kaolinite

It’s interesting to me how quickly I’ve soured on the concept of open banking, which on paper sounds fantastic and originally I was very much in favour of. And which I’ve used personally to make it easier to extract my own data for my own use.

However more often than not now I’m seeing it used for really invasive applications. Such as when I rented my most recent apartment and they asked to use open banking to verify our finances, which as far as I know would have given them access to every single transaction going back a decade or so. The agent was confused as to why I wouldn’t go ahead with it and ultimately let us opt out, but I do worry that at some point I won’t have much choice but to accept.

I’ve also seen credit scoring companies that suggest you’ll get a better credit score if you use open banking to hand over your transactions. I have no need to use that but I suspect others who are desperate to increase their chances of getting a mortgage, etc, won’t have much of a choice.

“Everything old is new again”.

Not always inaccurate, but often used to overlook nuance.

My partner and I had been working with a personal trainer up until the lockdown hit and had sold most of our exercise equipment before we moved to London, so without the gym we were a bit stuck. Thankfully we did have a rowing machine and some dumbbells so have been using those with an app called FitBod. You enter the equipment you have and it builds a workout based on that. It also has body weight exercises too. Once we’re out of lockdown I suspect we’ll skip the personal trainer and keep using FitBod, just at the gym instead.

Yes, the company I’m contracting at currently has done exactly this. We’ve kept Slack around for calls and for monitoring alerts, but other than that it’s all in Basecamp.

It has made an incredible difference. As a remote worker, I always felt stressed if I didn’t respond to a message straight away as it might appear as if I’m slacking off. With Basecamp, a delay is expected, so I finish my tasks before taking a look through my Basecamp notifications. I’m vastly more productive and far less stressed.

In addition, the proposals and comments on Basecamp are in far more detail and conversation is typically better thought out.

Could not recommend it enough.

I've read more in the past 12 months than in the past few years, purely because I discovered a company in the UK called the Folio Society[1]. They sell beautifully bound and illustrated editions of fantastic books, although at rather high prices (£30-40 on average).

Previously the majority of the books I read came in the form of cheap ebooks from the Kindle store. As a result, I often abandoned them (or even just forgot about them), only reading a few chapters. Now though, when I spend £30 on a single book, damn right am I going to finish it.

Plus, as a result of the curation, there isn't a single book on their site that isn't at least worth a glance. The same can't be said for many physical bookstores, let alone Amazon, etc.

And, the best part is, I don't really need these expensive books anymore. I've gotten into such a habit of reading because of them that I'm buying regular books again and I'm reading for at least an hour or two a night.

[1] http://foliosociety.com

Killer feature for me is being able to cmd+click on file paths in the terminal to open them. I use this constantly. There are plenty of other features too such as being able to reopen a tab you closed accidentally.

Creating a checklist for my morning routine has been such a great time-saver and anxiety-reducer for me. I have everything on there, even the most obvious items such as "eat breakfast", and all I need to do once I wake up is tick things off from start to finish. I haven't forgotten to take my umbrella or laptop charger since, and it's relieving knowing that - because I've checked everything off - there's nothing left for me to do. No more worrying about having forgotten something.

Not saying that these are valid reasons however two that spring to mind are thickness (USB-C is fairly significantly thicker) and elegance (one could argue that Lightning is a more beautiful and slightly more pleasant to use connector).

In addition, Apple controls Lightning completely so when you buy an accessory that uses Lightning, as long as it isn't counterfeit, it has been tested by Apple and is guaranteed to work. They can't guarantee that with USB-C.

That said, it's an awkward situation. Overall I'd like USB-C on my phone however if they were going to do it, surely it would have been with the iPhone 7. It wouldn't be great if they announced it with the 7S after people had gone out and bought Lightning headphones.

I'm on mobile so not sure if anyone else has pointed this out but Apple mentioned in the keynote that the escape key is still present when using the terminal. There is also a way to bring up the full row of function keys.

Personally I think this is the great advantage of the touch bar. The only app that I personally use the Esc key in has it available, but all other apps use the space for more appropriate shortcuts. Plus it can be customised too (finally I can add a screenshot button!), although not per app yet, as far as I can tell.

Interestingly I was getting occasional black screens (i.e. the entire screen, status bar and all) in Safari on iOS 10. Not seen that on any other site before.

I used to use this excuse to justify ridiculous levels of spending. My time is valuable, etc. It's definitely true for some people but probably not most and certainly not me. Unless you actually are earning more (and saving it too, not just spending it) as a result of this mindset, I'd recommend reconsidering.

Rails doesn't execute the query until you actually use it in some way, by which point it knows you've added a limit clause.

Adblockers on iOS require the 64 bit A7 SoC which was released with the 5S. I'm not sure if there's a valid reason why they couldn't make it work on 32 bit too, whether it was just extra effort or whether they'd have had to make technical concessions, but the way they implemented ad blocking within Safari is different to other solutions (e.g. the side-loaded ad blockers that 05 mentioned) so it's hard to be sure.

For more information on WebKit content blockers: https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/

Update: performance is the reason that it's 64 bit only https://twitter.com/awfulben/status/638526406805229568

You might want to look into this: http://www.lumobodytech.com/lumo-lift/

I haven't tried one myself, although I am tempted as I often get quite bad back pain (at age 23 :-/ ), however I can't quite bring myself to add yet another device to my life that needs looking after, charging, etc.

However, I wonder if you can solve this problem purely with software. Could an app detect slouching by monitoring the user through the webcam?

Try user groups for your languages / technologies of choice. I subscribe to a couple of Ruby user groups in the UK where jobs and contracts are routinely posted - in fact, it's how I found my current contract.

I use Arq[1] for backing up my Mac. It's also available on Windows, but not Linux. However, it does allow you to back up to Linux, via SFTP. It also supports S3 and a few other cloud services.

