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5G solves different problems.

Panasonic(at a trade show) says they can do 'next gen GPS' with 5g. Basically better location. This could be the solution for the winter problem in self driving cars.


If (as the article claims) you have to put an access point every 700 feet, I guess location isn’t very hard to determine!


Anybody can use a differential GPS currently, you put the GSM base stations in survey mode and you make them broadcast their L2 phase.

I know there are networks doing that in some parts of the world, you have to pay to decrypt the signal they broadcast.


GNSS locations can be accurate to within a few centimeters using the right equipment as long as you have a clear view of the sky. 5G isn't going to do better, and even if it could that wouldn't be sufficient for autonomous vehicles to operate in snow.


I teach a programming class and one of the 'easy' things I ask about is- "Have you taken algebra?"

All but 1 person had taken algebra, and with that I start into variables and functions.

So yes, people learn competent math skills in high school.


Knowing what functions and variables are is below high school level, and I'd say it'd be comparative to knowing basic greetings in a foreign language. I doubt that many students who don't go on to study math after high school remember what's taught in courses at or past the Algebra 2 level.


>The idea of teaching children math as a language from day one is an interesting concept though.

How and how young?

I have a newborn I'm teaching numbers.


Keep in mind that a child’s brain is incapable of leaning certain things before it develops enough. While hard and tedious repetition may seem to work, opportunity cost is horrendous.


You are going to burn yourself out real quick. Just give them a handful of cheerios and let them figure out counting for themselves.


My last kid is off to college as a pre med major in about 6 weeks. I basically did the opposite of all of the hard charging, teach your children everything, get your children ahead things that you see promoted here on HN. Mine were free range and breaking bones and getting deathly sick and etc etc etc. But you know what? None of it killed them. They found things they were interested in, and curiosity did the rest. They just had the regular problems. Girls used to be involved in petty high school dramas that would make Shakespeare look stoic for instance. But all in all, they turned out well.

I really feel bad for the children of some of the people I see posting on HN regarding child dev.


I read this article and I love the capitalism.

A company is losing money to give customers better service.

Its not selfless, but its a phenomena.

I have never enjoyed shopping more than with Walmart grocery pickup. And Walmart online is superior to Amazon (cost alone).

Is it bad to employ low wage workers?


I'm the other way, google is probably the best company in my lifetime. Its recent Apple exploit 0day, I'm a bit skeptical of the programming.

Google has the resources to make better products.


> Google has the resources to make better products.

True but for the past 5 years or so they have been interested in making more money not better products.


And yet I've had to switch all my Lubuntu devices to using Chrome because Firefox can't seem to manage to remain open without eventually locking up the entire system.


I've had this problem too. Although I'd rather live with it than switch back to Chrome myself.


Did you try filing a bug report?


If I had filed a bug report I would have then had to gather logs and other such things to get the developers whatever information they need to fix it, and frankly I just don't care about helping them fix it enough to bother with that. I didn't choose it for these devices it was just the default. For my purposes it was just much easier to switch to a browser that wouldn't hang the system if it was left open for a few hours.

Edit: I appreciate the downvotes, as though answering this question with honesty is undesirable behavior. Keep up the good work /r/svwebdev!


Downvotes can be frustrating but everyone gets them. Please don't let them trigger you into breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes this place even worse, and guarantees more downvotes.


For the record I didn't downvote you, and I agree being honest doesn't deserve this response, but I would guess it's related to the high amount of devs here who are probably upset that you took the time to complain, yet don't want to take the time to at least check if a bug report exists. In some respects I agree, in that, if we want change the world and fight the "good fight" against the near-monopoly Google has on browsing, we need to band together and everyone do their part.

"All my Lubuntu devices" makes it sound like you have a lot of devices, thus increasing the likelihood of being easy to reproduce. There might even already exist a bug report which you could contribute to.


It seems so easy to reproduce, just install Lubuntu and run the Twitch dashboard for a few hours. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already a bug report, a cursory search of bugzilla shows several hundred bugs containing the words like "hang" and "freeze".

And, again being frank, I don't care enough to bother with scouring that for one that seems related enough to add to it, and then again reproducing the problem and collecting the appropriate logs and etc. And if experience is any indicator it'll just languish in their bug database for months or years anyway. I've got shit to do man, so I'll just use a product that works, thanks. It is not my responsibility to fix yours.

And I only brought it up because someone mentioned how much "better" a product Firefox is and my experience differed.


> MacBooks are the best laptops in many respects

I've never heard this before.

I thought some people needed their proprietary software that could only be run on Apple products, and that is what forces someone to buy a Macbook.

What are they best in class for?

EDIT: Thank you for the serious responses


  I've never heard this before.
For several years (after the ThinkPad brand got sold to Lenovo who promptly started shipping it with spyware) there wasn't really a PC laptop brand with a rock solid reputation for high build quality.

Lots of companies were putting their badges on inch-thick, mostly plastic 15" laptops with mediocre touchpads that never delivered the battery life they promised. And if your employer issued you with a Windows laptop, that was what you got. Remember laptop bags, when moving a laptop needed padding and a shoulder strap and pockets to carry your mouse and power brick?

That's not to say there weren't some good products out there - there were some well designed Vaios, some pretty daring early tablet PCs and so on. But there wasn't a brand where you could say "Just buy an X" and know that you'd get a good quality product.

Of course, in recent years a lot of PC manufacturers have stepped up their game (or maybe I'm just spending more money?) while Apple has had a few stumbles.


> ...the ThinkPad brand got sold to Lenovo who promptly started shipping it with spyware...

That's incorrect. You're referring to SuperFish, which was only on Lenovo's consumer machines, not on ThinkPad.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish


Nonetheless, it cast a big shadow over the brand; you couldn't just advise someone to buy a Lenovo.


Oh, I would never just advise someone to buy a Lenovo. They might end up choosing some mediocre IdeaPad!

I only advise people to buy ThinkPads, and I make specific recommendations on what model to get and which options to choose after we talk about their needs. For example, most people are better off getting a better display instead of a faster CPU if they don't have the money for both.

Everyone I've advised like this has been delighted with their ThinkPads. If there is any "shadow" over the brand, it hasn't affected them or me.


> What are they best in class for?

Best overall balance between performance/weight/battery life.

Best trackpad, hands down, no caveats, no balancing against other concerns. It's just that good.

Best integration with other devices (iphone, watch, etc). Making calls/sending text messages from a laptop is something I'm unwilling to give up at this point.

And most importantly, it's _by far_ the best support for a commercial unix/unix-like OS on a laptop. Dell isn't too bad though.

In the end, unix or a unix-like os is hard requirement for many of us, and I'm just too tired of fiddling with xorg/powertop to get decent battery life. I just want to get work done.


The older (say 2008-2015) trackpad is best -- a dream to use. The newer one is too big, alas. It's shocking how often I accidentally press it when I'm just trying to rest my palms on my laptop.

(But yes, the unix-like OS that doesn't require a lot of fiddling about and has nice GUI is the big thing for me, too.)


Reliable, great hardware quality (keyboard aside), gorgeous Unix-based OS out of the box, excellent driver support.

Edit: And the best trackpad ever designed imo


Near-instant sleep/wake, best trackpad, Exceptional battery life, good weight/thinness balance for the power, industry-leading I/O performance with their SSD (which were PCIe years before the mainstream), very fast external ports (USB-C now) which can drive RAID disk arrays, fast flash drives, even eGPUs.

After the hardware, the software: it's a GUI that just works with minimal fuss, supports most mainstream software, and also works with all the *nix stuff from Linux and BSD.

AND I can dual boot to Linux, Free/Open BSD, or Windows

AND I can run VMware or Parallels or the native Mac hypervisor (Docker)

I've seriously given consideration to the Surface Book Performance Base and the Dell XPS 15, but there are a lot of tradeoffs that keep me coming back to Apple's choices. The touchbar is not very useful to me but it's a minor thing. The keyboard I've been lucky (for 2 years).


The trackpad makes it impossible for me to use a non-Apple laptop (I particularly love the haptic ones) - if anything else comes close I would love to try it.


Trackpad, battery life, the OS.


