skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not sure why they feel so emboldened to add a 27% tax on web purchases as well.

Because the judge's ruling still left the option open for Apple to continue to charge a commission fee for external payment processors.

Over 2 years ago, observers correctly predicted that Apple would still charge 30% for external payments. Example story:

https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/14/apple-can-still-charge-its-ap...

So Apple's new policy in 2024 is no surprise and the only difference is that Apple is charging 27% instead of the predicted 30%.
The (classical) liberals believed in inheritance taxes but that would probably get you called a pinko commie by today's standards, even by the supposedly classical liberal parties.
1. If you want to include a link to an website for payment of digital goods, you have to request an entitlement from Apple.

2. As part of that entitlement, you agree to pay Apple a 27% commission on any purchases made when users click those links, for up to 7 days after the link is clicked.

3. You agree to send Apple monthly sales reports.

4. You agreed to give Apple a right to audit your books at anytime.

That's the meat of it. It's a self-reported cost-per-conversion, which isn't exactly unheard of. Developers are in arms because they don't believe Apple deserves any money for distributing their app on their App Store.

That's the heart of the disagreement.

Apple believes they have a right to charge developers a fee for access to the users who shop through the App Store.

There are developers who believe that the App Store should exist as a free-thing Apple provides to developers, to encourage them to write software for the iPhone. They're willing to accept a nominal processing fee, but anything more is "anti-competitive".
I've published them at https://dev.honeypot.net/kirk/keyboard-maestro if you're interested.

Edit: That also turned into a new blog post at https://honeypot.net/post/making-notes-looks-like-markdown-e... . Thanks for the nudge! I've been trying to get into a cadence, but hadn't had anything to talk about recently.
I'd hesitate to say 'typical'. I think your use of the word 'spiral' is entirely appropriate because it becomes this revolving descent. Casual substance use becomes substance abuse becomes poverty becomes ... and similarly mental health becomes poverty becomes self-medication via substance use and abuse.
I assume you're asking as a contractor wanting to become fulltime? It's probably worth letting people you work with know that you'd take a fulltime role, because IME many contractors had no interest whatsoever in converting. But you should make sure to know about any legal/administrative blockers, like agreements between your contract company and your FAANG workplace.
Believe me, I know. I’m a grad student at Tulane and used to canvass in Donaldsonville.
Anger at the Kafkaesque ministrations of the neo-feudal lords is a valid emotion. Let's not normalize the passive, defeatist acceptance of abusive corporate culture. One doesn't need to be angry, but that's a privilege of someone who isn't living paycheck to paycheck.
The Santa Susanna Field Lab had at least one nuclear reactor (built without containment) blow up. They also dumped toxic chemicals and waste often. In the hills between LA and Ventura counties.

Story was buried for decades. Lots of folks in Simi Valley have died of cancer.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory

- https://parentsagainstssfl.com/
> Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt.

This isn't right. Behind every decision is still a human (for now). Someone messed up and you were the victim.
Considering both repositories are on Github, actually forking it instead of re-commiting it all as 'init commit' would be a good start.

As you said, nothing compels srikanth235 to do this though, but it's a generally more respectable (acceptable?) way to continue someone elses work as a new project.

Also not sure why you had to bring the race of srikanth235 into it.
Is this problem better or worse in alternative solutions (that have been instantiated with humans)?

Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.
Yes, that is part of the standard library interfaces I was referring to.

> you'll have to reimplement every part of the language toolkit

You shouldn't need to, those APIs already exist. Like https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/boxed/struct.Box.html#m... for example. Maybe there's some coverage missing, I personally use no heap when I'm working in this context.
Isn't this the premise of like, half of all cyberpunk works?
> Who is to blame is debatable, since being a criminal and breaking and stealing

Not debatable at all - if you get mugged, it’s the criminals fault.

But if you trust your money to a bank, they leave the safe unlocked, and your money is gone, it’s their fault. That literally the whole point of a bank.

Same with your data - when it stolen, it usually the company’s fault - after all if there is no security, sooner or later it will happen.
Once ChatGPT reaches software engineer level of performance it will be trivial to get to senior software engineer.
the same could be said of any game developed on Unreal and required to pay an (admittedly lower) percent to Epic
It's not about the indexes. Databases support transactions and ACID properties.

File systems do not.

They have some similarity in that they both store data, but that's about it.
Comparing the 1970's Cray-1 supercomputer against the Raspberry Pi
As a developer I am not forced to write iOS apps. Just like I am not forced to use Unreal Engine.

Apple charges 30% if you do choose. Epic charges 5%.

Apple argues that what you're paying for includes SDKs. Epic does too.
Steam is a valid comparison because they used to have IAP-style enforcement: EA’s original dispute and split to their own launcher was because they snuck a DLC store into Dragon Age 2, but used their own billing and paid zero fees. IIRC they tried to justify it by implying the DLC is not downloaded from Steam CDNs, ergo no platform cost, but it got DA2 delisted and EA left (for several years).

To this day I think you can’t sell DLC from outside Steam while in a Steam version — i.e. the in-game UI must use a Steam store API — but you can share DLC, currency, etc. bought elsewhere with the Steam version through your account system. (E.g.: Overwatch 2 credits and content is cross-platform, Sims 4 DLC is cross-launcher, Apex Legends currency and content is cross-launcher, etc.) I’m not sure if it’s an oversight or if Valve and the developer sort of handle it monetarily behind the scenes in some form.
A lot of it is substance abuse first, a lot of it isn't. Homeless advocates don't want to emphasize the former cases, however, since it drains empathy faster than just assuming everyone is in the latter category (although it doesn't really matter, empathy is drained quickly in either case). The same debate rages over between groups of people who wind up unhoused locally vs those who arrive already unhoused (you get more empathy for the former and less for the latter, both categories are significantly non-empty).
ARM's "Blackhawk" CPU Is a Plan to Have the Best Smartphone CPU Core
Unfortunately those mechanical sympathies related to spinning disks, and now we have SSDs that have to fake like they are spinning disks for file system compatibility and all the software that expects file systems to behave that way.
It absolutely was a full scale invasion. It just failed.
that's pretty lame. you were not asked for your opinion. you provided a link to a 2.5+ hour video. you were asked to summarize it. if you can't summarize something without including your opinion and snap judgement, then this isn't really someone worth having a conversation.

you can't come at someone with a video saying "here's why i think your wrong" and not be able to explain what the video is about and expect people to take you seriously
Ongoing big discussion at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39020365
Wishful thinking that will get rolled back after backlash.
I was convinced of this initially, but then I went back, deeper into the rabbit hole of the stackexchange discussion, and someone tracked down this image as clipart attached to the chinese characters for "axe" - so the illustrator did choose this image as specifically being an axe.
When the Greek soldiers emerged from the Trojan Horse, declaring 'this isn't a gift' would be a monumental understatement. Continuing to dwell on such an observation is akin to debating the quality of the woodwork while the city falls around you.

It's a distraction, and frankly, it's preferable to keep it that way. Better to have the enemy class lost in trivialities than rallying to mount a defense.
In a way it is disappointing... Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask.

Yet, while everyone might be only 6 handshakes away from everyone else (on average), we do not have sufficient human connectivity to locate this person, even with hundreds of people putting at least a little thought/effort into identifying the artist.
I'm just riffing about the sort of things that happen to Murakami's lead characters, which would not be most people's idea of a good time. The first and third are references to Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and the second to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.
The judge's comments were about the electronic stores of each platform. The distribution costs are only different for physically purchased games, Apple has to distribute just as many devices per customer as Nintendo does.
I suggest you take a look at DOS extenders at some point. They were brilliant and the best was DOS/4GW.
Yes, it certainly means that there should be some structure in the work, but do we need 6 or 600 human level AI agents or instead all can be done by just 1 agent that would do the human intelligence level work just faster?

Imagine the same problem that happened with computation. One human can compute, but slowly, now this can be scaled up by multiple human computers, doing organized task of computing - but even the best large scale human computing efforts can be simply replaced by a single electronic computer.
So if it were cheaper, what would you say
> What monopolies have emerged out of venture capital in the last 3 decades? In any industry?

* Google with ad-tech

* Amazon ecomerce

* There is a beer oligopoly with four breweries and > 90% market between them

* In mu country there is a duopoly of supermarkets

That is off the top of my head.
I've read a conspiracy theory that powers-that-be were really scared of Occupy Wall Street and so this coincided with culture wars taking off (more or less).
Sadly Apple's competition in computer OS is Microsoft, and Microsoft saw everything Apple has been doing and thought it was a great idea...
Cleanliness is a obvious concern with something like this, and I wonder how well people with dexterity problems let alone paralysis will be able to keep something like this clean. The one shown in the article has a lot of groves and valleys even on the bottom (tongue facing) side which look like they could trap bacteria.
Quite, but if you read the story you'll notice the CEO of Fujitsu has weighed in as well.
> you're not forced to use UE.

you are forced to pay Epic 5% of sales (if your game makes more than $1 million), so pretty much like Apple (fees are lower of course)
Cool, sounds like the 20X0's version of "we'll just outsource the engineers".

