Ask HN: What's your laptop? - <AUTHOR> I've never owned a device that is not a Mac. Currently I have a Macbook Air that is getting slower. I was considering buying something else to run Ubuntu or a Surface, mainly to  do some Clojure/JS development.<p>Any suggestions? <comment><USER3> 2018 MBP 15"

Now, I like macOS but this generation of hardware is shit. I had a 2016 model and the keyboard failed twice. Replaced it and got tired of constant problems with the keyboard.

Got a Dell XPS 13", decided I was gonna ditch macOS due to hardware issues and switch to Linux. After fiddling forever with the trackpad and the fact that sometimes closing the lid did not sleep the machine. It became clear that I was too old for that stuff. Tried Windows with WSL as I need a Unix environment. It works but the IO is too slow. It's just a toy at this point to show people linux binaries working on windows.

Went ahead and bought a 2018 MBP. The 2018 keyboard were supposed to be fixed.

Guess what, my up arrow key just started failing. I'm thinking about moving to a farm.

<comment><USER4> I also have a 2018 MBP.

There's so many possible issues that I have to baby the machine & live in constant fear:

* keyboard keys getting stuck - [0]

* USB-C ports wearing out [1]

* stage light issue [2]

[0] - [https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program- for-m...](https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-macbook- and-macbook-pro/)

[1] - [https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/9l5gno/usbc_por...](https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/9l5gno/usbc_port_is_becoming_loose_from_frequent/)

[2] - [https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/22/macbook-pro-stage- light/](https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/22/macbook-pro-stage-light/)

For a supposed Pro machine that costs $$$$, this machine was not designed well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not cheap, but the Thinkpad X1 Carbons are machines of the same quality as Macbooks. They are comparable to the Air in weight (but a little larger, I think) and are designed with reasonable trade-offs.

They (of course) (only) come in stylish matte black, and have the little red trackpoint, which I personally consider the best input device by far (not counting the keyboard obviously)...

If you decide for a professional Thinkpad (which the X1 is), strongly consider upgrading the warranty.

On-site support with coverage for accidental damages is so nice when you need it....

My 4th gen (the current is 6th gen) machine (which is technically a yoga gen1 and not a 4th gen Carbon, but the same base machine) has been running Linux since it's second power-on :)

<comment><USER6> I wish I could agree, but my X1C6 has many issues on Debian.

* Hibernate did not work out-of-the-box

* Lack of fractional scaling makes everything too small or ludicrously big (100% or 200%)

* X server crashes often on suspend

* Audio is too quiet on maximum volume

* Occasionally CPU performance tanks, and I have to reboot

* Track-pad is unresponsive compared to a MacBook (if you have not used a MacBook often before you may not notice this, and it won't be an issue)

* Battery life is a pretty middling 5 hours.

<comment><USER5> I think using Debian combined with an untrue belief of Linux being as polished as Win or MacOS is the root of some of your problems.

As for battery, my two year old battery hits somewhere between 7 and 8 hours when I work without power for a day.

I don't use suspend at all and have never used the trackpad (why would I, it has a superior pointing device). The trackpad can thankfully be fully disabled in the bios (and has been since the beginning).

The trackpoint combined with the on-site warranty is why I don't even spend time looking for "alternatives"!

<comment><USER5> Linux is also the only platform that a lot of people love, but has almost no hardware where it is officially supported (at least for desktops and laptops)!!!!

<comment><USER7> Ahem

[https://puri.sm/products/librem-15/](https://puri.sm/products/librem-15/)

[https://system76.com/](https://system76.com/)

[https://www.dell.com/learn/au/en/aubsd1/campaigns/xps- linux-...](https://www.dell.com/learn/au/en/aubsd1/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop)

[https://support.lenovo.com/au/en/solutions/pd031426](https://support.lenovo.com/au/en/solutions/pd031426)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would suggest an older ThinkPad instead of a brand new one. Almost every operating system I know of targets them as a platform, you won't run into issues with Wi-Fi cards and suspend/resume, and they are quite upgradable.

Some have hot-swappable batteries (no need to shut down just to switch to a fresh battery), they all have great keyboards, even ancient machines feel fast with a new SSD, and the cooling is miles better than an "ultrabook" design.

Whatever you do, I would caution against buying a machine for the specs. You'll probably get something heavy, with poor battery life, and if you need more power, you should be doing those tasks on a remote system or a beefy "cloud" VPS instance anyway.

<comment><USER9> I would second this. By "older" it could be a generation or two from their outlet for $500 or an old T42 from eBay for $100, depending on your performance needs. Either way it's really, really hard to go wrong with a Thinkpad... that's why they're such a standard in big enterprise environments.

<comment><USER10> The non-IPS screens in Thinkpads are terrible - so that's basically anything that is 1366x768 or 1600x900 and _not_ a tablet (So the X220 vs the X220T, which comes with an IPS screen)

The 1080p, 1440p, and 4K screens in the Tx40 series and newer (T440, T/W540, etc) are fine screens.

Don't forget the battery life also didn't get 'good' until Haswell chipset laptops came to be, which is also the x40 series for Lenovo. Before that, if you want any kind of battery life you need the extended battery that sticks way out, or the sheet battery which makes a not-so-thin laptop even thicker. Also, finding a battery that's in good shape for a 6+ year old laptop can be pretty tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to own Macs as well and then I got a Thinkpad, which has long been hailed as the ultimate hacker's laptop. If you are looking for something that is of the quality of a Macbook this is what you want. Personally I've also wanted a nice minimalist looking black laptop for a long time so that's a bonus.

I have a T480s, fully maxed out specs except no dedicated GPU (this will give you dual heat pipes instead for better thermal performance on an i7 core). 24GB RAM. Keyboard is incredible compared to Macbook. I recommend non-backlit version for better textures on the keys. Case itself is military spec compliant and probably stronger than Macbook unibody. Hard drive is a terabyte NVME ssd, and I added a Toshiba RC100 480gb NVME ssd into the WWAN slot (runs at 1x performance though, but still good). I upgraded the wifi card to the latest intel 9260 so I can achieve gigabit Wifi speeds at work, an easy swap. I run linux distros and windows in dual boot depending on work requirements.

Thinkpad laptops can also open ALL the way flat which has actually come in handy a few times. You won't know though until you experience it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have an XPS 15 9560, running Ubuntu. Honestly I really dislike it. Linux just can't properly handle a 4k display, or a laptop with a graphics card. I have to reboot to turn on Integrated graphics instead of a graphics card every time I want to use my laptop away from a charger, or else the graphics card stays on permanently and drains the battery so fast.

It is also incapable of going into hibernate, meaning I have to shut it down every time I want to stop using it for an extended period of time. Closing the lid causes it to heat up constantly, which is an issue if you ever absentmindedly close the lid or put it in your bag without shutting it down. It has gotten to extremely high temperatures from doing this.

Just makes me want a macOS device, for a laptop at least.

<comment><USER13> Why not try Windows?

<comment><USER12> I have dual boot Windows and Linux, but I just dislike developing on Windows. I use Windows for all other laptop usage other than dev

<comment><USER13> What do you dislike? (not being contrary or anything just curious)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an office notebook, Lenovo T480s is nice (1500 bucks, but it's worth). If this is not enough, you could think about Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon - it has a better display with HDR Support, which is very impressive. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOsERJzMhLc&t=315s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOsERJzMhLc&t=315s)

Things you should care about are:

\- Good Linux support (Lenovo is well known to have that)

\- Good display

\- NVMe SSD (not msata or m2 sata)

\- As much RAM as possible

\- Quad Core CPU if possible

If you would like to play games, you could think about an external graphics card, then Thunderbolt is required and should be the highest version possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not really into gaming and would use cloud services for big computing tasks.

Solid advice on the specs! I don't want to waste time figuring out hardware compatibility to be honest, so I'd pick something not too high end that is widely used.

Thinkpads and Lenovos seem like a good compromise

<comment><USER14> Beware that Lenovo has different series of thinkpads...

Take one of the following series:

\- X => high end

\- T => good value but still top technology

\- L => budget but still business line and good specs

<comment><USER5> Yes, and even more important: Thinkpads and "Lenovo"s (non Thinkpads) are two vastly different beasts. The former being great, the latter "meh".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have an HP Envy 13 that I bought mainly for the specs/price. But I was pleantly surprised with the build quality, very quiet fans but good thermals, and keyboard. Runs Ubuntu 16.04 without issue.

For $850 (on sale) the specs cannot be beat, 4k touchscreen, 4 core i7-8th gen, 16gb ram, 512GB nvme ssd, and dedicated NVidia GPU.

My only complaint is that it charges via barrel pin instead of USB-C.

Here's where I bought it, but I got it from their ebay storefront with a coupon or something: [https://www.adorama.com/ihp1kt13uar.html](https://www.adorama.com/ihp1kt13uar.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I have a 2018 MacBook Pro, i7-6core, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD. I can run Ubuntu in Parallels without issue (or VirtualBox without much issue). Parallels does run the laptop a little warm, but that's all.

I came from an ASUS ROG g751jy which was a behemoth in size. I ran Ubuntu on it for most of the three years I developed with it. My biggest concerns with it were battery life and form factor. Both concerns were addressed by moving to the MacBook Pro. I'm happy I did.

