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This is definitely a failure on PG&E's part, but I'm still not sure how much sense it makes to assign them blame for this fire. The environment they're operating in is somewhat ridiculous - the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much any flame source will start a fire large enough to burn a huge area; this specific tower failure is basically just the thing that revealed a much larger issue.

With proper engineering and maintenance, PG&E could probably reduce the frequency of fires significantly, but there's always going to be a non-zero risk of fire, both from power lines and other sources, and it seems basically inevitable that one of them would have started another fire at some point. If this failure hadn't happened, and the same fire had happened a year later due to an "excusable" cause (like a tree falling on a line, or someone's house catching on fire), would that outcome have been any better?

PG&E does ultimately have some responsibility, due to the fact that they were the immediate cause, but it really seems like people want to blame PG&E for the entire situation while avoiding the much harder truth: that this area will likely never be safe without significant policy changes (if ever).

It's decent from an economic standpoint, but it's still environmentally wasteful, and among people buying a $300 laptop, there's probably a decent number who would have a difficult time paying to replace it. Also, the actual hardware of laptops hasn't changed that quickly in a long time, and when compared to Windows (which runs on basically anything), and macOS (which officially runs on 7-8 year old devices, and can be patched to run on older ones), the ChromeOS update policy looks kind of silly to me. I'm writing this comment on a non-Chromebook laptop that was purchased in 2015 and still works perfectly fine; it's crazy to me that I would no longer be able to use it because of an arbitrary limit on software updates.

> I did my dissertation research using insurance claims data

Is your research published publicly anywhere?

For some reason, Chrome keeps the previous version around after you update it, so you always have two different versions installed (which doubles the space used). If you go to contents/frameworks/Google Chrome Framework.framework/Versions, you can delete the older one and it will work fine, but the space will still get used up again the next time Chrome updates.

All iOS jailbreaks are a result of security vulnerabilities, which Apple tends to fix almost as soon as they're discovered - and ultimately, it's Apple's responsibility to make their sandbox secure, regardless of what's running in it. I also don't see how installing outside apps would make jailbreaks any easier, given that you can already connect your phone to a computer and temporarily install an app on it (and for people who are motivated to jailbreak, this isn't much of a hurdle).

I haven't done enough iOS development to know for sure, but I'm assuming Apple could prevent private API usage by apps through technical means, rather than just app review.

I would argue that the technical limitations of iOS are what accomplishes this, rather than app review. For a malicious actor, sneaking prohibited behavior past app review is incredibly easy - look at what Fortnite just did! The reason that apps on iOS can't damage your device is that apps are sandboxed, and that the OS requires user permission to access data and places limits on how many resources an app can use. There's no reason that the same sandboxing system couldn't be applied to apps from outside the store.

(VPNs and provisioning profiles are sort of an exception to this, because they can escape the sandbox, but a) the number of scary warnings presented by the system should be enough to limit their impact, and b) they will also continue to exist separately from the app store issue).

This is an interesting idea! It's something I've been thinking a lot about recently, so it's nice to see someone actually do it.

I saw from your previous post that you're using Google for the web results, but the only option listed in their docs has a 10k queries/day limit. Have you been able to get them to agree to a higher limit, or are you planning to move off of Google once your traffic grows?

Also, your example search has a character encoding issue - "Stolen iPad Pro & Bose headphones".

> You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).

This doesn't seem to contradict what's shown in the screenshot (which only shows blocking from the search and trends page).

> This sounds like a store I’d love to visit in person—so many obscure items that are probably too difficult to price correctly. You’re bound to find a gem eventually. Even if it isn’t worth the time you spend, it’s probably a lot of fun!

Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, but when I went there a few years ago, it was pretty hard to find anything that was actually a good deal. The vast majority of the store is "normal" stuff (mostly random clothing and books) that's priced about the same as everywhere else, and even the obscure items are surrounded by crowds of people who have already looked over everything.

I don't doubt that if you went enough times, you might eventually find something under-priced, but for the most part it's just a somewhat-overpriced thrift shop (and not particularly fun, IMO).

Most of this is based on the IIHS data; 2012 is the last time a new type of test was added (small overlap), so it's what's being used to make this comparison.

Almost all the cars mentioned in the article have likely improved since then, but the issue isn't so much how safe specific models are, but rather what approaches the manufacturers are using to improve safety. What the test results indicate is that rather than actually designing for safety, manufacturers are designing to meet a very specific set of benchmarks; there isn't much reason to believe that has changed since then.

The most obvious example of this (which the article briefly mentions) is the difference between driver-side and passenger-side performance: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/small-overlap-gap-vehicles-...

How about JavaScript execution? https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449

I agree battery life for casual workloads will probably stay the same. However, if CPU power consumption decreases relative to other components, battery life on heavy workloads should go up.

> Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains

This doesn't really seem to match my experience; at least on a 2015 MBP, the CPU is always consuming at least 0.5-1W, even with nothing running. If I open a webpage (or leave a site with a bunch of ads open), the CPU alone can easily start consuming 6-7 watts for a single core.

Apple claims 10 hours of battery life with a 70-something WH battery, which would indicate they expect total average power consumption to be around 7W; even the idle number is a decent percentage of that.

(Also, has anyone been able to measure the actual power consumption of the A-series CPUs?)

The fact that most mobile platforms are sandboxed would help a lot to mitigate this - even if you do install a malicious app, the damage it can do is going to be fairly limited in most cases.

