kelchm

I used an HP 50g in high school — I always loved the look of confusion after someone asked to borrow my calculator.

Completely agreed. I've owned a lot of laptops and other devices... There's no question at this point that the M1 MBA has become my all time favorite.

The only complaint I have is that you can't run two external monitors off of it, but I have no doubt that the next generation will address that.

That's assuming there is a git repo or any kind of version control at all.

Here’s a link with some renders of what the trucks are planned to look like:

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35604138/usps-oshkosh-def...

This is my personal machine, so primarily using it nights/weekends for thinking with embedded development projects and web browsing lately.

I was using Firefox, but have recently switched Safari full time. It just seems to run better and isn't as brutal on the battery.

Just to add some more data here, M1 MBA 16GB Ram / 256GB SSD which I've been using for almost exactly two months:

    SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
    Critical Warning:                   0x00
    Temperature:                        34 Celsius
    Available Spare:                    100%
    Available Spare Threshold:          99%
    Percentage Used:                    0%
    Data Units Read:                    5,315,871 [2.72 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 2,249,290 [1.15 TB]

It’s still pretty impressive that they pulled off a basically seamless architecture transition. M1 + Rosetta 2 just works so well it’s hard to even tell the difference much of the time.

It’s incredibly disappointing that in 2021 booting from a microSD card is still the norm for nearly all of the SBCs on the market. Proper mSATA (and even NVME) SSDs have gotten unbelievably cheap in the last couple years. It’s at the point now where a good quality microSD card is only marginally cheaper than an mSATA SSD of the same capacity. Anyone who has been working with these types of systems for a few years knows how much of a headache relying on SD cards is. Inevitably your SD card is going to stop working or get corrupted — it’s just a matter of time and use.

Apple aren’t actually designing its own sensors, are they? I expected they would be using an off the shelf Sony sensor just like (most) everyone else.

I generally disagree with your premise here. Yes, you can do some pretty amazing things with image processing in software, but you have to have a decent starting point. A good example of this is just how minimal the image processing improvements are in the M1 MacBooks compared to their Intel counterparts — marginally better, but nothing to write home about.

I’m not at all an expert in optics, but I would expect the biggest constraint is the available depth for the lens and camera sensor within the upper clamshell of a laptop vs a phone. It doesn’t seem like it would be a huge difference but an extra millimeter or so makes a huge difference in the size of the sensor that can be used.

Absolutely this — I’ve had several MacBooks that ended up costing me less than $150 per year after I upgraded and resold them years later.

>> This is why we should work to transform the UN Peacekepeers into a militarized world police, composed of volunteers from countries all over the world. While simultaneously drawing down and disarming the world’s militaries.

It’s honestly terrifying to me that anyone thinks that this is a sound idea that would lead to a better world in the long run.

If there is anything that human history has proven, it’s that you cannot prevent corruption and that the centralization of power only further incentivizes corruption.

This is exactly what people mean when they say “fake news” in many cases. Not that the facts of a story are technically incorrect, but the way things are presented (or not presented) is intentionally designed to shift the readers perspective in a certain direction.

I honestly don’t understand how this is still an issue with Bluetooth devices in 2020. Why is there no lossless duplex audio profile / codec available at this point?

It’s not a cafeteria — it’s literally a set of tents that were erected fifty feet from this restaurant owners own outdoor tent.

It’s not logical at all.

Restaurants with open air outdoor seating as depicted in the linked video?

They didn’t do “nothing”. They gave guidance based on the data that was available and allowed individuals to make their own decisions on what course of action was best for them.

A large subset of the population in the US is (rightly IMO) not okay with their state or local government dictating what businesses are forced to close or imposing restrictions that effectively put them out of business.

By approaching the situation in this way it’s only further politicized the issue. I worry what will happen when something worse than COVID-19 comes in the future.

Is anyone on HN actively using this? I’ve had a hard time understanding what exactly I would use it for or what purpose it would serve beyond what integrations Home Assistant (for example) already provides.

Well if we’re going to go that route, maybe it should be called “synthetic chicken”.

Headline seems inaccurate/ misleading to me. Quote from Google in the article:

> If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos

Honestly that seems far more generous than I’d expect — why should Google (or any other company) be expected to store your data indefinitely if you stop paying them?

You're 100% right on notifications -- despite having borrowed a bunch of ideas from Android on how to handle notifications, iOS still doesn't get it completely right.

There was a point in time that I was pretty deep into the Android scene, but at this point in my life I just want my phone to work consistently and have great battery life.

After many years of using Android devices (including many Nexus / Pixel devices), I switched to an iPhone 11 Pro Max last year. I've been very happy with that switch, my phone always makes it through a day of use and I haven't ran into any of the quirks that I encountered on my Android devices on a regular basis.

