Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | embeddedpro's comments login

Upcoming /s-

It would really suck if someone could watch my front door. Like, they might know when my package arrives?

Or what if someone checked my naked footage?

/S

I really don't care. Should I care?


The only reason you had to explain it was sarcasm is of course you should care. You sound like one of those "I have nothing to hide" people even though having something to hide is completely irrelevant. You're being spied on and you don't see any problems with that? And by the way, everyone has something to hide whether they know it or not.


There's that one TED talk about privacy where the guy says something like, "People say they have nothing to hide, but do any of you want to give me access to your private email account right now? No? Right, no one's ever taken me up on that".

I've always thought that was a bit of a strawman. In the case of my front door, I really wouldn't mind even if it were livestreamed for the whole world to watch. I agree that "I have nothing to hide" is generally a poor argument, but I think when it's more specific it can be a valid statement, e.g. "I have nothing to hide when it comes to things that go on outside my front door". I can't recall in my entire life a single event outside my front door that I would care about other people being able to watch. Can I imagine a scenario where I might want privacy at my front door? Sure. Maybe my friend becomes a fugitive and comes to me looking for help. Maybe I become a CIA informant and they come to secretly meet with me. But in the few situations I can think of where I would actually care about total privacy around my front door, I'd hope I would have the prescience to pop out the batteries in advance. I legitimately cannot think of a single case in which I might care that someone is watching my front entryway.

Of course, I don't feel the same way about other camera positions. But I think I'm a pretty security-conscious guy (my in-home security cameras are airgapped and streamed to a local server) and I have a Ring on my front door and have no qualms about it.


If your front door were live streamed then people can basically watch your front door 24/7 while being invisible to you. They can watch long enough to be 99% certain the house is empty and rob you, or they can see if a package has arrived and you're not normally due home for hours and grab it. It would make casing the joint pretty easy.


The anti competitive business practices of Apple make it hard to imagine the world could be worse.

Instead of competition, Apple survives off marketing medium quality products at high prices.

I'm not sure how that's good for anyone unless they own Apple stock.


You don't get to Apple is (large market cap, high customer satisfaction scores, high reviews in the tech press, etc.) because of marketing. If it were that easy, companies would just copy their marketing or load up on marketing and they would be successful.

And a huge part of Apple's current success is based on the tech and expertise they got from NeXT. That work underpins not just laptops and desktops but phones, tablets, set-top boxes, and more.


Perhaps you only get to where Apple is with world-class marketing.

Apple's iPod wasn't the first mp3 player, and it for damn sure wasn't technically superior.

The iPhone was not the first smartphone, nor the first phone with a touchscreen, nor the first phone with a web browser, nor the first phone with an App Store. It arguably had a better UX than incumbents, but better UX doesn't win markets just by dint of existing.

The iMac was a cute computer that couldn't run prevalent Windows software and didn't have a floppy drive.

Recent MacBook Pros have an awful keyboard, not just aesthetically but with known hardware problems. I understand at long last they're reverting to an older, better design.

Tech and expertise don't win just because they exist.


You've left out the part where Apple makes products that have user experiences that are miles ahead of whatever existed at the time.


I'm as reflexively inclined as many technical people to be dismissive of marketing, but I dont think you're right here. You can't "just copy" marketing in the way you can't "just copy" anything else that a company is world-class in, and good marketing can indeed build market dominance (do you think coca cola is really a vastly superior technical innovation over Pepsi?)

The fact that it isn't a net good for users in most cases doesn't mean that it's trivial to do.


> If it were that easy, companies would just copy their marketing or load up on marketing and they would be successful.

Maybe good marketing is really hard and you can't just "copy Apple"?


If people willingly exchange currency for products from a company and are satisfied with the value that they get out of it to the point that they become repeat customers, then how can you judge that no one except stockholders are benefitting?


Because Apple obviously sucks. I don't understand how hard it is for all their happy customers to understand that they suck. /s


Network/lock-in effects and negative externalities can easily have that result.


> negative externalities

This is very true. macOS and the iPhone, for me, went from being "obviously the very best of the best" to "the lesser of all evils".

When my 2015 rMBP finally gives up the ghost and / or when 10.13 loses compatibility with the applications I use, I have no idea what I'm going to do - probably buy another working 2015 rMBP used and pray that the Linux drivers are livable by then.

I know it's ridiculous, but it helps me fall asleep at night sometimes.


You don’t agree on the 16” being the spiritual successor of the mid 2015 15”?


I feel like it's a huge step in the right direction, but for my own personal use:

- I still have mostly USB 2.0 peripherals. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

- I'm still hung up on the MagSafe adapter.

- I love the form factor. The 13" display is the perfect size, for me. I could've switched to a 15" 2015 rMBP with better specs, but I hated how big it was.

- I have no interest in using any version of macOS beyond 10.13, at present.

I'm really glad that they brought the Esc key back, especially as a pretty serious vim user. I don't know, maybe I'm stuck in the past. I'm certain that many, many people are really enjoying the new Macbook Pro 16; I just really, really like this laptop. It's the best computer I've ever owned.


I'm in the same boat as the sibling poster (albeit with a 15" machine) and I'll add this:

- The TouchBar is terrible

I hope they'll bring back a non-TouchBar configuration when they release the "new" keyboard on a 13" MacBook Pro. I could live with both a 13" or 15" laptop, but right now the list of drawbacks is still 1-2 items too long.


Can? Sure. I would commend anyone that can make the case that this is the best explanation for Apple’s success as a whole though.


make it hard to imagine the world could be worse

This seems like a failure of imagination.

I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I lived through the Bad Old Microsoft of the '90s, and grew up on stories of IBM of the '80s.

Apple is nothing like them.


I see unions good for established low skill workers.

Grind the years and that will lead to sucesss. No innovation or additional learning needed. Just wait.


Maybe. But every time I've changed jobs my pay increased 20 or 30k.

That means I'm doing higher demand work.

So at least my most recent skills are extremely valuable.


I'm doing a hardware selection and after much consideration, I'm picking a 3$ esp8266.

I don't see any purpose of Arduino outside education for kids. Makers should use cheaper products/knockoffs at worse.


The ESP8266 doesn't have hardware PWM, and only a single ADC channel, both which can make it unfit for a lot of tasks.

That said, it does come with a lot of SRAM and the wifi/bt connectivity is obviously great.


The only very slightly more expensive ESP32 boards have 18 ADC channels, 16 PWM channels, and 2 DAC channels.


Yeah the ESP32 is pretty darn awesome.


> The ESP8266 doesn't have hardware PWM

There are actually hacky ways to work around that using DMA but yeah. Software PWM sucks.


I recommend trying the ESP32 as well (more pins for ADC and a few other features).

Either way, the ESP's are an incredible value (I use both).


Same. I have a bin full of esp8266's that have become my go-to for little projects. Going to play with esp32's when I run through them


Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: