skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you don’t like the store policies, you may be able to find an accommodating store.

Can’t do that with the app stores, hence your analogy falls apart due to the lack of available competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch

Kitsch is an imitation of art with exaggerated sentimentality. Kitsch offers shallow emotional gratification with no investment.

This may seem subjective or culturally relative but I don't think it is. I think the weight of many opinions across time gives these things a certain solidity.
What prevents the Epic store (or any alternative store) from gaining more traction? Is it just that users prefer the default store that ships with the phone? Or are there other barriers?
There’s an old programming meme about laziness being invoked here: http://threevirtues.com/
I can't downvote you because you're a direct response, but please don't do this:

> Downvotes are not replying so I'm assuming they are just pissed that my logic checks out.

It breaks the site guidelines [1].

[1] Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Offline Developer Tools
I have 100% code coverage in my unit tests + behavioral tests (with cucumber).

And yet, problems still happen.

Programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
A lazy programmer thinks a lot before they write a single line or code.

A lazy programmer produces the simplest and most graspable solution.

A lazy progammer has the easiest time explaining their solution.
What about the people who are clever and stupid?
I don't see what google did wrong here. The op is calling it a donation when in actually it is a tip. i.e income skirting around by calling it donation doesn't change the fact the the op is trying to make money using google services without paying google its cut. Now we can argue about google cut being too high though they have changed it to less for apps making less than a million. But that's not the argument here. I am wondering do all the developers working on so called donations declare their income to the tax department as I believe it is income just like it is for restaurant staff.
Unfortunately there seem to be a LOT of people that think this way. "Now that these companies are so powerful, they can use all that power to benefit humanity! You're not like the Dark Lord Mr. Frodo, you can use the Ring's power for good!" It doesn't work like that.

Unlike the author, I ACTUALLY look forward to an "unbundling," to a breakup. The time seems right. Lots of lawsuits in the air, and maybe more importantly, nearly everyone seems to hate and mistrust big tech at this point. The downside is that if it does happen, we'll probably have some ill-conceived gov regulations that half-work and half are a pain in the ass. But we might get some space for actual innovation and competition again, instead of Youtube endlessly redesigning their website and discovering new ways to screw over their users.
>if I rob their shipments and steal their phones

This is supposed to be analogous to publishing an app and asking for donations?

>Being a criminal does not exclude you from being a victim.

This is not a criminal dispute nor analagous to a criminal dispute in any way, shape or form.
It's a compelling simple story for the decision makers that only requires them to spend other people's money and avoid changing themselves or their organization. Irresistible.
It sounds like they are asking, in a very awkward way and I'm not sure they are completely understanding their own needs, for a version of curl that can tick all the boxes for appropriation purpose (security audited by a US corporation and final sign-off by a US citizen).

Question is: How much is that worth to them? You could very well have a paid NASA curl and sell that version (it's not against the GPL) and still distribute source.
Upvoted because every counter point presented was on target and with solid examples. The article for me read a little tongue in cheek but there are some serious errs in reasoning for some of these. Just toxic behavior.
So blame Yahoo, the ones paying them during the "management failure?"
Besides Starlink, I'm curious to hear more about your Protectli. Why do you like it so much? What can it do, that you can't do on your own computer with some scripting and such?
Just release it. Maybe Valve will have to do something once folks start losing their precious CS:GO skins?
Microsoft lost its anti-trust case for simply putting IE as the default browser.
End app stores.

The megamonopolies have no right to have their hands in so many cookie jars, yet have the back breaking ability to take our 30% and shut us down. They control too much, and only got there through monopoly forces.

The Internet was not supposed to evolve in this direction. 1990 - 2007 was full of hope and dreams for an open ecosystem, then this app cancer showed up.

Windows lets you install anything without central control. This is how it should be.

Take the app stores down. Rip them out.

Take away Google's ability to run a browser too. They shouldn't be able to set web standards and shape what we can see.

Please, DOJ. You're our only hope.
Past related threads:

Ink – Scripting language for interactive stories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26147329 - Feb 2021 (15 comments)

The Intercept (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23244812 - May 2020 (4 comments)

Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21794981 - Dec 2019 (9 comments)

The Intercept - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538414 - Nov 2019 (1 comment)

Ink – inkle's narrative scripting language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16925588 - April 2018 (22 comments)

Ink: the scripting language behind 80 Days and Sorcery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269782 - March 2016 (18 comments)
Agreed. I have bought way more apps than I would have otherwise because Apple already had my CC and I have some trust in their curation (I know it’s not perfect). If we went to a free for all model we’d end up right back here with maybe another store?

Given the scams out there users are already reluctant to enter their CC details, so a natural trust network effect would weed out everyone else except the biggest players.
The lazy programmer rejects mainstream society, lives in a tent and forages and never has to work again.
1. I think they should support the ecosystem by selling phones. That would result in far fewer perverse incentives and market distortions compared to their approach of taxing developers.

2. I don't think Google actually needs a 30%/15% cut to "support the Android ecosystem". I think they're charging way more than necessary, just because they can.

(Same arguments for Apple.)
>Although this power could be used for good, it’s scary to think of what could happen if the “bad guys” develop or control such platforms. It wouldn’t just be a yearly 1 hour knowledge drip, but instead a firehose of propaganda.

I have bad news for you.
They have trial areas where they do 1Gbps lines as well, and when I was using one it would reliably hit that.
Mmm, sounds like the moon is just inherently dangerous, and trying to say that we should do things safely on the moon is like telling us just not to go there at all.
I've actually looked into buying one recently, but between general slowness (a friend of mine has one), price and lacking an Alexa-less option if you need 4k, I'm actually considering an used AppleTV 4k now.
(author here)

I am sorry this came up sounding entitled: I don't expect Google policies to change on this subject, and since this is not business threatening to me I just decided to write something I thought would be snarky and hopefully amusing to read.
Certainly this is unlike e.g. the 1977 flu pandemic, whose genetic sequence provided strong evidence that it was an accidental release of something derived from a stored 1950 sample. Even so, at the time the WHO said "laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...

And nothing requires accidents to happen the same way each time. If SARS-CoV-2 was a lab accident, then it's probably an accident involving a novel bat-origin coronavirus collected from nature. The WIV probably had the biggest program sampling such viruses in the world, and that's the database they made unavailable.

Why do you think that database is unavailable now? The WIV's stated reason could possibly explain why they took it down in the first place (though it would be a spectacular coincidence), but it doesn't explain why they can't bring it back up.

Note that I asked this in my previous comment, and you chose to ignore it, instead responding to the less substantive comment from another user. You likewise ignored my original question about the database until I asked it twice. You didn't discuss the possibility of an accident involving a novel, unpublished virus (which you consider the most likely lab accident scenario, I believe correctly) until others brought it up.

I don't think that's malicious, but that's not a comforting pattern. Virologists are supposed to be the experts, so they should be the ones presenting (and refuting where applicable) the strongest and most likely scenarios for a lab accident. Instead, they (and you) seem entirely focused on defending the profession, refuting easy and wrong arguments, and waiting to see how long it takes adjacent non-specialists to learn enough to discover the harder ones. You then dismiss their arguments, because they (David Relman, Alina Chan, Richard Ebright, I assume Marc Lipsitch too; the list is getting long) are mere molecular biologists or epidemiologists or whatever, and not specialist virologists.

Regardless of what we eventually learn about the origin of this pandemic, that's not the behavior of a profession that can be trusted to regulate itself, and I believe the world is realizing that now. It would be unfortunate if important virological research gets banned because the regulations are drafted by half-informed outsiders; but if virologists themselves don't seriously engage with the possibility that their work just killed 2.9M people, that's what will happen.

Of course that's not all virologists. Étienne Decroly has been pushing quite openly for an investigation of a possible lab accident, though mostly in French-language media and perhaps you'll find something wrong with his resume too.

And just so you don't miss it: Why do you think that database is unavailable now? Please feel free to ignore everything I've written except that question.
This is correct. On Android, add-ons from addons.mozilla.org can be installed onto Firefox Nightly or Fennec F-Droid (a fork of Firefox stable).

Instructions: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Firefox Nightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...

Fennec F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
It would need to be audited one each time the browser downloaded the JS. Otherwise, the server can trivially decrypt the data by serving malicious JavaScript once the audit is complete.

Anyway, this is Google. There’s no way they’re planning to client-side encrypt. Even if they did, they’d eventually realize it wasn’t generating enough indirect ad revenue to be too big to kill. At that point they’d ungracefully shut it down.
Yeah that was not a great article. They even mention that cats were domesticated more recently than dog but don’t say how recent.
This isn't about the total ecconomy, this is a single transaction.
Thank you, noted and removed.
I feel like every Google sized entity in the computer industry has tried to solve this problem over the past 30 years. Microsoft spent ages at it too:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HealthVault

Apple have been trying similar with the Health app too I'd argue, even if it's not nearly as integrated with medical records yet. Why does no one ever succeed?
I am not familiar with Craft CMS or Ghost, but I am familiar with Statamic; and it is an awesome CMS compared to WordPress.

While it is not a well-known name, Statamic comes out-of-the-box with many features that you would need a plugin for if you were using WordPress. Some of these features include multilingual functionality, advanced customer fields, form modules, search functionality, a backup utility, advanced caching system, etc. It also does not require a database, which is an interesting benefit of using this CMS.
The game is actually open-source (https://github.com/agateau/pixelwheels/), so which side do I pick?
The server that provides access to Exchange through Web Access can also provide for IMAP.

However, as there now is native support for ActiveSync in most operating systems there no longer is a very compelling use case to turn it on and run the associated risks.
Luckily it’s unlikely to gain traction. Hospital execs still bring up how they were screwed over by Google 10 years ago whenever you try to sell them on consumer health records products. Their malfeasance is legendary at this point.
> The Team Topologies book suggests to favor teams that are end-to-end, that fully own a problem to be solved, supported by platform teams and teams that manage a very complex piece of technology.

Does anyone have first hand experience with this working really well? It seems sensible but in my experience it does not work. The platform teams, I think, should be collaborations between a small number of members from each end-to-end team. The platform would be allowed to grow only as needed by the use cases. As soon as you put a platform team in charge with a mandate, what they build and what is needed starts diverging in the name of "Long term planning". Instead of fixing the struggles of today, they think they have the capacity and formula for fixing the problems of a year from now. In my experience, they do not. Would love to hear from others
Kitsch is not an imitation of art, plenty of art is Kitsch.
I'm not sure, class warfare isn't a thing that's accidentally happening according to those that subscribe to the theory, it's intentional. Not as a genocidal "let's annihilate the lower class" war, but to perpetually oppress, enslave and exploit them.

The Great Purge didn't consider its targets as accidentally doing harm, they were portrayed as a "fifth column" that sought to destroy the Soviet Union. That external enemy is what creates group cohesion and strengthens the resolve of members. "They're just people like you and me, but the circumstances make their behavior harmful to those people over there" isn't what you mobilize with, so we get White Supremacy behind everything or Patriarchy conspiracies that read like The Protocols.
Age of Empires 4
I don't think that's a solution; sure, making the site more accessible makes you reach more users even beyond the "disability" angle, but that doesn't make it a winning cost-benefit tradeoff immediately if ever.

EDIT: By analogy, it's very like software portability. If you make your software support Windows and MacOS and assorted Linux distros and the major BSDs and Haiku, you'll get more users. But if you only target Windows you'll get 80% of the market, and Windows+MacOS will get you 90%, and after that you really need to think about whether it's a good investment to target more platforms. By all means, be accessible because it's the right thing to do or legally required, but it's not obvious that it's a sound business move.
One way to fight information loss is through error correction. That means a feedback loop between the stages in this process where downstream results are reviewed by upstream actors to evaluate their suitability. Agile tries to build that in by iterative work, demos, and retrospectives.
Unfortunately their protections do not really apply to their own apps.

While 3rd party apps need to show individual dialogs to get access to location data, all their own services (eg. data collection for maps, or the "Find My" network) automatically get access to location data if you enable location data on your device.
For some weird reason, on all of the recent Wired articles, all I am able to see is the first paragraph. No "read more," no obvious way to see the rest of the article.

This is on iOS with Chrome.
Of course. A common sentence I have to say to people is "This is not a perfect number, but it's been imperfect in the same way for the last 10 years. As such, you should regard it as merely an approximation for any given year, but also that any trend you see is unlikely a result of those imperfections." This is literally a sentence that I copy & paste almost verbatim into a lot of reports.

I'm not allowed to do that sort of thing when the data is reasonably available. The UN could have obtained at least enough data to get an estimate rather than ignoring it completely. The Department of Agriculture in the US and similar organizations all over the world actually provide databases on their specifications for inedible portions of many specific foods. The UN could have at least used the US data alone, along with research showing that food waste in the US tends to be higher than other parts of the world, to place a probable upper-bound on this.

I think we can agree there's not a hard & fast rule here about when to use estimates and when to get full (or at least more) data. I sometimes have to impute values where data is available but it would take many hours of someone's time going through countless boxes of documents in cold storage and doing manual data entry with them. If the missing data is small enough or the issue is of low enough importance, I do the best I can. However a recent project of mine did actually involve having a few people go back into those files and get a random sampling of the data so that I could make reasonable estimates.

It all comes down to resources & importance. So lets look at this situation through that lens with the UN: Resources? The UN absolutely has them, and this information is neither unavailable nor unreasonably burdensome to gather enough for an estimate. Importance? It doesn't get much more important than a report intended to be used to guide global food & climate policy at the highest levels. The UN department that produced this report has an annual budget around $500 million/year [0], and this is one of their landmark publications: They have the resources, and this is important, they shouldn't have ignored the issue.

I also don't think the headlines were unreasonable in leading with that given the report's contents: Literally the first sentence of the report is about the climate impact of food waste. Media often gets science interpretation wrong, but when the first sentence of a report is:

"If food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third biggest source of greenhouse
gas emissions"

Given that, I think it's reasonable for reporters to lead with a similar headline. I don't blame the reporters here, or at least it's not where I assign the majority of blame.

[0] https://www.unep.org/about-un-environment/funding-and-partne...
Pedantically if your database supports index scans it can use the index on the column to scan for '%abc' rather than the whole table which can be much faster while not as a fast as a seek.

It can only do a seek if there are character before the wildcard: 'ab%c', 'abc%' and 'abc' getting progressively faster due to less index entries transversed.
Those are all sarcasm.

I suspect it's the last one that bothers you the most. However, keep in mind that Google has a monopoly on Android app delivery. (Yes, we will ignore the alternatives because they are not reasonably accessible to most users.)

Since Google has a monopoly here, any app that pleases some users strengthens the platform, leading to more users which leads to more apps, some of which generate revenue for Google. If there were a reasonable competitor app store for Android, this developer could drop Google and go give his app away for free on the other app store. THAT would deprive Google of more revenue because it would strengthen the competing delivery platform.

The only "entitled" party here is Google, because they believe they are entitled to a cut of all money possibly made anywhere from any app that runs on their "open source" platform - simply because they are the gatekeeper.
This bbc article is not reporting what the study actually found. They changed the question of the original article so that they can get a click-baity title. That's so annoying...
Vaccine Passports: A public health solution or ethical and legal minefield?
No, he doesn't. He gets donated cups of coffee for an app he developed and gave out for free and which makes the app store a more valuable platform.

It's only profit if you discount the value of his labor to zero.

Google is demanding that every time somebody wants to gift him a cup of coffee to say thank you for giving away something of value for free that they get a cash payment.

This isn't about Google just being rich, it's about Google using their power to extract profit from charity simply because they are economically more powerful.
Stop clubbing baby seals

http://oddlovescompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Februa...
what’s also interesting is the “problems” we are attempting to “solve” with that scale seem to be getting more and more driven on pure greed.

does the world really need facebook, or better infrastructure, clean water, food, education.

do we really next 2 hour prime delivery?

but let’s solve those with 100,000s of engineers moving fast, breaking things all because they get paid alot.

so many developers today are just building massive tech debt to vest their RSU’s and get out.

how many are actually doing any good for the planet or their communities.
I agree that often there are good business reasons for killing projects, and plenty of so-called technical debt is actually just the result of pragmatic decision-making. Imo developers should get used to maintaining that stuff, because that's a huge part of the job in most profitable companies.

But there is also a flip-side where I see the opposite happen - especially in startups and VC-funded companies. These companies can take massive losses while at the same time investing huge amounts into elaborate solutions that appear to primarily exist for the purpose of creating impressive bullet points on the resumes of careerist employees. In these companies, even in management, the work seems to be driven by everyone trying to maximize the impact of their own, personal "tour of duty", then making a profitable exit. These incentives are not the same as those of people working at more legacy/boring companies.
Well, let's say that I could hypothetically buy both the Google store and the Apple store, and I raised the percentage cut from 30% to 95% on all sales.

I'll even make it so that all apps are automatically available in both stores! And I'll use the revenue to buy out any competitors, or sue those who I can not buy.

would that still be fair? After all, I am providing a service, am I not?

I think the debate here is not about whether or not there is a service being provided -- but rather what kind of service fee would be "fair" in exchange for the service they provided, while acknowledging their (near) monopoly on android users.
Does that still look ok if you're selecting 10+ columns with functions, or would you split out the first line situationally?
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/
Its not just the file format, Photoshop is an abysmal product altogether. Features are basically the same as three decades ago. Linear 32bit workflow is broken to the point of unfixable. API basically not there. Automation laughable. GPU support not even worth mentioning. Referencing will freeze your computer for 1h a day when used in bigger projects. Apple is the only reason this piece of junk is still selling.
I started documenting my code so future me doesn't need to spend a lot of time figuring it out...