skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In all this dick-measuring, the people that lose out are the consumers.

Apple maintaining a stupid and unjustifiable premium forced higher prices.

Companies retaliating with this sort of posturing from Epic forces App Store removals and worse.

Epic are hypocrites. Apple are greedy. I’ll back the horse that’s neither
Steam changed a while back: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18120577/valve-steam-gam...

It's now 30% for the first $10 million, 25% for $10-$50 million, and 20% thereafter.

Also relevant here would be Epic Games Store, which is 12%. Also relevant here, is payment processors are way, way less than 30%, which is all that's used/needed for in-app purchases.
If you (are crazy enough to) do XLM programming then you will need this: https://github.com/xlladdins/xll/blob/master/docs/Excel4Macr...
> I don’t know why people feel it’s their undeniable right to be able to provide an app to iOS users.

Rephrased:

> I don't know why people feel it's their undeniable right to install the apps they want on iOS.
i used the form and emailed abuse@ (for sites blatantly impersonating relief effort organizations at the onset of covid-19)

all attempts got responses like "cool, but we don't do any of that. please contact google safe-site(tm) beta or something and get it blocked on the browser via that".

Everyone here posting that they replied probably used email from a domain that is an expensive paid customer from them. I used a @gmail one.
On the contrary, it is quite low versus what previous app stores for J2ME, Symbian, ringtones used to charge for.
It’s no more realistic to say “if you don’t like the licensing terms of your game engine then just rewrite your game.”
Invalid Traffic
No, there is one other phone platform.
I think "behind" is not the right way to put it. It only has the basic functionalities, but these are crucial and the implementation looks state-of-the-art to me (at a glance). It doesn't have the fancier machine-learning algorithms, true.
wayback link https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...
If you liked 688(I), I strongly recommend giving Dangerous Waters a shot. It’s a sequel made by the company, featuring submarines as well as surface and helicopter platforms, and is currently on sale.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1600/Dangerous_Waters/
Certisfy Wants to Make Internet Information Trust an Inexpensive Commodity
The constraints on data visualization are not the same as the constraints on an IDE, which is closer to what we were building. Also, our users could definitely "process" the data faster than it could be rendered, because what they were doing most of the time was skimming through it for points of interest. They were not sitting and deeply considering each data point one at a time; they could glance at a page and know in a moment whether what they were looking for was there, or whether they needed to scroll further, or whether they needed to tweak the query and re-run it or click a link to a different screen. It was muscle-memory for them, and the tiniest hitch was frustrating to the user experience.
Is it time for Epic to invest in the PinePhone?
What does “representing” something in memory mean in OOP?
And this is your choice, should you limit your use to the app store.

Now explain why the rest of us have to be limited to your choice only on our $1000+ mobile computers.
Apple set a new lower precedent versus J2ME, Symbian, ringtone app stores.
> struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.

If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line.

Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.
I don't think that matters because its clear the end consumer would benefit here if epic were allowed their own payment system.
This is great news, it will take a handfull of 'killer apps' to possibly move the needle.

App makers could start to 'play games' like trying different pricing models that 'go outside the bounds' and the 'come back' - making sure to blame Apple for the problems.

App makers could group together and 'go black' for a few days in protes.

App makers could group together and all circumvent the rules at the same time.
I think we all pay for it. Unless you live in a very remote area, the air will be polluted nevertheless (though to a lesser degree, sure).
Discussion of Apple topics here on HN almost always gets reduced to the argument that Apple is not a monopoly, so what they are doing is OK. I want to present an alternative viewpoint. It's not a monopoly issue, it is an anti-competitive issue.

In Canada, we have three major cell carriers. None of them has a monopoly, or anything close to it. None of them has even 50% market share.

You can have a 10 GB smartphone plan with Rogers for $75. If you don't like that, you can switch to Bell's 10 GB plan for $75. If you don't like Bell, of course you can switch to Telus's 10 GB plan for, wait for it, $75.

The Big 3 operate smaller brands with fewer bells and whistles and lower costs. You can get a 4 GB cell plan from Koodo (Telus subsidiary) for $50, or from Fido (Rogers subsidiary) for $50, or from Virgin Mobile (Bell subsidiary) for $50.

Sometimes one of them has promotional pricing, like $45 instead of $50 for 4GB. The other two offer the same pricing for the same duration. Sometimes one of them increases their prices by $5 a month citing reasons such as infrastructure investments, lower Canadian dollar value, or inflation. The other two increase their prices by the same amount a couple of days later.

And none of this is collusion in the legal sense. They don't gather in smoke-filled rooms and decide how to screw over their customers. There is not back-channel communication whatsoever. And it is not because the competition is so perfect the prices have been commoditized. In fact, Canada has some of the highest cell plan prices in the world, even adjusting for factors such as population density and GDP.

It's just that the big companies have decided to stop competing. If you live in, say Alberta or Ontario or BC, you have three options and they are all the same overpriced crap. Cell carriers in Canada are not a monopoly, but you don't have to be a monopoly to harm customers with anti-competitive behaviour. Apple and Google, Android and iOS do not have a monopoly or a collusion agreement. But they are harming the customers all the same.
Turf wars happen all the time. If there's a turf war over trash then that suggests that we're throwing away lots of valuable items in an inefficient manner.
Yes, which is why they should be mandated by law to include them anyway. Maybe that will force them to figure out a better security strategy.
If you've got time to read 6 posts, there's a very in-depth response to that quote starting here: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
This is encouraging. People are most worried about the most serious problem.
Epic Games files lawsuit against Apple
Doesn't every single payment provider do this though?
In a theoretical anti-trust investigation wouldn’t that been seen as extremely anti-competitive?
Quick correction - 15% faster was overall, it was 50% faster for ambulances.
Comparing a payment processing fee to hosting content on a store site is completely disingenuous. The costs are wildly little different and it’s unlikely any App Store like Apples could even pay for itself with only a 10% cut, for example..
Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]
Why I chose sex as the example?

It is scientific concensus that our genes survive through sex and that by optimizing for their own survival our genes have made sex the strongest possible behavioral motivator. It is also agreed upon that the desire for sexual exploration is higher for males, because their genes can spread more widely through additional partners, while a typical female can only get pregnant by one partner at a time.

You'll find that non-traditional pairings will have very little effect on genetic evolution, because they tend to not produce genetically related offspring.

So the study says "adults are less interested in exploration" and to that I reply "we have literally optimized our genes for adult male exploration over hundreds of thousands of years".

Isn't that a rather large omission in the study, that they didn't mention the single most powerful motivator for exploration?
They took the post down. I'd say either delete the thread or change the URL to an archived link
The are abusing a dominant position (as the only seller of iOS devices) to cross subsidise their software business and muscle out competitors in the services space (Apple Music vs other music services). That is a fairly clear breach of antitrust rules.

The prohibition of third party transactions or third party App stores are less clear to breach, but there is a case to be made...
But CO2 isn't bad, nor is it a pollutant. The rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere is what's bad.

I understand the intended implication, but the vernacular is pendulum swinging too far in the wrong way factually against CO2.

Nitpicky, but hey this is HN, and I can be unpopular at this party, too! :-P
I’ve been coding professionally for almost twenty years. Time (especially DST and edge cases like December 31st and leap years) problems are always going to be a problem.

Personal favorite: “the time” in the Gaza Strip depends on whether you are Israeli or Palestinian...
Cool. If you have a spreadsheet that's longer-lived than a few hours, you should probably evaluate whether you're adopting the best approach. You can replace a blown fuse with a penny, too, but you should probably call an electrician instead.
It's interesting how the industry is shaking up in so many different ways lately.

1. TikTok and WeChat getting banned (This will also have a huge side effect for Apple)

2. Uber and Lyft regulated to classify drivers as employees

3. Influential companies trying to tear down the Apple payment walled garden (Last time it was Hey, but this time it's Fortnite, which is infinitely more formidable). Now the only thing left is for Google to come out and say "we're going to charge zero commission for our in-app payments", and the wall will be down pretty soon.

I feel like there's some pattern here that may change the overall game of the tech industry. Grabbing some popcorn and waiting for new opportunities to open up!
Mastercard, Visa etc all take a fee for transactions.

There are serious costs involved in running an international payments system.

But that's very different from a proper 30% style cut.
are you suggesting they had any alternative if they wanted to pursue iPhone customers?
It’s so strange to me that after all this time they’re sticking with the high fee. The App Store is a major feature of the iOS platform and Apple benefits greatly from a healthy app ecosystem and user lock in. I would argue the 30% fee may not be a net gain for Apple.
Thank you. It's exactly clarifying comments like this, that is my main reason for posting articles here.
I don't think anyone is upset about the ability of a snap app to update without user intervention. It's the lack of choice. You're forced to take updates.
"low value dismissal" is the antecedent of the pronoun "it". On HN we routinely ignore low value dismissals. You know this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
But is that required on each and every platform available on the market?

Sure, there should be more platforms available. I'm into that. Personally, I bought an iPhone because of the closed ecosystem. I don't want to have to think about my phone that much, but I want to be able to rely on it. That's what I paid for and that's what I'm getting.

From my perspective demanding that the platform be open to any and everything is a bit like going to a carwash and demanding they also do your house.
If you’re not published on Apple’s App Store then you can’t reach a huge segment of the market that would like to use your product. I don’t think Apple, Google, etc. , should be the gatekeepers between a developer and their customers.
There are three problems. One that even with the resources MS has at it's disposal it's taken them half a decade to make their framework cross platform. Second it makes sense for them to target the big three that represents 95% of the market. And Linux desktop isn't one of those. And third the Linux community is hostile. Back in 2010 they could have embraced Mono which was sorely needed but didn't out of just spite.

Brings up a third point when talking about development. Microsoft is providing a posix compatible dev environment under Win10. The threat that poses is completely unappreciated.
To a degree they could (although it'd be quite embarrassing for Apple to claim that their OS can't prevent apps from damaging phones), it could be somewhat similar to how Android manufacturers sometimes handle custom ROMs by having the unlock set a permanent flag somewhere. Doesn't necessarily give them an out of legally required warranties.
> No, I'm asking if they will allow people to buy digital PC titles on EGS via direct purchase to the developer and bypass the percentage EGS takes.

And why would Epic do that? Apple doesn't allow you to buy apps on the app store without the cut. Epic is not advocating that. Nobody is advocating that. Rather, Epic is allowing in-app purchases in their app without giving apple a cut.

The question would be, when you sell a game on EGS, can you allow in app purchases outside of EGS?
Does somebody know the answer to this?
Nice site

I thought iweb were cheapest. Can't believe I ever used Hargreaves Lansdowne

Have you ever read monevator? It's good for this info too
Speaking of eyes I wonder if you can "inhale" it into your eyes too.

Viruses can enter the body more than just orally and even though we think it's primarily through the respiratory system, we aren't sure yet.

Even having expressed doubt, something is better than nothing. And if it eliminates requiring face masks it would be worth it alone for that.
Not doing anything might be worse. Within a month, all major money-making apps would make a similar move, hiding the functionality from Apple’s review process and then activating it once most of their users have upgraded.

Apple could spend time and money trying to find such hidden features, but that would mean many major apps would see no updates. That’s a losing game, too, even if they are successful at detecting such hidden functionality.

They must have thought about this and decided this is their optimal initial response (it need not be the final one. They can put the app back in their store in seconds)

I can understand that. Allowing this is guaranteeing the end of the App Store. Fighting gives them a chance salvaging it, parts of it, or at least, delay the inevitable.
iOS is the market leader by profit share and by amount of money spent on app stores, as Apple fans like to talk about all the time. In a sane world, being a market leader would mean that shareholder and corporate interests are kept in check by society.
Consuming less does not fix the bulk of energy demand, and this particulates in air. It helps with the trash side of the problem mostly.

Traveling less would do more, or using more public transport.
Bulk transit of non-food goods is very energy efficient, the last mile is not.

See website Without Hot Air as a rough but thorough analysis.
>If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.

I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an adfarm full of SEO gibberish. Or to use a common example, suppose you make a no-nonsense site with some nifty, original cooking recipes. You fall out of the search results because you aren't padding your recipes with pages of irrelevant anecdotes and other filler material. How is that "deserved"?
They did have something that was intended to evolve into something like that, I think, but it was half-hearted, somewhat tucked away, and never gained any real traction: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/WebIDE
Illegal does not imply monopoly, either.
Why would a natively Russian speaking team misspell this word? Is it possible this software wasn't developed in Russia/by Fancy Bear or that it's some sort of play on words that I don't understand as an English speaker?
I used to work stock at a bunch of retail stores for a decade and could see what percentage the markup was. It was almost never above 20%, and usually closer to 3-5%.
It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here...

Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.

You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.

The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.

When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.

Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.

Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
No, that’s not a correct comparison. Consumers don’t buy a device from Epic in order to run Unreal engine games. Consumers don’t care at all what engine a game runs on, they only care about the game itself (and what platform it’s available on).

If you forgo the iOS platform, you lose out on the vast majority of mobile app revenue. Android may have greater market share than Apple but iOS dominates the market among people who actually buy apps (mostly affluent people in western countries).
Exactly this, you can even look at the old consoles and see the same thing. They were built to a VERY specific margin and tuned for the same. There is as best I can tell no fat in any of the systems shipped except newer consoles and the original xbox. The only reason I'd say there is 'fat' in newer consoles is because they have much wider requirements than old ones do.
Do you really think they wouldn’t maximize their profit anyway? Being more expensive in the appstore is just politics.
This comment misses the point though.

If you want to be happy with using the store for all your life's needs - that's completely fine. Nobody will argue with you here.

Otherwise, people should be able to download as they please.

Imagine if your electricity company only allowed 'approved Toasters' on their electric grid, complete with special plugins, and a 30% cut of the device.

It's an anti-competitive practice as old as time.
> If a developer doesn't like Apple's terms, there are no viable alternatives for iOS distribution.

Lots of opportunities for mobile distribution though. Apple is what, < 20% of the mobile market? (I know where you're coming from, but this is what Apple's legal team will say).
Everything that's illegal was first something someone didn't like.
They really don't have a choice. Every app developer thinks the 30% fee is excessive and if Apple lets one company get away with it everybody else is going to follow suit.
Last I looked, Apples gross services margins were around 66%, which implies a break even for the store at a 10% fee.
Given that the QOI is a single multinomial proportion, an unweighted[1] random sample of the population has a maximum[2] ~3.1% margin of error on either side.

You could argue the QOI is something else (the sum or difference, or even the ratio estimator reported in the title). Margins of error on ratio estimators are quite a bit larger because of numerical properties of ratios.

Since there is interest, I ran a quick simulation[3] to derive the CI of the ratio estimate above ("5x"). By Monte Carlo and using standard assumptions, the confidence interval on the "5X" quantity of interest is 4.51 - 6.82x calculated via the quantile method.[4]

The confidence interval is not appreciably smaller in magnitude if you double the sample size, we're well past the point of diminishing returns.

[1] Weighting would induce a design effect, but here I would suggest that the real problem is a poorly defined population and sample frame, not sample error. This is the real issue here: we have zero reason to believe these 1,000 people are a random sample of any interesting population.

[2] For a parameter \theta = 0.5 -- uncertainly decreases as the statistic becomes further from 0.5. But classical MOEs overreport like this.

[3] R Code on Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/raw/UjHg7qnR

[4] Similar results come from taking the numerical sd of the sampling distribution and calculating a NACI about the mean, I just did the quantile trick because it's less code.
not sure what the brick and mortar equivalent is. what does that mean?

retailers pay suppliers some wholesale cost for their goods. doesn’t seem like an analogous situation to a marketplace that takes a fixed cut of every sale.
Yep. If you have to spend a week in hospital in the US it can break you even if you have "decent" insurance. Three words that strike terror into the hearts of Americans: "Out of network"
company policies are a funny thing.

I know of a business that had a policy that fired someone for missing work 3 times without notice. So... an employee missed work 5+ times and then got fired. That employee sued AND WON because the company didn't fire at 3, they waited until 5. If a company has a policy or ToS they need to enforce it.
There is no comparison to be made between TikTok and those platforms on the grounds of the combination of popularity and emotional retardation.