skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their MMR system has changed over the years to maximize revenue at the expense of player pain. They force the above-average player to play 100s of games climb to rank where they "belong" per season, gradually increasing the amount of time required to be absolutely absurd. Combine that with their lack of care for the toxicity in their player base and you have one hot stinky mess, and I wouldn't put a high schooler anywhere near their core game design values. Direct reflection of their (bad) company culture.

In the micro, fun and well designed gameplay (Valorant too!). In the macro, their games are a terrible slog rooted in addiction science. All to maximize revenue from rolling skin and champion releases. Every single champion is released overpowered to add a temporary boost in play time and revenue. We can do better.
Not to invoke fiction as proof, but Philip Pullman hypothesized animals with a shiny claw which co-evolves with a tree making wheels. The claw evolves to be the axle and the tree evolves to make the wheels for co-benefit.
It's a topic that most people can relate to and pits two complicated viewpoints ("user/developer access to hardware" and "vendors keeping their platform from becoming a cesspool of spam and low-quality content") with notes of other important topics ("freedom of speech", "monopolies").
It's not just $100/y.

You also have to buy Apple hardware to build and test their software. That would be at least an iphone and a macbook air. The wallet garden extends to developers as well.

I'm launching an app and I have no desire to buy hardware that treats me like I'm too dumb to be able to install software from whatever source I want.

So Apple will be ignored and that's gonna be a net win on sanity and time to polish the product for Android.
As an app developer, I'm moving to straight web apps. All the hoops, the review system,and ranking prejudice makes it an easy decision even outside of the 30% rake.
That could be a factor.

I think the fact that there are many devs here who deal with and depend on Apple is much more significant though.
What do you think had more to do with IE losing market share worldwide “browser choice” or the most popular website in the world hawking their browser on the front page and MS losing mobile - you can’t very well be IE only and want to work on mobile browsers.
I've been checking these out since v5 alpha was released. These look great! I can't wait till there are some social icons added like Github.
I tried something similar in Nim. While fun, ultimately I was faced with the reality of a lack of proper typing and other tooling support, which would be a mountain of work to add on top.
>PAYING game developers for exclusivity is much different than CHARGING game developers 30% of their revenue.

The way you frame it is totally incorrect and completely misrepresents

Steam (who is obviously relevant in the PC space) doesn't "charge" developers 30% of the revenue. Steam is acting as an affiliate. Affiliate agreements work on the fact that one party will get a commission for driving sales of a particular product.

Steam drives sales of a particular product by providing the market place, they provide the payment mechanism, the hosting and update infrastructure and probably a bunch of things I am not aware of.

Also the 30/70% split for an affiliate relationship is standard across many industries. This could be Travel, Gambling, House hold items.

> Also, the PC is an open platform. Game developers don't have to use Epic's or anyone else' store to distribute games on PC. With iOS you have no choice.

You are getting wrong way around. If would be fine if the EPIC store offered the same games as Steam at a lower price (by taking a lower commission). Then that would drive competition and that would benefit the consumer.

However that isn't happening here.

They are artificially dividing an open market by making some PC games exclusive to their store. This stops competition because the two store fronts can't compete because they cannot offer the same games. In the same way that if you wanna play Halo you aren't doing it on a PlayStation.

GoG and Steam will have many of the same games sold on them. I end up buying them on the GoG store, why is that? GoG is guaranteed to be DRM free. That choice cannot exist when some games are exclusive to one store. So GoG competes with the Steam store and offers a better refund policy (you can refund for any reason and at any time) and no DRM.

Now it may benefit developers to be exclusive to the EPIC store but this will ultimately make the PC ecosystem less open for the consumer.
Watch Elon Musk's Neuralink Reveal
Which is helpful, but you shouldn't be in that position and it is really just a dice roll away from becoming unsustainable.

The system is horribly broken. GoodRx helps people, but GoodRx are a symptom of a much bigger problem rather than a solution.
Put your Git log in sqlite and look at project participation over time
What exactly is shot-based encoding doing here?

Even old XviD would reliably always insert a new I-frame / start a new GOP on a scenecut, and perform global rate optimization based on scene complexity within the target ABR parameters.
Epic violated the contract, Apple didn't. Apple's following up on the violation by terminating Epic's account, which is in the agreement.
Consoles have been profitable since PS 4 era.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/sony-posts-2-1b-profit-as-...
>> That would introduce a level of red-tape

Jurisdiction X hereby decrees the tariffs for tax year 20/21 as:

Receipts not more than $X = tariff of $Y
Receip...

?
Are you streaming over wifi?
Epic is maintaining an illegal monopoly on Fortnite distribution.

It's not available on Steam store for example.
That way of thinking assumes that the people you are giving recommendations to care most about your app’s availability rather than the persons own preferences and motivations. If your audience is non tech savvy (group defined by not being a specific group, eg much broader), good chance they have a broad set of preferences unrelated to your free app availability.

