skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There are literally hundreds of Android phones, yet people are willing to pay more for iPhones."

Because there are hundreds of manufacturers of Android ones, and only one for Apple. Microeconomics states that in a competitive market, price will tend to the marginal cost, and this is exactly what happened in Android. It is not "what people are willing to pay", it's that Android phones have competitive pressures that are downward on price. At the high end, people pay as much for Huawei Mate P30s as they do for iPhones, because there are few phones at that tier.

Your rebuttal actually proves my point exactly. If Apple licensed iOS, and let clone makers sell iPhone clones, the price would plummet, even if all of the features were the same -- same OS, same HW performance, etc.

Apple's creation of their own little walled garden, complete with path dependency, and slick marketing, has created a premium that would not exist if independent manufacturers could sell clones.

This is why PCs were cheaper than Macs, when clearly PCs had WAY WAY better HW than Macs, way better CPUs, GPUs, et al, for much lower price points, yet people paid more for Macs. Even back in the pre-OSX days, the PowerPC days, the Motorola days, people paid more for less, again, because of the way Apple locks in a chuck of their market with incompatible path-dependency.

I mean, I had an Amiga in the 80s, it had 4-channel stereo sound, 4096 colors, multitasking, awesome games, on a great C= monitor, and the comparable machine at the time was this tiny 128k 9" B&W display machine, which was hideously slow because it didn't even have enough RAM, and cost well over 200% more. Amiga had vertically integrated all-custom chips like Apple brags about today. It was the premium machine, so ask yourself why some people paid 200% more. It could do substantially less, graphically, and in terms of software available for it. And before you say "desktop publishing", in college I used TeX to do all of my work, and the output quality was superior with less effort. For the home PC user, it was way way overpriced for underpowered hardware and a paultry software selection. This is what Apple was competing against in the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs

I'm an iPhone user, I've owned every iPhone since standing in line in 2007 to get one of the first. I use a Macbook as my primary laptop. So I'm not anti-Apple, but frankly all of the things I use iPhone or Macbooks for have NOTHING to do with their locked down App Store, refusal to allow me to install third party browser engines, or specify default apps, or side-load apps.

I want Apple to stop locking down freedom and when they sell me a computer or phone, let me OWN IT an do what I want with it. If Apple's ARM OSX Macs turn into a locked down system like their ARM iPad/iPhone, then this Macbook Pro and Mac Pro I own will be the last Apple devices I own, and it's hello Hackintosh or Linux desktop.
Curious to your thoughts regarding the mafia whacking witnesses who are about to testify in court.
Good points there, very interesting about the way other countries respect their land as a shared gift.

The US is huge though, there are some areas that are completely remote for hundreds of miles.
I guess the answer is no... assuming 1 is on the bottom:

1->2; 1->4; 2->3; 3->4

Unless 4 is slanted.
Building a city that way probably isn't the way of the future.

Do a google for the concept of "arcologies".
Are you referring to the secure enclave?
Because people know the difference between websites and apps.
What makes you think that there's only been a tweet's worth of text on the matter? Furthermore, why should the movement he spearheaded suffer because others can't be bothered to try to understand a brilliant, eccentric, neurodivergent individual?

Frankly speaking, I think most of the "normal mainstream" that condemned Stallman without even bothering to check up on and verify the facts of the accusations made against him outed themselves as easily manipulated, savage, and unstable individuals with little or no consideration for the damage they heaped upon a man who was doing nothing more than trying to encourage postponing of judgement until the facts were all in. In that one, tragically twisted-by-the-media email, Stallman did exactly what any civilized person who believes in the tenets of our system of justice should have done. He called for calm, and to give his friend the benefit of a doubt until all the facts were in. The "weird creepy guy" acted more in line with the ideal of normalcy than anyone else!

I'd take 100 more people just like him with all the inherent quirks than any of the mob who rushed to condemn him without even so much as getting to know him. I mean, good God. Show me someone who hasn't had a questionable view in their life from lack of reflection, and I'll show you someone who hasn't actively tried to get to know all the many facets of their species, or consciously come to terms with their own capacity for atrocity.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone! Til then, people need to nut up, shut up, and take a damn number. Thank who/whatever they worship they woke up this morning, and give thanks but that there for the Grace of $Subject_of_Worship go I.

Now get off my lawn, and keep your damn chickens out of my garden! They may be cute, but they're ruining my sprouts!

grumble grumble
that thunderstorm WAS epic, best I've seen since I lived here. Had the windows open all night, it was wonderful. it rained pretty hard at times here (Redwood City)
> the complete editing history of the Linux kernel (probably the largest Git repo ever created)

Linux is definitely not the largest git repo ever created [0]. The big corporate monorepos are definitely larger; I know MS has moved Windows to git, and itself claims it to be the largest ever created (~300GB as of 2017, per [1]). Google and Facebook both eschew git, though.

Finding data on the largest open repos is more difficult. The largest classes of projects are those that develop in monorepos that implement critical operating system [2] functionality, browser engines, and compiler implementations. The shortlist I'd make comes out to these projects (in no particular order):

* gcc

* LLVM

* Mozilla

* Chromium

* Linux

* OpenJDK

I haven't finished downloading all of these repos (my disk is begging me to stop right now), but it looks Linux is larger than gecko-dev by a very thin margin (so a putative gecko-dev that included comm-central with its CVS history as well would easily outstrip Linux), and Chromium seems to be an order of magnitude over both.

[0] To be clear here, I'm mostly thinking in terms of primarily textual repositories. Repositories with large binary assets are clearly not relevant for your means.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o..., although https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411724 claims that the 300 GB measures the size of the checked-out directory on disk, not the putative size of a full .git folder.

[2] I'm including both kernel roles as well as key userspace roles. Qt and Gnome would both be on my list of putative largest repos were they monorepos, but they appear to use many small repos instead.
I bought my cash register at Wal-Mart and I happily send in 30 percent of my profits there every month.
According to the news, this is the first rolling blackout since 2001, which, yeah, was bogus.
They’ve gone from being so old they’re crap to being so old that they’re cool again. All the sweet deals now are on 90s camera equipment.

The autofocus versions of the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens are competitive or cheaper compared to the manual focus ones even though they have identical optical formulas and the manual focus ones are almost guaranteed to need an expensive professional overhaul at this point.
All new technology is overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term.

Sort of like speech recognition... it was going to be big! and then it really couldn't understand as well as people thought... and it sort of fell out of the limelight. But quietly it started to be used for phones and now it's pretty much here.
Recently my MBP 2015 couldn’t boot because of the dead battery. I asked authorized repair centre and they quoted 400EUR as they need to order whole topcase. This is such a ripoff from Apple. Almost no one ships batteries cross border now. Finding a good replacement is almost an impossible task. The only thing I want the battery to be safe (not catching on fire or damaging my MBP)
Peak charges here (generation + delivery) are $0.56/kWh. That's insane. When I put in the solar array this number was $0.16. And I was told my rate was grandfathered in.
The iPhone without an App Store doesn’t work fine to install software.

Remember - they originally said - just use web apps, but developers demanded a way to install software, and Apple developed the App Store in response to that demand.
I wonder why that is? I guess the relative ease with which software is created and published?

Do civil engineers have the opportunity to create the bridge version of Linux as their masters project? I think the physical limitations of bridge building means that there isn't a great analog to Linux in the civil engineering field.

The only field I can come up with that could behave similar to software is art. Why don't artist release art "open source" for others to use and transform? I could certainly see compensation as a factor: artists are famously underpaid so they are not willing to work for free. Or maybe it's a cultural thing, where lots of people using your open source library translates into respect for the author, but lots of people ripping off an artist could have the opposite effect?
> its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.

ahh yes, seems like the "looking for toilet paper in all the wrong places" phenomenon where there's no lack of supply, but the existing supply lines head to the wrong places. (all the industrial/office stuff is idled, while rural locations are blasting AC in ways they've never seen before)
I 2nd this recommendation. If nothing else, it helps to have fewer recursive queries which are still treated as optimization barriers when you need to do complex queries joining to your DAG. So using a nice indexable ltree is much better for performance when your queries get complicated.
We have Peninsula Clean Energy which is actually cheaper than PG&E (unless you pay the small upcharge for '100% renewable', which we do).. however, it makes your bill impossible to comprehend. TOU, different tiers, different buckets depending on time of year, generation charges, generation credits.. add solar on top of that... net metering 2.0... good luck!
That’s a part of the machine therefore it would technically be included by the statement given on the right to repair policy page.

Obviously that page is meant to be a high level statement, it’s not law. But hopefully you can see my point.
When I buy an Apple device, it isn't a computer, it's a rented Apple shelf. That is what this roughly means.

Imagine Microsoft saying that I can not install Steam because Steam doesn't agree to MS payment setup. You can't imagine because MS doesn't have that control, it wanted to though, long back.

Apple has this control. It is bad for consumers.
All my homies hate C
so many great european games! and the demoscene was amazing!
I could probably find evidence of a high correlation between Football performance and performance in a medieval swordfight, but does that mean it's necessary to stab people? Obviously people who have better social skills are better at deception, and for that matter people with more general intelligence are better at it. What I'm looking for is an example of a case where deception is "necessary," not useless or destructive.
It's probably worse than that.

It's a model of reality as filtered through the human brain, with all of its neuroses, most of which we have only begun to model.

Aren't we stuck on things like sarcasm? How are you going to model everything from confirmation bias to undisclosed PTSD, in order to have a prayer of filtering the noise from actionable information?
Awesome read. Cool to learn about Charlie "Triumph of the Underdog" Mingus standing up for Brubeck's non-conformity when bop took over.
https://twitter.com/goldbe/status/1295528530646892545?s=20
Industrious people like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Larry Page, and Sundar Pichai?
Because people want a genuine part (reliable battery). I would pay the price if the battery was max 200eur. Nope, Apple is greedy. In my case they wanted 400Eur (together with top case)
We are having conversation with the engineering result from applying CS and physics.

Seems to work relatively well.
Bank of Japan Refuses Trader Work from Home Due to Cybersecurity Risks
> Then there is also the AGPL, which isn't a Free Software license, but rather an end-user license agreement (EULA), because it violates Freedom Zero: the freedom to use software however you want.

If you have this opinion of the AGPL, then you should also have it about the GPL, since the only difference between the two is section 13 of both of them (seriously, just diff them) which says that conveying over a network also triggers copyleft. This is just a modernisation of plain ol' copyleft from the days when conveying was mostly done on physical media instead of over a network. If some day we discover a way to distribute software over neither a network nor physical medium (I can't imagine what that could be... quantum entanglement?), then the definition of "conveying" should be updated to reflect the new technology.

The GPL has long been considered open source by OSI and free software by the FSF. You are free to use the software however you want -- you're just not free to deny this freedom to your users or clients, with neither the GPL nor the AGPL.
I agree that ETFs are the sane default choice (assuming you curate the choices to low-fees and sensible aims). But there are definitely places where individual consumers can feel close enough to the ground to feel some specific market trends.

For example, just look at the how many PC hobbyists made a mint on AMD shares just by noticing "they launched a killer product in a time period when their biggest competitor has been whiffing badly?" They may not time the market perfectly, but plenty of them will end up well in the green.

This is really the classic, pre-ETF/mutual fund stock-investment model, though-- long holds and relying on actual performance, rather than day-trading and riding on volatility or diversified large numbers.
As someone without A/C, switching to TOU saved quite a bit of money (relatively speaking; my bills were not very large to begin with).
If Apple waived the 30% take if you used GameCenter or their game kits you think that would be seen as anti-competitive? Yes. What you have described is Epic engaging in anti-competitive behavior that isn't yet because they are the smaller of the store players.

I think people are short-sighted in what Apple did for gaming. Just go back to 2007.

Before Apple the only way to make a game was flash/PC with no markets other than sites.

Consoles and handhelds were for selected larger game studios only. Consoles always took 30% and it was near impossible to dev on them, very few indie programs.

Apple changed the game.

Apple opened up game development especially handheld.

That success of the App Store led to Google Play!.

It led to Unity and Unity Asset Store (which also takes 30%).

That led to Steam opening up (which also takes 30%). It even led to Epic Games store.

It also led to engines like Unity/Unreal being simplified. Unreal at one time was $300k per title, same with Valve, same with other engines. Now those are essentially free.

I sometimes think that Apple takes heat, yes some of their rules are annoying, but compared to consoles and the way it was before Apple it is massively better for indies/small/medium game companies. Mobile is in a space between open and console.

Epic is biting the hand that feeds here, and Unity would never even attempt something like this. I think Epic is pushed by Tencent to do this and there is deeper reasoning for this, but they are selling it as "for the greater good" which is a lie.
Essential Coding Theory [pdf]
This is a great question! I don’t actually know the precise condition for box-diagram-ability of a DAG, but I’ve spent a long time thinking about it; it’s partly why I wrote that program. It’s not a deterministic algorithm, it’s powered by a SAT solver which may return “UNSAT” indicating failure. If anyone has a better answer I would be _very_ interested in reading about it!
Thus the 5yr remark.
It becomes a lot harder to justify a 30% cut should 3rd party apps drive the majority of downloads.
Sure, but for how long.
The legislation I'd get behind is to enforce import / export of data across platforms a la. Google takeout but better where you can both export and import with a single click.

That is, rather than getting into some abstract arguments on what an App store should or shouldn't do the focus should be on lowering the cost of switching mobile / wearable computing platforms down to a single click of a button.

There is no issue with making an ecosystem more appealing by making them well integrated but there has to be an out of some kind for the consumer.

All those "Their app store, their rule" arguments don't hold water if you compare it to, say, AT&T holding your phone number hostage and claiming that they're not a monopoly and you can switch to another carrier but need to use a new phone number if you do.
> but that’s why I buy an iPhone and I want it to stay that way.

Ok. Now what if I were to tell you that you are perfectly capable of doing this, by simply not installing other app stores.

You dont need to metaphorically break into my house, and force me, at gun point to follow your rules as well.

You can do what you want with your phone, even if other people are able to do what they want with their own phone.

> If I wanted another App Store

Then just don't install the other app store? You have no said why you need to force me to do something, in order for you to get what you want.
How long is short term? Jobs has been dead for 9 years.
> essentially, "if the animal initiates it then what's the problem?"

Note that this is current law in Germany.
I'm curious if it's possible to build a 2015 MBP from scratch with aftermarket replacement components...
Fragile e-amber
I replaced it with the string method as well. I didn’t find a recipe to soften the glue before. Thanks
This is a great point!
What does that have to do with desktop environments?
Every single one of Apple’s competitors in the PC market were better capitalized in the 80s through 2005. Especially when Apple was almost bankrupt. The other companies were incompetent. They could have done the same thing.

There was no lock in with Macs - the same Software was available for Windows and more. Have you ever thought that it wasn’t just about the hardware?

Did Apple have a lock in on marketing that kept Microsoft and Google incapable of marketing their own devices?

Did Apple stop Commodore and Atari from executing?
A Singapore indie gaming startup earned $3.8m with its flagship titles
Heard about this before from this ppl [1]. As it appears, even meditation needs to be done in moderation...

1: https://www.cheetahhouse.org/
It’s annoying someone as prominent as Cory Doctorow would spread such obvious BS.
Over here in Germany I've been ordered back to the office (open plan, what else) for at least two months now. It feels like decisionmakers are scrambling to get the biggest slice of "back to normal" they can legally get before the therefore inevitable second wave takes it away again. WFH played out pretty well (the teams I know are badly implemented partial remote under regular circumstance, so going uniformly remote was an instant improvement), so it's just "because reasons". I suspect that it's nothing more than C level being afraid of appearing weak in front of owners.

Morale is low because it feels outright unethical when highly WFH-able offices are reopening while other businesses are still hemorrhaging money due to being forcibly closed. A community has a fixed transmission risk budget if it wants to keep the virus subdued and that allowable risk should be allocated on need, not based on first come first served.
Good on Ilford for keeping film alive. Fujifilm finally ran out of Acros 100 in their freezer, so now get Ilford to make it.

There’s some mystique around Oriental Seagull, but in reality it is “just” rebadged Kentmere. It was really cheap and nice for about 5 minutes back in 2016...
Given you need to be a bona-fide security researcher to qualify to gain access to a partially-unlocked iPhone[1] - I think you’re on to something: having DRM built-in to the lowest levels of the hardware means it’s possible for Apple to truly control the system.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/programs/security-research-devic...
I think it's a thing! https://github.com/imazen/imageflow
There are bots to find out mentions of specific keywords on HN.
It's tragic that the US has politicized this pandemic and decided that rolling the dice with student lives is the right outcome.
I've solved the replaying bit before with a brute approach and AWS Athena. It would ingest all the events from S3, filter the unwanted ones out, and put the rest in SQS ready for consumption. It was definitely expensive though, not something you would run often.
Just wonder, what are you gonna do next? You know, just my simple curiousity;)
I find some of what makes it into CACM is just absolute dreck. To be honest I think they are having trouble finding authors for articles. I can't tell you how many times I've seen articles from Kate Matsudaira prattling on about managing a software team (which, based on conversations with my wife, who is an actual director of software development for a large team, seem to convey naive entry-level management insights at best) or endless articles from Ivar Jacobson trying to evangelize the Next Big Thing to Replace Agile for software engineering.

At the same time there are usually 2-4 articles per issue that are very good. CACM also presents curated lists of interesting research articles, so (as practitioners) we do not need to sift through every article from every conference proceeding or journal publication talking about how some squeezed an extra tiny incremental fraction of x out of an O(n^x) algorithm or incremental papers discussing how compiler type inference algorithms could be improved this tiny little bit with this one weird trick.

And we occasionally get really insightful practitioner articles as well; for example, some interesting bits of how Google manages their code base, or what an incredibly difficult problems Coverity faces when statically-analyzing (supposedly)-compliant C/C++ code.
Sure, but most SSH servers probably don't support FIDO2 yet (GitHub didn't the last time I checked).

Also, please sign your git commits.
Haven't heard of people selling successful open-source projects, as it's kind of a contradiction.

If you don't want it and stop maintaining it, motivated people could presumably fork it and maintain it themselves rather than pay for it... but I guess you're also buying the community
The current state of the field is reminiscent of discrete mathematical optimization in the late nineties. The computational power was increasing rapidly back then but our our ability to solve problems with more than a hundred of binaries hadn’t improve almost at all. It was only after new theoretical results in integer programming found their way into the solution algorithms when we saw a stepwise increase of performance.
U.S. states seek $2.2T from OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma