skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's absurd. The app store is not a service to developers but to consumers that Apple uses in order to have a working ecosystem.
>Not exactly, as Comcast don’t provide the infrastructure to Basecamp to host and deliver it’s service.

Neither Comcast or Apple provide any infrastructure to Basecamp for hosting. They are just in charge of delivering the ways and means of accessing their platform.
I thought that was what they hey app was doing

> Users cannot use the app to access email or perform any useful function until after they go to the Basecamp website for Hey Email and purchase a license to use the HEY Email app. This violates the following App Store Review Guidelines

The problem is it's not classified as a reader app according to Apple's guidelines. If you are not a reader app and there is something to be purchased, you must also offer in app purchases.

> if an app is a way to exclusively consume content purchased elsewhere, like songs or movies or podcasts, they don't have to have in-app purchases.
I agree, but I don't think that's relevant. Those laws are pretty well known, and their problem isn't obscurity or complexity, its injustice of outcomes.
Our neighbour had a golden retriever who I would feed the odd treat to (because who doesn't like dogs?). One day he saw me and came up to me and looked at my face to see if I was looking at him, and then with his eyebrows gestured to my pocket (where I normally kept treats for him) and then looked at my face again.

Smart dog.
Why does Apple need revenue from Basecamp (or any content provider)? They don't have any cost whatsoever associated with this content deliver. You already paid for the phone, $$$. The network isn't theirs; Apple takes zero part in the content delivery. Apple provides no content; that's all Basecamp.

This is just Apple noticing money being changed hands, and inserting themselves into the process so they can extract a cut. Get their beak wet, as it were. Not for value received, because there is clearly no value add here.

And the hoops they jump thru to make sure they get their cut! Locking down the phone; a walled-garden marketplace (you can't go anyplace else); the threat of revoking the app from a customer phone(!) if you don't toe the line.
> Apple wants to own iPhone consumers so that anyone who wants access to that demographic must pay the toll and follow their rules. It's far too much power for one corporation. Nice to see authorities are starting to take the matter seriously.

Unfortunately, this seems like a problem where nobody has come up with a good solution. Google allows other app stores on their phones and they allow sideloading, which might seem like the ideal situation. The biggest issue then is that Google still has the monopoly on apps on Android because the size of the Play Store far eclipses every other store. So if Google bans an account or app unfairly, the only realistic option is to appeal and cave in whatever they want you to do. Because being relegated to an app store that nobody uses is essentially a death sentence for that app and its revenue.

How do you fix something like that? The power or the problem doesn't go away because there is choice. I feel like Google has neatly sidestepped the problem from their perspective and thus aren't being scrutinized, despite being in nearly the exact same situation as Apple.
Been chewing on this reply. This is terrific. I very much support doing this kind of analysis. I wish I had this kind of analytical framework back when I was active.

To better understand the opposition, and rebut their rhetoric, sure.

But also to better advocate one's own policy, to message craft an affirmative agenda.

--

Say what you're for, not what you're against. Whatever the issue, there's a positive message. Say "Walk please" instead of "Don't run". For privacy it might be "I have the right to control my public persona" vs "Stop the panopticon!"

Discussing policy using your opponent's framing is a trap. Because of the asymmetry of bullshit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

I did election integrity activism for about 10 years. Utterly exhausting. Any effort rebutting your opponent's talking points is wasted resources. And they'll always come at you with ever more inane irrelevant points, seeking to discredit you, overwhelm you, muddy the waters.

For law makers, anything ambiguous is radioactive. Make it easy for them to choose your policy. A great analog is Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think".

FWIW, lawmakers and their staff can only seriously consider 10s of the 1000s of bills up for discussion. It's an attention economy, they're doing triage, just like everyone else.
This isn't about money. If the app had free registration inside the app it would pass the guidelines.
Some people are going to quibble with you over the costs paid for developers licenses, but I think that's missing the real problem.

Apple is welcome to provide a platform for developers to distribute apps on, on that platform I believe they should be able to charge whatever they determine is reasonable.

Apple SHOULD NOT be allowed to have a legal monopoly on making that platform.

It's not really a fair price (doesn't matter what it is) if there's no alternatives because you've literally blocked them from competing.

This is the problem.
OpenAPI 3.1.0 RC0
Sure, it might be decent value to a company. It's still not zero revenue as Apple likes to frame it.
> When you look at how many bad decisions have been taken these past few years despite plenty of access to good information, this sentiment seems pretty out of touch…

I'd argue we have lots of good information about what is going on. I'm not sure we have lots of good information about what we should do. Should we move to renewables and storage, nuclear or carbon capture and storage or would it be better to geo-engineer?

There are lots of trade-offs for all these paths. Being able to simulate their interactions accurately and under different assumptions might help form a consensus about a not too bad way forward.
Math 213 at uwaterloo has publicly available notes in spades:
https://www.gabrielwong.net/notes/math213_notes.pdf#page9
Disagree. They let Dropbox slide, and it looks arbitrary that HEY is considered that different. If HEY stores your email in their servers they should argue that they are also similar to Dropbox then and should be exempted. This seems like Apple drew an arbitrary line where it still can draw one, and is having a tantrum. Nevertheless the arrogance of suggesting that their benevolence is why apps like basecamp have survived is just boggling. They make the best devices for sure but I keep hoping other companies start stepping up and give them real competition.
If it didn't provide any value, Hey wouldn't be so concerned with losing it.
Woman beater gets a knocked tf out
The same issue is present if simply transit through Hong Kong International Airport.

The government of China border guards scan everybody's passport details.

It's unfortunate that a passport number is a form of ID.
Your tech cults will all die one by one as the big players fall on their own swords. A walled garden is not very resistant to disease.
Summer intern project
Already linked the source few comments above; if you read it there are quite a few more links.

The problem with victim's accounts is twofold. First, there are many accounts, and what gets quoted are folks telling the stories of terror, not the ones who fled for eg religious reasons.

Second, when it comes to China, there's a metric ton of fake news everywhere you look. You look into a story about communist government destroying a church, and later it turns out the church was actually a church-owned commercial building raised without a permit. You read about concentration camps, and only after going through few hundreds pages you realize they are more like western juvenile detention centers. And so on, and so on.

Thus, we shouldn't blindly trust either of sides; there's way too much politically-motivated misreporting involved.
Has anyone used this service, and why should someone ditch their current provider to use it? All I've seen is the founder kicking off about Apple murdering kittens, which put me off looking any further.

I've got my own domain hosted on google apps, and it just works. Rarely get spam, I'm used to the UI, I don't want to change my email address because I don't need to.

Having said the above, I guess I am not the target audience for this.
Making them a common carrier would solve almost all issues, except complaints from some groups that some other groups are allowed to use Twitter to spread their own political speech.
> is utterly dominated by 2 monopolies under Apple and Google.

duopoly not monopoly
Instant Karma – Instant Justice – What Could Go Wrong Fails – Instant Regret
How well did the mobile developers do before the App Store when they tried to peddle their J2ME apps on feature phones? What are the chances that game developers would entice the whales to buy loot boxes and tokens for pay to win games if not for an easy payment method?

Does Amazon provide value with the Kindle? Does Valve with Steam? Amazon market place? eBay? The console makers?

The theaters don’t bring too much value as evidenced by them holding on by tooth and nail trying to convince the studios not to go straight to digital.
Well, let’s use the food court analogy then: whoever owns the food court is permitted by law to set whatever rental prices they choose for their tenants (provided they aren’t discriminating against people based on certain characteristics). They don’t have to be consistent, because the food court is their property and they have very wide discretion over how it is used. Fair? No. Legal? Yes!
The reason Netflix is allowed to do it is because they are classified as a reader app

> if an app is a way to exclusively consume content purchased elsewhere, like songs or movies or podcasts, they don't have to have in-app purchases.

According to apple an exclusive email client is not classified as a reader app and so they are forced to offer in app purchases. The guidelines are super confusing and in my opinion pretty crap but it's not a case of favouritism or giving special exemptions to Netflix for example
This. Many of the commentators on this issue are really lazy people. Please before making suggestions, get background information.
> Apple have (freely) provided Basecamp a platform to grow their business via the App Store, whilst giving Apple (effectively) nothing in return.

So the apps on the App Store don't provide any value to Apple? If all business apps were only on Android, would they have the same market share?
> The HEY Email app is marketed as an email app on the App Store, but when users download your app, it does not work. Users cannot use the app to access email or perform any useful function until after they go to the Basecamp website for Hey Email and purchase a license to use the HEY Email app.

The Fastmail email app works exactly the same way and is available on the app store without issue. Seems like a pretty arbitrary decision here.
This book is going to help you a lot with establishing whether you really can do it or maybe only have been fooling yourself:

Nail It then Scale It: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation, Nathan Furr & Paul Ahlstrom

It's basically a unique primer on the exact topic you've been struggling with. I would buy it even if the price was like 10k USD. I think that speaks for itself.

I wish you luck!

No doubt that clarity of thinking and weighting risks is a no. 1 priority.
Naw, you can have regulations for specific industry. They just wouldn't be relevant unless you are in such an industry, and should be organized enough that you can read and understand them when going into an industry, and have clear boundaries of when they become relevant in the simplified general law.

Also, the concept conflicts with the idea of local government and basically requires a large central world government. I feel like thr idea of simplified laws is mostly an impractical pipe dream propagated by people who don't like that they can't dump poison into local rivers or sell people scams that harm them.

Here is how we can get a proper measure of the problem: how often are people harmed by complex contracts they signed but didn't understand, vs how often are people harmed by laws they didn't know existed? And how often were those people doing something meaningfully harmful to someone else and should have known better on basic moral grounds?
Genomewide Association Study of Severe Covid-19 with Respiratory Failure
Isn't this part of the problem though? Apple _could_ remove the app store, and consumers would lose the apps that have existed so far, with no alternative.
While obviously what Apple is doing is crap, why not just increase their in-app prices only on iOS? That's what Marvel have been doing with their comics. A comic that through their website costs £3, on the Android reader costs £3.29 and on their iOS reader costs £3.49. I always just buy them online and immediately download to my ipad without paying the Apple premium.

Yes, it sucks - but it seems like a relatively easy way out.
I am loving HEY so far, but this is one thing I hope they walk back. I get it, it's not the same as a traditional "inbox," but why does that matter? "Imbox" is annoying to look at.
Oh, please. Walter Headley is so obscure he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. The closest he's got is a page for the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts", which wasn't created until after Trump had made his Tweet.

The idea that this is a well-known racist catchphrase which anybody had heard of a month ago is absurd, and you know it.

(For the record, I despise Trump. All I ask is that we keep our criticism of him tethered to reality - it's not like we don't have enough non-fictional reasons to oppose him.)
Apple should negotiate with all developers as to how much they want to pay developers for offering content on their devices.
This is so adorable. I wish more people and companies were using/designing/serving web sites the way that was meant to be done.
Apple’s policy really degrades the experience of apps on their platform, such as Kindle.
Loved being greeted as 'wpareamatuers' when I signed in for the first time :')
Comcast also doesn't restrict all its users to exclusively acquire software from the Comcast Store™. Apple does.
Genuinely need to block Hey in keywords now. The marketing is too much.
New nuclear (Hinkley C) in the uk costs £92.50/MWh -- 3200MWe, operational from 2025

Proposed new offshore wind farms cost £40/MWh, operational from 2023/2024

Nuclear was the answer 15 years ago. It's not now.
Visions of ARPA (UK's DARPA-style agency) [pdf]
I kinda went down the same path to generate my site. I had a static generator, which worked as most static generators, being a standalone program, and moved to having a python script (and it's .venv) in the root folder of my content, that has markdown, that converts it to a HTML.
It doesn't prove anything about Buddhism. I only meant Ashoka is constantly put up as an example of someone whose conduct improved after conversion to Buddhism, but that is a very selective reading.
So requiring an app to have a feature would then be necessary for all those other applications.
The PC market, for many people the only computing device for a long time, is utterly dominated by Microsoft. But no one has ever done anything about that.
How far do you think $99/yr goes in the grand scheme of things?

Cost of servers, cost of bandwidth, cost of maintenance of the App Store backend services and development of future features, technical support for developers, Xcode development, App Store review time, etc

I would hazard a guess they make nothing on that $99 at the end of the day. The cost is merely to be a gate to prevent anyone from submitting terrible apps for review. Having some monetary requirement there is just a deterrent for the lower quality stuff (obviously not all of it, but probably a rather significant amount).
I don't understand the relevance here. A/B testing in political campaign ads is pretty normal.
> The apps to which DHH compares Hey with are very different in nature and all the mail apps he constantly mentions are also different in nature. They all implement the suggestions which Apple has suggested in their response.

I can only speak to the app I'm most familiar with that DHH has compared it to multiple times. Fastmail. Fastmail's app lets you access Fastmail's email accounts, but not POP/IMAP accounts more generally. It doesn't provide a way of subscribing, and just loads to a login page when the app starts. It doesn't follow the suggestions they included in the letter, and I've seen DHH reference it multiple times.

For what it's worth, I've enjoyed Fastmail a great deal, and having an email client directly tied to the service provider has been great for me. I'm mainly concerned about this whole issue because of it's implications for new updates to Fastmail's app.
I saw a house for sale outside Perth (the other one) that included a pub in one of the outbuildings.
Quesion is, would you rather be an ordinary citizen in China-occupied country, or a slave in an independent one?
> But it's not clever. It's just annoying.

To each their own, sure, but yikes there are so many more things in the world to be annoyed by right now.
This is so interesting and so difficult. Van Vogt wrote about the cortical-thalamic pause in Null-A (1948), you could almost read this as vindication of Korzybzki and Van Vogt.
If I were basecamp I’d be tempted to pull my apps over that passive aggressive bullshit.
And most importantly, you're not actually allowed to communicate what the actual price of the service is. So any customer who doesn't look up the pricing on their website will think that it's $142 a year, not $99 a year.
How is this a dog whistle for white supremacists?

When people loot, other people will shoot them to prevent their livelihood from being destroyed. It’s a good phrase to sum up that there is going to be a violent reaction to looting.
Graves, I think, will be the the key to a lot of future paleolithic discoveries.

They're basically intentional time capsules. A meaningful amount of archeological knowledge about vikings (for example) comes from graves. Gobekli Tepeh, the most significant evidence of early neolithic (and maybe late paleolithic) "high civilization" only survived because the whole complex was intentionally buried...

Not many gravesites dating to before the late paleolithic have been discovered. I think they exist though.

Mesolithic Neanderthals made graves. More shockingly, Homo Naledi were found in a gravesite. These humans were small brained & semi-arboreal. They were contemporary to early Sapiens but are thought to have split from our ancestral line at a very early stage. The site really seems like a grave, but archeologists are still hedging bets.

Large brain humans like Sapiens and neanderthals were thought to have "invented" mortuary practices pretty late-in-the-game. The oldest known sapien grave is in Israel, dating to just 100kya^. Homo Naledi mortuary practice seems far fetched. But, it's very hard to think of an alternative theory for the naledi site. Everything about it says gravesite.

If such distant human relatives made graves, and I think they did, then other humans probably did too. They're out their.

^The bones were also painted with ocre, like the French site.
Except that you have artificially defined the market to be "applications on an iOS device" instead of "mobile applications".

By that definition Microsoft has a monopoly over XBox games, Tesla has a monopoly over their car apps, Sony has a monopoly over their DSLR apps etc, Salesforce has a monopoly over their marketplace apps etc.

Any antitrust action based on your definition would actually set a precedent that would unravel every single marketplace product. Hence pretty unrealistic.
Deploying Machine Learning Has Never Been This Easy
It kind of makes sense, actually.

We're extremely good pattern matchers, much more than we are aware of, but it stand to reason that as our more complex survival mechanisms seems to have close ties to how we perceive ourselves and maybe our "group", we become really terrible at correctly matching what we intuit, if "we" can be considered the perpetrator.

Hypothesizing that we are part of the victims is also a much more effective strategy for the group if we're in a fear/survival mode, as an erroneous attribution often only presents a post-facto moral dilemma for a few individuals, a dilemma we can shield our ego from by saying we didn't know.

That we didn't know is also often objectively true as long as we disregard the uncanny notion that research on social interaction has let us understand exists, that our brain doesn't always let (most of) us know everything that it is going on if it will harm the social interaction.

Most of the above is not much of a problem when that group is a group of people in the middle of a forest, but becomes very much a problem if it is almost the entire population of a country, and when we as in the current day and time is obsessed with polishing our ego.
Personally I vote to let people write code in the format they are most comfortable with and run the formatter as part of CI
Myths about Breast Cancer
I see it coming into play with automated UI building systems
Changing my cool and fancy "Imbox" to "Inbox" because I didn't care to test with users in 3...2...1..
> Some people are going to quibble with you over the costs paid for developers licenses

Yeah, I thought I'd phrased it clearly enough saying "effectively" nothing was given in return, but obviously not!

I see a new perspective in the rest of your comment. Thanks for sharing.
If the regulation is smart (sometimes the EU does ok with tech regulation, sometimes they fail miserably) then it's not about picking a number.

The number is never the issue. The issue is that apple has artificially blocked any competing channels from distributing to iOS.

I don't believe they should be allowed to have a legal monopoly on app distribution. In fact, I'd go as far as the ruling for IE with Microsoft around basically the same issue but for web apps -

Not only are you not allowed a legal monopoly on app distribution, you MUST ask the user which app distribution methods they'd like to enable.
We went the other way...

https://twitter.com/BronGondwana/status/1273790422947487744
For me it was their marketing message. Empty, annoying, misleading and filled with pats on the back, Apple style. Except I can't find anything innovative
In the U.S. they are. So it is anti-trust.
> Twitter is where a large percentage of web devs hang out

Source?
Apple would say tough potatoes and point out that billions of users worldwide are very satisfied with such a deal. You also very rarely hear stories of malware / fake apps on the Apple store.
I’m on Apple’s side on this one. They’ve made Hey’s choice simple: change it so it’s compatible for people to use their mainstream email services (no $ involved), or make it subscription out of the box. Currently you need some dumb invite-only code.

I actually feel misled by Hey’s comments pointing out that Netflix, etc. require a subscription to make the app useful. It wasn’t until I little additional digging revealed that the main difference you can order it straight away, and Apple still charges them the 30% fee. To get around this, Netflix charges for in-app or you can order cheaper directly from their site. I don’t believe Apple’s store T&C’s indicate Netflix is violating anything through this model.

Really this is about how much is too much for Apple’s fee structure. I suspect regulators may try to force Apple to allow other App Stores (like Android) but then the usual problems will surface re: security, etc.
The article used the term "extreme right", seemingly because it's a traditional term for this kind of movement, but I used more colloquial term "far-right". Please let me know if there are any other more appropriate names for the movement.