching-monitors-in-osx-mavericks)

<comment><USER23> another two:

* when you fullscreen a window, there's a white (sometimes black) bar where the menu bar used to be * app switcher changes monitor depending on the monitor you last used the dock (which makes no actual sense).

<comment><USER24> That first one happens if an app is built with an SDK older than 10.9.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I honestly don't understand this design direction. I know it's nice to have a change but from the few screens I have seen on the Verge it looks like something that came from one of those "I redesigned OS X" blog posts.

<comment><USER26> Probably because those posts took heavy inspiration from the visual appearance of iOS 7, of which the new OS X design is based off of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one here who hates to see Lucida Grande be replaced with Neue Helvetica Aslightaspossible?

Eager to see how it looks on non-retina displays.

<comment><USER28> I'm with you. Helvetica Neue in the screenshots looks like placeholder text, waiting for some better typeface to be applied.

<comment><USER29> Gruber seems to think that they have been developing an in-house font called Apple Sans: [http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/wwdc_2014_prelude](http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/wwdc_2014_prelude)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The upgrades to Safari look amazing! [0] Less chrome, Javascript benchmarks (impressive), and the spotlight search in the url...nice! I hope Apple changes the zoom button to maximize the screen.

[0] [https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/apps/](https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/apps/)

<comment><USER31> Looks like Epiphany, the Gnome browser... [0]

Actually, a lot of OS X Yosemite borrows from Gnome's Gtk+, like headerbars [1]

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/xBof95c.png](http://i.imgur.com/xBof95c.png) [1] [https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.10/GtkHeaderBar.html](https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.10/GtkHeaderBar.html)

<comment><USER32> Apple has been toying with putting toolbar controls into the title bar for a long, long time. E.g. Mac App Store. iTunes at various times. It just was never the default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Apple has done away with the faux-3D shelf look here and has put the icons > on a simple translucent background instead.

I like the faux 3d dock . . . it'd be nice if this was configurable.

<comment><USER34> When they switched from the 2d dock to the 3d dock a lot of people said the same thing.

I like how apple is slowly reversing their design decisions. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the return of the spatial finder ;)

<comment><USER35> I tried using the spacial feature of Nautilus, a file manager for Linux. What's your usage of a spatial file manager? I couldn't see it being beneficial to my file browsing in any way. Just curious.

<comment><USER27> Valid question, don't know why it was downvoted.

The short answer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager#Advantage...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager#Advantages)

The verbose answer: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/04/finder/](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/04/finder/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Url changed from [http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/02/apple-announces-os-x- yosemi...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/02/apple-announces-os-x-yosemite- with-translucent-flatter-design-updated-notification-center-and-more/).

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not a fan of the flat design personally, but the redesign is pretty sharp. I like the minimal safari UI; its nice when the browser lets the webpage be main focus and I think it is something Safari does best.

<comment><USER38> Safari looks similar to GNOME Web[1]. Not that this would be bad, I think it's a great UI.

[1]: [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Spotlight seems an awful lot like Alfred now. [http://www.alfredapp.com/](http://www.alfredapp.com/)

<comment><USER40> Alfred does a lot more than that. But yes, the inspiration is obvious (and Alfred itself was inspired by Quicksilver).

<comment><USER41> Which was inspired by LaunchBar. The cmd-space keyboard shortcut originated with LaunchBar back in the NeXT days. Spotlight has had added features repeatedly over the years, and people have said that LaunchBar/QuickSliver/Alfred are about to be "Sherlocked".

<comment><USER42> > Sherlocked:

> To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple > come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update.

> It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with > iWeb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> As seen on a the screenshot for the new notification center calendar, the Life of an Apple user begins at 10:00 with a crossfit session. After that it is not that you go to work then. Relaxing talk with Anne on the phone, maybe talking a little business on the side, but not to rough. After Lunch you do not start to work either. Just let out all those wise thoughts gathered while living your apple lifestyle in a fresh stream, like you do.

</comment><comment> J-H Really like the new design, but I think the coolest new thing is HandOff. The new Spotlight search is cool, too.

<comment><USER44> Agreed. The UI design isn't even worth mentioning if they really make it seamless to go from device to device. I'd love to leave my phone in another room and just use my tablet/computer while at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Not a great article: new features trumpeted include Spotlight's ability to search for mail messages and contacts, and a Private Browsing mode for Spotlight - both of which are pretty long-standing features.

