rogerhoward

> I can't think of a feature I care less about on a laptop

This is how I feel too, but at 49, a Mac user since we bought our 128k, I'm no longer certain I am the market - fairly sure I am not. I have two kids, 10 and 7, and we've had a handful of cheap Chromebook laptops, some with touch and some without, and I can say that my kids always prefer the ones with. I don't get it, objectively it doesn't make sense to me, but it does to them. They would absolutely prefer a touchscreen, even in laptop form factor.

I joined a startup with a product in production for a dozen or so major customers (US universities), public facing, with a slick new front and backend the team had been working hard on. I brought along a young engineer friend who had a pet interest in pentesting, so his first task before getting up speed as a dev was a security review.

He and I sat down on day one to poke around, mainly to get oriented, not expecting much l. Popped up Chrome's devtool network panel, refreshed the login page.

One of the first XHR rows was to an endpoint named “getKeys”

The return object was the root keys for the AWS prod account.

This crap is incredibly common. Maybe not that egregious, but close enough.

"The first lossless audio format to gain widespread adoption (FLAC) was released 6 years after MP3."

AIFF and WAV say what?

When I worked at a video game studio, my wonderful grandma would tell her friends I worked at a toy factory.

After months of suffering with this, with an out warranty 15" MBP 2016 that was relegated to desk duty with an external keyboard, I heard about this program. I made an Apple Store appointment for the next day (a Tuesday); they checked it, warned me it could be a week or more because of a holiday that week. Thursday morning I had a call that it was ready. Total cost: $0 (according to the invoice the parts were over $800, including a mainboard replacement to fix a loose USB-C port). It was a basically new machine when I got it back.

I'm still sore over this kbd design, but its otherwise been a good laptop and their no-questions-asked handling of it was great.

It's about the 2015 models.

Loretta Lynch faced extensive questioning in the Senate and long, contentious hearings about her background and clientele during a nearly six month nomination process. She was heavily vetted by both parties and eventually gained enough votes to move forward, including by McConnell and Graham. Yes, she was vetted publicly. No, this acting AG has not been. Not for a moment, which is why the free press is so important in an appointment like this.

Define blackmail.

Unless I misunderstand you, that’s an absurd overstatement at best.

My wife is a somm as are many of our friends. I joined in on many of their study sessions as each of them went through various phases of their certifications.

Granted I’m lucky to tell a Pinot from a Chardonnay, but watching trained Simms do blinds is impressive. It’s a mix of a very specific process - they work from “the grid”, picking apart specific properties of a taste one bit st a time - as well as incredible amount of practical knowledge that comes from tasting an absurd amount.

It’s another thing to say that tastes don’t necessarily correlate with price - any honest somm will tell you that. But anyone with a reasonable amount of experience can tell a $5 bottle of Cupcake or a two buck Chuck and something less industrial.

I know there’s a lot of excitement for lab made - it’ll rightly be seen as just another technique eventually.

My current Macbook Pro is probably the first bit of Apple hardware in two decades that's made me actively consider alternatives. It's been the one laptop - premium at that - from Apple which I've had continual frustrations with compared to its predecessor, for all the reasons listed above.

I love USB-C, but not for power. Already, two of my ports are loose. I've never had that on any previous Apple power connector. MagSafe was a brilliant solution to real problems, and just dropping it without a superior alternative is not at all what I expect from Apple.

I also like the universality of USB-C, but it's not like Apple didn't opt to keep one legacy port for usability reasons - that little headphone port. SD and HDMI would have been enough.

And yes, the keyboard is terrible. For a machine I spend all day on, designed for pros, its a disappointment. Like most people here, it always takes me a little time to adapt to a new keyboard; unlike in the past, after more than a year I still loathe this one.

Perhaps the only thing that doesn't bring out my inner rage is the Touchbar. I'm largely ambivalent about it - the lack of esc/f-keys was annoying for a few days but I adapted. Obviously, others disagree, but on this list its the one choice I could have found a way to rationalize.

I'm surprised no one has noted the copyright is to Design Science - this is a small company in my hometown who are still around. I've spoken with their CEO a few times and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the source code was lost, or somehow at least wasn't being made available to Microsoft (I doubt it ever was). It's a really old school shop who seems to have largely been coasting on the licensing of this one component for the past couple decades and I wouldn't at all be shocked to find they no longer are capable of maintaining it themselves.

The main census is only every ten years, but there are other datasets updates more often, as well as extrapolated data. The issue for me wasn’t data being out of date, it’s just that the structure and content is fairly arcane if you’re not well versed in census - I assume much of the structure has been carried forward over the decades as there’s an obvious need to make sure data is comparable across different census.

I've worked with this API a fair bit since early 2016, and it's been around longer. I've got no real complaints about the API, just want to note that the data itself is.. arcane.. it'll take a bit of study and research to get up to speed on even a small subset of what's available.

Indeed, I was responding to your "pick Florida" by citing statewide statistics. But Melbourne is, itself, significantly worse than average nationwide, and in fact higher than the Florida state average.

https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/fl/melbourne/crime http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Melbourne-Florida.html http://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/florida/melbourne...

Florida is hardly a state with almost no crime; on a per capita basis it ranks well within the top ten, usually close to #5. Miami, Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, and Tampa all have higher violent crime per capita than, for instance, New York, Seattle, Portland, and San Jose.

Source: Justice Department's Uniform Crime Reporting data.

Don't combine the two; outsource your email hosting (Google, etc) to save a lot of pain, and select your Django hosting from a large range of options, from Digital Ocean to Heroku to AWS.

No technical reason these two need to be hosted together, and the market has definitely not favored putting all these eggs in one provider.

Zappa: https://www.zappa.io

Seems to me like POSIX compatibility is actually a cheap pass that gives you access to a huge software environment. Right on the homepage they mention already having packages for Python, Ruby, Git, Lua, and Node... would that, and thousands of other packages, be feasible without a workable POSIX layer?

90% of the code is locked to the vendor?

I've been using lambda lately and perhaps 5% of the code in my Lambdas is AWS-specific; the vast majority was rapidly extracted from existing projects, wrapped in a simple Lambda interface, and done.

While I don't advocate Lambda for everything, there's almost nothing there to lock you in - its a simple function that accepts two parameters. Even coupled with API Gateway, its just moving my routes definition to a slightly different layer. I could easily port any of this work back to any common Web framework with almost zero effort. I won't, because Lambda solves actual problems for me now.

Being a CTO and being a contractor seem like mutually exclusive conditions, at least where I'm from (California). It's not B&W entirely, but it's far more likely than not (at least here) that you should be an employee with that title.

Yes. Because I've got plenty to lose from criminals too.

I've already seen the child porn angle playing out in posts on Facebook. This just a little while ago:

"Every child porn videographer in America is trading in his camera for an iPhone"

Not saying JPEG hasn't had its share of exploits, but that the format itself isn't an example (like DOC, and PSD) of a format that can be described as "direct to memory" in the same sense. DOC and PSD are in many ways just the in-memory data structures of the apps that create them, written to disk.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

"These are binary formats, so loading a record is usually a matter of just copying (blitting) a range of bytes from disk to memory, where you end up with a C data structure you can use. There’s no lexing or parsing involved in loading a file. Lexing and parsing are orders of magnitude slower than blitting."

PSD is much the same - it's why interop with PSDs is such a challenge.

JPEG has to be parsed and decompressed - another source of problems, but not remotely in the same category.

> Word and JPEG are both examples of such "direct to memory" formats

I think you mean Word and PSD, not JPEG - otherwise spot on.

1. The implication that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had him under their control since 2006 is important. We were still neck-deep in two wars that were sold to the public in large part based on Afghanistan's unwillingness to hand him over. If true, it also provides more explicit verification that SA and Pakistan are terrible allies at best.

2. Setting aside the morality of assassination, it suggests that the reason we killed him wasn't out of necessity or even expedience - but rather to prevent him from talking about these so-called allies.

3. Rather than implicating Pakistan and its corrupt ISI services, we implicated a humanitarian medical mission and its lead doctor. I fail to see that as the lesser of evils.