This point above is more of a “save your breath” suggestion as tech savvy people would much more likely be interested in this trade off when considering a which device type to purchase.
I guess you are you saying that I and others should pay more money for our prescriptions? Do you have any idea how expensive many prescriptions are? People with serious chronic illnesses already have a tough enough time with expenses in the U.S. and blaming them for lack of medical reform is disheartening to hear.
You can do something similar in Germany to get access to cheap public transport.

Just enroll in an University which cost around 280€ for half a year. This will get you a ticket which you can use in busses and trains for quite some distance. Usually a whole Bundesland (County or whatever the US equivalent is).

This is a fraction of the cost of a regular ticket and nobody checks if you pick an unpopular field like physics.

I know people doing this for many years.

And yes the US should totally get a proper public Healthcare system...
Note that Apple wouldn't be just be forced to loosen some restrictions to match Google Play and Android, they'd have to go far further. Google Play is also being sued. Its not as dramatic or fun to cover it that way, but I feel like news orgs could be doing a lot better here.

Android is already a mess with multiple stores and loose, to put it mildly, standards for the quality of apps. And that still isn't enough for Epic. I don't want my iPhone turning into an Android (I did have many choices, and I chose iPhone) and I __definitely__ don't want it turning to an even less regulated ecosystem than what we already have with Android.

I don't really care if developers are happy, because so many of them have interests hostile to mine. Apple is fortunately big enough to be able to force folks like Facebook and Uber to play by the rules. They're also big enough to force developers to play ball with things like iPad support or get booted from the store. The cost of targeting iPad is less than the cost of e.g. Twitter losing their spot on iPhones, so now iPad has a great Twitter app where it didn't before.

Edit: forgot to mention how Apple's subscription management process is far, far superior to any other device. I explicitly choose to subscribe through Apple because I know I will be notified before renewal and that I can cancel easily. I know the scale of the iPhone market, combined with Apple's restrictions, are the only reason I have that choice.

People paint this whole situation as Epic fighting for the consumer, but really Epic is fighting for the interests of Epic alone. I know Android users don't get it becuase they may not have experienced it, but really Apple is adding loads of value here and taking that value away isn't automatically pro-consumer, even if associated with words like 'freedom' and 'competition'.

Edit: Another perspective on this is that as a developer who writes software for Android and iOS, iOS is a far, far superior experience. Things work more reliably, testing is easier because iOS is an OS whereas Android is really a family of operating systems - see how much things can change on Pixel vs Galaxy. Things are getting better over time especially with AndroidX and Jetpack, but the developer experience is still loads better on iOS.

If you're referring to developer as 'individual who writes software for iOS' Apple is far superior. If you're thinking of developer as 'financial entity that profits off software' then the 30% cut becomes more painful, but Apple justifies that by having a premium offering with customers who spend more on apps.
I made a free game, and it was totally free (apart from a regular store sign up fee): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/rob-game/9nblggh5fkh6

I don't think it is too hard to make a regular game UWP compatible. Unity just lets you do that.
I suspect the arguments are made to make sense to media executives not to the consumer. After all, DRM is an anti-feature for the consumer.
On my phone it lets me download Apple TV+ content. The files are shockingly large compared to what Amazon Video downloads are. A 1 hr clip was maybe 800mb in prime, but a few gigabytes from apple. (I don’t have any on my phone atm, but a quick search is telling me episodes of “For all mankind” are ~4GB and an hour long) It looks noticeably better, a massive step up that is completely worth the extra bytes.

On my desktop I always rent stuff through iTunes just cause I can download it in advance, and don’t have to deal with buffering or reduced quality.
The pandemic will feature prominently in fiction for many years. Every genre from scifi, dramas, horror, comedies, etc will be touched by it since the event has touched every person on earth. Themes around loneliness and isolation will be more common than before. The aesthetic will be sweatpants.

The other big concept will be concentration camps, specifically the ones currently operated by the United States. China also has these, at a larger scale and with much, much worse treatment, but the megacorps that control western media are too cowardly to broach the subject until after they are banned from the country. Criticizing the US is less risky. Perhaps the next Nobel in literature will be written by a teenager currently laying on a concrete floor trying to console a toddler who was sprayed with a chemical prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
It is more entry per customer because GoodRx must be entered for each transaction (or at least the initiation of each new prescription.) One insurance card stays on a customer’s file for a year or more.
I picked up some of the terms watching Hikaru No Go a japanese anime about a middle school kid who learns to play Go with the help of a ghost. Good clean fun. It's on Crunchyroll and probably other platforms.
This doesn't completely work because of all the missing features that Apple's iOS Safari does not implement. And you cannot even get a different browser (engine), because of Apple's App Store rules.

