skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a fan of what Apple is doing, and am happy to see it be tested in court.

But, I'm not a fan of another multi-million dollar company making such a blatant appeal to emotion, as if Fortnite needs to be "freed", to the common person who has no concept of how nuanced the legalities of this entire thing are.

I'll be happy when the theatrics are over with, and we can simply view the outcome of the legal precedent that is about to be set. This is a battle for the courts, not Twitter.
Possibly one step towards named arguments in Rust
not my blog :) This was the first source and wanted to share
This should not matter, if it does then it would be hard to call the US a "constitutional state"/"state of law".
As NLP models keep increasing in size, they 'll reach the scale of the google index, and they give better answers. It's basically a huge associative memory that can produce responses it has and hasn't seen -it s definitely the evolution of searching.

Google has strategically bought every browser address box. It has eliminated the referrer , so websites don't know what search keywords led them there. It owns the whole process, and at this point , web content is just fodder for the next iterations of NLP models. It's already become cheap enough and it will become unmonetizable (unless it's opinion content, which is fodder for endless social media rambling).

Currently the most monetizable content is video. This might take longer to commoditize as deepfakes are still too early.
Yeah, I flipped the terms in the second one. The intent remains clear I think.
Epic effectively pulled it themselves when they unilaterally broke their agreement.

I think Apple's cut is egregious but at the same time, they're not a monopoly. My main gripe is that they're behaving as if they're bringing value that the developers are riding on, when in reality nobody would buy iPhones if it weren't for the value that many developers are bringing to the platform, often at no cost to Apple.
Still, they are unlikely to be the real issue for Epic. I'm fully expecting some anti-consumer behaviour from them if they get away with their own payment system, like difficult to cancel payments, gambling or similar.
Yes its called "simulated annealing for your own life".

In 3 days hacker news will discover GANs and make a shocking headline like "challenges and adversity makes you better / stronger".

#mindblown
But that same complained about phenomenon applies in the UK. Regulators do put at least some effort into trying to disrupt it but it's definitely there.

Example: A few years ago it was legal in the UK to advertise the price of broadband excluding the fee for "landline rental". This recurring fee notionally covers the service cost of the actual copper (in most cases) last mile cable needed to deliver service. In principle you could use it to make voice telephone calls (remember those?) and needn't buy it from the same provider as Internet service piggybacked on the same physical infrastructure.

So e.g. Big ISP #1 advertises Internet is "£5 for first six months†" and then the small print explains "† Plus line rental of £11.50 per month". That's £16.50 customers will actually be paying, and a competitor Big ISP #2 won't get far advertising Internet as "£15 for first six months" because that sounds much more expensive even though it's less. So sure enough they'll do the same thing only more so "£3 for the first six months†" "† Plus line rental of £12 per month".

Still, ISPs argued this is fair because they don't actually provide the service "line rental" pays for, they don't have teams of engineers in vans ready to dig up cable and repair it, that's something a last mile owner does.

Except, since the last mile is a natural monopoly that provider is legally obliged to publish its pricing and rationale. Sure enough it does bill for "line rental". But is it charging £12 per month? £11.50 per month? Er, no, over the modern period its costs have reduced gradually and it's charging those ISPs about £8 per month. So that £12 "line rental" is actually £8 line rental plus £4 "Money we're hiding from our real prices so as to trick customers".

Even if they never met in a darkened room and agreed to fix these bogus prices, the effect was that all large UK ISPs inflated a fee so as to make their prices look cheaper, taking advantage of customers. Maybe no crime was committed, except in the sense that customers got ripped off.

This particular loophole was closed by requiring ISPs to advertise the price that includes all fees needed to deliver the actual service, and sure enough once they couldn't use it to hide the real price the ISPs stopped pretending "line rental" cost 50% more than it really did.
Poor analogy. iOS does not have the market dominance that Windows/Microsoft has. In this case, iPhones represent about 15% of the global smartphone sales and I think that the OS (in the US) is a 60/40 iOS vs android split. There is a viable market. Developers, unwilling to pay the Apple fee, can switch to Android. If more apps are available on Android, that will shift the users away from iOS to Android.

When I see folks complain about this, I like ask "what do you think is a reasonable fee for Apple to charge?" Zero is not a realistic answer as Apple does incur costs to run the app store. Moreover, they're entitled to make a profit off the marketplace they created and support. So what's a reasonable percentage?
Any cut apple makes is too big in a corporation’s view. Even at 5% they will look to get it down to zero
> I just sometimes ask myself if people in previous centuries thought and lived as superficially as today. Or if, piece by piece, as times fade, their bad aspects retreat to the background and their goodness shines especially bright? At any rate I think that the individual, regardless of outcome, has to be vigilant, and especially when it is made hard for them. You also believe that this can never be levelled upwards, as desirable as that seems. When there is levelling, it always happens downwards. But here, too, there is a brilliant opportunity offered by fate to prove ourselves. Maybe one should not underestimate that, either.

-- Sophie Scholl
I cannot speak for the article you linked to, but the Zalando guys (from the "failure stories" talk) seem pretty experienced and do seem to know what they are speaking about...
Wow, 20 million developers paying $100. I had no idea it was that high. So they make $2 billion a year in just dev fees?

Do you have a source for that?
Talking about magic, Arthur C Clarke put it well:

http://lab.cccb.org/en/arthur-c-clarke-any-sufficiently-adva...

What you are saying is "Any Magic is just Sufficiently Advanced Technology" which I guess is the corollary :-)
haven't used any so wouldn't endorse, but the general category is 'roadmap' tools or what used to be called 'idea management'

there are some 'release management' or 'launch management' plugins for JIRA that address the other side of the pipeline, but solve similar problems -- also haven't used, but friends who are big-company PMs talk about them

IMO many saas products are inflexible, their strength ('we automate workflows') is also a weakness ('better not deviate from these workflows')

The only project management tool I've heard people rave about is airtable, which is basically an improved spreadsheet UX and not purpose-built for project management.

I suspect the future of project management saas is tools / plugins that provide summary views, but the tickets / specs exist in freeform spreadsheets like airtable. This 'view plugin' ecosystem is alread starting to exist for notion and roam.
Probably to satisfy legal duties. Someone, landlord or municipality, has a legal obligation to ensure that waste is dealt with regularly and appropriately. If they contract with a third party, they have fulfilled that legal obligation, and even if the trash piles up, the question becomes why did the third party not fulfill the contract. If the responsible party leaves it to scavengers, they are assuming liability should the trash pile up. Ultimately, this legal service is why the "legitimate" business isn't providing the exact same service as scavengers, though I agree with you it is less efficient at waste removal.
WTF are you talking about? Subscriptions on iOS are the nicest, most customer-friendly I've ever seen on any computing platform ever.
so what would the experience be for someone new joining the project, particular if you have many repositories? having to search across numerous repositories? In practice I've found this (source control commit messages as ADR's) doesn't work. Unless I have mistaken what you have said? I just keep a repository for ADR's, which can then be published to a wiki or else where.
Most of the focus on the legal position but the damage to Apple's brand shouldn't be underestimated here. Hey was a big deal for a small group but Fortnite will hit a much, much wider audience.

The 1984 video was a clever and calculated move.
FWIW one of my biggest annoyances in gaming is how closed consoles are - i have a PS Vita, which is a great gaming handheld hardware-wise, but totally a victim to Sony's whims software-wise (they even disabled and removed all PSM games).

Similar with Nintendo's Switch - Nintendo even tried to shut down a YouTuber's channel just for mentioning homebrew/jailbreaking for Switch.

It is such a shame and honestly i wish these devices were as open as PCs are. That they aren't is a testament to how much they have brainwashed people to think as normal that they have no control over their own devices and what they can do with them.
Copyright on macOS, and patents makes Apple phones the products of a company with a legal monopoly.

Are they an illegal monopoly in the US? Well, that's trickier. There are several reasons for and against. There are lots of phone brands, hundreds worldwide depending on how you count, and Apple are the are the largest phone and tablet brand with almost 50% of the US market.

Only Samsung is even close when it comes to phones, but afaik they have nowhere near the same profit margins.

Whether they are monopolistic or not, both Apple and Google has shown clear monopolistic behavior regarding their respective app stores, with Apple seemingly the more egregious.
The game is free to users but that doesn't mean Apple can't charge the developer for installs, especially if the developer is making a profit through in-app sales.
It is much easier now, COVID-19 pushed messaging tools to build hipaa compliant version.
Messaging: both twilio and sendbird provides hipaa compliant api
Video: daily.co
Forms: jotform
AWS: backend data storage
Mobile device: data storage using realms encrypting
Do you believe that the flu poses a more significant risk than COVID-19, despite being both more contagious and more deadly?
Some years we still have flu pandemics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957–1958_influenza_pandemic

That’s 1+ million deaths when world population was less than 1/2 what it is today.
No, they haven't. Android usually permits software beyond the Google Play store but this is deliberately an obscure and deeply second-rate option. Android does what it can to steer users away.
>Creation of Bacterial Cells with 5-Hydroxytryptophan as a 21st Amino Acid Building Block

https://www.cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451-9294(20)30363-6?_re...
Netflix and Amazon make you carry out purchases offline, and then they don’t pay for the store fee.

Why doesn’t Epic just have a subscription model, wouldn’t that circumvent the App Store?

