I am running Xubuntu on this thing and I hate it so much. Palm detection is so broken that even after tweaking Synaptics and trying libinput (customized it "perfectly" under Arch with no improvement already), I had to disable the trackpad. The pointer nub on new Thinkpads is terrible now that it's secondary, so I have to set low sensitivity.
Colors are messed up with poor contrast. Windows looks much, much better. I messed around with exporting color profiles and importing other users' color profiles with no real improvement. So it's really only useful as a headless machine or in low light. Which leads to the next issue...
External displays don't work properly with lid closed unless you boot with the lid closed. Even then if you suspend, you will wake up with no screen. If you set to "turn display off" on lid close, then when you close the lid the cursor becomes completely erratic and unusable. I'm sure this can somehow be fixed with some arandr and acpid scripting, but seriously fuck that noise.
The keyboard is crap and the form factor hurts my hands. Even my old R500 education line Thinkpad is better in this regard.
It sits on my shelf and collects dust. Every now and then I bust it out because I love programming on Linux, but always go back to the MBP for the reasons mentioned. I want to sell the Carbon X1 and regret spending $1500 on it so hard, but I'm wary of my ability to install Windows and get the right drivers on board (have done it, but also was getting terrible offers for it so decided not to sell at the time). And I'm holding out hope that these issues get fixed some day.
Seriously, just get the Mac. It's sad that the state of Linux on the laptop is worse now than it was a decade ago, when you could get a T4* or T6* and everything worked like a dream. A big part of the problem is that non-Apple hardware is utter crap nowadays (not that Apple's stuff is universally amazing). Going Linux laptop shopping right now is the most depressing experience.
While we're on the topic, please eliminate downvoting, or at least the greying of text. It's antisocial and pointless.
Edit: Point proven. Two upvotes and seven downvotes in 12 minutes. Nothing short of a reply from `dang` will save it now! Bad commenter, toe the line if you seek discussion, lest you be banished to the graveyard of greydom. I'm baffled that nobody else sees how this is a problem.
This was discussed before [0] and I'll reproduce a comment of mine. TL;DR: downvoting promotes social standards thus it's neither antisocial nor pointless:
If nobody downvoted, then the author of the comment would be unable to distinguish between "the community doesn't value my comment" and "my comment was ignored". A downvote sends a clear signal vs. a lack of signal which is important to establishing/maintaining community norms. If we didn't have that signal, there might be reddit-style pun chains on HN and new users who see that might think it's accepted by the community since those threads are indistinguishable from other comments due to the scores being hidden. Seeing comments downvoted to grey is an important signal.
Of course, replying is also a signal but it's not appropriate in every circumstance. It's redundant when sibling comments provide correct information vs. the downvoted comment's incorrect information and an in-context reading of the thread will make that apparent. Or when the downvoted comment is flamebait/trolling and you don't want feed the trolls. Or when the comment clearly doesn't fit the community norms. And, most importantly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to reply to every comment on HN offering constructive feedback so I pick and choose carefully when I do that... as I'm doing here.
Long story short, HN deemed it acceptable to allow users with a minimum karma level to downvote. It's a feature, not a bug, and as long as it's used with discretion it sends a valuable signal to the comment's author. That feedback mechanism also confers positive benefits to the entire community.
>the greying of text. It's antisocial and pointless.
In my experience, the greying of comments for "computer/programming" topics is usually accurate and lets me save time by skipping them.
However, for non-technical topics discussed on HN such as economics, gender sociology, suburban housing, the grey text often is result of a larger group winning(downvoting) an ideological war. Ideally, the top 2 comments should be constructive comments representing opposite positions. However, the popular ideas are often at the top and the contrarian ideas are on the bottom and greyed out.
It's not a perfect situation but since I view HN as a resource for technical topics (Techcrunch, Ars Technica, programming, etc) instead of the "soft" topics (NYT, The Atlantic, etc), I'm willing to outsource the disapproval of bad technical comments to the crowd because it has shown to be pretty accurate. I have finite reading time so evaluating every comment on its merits is a step backwards in productivity. The ability for the anonymous crowd to create a quantity of unproductive comments exceeds my capacity to filter every comment that isn't greyed out.