There are a lot of reasons to be disturbed by this story if it turns out to be factual.

I came here to say the same - Los Angeles is a big region, and there are many lovely places to live within. Like New York, if you can find a way to live near where you work it can be fantastic, and Long Beach is a perfect example.

Long Beach is both a great city to live in and, increasingly, a great place to work - not only if you work remotely, but if you want to work local. We have a great and growing tech scene, increasingly awesome food and drink, and a long history of arts, music and community.

PS, hi Dan! Great to run into you again (and again).

When did Apple deprecated Quicklook? I can't find any mention of that. Generally when frameworks are deprecated it's noted here too:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/MacOSX...

Also no mention:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Look

Quick Look's media support is pretty sparse, but that's due to its use of Quicktime X for most video and audio. QL supports plugins from third parties though so... yes. You don't need to replace QL, just build a plugin for it.

I have bad allergies to cat and dog dander, as well as a bunch of other stuff. After getting stabilized by a lineup of drugs that put my grandmother's to shame, I slowly backed off a number of the nastier prescriptions.

I opted against the shots based on my allergist's recommendations - essentially she told me that if I couldn't commit to the incredibly frequency (at least once a week) and duration of the treatments (several years), it might not be a good fit... particularly because there's always a chance of a severe reaction to the treatments, and no guarantee it'll help.

What has helped, anecdotally, is:

- Diet... my diet has changed substantially in the same timeframe. I was a vegetarian with enough soy intake in spite of an apparent (per testing) late-onset soy allergy. After 8 years I started eating meat again. While adding meat back in, I've also cut out essentially all processed foods, most dairy, excessive sugar, and essentially all grains. There were a lot of benefits - I'm not going to lecture anyone on diet, and I'm hardly a model of perfect health, but this has been a good experience for me. I cook almost every meal, and from scratch - no prepackaged meals, everything starts with fresh foods I buy myself.

- Exposure... while one of my worst allergies has long been cats, about 18 months ago my now-wife moved in with two cats. Before they moved in I was clearly allergic to them - visiting her apt. meant stocking up on drugs, and fortifying myself. It wasn't overnight, but with the initial assistance of drugs to supress the allergic responses, I'm now able to live with these two cats with very rare, if any, allergic reaction. I still react, though less, to other cats, in other homes.

I went from a big lineup of prescriptions to taking a single, OTC pill a day, in spite of more exposure to one of the biggest sources of my allergies.

I didn't have the luxury of double blind experiments, or of minimizing the variables - so I can't swear to which, if not all, of these changes had the greatest effect... but I was able to make a huge change in my allergic responses in less than 2 years.

> You can use AppleScript and Automator to automate some tasks, but you can't really call that programming

If Hypercard was programming, so is AppleScript. So is Python. So is bash. I think we're talking about the general "programming" - since I also see Excel included alongside Hypercard in this reminiscence - not the more specific (and arbitrary, IMHO) programming vs. scripting language divide.

I loved Hypercard and was also a regular in the AppleScript world for a decade (and made a good part of my living on it at the time), but there are far more options for anyone remotely motivated to program today and with the exception of XCode (probably the least accessible option) they are preinstalled and freely available. And if downloading a free development environment with a simple installer is too great a burden today, I don't think you would have gotten anywhere in the good old days.

I don't really see the burden today - we have more options than ever, and many are available out of the box, and the rest almost universally free. I can automate my OSX environment with AppleScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and bash (and doubtless others) out of the box. I can build command line applications out of the box. I can build Web applications with GUIs out of the box. I can easily extend AppleScript or Python (and, I'm certain, Ruby and bash) to allow me to build GUI applications.

Programming in the 80's was different, for sure, but I have a hard time understanding the sentiment that it was somehow more accessible. Sure, BASIC was preinstalled on some platforms. Still, most platforms today have more, and better, options out of the box than any platform of the early 90's. Did you write C in the 90s for Mac OS (if we're accusing Apple of being inaccessible because of the lack of preinstalled XCode at the moment, then the 90's were far worse if you ever had to pay for THINK C or CodeWarrior).