skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While it looks like kortilla was being downvoted for their reply quoting back "is not a computer", I think it's actually completely on point. To date, Apple has consistently treated iOS devices -- including the iPad -- as "application consoles," not open computing platforms. It's not just that applications can only officially be installed through the App Store, but that applications are "boxed in" both literally (i.e., sandboxing) and metaphorically (no practical way to run development tools and, from appearances, no interest on Apple's part in changing that).

I'm not arguing this is necessarily either wise or ethical of them, and there's a real sense in which this is orthogonal to the App Store's fee structure. But it seems to me that while Apple is going to face increasing pressure to change the way they run the App Store, the solution -- at least the solution Apple will offer -- very likely won't involve letting the iPad become a general purpose computer the way the Mac is.
Why are stored procs hard to version control?

They're just text in a text file.
Bacterial “gain of function” experiments. What could possibly go wrong?
Which you can in android, it's a setting everyone is free to change at any time.
Cantvote.org
Hacker News,

I've become increasingly concerned about voting interference and was surprised to hear there's no national repository for reporting difficulty in voting.

There's 866-OUR-VOTE, but that's voice only. FairFight.org has a Google spreadsheet. So far I haven't really found a website dedicated to collecting reports of disenfranchisement.

I bought CantVote.org and would like to develop a simple PWA for submitting reports of voting-related shadiness or outright interference.

This would obviously be ripe for abuse, but my main goal is to log the reports and worry about filtering out fake data later.

People would be reasonably suspicious, so the code would be open-source. My current plan is to dump submissions into an S3 bucket or DynamoDB and find low-cost ways to share anonymized data afterward. Come join https://github.com/CantVote if the tech side of this project interests you.

But before getting started, does anyone know of any:

1. Similar efforts?
2. Obvious dealbreakers?
3. Good people to contact?

Thank you, fellow patriots.
Same for me; Debian's apt repo is my computer "app store" of choice.

On Android, the F-droid app store (https://f-droid.org/) comes closest but it has nowhere near the breadth of the Debian repos.
What are you referring to? I've not seen the claims you describe, and they aren't mentioned in this article.

From what I've heard the main datapoint in support of the claim that Asians and whites are being discriminated against is the average SAT score and GPA of successful applicants. But even if you don't believe that those numbers are inherently biased, I hope no one would claim they represent the totality of a person's qualifications for attending college, or their value to the institution and their fellow students.
And your employer is correct. We don’t need the government to protect people from their own decisions.

I’ve made the same argument about Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Amazon (even before I started working for AWS).

This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.

Did the open source community whine about mean old Microsoft or did they create alternatives to the point where even Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs? They went out there and built something better. They out competed.

Every single one of the big tech companies got there through better execution.
I would agree that ADRs are not really necessary if you work alone. Maybe not even within a team if it stable over a long time.

Where ADRs are helpful is when many teams cooperate and if people come and go. The reviews happen implicitly because the decision is discussed among many people.
Microsoft got pinged for pre-installing Internet Explorer.

Android could potentially get pinged for pre-installing Play Market and not offering a choice.
Or in this day and age to even choose that a byte has 8 bits.
There are an endless number of gross and harmless things which I don't want to sprinkle on my food.

It's actually a good question, and I'm disappointed to read middlebrow dismissal of it.

As long as we want to go fast, there will be some brake dust in the air. Brake pads can be made out of a variety of materials, and we want to use the ones which are least harmful to our lungs and other organs.

That takes research, not emotional appeals to disgust (from the Latin, meaning "bad to eat").
the 1984 ad is a little strange TBH. Apple was saying IBM wants to control the future of all information in this country, so come join us instead. Epic is saying, we want more money so standby while we go to court. Where is the epic smart phone alternative which is going to save us from the apple monopoly?

It will be better for all developers if the gatekeepers lower their rates, but epic really doesn't strike me as a white knight here.
Good for Epic to open this new battle front against Apple (and it seems Google).

As I wrote in the Apple thread: I think Epic are the ideal entity to do this since - so long as Apple or Google won't actively erase apps from people devices - they already have large install base and it's unlikely to grow much more.

Those who managed to install the latest update are already able to use epic "apple/google tax"less payment system so that protects their revenue for a while.

If either of those para-monopolies start erasing apps from people's phone's that would only add to the narrative that Epic, Spotify, EU et al. are already pushing: these two entities have built a global extractive platform that keeps partners and consumers hostage by their fees.
I'm sure they weighed that against setting a precedent that developers can sidestep their 30% cut. The income was probably considered more valuable than the PR.
I think you still have to clarify what makes baiting bad here. If I hold a sale in my retail store, is that baiting? Is that bad? I don't think so.

In this scenario, much of the uproar that happened was developers breaking promises, and the blame for that being placed on Epic as well. Epic merely offered better deals(in the form of a better revenue split) and cash offers to developers that are notorious for being poorly funded. I don't see how this is a bad thing.

In fact, I'd make the argument that there being more competition in the PC video game marketplace is a good thing that will benefit the consumer.
You install Debian Testing, but you configure your sources.list with the actual distro name (today: bullseye) instead of testing. Some of the installer media even do that for you: https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2020/2020.... Just keep updating your distro and when it gets released you will be on Debian Stable.
the point is that the group that should be taking the hit from affirmative action is (wealthy) white people, who have been disproportionately benefitting from an unfair system for the history of the country, not asians, who, while more successful than average, have also experienced discrimination and unfairness through most of that history.
Glacier Timelines
The 'your iPhone is an Xbox' is the Gruber approved narrative as of last week, the Apple community left defending this is sextupling down on that idea.
This is completely false. The Play Store has "won" by Google chopping the legs off all the alternatives. They have to be sideloaded and you have to enable a scary checkbox to do so, that suggests it's less secure to use any app store but the Play Store.
There has been no strong arming whatsoever. If you believe there was, then provide any hint of proof of it.

There have been good deals for developpers, and good deals that developper shouldn't have taken but still took despite their previous engagements to their funders, but Epic literally had no position to strong arm anyone into anything, and they didn't bait anyone - no one signed then realized "oh damn, I didn't think money for exclusivity meant money for exclusivity !".

Epic just said "hey look at this bag of money, I give it to you if you put your game here".
the media was already filled with stories about the obama administration's record number of whistleblower prosecutions in 2013. there was nothing to 'expose'.
Who says the iPhone is a general platform? It’s not, it’s a closed platform with specific features designed and implemented by its manufacturer. One of those features is a mechanism for installing additional software modules.

What is an open platform and how does it get defined? Installing software is a feature implemented by the manufacturer. Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps. Who gets to define those features and say which products should or shouldn’t have them? Who gets to certify compliance? Who gets to specify open as a technical standard that can actually be implemented?

If this had been done in the 80s, we’d probably still be stuck with consoles having an 80s style cartridge slot on them, with specs written in legislation and updatable only by government committee.
> heavily homogeneous outcome

You can classify people along lots of dimensions including race, ethnicity, gender, religion, wealth, urban vs. rural upbringing, sexual orientation, introvert vs. extrovert, political leaning, and so on.

Your claim of homogenous outcome is based on how many of these dimensions? Just one?

Because of the immigration policies of the United States, people of certain ethnicities tend to be crème de la crème, for example, if you are from Asian countries you have to be in the top 0.1% of your country in order to immigrate to the US. As a result, if you take the top 10% of performers in High School they tend to have more Asians. To limit their advancement based on their race does not just punish them it punishes the nation by depriving the nation of its best brains.
Except that nobody is alleging they have a monopoly on phones. The market of concern is the app store. Which they obviously have a monopoly on because a customer with an iPhone can't use any other store, and a developer with customers who have iPhones can't distribute to them using any other store.

It's like claiming that nobody can have a monopoly on electric car charging stations because the customer could just buy a gasoline powered car and electric cars don't even have majority market share. It's still a monopoly. It's a monopoly on charging stations, not a monopoly on cars.
> If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably.

Now that's an interesting (though highly impractical) idea!

Imagine both app stores on every phone, providing the exact same service. There's probably no room for price fixing here, because Apple's market share is far smaller than Android's, so Apple would have a significant incentive to reduce the fees (and snatch some of Google's customers.

Now add two or three other "app store providers", and things get interesting.
There are millions of people using Google sites on browser(no apps) on windows. There is no silver bullet "make it cloud ready" to make Linux desktop happen.
You really think Apple added ad blocking to mobile because of Firefox?
It's not a coincidence and I have never heard a claim it was. Apple set it at 30% and Google decided not to compete on price. Of course it is legal to set the price of your product based on a competitor.
Thanks for the recommendation! Already enjoying this!
Price aside, boats are a fairly compelling electric vehicle. Boats are one of the most efficient means of transporting large amounts of freight : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport

In short, doubling the weight on a ship does not double the energy needs required for moving it. The same can't be said for wheeled transportation, let alone air. Batteries are very heavy, but on boats this doesn't have to be a big negative.

However, we're not talking large amounts of freight here, this is more or less a personal watercraft. Also, for personal watercraft most of the energy is spent on accelerating and decelerating, something that boats are not as efficient at.

So, good idea in theory, bad idea in application.
Money flows through the food system from people who eat to landowners who personally live in places like Beverley Hills and Pebble Beach. Food production in America in 2020 has nothing to do with salt-of-the-earth farmer-models they put on packaged food labels.
> programs meant to help the descendants of African-American slaves. The only question is if the Ivy League universities care about this or not.

Where is it communicated that this is the intent of these programs? My understanding is that the criteria is simply race (and to an extent, economic conditions).

Should it matter if you’re an immigrant or not if the program is designed to provide an advantage solely on race and economic circumstance? If so, it sounds like the program should come right out as indicating reparations are the intent.
Imagine Epic doing the same, with a 20% cut through the Epic Game Store, for PC games. And to ensure they are the Gatekeeper, they pay guarantees to Publishers/Developers to exclude retail and other platforms.

Oopps... They do exactly this.

This is not to defend Apple nor Google. But Epic is by no means better, just not as big as A/G.
Soda – an open-source document API for Oracle Database
Regarding schools, I think there is evidence that charter schools and school vouchers have a significant positive impact for the most disadvantaged kids.
Bad history wasn't caused by race blindness but quite the opposite, by racial discrimination.

There are many ways to justify racial discrimination, they are all wrong. Not the first time "the privileged" were said to be in the wrong either.

If you want to help people who are poor, live in poor neighbourhoods and whose parents have no degrees (example of effects of bad history), go ahead and no one will judge you use those factors and end up helping mostly people of a certain race, as long as you're not actually taking their race into account when making decisions.

But that's not what's happening, or at least what DOJ is alleging is that Yale does in fact use race as primary decision factor. They should not be looking at race as a factor at all, even if supreme court allows for that.
Isn't this just an interface in an OO language?
> As far as I know, before she worked at Mozilla, she reported to Netscape's General Counsel. That is not a super competitive position level.

That's a bit of a harsh reading of her career. 26 years ago, she was one of the first legal hires at Netscape and reported to the Netscape CEO initially. Her reporting to the General Counsel was an artifact of scale after that - while reporting to the General Counsel, she also created and headed Netscape's tech-focused legal team. So it's not like she went from "mediocre legal position to Mozilla exec".

She's also been with Mozilla essentially since the beginning. When Netscape open sourced their software and formed Mozilla, she was put in charge as the general manager of it. After AOL bought Netscape and decided to stop their corporate stewardship of Mozilla, she's the one that formed the Foundation[1] to migrate all of the Mozilla assets to[2]. And she did that 17 years ago, when Firefox/Mozilla had very little market adoption and low single digit browser share.

A plausible alternate reality without her could have involved AOL cutting all support for Mozilla, the Mozilla projects going into a state of limbo (with no more corporate support and uncertainty of even legal usage of their existing names/logos), the dev community around those projects either fracturing or fizzling out as a result of the uncertainty, and Internet Explorer retaining 95+% of the browser market.

It's entirely possible someone else would have stepped up and performed the role she did. But in the end she's the one that did it, and her contributions in the early days of Mozilla certainly warrant her current executive position (and the associated salary that comes with it).

That's not to say she isn't overpaid - virtually all executives are overpaid. But she's at least contributed enough to Mozilla since the beginning to get to the point she's at now. That said, many companies are having their executives take pay haircuts to soften the blow of the current environment and mitigate the need or severity of layoffs. The fact that she chose not to do that for Mozilla is incredibly disappointing.

[1] The original Articles of Incorporation from 2003 lists her as the sole incorporator of the foundation: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-articles-...

[2] This may not sound like much, but those assets were things like the legal rights to the branding of Mozilla and Mozilla projects. Without this, Firefox (et al) would have either had to completely rebrand and reset consumer mindshare, or keep using the Firefox name/logo and hope AOL (or a rando AOL exec) never decides to exert their power and kick up a fuss.
So Apple, who illegally colluded with other tech companies to keep engineering salaries down, should be put in control of hiring processes?

There isn't a lol big enough
Google Pulled 'Fortnite' from the Play Store on Android
It may not just be for a lawsuit. They may provide fuel for a change of law, as Congress bumbles through an attempt at anti-trust enforcement, maybe they can become a test case for lawmakers looking for loss of competition and consumer choice. (Although existing lobbying dollars from Google, Apple, Facebook, & company may be effective in holding back representatives. Money in hand, in election season no less.)

Epic Games can show just how much the on-going appstore tax prevent new business models from taking hold. They shown an incredible ability to entice people to separate from their money, even convinced Disney?! to partner for branded content.

Alongside Epic Games licensing of the Unreal Engine at-or-below cost (12% [1]), I believe Sweeney's commitment to growing a "Metaverse" market at the expense of Epic's short-term profit.

This comes alongside EPIC(.org)'s comparisons about American vs Chinese & emerging markets competitiveness, linked today [2].

[1]: https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse
[2]: https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai-commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSC...
> Apple recently rolled out "Sign-In With Apple", which creates burner e-mail address that you can seamlessly use with 3rd party services. As a privacy-conscious consumer, this was great!

Apple spins this as privacy, but it's really a salvo they fired against other companies. Notably Google and Facebook. Apple seeks to weaponize its userbase in the war over attention.

Apple wins by inserting themselves as middleman into every transaction they can.

A "Sign in With Apple" user isn't your customer anymore.

If you think they value privacy, you should consider the telemetry they collect on you and the conversations they record.
It's probably better to think of it as heat leaving the liquid rather than cold entering it.
Or, it’s an extremely obvious immediate parallel
I agree with the spirit here, what we really want are more phone operating systems and competition that way.

They are of course really hard to make ...
Epic Goes to War with Apple over the App Store
Apple and Google also being prepared doesn't mean much for the final outcome of the case.

Even if Apple and Google have wargamed the move and found out they would definitely lose, would they do anything without first being confronted? I'd bet they wouldn't, because that would be several hundreds of millions in lost revenue. It's better for them to stay quiet, perhaps try to appease under the table those who have deep enough pockets to challenge them (e.g. Amazon), keep milking the cow for as long as possible.
I completely agree there as well. I am not in any way defending Epic's use of in-game gambling. If Epic gets Apple's monopoly removed, that is a good action, independent of their immoral actions in other spheres.
Truly terrible headline clickbait. Are scientists now doubting the existence of neutrinos?
Better: “Physicists cast doubt on ‘Sterile Neutrino’ theory ‘ etc.
The flu comes around every year, so one would have to look at the cumulative risk.

I'm well aware of the flu risk, and already had my vaccination for that for this season. Most people I know poo-poo getting that vaccination, despite it taking only 5 minutes and is already paid for by one's insurance.
We're on Hacker News, so the amount of people that are comfortable with sideloading apps on iOS is definitely going to be skewed.

I don't think that it's a good argument to make that anyone can do it, because it does require _some_ technical knowledge in order to do it. I'd make the argument that if it's not accessible to everyone, then I don't think it's a viable replacement for an app store.

To lean on F-droid as an example on the Android side, outside of the initial installation of F-droid(which can be done from your phone), you can easily browse F-droid and install apps.

I don't think it's as easy to sideload apps on iOS. I haven't done it in years(since my jailbreak days), but I remember that you needed to be on a Mac and needed xcode to do it. It's probably updated now to make it a bit easier, but from a quick Google it looks like you need to download a separate program in order to do it. It looks like other ways to sideload apps requires some abuse of developer certificates to make it work.
Then extend those programs. That should be obvious. Open up socially distanced food lines for kids and their parents that give out free food. None of this is impossible especially with the amount of wasted food we have. None of these problems lead to the conclusion that we should open schools when we can resolve these side issues in smarter, better ways that don't put the entire society at risk for covid. The House passed a relief bill 3 months ago. The failure of the Senate to do the same is simply inexcusable. That failure should not be the reason for even more people to die. This is so fucking absurd.
Except in order for that game to be in a GameStop, Walmart, or KMart, the developer of the game has to sign a publisher agreement with Microsoft. This agreement gives Microsoft a royalty for every copy sold, plus approval rights over the final game, marketing, and packaging materials.

So, no, a developer cannot distribute a game for Xbox without Microsoft's approval.

This is also largely irrelevant to the question of whether the market of "games for Xbox" is a separate market from "games for Nintendo" or whether they're actually both competitors in the "video game" market.
With more than 1 (high end) video card?
> It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members.

Can be done with increasing seats, so same count of existing racial profiles + additions for the affirmative actioned populace
Like iOS devices, all major consoles are locked down and limited to what's in a single app store. Any argument in favor of forcing Apple to allow multiple app stores would also apply to consoles.
Isn't this itself local knowledge being spread and not science? Why argue against it with it? Thus my confusion.
Bully for them if they win, I'm just not sure why I'm supposed to be taking sides in this fight. It's not exactly David and Goliath, at least as far as I can see.