For those who oppose grey text, please state your reading budget for discussion forums like HN. That would give me an idea of how you "manage" the signal-to-noise ratio.
I'm ok with greying, but I think it goes too far when the contrast gets so low you can't actually read it easily. Even selecting highly grayed text doesn't make it readable.
I get that the point is to make it easier to skip over the downvoted text, but greying so far as to make it almost impossible to read is heavy handed, more like censoring then censuring.
Maybe a continuum of first greying (but not too low contrast), then shrinking (but not too small), and finally striking out (for truly terrible stuff) would be better.
Your original comment made a grandiose claim about a controversial topic that had no content other than borderline name-calling ("antisocial and pointless"). Far from proving your point, that seems like a good candidate for downvoting to me. You also broke the HN guidelines by going on about getting downvoted. When people do that as a rhetorical device, that's a marker of a low-quality comment.
I wrote a pretty decent reply to this, then realized that posting it here would be utterly self-defeating. The double standard you're pushing here is disgusting, and you know it. Time to find a less negative programming community, or one that's at least a touch self-aware.
Your account has been active for 158 days. HackerNews has existed for nearly 10 years – at least 3000 days. On pretty much every single one of those days, pg, dang and others have worked to build this site into something that reflects the wishes of its community – a community that continues to grow in number and quality as a result of their tireless efforts.
The downvoting/greying feature has been developed, discussed, reviewed and refined steadily throughout the history of the site. That will continue as the community evolves, but right now, it reflects a status quo that the overwhelming majority of the community endorses, as evidenced by their continued engagement with the site and the particular feature.
Any user is always welcome to suggest an improvement to the site and provide a thoughtful and articulate justification for it.
You, on the other hand, have entered this discussion with just 158 days of history and 276 karma points, trashed a core feature of the site as "antisocial and pointless" and demanded its removal without suggesting an alternative, then broken the site guidelines by complaining about the community's response to your demand.
Then when the site's administrator – a person whom the longest-standing and most positive contributors to the community respect and value as the thoughtful, fair and hard-working bedrock of this site – takes the trouble to explain why you've been downvoted, you abuse him as "disgusting".
It's worth reflecting that dang often finds himself being attacked/abused by people on opposing sides of the one argument, with each of them complaining that he's favouring the other.
If there's a community that welcomes the kind of behaviour you've exhibited here, you should most certainly defect to it right away.
I've long thought and occasionally argued that downvoting should be eliminated.
But perhaps the problem isn't downvoting itself (occasionally I see abusive comments downvoted and think yeah, this is what it's for)....
The problem is that downvoting has no cost.
Anyone can downvote anyone anytime, at no cost to themselves. Contrast this with commenting, which has a cost in time, in mental effort, etc. - and occasionally in karma, when one's comments are downvoted...!
IMHO the cost-free nature of downvoting encourages glib, quick, lazy downvoting. It encourages dislike and abuse.
Let's make downvoting have a cost - and let's make the cost increase as one downvotes more frequently (if one self-appoints as a guardian of HN, increased cost will police the "guardian's" behaviour).
For example, why not a Fibonacci sequence of downvote cost? The first downvote of a period T removes one karma point from the downvoter, the second removes one, the third removes 2, the fourth 3, etc.
One's position in the sequence would be reset by not downvoting for some period. People who rarely downvote would incur no practical cost, but people who over downvote would incur a large cost.
What you are asking here is to eliminate freedom of expression. By downvoting I voice my disagreement with your statement. Preferably there is a comment added, but that must not be necessary. Eliminating such a feature would give a distorted view of this community as a whole. One must live with the fact that not everybody has the same opinion.
>It's antisocial and pointless.
No, according to [0] antisocial is a behaviour that is contrary to the laws and customs of (a) society, in a way that causes annoyance and disapproval in others. In our society, or at least that is how I appreciate it, dissenting opinions are important and accepted. Yes, as mentioned above, a following argument would be nice, but isn't necessary. And also others must feel annoyed and be disapproving of it - not you. As to "pointless", see above.
> By downvoting I voice my disagreement with your statement.
There seems to be a consensus here that disagreement is not a sufficient reason to downvote a comment. However, I don't see anything in the Guidelines about this.
