alialkhatib

The original title was sufficient but not click-baity enough, so Quartz seems to have changed it. The URL reveals:

    uber-drivers-are-comparing-fares-with-riders-to-check-their-pay-from-the-company/

I'm not seeing the part explaining how guests are locked in their rooms. Is it that they don't feel they can leave or their belongings will be locked in a room they can no longer access, or is it some literal situation where the doors won't open unless the hotel's key system is restored?

If it's the former, it's more than a little melodramatic to say they're locked in. The situation would be resolved when the hotel paid the ransom (which they'd done twice before). And they don't really even have to leave their things in the hotel room; guests could pack up their belongings and move to another hotel if they really feel like the situation won't be resolved in a timely manner. I assume European laws would guarantee customers a refund (or at least a prorated refund) in a case like this, wouldn't they?

If it's the latter, then what kind of hyper-secure system is this hotel using, and more importantly why?

one quick way that comes to mind would be to check a web archive for past versions of the page in question

That does trouble me a bit, but if they stick to the spec (and I assume the retina Macbook hasn't deviated in any way to suggest they will for future models), then I see no reason not to remain tentatively optimistic.

I don't see any reason to go off spec given that they should be able to go up to 100W, but I may be wrong. Or Apple might come up with some hazy excuse for why the existing standard was no good. It'd be a real shame, though.

I'm about as heavily invested in MagSafe as a single person can semi-reasonably be, but I have pretty strongly mixed feelings about dropping MagSafe, so when I hear that people are upset (and I admittedly presume that those individual people can't possibly be more deeply invested in continuing with MagSafe than I am (although I make no claims about people making decisions for groups of people, like IT staff)), I see an opportunity to point out that there's at least some merit to this. I want to be clear upfront that I'm not saying it's a landslide in favor of Type C, but that there is at worst a silver lining and perhaps at best this is a net win.

First, it's a good thing that we're converging on a standard. Standards mean not only that we can safely buy components from third parties (for instance, buying reputable, reliable USB Type C cables from places like Monoprice or whomever), but that we can borrow charging cables from others relatively easily. We've had a taste of that thanks to MagSafe's ubiquity, but a USB-based spec potentially broadens that.

Second, USB battery packs (admittedly a slightly niche product category, but one that's been growing rapidly in the past few years) could potentially be made to charge Macbook Pros now. There are some battery packs out there that support MagSafe today, but my sense from shopping around every few months is that the best option continues to be to buy a battery pack that has a standard electrical outlet, and carrying that big bulky MagSafe AC adapter with me. Transitioning to a USB spec (should) permanently open the door to portable battery packs, third party AC adapters, etc...

Third, USB power hubs (again a slightly niche product category, depending on whom you ask) can consolidate all of the AC adapter functions that devices need for charging. I'm already nearly there --- my tablet, battery pack, bike lights, phone, and watch all charge by USB (heck, I have a charger for my DSLR's batteries that uses Micro USB), and a single AC adapter for those devices is both tidier and easier to pack and travel with.

I agree that MagSafe's really nice and I'll be sad to see some of the benefits go, but particularly with MagSafe 2 they've overcorrected in my opinion by making the threshold strength necessary to break away too low, and it's caused me to seriously reconsider whether the frustration of all these inadvertent disconnections is worth the benefit. I see at least a few reasons to be glad that the next laptop I buy (maybe in a year, certainly in three) will probably be able to charge via the same (reasonably priced!) AC adapters and battery packs that I'll own for my peripherals, and that if I'm really up a creek it'll be more likely that I find someone with a compatible charging cable, since USB is (and will continue to be) pretty much ubiquitous.

While the author of the post makes it clear that this is for developers, I think this kind of cheat sheet has some value for non-developers. Stuff like recognizing how to run a python script, how to enter the python shell, etc... all sounds like really trivial stuff that we should all know, but if I gave a crash course in Python to someone who primarily used Excel to do data analysis and parsing and whatnot, then this cheat sheet would be useful (I think). It's the little reminders that act as bridges between the gap of learning and internalizing something, as jake-low mentions.

I probably wouldn't give them this PDF, but I imagine I would give them a markdown file that illustrates many of these same reminders with examples and caveats.

It's confusing that the author specifically says that the startup works with Python and Django, because I agree that a Python developer shouldn't need a reminder that `python <file.py>` runs the python script (and in fact in that space I would have instead made a note about `python`/`python3`) but I want to try to take the value from this, rather than pile on with the crowd deriding it.

It's always interesting to see qualitative stuff associated with quantified self; it seems like ultimately the goal is to lead a (happier|better) life, which is a very qualitative notion, but we end up turning as many things as possible into quantitative criteria and looking post hoc for some pattern.

Koby's tweet shows what a breakup looks like, and it's tragic, but if you imagined someone retrospectively posting a screenshot of their heart rate readings from the day they met their current partner, we might see a similar pattern of elevated readings as well, wouldn't we? It seems like it would be just as plausible (to me, anyway).

I'm not saying that we should find better dimensions to measure (I think we'll always find ambiguous, confusing results absent context), but that whatever we measure should get qualitative context if we want it to really mean anything.

I was similarly confused. While the HN title accurately reflects the Reuters title, I think it'd be reasonable to retitle the submission to something along the lines of "Apple: breaking encryption on devices running iOS 8 and newer 'would be impossible'", or something (point being to highlight that we're talking about the encryption issue, not carrier).

Yep I did, my bad. Sorry about that.

I went more or less with option 2 (a pair of 4K monitors) and "drive" them with a hackintosh I bought/built for that purpose. At the time I had a 2012 rMBP, which didn't offer MiniDP 1.2/Thunderbolt 2, and driving just one of these monitors is more than a little resource-intensive. It was relatively expensive compared to not buying anything more than the monitors, but cheaper than buying a whole new laptop to drive all those pixels.

It's also nice to be able to upgrade that desktop relatively easily, tap into a more performant computer when my laptop's not up to snuff (but the problem's not quite big enough to justify spinning up EC2 instances or using some university resources), and plug in/unplug essentially with an ethernet cable (to mitigate the latency issues of on-campus wifi) rather than deal with a mess of cables.

I actually have 3 monitors (2x4K and a 1080p display), so all of the MiniDP ports and the HDMI port would've gotten taken up, leaving me just with USB, which would've been somewhat frustrating (yes, a shortcoming of the laptop, but one I accept). This way I still have my HDMI port and a Thunderbolt port available (and I have ethernet, arguably somewhat faster than the available wifi, as a nice side effect).

It's not necessarily perfectly ideal - perfect might be something like monitors that connect wirelessly, certainly without a second machine running in the background - but having a pair of 4K monitors in portrait/vertical orientation is so pleasant that it totally overwhelms any lingering misgivings or doubts about whether it's worth it. I can put myself in Bandt's shoes where he says that he didn't really like having 2 or 3 monitors, but for me that awkwardness was only temporary.