These things tend to get rushed out, but maybe TC could have waited just a few more minutes to weed out the obvious stinkers.

<comment><USER46> Was this originally a TC link? Because it now points to the Apple.com page for OS X Yosemite, and some of the comments elsewhere in this thread no longer make sense. I didn't know it was possible for mods to change the link associated with a story, and now that I know I wish they wouldn't do it.

<comment><USER45> It was a pretty crappy TechCrunch story, yes. My comment is therefore invalid now, so it might be a good idea for a mod to kill it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Those bars looks surprisingly close to GNOMEs' ones.

<comment><USER48> This browser looks surprisingly close to GNOME's one.

[https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web?action=AttachFile&do=get&tar...](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Web-3.12.png)

[http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/IMG_96...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/IMG_9664.jpg)

<comment><USER49> It looks virtually identical to the iPad one.

[http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/06/io...](http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/06/ios-7-ipad-safari.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> If possible, could someone from the Apple community please tell me if Yosemite will be faster / lighter than snow leopard? I don't want an OS that requires 8 gigs of ram to run "fast" like Mavericks requires.

<comment><USER51> You need to come to grips with the fact that SL was the high-water mark for OS coherency/consistency/quality from Apple.

You can't pour all of this time and energy into iOS and phones and still make something as clean as SL. Which is too bad.

FWIW, I continue to run SL on an early 2009 Mac Pro with no problems or annoyances ... hope that can continue.

<comment><USER52> I guess you can, until you run into a piece of software that wont run on SL. SL is my favorite OS X version by far too. But Lightroom 5 requires 10.7, so that's where I'm at now...

<comment><USER23> i wish i could stay on SL -- spaces was quite awesome, expose worked better, really lightweight and fast.

i stayed on SL for as long as I could (aka had to upgrade my computer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is awesome, but can we talk about the very scary looking folder icons?

<comment> robinson-wall Oh yikes, I missed that. They're pretty garish: [https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/design/images/apps- gallery...](https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/design/images/apps- gallery/osx_design_view_finder.jpg)

<comment><USER54> Eh... Wow! Looks like they decided the hell with it and installed xfce ([http://cdn.xfce.org/frontpage/slider- desktop.jpg](http://cdn.xfce.org/frontpage/slider-desktop.jpg))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Hopefully they've spent some time on Messages; it's by far the buggiest app of theirs I've used in quite some time.

<comment><USER56> +1

I hope that they finally fix groupchats across devices. Always have about 5 different conversations with the same 2 people and each message goes seemingly randomly in one conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> For those interested, the translucent effect can be disabled in Accessibility flagging "reduce transparency".

</comment><comment><USER58> OS X Yosemite - call me impressed.

Favorite features: HandOff, phone calling feature, Markup, Safari improvements... Oh yes, and AirDrop now working between OS X and iOS. At last.

</comment><comment><USER59> So... Oh Ess Ten Ten Point Ten? Is that how it's pronounced? I suppose it's better than OS X X.X.

<comment><USER60> They already dropped the first ten. It's OS 10.10.

<comment><USER61> Apple is definitely printing "OS X 10.10": [http://cdn.macrumors.com/article- new/2014/05/osxyosemitefall...](http://cdn.macrumors.com/article- new/2014/05/osxyosemitefall.jpg)

<comment><USER62> That is not an official Apple image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'd be happy if they fixed Mail's connection to Exchange (drops randomly - <USER2> know issue), or the terribly slow SMB - mounting Windows drives is just a nightmare. There is a fix, more like a hack really, forcing the OS to use an earlier version of SMB.

Fix those two and I'm there.

<comment><USER64> Are you talking about Mavericks? I'm still on Mountain Lion and Windows drives take a little while, but I wouldn't call it a nightmare. I guess what I'm asking is: did SMB get worse on Mavericks?

<comment><USER65> Yes, Mavericks started using SMB2 which has many reported performance issues [0]. Most people experiencing it can work around this by using cifs:// instead of smb:// or disabling SMB2 and reverting to using SMB1 [1].

