skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can make a purchase on an American website with a debit card.

The point of the credit card is to borrow money and pay it back later. That's all.

Most Americans have both Debit and Credit cards and will switch between them based on their financial need.

> You just go the the checkout, scan a QR code with your banking app, accept the purchase in the app and it's done.

And those people who don't have data for their phone?

> that in a connected world like today

Not everyone is connected.
First of all, this is irrational, holy is a deprecated concept. It's for children. Second, you all should embrace multiculturalism. Inter marry, hire each other, etc. Embrace American ideals along with the free American money.
> People get there, and realise that they’re not the best, the smartest, or the most hard-working anymore.

At USNA, we said: "You're always someone's boy", meaning: "No matter how great you are at X, there is always someone who can school you."
I do believe you, in this exact order, missed my point and then proved it...
The biggest reason I haven't jumped ship to Android over the years is that the App Store has always been inherently curated, and typically more secure than the Android store.

The iPhone has been pretty good for security / privacy as well - I remember an article that made the front page here about how an accidental usage of the phone's GPS was still stopped when not allowed in the user's settings, and still triggered the location use icon in the status bar.

Much like how Standard Oil actually lowered oil prices while it dominated the market -- sometimes, a monopoly is benign or even benevolent towards consumers. Meanwhile Amazon is an example of a more predatory organization, as evidenced by some of Bezos's responses in the recent congressional hearing.

Monopolies like Amazon should be torn down for the consumer. Monopolies like Apple should only be torn down if they are using their market dominance to extinguish competition that would otherwise force them to improve.
Whataboutism. All you did was show that Apple is also bad.
NYT Open: Published Assets? We Had a Few
The consumer cares that Apple engages in routine editorial censorship.
I was thinking the same thing. Nvidia could start charging obscene fees for ARM licenses, but then RISC-V is poised to receive more investment and become increasingly mainstream. Not such a bad thing. We can switch architectures. The toolchain is maturing. Imagine if more companies started making high-performance RISC-V chips?
I don't know anything about EU law, but 25% marketshare is a tough case to make for a monopoly in the US. Also, antitrust has literally nothing to do with what laws/regimes Apple supports. Why not just focus on that?
And Steam (unless you have a very popular game) and GOG.

But it's easy to argue that many of these just derived their rates from what existing similar store fees were. Epic Game Store tried to disrupt this and they're still at it a few years later but for most developers publishing on Steam/GOG nothing changed.
> The question is whether this will be a problem as the economy starts to reopen.

Isn't the question whether the economy should reopen?
Would you advocate leniency this forcefully for a 17 year old teenager of color who was charged with committing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property theft (e.g. stealing expensive cars)? Or do you want this kid to receive special treatment just because you identify with his demographic? Presumably you were also once a tech-savvy teenage hacker at some point.

People with your mindset are responsible for a lot of the inequity in the criminal justice system. Upper middle class suburban white kids (e.g. Brock Turner) get away with slaps on the wrist all the time for the same crimes that poor and minority teenagers get sent to prison for years over, because judges (who were almost all previously upper middle class white suburban kids themselves) feel sorry for them and chalk their crimes down to kids being kids.
>Being caught off guard is not a crime

It can be. Twitter could be found criminally negligent if they knew the risk of this type of attack (or it was obvious) but chose to ignore it.
"The question is whether our totally antiquated systems will be capable of pulling that off."

COBOL anyone?
Honestly, this sounds like a great outcome for everyone.

Western users get assurances their privacy will be respected as much as any other western company (not great, but not Tencent levels of government interference/monitoring etc).

Microsoft get's a massive jump-start into social.

Consumers maintain a competitive social-media landscape.

Investors in TikTok get appropriately paid.

What's not to like?
Also Intel ME and (not sure, but probably) AMD PSP.
That might just be blurring a widget within a window, not a texture coming from another one
I don't know why this is downvoted. If any, Nvidia has been providing quality drivers for Linux for decades, and it was the only way to have a decent GPU supported by Linux in the 2000s, as ATI/AMD cards were awful in Linux.
Code can be describe with aesthetic qualities like clean, beautiful, shitty, complex, delicate, etc. Just like music. Art is just a representation of human creativeness and imagination which is what software is.
Can you e-mail me? I am coming up with a theory of emotion/personality and have some questions. Address in profile.
Yes! Fraud dept told me it was someone entering random numbers. What does that explain?! shrug
It's funny to see tribal reactions to these news.

Apple and other large tech companies have obviously arrived at a dominant position that would trigger these sort of investigations. You could say it's an attack on their success, and it is ironic that: success obviously has to do with it.

What apple and other tech companies have are not natural monopolies so it's not always easy for everyone to understand why anyone could claim they wield monopolistic powers.

But the point of these "platform businesses" is and has always been about gaining quasi-monopolistic strength so you can extract value from the margins of everyone involved in the platform ecosystem.

Is a monopoly illegal or necessarily undesirable to society? It depends on how society sees and regulates it. Depends on what society interprets as a NET win or net loss to itself.

And I can definitely think of several aspects of this state of affairs (handful of platforms sitting at nodes of large chunk of digital economy) that present as triggers for society to question the value of the ongoing monopolistic powers of these companies.

But if anything is to be taken from Google's case with EU, Apple will just pay a headline-grabbing fine and continue doing whatever they are doing.
This is assuming it would have to be a new company, rather than an existing company like Qualcomm or AMD which could produce a processor with a different ISA if nVidia/ARM became unreasonable to deal with.

This is particularly true for Android because basically the entire thing is written in portable languages and the apps even run on a bytecode VM already, so switching to another architecture or even supporting multiple architectures at the same time wouldn't be that hard.
Bad analogy: the only victim of a home invasion is the home owner.

In the Twitter case, the victim were the users.
Imperfect competition is an economic concept. The legal concept of monopoly is not the same thing.
This isn't "controversial", it's just a kneejerk contrarian position from an armchair expert. It's actually hard to understate the demand for music production. You walk through any major retail store, they're playing music that is generally designed (and proven) to make you purchase more. Advertising, movies, basically any form of audio-visual entertainment would be devoid of life without music. And people demand novelty. Just because you don't personally see the value because of your "automatic brain adjustment" problem doesn't mean it isn't there. These of course, are consumerist arguments, let alone the fact that say, personal expression has been a major feature of popular music for over 500 years, and that people from all walks of life have proven time and again that they are willing to pay for the experience of live entertainment, even to change their entire life to accommodate it (think festivalgoers, Deadheads, other diehards, etc.). I mean you may as well be arguing that the economy doesn't exist—like, yeah it sort of doesn't, because currency is all just an illusion we have to agree upon to grease the wheels, but acting like that invalidates the clear societal value of music... is some willful ignorance. The music industry has grown over the past decade. I implore you to do some reading on this, maybe start with Tin Pan Alley.
Who cares about the laws in Mexico?
I honestly didn’t either until I worked there. It’s actually for real. They take their values and culture really seriously, which was refreshing and very cool.
Barring massive inflation in a short period
Wait, apple makes up 5% of the entire US stock market? That feels... weird.
Ah yes let's pine for the days when ~men were men~programmers were programmers and we coded real quality, unlike this current trend...
This is a broad generalization, and for most unemployed Americans, wrong.

The New York Times did a very large, good chart about this a few months ago. Only people in about half of the American states might possibly end up getting more while unemployed than they did at work. The way some states' unemployment systems are set up, it's simply not possible.

Further, it can only happen if the unemployed person qualifies for the maximum benefit in their state, which the vast majority of unemployed people do not.

The whole "Americans are making more money from not working" is not only a three-month-old meme, it's only true in a small percentage of cases. The only thing it is good for is getting people like my mother riled up with, "People aren't working because they're getting too much unemployment!" Completely ignoring the fact that there simply are no jobs to be had, and businesses are still shutting down left and right.

But, each to her own bubble.
hey jsnk, email sign up is supported now! https://indielog.backlogs.co/changelog/support-email-sign-up...
Oh it's absolutely possible that if they had settled in the 1920s they'd eventually get screwed anyway.
To be fair, stifling web apps sounds like an anti-google move, not a pro-apple move (unless they've explicitly stated otherwise, I'd assume this is the reasoning). That said, I have been able to install some of my own websites as apps on iOS after adding PWA support. I am not sure how much their support differs from the Android implementation.
Uninstalling Spotify.
Microsoft is more relevant than a few companies in the FAANG list.
Were getting. The article is from May. The CARES Act benefit, which it describes, expired today. https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/extra-600-cares-act-un...
While I respect the EFF, they do have their own ideology that makes them not necessarily able to give an objective summary of the law. Is there another account of what the Mexican copyright law does anywhere?
I look forward to the day a report this critical of Israel can be published in a US newspaper!
I think it's unlikely you will get any recourse here. However what you can do is the following.

1) Find one of the input addresses for the transaction(s) you sent to the scammers

2) Use that address to sign a message like "alexander1100 owns this address" (but use your legal name) to prove ownership of the address.

3) Attempt to follow up with the FBI about recovering your lost funds. This is the step that you will have the most trouble with.

