skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a while ago calculated the actual download cost with S3's pricing on what each ~100MB Spotify update would cost if it was self hosted. Assuming each paid and free Spotify customer on the iOS platform updated the app was something to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars depending on how you estimate the marketshare of iOS for Spotify versus their other platforms.

What the App Store provides is not valueless, quite the opposite in fact. It's an entire system of distribution management.

Is it monopolistic? By definition, no, because Android is the #1 smartphone platform in the world.

Is it great that Apple has provided no alternative way of downloading software to the iPhone and iPad? No, that's not great either, but users knew that from day one (when the iPhone had no App Store at all).

In reality, iOS is no different than a game console like the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, and yet we consider those closed marketplaces completely functional and normal.

If Apple was the only company making smartphones or if they even made a plurality of them, perhaps this would be a problem.
YES! "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps" is the best place imho for anyone to just into learning philosophy.

I'd also recommend "The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition" on audible. https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Great-Ideas-of-Philosophy-2nd...
Once the regulate everything people aggressively invited the government in, there was no going back. It's going to get extremely bad over the coming decade. Laughably bad. Politicians will regulate every possible inch of the Internet. And they rarely remove stupid regulations, so it will all pile-up deep. It will mirror the physical world, every click and every feature will involve breaking numerous laws. There is nothing that can stop this outcome now, the fox is in the hen house. The result will inevitably be stagnation, as creating anything online will be very burdensome in all possible regards. Most simply won't do it, they'll just work for a bigger corporation that can deal with the regulatory mess. Want to launch a simple service? Hire a lawyer, do a six month review before you write the first line of code, spend tens of thousands of dollars, and you're still going to be breaking some stray law if you dare to launch. Compliance requirements stacked up to your ears, placating every special interest group that wants their cause accounted for in regulations. And that's before we get deep into the big corporations buying/bribing/lobbying thousands of new regulations for their own protection.
Thanks. Another example is the Dutch DigID: https://www.digid.nl/en/about-digid/
>Every website could try 0-days exploits or drive-by downloads

That's an unfair comparison. Any piece of software could try and 0day you. The point is that in a permission-based system, the permissions for browser extensions are in practice far too permissive to the point of being broken.

>You can't blindly trust anything "from the wild" yet you can't really live without it.

The point about permissions is to provide granularity to trust. I may trust an app to use my camera without trusting it to track my location in the background.

>Every app can abuse its permissions and track you/upload your photos/eavesdrop on your conversations.

This is the best comparison - mobile phone permissions - and on this front browser extensions are far worse. The majority of every single extension I install wants complete control to everything. In contrast, most apps only require a few things as appropriate. Yes, there are those flashlight apps which require _every_ permission, and those are basically the standard of extensions.

It should be added that UXSS (basically a malicious extension) is basically an RCE in the browser which in some cases is more beneficial than a full RCE, e.g. easier to steal banking creds.
Imagine if they had a refund process like Android. I'd buy way more stuff. But because I can't try an app and make sure it's not fake or advertises it does x but really only does y I'm scrooge mcduck. I've bought way more apps on Android because of this.
Right, the author just forgot about every game console existing.
If I have to use my hands to pull my phone out of my pocket/bag/whatever, and the easiest way to make the screen point at my face is by holding it in my hand, what do the radar gestures add? It's either a gimmick or they have some very clever new UI features that might be a big change from what we're used to. I'm really hoping it's the latter.
Matz flip-flops as flip-flop flip flops
~1.6 billion trees are planted in the US every year and the total area of forested land in the US has been consistently growing since 1990.
Assessing the Risks of Chinese Investments in Sub-Saharan African Ports
> I usually “unsubscribe” from these kind of services by changing my credit card to an empty prepaid one and let the payment bounce

Yeah, luckily I subscribed through paypal, so I could block them through that.
Put it on an installment plan, market it as a premium device (status symbol) and people will pay anything.
Hi folks! MySigMail Card developer there

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Stack:

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I'd be happy to get any feedback
There's a whole paper explaining how it all works :)
This needs a (2017) tag
Does this have anything to do with Apple and their walled garden though? To me it sounds more like a business opportunity to make a SSH client and sell it at a realistic one-time fee to people like you (and me by the way) who are sick of subscriptions. But can’t that be done within he current ecosystem?
Incompetence is not an acceptable excuse.
The scenario you propose would eliminate the ability to develop apps for iOS. Are you suggesting Apple is actively trying to kill the iOS app store?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204084

Not as instant/universally approved as Google's system but there is a process.
You left out retirement. Assuming a two income household, that’s near $40k for 401k contributions. Assume Roth for sake of convince for tax calculations.) Healthcare likely costs 6-12k/year for a family too. (Premium plus deductibles, and contributions to HSA account.). If any kids are in daycare, that’s 12k per kid, probably closer to $24k near major cities.
Apple doesn't allow me to buy anything on my iPhone, as I got my phone in New Zealand, have a British Revolut CC card and phone number, then was in the Netherlands for a while, and am now living in Ireland.