Of course, they have relatively little to lose and can just reverse course in a few years, likely undercutting the market despite talent being more efficient and self sufficient and able to generate more funds for the company (if I take the charitable end road for this AI stuff).

I guess history really does rhyme.
They'll also refuse to house you if you have a pet, smell like alcohol, have a tent, or they just filled up already. There is rarely consistency in a shelter, so most are better off finding an alternative that's consistent. Otherwise you end up with no shelter some nights, with no way to manage it.

I can't stand how everyone keeps brushing over the fact that it's completely legal to clear an encampment if there's somewhere for them to go. Instead of immediately starting housing first initiatives; these cities pretend there's nothing they can do and continue to sue for the right to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on their citizens. It's insane.
I could actually see myself using this, if it is reasonably precise. A lot of the software that I use is GUI-only, and I really don't like taking my hands off of the keyboard to reach my mouse.
but not all dirt is equal. some dirt is laden with forever chemicals or other toxic pollutants from industrial processes. some dirt is full of microplastics.

if i were to offer you two glasses of a clear liquid and said one is clean water and the other is full of microplastics and forever chemicals, would you drink either one? what if we passed both glasses through a Brita, would you drink either of them then? what level of processing would you be comfortable with before drinking either of them?

or, more to your point, what if i said that both glasses were the results of filtering out all of the dirt. one glass from dirt from a farm, and the other was from a local dump with a nearby 3M PFAS plant. how would you feel about the water then?
I can't speak to making that much money, but I did leave a job where I had worked most of my career, making more money than I had ever imagined making, due to a changing culture.

The hard part wasn't the money at all. The hard part was that I had let the company culture become a major part of my self identity. It sounds like the author didn't let that happen to him. Kudos. I wish I hadn't.
The article mentions those at the bottom: "And that’s it for today folks. I intentionally did not touch on DPMI—the technology that truly allowed DOS applications to break free from the 1 MB memory limitation—because I’m saving that for the next article. So, make sure to come back for more!"
> To your example, both you and many of the general patrol police officers are legally prohibited from carrying a firearm, yet the Prime Minister’s protection detail does carry firearms. They do that because factually a firearm is an effective tool for self-protection and neutralizing threats. If that wasn’t the case, militaries wouldn’t likely use them!

And the NRA strongly advocates "from my cold dead hands"... unless you're at an NRA convention. Concealed or open carry... unless you're at an NRA convention.
This is awesome! Thank you for a great read!
Google doesn't even have 50% of the online ad market. Nor does Amazon even have 50% of the e-commerce market...

It's like saying Boeing has a monopoly on airplanes, when actually they can be said to have a local monopoly within a few hundred km of Seattle.
Taleb talks about this specifically, his advice is to only check stocks occasionally that way you don't get the negative feedback from the down cycles.

His argument is that since stock generally goes up, if you're not constantly checking, when you DO check it will be higher than it was before and you'll feel positive about it.
Led me to this, previously unknown-to-me, pot of gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

"Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
I think it's useful to separate these scenarios -

1. A user knows they want to install a certain app; they do so using the app store since that's the only method Apple allows.

2. A user discovers an app while browsing the App Store, but Apple isn't involved beyond that.

3. A user discovers an app through Apple's marketing, e.g. from WWDC.

With (1), it feels very unfair for Apple to charge 30% just to essentially get out of the way. It's not too far off from Apple threatening to block websites from Safari unless they agree to a ransom payment.

With (2), Apple did refer the customer in some sense, but it still feels unfair in a way since the user was essentially forced to use their App Store for discovery.

With (3), at least Apple is putting in some kind of work (specific to the app) rather than purely rent seeking. Still feels morally questionable since developers have no choice to opt out, though.
If it was just a tax, it'd be bad enough. But Apple's in-app payments solution is severely lacking in terms of features and capabilities.

Just some of the problems:

* You cannot issue a partial refund.

* Actually, you can't refund a customer at all. Customers have to contact Apple to request a refund and it's entirely at their mercy of their whims.

* If Apple declines the refund for whatever reason, you and the customer are just screwed. Literally had to buy a gift card to give a customer so we could make them whole.

* You cannot offer a discount and free trial at the same time.

* When trying to create a different subscription group to A/B test our pricing, we somehow got cursed with a reviewer who did not understand the concept long after it was released. New app builds with bug fixes completely unrelated were getting rejected. It took weeks of escalations before they finally relented.

* Promotional pricing is so frustrating to setup between Introductory Offers, Promotional Offers, and Offer Codes.

* You cannot generate ad-hoc pricing for anything.
YouTube to eliminate 100 employees as layoffs at Google continue
How about thinking of the first order effects? Do you think taxes are fair as they are now? How is that working out for us?
A groundbreaking study shows kids learn better on paper, not screens. Now what?
Checking in briefly as a person whose parents paid for college: I feel as though I owe these people 9/10 or more of everything I own and if push came to shove, I would be happy to pay all of their bills until they die.

Put otherwise, these two people have created quite an asset in me and we aren’t even considering their other children. I doubt very much that any one of their financial or physical assets would go to the lengths to which I would go to protect and aid them.
At the point COVID was around and known, it would already be too late, because there would be less than a year left in Trump's first term. If I was Putin and I had a useful idiot in the White House, I would start planning that in 2016 before he was even inaugurated.
Ultimate nerd snipe
> Meanwhile, the Fed fecklessly raises interest rates over and over, refusing to acknowledge that it didn't work

The interest rate hikes did work. The inflation rate has dropped by over 5% from it's peak [1]. Real wages rebounded right after the Fed started raising interest rates [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=rocU

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
The important thing is to always find a powerless minority to torment
That's not an apt comparison because Apple banned alternative app stores from their devices.
Pedantic notes:

1. The 4% number comes from the Trinity study, which found that 95% of the time you have >$0 after 30 years. If you're >30 years from death now, a more appropriate benchmark might be 3% or possibly 3.5%.

2. $100k/yr post tax is more than $100k/yr pretax, even if it's mostly long term capital gains and dividend taxes.

3. Health insurance $$$.

So the number for you is probably a little higher maybe $5m to switch to 3% and add an additional $50k for tax and health insurance costs.

But yea the general point stands. Someone working as a director probably pulling >$1m/yr, with a long tenure, almost definitely has way over that amount. (I wouldn't be surprised if it was $20m+)
The longer this case goes on, the scummier Apple looks. Firing back with a 27% cut isn't going to relieve pressure from this vessel; its going to piss off developers even more, its going to drag the case out even longer, and frankly its going to become evidence in an inevitable future, separate trial concerning broader anti-competitiveness.

Apple could make stupid amounts of money by just lowering the cut to 7%. Just lower it! You'll make the IAP system more accessible to your mega-business peers, and one company like Netflix deciding that 7% is an acceptable cut is worth ten-thousand indie developers suffering through 30% (or, I suppose, 15% if under a million now).

Anyone who believes their behavior is about security is being intentionally daft about their inaction in lowering these fees. If its about security: lower the fees. Make these problems go away. The judge insinuated it herself; there is more a case here that their fees are too high, but that's not what Epic pursued, so they lost.

The alternative is dark for both Apple and Apple's users. There's no innovation in the iOS app ecosystem anymore, beyond thirty copycat ChatGPT apps. Why should there be? Software is expensive to build, and Apple is putting up a toll-booth larger than the US Tax System to enter. There exist alternate realities where the iPhone Pro and iPad Pro are actually professional devices, which cultivate the creation of bespoke, powerful software for the form-factor. Gates defined a platform as a piece of software itself could be created with. Apple, the company, could never be created within Apple's world. Apple doesn't create platforms. I'm not confident they create much of anything anymore. Their most profitable skill nowadays is extraction, not creation.
Their fluorite lenses in Takahashi telescopes are a hit among amateur astronomers.
right. human being gets laid off.

Has this ever happened before. It does seem like SV folks have an elevated sense of purpose. Which is maybe fair to a point because of SVs inclusion in our online lives. But really, it seems like people in high paid jobs getting laid off isn't so much news for anyone, in general.

Maybe if there's some juice about how to order the world's information, but then they'd get sued for saying no doubt.
The "backpack" is some kind of tiny disc you can stick on a cell that will modify its behavior for weeks... It makes for the best title I've seen in quite some time.
That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008. Within 2 year of joining, I had approval to use all the idle cycles in prod for protein design, folding, and drug discovery, and I had a front-row seat with some of the best programmers in the industry. By and large, employees were fun people to interact with, and the management was generally understanding of our hijinx. The main struggle I had was to convince the leadership to move faster into the cloud ("But we have appengine!" and "But profits aren't as good as ads", until MSFT ate their lunch). As soon as it was possible, I built and launched the cloud product I had wanted Google to make even before I joined!

It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did.

Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust.

Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.