It does cost. You can either pay for a subscription to use their servers, similar to Backblaze, etc, or you can pay $40 (this is what I did) for the stand-alone app. Personally I back my Macbook up to S3 - it costs me less than $5/month. I've been using it for a couple of years now and it gets regular updates and has saved the day for me more than a few times.

[1] https://www.arqbackup.com/

I made Trunk as an Evernote alternative. It's open-source and web-based, using Markdown to store notes. It might be too simple for your needs however.

You can try it at http://trytrunk.com/ or get the source at https://github.com/timdavies/trunk

For the past month or so I've been building a notes app as I wanted to move away from Evernote and couldn't find a good replacement. It has been really fun building something that I use every day and building it exactly as I want to use it.

http://github.com/timdavies/trunk

First of all, thanks for your feedback - really appreciate you trying it out and taking the time to offer your thoughts. Regarding your points:

1. I'll check the search tonight and add some tests to cover it, thanks for letting me know.

2. Agreed regarding the design - could do with some improvements. I'll tweak it.

3. The reason there's a notes icon is because I'm planning to have other icons there too (I'm considering a few options but perhaps bookmarks, contacts, files, etc - that kind of thing). Doesn't really need to be there now, admittedly, but it shouldn't be too long until there are other sections.

This article reads as if it were copied straight out of an email from a PR rep.

I've drastically cut my HN time in the past few months by following this one weird trick:

Add "news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext" following to your Adblock/uBlock custom filters.

You still get to read the articles and keep up with tech news, but you don't end up in comment threads (unless it's an Ask HN/etc, hence why I'm commenting now). Occasionally I load up HN in a different browser if I want to take a break and read some comments but my idle browsing has been drastically reduced.

There's lots of great content in the comments, but it's also a fantastic way to waste time.

Completely agree. Often I'd look on the designer's website and find the exact price listed - even though Gilt said it was heavily discounted.

After my last shopping experience with them, I won't be buying again. Whilst it took several weeks for my items to arrive as they picked a cheap shipping option (which I don't really mind), they expected me to pay for fast delivery back to the US when I had to return the items. In the end, I received a little more than £100 back from an order that cost almost £200.

Consider using this Adblock/uBlock filter:

    news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext

I've been using it for a week or two now. It blocks links to all comments (besides Ask HN, Show HN, etc - which is why I'm here). I've drastically cut down my HN time but still keep up to date on tech news. I also read the articles in full a lot more than I used to.

(It also tidies up the homepage and makes it look a lot cleaner, IMO: http://i.imgur.com/RzHKD2d.png)

Your customers may not read TechCrunch but they may read The Guardian or the Wall Street Journal and if you want to get an article there, your best bet is to have an article already on TechCrunch and similar sites.

It's the same reason why Hacker News, Reddit and other community-based sites matter more than you might think: it lets journalists at larger companies know that there is interest and that you might be worth writing about.

This is what Homekit[1] (and Brillo[2] from Google) is trying to fix. We're early on in IoT - things are very immature right now but that doesn't mean the entire concept is flawed.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/homekit/

[2] https://developers.google.com/brillo/

Sorry, perhaps I should have been more clear - I'm not saying these cars are unreliable or will fall apart, I'm saying they're ugly and made of horrible materials. Unpleasant fabric, plastic that is textured to "look" like leather, fake leather and just awful, awful designs (e.g. The Toyota Yaris or the Nissan Juke - just dreadful). I'm sure these cars are very reliable, but from a design perspective they're ghastly.

Even though it's hard to imagine Apple making a car, there is an awful lot of smoke around this. There has to be a fire somewhere. Lots of people are wondering how Apple can differentiate in the car market - I think (surprisingly) it comes down to price. Few people may remember this, but when Apple announced the iPad, people were shocked at how cheap it was. People knew the iPad was coming and were predicting it would start at $1000, easily. It cost $500.

Leaving out driverless car tech, which I'm not sure whether Apple will have ready for launch, I think the Apple Car will look and function like a $100,000 car - but will cost significantly less. Say, half the price. Ive, in a recent interview, spoke about how he hated so many cars on the road. Not because they were cheap, but because they were poorly designed and put together with such little care. I think, unless he's gone off the deep end into the luxury market (which he very well may have!) he would want to produce a car that is really great - but still affordable enough that lots of people will be able to afford it[1].

All of that being said, and no matter how much Apple cares about the mass market, Apple will want to keep their high margins. They'll need to bring down manufacturing costs considerably. However, if anyone can do it, it's Tim Cook. He's well known for being a wizard at managing supply chains. Perhaps it'll be their first product assembled entirely by robots, who knows.

We'll see what happens but if Apple are able to produce a very high quality car at a reasonable price, I suspect that it will be extremely disruptive. In the UK at least, pretty much every car under £30,000 is utter garbage. I'd love it if Apple could change that.

[1] I suspect, as with Apple Watch, there will also be a high-end version of an Apple Car. It will probably have the same functionality (i.e. it won't just be a super-car) but will have extras, like a Hermès leather interior. I, for one, look forward to customising a car like a new Macbook - current car customisation screens are a pain (besides Tesla, actually, theirs isn't too bad).

Maybe for you (and me too) but for the general public, the default apps are used a hell of a lot. 50% of users use the default notes app[1], for example. Apple Maps (which based on the press, many might assume isn't used at all) has 3.5x the usage of Google Maps[1].

I don't know whether there are any other stats out there, but I suspect that for most people, there's no need to install a custom podcast app, for example, when the default one works just fine for them.

[1] https://www.macstories.net/news/the-numbers-from-apples-wwdc...

He confirmed on Twitter that it'll keep being updated for the foreseeable future.

https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/645060381778571265