I had to switch the region to Netherlands to install the (free) RyanAir app (why?!) which was rather annoying since then it started offering Dutch suggestions for stuff (which I don't want).

I can't add my UK CC to my account though as it's not a Dutch one, so I switched to the UK region, and then it errors out with "your account is not valid for use in the UK store. You must switch to the Dutch store before purchasing". Why ...? I don't know.

I had a similar problem with the RyanAir app: I switched to Dutch store and then got "your account is not valid for use in the Dutch store. You must switch to the New Zealand store". I forgot how I fixed that.

The reason they have all these restrictions is presumably so I can't use a cheaper store to but stuff.

While this isn't the sort of "broken" that the article talks about, effectively, the iOS store is broken for me. That's always the problems with these kind of restrictions: they also block legitimate use for people who don't fall neatly in your expected audience. I had similar problems ordering a new charger for my ThinkPad in NZ, as I had to use a NZ-based CC to get it delivered to a NZ address :-/

I find this kind of bullshit a super annoying way to waste my time. I never had these kind of problems with the Android store, and as soon as there's an updated Android phone that's not larger than some TVs I've owned (iPhone SE is good size) I'm getting an Android phone again (not that I have a particular love for Android, it's just "less bad").
That's fine, but pretending like this is an objectively superior solution and the value prop of these companies doesn't exist is flat wrong.

What if someone applied your own logic to buying your product (why pay when I can get the exact same thing from free tools)? It'd be annoying and generally wrong, wouldn't it?
I didn't even know that was a thing before clicking on this article
Maybe try Ubuntu phone? [1] It is an officially supported device of UBports.

[1] https://ubports.com/de_DE/devices/promoted-devices
I broke my ankle three years ago and your post reminded me of my post recovery state. Super sympathetic and appreciative of people who accommodated me when I was down.

Fast forward three years and I am getting super frustrated with people going up stairs slowly when getting off the subway. Thanks for the reminder!
Actually America industrialized quite early. The north was business and industry savvy, while the south focused on slavery. Slavery was not important for national economy - otherwise there would have been no civil war in 1860:s. Instead north was doing just fine economically without slavery, while south wanted to hold to most of it's capital (slaves).

I agree that the expansion to west was facilitated by forced migration of native americans from their homelands in a process that was borderline genocidal.

The fun part is about american industrialization - quite lot of it was based on directly stealing the IP of european industrialists (i.e not respecting their patents). This is quite fun in the sense how vocal US is now in upkeeping IP laws.
Could an untestable underlying theory inspire new models and implications that are testable?
No I really didn’t-could do without the implication, why don’t we and leave the personal jabs about what I forgot or didn’t out of this and stick to the issue.

I don’t believe as designed that even three strikes does well at (pardon the pun) striking a balance between content creators and content ID claimants. YouTube’s own behavior, leading up to where we sit now, and the behavior of claimants gives me no reason to give either party the benefit of the doubt or faith in how they purport to be handling content claims.

I forgot nothing, friend.
They'd only adopt all forest if food was limitless, they're going to reduce their growth below replacement by over-predation before they inhabit the entire World. It's possible that forest increase would see a commensurate increase in prey, but it's not a given, I imagine.

You sound spot on with the culling, population management is a complex problem given the tendency towards chaos for such systems.
For them, it's not a simpler feature phone, as the article mentions they gather around to watch movies at night on it. They offer 14 GB for 1.50$ a month.
Show HN: Simple RPC Framework in Golang from Scratch
Auto-play is a tax on the poor with limited data plans.
And that they were posting on Medium for maximum irony.
Based on what? Have Apple executives said anything on the matter? Even vague warnings? You're relying on your own interpretations of their intentions.

Over the years, Mac's defaults have changed to protect inexperienced users via restrictions like Gatekeeper and SIP. Apple has never attempted to make any of these systems mandatory. All it takes is a few terminal commands to gain complete kernel-level access to my system.
The implementations that are moving at all are keeping up fine. The biggest question for web developers is whether they support IE. If you do, you're stuck on ES5. If not, you can use most features from ES2015 and up. Once the next release of Edge is out, that will expand greatly.

