barefoot

I’m a developer and love the Touch Bar. I’ve never had a problem pressing the escape key and I use VIM and other applications that make use of it on a regular basis.

While I’m not a fan of replacing physical controls with touch-sensitive counterparts in safety-critical settings like cars and airplanes I think the Touch Bar is a significantly underrated improvement that I use and enjoy constantly.

I wonder how many other users feel the same way but never comment?

If it worked well and was free from regulation significantly limiting its use then a guess is there would be a substantial market for something like this.

Most importantly, we’ll never get to a future like what was imagined in the video if people are not taking honest shots at it. The fact that this is being given a chance is very exciting.

Just adding here: gyms don't want you to use their equipment / facility to get healthier. Or at least many don't.

Many small companies take this approach. Usually it’s lower-risk PII.

Some small companies will refuse to use generated data if it takes even a minute more to generate it vs import it from production. In the consulting world I’ve seen multiple examples of companies complaining bitterly about other security minded consultants efforts to improve security and privacy through even small amounts of additional development time.

Yes I did. This was typed out on a mobile phone and missed that one. Now I can't edit it.

Good naming, often a causality in older codebases, helps this a lot.

Abstraction hurts when things are abstracted and named poorly but helps a massive amount with readability when done well.

If I’m looking at a (software) method to cook a meal show me the high level salient features of that process in some centralized place. Don’t show me the angle of the knife blade or the exact movements used to chop the tomatoes. It should be (simplified in many ways):

PreheatOven(temperature:400);

ChopVegetables();

CombineIngredients()

Etc...

Sadly the problem is this basic level of software abstraction is preserved in much enterprise software but ChopVegetables upon closer inspection - and after drilling down into other methods - will also purchase missing ingredients and if you don’t have the money to buy them will also sell your items including the already preheated oven you need to cook the food.

If the latest WEF report on employment is any indication (http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf), a significant volume of workers are either already misemployed or are about to be misemployed.

I get a strong sense of this any time I get out of my office. I'm sure part of it is because I don't prefer interacting with humans but - as the owner of a machine learning consulting company - I see few jobs that can't be automated today with current technology given enough time.

Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

Note the publication dates on the books under the "Academic AI Textbooks": 2002, 1998, 1992. While many core concepts featured in these books (eg: backpropagation and genetic algorithms) are still relevant today we've come a long way in finding palatable explanations for them.

"If you’re not learning you’re standing still"

This is a large understatement. In our industry, if you're not learning you are drifting backwards rapidly.

I aim for twenty hours a week of (unpaid) reinvestment and learning. Some weeks I still feel like that's not enough to stay current.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

I've had a similar experience with coinbase - likely the worst customer experience of my lifetime.

Reduce stress in your life if possible, it can negatively impact memory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_stress_on_memory

Get more meaningful (and the right amount of) sleep, lack of sleep or too much sleep will negatively impact memory as well:

http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/little-sleep-much-affect-...

You are exercising regularly, right? If not, you may be missing out on a subtle way to improve your memory as well:

http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-...

What are you eating in your diet? Reduce the amount of foods - like steak - that increase LDL and change your drinking habits to increase or decrease your alchohol consumption to one drink a day:

http://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/boost-your-memor...

It's crazy to me that as a society we celebrate the digital equivalent of smashing a window in with a brick and climbing in through the jagged glass.

This wasn't a skillful attack. It was a messy, shitty social engineering exploit that very many people could have done.

In case anyone is reading from NBC, would you mind using the term "UAV" or "RPA" over "drone"? When we throw around the word "drone" here on reddit and hacker news I feel like it's okay because many of us know the key differences between what we're flying and the hellfire raining completely terrifying semi-automated flying death machines deployed in war-zones around the world.

However, many people who read your articles might not be so well informed. Many people have an incorrect and confused understanding of them and to them the word "drone" carries that jumbled mess of an associations. It would be helpful to everyone involved to use more precise modern language. You may argue - as the ACLU has - that the word "drone" is the most direct way to talk about unmanned aerial vehicles to the broad public. It may be easy to use and direct, but it's far from accurate. As Edward Murrow famously said "We cannot make good news out of bad practice."

We use this at our makerspace. The only complaint I've ever heard is that it can do a better job at scaffolding.

I completely agree. I would never write anything like the examples in the article and would be very discouraged if I received any of those responses to an interview I attended.

It's an interesting discussion and I find many non-developers unaware of the potential for technology to displace jobs over the next 20 years.

If you're interested in related material I recommend a book by Martin Ford that's freely available online, The Lights In The Tunnel:

http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com

It's not illegal, it's just not recommended per a previous FAA advisory. This is a common misunderstanding.

I fly FPV aircraft as a hobby and don't find anything particulary scary about police use of drones for increased situational awareness. They are excellent low cost tools that could probably save both civilian and law enforcement lives when used correctly.

A point that I find interesting - not brought up in the discussion here so far - is that the reduced cost in equipment also makes it easier for ordinary civilians to oversee police activity to some extent.

We're living in the world where anyone can make and own this amazing bit of technology. It strikes me as bizarre to limit police from using them.

Beautiful

Beautiful. The third screen appeared to be breaking on my computer though. Clicked the next (right arrow) button once and the numbered information boxes disappeared with some flickering without any further information displaying. Needed to press button again to progress to next screen. Noticed similar problems when clicking through a few times (ex: "This is your wallet's Bitcoin address" shown below with no address displayed)

I'm using Safari 6.0. If anyone can remember one of those services that captures machine information I'd be happy to use one and post that here.

Do BDD tests typically take that long to run?

My unit tests take 1-50ms to run (the majority of them closer to 1ms) and I can run a decent suite of them in a few seconds.

Pylons above the existing I-5 freeway.

Possibly not too high. Try using map, filter, and reduce on some example problems and you'll pick it up fairly quickly. Project Euler makes for decent fodder. When you've successfully managed to apply them then try rewriting the functions (delete the implementation you are using - such as the library above - and rewrite it from scratch).

Looks like the first link to his personal website in the article is broken:

http://bellard.og

I was going to report it on their main website so I looked for a good way to get in touch with them and found a contact form which seemed to be geared towards sales and had a number of (unrelated to my task) required fields. I'm too lazy to fill out something that is going to get routed to the wrong place and requires me to enter my phone number, position, country, and area of interest on top of my email address and name.

So, I thought I'll just call them.

I called the main phone number and had no way to speak to someone there. The phone prompt simply diverted me to email sales. Heh.

There was a brief period of time where I wondered how a link could remain broken in an otherwise good quality article for over a year. That mystery has been solved.

If you enjoyed this podcast I can recommend the book "Getting to Yes":

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0395631246

It's a little bit dated but an excellent introduction to negotiation and overlaps with a number of the topics discussed in the show.

This has absolutely happened to me too.

"...being locked to IIS as a Web server (or dependent on crippled Windows ports of better Web servers) means you'll be playing in the bush leagues. IIS is found running many huge and powerful websites in the world, but it's rarely selected in a vacuum..."

I sense a little bit of bias.

As a multiplatform developer I can think of a number of reasons why someone might opt to go the Windows Server route. ASP.NET MVC 4 is a first class framework and many prefer it over other popular alternatives on other platforms such as Django, Rails, and Cake. In addition, Visual Studio is arguably the best IDE available and publishing to an IIS server is dead simple.

As for cost, full versions of Visual Studio and Windows Server can both be obtained for free through the DreamSpark program for college students and through the similar BizSpark program for startups and small businesses.

I would love to see the performance data for this campaign.

Fair enough, but I would hazard a guess that most users in versions previous to Windows 8 attempted to click on the center of the button, a slower movement than hitting the bottom left corner of the screen.

The start screen and missing start button are indeed steps forward when implemented properly and I think Microsoft is most of the way there. I would be very displeased if they added the start menu or button back.

There is still a start button, and they made it larger. The four corners of the screen are the fastest and easiest targets to acquire aside from the pixel directly under the current mouse position. The lower left corner is infinitely larger and easier of a target to hit than the old start button. The only place this breaks down is inside a virtual machine (you can still use the corner to open the menu but it's significantly slower).

As for the start screen replacing the start menu on the desktop, I think it's still a net win. How often do you need to see your current desktop while navigating the start menu? I can't think of one occurrence in my ten or so years of using Windows on a daily basis. If the rest of the screen is not actively used for the task, why fill it with noise?

The start screen on all of the Windows 8 installs that I've used opens just as fast as the previous start menu. I primarily use search (Windows Key + Start Typing...) and it works better than the previous version by taking advantage of the additional space on the screen.

I'm not sure if this is even a story. What's a rational well-reasoned argument for bringing back the start menu or button other than "it's what I'm used to"?