[0] [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5470025?start=0&tstart=...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5470025?start=0&tstart=0) [1] [http://cammodude.blogspot.com/2013/10/os-x-109-mavericks- wor...](http://cammodude.blogspot.com/2013/10/os-x-109-mavericks-workaround- for-smb.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I wonder how legacy apps will look? I'm assuming it will work the same was as iOS 6 apps do on iOS 7, where they just run the same as they did before and look like older apps.

That's going to be a confusing transition. Although it might shame app developers into updating their apps.

<comment><USER40> This isn't the first time OS X has changed the looks of title bars[1]. Typically the transition is eased a lot by a) Cocoa works it out for you and b) an active developer community that is provided with early access. So by the time the OS is released to the general public, most apps have already been adapted.

[1] [http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/macosx...](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/macosx100.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> The dark UI option is a nice touch.

<comment> k-mcgrady I wonder how that translates into applications? They just showed the menu bar and dock go dark unless I missed something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I don't care about flat or transparent. I just hope they effing fix windowing and multi-monitor support. ⌘+` is ridiculously buggy.

<comment><USER69> I left OSX for Linux 5 years ago primarily due to the unbelievably lacking window management. Having come from Windoze land with the then, and perhaps still, excellent UltraMon, I could never adapt to manually reizing app windows side by side into grids, or context switching between layers expose-style.

The tiling window manager options on Linux are so good that I've dropped the desktop environment entirely (Gnome, KDE, etc.) and am just rolling with a TM, lightweight theme and icon package for a quite nice gtk3 look.

OSX wins in out of the box "just works" and bling departments, no argument there, but otherwise it holds no appeal, this bird has flown...

<comment><USER70> Faced with the same issue, I installed a tiny app, SizeUp. There are at least 1/2 dozen alternatives.

<comment><USER71> I'm quite fond of Spectacle ([http://spectacleapp.com/](http://spectacleapp.com/)), which is MIT-licensed F/OSS: [http://spectacleapp.com/](http://spectacleapp.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I am deeply disappointed by the "development" of OS X. It seems that Apple has long ago gutted their x86 OS group due to dwindling profits and lack of real competition. There are a handful of reasons people buy a Mac, and I would largely put them into three groups:

* Students looking for a stable and/or sexy device for their university.

* Artists using applications that don't exist on other platforms (or that prioritize Mac platforms).

* Hackers that want a Unix-like system with a BSD userland, or want Anything But Windows on a laptop.

Sadly, these groups are small groups with eclectic needs that won't be met or improved by real systems engineering with the kernel and core modules. What do I mean by real systems engineering?

* Major kernel development

* Novel and/or modern filesystem support

* Fundamental or deeply integrated "platform" features

In Linux land, every major kernel release brings these features. There are tangible improvements to filesystems, to core features that enable new things to be developed on top of them in every Linux release. These are, largely, absent on OS X. The system is _too closed_ , and the result is that things like Time Machine or even security features and ACLs are hacks upon hacks. Full disk encryption and home folder support is, again, hack-ish, and largely built on work other people did. OS snapshots is essentially an "rsync" to another drive with a smart "restore" utility that repairs changes.

The major kernel development that Microsoft undertook with Windows Server 2003 and Vista is still paying dividends. Folder shadow copies became integrated into fully consistent backups with built-in snapshots. Full disk encryption improved - though home folder encryption is still tragically stuck with NTFS "EFS" support (lackluster, at best.) UAC, AppLocker, and integrity levels brought foundational improvements to the security model. Networking stack changes brought DirectAccess, a woefully underused and under-marketed technology. Storage Spaces and ReFS, though years too late, are interesting alternatives to ZFS/BTRFS. Transactional NTFS was woefully underused, but maybe it will return with ReFS. The core improvements Microsoft is making to the NT kernel are still worthwhile, though. Hyper-V is a fantastic technology, and could really blow people's minds when it's baked into the client OS. (For reference, Hyper-V powers the Xbox One's dual app/game personality. It allows isolating the management OS from games running on it, and also keeps the management OS from interfering with game performance with resource limiting. And they both share high performance access to the GPU.) Ah, I could go on. Reading about new stuff in kernel development is a joy.

Of course, I could go on ad nauseum about Linux changes since 3.0x, but [http://kernelnewbies.org/](http://kernelnewbies.org/) does a better job than I will.

