If someone recommends me a subreddit, I would check it out. Reddit is not inherently bad. However, you have to understand a lot of us have a negative perception of subreddits, given how many jerks, trolls and bullies participate in them. Even in the good ones there's so much negativity and discourtesy. It's so sad, I personally am afraid to participate most of the time because I admittedly have very thin skin and those kinds of interactions can ruin my day.
AskHistorians is far more anal than HN with regard to maintaining serious discussion; maybe not quite so rule-bound as StackExchange ("delete this question with five answers and 100 upvotes it's off-topic") but strict about being a sourced, on topic, no memes or humour -type of place.
Your points are completely valid, I get your frustration. But you are comparing against previous generations of MacBooks. I would like to know your thoughts when comparing against e.g. a top tier ThinkPad running Windows or Linux.
I couldn’t use it long enough to unlearn using the trackpad as a crutch. Thinkpad trackpads are pretty terrible by comparison. I also hated trying to use windows and didn’t want to keep maintaining a Linux install, though that might have gotten better lately.
I am going to ride out my personal 2013 mbp until they fix the keyboards on the new machines. I have a new one at work, and each incremental fix still breaks after a while and I don’t think they have ironed it out. It’s a beautiful feeling machine and I want to love it. However, you can get everything else perfect and screw up the keyboard, and it doesn’t matter because I can’t get work done.
If they don’t get it right by the time my current MBP dies completely I guess I’ll see how far Linux has come. I’d suggest the same for you - even as an apple shareholder and former employee I can’t recommend a programmer buy a laptop with such an unreliable keyboard. But if they nail the keyboard in the next generation, absolutely hop aboard the bandwagon.
Pretty much it comes down to the flaky keyboards for me. USBC support is just getting better, the displays and trackpad are still best in class, and a lightweight aluminum unibody design is something I didn’t think I would miss but you absolutely do. The OS is widely supported by a community of other developers, and it is super easy to set up a productive development environment. And the OS is widely supported by hardware and software vendors too, so you don’t have to fight compatibility issues nearly as much as Linux.
The X1 Carbon has a really nice body, and a decent screen. The touchpad is still hot garbage, and I never really enjoyed using the nub, but overall they've come closer than anything I've used to unseating my MBP as a daily driver.
An apple trackpad isn’t just the hardware, it’s also the software integration. Plus, who wants to carry around an external trackpad for their machine? I’ll just cope with avoiding the trackpad if I switch back.
I can’t honestly give you that comparison because I’ve never used a thinkpad long enough to get to know it. I’ve been Mac-only for 8 years now, but I’m looking around to see if the community decides on a solid MBP replacement of my old MBP dies.
I think this depends a lot on what kind of laptop user you are. Are you someone who is always at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, or do you want to post up in a coffee shop with just your machine and no peripherals?
The macbook pro is vastly superior to any device for the later use case because the touchpad is so far ahead of anything else. The new keyboard on the other hand is a bit frustrating when coming back from my personal surface book.
> In a place I worked, if someone left at 5:30 pm, the CTO used to joke "half day today?", even though the person came in at 9 am.
In both the places I've worked, it's a common joke anyone says when somebody leaves. everybody laughs and nobody gets offended. It doesn't mean anything.
As far as I can tell, jokes are an important method of communication. There are times where they are light-hearted, or just part of the culture, but there are other times (where there is, say, one person in a position of authority, making the same joke repeatedly) where it is meant to call out a behaviour and implicitly shame it.
It's like if you're on the bus and someone's sitting really close. Some people would say "Excuse me, you're too close", but others would jokingly say "Little close, aren't you?", but the meaning is the same - Move.
Joking that a reasonable leaving hour == too early isn't a good joke. It plants the idea that the reasonable hour maybe isn't reasonable in other peoples' minds.
That kind of thing only works as a joke when it's about an obviously late hour (i.e. well past the norms of the company). If someone stays until 9pm to put out some fire and then people joke about working a half day, its obvious that there's no underlying meaning to that, since the leaving hour is well past the established norms
That’s a very toxic attitude to have, especially as a manager. You don’t know that “nobody gets offended”. All you know is that “no one chose to express their discomfort”, a very different thing.
It's pretty easy to make sure nobody gets offended - you communicate (in a serious setting) that you value results over hours worked and you demonstrate this in practice. At that point irony and sarcasm is safe territory (appropriate or tasteful is another matter). Being afraid to joke about this because it could be missunderstood tells me you are failing at that which is far more important than worrying about what are potential interpretations of your jokes.
It’s not being afraid to joke, it’s making sure that employees do not feel like they are receiving mixed signals (“he says results are what matters but he’s always joking about me leaving early when I’m leaving at a reasonable hour and getting my work done?”). This is particularly important when considering employees who might not have English as their first language, or come from a culture where joking is perceived differently.
interesting, in that from my perspective it's a joke that only works if you're reinforcing a cultural attitude that they're breaking a norm. I.e. it wouldn't exist or even thought to be said unless there was an inherent expectation/value in working long hours.
Also, I'd probably worry that such frequent jokes walk a very fine line towards passive aggressive behavior (again, such jokes just won't exist where there is no expectation).
obviously I don't know your workplace, so there's a good possibility no one gets offended, but just pointing out there's different interpretations of such actions, and just because no one's saying anything doesn't mean it's not happening...
I'd argue that this sort of thing is fine, as long as the `return` is not nested deeply. A function which starts with a list of 'early exit' simple conditions is fairly easy to deal with, compared with one where you need to read the whole thing to check that the value assigned to the returned variable isn't reassigned later in a different condition. Early returns can significantly reduce cognitive load if used correctly precisely because they exit directly.
Once you have complex bail-out scenarios, the function needs breaking up or insanity follows... but that's true of any sufficiently confusing decision tree.
Generally I have found `else` to be something of an antipattern. I usually find it cleaner to write the code as 'this special early bail-out with a return, and the other case is just the rest of the function'. A bit like pattern-matching in Haskell, or a `switch` block in which the default case is the usual one.
I also try to avoid reassigning variables, eg. in Typescript everything would be `const`.
Wasn't Java problem a a branding issue? Java got a bad reputation of being slow and not looking native. Java apps looked like Java apps. Also, they were so slow that could actually tell when the garbage collector was working. by the time Java got fast it was too late. Even now, .Net guys that didn't bother getting to know Java after its first decade, usually say Java is slow. Something similar happens now with people who hasn't used JavaScript in 15 years saying it's not a real language, etc., etc.
Start there, learn English. I know so many potentially good devs that cannot be hired at good paying companies because of lack of English skills. (Speaking of Mexico, btw.)
>I suppose Uber could validate the GPS position of the driver and my phone and use that to validate my story, but I doubt they went through all that trouble :(
For that, I assume they would need to have tools built for that specific purpose, with security/audit in place. I doubt any support guy could just randomly query for GPS data for drivers/users.
> I doubt any support guy could just randomly query for GPS data for drivers/users.
There was a very widely publicised case a few years back when their support people were doing just this to stalk celebrities and exes. How quickly the world moves on, I guess.
But it terrifies me that you say it like it's nothing and like this digital "purchasing" thing is something new (I am not disagreeing, on the contrary.)
I have avoided and have never bought anything digital for those reasons, but it really is depressing that these things have not been solved by now.
It should be terrifying! You’re handing your hard earned money to a company in exchange for access to something narrowly defined in a 100 page Terms of Service document, written by company lawyers, giving them tons of escape clauses, with no input from you. You’re smart to avoid the trap, but unless other people do also, in large numbers, nothing will change.