So if your budget allows, I suggest going with another Mac, but if you wish to go somewhat cheaper, take a look at the Thinkpad X1 Carbon laptops or the Dell XPS 13 Developer edition laptops.

My biggest beef with most laptops is the 16GB max RAM. I run VMs and a few Java apps, so I need the RAM. Once Apple finally put it into their MBP line, I was sold.

</comment><comment><USER17> XPS 15 9570; very happy. Linux is imperfect but largely good; I use i3-gaps on manjaro. MacOS also works, if you're interested in hackintoshing, with 2 caveats: one, patching acpi tables is really hard (though I hear you can get help over at olarila). Two, you need a new wifi card (preferably an intel). If you gripe to dell about the old one, they'll usually send a replacement. Which is probably good anyway, since the killer is not good at all.

i7-8750H, 1tb ssd, 4k screen, 32gb ram (really good for dev stuff). The screen is also excellent: you don't appreciate it until you've got it, but it's actually usable in bright sunlight. And the battery is huge; near the tsa limit for how much lithium you can bring on a plane.

</comment><comment><USER18> I installed Linux Mint 19 on my Dell XPS13 when it arrived (it came with Windows 10) and it's not missed a beat: 100% hardware compatibility. I did update the BIOS before installing Linux though. It's the best laptop I've owned.

I don't use the trackpad often, I like my mouse, but when I do it always surprises me how good it is.

I have the companion dock on my desk, which also worked out of the box with Mint 19 despite some forum comment that it wasn't fully compatible. I can unplug the laptop from the dock (which has a large monitor, USB audio, ethernet) and keep working; plug it back in and everything reconnects seamlessly.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have three:

 _2016 MacBook Pro 13 " non-Touchbar_

It's a great machine. I'm not putting faith in the keyboard lasting longer than the 4 year service period Apple has, it's been replaced once already. The screen is amazing, battery life is great, no real complaints other than it only has 2 ports.

 _2014 MacBook Air_

Also a great machine. Battery still lasts almost 10 hours, which is about 2 hours longer than the 2016 MacBook Pro I have. It's very usable, but it's not very fast. The other MacBook is 50% faster in both single and multicore tasks. I keep it around as a backup machine as well as having a slower device to use for testing. However, if I spilled a coffee on it I would not miss it. I'm partial to the Air as I had a 2010 and loved it.

 _Lenovo T480S_

This is a great machine. I work in a Windows world so I can't use a Mac. Works great docked, gives 8 hours of battery on the road, really winds up with 4 cores of power, 16GB RAM, an 512GB SSD, and was a little cheaper than the Mac. Screen and keyboard are great. Single-core stuff it's only about 10% faster than the Mac but for the multicore stuff it's over 50% faster. Strangely not 2X as fast like my 15" MBP was.

</comment><comment><USER19> Dell XPS 13 9350. Wish it had more than 8GB on the model with the 1080 panel, but it's been great for the past few years running Fedora.

Upgraded the WiFi card to an Intel 8650 and storage to a Samsung NVME 512GB.

Keyboard is pretty good. No real strange key placement. Screen is great since matte was an option. Battery life is great. Form factor is perfect. 13" in the size of a traditional 11".

</comment><comment><USER20> Dell XPS 15 9570, best notebook I've ever had. Only major issue is that the default fancurve was probably chosen randomly because they just couldn't be bothered.

It can be fixed thou with [https://github.com/TomFreudenberg/dell-bios-fan- control](https://github.com/TomFreudenberg/dell-bios-fan-control)

<comment><USER21> Similarly: the dell precision 5520 (or, 5530? now I guess)

Amazing laptop, great linux support. Shame the TB16 dock is hot garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A souped up work 15" MBP 2018, although I would prefer a Thinkpad. The keyboard on MBP still feels very fragile and does not inspire much confidence.

It is for these reasons, I find it hard to discard _some_ of the trusted old kit. So, I either try to reappropriate it or find a utility; otherwise, it a goes to a new home.

For example, I have managed to turn a Thinkpad T420s into a Hackintosh, recovered 17" FHD panel from a Sony Vaio and connected it to a Raspberry Pi via LVDS interface, a 1st gen Lenovo X1 which dual boots Ubuntu & W10, runs VM's and does so much more despite it's meagre specs. It is my Tamagotchi and a device I will miss when it dies, probably due to battery degradation or some kind of fan error.

[https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285678-lenovo- thinkp...](https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285678-lenovo- thinkpad-t420-with-uefi-only/)

</comment><comment><USER23> LG Gram 14 with i5 8th Gen with 8gb RAM and 256gb SSD. It has one extra slot each for RAM and SSD that I plan to fill later. Linux Mint 19.1 with dual boot to Windows that it came with - everything worked right out of the box. Things I love are 990grams weight, 14 hours battery (4.18 series kernel and mostly I use terminal, vim, Firefox; when I compile java applications regulalry, still get 9hours of battery); backlit keyboard and a very lovely FHD display (though the glare from lights is a bit more).

It doesn't have dedicated graphics card and it doesn't feel sturdy like an all metal laptop - though it has survived several flights in a regular backpack in overhead compartment.

I switched from MacBook Air to this. Mainly because the sharp edge in the front was getting tiresome while typing. Plus I didn't think any of the new Mac's are worth the outlandish premium for my mostly terminal driven work.

</comment><comment> semi-extrinsic Running an HP x360 for the past year, it's been stable and is small enough yet usable. The pressure-sensitive pen is great, but only works on some apps on Windows it seems.

Before that I had a Dell XPS 15 where the battery overheated and bloomed up to the point of destroying the chassis and touchpad. Needless to say, that wasn't great.

<comment><USER17> I heard about this problem in the older models, but have had no such issue with the 9560 and 9570. 9550 was the one with the big problems, if I understand correctly (with a little in the 9560 too).

<comment> semi-extrinsic Yeah, I think the first-gen XPS 15 had a lot of wrinkles, but it seems reasonable they've ironed them out by now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 2015 MBP 13" \+ 2018 MBP 13"

My hardware needs are within the current scope of silicon Apple has in their lineup, and using both Thunderbolt 2 and 3 I can connect everything I need (usually only using 1 or 2 cables for everything).

I do not need or want to use Windows on my own hardware, and I do like how macOS presents a reasonably polished Unix/POSIX type of experience. I run Linux on stationary hardware as a side-workhorse, everything else is either in a datacenter or in a public cloud.

While this Apple stuff isn't perfect, it works in the areas that I need, and other mobile hardware + software combinations simply don't come even close, which isn't as much an Apple-does-it-right thing, but more of a the-others- need-to-get-their-crap-together thing. It's 2019, you'd expect things like responding to input (trackpad, closing the screen, connecting devices) to be solved.

</comment><comment><USER25> I need to run Windows, macOS, and Linux for testing purposes. I've had the luxury of having a different machine for each OS through work, but I'm moving to freelance work soon and won't have that luxury anymore.

I'd like to use a mac as my primary machine. Right now I have an 8GB 13" macbook pro, and when I tried running Windows and Ubuntu in Virtualbox, it was pretty laggy. I wasn't sure if that was because of issues with Virtualbox, or whether my system didn't have enough resources to run virtual machines efficiently. I haven't tried either yet, but I'd be happy to go with Parallels or VMWare Fusion if they run better than Virtualbox.

I'd really like to stay with a 13" macbook if possible. Does anyone know if a maxed-out 13" macbook pro will handle multiple OSes well, or do I need to get a 15" to handle this load?

<comment><AUTHOR> Macbooks are so sticky! Plus there's always the risk you'll have to build some iOS app.

Maybe for Ubuntu, unless you develop apps with GUIs you can just use a VPS?

<comment><USER5> Yes, they are.

Many/some Mac users regret their switch.

Personally I tried it the opposite way. I love Linux, windows is okay - <USER2> OsX was the reason I gladly took a 1000 USD loss after three months for getting rid of a fully specced PowerBook. All longtime Mac Users tell me that 10.4 was near the high point...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 2013 MBP, now I just use a PC that I already had for some gaming reformatted with linux. Takes some getting used to with all the keyboard shortcuts and stuff changing, but it was a massive 'free' upgrade for my work and now I just use my laptop where it is suitable.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've had pretty good luck with buying a new ASUS laptop every year or so and then giving the old ones to my family. They definitely don't last as long as a Mac, but the specs are often comparable and I prefer to run Windows/Linux in a VM than OSX.

Not sure if this is a good mindset to have, but I feel less worried about lugging a ~$1000 laptop around town compared to a $3000 Macbook. It feels a little less like a priceless object and more like a "disposable" tool (as disposable as a $1000 object could ever be).

Also the keyboard is perfect and isn't the Mac's, which I can't really deal with.

Currently I'm rolling with a Zenbook UX430U, primarily because it was the one with 16 gigs of ram.

</comment><comment><USER28> Lenovo Yoga 900 that I've bought in 2016. It's running Fedora since day one and I only had two issues with it: \- Wifi driver didn't work with the Fedora version I was using but I fixed it by using next version's beta. \- using it with an external monitor with resolution different than the native display (4k) was an issue because of X. It worked, but the external monitor (1080) had a crappy resolution. Once Fedora started using Wayland, problem was solved.

In comparison, the MBP that I have to use at work is a nice piece of junk. Can barely handle 2 external monitors and had to be replaced twice because of filesystem encryption being corrupted.

</comment><comment><USER29> At the moment I have a Lenovo Legion with 16GB of RAM. Used to have a dual boot with Windows 10 and some kind of linux flavor but moved to W10 + WSL since. With a GTX 1050 the battery life is not great but I'm not complaining.

</comment><comment><USER30> I ended up with a Microsoft Surface Pro (2017). I like the fact I can use it as a regular tablet for web browsing and media consumption, but when I want to do some serious work, I can use it like a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER31> T420 with a ram upgrade (10GB total) and an eGPU dock forced into a desktop replacement role.

You just can't beat the ease of access to the guts. Swapping the RAM was easier than on a desktop. Great Linux support, huge aftermarket. Ultrabay slot allows for an easy on the wallet small SSD for OS + data HDD setup. Hell, the entire laptop can be bought for $200 or less.

Not a great laptop for the road though, at least for me. I plan to buy an X series (X220 or even an IBM era laptop given the 51nb treatment) or another 10-12" business laptop.

</comment><comment><USER32> Used Macs for 15 years, then a year ago I decided to go back to Linux and I now have a Lenovo X1 Carbon and a Purism Librem 13: love them both, but will probably only use the Librem in the future.

I have to say with the recent release of the Librem v4, there's not much reason to get an X1 or an XPS13: the Librem looks great, works great and I really like the idea behind it.

As for Mac vs Linux: it really depends on your workflow. I do backend dev in Go, Rust and Ruby, so I was already in a Terminal most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER33> 2015 MacBook Pro Retina.

I'd love a new machine but every MBP made by Apple since 2015 has been an absolute sack of shit. I'm guessing I'll just cling on to this one until it dies, then buy another reconditioned 2015 model from eBay with a years warranty or something.

If someone offered to modify my MBP to give it a worse keyboard, emoji bar, and take away all the useful ports, I'd wonder what they'd been smoking.

</comment><comment><USER34> Asus Zenbook UX410UA with memory extended to 16 GB. Works perfectly with Ubuntu but it's almost two years old so you can probably find something better.

Although the only thing I'm missing is charging via USB-C (which it has but cannot use for charging). Everything else is excellent: the screen is beautiful, battery life is in the 10 hours range, the aluminium body is quite tough, and it doesn't get hot.

</comment><comment> jon-wood I'm currently on a MacBook Pro, but previously used a 2016 Razer Blade Stealth. The spec and design were fantastic, but sadly Linux support was a nightmare - everything from intermittent issues with suspend/resume, right the way to toggling caps lock causing the entire machine to hard crash. Some of these issues had workarounds, but overall it just wasn't worth the hassle.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have two.

Personal: Thinkpad P51s running Ubuntu 16.04. I also have the big 72wh secondary battery. I'm one of only a few people at conferences not looking for power by 2pm.

Work: Dell precision 5530. It came with Ubuntu 18.04. the extra work Dell has done to make all drivers/hardware working is great. Everything just works out of the box. Even my Thinkpad required a slight amount of tweaking.

</comment><comment><USER36> I run a Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro. At the time it seemed like a decent purchase for a machine with dual NVME slots and a low-end Nvidia GPU for light gaming like Rocket League

Turns out the BIOS in it is garbage and has virtually zero customization options. So I'm waiting on Nouveau to catch up with the GTX 1050 in it so I can just use the Intel GPU forever and have decent battery life

</comment><comment><USER37> Lenovo flex 5 1570. It's awesome. i7, upgraded to 16 gigs of ram. Running Ubuntu 18.04 everything works except fingerprint reader, but I don't care about that.

Aluminum body, 15 inch form with a 10 keyless keyboard. So your hands are centered and don't feel like your sitting left of the screen.

Was about 1000 bucks with the ram upgrade at the time. However now, it's about 800 a year after I got mine.

</comment><comment><USER38> After 15 years with Macs I just last week bought a Surface Pro 6. Windows 10 is alright, better to live with than I thought it would be. It was also significantly less expensive than the MacBook Air I was considering (AUD $1250 vs $1850) without being concerned about keyboard longevity. Overall, I'm quite happy with my choice.

</comment><comment><USER39> At home Thinkpad T460p.

At work Thinkpad T470.

Very happy with both. A Thinkpad S-series was my gateway drug.

Worked on a rMBP for ~1 year, would always go for a Thinkpad now.

</comment><comment><USER40> Lenovo Thinkpad E540. Bought it back when I was a student

i7 4702mq

8GB (upgraded to 16GB)

geforce 740m

1TB + 16GB SSD cache(upgraded to 1TB + 240GB SSD)

fullHD TN panel

Love the keyboard, don't like the touchpad but on linux i don't use it much. TN panel was the only option back in the day if I wanted fullHD but I thought of it more as an advantage since it was harder for other people to see what I was doing :)

</comment><comment><USER41> Surface Pro 6 is the way.

Sold my Macbook Air (Early 2015) for the latest model and did not regret it. 2K display, very decent hardware and responsive. WSL is a excellent way to use linux tools on windows. And you can use it like a tablet.

If you can shell out the cash and still don't want to feel like you got gouged, this is great choice.

</comment><comment><USER42> Lenovo ThinkPad T480s running Xubuntu 18.04. It's considerably less expensive than X1 Carbon while being just slightly thicker and heavier, with more expansion option (mine has 24 GB RAM). That said, I'm now thinking about upgrading, and have been eyeing the new X1 Extreme.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anybody have experience with thin clients connected to buffed workstations or servers?

My laptop is pretty good for scripting and light compile jobs, but if I could just code on it and forward the heavy computing to my other buffed computers it would save me both battery and time.

</comment><comment><USER44> Picked up an HP Spectre a few months back. Running Ubuntu 18 with 4k. Initial complaints have gone with muscle memory. Does crash sometimes when I'm running minikube in kvm2. Battery life is great.

Compared to the Dell and Razor laptops at the time

<comment><USER45> What sort of crash?

<comment><USER44> It turns itself off? Not really sure, it's only happened three times, all while I was away from it. So once every couple weeks, which I'm not getting upset over given I can run minikube for hours without a charger

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> MacBook Pro 15" 2018.

I was in a similar situation as you. And I looked at the alternatives but came back to Apple. I upgraded from a 2012 model.

It has taken me about 6 months to get used to the keyboard but other than that it is a truly excellent machine.

</comment><comment><USER47> ThinkPad T480 with touchscreen - runs Kubuntu well. Audio is terrible, but I like USB-C charger, builtin ethernet, & removable battery.

I was able to upgrade the SSD and it was a pretty good experience, if you're into that.

</comment><comment><USER48> Huawei xmate pro running Ubuntu 18.04. Loved my old Macbook air but the hinge got loose and the new keyboards are apparently bad. Love this machine and would buy it I again

</comment><comment><USER49> after 2 years on osx, 5+ on linux, I've ended up on Surface Book 2 15" (Windows 10 with WSL - I don't use Window's cmd at all) and I'm pretty satisfied with the result - AMA.

Before that, I've been using ASUS Zenbook UX32LN - I think it was the best machine I've ever had (now my wife is using it, I wanted to try out Surface devices since I've fell in love with the design of that product line)

</comment><comment><USER50> I'd like to compare the Librem 15 with the Dell 5530 (or whatever the high-end 15 inch Linux laptop is). Does anyone have experience with both?

</comment><comment><USER51> Dell XPS 13 9380

\- Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz, 1800 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

\- 8 Gb memory (enough for me)

No complaints so far

</comment><comment><USER52> Lenovo ThinkPad T480s. Switched after using Apple products for around 15 years. Running Windows 10. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER53> an HP EliteBOOK 8460p from around 2013 - purchased in 2016 used on ebay for around $200. this is my usual procedure for buying computers: lightly used, older design but still _much_ better than new computers at the same price point.

</comment><comment><USER54> xps 9360

Have been running Arch Linux for a while, suffered from several bugs like freezing, overheat etc. But the major issue seems to be related to the the battery not properly connected… which was actually an man-made assembly error.

Besides that, everything works.

</comment><comment><USER55> My laptop is currently an iPad Pro (2017 model). I like it better than my macbook.

<comment><AUTHOR> how can you code on it? are you using a cloud IDE or something like that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> 2017 15" MBP, have none of the keyboard issues and I prefer macOS

</comment><comment><USER57> Retina MacBook Pro 15" 2012, i7 2.3 GHz, 16GB + Nvidia 750M

</comment><comment><USER58> Dell XPS 13" 9370 running Fedora 29 at home 9380 running Ubuntu 18.04 at work. Formerly MacBook Pros. I'd recommend the Dell XPS 9370 and Fedora 29 combo as a decent Mac alternative.

I've run Linux systems for a little over 20 years now and have historically found the Linux laptop experience to be pretty painful, full of driver incompatabilities and other annoyances like non-functional suspend. So when Apple transitioned the Mac to Unix-like OS and Intel chips I hopped on board and was a huge Mac fan. Early on in the 10.x series Mac OS was a great Unix operating system with a nicely functional desktop environment, most stuff just worked without a bunch of hacking. Over the years, though, Apple has been gutting the core of Mac OS and replacing it with their own proprietary APIs that lack Linux compatibility (OpenSSL, OpenGL, OpenCL, etc...). Homebrew and Docker can spackle over some of this but it seems quite a hack, especially given that most production work I do runs on some variant of Linux. At the end of the day most of the tools I use heavily are open source and run on Linux and those that don't have reasonable open source alternatives (1password vs pass, for example) so I migrated.

On the work front I've been using Linux desktops since around 2006 and have been keeping tabs on the desktop experience. It's improved a ton over the past few years. As much as it pains me to say this systemd has helped a lot. In my experience Dell hardware has mostly had decent Linux compatibility because they rely heavily on Intel chips and Intel puts a lot of work into the Linux kernel. The Dell Sputnik hardware has helped even more since the whole system is Linux certified by Dell (well Ubuntu certified, but all the patches make it to upstream) which makes a huge difference for things just working. The unpatched mainline kernel just works on Sputnik hardware without any hacking in my experience.

In my recent experience Fedora is an easier distribution to run because they keep packages very up-to-date whereas Ubuntu has inherited the slower release cadence of Debian. Neither are unpleasant but Fedora has required less configuration to make it work. There are a few minor annoyances so far but nothing that can't be fixed. Suspend defaults to suspend-to-ram, which is IMO wrong but configuring it to suspend-then-hibernate (sleep to RAM for an hour of inactivity then wake up and hibernate to disk/power off) is just a config file edit. Apple accessories (can't break up with my Magic Trackpad) require really recent kernel versions (4.20+) to work reliably and then some X configuration on top of that. The Atheros wireless cards can be a little flaky around suspend/resume/unexpected device behavior (this is Atheros or the driver's fault, hopefully Dell ditches them for Intel soon). Projectors, printing, pretty much everything else has just worked without any issues at all.</comment>


An iPhone, drawn entirely with CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://demos.jeffbatterton.com/iphone-css3/

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of these "x done entirely with css" posts as of late. It's cool, but not really newsworthy. Drawing stuff with CSS is the new ANSI art[1], I guess.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art>

<comment><USER3> Except this is the type of thing the advances in CSS are meant for. It's not a creative hack. This is people exploring the bleeding edge. They introduce new and arguably better techniques for presenting content and I also think they serve as a good barometer for progress.

<comment><USER2> Did you read the source code? They're using 50 · elements as a speaker grill. That's about as close to ANSI art as you can get and still call it CSS.

My point is: With enough DIVs you can render anything in CSS (see examples below, including an entire animated Spiderman cartoon). Does it take artistic talent to draw something with CSS3? Sure. Is there lots of effort involved? Absolutely. But worth knocking something else off the front page for?

[http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/web- development/p...](http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/web- development/pure-css3-spiderman-ipad-cartoon-jquery-html5-no-flash.html)

<http://31o5.com/2010/05/05/doraemon-with-css3/>

<http://admixweb.com/demos/ipodcss3/>

<http://sxsw.beercamp.com/>

<http://jonraasch.com/blog/drawing-with-css>

<comment><USER4> Also: isn't this what SVGs are for? Fast rendering, resolution independence... Drawing stuff with CSS3 is a cool _hack_ , but I don't see the motivation for this from a practical perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An iPhone, drawn entirely with HTML:

<img src="iphone.png">

</comment><comment><USER6> _This project will only display correctly on a webkit browser_

Can we honestly say this is any better than "this site will only display correctly on IE"? Even if they're using open standards, it just doesn't seem right to be incompatible with 90% of browsers. Is there any practical value of these demonstrations of CSS prowess to HN?

<comment><USER7> IE was different, just to be different (and to trash the standards). WebKit is different because it is on the bleading edge.

IE will at some point in the future catch up. IE 10 or 11 will probably be able to render this example correctly. Those sites that only works with IE depends on IE-quirkiness (aka bugs) which _never_ will be implemented in any other browser.

So IE will catch up to this. Other browsers would never "catch up" to IE's weirdness. And IE never lead the direction of html development. WebKit does (e.g. transitions, 2D and 3D transformations, css animations).

I use these examples to show my customers that it is good to give users with advanced browsers a nicer design than what is possible (easy) with IE 6. That they should leave the idea that a website should look exactly the same in all browsers. That a sprinkle of css can improve a design in FF and WebKit, but would take huge amount of pngs in IE 6. Much more value for their money because adding a bit of css is much faster than fighting IE6.

<comment><USER8> _IE 10 or 11 will probably be able to render this example correctly._

It won't. The demo uses -webkit-gradient, -webkit-box-shadow, -webkit-border- radius, -webkit-box-reflect, -webkit-transform, and -webkit-animation. Of course, it might be able to render it correctly when the "-webkit-" prefix is removed. But for now, demos like this are necessarily browser-specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And here are the iOS icons in CSS 3: <http://graphicpeel.com/cssiosicons>

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a great showcase for what's possible! I have slight graphic issues (harsh borders) on my iPad. Anybody experiencing the same?

</comment><comment><USER11> >> This project will only display correctly on a webkit browser and has only been tested in Google Chrome.

Honestly, if you know it will display in a webkit browser, is it that difficult to at least test in Safari before you put the page up?

Or at least a lot easier than drawing an entire iPhone in CSS, I might add.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's pretty cool, but everyone knows the second hand on the iPhone moves discretely with a little bounce rather than continuously!

Kidding aside, it'd be awesome to have a tool that converts images to their css equivalent if there would be space savings for that particular image.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool. For anyone wondering, here's that page in FF 3.6 and Opera 10.11:

<http://imgur.com/R2Wod.png>

<comment><USER14> That's because he's using -webkit prefix, it would probably work wit -moz prefix on firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 2k of html, 20k of CSS, impressive!

When is firefox scheduled to be able to render things like that, will 3.7 do it?

</comment><comment><USER16> Buttons don't work. Less realistic than reality. Lame.</comment>


Show HN: I built a cool thing, does the readme make me a sellout? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/googlecli <comment><USER2> I tried it, couldn't get it to work. And found this [https://www.npmjs.com/package/google- cli](https://www.npmjs.com/package/google-cli)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey JJarad what was your error?

If possible could you start an issue on the github repo?

Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll assume you're asking about the "buy me a coffee" link, and the answer is not at all. You built a thing; you're letting people know how to show appreciation if they find it useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! That was exactly what i was asking about!

Thanks for the insight I was concerned haha</comment></comment>


So nice we're doing it twice:  bit.ly hackathon this Wednesday - <AUTHOR> http://hackabit.com

<comment><USER2> This is at bit.ly world headquarters in NYC.

I'm looking forward to seeing you there!</comment>


Source: Apple set to acquire Path in an attempt to bolster iOS social cred - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/09/09/source-apple-set-to-acquire-path-in-an-attempt-to-bolster-ios-social-cred/

<comment><USER2> "Apple acquires failed social network to add to portfolio of failed social networks"</comment>


The Road to Learn React.js – Build Hacker News App - <AUTHOR> https://www.educative.io/collection/5740745361195008/5676830073815040?ref=hn <comment><USER2> I've plugged Robin's previous posts and materials many times, because they really are that good. If you're looking to get into React, I'm sure this course will be worth looking into. (For one excellent example of his writing, you might want to look at his recent post "Tips to Learn React + Redux in 2017": [https://www.robinwieruch.de/tips-to-learn-react- redux/](https://www.robinwieruch.de/tips-to-learn-react-redux/) ).

If you're looking for more material to learn React, I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, ES6, and related topics, at [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links) . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a source of solid info on more advanced topics.

</comment><comment><USER3> For people who want to learn some concepts before (or after) they built such an app:

[https://github.com/kay-is/react-from-zero](https://github.com/kay-is/react- from-zero)

Also, I started blogging this year, maybe some of the (React) posts help:

[https://dev.to/kayis](https://dev.to/kayis)

</comment><comment><USER4> This Show HN from mid-December on Robin's blog post looks related:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13170837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13170837)

Lots of upvotes, some discussion there.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that post was for Robin's self-published book. This link is a paid interactive course based on the same material.

(FWIW, Max Stoiber did the same thing with his React/Redux/Immutable tutorial [0], and I'm actually hoping to turn my own "Practical Redux" tutorial series [1] into an Educative.io course in the near future as well.)

[0] [https://www.educative.io/collection/5642398931615744/5741031...](https://www.educative.io/collection/5642398931615744/5741031244955648?authorName=Max%20Stoiber)

[1] [http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/series/practical- redux/](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/series/practical-redux/)

<comment><USER5> Oh. Practical Redux is your doing; Good stuff. Thanks.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, glad you like it! I've paused the series for a bit so I can focus on some other tasks for the immediate near future, but have a bunch more topics that I plan to write about. If you're interested, I've got a list of tentatively planned blog posts at [https://gist.github.com/markerikson/840fc9baf9598971ae252b92...](https://gist.github.com/markerikson/840fc9baf9598971ae252b92ac832955) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paywalled. Not saying it's not a good resource, just putting that out there so others are aware.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.threaditjs.com/](http://www.threaditjs.com/) implements an HN-like app with user submissions, threaded discussions and backend communication with various frameworks (Angular, Backbone, Ember, Mithril, React and Vue).

Kind of like TodoMVC, but with a more substantial app.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm one of the co-founders of Educative which is an interactive learning platform for software developers.

We are working with authors to either transform their existing content into an interactive course or create entirely new content from scratch.