Best in class screens

The trackpad is unsurpassed in the industry

Low power consumption / good battery life


Except for trackpad and a decent MacOS, nothing really. Low quality hardware, increasingly subpar battery life on newer MBPs, battery swellings too common.

The hardware issues are common, but PR damage control teams, stakeholders, and fans will bury anyone who mentions it.


> What are they best in class for?

The overall experience.


Electrical Engineering, its very cool to be able to calculate and invent anything.


Healthcare is expensive because of Physicians.

They are the bottleneck. The American Medical Association has lobbied 400,000,000 dollars in the last 30 years to make sure they are the only ones that can issue prescriptions.

Making 300,000 USD/yr is unnatural, even for professionals. The market is artificial and gives them massive power even outside yearly income.


You're not wrong that physicians are an artificially restricted job market. The consequence is that most people actually spend very little time with one; PAs and nurses do a lot of what a doctor used to do.

Rather than doctors salaries driving up health care, there are fewer doctors serving more patients. A substantial amount of the increase in health care is the fancy facilities, high tech equipment, and the under-charging by medicaid and medicare for services.

On the one hand, I know a doctor who was essentially paid by medicaid less than minimum wage for certain treatments. On the other hand, I paid cash for a pre-surgery physical to make sure I was healthy enough for the surgery (I showed up thinking they were in my insurance network, and they were not).

Basically, a couple hundred bucks down the drain for a nurse to take my temperature, blood pressure, height, weight, and for a doctor to look at me and say "yup, you're good to go".


There are doctors in my extended family. . . the way their referral networks work and the way they can restrict who can practice in the same town/area is straight up mafia.


Don't forget the HMOs and Big Pharma. Healthcare in the US is massively one big racket.


  they are the only ones that can issue prescriptions.
In California, Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants can write prescriptions. Is CA unique?


>because the Primes will come muscle them out.

Over and over people mention this phenomena. I am not sure why its okay, or that people even suggest giving these organizations more money.


Regulation- the kind that creates red tape- favors the biggest companies. One of my favorite clients had a software product that their contacts in the military said stood head and shoulders above what they were currently using. Unfortunately, they were not the people in charge of procurement, and didn't have the clout necessary to make inroads enough to land a contract that would keep the company afloat.

In the end, they pivoted to market their software to commercial enterprise clients (think data analytics) and they've been going ever since. It's a shame, really.

The flip side, of course, is that a lot of the same regulations I bemoan as red tape exist because someone, somewhere, bought something that either completely failed, or the supplier wasn't big enough to support the military's scale. I've seen businesses make similar reactions- every time there's a mistake, layer on another new process or documentation requirement.

There's got to be a middle ground somewhere between the needs of auditing, accountability and avoiding regulatory capture, but I don't really have a good answer for what it is.


I always think of the two kids that got rich gaming the new Internet bidding process to buy tons of ammo that went to the military in george jrs. Iraq war that was completely useless.


> I am not sure why its okay, or that people even suggest giving these organizations more money

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM


They better start doing that then


The reason "no one gets fired for buying IBM" is because big players (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc) are known quantities (so you don't need to answer questions around "why would you choose that fly-by-night company, you must have some financial interest!") and critically, if something goes wrong they're big enough to sue.

If you pick a small company and something goes wrong, they might go out of business and leave you with nothing. If they stay in business, you might try to sue them but the company isn't worth enough to make a lawsuit worthwhile. IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc, they're big enough to sue. Which is kind of an insurance policy against something going wrong in the contract.


Except IBMs products are a contract, maintenance and usability nightmare, much worse than the other options


>In the mid 2000's the Mac really took off due to being a good-enough Linux replacement on the command line, while taking care of all the hardware integration and providing a sleek desktop experience. This really helped the Mac take off among hackers. This system wasn't as open-source as Linux, but it was good enough: Most of us don't want to mess about with the desktop stack.

Who are you to claim this?

The closed off nature of Apple is very dangerous to trust, and I don't know any 'hackers' who are willing to risk unchecked/vulnerable OSes.

I have no idea if Apple has a backdoor to the FBI. We do know on Linux there is no hidden backdoor.


As long as you some assume that there are no unpublished exploits in Linux. The Heartbleed bug was in open source code for a year and a half before it was found.


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