Congrats to the team for tracking this down, it was a great write-up!

Twitter has some great networking/kernel engineers. When I was working at Twitter a few years back we isolated and fixed another insidious kernel bug; a large group was critical to making it happen (including Cong, who worked on this bug): https://tech.vijayp.ca/linux-kernel-bug-delivers-corrupt-tcp...

I'm always shocked at how the kernel seems to mostly work, with such meagre test coverage. I guess testing in production does kind of work at scale?

The design is terrible. I never use the touchpad for anything regular keys wouldn't do better. The keyboard on my 2017 MBP13 failed three times in the year I've owned it. The first time, the Apple Store person "cleaned" the keyboard, fixed things for a while. A couple of weeks later, the problem came back. I insisted on a better solution, and they replaced the keyboard.

Five months later, a different key failed, and the Apple Store people sent it to Memphis. This time, it came back with one of the "new and improved" keyboards. They also replaced the screen because of 'delamination' which I hadn't noticed. The total amount they spent to repair this computer is approaching the cost of the machine at this point! So far, the new keyboard hasn't failed yet but I'm not holding my breath…

I had a similar experience with a top spec late 2016 MBP, which I switched to from a PC for web development. It was my first and last Apple product.

After opening the lid one day there was a loud crackling noise and the speakers were both blown. To repair it, the Apple store had to replace the entire top case (top half of the chassis including keyboard, trackpad, speakers) and also replaced the battery, which would have cost ~£500.

I got it back two weeks later after dealing with a smug 'Genius' who treated me like an idiot. He also claimed that the software diagnostics were clean, so there was nothing wrong with the laptop. I had to drive 1 1/2 hours each way to the store for a second time during business hours just to argue in person with them, because the speakers were clearly broken.

The exact same problem happened twice more over the next year, taking two weeks to fix each time. The final time was outside of the 1yr AppleCare warranty, and they wanted to replace the top case, battery and logic board for ~£800.

Coupled with the useless touch bar, 16GM RAM cap, awful display scaling issues/confusion when external monitors were attached, sluggish performance for video editing and OS updates that broke the machine, it convinced me to avoid Apple products completely.

I got a full £3100 refund after 18 months under EU consumer law and build a powerful desktop PC (16 core ThreadRipper, 32GB RAM, 1080ti) with £1500 left over.

Are the touchbar Macbook Pros still experiencing widespread screen delamination? I thought that was specific to the previous generation.

would love to see a parts list for the ThreadRipper build.

It's something like this: https://i.imgur.com/0cXRPGB.png

My CPU is actually the 12 core / 24 thread version, which I got for £340 on a flash deal during a meet-up event. My case is also better than listed, but was the same price as part of a weekly deal.

Note that it's pre-VAT price (£1499), because it's a business computer. The Macbook was ~£3100 pre-VAT, and this thing shreds through video exports maybe 4-6x faster than the laptop. I do miss the MacOS terminal for web development though.

I personally find function keys useless (I’m mostly in Vim and map things to leader + mnemonic key sequences), so the Touch Bar tends to offer more value for things like media control. It really boils down to personal use, rather than a fundamentally flawed design.

Yeah, I’ve been interested in the touchbar as a way to get emacs-mode-specific shortcut keys.

You can sort HN by date, and few URLs are updated every day. So you can push a new bloom filter every day and a different list of updates every 5m. Then just check your URL against both of them.

How do these execs not have 10b5-1 plans set up?! Many companies require them for all senior managers.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp

Mirabel airport [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montr%C3%A9al%E2%80%93Mirabel_...] probably was a contender. The passenger terminals were eventually torn down recently, but cargo flights continue to use it.

EDIT: "By surface area, it was the largest airport in the world that had ever been envisioned, with a planned area of 39,660 hectares (396.6 km2; 98,000 acres)"

Gaza International.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat_International_Ai...

That was a completely sensible thing to build (and I even flew in once!), it was just destroyed by Israeli bombing.

Agreed -- I feel far safer biking around in Manhattan then sf. There are way more separated lanes in NY, traffic moves much more slowly, there are no tram tracks, and the lack of right on red makes it less likely I'm going to get run over by an inattentive driver.

I don't know if you read it (because it's in French) but it basically says that it comes from shampoo (which comes from the Hindi champoo) but not why it comes from the gerund shampooing.

I googled for a good half hour and came across that link in my searches, but no clear consensus on why it stems from the gerund form.

The only thing I can think of is that the original Hindi word is "to lather/massage" so maybe the French took the English transliteration and merged it with its Hindi gerund origin to end up with shampooing?

According to the CNRTL link, in 1877 it was used in the same way we would use the gerund in English, to refer to the action ("signifying the washing of hair") then in 1890 became the word for the product used in that process (shampoo) as well.

That seems to happen from time to time in French, when the gerund also becomes the name of an object involved in the process, as with "le parking".

Sometimes it happens in English too, like "building" and "booking".

Have an upvote, that makes sense.

If he actually flew out of YVR, he was probably in a us preclearance area -- us customs are located in some Canadian airports so flights can go directly into us domestic terminals.

Since those screenings are on Canadian territory, us agents do not have police powers or the right to detain people. They can deny entry but people can leave at any time unless they have violated Canadian law. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_preclea...)

If this was the case, he could have simply left the airport at any time.

I prefer going through US Preclearance in Canada due to the fact that I am still subject to Canadian law when doing so. I don't understand why this wasn't even mentioned in the article.

Yeah, maybe human review is not the most scalable solution; if data analysis shows that certain patterns of behaviour are highly predictive of an account takeover, there are almost certainly product solutions for them.

I guess the real question is what the data actually show

How about "we'll review your request for $20". For recovery of email accounts and such Google could absolutely make a profit from that I feel and enable people to recover their accounts; they can surely scale a support system on that sort of funding.

Sure I can see problems with that. My initial feeling is people will thing that such support is a scam, but that at least shifts the position of Google from "we can do such support" to "we don't want people bad mouthing us so we're going to refuse to do that support even if it were prima facie profitable".

Yeah, a couple of years back, I went to a t-mobile store (I think it was on Broadway and Park Pl) to get a new SIM card; I'd lost it in Europe when I was on holiday. They gave me a new SIM card and let me pay cash without even checking my ID…