Good luck.
Has anyone come across an ergo keyboard like this that has a mouse roller on the thumb pad? I think my arms would appreciate a way to interact with the mouse without moving my hands away from the keys.

I'm using a Kinesis Advantage2 right now, but I still need to move my hand to get to the touchpad.
"In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
tl;dr: Spotify performance royalties paid by PROs used to be fairer than other revenue streams, until independent labels + artists got screwed over by the major labels.

------

Story time.

The streaming point values PRS for Music assigned to Spotify used to be higher per play value than many radio stations in the UK. Someone I worked with actually analysed all this and we were really surprised to discover it. Low Performing royalty revenues were not Spotify isn't paying money fairly to artists, rather Spotify knew exactly how many people streamed any given track and the royalty payout model paid based on % of total streams.

So it was actually a fairer model -- if you assume number of streams is an indicator of performance copyright value.

Compared this to the Radio model. A typical track played on BBC Radio could earn something like £80 for one play (depending on the time of day and the station). But that was because radio audience figures were estimated from sample data for the entire nation. And those samples changed something like every 1-2 years. 10 people in the country might actually be listening to the station at the time -- but you'd still get £80 regardless.

Of course the actual total license value then becomes the big point of issue -- was Spotify being charged enough...?

EMI, Sony, Warner et al. all thought no. They went and cut their own deals with Spotify. Not only was their music being treated as equal to everyone else (they didn't like that), they thought they could get a larger license revenue by dealing with Spotify directly.

So the we ended up in this really weird position: PRS for Music wasn't licensing the majority of UK royalty revenue from Spotify (the majors were) but PRS did all the processing for them (eventually GEMA took over). Leaving PRS for Music with the same workload and less bargaining power during license negotiations.

I bet you all £10 in my wallet that the artists Ek referred to as "happy" were on those major labels' rosters.

------

Source: I used to work for PRS doing usage level data analysis.

Note 1: This was correct as of 5 years ago, certain things may have changed recently.

Note 2: I'm only talking about the Performing copyright. I stayed the hell away from the mess that was Mechanical rights as much as possible.

PRO: Performing Rights Organsiation

streaming point values: 1pt = 1 stream for Spotify. 1pt = 1 second of music on Radio.

royalty payout model: total points in a quarter * point value = total available license revenue for the quarter
The way it's always worked in southern Europe, hence the high unemployment rates.
I thought that was intentional, to make sure that people stayed home instead of looking for extra work.
> any company would love to have it.

But few companies would love to do what it takes to get it.

Things like protecting customer privacy and taking security seriously.

I once saw a 1 hour presentation on the cryptography design of the iPhone compared to an Android phone. The IOS design used layers of fine-grained encryption and was obviously carefully thought out to protect the consumer from: device theft, misbehaving apps, illegal searches by law enforcement, and even nation-state levels of spying.

The Android phone had a feature that basically said "Encrypted: Yes".

That's the difference. I see that difference everywhere, with every organisation. The right attitude gets rabidly loyal customers, the wrong attitude relegates you to the low-cost section of the store.
Easiest thing to do at this point would be an excel spreadsheet and a single employee who venmos everyone their unemployment manually.
I understand that, but your original argument was disingenuous.

The central question at hand is the App Store monopoly, and your argument was:

> There are thousands of powerful smartphones on the market, from many different companies and even countries.

But that number willfully misrepresents the current state of the market as it pertains to the current discussion because all but one of those powerful smartphones only operate on one other OS, and by extension, one other App Store regime.

Whether this OS duopoly is acceptable is the whole debate.
My understanding of the 2018 CLOUD act is that a US headquartered cloud vendor must hand over subpoenaed customer data even if the datacentre is outside the USA.

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2018/04...
I was a big Cortana + Windows Phone fan (big enough even that I had one in use in 2014) and it did start out competitive. Over time though, Siri got better, Alexa got better; Cortana never did. Microsoft shows an inspirational video at Build every year, but what they show never seems to become reality.

In contrast, I started investing in Alexa mid/late-2018 and while it was great to start, it has become increasingly useful. It makes phone calls to businesses, and gets it right very consistently; it knows business hours; the automation has become more powerful over time (a category Cortana never even began to touch); and the integration ecosystem is superb.

Alexa keep improving, too. Yesterday I invoked a routine that included playing music, while the invoked service was busy playing on another device. While in the past the music just wouldn't have played, now she says, 'Amazon Music is already in use on another device. Did you want to play Thunderstorm Sounds on Bedroom Sonos?' That's just one example, but they are numerous and regular enough that I was able to pick one from just yesterday.
Eh, it'll do plenty to trigger the "You WORK FOR A LIVING and if you aren't working you should be eating shit!" people.
This moron's statements piss me off so deeply I don't even know where to start.

The commoditization of Music?
The complete lack of understanding of how creativity works?
Telling artists to "work harder" while his net worth is in the billions, all thanks to the exploitation of said artists?

All this non-sense during a terrible crisis that puts many musicians out of job since nowadays they have to rely on live performances to make a buck, all thanks to....platforms like spotify?

Can we please boycott spotify to hell?
First, the system doesn't belong to any one person. Not even the owner of a company. They own one company. They don't own capitalism itself.

And yes, you are always free to get rid of any one company's system and start your own system (i.e. company). What people find when they do this is that with freedom comes a lot of responsibility.
Fauci is 79 years old.

We need to stop the delusion someone who's 79 should be running a large critically important part of society.

We are not talking about an employee contributing as many 79 year olds do. We are not talking about a founder rightfully continuing to run their company.

We seriously believe at 79 people have the same energy levels as 65? Has SJW culture really infected our science that much we no longer believe in ageing?
No, it's the other way around. Advances in computer hardware have allowed the use more inefficient programming languages allowing more inexperienced and unskilled programmers to create programs leading to more resource hungry programs. When there are little resource constraints the only real constraint becomes developer time.

I don't see how having IDEs implemented in browsers has anything to do with security, the speed of light or compatibility. It's just the lack of constraints allowed by advances in computer hardware.

Most software is written with no performance considerations in mind at first and the performance issues are addressed only when they become visible. However, if there is abundant memory available, why bother?
I went looking for the talk and all I could find was this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337590358_Inflation...

I'd like to watch the actual talk. Hope you could try remembering the name.
If we're talking about society as an utilitarian construct, one doesn't necessarily see value in another's intellectual satisfaction as much as one does see value from being able to acquire food, plumbing services, etc. A degree is a commitment of 5-10% of a person's life, and it's meant to support the person's ability to contribute to said society for much of their adult life.

Is there value in having _someone_ have expertise in classical music? Sure. Is there value in everyone in the world pursuing expertise in arts at the expense of society's ability to produce food? Obviously no.

The idea that everyone should have equal opportunities to pursue the arts doesn't work on a fundamental level because the distribution of what needs to be done vs what are "desirable" occupations do not match in reality - even when we account for automation. Put another way, everyone wants to be the rich instagrammer posting cocktail pics, not the person serving said drinks at minimum wage.

So, is it really a surprise that even though more people have access to arts degrees nowadays, that they are unable to realistically sustain themselves on the back of these degrees?
Just because there is more money is chicken McNuggets doesn’t mean they are better than fine dining.

This is just the death of another art form.
Right.

This one, though, seems to be much more adept at spreading through communities than your run-of-the-mill bacterial pneumonia or type two diabetes.

That must factor into your equivalence test, no?
What about being a painter, singer, writer or poet requires a four year degree? In some cases (in particular, the visual arts) conventional wisdom seems to be that going to school for such a thing narrows artistic vision and creativity into a box.

Actually organizing events requires an entirely different skill set- while having an appreciation for the arts absolutely can help pull off a successful event, it is by no means a requirement.
I think that's a luxury Apple can afford though and an outcome of their approach to devices.

Take the example of Maps, for anyone to create a good maps experience they need a lot of money, A $1000 phone with about $200-300 actual component costs has enough margin for other things, even software. So the price is kind of included in the phone.
Even if we just give $10 of this to Maps as it is a core experience, that is $2-3 billion per year.

For other companies trying to compete, it is either ads or subscription. So even if you charge $20 per year, you need 100 million paying users. Apple also incurs the cost of running it but it gets hidden the price of the phone, others don't have this luxury. Though, I think certainly a company like Samsung which has significant device revenue can try this approach.

Also, in case of ideals if I have to give an example of a company that tries to uphold one ideal very well would be, Google's efforts to improve diversity. https://diversity.google
And also having an incentive for more people to stay home during a pandemic might even be wise.
I've had issues with Outlook on Web in Firefox, mostly when I have the tab open for a long time. If you haven't tried, I suggest reloading the tab when it gets slow. It has been really fast for me otherwise.
Yep, he’s telling musicians what he wants them to optimize for his platform, which does not pay viable rates and never will. Which means if you ARE a musician you should run the other direction.
Yes, many people consider facebook and Twitter "The Internet." and while they are just two giant tech companies publishing web apps.

Networking Layer is invisible to 99% of users nowadays. "it just works."
That's strange, on Firefox for Android v68.11.0 every article for krebsonsecurity.com can render in the reader mode. The main home page does not work for this, but individual articles work fine.