If you are a content creator instead in knowing more, send me an email. My email is in my profile.

Happy to answer any questions.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just bought it. I've been building a React app for about 2 weeks, but there's always more to learn. I look forward to following along with this tutorial!

</comment><comment><USER10> This comes across as an advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know how the 30day back thing works?

<comment><USER8> Just send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER11> But I can't seem to find the fine-print conditions.

<comment><USER8> Here are the Terms[0] and FAQs[1].

Feel free to send me an email if you more questions(email in profile).

[0]: [https://www.educative.io/terms](https://www.educative.io/terms)

[1]: [https://www.educative.io/collection/page/6630002/170001/2200...](https://www.educative.io/collection/page/6630002/170001/220001)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What price ($0.99-3.99) maximizes profits in the App Store? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Depends on the elasticity of demand.</comment>


Scott Meyers: The Last Thing D Needs [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/47947981 <comment><USER2> Great talk, and a satisfying introspective side to Meyers compared to his usual "Meyers explains it all" talks and books (which frankly, have been controversial in some respects in glossing over the "tool use" complexity to enable readers/viewers to reach the "tool application" side of C++). That said, you can never win... a couple of the C++ examples in this talk could have used a few extra words of explanation and rationale, but he erred on the side of not losing the audience, which is good.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice and entertaining! I will definitely use this talk as an example of why kids shouldn't start learning programming with C++ (just in the last couple of months I had both my sister and a friend consider it for their kids). Although, maybe those who survive will become outstanding developers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I gave this 10 minutes and there wasn't any content up to that point. Anyone have a transcript of the actual meat?

<comment><USER5> I watched the talk live. I'll throw this out there just to see if anyone disagrees or has a different perspective.

It's basically Scott bashing C++ in his incredibly informed style. He shares some of the parts of C++ that everybody hates: the gotchas. This is what he has been doing for a few decades now with his Effective C++ series.

The conclusion was that the last thing D needs is someone like him. Someone to explain D like he has had to in his Effective C++ series and talks. Some of the crowd comments that D doesn't need this because it has less gotchas.

I admit to being let down by the talk mostly due to my expectations of what this talk could be about. I was massively excited to see Scott give a presentation about D. In the end, it was hardly about D.

<comment><USER6> Not at all ! The conclusion is D does not need him. If fact, D should not need someone like him. C++ needs Scott because C++ is not consistant, and with this talk he wanted to show us that if D makes the things the right way, we will not need him.

<comment><USER7> I think that's what "the last Thing D needs" means. Not the final piece. Rather, what people mean when they say "The last thing X needs is Y", they mean that X does not need Y. I make mention of this because the GP comment says the last thing D needs and you say "Not at all" and then go on to say effectively that the last thing D needs is Scott.

So, a lot of confusion in terms of wording, I think.

<comment><USER8> It's one of those tricky phrases that throws off foreign speakers. Many English learners would assume "the last thing X needs is Y" would mean "eventually X will need Y".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Cat Meme Photographer from a Century Ago - ainar-g http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/09/10/culture/art/cat-meme-photographer-century-ago.html <comment><AUTHOR> I don't think they qualify as memes to be honest. For a lot of people "meme" is synonymous with just "funny picture" it seems, but a real meme is something more than just a funny picture.

I think Wikipedia puts it quite well:

> An internet meme, commonly known as just a meme, is an activity, concept, > catchphrase, or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry or for > humorous purposes, from person to person via the Internet.

The spreading from person to person being the crucial part.

<comment><USER2> > a real meme is something more than just a funny picture.

> The spreading from person to person being the crucial part.

The article says:

"They were called postcards, or souvenir cards, and mailing them to friends and relatives was immensely popular for sharing a gilded, snowy holiday scene or even a lolcat."

<comment><AUTHOR> I was being overly simplistic.

I still think there is a difference between individually forwarding a funny picture to others, and what a meme is.

In order to be a meme, I should have said that it needs to be adopted and adapted by a collective of people.

A postcard sent by me to my friends with a cute cat is not a meme. An image macro that I make and share to a collective group of my friends and them making variations of it makes the image a meme.

<comment><USER3> >A postcard sent by me to my friends with a cute cat is not a meme.

And when they send it to others, who send it to others, then it is a meme.

<comment><USER4> I think only if some of them make modifications or variations on it.

Or, at least, that should be required to make it a central example of the concept?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "he committed suicide after receiving a cancer diagnosis"

Wow, he sure came to a sad end to his life after spending so much of it making such whimsical images. I guess the stress of looking after his parents had ground him down a lot over the years.

Nice pictures though.

<comment> ainar-g I mean, he was 73 at the time. Having lived a long life, making a small but noticeable difference in the world, I think he had the full right to say "Ah, screw it, I'm done." after receiving the diagnosis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't look like those cats were having a good time

<comment><USER7> True. But at least they were still alive.

<comment><USER8> Yup, there's a stuffed frog collection in my town, made in the early 20th century. Really bizarre and disgusting. If you have the stomach for it google "Ferenc Mere".

<comment><USER9> The original Pepe meme?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Buried a few miles away from my rotten workplace [https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/24091730/harry- whittier-...](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/24091730/harry-whittier- frees)

<comment> gm-conspiracy Do you live in SRQ?

<comment><USER10> Yeah but I work in Pinellas Co

<comment> gm-conspiracy How is that commute?

<comment><USER10> Soul crushing, dangerous, unsustainable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> "He makes exposures at 1/5th of a second, has to junk two-thirds of his negatives,"_

That's quite impressive especially given the subjects and shutter speed; if I get 1/3 of negatives I'm happy with on a 120 roll, it's a very good day indeed.

<comment><USER12> In his case, motion blur given live subjects would be a common problem, resulting in trashing two-thirds of the photos. With a modern camera and sensitive file or sensors, you can shoot at much faster shutter speeds for the same amount of light. On a given shoot, I may take 250-500 shots of which, unless I screw up, almost all are technically fine (correct exposure and focus) but only a handful turn out to be keepers for aesthetic reasons. But then, I shoot mostly landscapes which tend not to move around too much.

<comment><USER13> "120 roll" refers to an early 20th century camera technology. I've never worked with anything near that old but I had the same thought, getting 33% keepers under the circumstances is pretty amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >claimed the cats were alive

Yeah I dunno about that. Those legs look pretty bent out of shape...

<comment><USER15> I think the only part of the cat that is really the cat is the head. All the pictures have a darker flat background.

I assume the scene is setup and there is a hole in the background for the cat to stick it's head through. The photographer can get the cats to look somewhere and take the picture. It's also possible some of the paws are real but I also feel they don't quite look right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _"He never married"_

It's rare to that euphemism used in modern writing. I'm guessing the author might have just read it in research and copied it.

<comment><USER17> How is that a euphemism?

<comment><USER16> It's a very classic way to say "he's queer" before it was at all socially acceptable to talk about it.

<comment><USER17> Interesting! How would one say that... he never married?

<comment><USER16> Straight and never married? IDK, ladies man, or committed to his work, or never settled down?

It would be arguing the "social" _he never married_ vs the literal. It's been reasonable acceptable to say gay since I was a kid so I only know about the phase from reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe these count as memes, and maybe they don't...

... but they are now! I'm definitely making image macros out of these things!</comment>


Open Source at IFTTT - <AUTHOR> https://ifttt.github.io

<comment><USER2> I am in love with IFTTT's Do apps. The UX is purely phenomenon and has become part of my daily life. I hope they keep up these types of projects!

<comment><USER3> I have been meaning to dive in. What are some recipes/use cases that worked out best for you?

<comment><USER2> Making an Evernote note is great with do. I don't have to launch the app and risk switching context. Same with Todoist, Salesforce chatter, and more. The idea of one way UX (not just react-style unidirectional dataflow) where the user has a view for just data entry or retrieval is a powerful one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really wish I had the ability to:

1\. Call out any remote API.

2\. Schedule a task to run at a certain time of day.

Basically, I want cron with workflow and recipes.

<comment><USER5> Have you seen the Maker channel? [https://ifttt.com/maker](https://ifttt.com/maker)

That combined with the Date & Time channel would probably do a lot of what you want.

<comment><USER6> How does this handle authenticated requests?

For example, does it store OAuth tokens and refresh on your behalf?

<comment><USER7> The Maker Channel Action doesn't support authenticated requests, at least anything beyond something you could send in the URL or body of the message. We do this to prevent people from using it to spoof requests to public authenticated services that might view such behavior as slightly "shady". The Maker Channel is really meant for prototyping and experimenting and so we've limited the capabilities to keep the uses in that realm. Hope that helps!

<comment><USER8> That's somewhat of a bummer, as it also forces all legitimate users to leave their endpoints acessible for everyone who knows the URL.

Have you thought about at least adding support for authentication where the credentials are generated by IFTTT? (Similar to the "secret" that you use for the trigger) This would allow makers to protect their endpoints while still disallowing spoofed requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I want their Channel Platform to come out so badly. Being able to hook any service into IFTTT would be incredibly powerful/useful

<comment><USER10> If you haven't looked recently, they now have incoming and outgoing web requests:

[https://ifttt.com/maker](https://ifttt.com/maker)

<comment><USER11> But no authentication? Makes it somewhat useless. How many services allow unauthenticated requests?

<comment><USER12> There's a secret key. Isn't the idea that you're wiring this up to your own services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Laura, you rock!

<comment><USER14> Thanks! Super excited to make this public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hadn't heard of Jot before. Looks really interesting and useful for a bunch of applications.

</comment><comment><USER16> jot should be jottt.

Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER17> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hell YEAH!!!

</comment><comment><USER19> To me, that looks around 99% Mac/Apple-centric, and that puts my interest firmly at zero.

Touché that their open-source efforts can't actually be used on _true_ open- source systems like Linux.

I like IFTTT, but this was massively underwhelming.</comment>


Why whisky tastes better when diluted with water - <AUTHOR> https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/news/2017/why-whisky-tastes-better-when-diluted-with-water/ <comment><USER2> It's actually more complicated. There are thousands of potential compounds in a bottle of whiskey that come from both the distillation and ageing process, and even some leached from the bottle itself.

Whiskey doesn't necessarily taste better with water. It simply tastes _different_ with water. It also tastes different cold. Since every whiskey contains different amounts of different compounds, every whiskey requires a different variable of water and/or temperature. Some are really good by themselves.

Personally, I can't stand Johnny Walker neat, while I find Macallan ruined by water. Decide how you like it for yourself.

<comment><USER3> "even some leached from the bottle itself" \- Intriguing, I've not heard that before said about glass. Do you have any more info on that? Or are you talking about a potential to oxidise in the bottle.

Edit: Just found this [http://whiskyscience.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/bottle- maturatio...](http://whiskyscience.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/bottle-maturation- obe.html)

"First, the water condensed from the humid air causes mainly sodium to leach out of the glass" \- Wow! I thought glass was kind of 'inert' with ethanol at least.

<comment><USER2> Alkalis in the surface of the inside of the bottle can be leached by the alcohol, raising the pH enough that it actually attacks the glass. To avoid this most glass bottles are dealkalized before filling, but if water from a humid environment makes it into the bottle before filling it begins a process which leaches various compounds from the glass. But this would take a long time to occur in whiskey (vs Vodka/Gin, which are less acidic).

Oxidation is probably more affected by the sealing method than anything else. Corks also change the flavor of whiskey due to things like absorbing certain compounds depending on what they are made of or coated with.

<comment><USER3> Cheers! I never knew that about dealkalization either regarding glass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15038059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15038059)</comment>


Show HN: Service Workers and IndexedDB based IDE - <AUTHOR> https://try.habemus.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

we've built an offline (highly experimental) version of our code editor on top of Service Workers and IndexedDB.

Basically, the service worker intercepts all requests for /preview/ __/ *, fetches files from the IndexedDB and passes them through a series of express.js middleware, everything inside the browser. Live code inspection is enabled via window + service messaging.

The most interesting concept in this project was to bring some server-side logic into the browser, specifically into the service worker, e.g. running css-autoprefixer through all CSS code before serving it.

Works on Chrome and FF.</comment>


Bush Condemns Free National Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/bush-condemns-free-national-wifi <comment><USER2> Riiighht. Because the phone companies are such shining examples of this so called "free" market.

As much as I'd love free national wifi, (And I do think its a great idea) I've got no illusions about it being high quaily enough to carry voice calls for a long time.

There will always be space for the traditional carriers to provide high quality wired connections. The truly ironic thing is that this will force them to actually compete with _something_ , so the great big socialist internet project will make the telecom markets _more_ free!

</comment><comment><USER3> Because it means the end of the telecommunications industry. Cellphones that use Skype would mean free national telephone calls to everyone. But it's exactly this kind of progress that can get us eventually out of this depression.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why has no one pointed out that implementing WiFi on wireless frequencies that aren't the b/g 2.4GHz or the a 5GHz won't work with any existing WiFi devices?

Basically, this is a free, new wireless data service that requires new equipment purposes (should it go through). It would also be a service with near no bandwidth. Wireless is a shared resource. That's one of the reasons its slower than hard lines. If I was the only user on AT&T's HSDPA tower nearest me, I could easily pull data speeds better than my cable connection, but that isn't the case. I'm broadcasting to the tower and the tower is broadcasting to me - even though it really isn't a broadcast, but a single connection. If we're talking about taking a small amount of spectrum to set this up, it won't even be 700k. 100k would be lucky, dial-up speeds or lower the likely.

In terms of providing "free" access to schools, etc. it really isn't free since it requires new equipment. In fact, it's really expensive.

I'd argue that the FCC should do the same thing they did with the Google open access auction. Put a reserve price on the auction. If no carrier is willing to pay $5bn for it with the restriction that they offer free wireless to everyone on 25% of the spectrum, then it's re-auctioned without the restriction.

Oh, and for the article's author, when you say something like 'It used to be that public resources like land and radio spectrum were leased to private companies by the government so that the "people" could profit from their use,' you need to realize that we do profit from companies paying lots of money in licensing fees since that's government revenue that doesn't need to come from my pocket and it's a win as long as companies don't overcharge for the product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez Condemns Free National Wi-Fi

There; fixed that for you.</comment>


Got 5 minutes to test my new product? - <AUTHOR> Hello Everyone,
I developed a product https://feedfront.me, and people are coming but not signing up...
Could you test it and let me know what's wrong with my product? <comment><USER2> "Stop wasting time..." is wasting people's time. That works for a commercial before a Youtube video because the viewer has to wait for the good stuff. On the web, if it's not "the good stuff" there's no reason to wait.

Just say "Collect bugs and feature requests" or something like that. Make things as simple and obvious as possible for anyone who lands on your page and might have a use for your product. Just say what it does and how it does it.

To put it another way, a common reaction to "Stop wasting time" is "You are wrong. I am not wasting time." Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, I will change that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> After I try to sign up and click the verification link in the email, I can't log in.

The email textbox gets a red frame and an exclamation mark, but no further details.

Also, going through the signup flow doesn't trigger my password manager (bitwarden) to offer saving the account. It normally happens on all other services, so there's probably something different in your signup/login form.

<comment><AUTHOR> let me check

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really understand how I am supposed to be using this. It seems like it is some sort of product management tool but more training on what the workflow seems like it would make it a more valuable tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply, I am working on changing the flow of the app so that it would be easier to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If people have to create an account to leave feedback for a company I see that as a big obstacle. Is that the case?

</comment><comment><USER6> Ah, why would I sign up for a mystery product that runs like an e-mail trap

<comment><AUTHOR> email trap? please explain further this is something i really wanna know now

<comment><USER2> "Try for free" doesn't provide more information to make someone believe there is actually a product. There is only a identity harvesting screen and most people have experienced entering identity information only to find there is no product or product access.

From a design standpoint, you've succeeded in getting a visitor to actually interact with the site and given them less than nothing in return. Less than nothing because there's more for the visitor to do and no new information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pricing questions:

1\. What are the max Feedbacks for the Free tier?

2\. What is a tracked user?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will update pricing page to make things more clear

tracked users are those who comments, upvotes or post on your sub domain</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you fix this failing startup? - <AUTHOR> Suppose that you've joined a small startup as the new CTO. This startup has a lot of users but its quality of service is terrible. Their website and apps are slow and they fail left and right.
How do you find the cause of all problems and fix them? And more importantly, how do you make sure they never happen again in future?
P.S: The tech stack is not important here. I'm interested to know your approach and management practices that you'd implement. <comment><USER2> This will happen again and will always happen if product is prioritized above sound technology base. Any time something is developed incurring tech debt.

To solve, the company will need to go into investment phase again. Invest into sound technology, paying off all the tech debt, building resilience and self- healing into services.

Product development will suffer, but that's how debt works.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I said, this is not much of a technical issue, but lack of processes and best practices. The codebase does not look very bad.

> building resilience and self-healing into services

How would you do that?

<comment><USER2> Circuit breakers, retries, back-off. Monitoring, heartbeat detection, automated restarts when service is unhealthy. Here's a no-nonsense paper, and a lot can be relevant to a smaller company too: [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, you basically described it's premise. It's a pretty good novel that describes how DevOps practices can help a company dig itself out of the hole you describe.

</comment><comment><USER4> How do you know tech stack isn't contributing?

> apps are slow and they fail left and right

Better tooling can improve performance and reduce errors.

> approach and management practices that you'd implement

What approach and management practices are currently used?

<comment><AUTHOR> > What approach and management practices are currently used?

As far as I've seen, they don't have any in place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd start with monitoring: performance, error logging, general infrastructure. You can't fix the problems if you don't know what's actually happening.</comment>


Ask HN: Y Combinator summer pre selection - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys. YC isn't supposed to choose the teams that will be interviewed today? I've finger crossed since weeks now. Is everyone will receive an email (even the ones that are not choosed) or if you don't get one then you're out of the course? <comment><USER2> It would be nice to know if you aren't accepted, with an official message. I've been thinking, based on an FAQ, that they only contact invitees.

Are there any past applicants who have know if they do indeed contact groups who are uninvited?

<comment><USER3> They do. Here is last year's email:

\---

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

<http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html>

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff

<comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing. We're anxious to hear the result. Invited or not, I think it's a good experience to force oneself to tell the story of your business and be really honest about it.

Good luck to everybody. You all feel like a classmate to me ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yep, it is today. They'll most likely send everyone an email just so everyone gets a decision.

Interesting to think that the decisions have already been made, we're just waiting on that information.

Regardless, good luck today!

<comment><AUTHOR> Finger crossed. Nevertheless, as they said: no one should take it personnaly and it make me think of something i've read a few days ago on HN : "Stop Panhandling your Ideas": [http://bennesvig.com/post/4363890591/stop- panhandling-your-i...](http://bennesvig.com/post/4363890591/stop-panhandling- your-ideas)

If you trust your idea, you just need to go, you don't need someone to validate your idea. However YC is definitly an opportunity for any start-up with a good product to have enought attention to get started.

Again finger crossed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, I think everyone gets emailed.

</comment><comment><USER7> nice post! there is always angellist which connected me to a minnedemo mtg next week with an Angel.. St. Cloud MN 4/12, as a backup plan!

<comment><USER7> 0 points! hey Minnebar at Best Buy Corp office May 2010 was great!, Free classes and Free pizza! Minnedemo will be even better. Minnedemo deserves more than 0 points mods! come on!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does Google have a way to report scam advertisements? - <AUTHOR> I got the linked ad [1] show up on a website I visited. It's a scam for bitcoin trading, which is presented using the same website as our national broadcaster. I tried to report it, but the only option that fit was "inappropriate"
Does Google really have no way to report scams? I am afraid the reviewers will miss it, as inappropriate often refers to sexual decency
This type of scam involving celebrities and fake news articles using national media layouts have been going on for more than a year to my recollection
[1] https://retinasket.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-ZvVl5af6wIVXcq7CB... <comment><USER2> Meanwhile there are whole legitimate industries banned from adwords, like repair and data recovery _if_ you arent a huge corporation. "We need to discuss Google's anti-repair advertising discrimination." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBJ2LD- Dao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBJ2LD-Dao)

Btw Youtube has no problem runing those scam bitcoin ads [https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/i877ci/those_fake_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/i877ci/those_fake_crypto_currency_scam_livestreams_are) /

or pr0n blowjob banners for that matter [https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/i87jfj/vpn_cumshot...](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/i87jfj/vpn_cumshot_porn_to_advert_on_youtube/)

<comment><USER3> The porn banner makes a little more sense when you realize that there is a small but growing number of Internet users that need to use VPNs to bypass nanny state restrictions on access to pornography.

Obviously, they're against Google's Terms of Service and should be removed, but that's the market that the VPN company is targeting - people looking for porn on YouTube.

<comment><USER4> There is no hardcore porn on YouTube.

<comment><USER3> Yes - that's the point of this ad - targeting the crowd of people that want access to hardcore porn but need a VPN to get it. A significant number of people looking for that view softcore or soft core adjacent porn on YouTube, and this ad (and ads like it) target that crowd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I finally got rid of some crazy annoying ads after I contacted Google on the ad _sales_ side and pointed out they were basically defrauding their advertisers at this point after I'd clicked "not interested" for years, made sure my ad preferences didn't include the topic and was not aware of anything I had done to trigger those ads besides being an adult male.

<comment><USER6> How did you contact them? Curious. Is it some kind of way feedback?

<comment><USER7> Google is famous for "non-human support", believe it or not. I never seen people successfully contacted a Googler.

<comment><USER6> Yes, exactly, thats why I asked, maybe there is a way. OP said Sales Side, so maybe he is Google's Ad Buying Client?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here: This has been noticed by Norwegian media for some time, but it is still ongoing

Apparently they have brought it up with Google and Facebook, but I can't see anything happening, and the options to report ads does not deal with issues such as scam.

Where is the social responsibility?

[https://www.faktisk.no/notiser/aDw/falsk-nrk-artikkel-om- kri...](https://www.faktisk.no/notiser/aDw/falsk-nrk-artikkel-om-kristofer- hivju) [https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/var-staude-og-god- morgen-...](https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/var-staude-og-god-morgen-norge- misbrukt-i-bitcoin-reklame/3423650822.html) [https://e24.no/naeringsliv/i/GGKqyq/dnb-sjef-norske- kjendise...](https://e24.no/naeringsliv/i/GGKqyq/dnb-sjef-norske-kjendiser- blir-misbrukt-i-bitcoin-svindel)

</comment><comment><USER8> You should be able to do this by right clicking the ad or following options on the ad [triangle with the I character, top right, > why this ad > report this ad) - Anyhow, you can achieve the same by clicking the permalink listed below

[https://support.google.com/google- ads/troubleshooter/4578507...](https://support.google.com/google- ads/troubleshooter/4578507?hl=en)

<comment><USER9> I do this all the time in ads in mobile apps but they always re-appear no matter how you report them in the options.

I think the OP complained about fraudulent google search results though - there's no way to report them (been wondering the same myself). Only a "Cached" menu option if you click on the small upside down triangle there.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here, it was a Google Adsense ad served on a normal web page. I reported it using the chevron-button, but didn't think the 4 options were adequate descriptions

* Seen this ad multiple times * Ad was inappropriate * Not interested in this ad * Ad covered content

It's like they only want to improve their algorithms, not make sure they're not serving law breaking advertisements

<comment><USER4> Law breaking ads are inappropriate.

<comment><USER10> Inappropriate is a maddeningly vague descriptor. I've never felt like it's accurate enough.

Is it inappropriate for the website it's displayed on, for me as a user, for google ads at all... Is it legally inappropriate, morally inappropriate, ethically inappropriate, or just something I don't like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Try more than a decade. AdSense was filled with scams and botnet software (pay per install, was quite profitable for a few years). Google never cared.

I wonder why they've never been investigated/fined for stuff like this (or have they?). I'm thinking their defense is that the fact that there's scams is a legal issue, so go through the legal system...

<comment><USER12> It's Section 230. They don't care because they're not liable and they keep the profits either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently started to watch a lot of finance and investment videos on youtube and the amount of scam ads I see went up like never before. It's just mindblowing how so many different scammers get through this system. There must be tons of people of get cheated like this.

<comment><USER14> Ah!

I recently signed up for US stock trading using my ASX broker, Commonwealth Securities - Commonwealth Bank of Australia's share trading platform.

This explains the sudden increase in robocall scam calls and SMS I've been receiving since then.

Hadn't put that together till now.

<comment><USER15> The do-not-call register complaints worked magic for me: [https://www.donotcall.gov.au/consumers/lodge-a- complaint/](https://www.donotcall.gov.au/consumers/lodge-a-complaint/)

Daily calls stopped a day after reporting them.

<comment><USER14> I keep forgetting about the DNCR, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is an incredibly annoying problem on YouTube as well. Made me go out and trial Premium so I guess it's good for metrics by the wrong reasons.

<comment><USER17> Adsense has one small info button on the top right where you can click and report, however, for Youtube video ads, there's no visible way to report them as well, especially softcore porn. What's worse is that Youtube doesn't care whether the current audience is suitable or not as long as the ads were shown at the intended target ( ie gaming related video )

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At this point i'm more worried about the chumbox (taboola shit) scammy ads that appear even on the most reputed media sites.

<comment><USER19> While agreeing, I'm even more worried that the "taboola shit" seems to gain lots of clicks even on reputable sites. Out of curiosity I followed a few of them, and most of the time the linked content is the cheapest "content" look- a-like possible - still a lot of users appear to click.

I wonder if there are any studies regarding shallow content and its apparent appeal.

<comment><USER14> There are entire industries operating around shallow content and it's appeal.

But now you've said it we can patiently wait the thousands of freshly minted PhDs to support the obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No, and they don't care either. For instance, you can type in "car locksmith", and get an ad for $10 unlock in your area. If you click the ad, that offer disappears in the actual prices around $100.

</comment><comment><USER21> Google/W3C are currently rebuilding much of this ecosystem and you can share your input on github.

Project overview: [https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy- sandb...](https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox)

GitHub: [https://github.com/w3c/web- advertising/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/w3c/web- advertising/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER22> In-browser ad auctions and in-browser machine learning for ad targeting? Incredible what you can do once you won the browser wars.

<comment><USER21> Yeah there is a ton of context outside of those links, but I agree. Everything in that github is in the proposal stage, so open an issue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's heaps of scam ads on YouTube, or sponsor spots on videos promoting scams but YouTube doesn't care.

So I doubt even if Google had the ability to report them they would care.

<comment><USER14> Huh?

Google owns YouTube.

They don't care.

QED.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was getting served ads through DoubleClick a few years back prompting me to install malware - the kind masquerading as a "security advisory" claiming my device was infected. I tried reporting them on multiple occasions and nothing happened (of course). The solution was to stop using Chrome for Android, switch to Firefox and install the uBlock Origin plugin. Haven't had any issues since.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not scam ads but I've been having troubles with adsense ads that redirect the webpage I'm seeing to a copy of the website of my ISP asking to update information about my account.

Wasn't able to report it so... If they get the money they don't care to spread scams or malware.

<comment><USER4> How do you know the AdSense ads do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you scroll to the bottom of the page on a search query, you'll see a link called "feedback" by settings and help. Submit your report there.

I saw an advertisement for counterfeit currency on Google one time. The scammers weren't even trying to hide it or disguise it as collector money or anything. It verbatim said counterfeit money for sale. It linked to some Weebly page selling fake bills at a discount to face value. I took a screenshot and reported it using the feedback form and someone got in touch with me in about 5 hours and they thanked me and said they took it down.