There is no such consensus. Downvoting for disagreement has not only been common for years but even explicitly condoned by pg 8 years ago. It isn't in the guidelines because it isn't a guideline.
So you and Paul Graham both condone downvoting any opinion that you find disagreeable on HN. I respectfully disagree with that policy, and I hope we never cross paths again.
Ahh, the purity of seeing everything in black and white terms.
The topic was "is there a consensus that disagreement is not a sufficient reason to downvote a comment?" I pointed out that there is no evidence for a meaningful consensus even in this thread, with several people arguing in favor of downvote-for-disagreement. I pointed out that historically people have downvoted for disagreement, with links to examples, and I pointed to pg's early statement to that effect.
The evidence is that there is no consensus in HN readers, and that downvoting for disagreement, within limits, is allowed by the powers-that-be.
"Allowed" or "condoned" is different that your unjustified interpretation as "downvoting any opinion that you find disagreeable".
Just because we can send a man to the moon doesn't mean we should send all men to the moon.
I think it is fair to say that greying is contrary to the customs of HN. Think about it -- one user's disagreement/disgust/whatever immediately renders a comment suspicious. That doesn't seem to be in agreement with any "hacker spirit." I don't have a big problem with down-voting and ranking per se, but the greying stuff is lame. Your comment is grey right now and shouldn't be.
Just to leave it here - use downvoting when the comment is NOT SUITABLE for conversation, not when you disagree with the statement. As long as the statement is nonoffensive, not a lie and not a trolling - do not downvote it.
>or at least the greying of text. It's antisocial and pointless.
I think I agree. The culture has changed a bit here, which is fine (or at least unavoidable). But now there's much more down-voting of things with which the voter merely disagrees (case-in-point, your comment: down-voted with no replies at the time of my writing). It reenforces the hive-mind.
Here's an AskHN from 7 years ago titled "Ask HN: Downvote for disagreement in some cases?" The top answer is "This comes up all the time here. Most people use downvotes for disagreement. Gotta live with it." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020612 . Others express other opinions.
Back in 2008 pg said "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
How do you know that the hivement changed in the last 8 years in this regard?
Not a personal attack, but from your profile page I see you've been a member for a little over a year. I don't know if that's enough time to observe a change in culture.
Personally, I've been lurking for a little over three years, and haven't seen much of a change.
Completely agree. We should also be allowed to talk about downvoting (in the appropriate place, whatever that is) without fear of reprisal!
Downvoting should be for comments that don't add to the discussion, not for disagreement. I know pg said years ago that you could use downvotes for disagreement, but I propose that we revisit that...
Vendor-published case studies are pretty worthless IMO. I've seen plenty where the vendor was absolutely despised by anybody working for the client who had to deal with them.
If only it was just thumb down and up, but it's also smiley faces, fireworks, hearts and probably many more. It feels like reading a conversation between teenagers on MSN Messenger.
This is such an old fud thing to say. As if using an emoji wasn't a mainstream thing for the vast majority of people to do.
Personally I like the inflections and emoji brings, plus it makes statements that might otherwise be taken as hostile either as well intentioned or just good old fashioned ribbing.
Plus, these reactions allow folks to add their sentiment/support to comment without adding an extra 'I agree' to the comment chain, it actually helps maintain a bit of focus.
GitHub never would have had that problem in the first place if :+1: were not so easy to do. There's no reason to make emoji part of GitHub flavored markdown or for it to be an autocomplete.
There is now no longer a reason to make emoji as part of the markdown, as the vast majority of devices can now do it natively. When Github flavored markdown was first created, emojis were most certainly not at all widespread natively.
Not quite, it's difficult to avoid using votes as a heuristic for post quality. A reader's first impression of a heavily downvoted comment is negative. It encourages groupthink, downvoted comments are unacceptable, and serve as examples to others who might step out of line. Also, there is less pause when downvoting a comment if it is already well in the negative. When you think about it, the whole downvoting thing is antisocial. It's bizarre that almost every popular discussion platform these days allows users to passively shit on each other as a core feature.
In a system that doesn't rank, sort, hide, distinguish, or otherwise do anything other than increment a counter next to a post... huh?