The result is tragic: Microsoft invested in platform features and then didn't sell users on what it could do with Vista. Apple continues to apply lipstick to the OS X pig and sell users on changes to the window manager and built-in applications.

<comment><USER73> Mavericks introduced a lot of tangible under the hood improvements that perhaps you missed, Ars did a thorough review, perhaps start with how the OS was changed to improve energy consumption: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/12/#energy- sa...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/12/#energy-saving)

<comment><USER74> Yes, linux geeks can school Apple on systems engineering when they can deliver laptops with a better battery life than Macs get. As for this latest release, what, adding a new systems programming language and a whole new graphics API isn't enough?

At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that.

<comment><USER75> My 15" rMBP running Mavericks randomly reboots on occasion, and to this day still requires me to manually disable / enable WiFi almost every time I open the lid.

Meanwhile Homebrew is a poor substitute for aptitude and PPAs, multi-monitor support is relatively poor (xmonad excels here), and the Apple keyboard is missing a bunch of keys I use on a regular basis.

<comment><USER76> This. People sing to the heavens of how stable OSX is and how it just works. I've had as many if not more issues than with my Windows 7 Samsung laptop.

Wifi constantly needs manually disabling/enabling, Bluetooth Audio crashes are common, I average one full system crash per month, display settings reset themselves magically and Finder is infuriating. I should be keeping a log of all the issues I have.

This is on a 2014 Macbook Pro.

<comment><USER77> Latest Macbook Pro here and have that same WIFI issue. I still have 5 year old Lenovo with windows 7 on it that is just as, if not more, stable than the Mac.

On Mac things like Alfred (probably will drop this for the new spotlight), better touch tool, some capabilities like ability to swap USB MIDI controllers without restarting OS are cool. Honestly though, performance wise there isn't that much difference between my Mac and Win Machines and being in programs full screen most of the day I notice much difference at all. The really flexible information moving things I've grown accustomed to on Win seem a bit crippled on Mac because of lack of a filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I know it's hardly the most important thing in an operating system but god that looks ugly. This dumb flat fad cannot end soon enough. I hope mavericks get security updates for awhile because I don't have plans to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER40> I just hope there's a setting to turn off all this translunacy[sp!].

<comment><USER79> System Preferences > Accessibility [Display] -> Check "Reduce Transparency"

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> My wish list is per project spaces, such that:

1) a copy of mail, tasks, text editor/IDE, preview etc. Can all be opened that are specific to a project/space, say.

2) Multiple copies of apps filtered by their project

3) mail only shows emails about/from/in association with the current project

4) preview/photoshop shows project assets, these are shared in the ether via iCloud, you can see designers working on things in realtime

5) I switch spaces and they are all saved/restorable after reboot

6) developer Apis for this!

Wishful thinking I guess :-)

</comment><comment><USER81> Wait... is it just me, or do the apps and window designs look very much like Gnome3 (circa 3.12)???

Compare pictures: 1\. [https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/apps/](https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/apps/) 2\. [https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/](https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/) (Web, Chat, Mail, etc.)

<comment><USER82> I dunno, I think this refers back to [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2002/09/macosx-10-2/10/#brushed...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2002/09/macosx-10-2/10/#brushed- metal) minus the texture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Does anyone have a link to a screen shot of the new "dark mode"? If I've seen it, I didn't notice it.

<comment><USER84> This is the only one I've seen: [http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/162...](http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/16225/DSC_0848.jpg)

It was linked in The Verge's live blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> The Handoff feature is interesting. I hope its not just some lame cloud sync that takes ages to sync because your 3G/wifi is spotty. For e.g. If I was writing an email in Mail.app I'd want to be able to shut my mac and resume writing on my iphone exactly where I left off. Same with Safari and other shared apps.

</comment><comment><USER86> Again, I came to the same conclusion like many times before. Apple does have the best hardware (talking about notebooks), but that's where the story ends.

I found a combination of MacBook Pro with Linux, as the only good use of Apple hardware.

<comment><USER87> Completely the opposite for me. Now that I am used to all the pleasantries of OS X, it is painful to try and get anything done on a linux computer. I end up ignoring whatever disaster of a desktop environment is installed and living in the terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Folks using vmware fusion be warned, it does not work with Yosemite.

</comment><comment><USER89> Will the syncing of Mac and iOS have a significant impact on the battery life of the iPhone? I noticed MightyText takes up significant energy on my Nexus 5.

</comment><comment><USER90> translucency is the new glossy screen---it looks cool at first, but in practice makes what you're looking at harder to see

<comment> UVB-76 I wouldn't say that's the case with iOS (and now OS X Yosemite) translucency.

This isn't like the Vista Aero catastrophe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> How do you enable dark mode? I'm on 10.10 and I can't find it anywhere.

<comment><USER92> I don't know about the dark mode, but can you answer, is 10.10 stable enough? I'd like to try it on my home system

<comment><USER93> I've just tried it on my 2014 15" rMBP and I'd say it's too unstable and buggy for use as your primary OS. I'm now back to Mavericks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Ye gods, is this the end of Chicago?

<comment><USER95> Chicago hasn't been the system font for roughly 14 years.

<comment><USER94> Ha, you're right. I guess something about how Lucida Grande is rendered, plus all the formative years spent on a Mac Plus, made it so I've been seeing Chicago this whole time.

I'm feeling rather shaken right now.

<comment><USER95> It's ok. I miss Chicago, honestly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Hopfully it will be more stable than os x mavericks

</comment><comment><USER97> The race of the uglies - OS X Yosemite vs Windows 8.1 - is on! :-D

<comment><USER98> The flatter design looks more like older versions of OS X. [http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/10.3.9-P...](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/10.3.9-Panther.jpg)

<comment><USER97> Sorry, this was just a jab at the flat-design trend nowadays ;-)

I use OS X only since 10.7 so I didn't have any exposure to its previous versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Yosemite? This doesn't sound feline!

<comment><USER100> Neither does "Mavericks" \- they switched last year to "Places in California".

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Ironic that the official apple page for Yosemite shows it running a macbook air, which hasn't seen a cosmetic or design update in ... 6 years ? 2009 was when they removed the physical mouse button...

<comment><USER101> And what would you like to change in MacBook Air in terms of design? The only thing I can think of are very minor, evolutionary changes, but other than that, this machine is perfect (or very close to it) for what it stands for - very portable computer. On the other hand, there's plenty to do around the OS X.

<comment><USER94> How about allowing the lid to open 180 degrees? I can't curl up on the couch with my Air nearly as well as I could with my Thinkpad.

Or making it so the palm rests don't suck all the heat out of my hands? Or smooth the sharp edge so it doesn't sometimes dig grooves into my wrists? And, ffs, retina?

True, the Air is still the best portable laptop going (Intel should be downright ashamed of their Ultrabook fizzle). But very close to perfect? Not yet.

<comment><USER102> None of this bothers me in the slightest. But for the love of Christ, move the damned power button. Accidentally hitting that makes me so very sad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> In 2 years when they announce iOS X (10), I expect that will be when apps can only be loaded from the App Store and their vertical integration will be complete.

</comment><comment><USER104> Is the name a subtle reference to how its going to blow? I'll see myself out.

I'm sure it will be extremely solid, it looks really nice. For me I'll stick with linux / linux vms, though.

</comment><comment><USER105> So basically it is catching up with Windows 8.

<comment><USER106> I think you mean "Aero" on Vista.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> _Yawn_ Come on Apple, you can do better. Innovate!

</comment><comment><USER108> I hope they will be offering a cosmetic repair to this fugly monster. I already miss Mavericks AND I'M STILL RUNNING IT.

</comment><comment><USER109> Yep, Apple still hasn't learned that iOS Flat is Apple's Vista. Windows users used Vista DESPITE aero not because of it. So now they added it to Mac. If I can keep from upgrading, I will.

</comment><comment><USER110> I think the iOS 7 design looks like a joke, but I'm nonetheless happy they're changing OS X, it needed a renovation.

<comment><USER58> It's so easy to criticize. What did you do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> I wish Apple would spend their resources on finally fixing some of the most broken fundamentals (photo sync, notifications, finder...), rather than letting Ive further trash the GUI and celebrating that as some sort of accomplishment...

<comment><USER112> Other than Finder, the rest of the keynote seems to have addressed photo sync (nonissue for me so I saw something happened but didn't follow the details), but notifications is getting a big revamp (in experience more than UI it seems).

EDIT: The Notifications UI is actually getting customized widgets finally. About damn time.</comment></comment>