</comment><comment><USER27> Facebook also seems to have a particularly bad record for running this type of obvious scam ad. Think the main result of clicking the report button is that Facebook's algorithm now thinks I have an above average interest in fake news articles about fake celebrity endorsements of get rich quick schemes...

</comment><comment><USER28> You should report the scam ad to the website, not to google. The website has chosen to serve this ad on their site (by whatever means) and thus it is their responsibility. If this means that ultimately nobody can use certain rogue ad servers that show scam ads (such as google), so be it.

<comment><USER4> The website gets money from the ads too. Why would they care more than Google?

<comment><USER28> They will care only if the users complain, which is my point. It's probably easier for them to care about a handful of users than for google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been flagging them too as scams and they generally get taken down within and hour or two.

I tried to report their actions to their ISP but I think I mistyped the email address or something because it got sent back.

</comment><comment><USER30> I get ads on facebook for cheap Bose speakers and software license serial numbers for cheap. there is no way both can be true.

wish there was a central repository to submit these potentially scam posts

</comment><comment><USER31> Making effort to deal with scams doesn't scale.

</comment><comment><USER32> What ads? Seriously: use an ad blocker.

<comment><USER33> You never disable your ad blocker to see content that refuses to show on user agents with an ad blocker installed?

<comment> _-___________-_ No, I haven't come across any content I want to see so much that I'd disable my protection to see it.

When I see one of those scummy "disable your adblocker or we won't show you this content" pages, I usually Google the article title and either find a way to see the exact same content without disabling protection, or find another publication that has posted largely the same content. If that doesn't work, I just move on.

<comment><USER34> Try to load the reader view of those pages. Works most of the times. I even set sites like medium and forbes to autoload the reader view :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Google cares less than zero about its paying customers [0], mind you if it cares about you reporting some kind of scam.

end users are notoriously not a concern for google, sorry.

\---

[0]: see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445)

</comment><comment><USER36> If everyone on HN started clicking on every single ad we saw, would that be enough to break Google's ad algos? At some point if every single ad is clicked on, then things wouldn't work right? Is that not the proper solution to this problem? I've started doing that to hopefully make Google think I'm a fraudulent user. If tens of thousands of people started clicking on every single ad, it seems like that would be enough to wildly set their algos off and force a re-evaluation of what they are doing. Maybe if it was a concerted plan like "click on every ad month until Google fixes themselves" it might have even more impact.

<comment><USER37> You know what happens to "fraudulent users"? No gmail, no sign in with google, no play store.

<comment><USER38> I started using the inurl: feature to search for things, and Google started telling me I was a bot like every third search and requiring me to do another captcha.

It was pretty horrifying; while I get that 99.9% of people don't use it, it was like a glimpse of a future where the AIs watch constantly for anyone who can add 2 + 2 without help and then alarms go off.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: TinyWall or something else? - <AUTHOR> Since Glasswire 2 didn't solved long standing problems I have with it I'm looking for an alternative. Would be better if there was an open source alternative.
I want to be able to whitelist applications and block everything else by default, basically a better frontend for the Windows Firewall.
What do you think about https://tinywall.pados.hu? Does it send data back (telemetry)? <comment><USER2> I am testing simplewall, it has some minor UI glitches but looks good.

I also use Tinywall in my work pc. I don't tink it does anything else besides checking for updates. But you can remove it from exception in the options, open windows firewall from control panel and clear see that Tinywall is not allowed to connect in the rules.

[https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall](https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's probably just what I need. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Binisoft Windows Firewall Control is quite good.</comment>


Homebrew Package Update Notifications via Growl - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/1231331

<comment><USER2> Very nice - using it right now!</comment>


A Barclays exec who went to prison for LIBOR-rigging breaks his silence - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/alex-pabon-interview-libor-fixing-2017-4 <comment><USER2> "that he knew changing the LIBOR number affected the valuations of swaps — a type of credit derivative based on interest rates". Wrong! The men convicted of Libor manipulation were all interest rate swap traders, so the swaps at issue are interest rate derivatives, not credit derivatives.</comment>


4$ Xiaomi thermometer custom firmware LYWSD03MMC BLE TLSR8251 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXKzFG61lNs <comment><AUTHOR> Repos :

[https://github.com/atc1441/ATC_MiThermometer](https://github.com/atc1441/ATC_MiThermometer)

[https://atc1441.github.io/TelinkFlasher.html](https://atc1441.github.io/TelinkFlasher.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> I have been looking for a low cost, programable thermometer now for several years. A a handful of bucks? Wow. Just ordered a bucket of them from AliExpress - fantastic stuff!</comment>


Photoshop simulator in HTML, CSS and jQuery works just like the real thing - <AUTHOR> http://visualidiot.com/articles/photoshop <comment><USER2> Very nice. I hear the guy who made this is super attractive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks cool, but any time I try to click on anything, I get a OSX-style error dialog saying the app has become unresponsive. Using Google Chrome 16.0.912.75 m on Windows 7. But I must say it looks impressive up to that point! =P

<comment><USER4> You mean this image: <http://visualidiot.com/posts/photoshop/img/cymbal.gif> ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To actually bring up something slightly more serious: "I didn't have time to wait for Firefox to open up" - Is this really valid today? On my computer Firefox starts up slightly slower than Chrome, but that's because it's full of add-ons. When I run on a clean profile, it's just as quick as Chrome. Anyone else got some data/time on this?

</comment><comment><USER6> ha ha ha</comment>


Taxation – Explaining What a Double Irish Sandwich Is - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9047-taxation <comment><AUTHOR> Youtube version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuxOKhlLfRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuxOKhlLfRU)

<comment><USER2> Shocking: [https://youtu.be/wuxOKhlLfRU?t=13m21s](https://youtu.be/wuxOKhlLfRU?t=13m21s)

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

<comment><USER3> This assassination had almost no coverage on the continent. EU institutions and member countries apparently have more important issues than billions of euro vanishing without a trace (time to increase the contributions for those employed; those single, childless, and employed soon will not be paid with money at all).

<comment><USER4> This assassination was covered in the US.

However, I don't understand the coverage either here or in Europe and am hoping that a local Maltese reader might be able to help out. In all the coverage, she's praised to the skies as a tough investigative journalist who uncompromisingly challenged authorities and followed through on corruption.

But then you go to her blog, which was her primary reporting outlet, and it's nothing of the kind. Her last post was literally belittling a politician for his posture [1]. The rest of her posts include gossip and snark ("Opposition leader's wife says convicted drug dealer's girlfriend is 'one of my closest and most trusted friends'"). [2] And so on.

For locals in Malta, or anyone who actually followed her before she was killed, was she viewed in Malta as a serious investigative reporter? TIA.

[1] [https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/10/first-things- first-...](https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/10/first-things-first- something-horrendous-posture/)

[2] [https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/10/opposition- leaders-...](https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/10/opposition-leaders-wife- says-convicted-drug-dealers-girlfriend-one-closest-trusted-friends-drug- dealers-girlfriend-says-opposition-leaders-wife-close-friends-like/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you expect a good explanation on the double irish thing, look elsewhere, this talk spends less than a minute on it and does a poor job. A better title would be "How do we make these greedy capitalists pay more money to our governments (so that they can waste it)"

<comment><USER6> Also what no one mentions is many of these strategies get disallowed upon audit. Coke got hit pretty bad by it to the tune of billions. The issue is that you cant restructure your business to create a false reality. If 100% of your operations and sales are in the us then you wont have a good chance saying your ip is foreign owned and oh by the way our ip paid to the foreign entity is nearly identical to our taxable income.

It is different if the company has legit foreign operations.

People think these strategies work but they dont. The irs is only recently getting around to finishing audits that involve these creative structures.

<comment><USER7> It's obvious to see that these strategies do work by looking at the effective corporate tax rate of all the companies mentioned. I've never heard of audits like you are talking about for the top few tech companies (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook), do you have a pointer?

One of the points in this presentation was that for intangible goods, it's much easier to pull these schemes off, so it makes complete sense to me that Coke would get hit but tech companies would not.

<comment><USER8> I mean you could ask your neighborhood search engine.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-13/irs- audit...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-13/irs-auditing-how- google-shifted-profits-offshore-to-avoid-taxes)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A closer look at the Skipfish (Google's Security Scanner) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/03/closer-look-at-skipfish.html

<comment><USER2> I'm working through an eval of the scanner right now. It looks like some thought has gone into how it finds files and extension. (There's a README- FIRST in the /dictionaries directory that explains this in details). However, I noticed some artifacts in my logs that point to some interesting beta- goodness behavior. For example:

GET /xmlrpc.php?tar.gz.cpp HTTP/1.1

So, it looks like the scanner found the xmlrpc.php but then started getting confused when it came to arguments versus file extensions.

I'm still testing and hopefully will have time to compare it to WebInspect and AppScan for those interested.

</comment><comment><USER3> Skipfish also runs a few checks against external libs - like Google Analytics javascript for example.</comment>


How Your Employer's Brand Affects Your Professional Career Path - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhall/2017/12/05/how-your-employers-brand-affects-your-professional-career-path/#6ce556ec5396 <comment><USER2> The only takeaway here is: build your brand by having an active Linkedin profile.</comment>