Even if you support IE, you can still reap the benefits of modern JS if you're willing to do some differential serving. You can use the module/nomodule pattern to serve ES2017 without making changes to the server.
Are there any such documented cases? I would think that level of cognitive indirection is beyond most 3-7 year-olds.
My experience exactly. “Hmm.... no I have not. Cmd-W.”
Agreed. You have to develop such that your product survives whatever is fashionable today in any case. As Joel Spolsky pointed out at some point, your architecture is not the framework you picked.

On the other hand, CD/CI needs to be an enabler and in small startup there is only so much time you can dedicate to it. Any change on this front tends to be disruptive and suck up non trivial amounts of development time. So keep it simple. Follow the principle of the least amount of surprise (for new team members if you hire them). And keep it reasonable. You are going to cut corners here one way or another. Don't obsess about that.

The Dark people seems to want you to buy into their entire stack (editor, language, saas platform, etc.). That sounds like a lot of risky unproven technology to me. Maybe use something more mainstream like heroku?
"will never" is probably an overstatement, but the article does discuss some interesting points, gestation in lower gravity environment, for example.
"In order to grow user-curated content, you must first plant seed content."
The restrictions and policy applied by Apple and to some extend Google makes it very hard to get traction, particularly for smaller developers.

It feels extremely risky to develop high-budget new apps in this environment as there is a real chance the app will be rejected in order to comply with hard to understand limitations or end up not being allowed to be published at all.
Private Equity Should Not Exist
The list includes The Will to Power as the first entry under Nietzsche. On this basis I'd have to question the degree to which this list was curated at all as this work wasn't actually written by Nietzsche, but rather edited together by his sister whose motives may have been suspect.
Yea, it does feel like there must be some fine print behind that number. FWIW, the Minister's twitter account does specify tree seedlings, so it doesn't sound like they just airdropped 350 million seeds or anything like that.

Though the limiting factor on how fast you can plant trees is more the production of seedlings than the physical labor of planting. So I guess if they've spend the last several months growing and distributing seedlings in preparation for this campaign, actually plainting them all in one day isn't so crazy
Ask HN: Know anyone who makes money selling anti smartphone addiction software?
I am bothered by our current smartphone addiction. Plus I noted that a even though I spend a good chunk of my time on phone, it gives no feedback on whether I should be focusing on 'X' instead of browsing instagram or more reddit.

I believe smartphones (and desktop browsers) should be able to give feedback on our moods based on sites/apps we browse.

Do you know anyone who makes money(lifestyle businesses ok) from selling such anti addiction/quality of life improving products? I looked at a few "minimal" phone launchers with 100k+ downloads, but I do not know how much we make.
Your views don't change even after learning that most of your purchases that are to support developers are being skimmed by 30% ? (similar situation to Steam but at least their development tools are nearly bug free, and really help development)

The problem here is that they also charge 100 or $50 just to start developing on their platform...
They closed schools for this. There were a lot of people involved.
Paige Thompson, Capital One Hacking Suspect, Left a Trail Online
So if it is the “desired outcome” why is it taking them over a decade? The Mac App Store was introduced in 10.6 - 7 releases ago.
> Is it monopolistic? By definition, no, because Android is the #1 smartphone platform in the world.

This depends on how you describe the market. Is the market smartphone users or is it iOS apps? If you are in the market to buy an iOS app, you must go through apple, which would suggest it is a monopoly. IANAL but this has precedence - think of the “windows browser market” that Microsoft was raked over the coals about. The fact that you could buy a Mac or run Linux didn’t appease the courts IIRC.

I find a lot of value in the iOS App Store and think it is just like a game console, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be viewed as a monopoly _for iOS apps_
> I don't want to be forced to trust every company with my credit card information

This problem is solved with Paypal.
But JS already allows that.
>Why does macOS keep getting offhandedly roped in...

Because the people who write these screeds are ignorant. Apple has good reasons for doing things the way it does, and instead of acknowledging and addressing those reasons, the authors usually project onto Apple some made up evil, greedy intentions that don’t exist except in the mind of the writer. In this deluded world it must be the case that Apple does the same with macOS... they don’t even bother to check. Haters gonna hate.
He utterly mangled it, but there is an experiment which proves the underlying concept (which I'm guessing was his intent, live testimony is hard):

Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake

Objective: Using self‐refilling soup bowls, this study examined whether visual cues related to portion size can influence intake volume without altering either estimated intake or satiation.

Research Methods and Procedures: Fifty‐four participants (BMI, 17.3 to 36.0 kg/m2; 18 to 46 years of age) were recruited to participate in a study involving soup. The experiment was a between‐subject design with two visibility levels: 1) an accurate visual cue of a food portion (normal bowl) vs. 2) a biased visual cue (self‐refilling bowl). The soup apparatus was housed in a modified restaurant‐style table in which two of four bowls slowly and imperceptibly refilled as their contents were consumed. Outcomes included intake volume, intake estimation, consumption monitoring, and satiety.

Results: Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup [14.7 ± 8.4 vs. 8.5 ± 6.1 oz; F(1,52) = 8.99; p < 0.01] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls. This was unaffected by BMI.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2005.12
Sorry, but the blog post is a hard sell. It's obviously from an app developer that would prefer not to jump through the hoops of the App Store, but as a customer, I like it.

It's not perfect but it appears to be much, much better than Google version.

What I don't like is the limited app discovery, and the bad rules in terms of apps just taking names and causing a lot of confusion so that I'm not sure if that's the app I really want to install.
There are many facets to this. First of all, the App Store performs a range of services. Payment processing, the app review, hosting. For the user it is a trusted platform, where credit card numbers are not transmitted to arbitrary locations on the web, the app review and the ability to withdraw malicious applications do offer quite some protection.

From this side, the App Store fee can be justified. Whether it is reasonable or to high depends on many parameters. A fair solution would be to have the fee start at 30% and decline with sales numbers, as the review process doesn't increase. Of course, large commercial entities, who do have their own servers/payment processors and don't need a trusted site to host their apps are less happy with the policies.

But beyond the discussion about the fee, there is the aspect that Apple prevents all software installations from outside the app store. This is something which has to change as Apple isn't only protecting against malware, but also limits a lot of benign applications from being available on iOS. The first thing coming to my mind is Termux, which would instantly make an iPad much more usable. And extending that, a whole range of development tools could run way better on the iPad than it is allowed on the App Store. Just imagine a Linux VM running on the iPad...

Apple should (or should be forced by regulators) to offer a Gatekeeper-like solution on the iPad/iPhone which gives the users a reasonable amount of control about their devices.

And there is of course the content question. Apple tries to enforce their idea of "morale" onto the users. This is fine for their storefront, so to say, but there should be a section in the App Store for adult content. Especially the safe payment process would make this a very attractive service. If Apple wants to keep the "service" story alive for the App Store, they should craft their services according to the user demands, not to their ideas of what users should consume and install.
This shouldn't be news. It's game over once physical access is compromised. If you're injecting frames remotely that's another story...

Lest someone patent it let me state clearly that injecting false data on a small airplane's canbus is a patently (!) obvious technique for create a training environment to help pilots in simulated IMC recognize instrument failures.
>As a developer (though it has been a few years since I wrote code for mobile) Apple's tools, documentation and libraries were so much better than Google's

This is still very much true IME, Android Studio has much more frequent random issues and is generally slower and harder to work with than Xcode (I use both every day)
What are you estimating as the effort?
There is a refund process[0]. I generally don’t play games on my phone or use non-essential apps so I haven’t used it often but it has always worked for me.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204084
What? I'm a console developer. I can use any PC I want to deploy software to the console. I can use Intel, AMD, or any other x86 compatible chip (mainly because I don't want to deal with the headache of cross compiling). I can even choose the compiler I use and the IDE. Sure the debuggers they ship run on Windows, but that's just the tools they know how to write, and they are damn good tools.

iOS in comparison is downright draconian.
Again, that really depends on what features you use and who your clients are. It's entirely possible that a team may not need IE11 support now or that they've moved in the direction of low-overhead for modern clients and a legacy mode (possibly transpiled) for the <1% of people who affected.

At some point this is a business decision like anything else and the security considerations in particular have helped get people onto evergreen browsers faster than used to seem possible.
Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors.

The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishers.

The problem would be surviving without being sued long enough to gain the traction and acceptance that Spotify has.

The real problem, of course, is that there are a billion different news organizations with independent paywalls and gateways. It's a hassle to sign up for them all and completely unreasonable to expect that we should subscribe to all of them. Because they don't have a federated micro transaction model in place, the solution is to come up with one for them and get them to adopt it. It's better for both us and them, they just don't know it yet.

Could it work?
> Posting article ranting against walled gardens on Medium

The irony here is palpable ಠ_ಠ
What the US gets wrong about China's public trust system a.k.a. “social credit”