Credit card companies charge 3% just to swipe a credit card (and fixed fees can make small transactions 10-15%) — Apple is charging for hosting the game, certifying and ensuring security for its user base, and carrying out the financial transaction. What would be the appropriate percentage?
If they were just there for trust, then the 3rd most valuable company on Earth, valued at over a trillion dollars, with billions in cold hard cash, would have no need for the tithe. Make no mistake, Apple is rent-seeking, not establishing trust. How much do you actually think it costs to provide trust? 30%? That's obscene. Many organizations provide better levels of trust for free. Wake up, there's no need for you to subserve yourself to these malpractices.
Not when the health outcomes will financially cripple us all. We simply can not afford to continue having mass outbreaks of this disease. It costs absolute fortunes to deal with the immediate crisis, and fortunes more over the long term dealing with survivors’ continued ill health. “My choice” is simply not compatible with maintaining a healthcare system or even a productive economy.
I like the font they use at the end, anybody got its name?
My girlfriend has an iPhone and an android phone. She is 29, she has accidentally installed malware from the play store, multiple times.

Anecdote yes, but the fact it happened in my house and more than once opened my eyes significantly to the problem.

My grandparents have no chance if my girlfriend gets got.

You and I live in a microcosm, most people on this site have a very finely tuned bullshit filter. Don’t assume everyone does, even the young.
Because you could charge up to 29% less to draw out direct purchases and still make more than an App Store purchase.
Goodwill is of course lovely. But that's not a plan of financing the project. No money, no full-time employee, not enough developer-power to keep up with the ever-evolving web standard, and hence not competitive against the chromium family.

And even if this better-will project is formed, and funded, and worked, there is nothing stopping the team from picking up all the bait-and-switch, corporate speak, etc., when they are wearing the same shoes as Mozilla.

In any rate, it's not as simple as someone with better-will to fork the project. I'd rather stay with Mozilla for now, because 1) they are a public entity who cannot commit an evil deed and simply ghost everyone, so they have the motivation to not be hated too much, and 2) they are the only player other than Webkit family and the Chromium family on the browser market, while nobody else has the power to even enter the competition (at least for now).
> Handles were used all the way through System 7

Handles continued to be used all the way through Mac OS 9, as they were used by a ton of critical Toolbox APIs like the Resource Manager. A vestigal version even existed in Mac OS X -- handles still existed in Carbon, but I'm not sure they would ever be relocated by the system like they were previously.

> of course these later gen machines did have MMUs.

They did, but it was only used to simulate a system with more physical memory. Every process still saw the same view of a single "flat" memory space.
Yeah that is fair. That assumes that the developer passes the cost on to the user and the alternative app stores take 0-10%.

Here is my fear. I like most, not all, of the restrictions the App Store puts on apps. If there were alternative app stores developers might only provide their apps on those stores that don't provide the same user protections I value. This is why I would prefer Apple to resolve this without allowing other app stores. I think this could be done by adjusting their rules and reducing the amount they take.
What is the argument against, and dangers, of simply maintaining their app store where they continue their strict quality control & take the fees, while also allowing 3rd party app stores?

App devs can choose to participate in Apple's store and pay fee or not or both. 3p allows users to load any apps at their own risk. Put a permissions popup explaining the danger. Maybe it would open up more jailbreaking. Don't allow drive by downloads, users would have to download the 3rd party stores from the app store. Probably only the most determined / technical users would load a 3p store thus protecting the majority
Yoshua Bengio: From System 1 to System 2 Deep Learning
Epic literally tried to only have Fortnite available via direct apk/themselves. It did not go well.
Jobs was all of that and more. Modern personal computing wouldn't exist without his insistence at making "Computers for the rest of us". There were many quite pissed at Apple for selling pre-assembled, ready to use computers. It was thought that unless you could assemble your machine you didn't deserve it.

Heck you see a lot of that attitude today in many open source projects.

And that's just one way he pushed modern computing into what it is today. Did he perform every detail himself? Nope - that would be absurd. But he took things that until that time no one else correlated, and he correlated and pushed for them. Often with amazing presence. And it wasn't willy-nilly, either.

I mean just look at the way he handled this OpenDoc troll:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

How many can compose themselves and deliver that kind of a response that quickly? Not many.

So yeah, those who try to dismiss Jobs as just a marketing or product guy are only displaying their profound ignorance. I don't think Jobs was perfect - far from it. But he certainly did make a dent in the universe, and many others too - perhaps it is a good thing that people like Jobs are pretty rare but there is no doubt we would all be a lot poorer if he hadn't existed.
How much more did they prepare beforehand lol
Wow, what they did is brilliant. Direct way to show consumer harm due to the iOS fees.
If there is any group we should be most cautious about when it comes to the unknown long-term risks it's children because they have the longest term that they'll be stuck dealing with it. For a 60 or 70 year old when we talk "long-term effects" we're talking 10-20 years. When we're talking about potential long-term effects for a 10 year old it's an entire lifetime - 50, 60, 70, even 80 years of unknown physical and financial burden. I'm not a parent but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that parents would be very troubled by that kind of potential downside no matter how remote or unknown or unquantifiable the possibility.
If you travel, vaccinations are sometimes not optional, depending on the destination.
Our small business could fund dedicated programmers and accountants to handle all that and still come out ahead compared to what we get hit by Apple for. 30% of annual revenue on Apple devices per year is millions for many small software companies. Money we used to get from direct web sales. And we have a nightmare time getting app updates released due to their opaque and unfriendly review process with no accountability. Not to mention their horrific tooling. Apple is a blight on the industry.
Start giving the chance to competitors to enter the market, then if they cannot undercut apple you are right. Until they can't even try, we don't know.

Maybe they will even just "compete orthogonally" instead of just trying to work around the parameters you talk about. I don't know... maybe a store without IAPs will be born where games cost more but you get the full game and you know the author is not gonna try to gamify-casino you. Maybe someone will make a store which allows me to buy an app both for android and iOS in a single purchase at a lower price than buying both separately.

Maybe whatever, I don't know, but I for sure want to know what I could get.
5x more worried? That implies measuring “worriedness” on a ratio scale (ie a scale with fixed zero). This wasn’t discussed in the article. Maybe they meant “5x more parents are worried,” although looks more like 3.5x
This could be great news.

Might finally get the ball rolling on a court case to stop the huge app store abuses by Apple and Google.
> Not only that, but this is the biggest omission of the truth: Making your own server is no longer possible because of assertions. All Snaps are now digitally signed by Canonical, so you actually need to have the end-user install a forked snap tool on their system to access the custom repository. You cannot disable this signing - your only way around it is to manually download the snap and install it with `--dangerous` through the CLI. And you won't get auto updates that way.

The blogpost is very clear that each _device_ is made to point to a single store. If you want to point it to a different store, you have to recompile snapd to include your own certificate.

This is why I talk about, for example, Manjaro having their own store. Since they compile snapd, they get to choose what certificate is used and so what store is being used.
Ten % Is more than reasonable. But the point here is that not o my do they charge 30%, they forbide you from selling from outside their store.
Keeping kids out of school _is_ a decision, and not an easy one when having kids at home means the parents can't work.
... the developer on Thursday implemented its own in-app payment system that bypassed Apple’s standard 30 percent fee.

...1,000 V-bucks, which is roughly equivalent to $10 in-game Fortnite currency, now costs just $7.99 if you use Epic direct payment instead of the standard Apple payment processing. Normally, that amount of currency costs $9.99. Epic says, in this case, customers keep the extra savings, not the company. That cast the new arrangement as a pro-consumer move instead of a greedy power play.

My math skills aren't the best but it seems like epic is still pocketing almost an extra dollar there than previously (almost 10%), indicating that this is move motivated by financial gain (if not greed). Of course Apple stands out as the bigger case of "highway robbery".

I am somewhat curious on how much apple spends on maintaining the app store and how much of that %30 is net profit.
Really?

If we are being candid, many software developers helped crowned the Tyrant king.

The majority of developers focused on building for iOS and treated Android as a second class citizen.

Developers set the prices and in a race to the bottom, many developers set the price to $0.99. I remember the apps that had reasonable prices were often criticized by consumers because other developers set their prices so low.

30% take was there from the start of the app store before Apple become the most profitable smartphone maker. Developers should never have agreed to the take in the early days, but short term thinking prevailed.

If the vast majority of developers from the start refused to build for the iPhone until Apple had favorable terms or gave customers the option to allow third-party installs things would be different. Perhaps developers should work together to solve the problem they help create? Are developers want Apple to change would are they willing to coordinate a response? A coordinated response could mean the top 50 developers building mobile web apps & writing a letter to Apple that they are removing their apps from the Apps store and alerting their customers as well.

The idea is not so far fetched, see: https://deadline.com/2019/07/cbs-blackout-directv-u-verse-at...

Will a web app have all the features of the iOS app? of course not, but if Apple wins the legal case, this seems like the only real option to get Apple to change. Because most of Apple costumers are not bothered by Apple developers policy.
I've built pre-parsing layers for queries that can explode out params properly for IN() handling - though depending on your SQL variant you can also get away with string passing an array to get around that.

Conditional WHERE seems unapproachable with this tool - which is one of my doubts about the need of a tool like this.

If you instead approach your SQL by having each query wrapped in a function in an isolated part of your code base you, as a company/team/whatever, can choose how much logic to let reside inside of those functions - building up conditional WHERE clauses is a very common thing to need to do.
Store exclusives have been a thing since forever.
It’s about time someone is standing up to apples smug anticompetitive behavior. Hopefully more major developers and game platforms will join suit.