Off the top of my head, iOS Safari doesn't support notifications or (at least on iPhone) fullscreen API. Surprisingly there is controller support

https://caniuse.com/#feat=fullscreen
> As a side note, we do have some additional points, not shown in the plots, that are used in resolution limited scenarios — such as a streaming session limited to 720p or 1080p highest encoding resolution. Such points lie under (or to the right of) the convex hull main ladder curve but allow quality to ramp up in resolution limited scenarios.

They're showing the curve that is used for connections that want to be streaming 4k. So if you're on the 1080 stream in the charted scenario, it's because you're bandwidth-limited. They have higher-quality, higher-bitrate encoding curves for lower-resolution connections. However, it doesn't make sense to use that 1080 encoding for a 4k connection. If you could afford the bitrate, you'd rather be streaming the higher resolution from the displayed curve.
This is how all life evolves. The bigger and grander the plans, in general, the harder and worse they fail. Communism and Brazilia spring to mind as examples. "Seeing Like A State" takes a look at the causes of failure patterns endemic to bureaucracy/government/planning. (Not saying we should give up on planning, but that we might learn to love and live with the idiosyncrasies introduced by iterative development in all domains.)
>the US is a platform which you can leave for one of 200 other platforms

if you are native born, it is not trivial to renounce your citizenry nor to become a citizen in another country. Even before taking travel to that other country into account. you also don't really opt into native citizenry since you have no control of who or where you are born into.

Regardless of my personal thoughts on this article, this is a strange comparison to make.
Good luck with that. Users hate mobile web apps.

App Store has been around over a decade and the number of popular mobile web apps (that didn't also release an app) is basically zero.
What high cost of switching? There are hardly any popular iOS only apps or popular apps that people paid for instead of buying a subscription that works cross platform.

As far as media that you bought, music that you bought on iTunes has been DRM free for almost a decade.

Even with movies, you can blame the lock in on the studios that don’t participate in “Movies Anywhere”. Any movie from the participating studios that you buy on Prime Video, Google Play, Vudu, or iTunes is automatically considered purchased on the other platforms.

Most of the money being spent on the App Store are from in app consumables.
Since fortnight stopped running on iOS, they lose all that revenue. I figured they’d hold up to the wire and then give up so they didn’t lose that revenue. Seems I was wrong.
Lamentably, I think on iOS the only web browser is safari (or uses the safari engine), which hopefully doesn't limit the web app route too much.
Not Apple TV specific, but Netflix (and I think Prime) have test videos that also show the bitrate as it’s streaming. I used them a while back when setting up my network and access point location.
You mean "naturally, since many of these codecs are completely or partially proprietary and/or not publically documented, this solution will not work on platforms that focus on non-proprietary open standards"?
Before I turned that on, watching BBC documentaries in 25 FPS the judder was very noticeable on panning shots. Definitely worth enabling if your device supports it.
I guess I don't see them mandating the use of their products. You can have your app on iOS or not. I just don't see the moral issue here. They've never raised the prices and have had this price since they had 0 3rd party apps so I have a hard time seeing it as rent seeking. Do they make a lot of money? Yes, they do, but is that enough to force them not too? I'm just not convinced of that yet.
Its easy to get fake ids that look very real (ask a local 20 year old).

Also you often do not even need to take a picture of an ID to open an account online, just have the info of an identity that you steal.
After that, you get an atm card, wear a covid mask, shades and hat, call to raise the limit and take it out asap.
It touches on multiple axes of discussion that can often be found here:

- The rights of the individual/company compared to the good of the public.

- The right of an individual to control that which they bought. Also, whether and what you buy compared to license the use of.

- Anti-competitive behavior and monopolies (as distinct concepts, whether one applies doesn't preclude a different answer for the other).

- Very large companies and the amount of control they have over individuals and their rights.

These are all vibrant topics of discussion on HN, and this includes, and in some cases epitomizes, aspects of all of those and more.
Tedegraph
There are various formats, how to present information. (Mindmaps, Outlines, or Tedegraphs :-) This is a poor quick implementation of application making tedegraph from Wikipedia article in Python3 and PyQt5. The format could be used for information exchange in the future. When we read something our concentration is better with the picture (because picture is worth thousand words). Picture or other graphical information piece is the core of information which is described by sentences which are played one by one.
There are multiple streaming services, but most people won't pay for multiple services, so there is a lock in effect. And Spotify has a higher market share in music streaming than Apple has in cell phones.
> That's not even about censorship, so I'm not sure how it applies.

I'd argue that political action is a form of speech, so laws that prevent certain kinds of political action are speech. How do you draw the distinction between a law, which you're arguing isn't speech, and political donations which are, at least under the law today, a form of speech. I'm claiming these are all the same thing, because you can't draw a non-arbitrary line between a congressperson addressing congress and a congressperson drafting a bill and me asking a congressperson to draft a bill. They're all speech. You're free to disagree with that framing, but that is how I view speech. It's for this reason that I also don't agree with the common-in-the US excuse of "it's just speech so it can't hurt anyone", or similar. The only difference between your "just speech" and a law is who is willing to listen to the speaker.

Now, you can claim that we're talking about government representatives, so things are different, which may or may not be true, but I'll accept that. Perhaps people who have more authority should be given less freedom, an interesting tradeoff. But let's ignore the government entirely and just discuss what makes the two situations distinct.

So, it clearly isn't okay to censor Muslims, because that rule cannot be fair/equally applied. It will, by definition, be discriminatory against individuals, which seems to be the bad thing we want to avoid (or maybe I'm wrong and you're okay with discriminating against individuals?). However, censoring certain topics may be done without discriminating against individuals. It applies equally, for example, to a Muslim person wanting to extoll Islam and to a Christian wanting to demonize it.

If we bring this full circle: preventing Muslims from speaking ensures that they will not be represented [in the discourse, in the government, whatever]. This can, realistically, only be harmful to them. Banning discussion of Islam certainly has the capacity to be harmful to them, but also has the capacity to not be harmful to them (for example if the discourse is full of demonization of Islam, perhaps banning discussion of Islam is a net-gain for individual Muslim people).

Obviously this requires, like, an actual fair moderator, and it raises a bunch of tricky questions (like is the meta-discussion of whether it should be acceptable to discuss Islam, itself an acceptable discussion?), but it isn't, call it, implicitly harmful.

tl;dr: Removing people from discourse cannot be beneficial to those people. Removing concepts from discourse depends.
Unfortunately, supporting a brand as team sports is a thing like supporting a political party as team sports is.

HN is, hopefully, better than most places on the internet as there are lots of people willing to decide each issue on its merits, and also recalibrate their positions continually in the light of events,
"Variable bitrate" encoding is a thing, which allows chunks of a file to be encoded at a higher or lower bitrate depending on how much is happening. I don't know exactly how it happens, but I assume that each chunk is determined by duration or size, while Netflix's new method determines each chunk by the content.

In order for this to be the default, you'd need either humans, or pattern recognition algorithms to identify the chunks. You also need to quantify how by how much each chunk needs its encoding parameters tweaked.

Monetary costs aside, that's increasing complexity of your pipeline with relatively small gains. I'd bet that more companies will start looking at similar approaches now that 4K HDR (and 8K) are becoming more common. Probably not worth the R&D for 1080p, but we'll see tricks like this start to trickle down, I'm sure.

It's highly unlikely we'll see anything similar in FOSS tools in the near future.
Go already required memorizing 'joseki' or standard patterns that crop up again and again (particularly in the opening). The usual mantra is 'don't learn joseki, learn _from_ joseki'. But the truth is - like openings in chess - if you don't know them and you play someone who does, you're often at a disadvantage.
As someone who preordered on hope and has been patiently waiting.... a long, long time....

...I'm fine with the wait. Phones are _hard_. Harder than laptops by a lot. RF optimization and certification makes grown engineers cry.

I think a lot of people think of cellphones as just smaller versions of laptop components, but it's really not like that at all. Much of the criticism seems to be from folks who either A) think crowdfunding is a store, B) have a personal bone to pick, or C) have no idea how engineering works.

I say this because a group at work (adjacent to my group, I work on their team sometimes) has been going through exactly the same struggles on a device that includes cellular data functionality. Many rounds, many thousands of dollars per round, and every time you think there should just be one more round. And going into it, we all thought it would be like the other embedded devices we've designed, plus radios, how hard can that be?

The current update is encouraging, and with the world having gone sideways since the last update, the shipping delay is neither surprising nor unwarranted. I'm excited for the RYF certification, because few others seem to be chasing it, and I think it's important to support this work. Maybe I even get a neat phone out of the deal.
Your link does not give evidence for what you assert.
I agree.

Epic could have taken the matter directly to the courts and taken action (whatever it was) after a verdict. Heck, they could even have tried to make a case to the European Union, which seems to have a knack for pursuing this kind of thing. A ruling over there wouldn't directly impact the rest of the world, but it could get the ball rolling.

Instead, they decided to make a spectacle of this whole issue to try to rally customers to their cause. For that, I have no sympathy. Customers are being used as cannon fodder here. And it's not by Apple.

I agree that the App store cut is too high. But this is not the way to go about things.
As far as I know, with netflix the quality depends on things like the platform you're watching. Even with the highest subscription plan, if you watch it in Firefox or Chrome you're limited to 720p and you now get about 500 kbit/s, which looks awful. The older content seems to be at 1 or 2 mbit/s, and the 2 mbit/s looks good. But as you can see in the figures, they no longer seem to offer good quality 720p.