I completely understand why you would prefer Android, but there are definitely people (including myself) that are happier with iPhones.

> In fact this makes me wonder: if Apple chips are so far ahead, why are iphones not the fastest, best smartphones by a wide margin?

Apple has pretty consistently had the fastest SoCs for phones and tablets for a few years now, particularly in single core performance. Here are some benchmark results of the iPhone 12 versus some of it’s Android competitors [1]. Notice that last year’s iPhone 11 Pro Max still outperforms Android phones from this year as well.

I think part of the reason this isn’t a major differentiator (for phones at least) is that phones have been “fast enough” for several years now. Given the very aggressive throttling that is utilized on these types of devices, I think the primary difference ends up being battery life / efficiency rather than raw performance.

It’s also worth noting that while the performance / efficiency gap between x86 and ARM seems to be pretty sizable at this point, the gap between various current generation ARM CPUs isn’t nearly as drastic.

1: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-benchmarks-this-des...

This is tangential, but I came across an interesting paper from 2012 on the usage of face masks in Japan. I had preconceived notions that the prevalence of mask use in Japan was solely driven by collectivist culture. If nothing else, this was a good reminder that even groups that appear to be homogenous to an outside observer have diversity in their views.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9566...

Do the Intel MBPs actually thermal throttle any faster than similar Windows laptops? As I recall the thermal performance on something like the XPS 13 isn’t much better.

You say that as if Apple hasn’t been delivering yearly performance improvements in their SoCs like clockwork. They’ve roughly tripled the performance in the last five years between the A9 and A14.

AMD has done a great job with Zen 3 in particular, but IMO they are going to really struggle to compete with what Apple is able to do with ARM.

What do you mean by noise?

Anecdotal, but I had around 40 trees harvested from my property last year as part of a larger forestry job on an adjacent property. These were mostly mature Poplar along with a few middle aged Black Walnut.

At one point I asked the forester what I could do to help promote healthy regrowth of the forest. His response was that I didn’t need to do anything and that “the best way to grow a new tree [in a forest] is to cut an old one down”. This honestly seemed a bit like nonsense to me at the time, but watching the way things have already started to rebound has been pretty incredible.

I started counting new seedlings this summer but ended up giving up after I had counted more than 200 poplar seedlings within a relatively small area. Obviously all of those won’t survive to maturity, but it’s given me a new appreciation for just how effective forests are at regenerating themselves when harvesting is done responsibly.

If you're talking about the 'ENVi' thermostat [1], it was actually manufactured by ecobee from what I understand. I know Daikin has

Honestly, all of the controls for residential mini split systems are pretty awful. My Mitsubishi system has the MHK1 thermostat [2] which is Mitsubishi specific version of the traditional Honeywell thermostat. The newer MHK2 looks a bit more modern, but honestly isn't really any different in function.

1: http://www.daikinac.com/content/residential/residential-cont... 2: http://www.nonul.mylinkdrive.com/item/MHK1.html

Great discussion in this post. While I do generally prefer squashed commits when merging a branch, I absolutely seen that cause some pain in specific circumstances.

I think part of the problem is that modern repository software has built an 'additional layer' on top of git (IE: pull requests) that most of us have become accustomed to using in our day to day workflows. Git itself doesn't really have a 'lossless' way to persist that extra information.

Squashing commits at merge gets us close, but ultimately we’re throwing away potentially useful information by doing so. The main time I’ve seen it be problematic is when multiple people are working on a complex feature where PRs are getting merged into a long-lived feature branch rather than directly to the default branch.

Say I need to base my work on someone else’s WIP branch for said feature. If they squash their commits when merging their work into the feature branch, I’m going to end up with merge conflicts that need to be manually resolved as the individual commits that I had based my work on no longer exist, as they’ve all been squashed into a single new commit.

What if git supported a sort of 'soft squash' concept, where associated commits could (optionally) be grouped together with additional metadata. That would let the application consuming the git history (IDEs, CLI tools, etc) make the decision in how commit histories are presented to the user.

Why do it locally when most modern repository software (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc) can do it for you when a PR is merged?

My point of view is that if work is being done on an individual feature or bug fix, having a view of the individual commits might help give any reviewers important context on how a final solution was arrived at. It can also be helpful to be able to see the specific changes that have been made since a prior review.

While in most cases I favor squashing commits when it comes time to merge into the parent branch, it seems like doing it manually just creates extra work and potentially throws away information that may have been useful to reviewers.

Completely agreed — squashing commits isn’t desirable in every circumstance, but if all the commits pertain to a single feature then it makes complete sense to me.