hn_check's comments

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

"People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed."

Independent software development was an absolute wasteland. It was extremely hard to get a user to give you money outside of a few extremely fortified ghettos (Steam, for instance, which takes a 30% cut as well). Begware was the most common tactic.

Even now with multiple options, while everyone piles on Apple, we should note that iOS was the single most profitable platform for Epic, across all platforms. Apple did more to liberate payments from a user than any other platform. Through trust, through standardization and normalization, and even through things like the wide availability of App Store gift cards (which are often heavily discounted - $85 for $100 of App Store gift cards at Costco many times through the year).

Elsewhere people are arguing that Windows is a wonderful platform because look, it's so open. Okay, go and make money from Windows users and see how great it is. Unless your name is Microsoft or Adobe, you are in for a really, really rough time of it. You'll get 100% of nothing.

As always, of course this is downvoted. Anyone looking to HN for rational, reality-based discussion might find it a bit disappointing. Here apparently the Windows ISV market is a vibrant, lucrative market. Everyone here is profiting from it, right? (LOL -- close to none of you are). This is farce.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Why ‘Civilization’ is a political masterpiece

Orthogonal complaint, but it was a huge loss when the Civilization catalog was removed from GeForce Now.

I loved playing Civ while developing on my laptops, without it spooling up my fans, burning my lap or impeding my other processes. Playing it in the cloud was the perfect solution, and it has the perfect "lag doesn't matter" gameplay where a bit of latency doesn't diminish the enjoyment.

Whatever their pissing match is, after playing Civ in the cloud I just could never get back to playing it locally. I was spoiled, and as a result I haven't bought two of the most recent Civ expansion packs.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

Apple's GPUs achieve "integrated" level performance and it would be a large step for them to achieve AMD or nvidia performance levels. Maybe they can scale it up sufficiently, or put it on a separate die with its own heat dissipation, but that seems like biting off too mcuh.

My MBP has the intel integrated graphics, and AMD discrete graphics. I imagine as Apple moves to Apple silicon it will be the same arrangement at tiers that currently have discrete graphics, with the intel integrated just being swapped out for Apple integrated, leveraging the discrete graphics when appropriate.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Letsencrypt, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

You should demand a refund. Vote with your wallet.

Of course that was a bit trenchant, however you're complaining about a promise that was never made. No one ever promised that you could setup a old certbot instance and it was out of sight and mind for perpetuity. There are any number of issues that can occur, and honestly if one expected certbot to run without issue, having it automatically updating as well seems to be a base minimum.

Also worth noting that LE was early with ACMEv1, but a lot of alternatives started with ACMEv2. ACMEv2 became the common standard.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Getting Fiber to My Town [video]

Mr. Mauch is replying through this thread and I don't think many have noticed.

Great initiative and project, with a wonderful outcome. This is great HN material.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Getting Users Is Hard

The submission is about trying to draw in users for a meat-world social application during a pandemic.

In the sunscreen example, someone could absolutely be designing packaging, securing suppliers, building a workforce, etc, during the winter, but if they went to the door to door phase at the same time it would be a completely disastrous exercise. It was the door to door phase that I was comparing to.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Getting Users Is Hard

Their comment addresses the fundamental substance of the submission. It's as if someone started their sunscreen door to door business in January: The fundamental timing is broken.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

"I believe most people just don't notice the judder, and many of the rest don't care"

This is probably the case. DAZN took over NFL streaming in Canada and for the first two years seemed to use their existing European soccer processing chain (they might still --- I gave it a try to years straight and then gave up). So the 60/30 NFL stream was re-encoded to 25/50, and then on playback on my set would be displayed at 30/60. It was brutal, and even if displayed at 25 or 50 FPS was still brutal because they were seriously corrupting the NFL stream.

I tried it across a number of devices -- AppleTV, Chromecast, different TVs, pads, laptops -- and it was just unbelievably intolerable to me. Every panning pass was the horrendous juddering mess. Yet somehow no one seemed to have a problem with this! In discussions it seemed to be a non-issue.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

"supporting a brand as team sports is a thing like supporting a political party as team sports is"

This may be true at times, but the assumption of the same is the root of a lot of the toxic behavior. You cannot be neutral or even in agreement with Apple's position without being a "fanboy", or giving into the "cult of Apple", etc.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content

"I have an Apple TV 4K, which can do 4K Dolby Vision playback and looks ok, but the Apple TV tends to have some jittering when streaming certain shows (very noticeable in panning shots of animation)."

How don't more people complain about this? I avoid streaming on the Apple TV because it does some sort of bizarre framerate thunking that is just brutal for panning. Do so few people use the product that it just goes unnoticed?

My LG 4K TV has fantastic Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ clients. HDR, 4K, etc.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Is TDD Dead? (2014)

"But, selling it to a company that have commitments to investors, paying customers and an executive team who might not all have technical backgrounds makes TDD a hard sell"

It's an incredibly easy sale. The whole basis of TDD is that it's an approach that makes your development efforts faster, with higher quality. A million graphics of the amount of time that development spends fixing errors are what sold TDD to the masses.

The theory of TDD is exactly what sells to the suits and the money counters.

The theory doesn't mesh with reality, though, and it's that engagement with the enemy (reality) where TDD falls down.

As an aside, in my own career I've seldom been able to incorporate TDD because each project has been novel enough that trying to define tests up front was just not possible. Yes, if I was implementing the re-invent the wheel "sum two numbers" type example, it's trivial. But most of the time it's a vague API for a vague need on an uncertain technical foundation, and until the clay has taken form we really weren't sure what we were dealing with.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: A Chrome feature is creating load on global root DNS servers

"The ISPs now will have a series of PR articles about how Google wants to own the internet, track all your web DNS, monopolize the access, and evil blah blah."

They'd be right, but that's neither here nor there in this contrived strawman.

And yes, a lot of people would have a serious problem if Google baked in their own DNS. That would break a lot of stuff. And it would make the notion of checking invalid DNS entries rather unnecessary, wouldn't it?

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: Apple ordered to not block Epic’s Unreal Engine, Fortnite to stay off App Store

Epic knowingly, intentionally, and publicly defied Apple's rules. In response Apple "threatened" exactly what they threaten every single other company doing the same -- to suspend or terminate your developer accounts if you don't remediate the issue. There is absolutely a basis for it, it certainly isn't "unrelated", and trying to attribute motives like spite or having a "temper tantrum" is baseless nonsense.

The court has blocked it because there could be greater harm in the short term (although that is grossly overblown -- the UE wouldn't stop working in the short or even medium term), but don't be confused into thinking this isn't a completely rote, normal response.

>The fact that fortnite is built on UE doesn't have any significance here.

You understand that Fortnite and UE are made by the same company, right? The canard that it has anything to do with what engine Fortnite uses is absurd noise.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: TikTok Inc. vs. U.S. Department of Commerce

The US is nowhere near leadership in either democracy or corruption. I didn't hold it as the stellar example, beyond countering someone who is surprised (or finds it "weird") that a government has checks and balances, and a legal system. I know few Americans who "think they're not corrupt", nor does that change the fact that India is very corrupt and has a very flawed democracy.

hn_check | 5 years ago | on: TikTok Inc. vs. U.S. Department of Commerce

What about them?

I replied to someone saying "ha ha isn't that weird they can contest it in the US look countries like India just went ahead and banned it and there's no recourse". Great. Other countries can talk about it, go through a legislative process (in Japan lawmakers aren't even going to start talking about their possible options until September), then there are legal challenges and normal processes to go through, etc.

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