(And the platforms that don't have effective sandboxing need to implement it, regardless of whether they allow outside apps or not).

> And Apple suffers since they allowed the app to be sold on their store.

Well, they could allow the app to be sold outside their store, and then they wouldn't face any reputational risk from it.

I don't really see how this is deceptive either - if the app clearly states that you're paying for it upfront, and what the price is, then how are you being deceived? If you aren't willing to pay for it without trying it, then you can just not use it.

I guess I'm using a different definition of "general purpose computer" - IMO, it's defined not so much by the device design, but rather what people do with it. It's possible to do almost everything you can do with a normal computer on an iOS device, and for many people, it's their primary or only computing device, which I think makes it sufficiently "general purpose".

(There's also the other definition of "general purpose", which is that you can install your own OS on it and have full control over what software you run. I think Apple should allow that too, but that's sort of a different issue).

1) iOS devices are effectively general-purpose computers at this point (and the only computing devices owned by a significant number of people).

2) Why shouldn't I be able to write an app for my game console?

I don't think the car analogy really applies, for the reason that there aren't very many third-party services in a car, and not much demand by customers to install software in their car. Cars are essentially a single piece of equipment, where the car itself provides the primary value, and the number of people customizing their car is fairly small.

In comparison, with computers there's a much clearer separation between the device itself and third-party integrations. Almost everyone customizes their computer by installing software on it, and the computer and OS itself don't provide the main value - instead, it's a tool to run different software applications on it, and so Apple's attempt to control third-party software based on the fact that they make the hardware and OS is an attempt to use their power in one market to interfere in another, rather than just an attempt to control their product.

And to take this further: supposing that cars were people's primary computing devices, and everyone began using apps on their car, I would argue that car companies would be obligated to let people install the apps of their choosing.

I think the market share argument also tends to ignore the economics of how the software business works (and as you stated, all the high-paying users are on iOS, because they're generally higher-end devices than Android). If I create a new service that Apple won't allow, and it's only available on Android, iOS users aren't going to switch no matter how good my service is (because that involves spending hundreds of dollars on a new device and transferring all your other services, which is a ridiculously high bar to clear). And without those users, the chances of my service surviving are much lower, so it's most likely going to disappear from Android as well. The result is that even though Apple has a minority market share, they end up controlling the entire ecosystem. And in turn, that means that when consumers are choosing a phone, they don't actually have a free choice to avoid Apple's policies, because even if they buy an Android phone, Apple's policies will affect the services available to them. (And since the available services end up being the same, more people buy iOS devices for various reasons, which increases Apple's power even further).

Wouldn't a sandboxed Zoom downloaded directly from them be equally secure?

A lot of the people with issues appear to have airdropped the photo to their computer (which doesn't trigger the auto-conversion path), and then uploaded it from there (possibly using a non-Safari browser, which wouldn't do any conversion).

Web workers launched from the renderer work fairly well if you just need compute. I think I've also seen some apps add an additional BrowserWindow that's never displayed onscreen, although that will increase your memory overhead.

Electron supports multiple windows, but it ends up being annoying to do because each window runs in its own process. If your app has any kind of central state that's shared between windows, you end up copying data between processes frequently, which can be slow.

Rendering consistency is generally pretty good; I haven't run into any issues with that.

The new searchbar uses the top sites from the new tab page, which is a different algorithm from the one used for the old list (which I don't understand either). However, the one upside to this is that you can edit the top sites from the new tab page, and the edits will show up in the searchbar dropdown.

It looks like the mouse lines and the selection highlight are just partially-transparent divs stacked on top of the canvas that get moved around, so nothing actually gets redrawn unless the date range changes (which is a pretty clever approach!).

There should be an extra } at the end of the link; HN seems to be interpreting it as a separate character for some reason.

≠ represents a gate [1], which the routing engine probably assumes you can go through; if it's not possible to open the gate, it should have an access=private tag added to it to indicate that it's not passable.

If you click on the mouse cursor button on the right and then click on the symbol, it will show you the details for that object.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:barrier%3Dgate

I don't think there's any exact numbers. You can search for changesets that have Strava listed as a source [1], but that doesn't mean the Strava data was actually used.

[1] https://osmcha.org/?filters={"source"%3A[{"label"%3A"strava"...}

Just having a trace of your route probably isn't very useful in a lot of cases, since it's going to be mostly on roads that are already mapped. Instead, you'd probably want to map the actual paths, in which case you can view your GPS trace in the editor to map from without having to share it publicly.

The Strava heatmap is also licensed for usage in OSM, and in a lot of areas it has pretty good coverage of bike paths already (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strava).

As someone who's not a skier, the descriptions are a bit confusing. I read through most of the page thinking this was a service where I could pick any place and you would make a map of it (which would be really cool actually, although I have no idea what would be involved in doing that), and then when I got to the bottom, there were suddenly options for a bunch of places I've never really heard of.

If you're marketing only to skiers, I would make that more clear from the beginning (like, put a picture of someone skiing at the top). Alternatively, I would actually consider buying one of these even though I've never been to these places just because they look cool, but in that case I'd want more information about why you chose these places and what makes them interesting in particular.

(and the maps do look really nice! Actually, this is making me wonder if you could integrate with Strava or something and overlay the details of your trip on top of the map, but I'm not really the target market for that, so I don't know if that would work well or not).