Groupthink: You mean a community that downvotes a comment about X suddenly has a positive notion about X because the votes are hidden?
An example to others: I see this as a good thing - it lets an outsider get a good feel for what community members like. A number is much easier to parse than thousands of comments.
"Shitting on others" is a very melodramatic way of "people saying they don't like a comment with numbers".
I ran a setup like this for several years but rejected/spam foldered emails were always a pain, plus a well-appointed mail host uses a fair bit of memory. I use Google mail now. It's not very expensive, and instant unconditional delivery to other Google mail users is a pretty nice perk. The nicest thing is not having the worry in the back of your head that just maybe something has gone awry with your setup and you are losing mail right now.
Not all software requires the same degree of rigor in design and implementation. Software has bugs, but it sounds like you'd prefer if such software were never written in the first place. Regarding risk, it's as likely that the super-educated "engineer" drops unfiltered input directly into a SQL query as it is that Joe Programmer has the chance to corrupt data with a concurrency bug.
Bugs and defects will happen at the time of implementing functional and non-functional requirements no matter how strong your preparation and problem solving skills are. But they differ since assumptions would differ in nature.
Many people would work on a problem until it works (or stops being an obstacle). But it takes some preparation to understand if an implementation is acceptable from a non-functional requirement standpoint.
How exactly do you know which of your tenants are using cannabis? Do you drug test your tenants?
> You should not need to live in an altered state, intoxication, and if you are frequently choosing intoxication from pot as 'recreation', something is wrong.
Your comment is ironic evidence for insobriety. Anger, stress and frustration are all palpable, and you may need some help to unwind. Hell, I could use a beer after reading it.
Imagine showing vacant apartments to prospective renters since 1993 -- for 23 years. Lots of units, lots of prospective tenants.
In 1993 I had no pool of 'before move-in/after move-in' experience with tenants. 23 years on, I have a large number of 'before move-in/after move-in' tenant experiences.
So when a tenancy went bad, over time I started making a mental note of
1) the social cues the tenant made when I first met them
2) what their behavior was after move-in
I started seeing patterns. After 23 years of "before move-in/after move-in" experiences, I developed predictors.
In my mind, I suspect that Judges, teachers, cops, hiring managers, any profession where you have a lot of "before/after" experience with lots of people -- have developed similar wisdom, similar predictors.
It's probably a survival skill humans have -- if you get burned over and over, you start connecting "is there any way I could have used this person's before behavior to protect myself from their after behavior?"
Here are some of the screening-out cues I use:
1) during the initial showing of the unit and meeting, does the person forget something I just told them ("It's a one year lease")? Did they exhibit more than one memory lapse like that?
2) was the person inarticulate in writing (on the application), or in their speech?
3) on the continuum of demeanor (behavior and body language) from "street people behavior" to "my professional peers" -- was the prospective tenant closer to "street person" demeanor or closer to "professional peer"?
4) does the person smoke cigarettes? Over 23 years most of my pot-smoking tenants smoked cigarettes. It makes sense I guess, smoking cigarettes for nicotine, smoking pot for thc.
The list of 'cues' I have is not perfect; people are still moving in and smoking pot inside my properties in violation of the lease.
I understand that you've had some bad experiences with people who also happen to smoke marijuana, but you are painting with much too broad a brush.
You must ask yourself: how accurate are you in your assessment of who smokes marijuana and who doesn't? For some of your tenants, I'm sure it's obvious that they partake. But, I'd wager many of your 'good' tenants do as well, and you have no idea. It's really not hard to hide marijuana use from your landlord. And from what it sounds like, the tenants who don't make any effort to be discrete with their marijuana use are also the tenants who don't care if their car is blocking another car. Perhaps a DGAF attitude would be a better thing for you to screen for than marijuana use.
'DGAF' is not always evident in the short time we meet, interact with a new tenant. Unlike a job interview process (several stages of contact: phone, in person several times, etc.) it's not practical for landlords to spend that much time with each prospective tenant.
The 18 tenants I've evicted in the past year and half -- they ALL slipped 'under the radar.'
My "cues/indicators" list above is 100% NOT all inclusive.
Until you've dealt over many years with pot smokers, in quantities, you really, really have no idea how defiant/grouchy/uncooperative/troublemaking they can be, behaviors you can only witness over a period of a lease.
Here's another example. 31 yo male, he should know better, right? About the useless 'crutch' of drugs and alcohol as the foundation for personal recreation?
Smoked up a storm. He befriended surrounding tenants, and so no one complained. NOTE: in our non-smoking properties, keeping in mind that very few people smoke these days and make an effort to only live in non-smoking apartment properties, if a non-smoker is exposed to 2nd hand smoke, do they complain to Management? Oh my god. Especially pot smoke. We get complaints like "the person below me is smoking pot, you said this was a non-smoking property, I don't want to get high from their 2nd hand smoke" -- we get COMPLAINTS. It's understandable, very few people smoke or want to be in close breathing proximity to smokers these days.
Well, I had to catch him in the act, he chummed up with the surrounding tenants "in range" and somehow got them to not complain. It wasn't easy. Caught him over the course of 2 weeks on our security cameras.
We didn't tell him "Joe, we have video evidence you're smoking" we just served the 3 Day Notice. He refused to stop. Went to eviction court, he lied to the Judge. HE'S UNDER OATH. "Judge, I stopped smoking weeks ago." Lied to the Judge while under threat of perjury. DEFIANT.
Then my attorney brought forth the photos and entered them in the record. The Judge looked at Joe. I'm thinking 'it's perjury, is Joe going to jail?' The Judge must have been in a good mood. He looked at my photo evidence for 20 seconds, BAM the gavel dropped, "judgment for the plaintiff."
Pot smokers are T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
It depends on how long they've been smoking. Those 3 years I smoked it as a teen, it was in the final year I started with bad behavior, and bad experiences I finally realized were not me.
So I don't really care how much a pot smoker says "it's fine, I'm fine, it's harmless."
My philosophy with ANYONE who uses pot, and this is solely because of my 3 years personal experience and the screwed up behaviors from pot smokers over 23 years of landlording:
get away from me. Stay away from me. I don't care if you compromise your personal life by thinking intoxication is a good foundation, just don't do it around me.
That stuff is a disaster in many ways BECAUSE the damage is so incremental, that the build of up negative consequences is invisible to the user.
I have personally walked the path and I now also have 23 years of screwups, pot smoking tenants causing weird problems no other (sober) tenant causes.
Let me say, I feel deeply sorry for anyone who leans on drugs and/or alcohol for 'recreation.'
If you find yourself frequently intoxicated for 'recreation' - from pot, alcohol, whatever -- MOST people are going to have problems from it. You can throw the dice with it over the long term if you want.
Pot smokers make bad decisions MUCH more frequently than sober non-users.
I am in a position to observe that -- lots of non-users and a few users, at our properties
It doesn't matter if 100,000 non-experienced people tell me my opinion (based on personal experience across 23+3 years) about pot smokers is wrong.
I actually have THE EXPERIENCE.
But, as I've said, and as I tell prospective tenants, it is not for me to tell you how to behave. My job, if you are a fan of repeated intoxication, is to keep you out of my apartments. That's all I do.
And in the past year and a half, 18 people have slipped under the tenant screening radar -- and got evicted for smoking on the premises.
We go to so much trouble to help people realize "hey, these people are really serious about this 'no pot' rule, this place isn't for me"
18 people in a year and half. Despite the fact we TOLD them, UP FRONT, no pot smoking (or cigars or cigarettes) on the premises. Before we even take a deposit.
Think about that. 18 pre-warned-and-now-evicted pot smokers. THAT'S THE POT. That's the bad decision making.
And you don't see or experience that. So I understand it's hard to grok, these pot smokers.
> "I am in a position to observe that -- lots of non-users and a few users, at our properties"
This is the crux of it. You simply cannot know for certain who the non-users are. I guarantee you over the course of your 23 years, there were tenants who you assumed fell into the non-users group but actually didn't.
I may be younger than you have been renting out apartments for, but it seems to me that the first 3 cues in particular might not be that effective in discriminatory power?
1) I'm estimating memory lapse / brain fog etc in the general population is much more prevalent in non-pot-smokers for general reasons -- hell, depression affects something like 5-10% of Americans which iirc is many times over the fraction of people who would wake and bake prior their apt. showing. Yeah, memory problems are a strong signal when you know a specific person is blazed, but across the whole of the population this is going to be a filter with a really high false positive rate.
2) kinda seems like a proxy to their parents' wealth, maybe that matters to you but really should the equivalent of an SAT score really predict the ability for a tenant to keep to the contract?
3) there could be a couple of effects at play here. Kind of another proxy to parents' wealth. People might also put their guard up once they notice you sizing them up. But conveying professionalism as a game theoretic 'signaling' strategy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
Cigarettes though? probably not a bad indicator. I think as a whole they probably do more damage to the building and other tenants, too.
That list of "cues" is hilarious. Guaranteed you know professional people who hide it from you because, well, you know why. And to reiterate, you need to unwind. Holy crap.
This really leads like a list of reasons for your prejudice and stereotyping/profiling people. You only actually have positive confirmation for the ones who disrespect others and violate the rules of the lease, while you may have many people who consume regularly and are still able to respect others. By doing things like respecting the fact smoking inside makes a huge smell (and take edibles/use a smokebuddy/vaporize/go for a walk and smoke) and respecting parking rules, or even other social rules such as not smoking cigarettes (a more outwardly "rebellious" behaviour), these individuals don't make problems, can interact nicely, and you totally forget about them.
This all just reads like a 23-year long confirmation bias building up.
I haven't noticed any reduction in catalog size or variety over the years (US), maybe I've lived around well-funded systems? If anything it's become more varied with time. The only annoying thing is having to filter out eBooks every time searching the catalog.
This logic is full of holes. A robot can, by not needing to rest, be vastly more productive than the same person. The robot can be designed to never make a mistake too. Indeed, automation of all aspects of bread production would increase the bread supply. And the person needed bread either way, so unless you're saying that their death is the alternative, what they do with their day is irrelevant. And about fuel, I guess "burns oil" tugs at more heartstrings than "burns solar energy."
I don't agree. The commenter said that now both the robot and the worker use resources. It's gotten better if you only look at the business and ignore the laid-off worker.
Note that I'm always for such improvements, the solution for a broken system should not be to let people do useless jobs (like the road workers whose sole job it is to hold up a "Stop" sign in a construction zone).
I think the argument is solid, but not that impactful. Sure, worker + robot = seems like more energy used than worker alone. But robots will be more efficient, probably impressively so if you factor in energy savings on human commute and maintaining "habitable" (for lack of better word) conditions in the workplace. Lights, HVAC, safety equipment, etc. Given that, it's not inconceivable that welfare humans + working robots could use less energy than working humans alone!
But that's all besides the point. Even if energy usage E(humans+robots) = 2 x E(humans) (and I suspect it's more like factor 1.1x), it's still worth the cost for the quality-of-life increase for those humans. Economy should not be about optimizing its random and fluctuating "productivity" function. It's about improving quality of life for humans.
Colors are messed up with poor contrast. Windows looks much, much better. I messed around with exporting color profiles and importing other users' color profiles with no real improvement. So it's really only useful as a headless machine or in low light. Which leads to the next issue...
External displays don't work properly with lid closed unless you boot with the lid closed. Even then if you suspend, you will wake up with no screen. If you set to "turn display off" on lid close, then when you close the lid the cursor becomes completely erratic and unusable. I'm sure this can somehow be fixed with some arandr and acpid scripting, but seriously fuck that noise.
The keyboard is crap and the form factor hurts my hands. Even my old R500 education line Thinkpad is better in this regard.
It sits on my shelf and collects dust. Every now and then I bust it out because I love programming on Linux, but always go back to the MBP for the reasons mentioned. I want to sell the Carbon X1 and regret spending $1500 on it so hard, but I'm wary of my ability to install Windows and get the right drivers on board (have done it, but also was getting terrible offers for it so decided not to sell at the time). And I'm holding out hope that these issues get fixed some day.
Seriously, just get the Mac. It's sad that the state of Linux on the laptop is worse now than it was a decade ago, when you could get a T4* or T6* and everything worked like a dream. A big part of the problem is that non-Apple hardware is utter crap nowadays (not that Apple's stuff is universally amazing). Going Linux laptop shopping right now is the most depressing experience.