hn_check's comments

How is this weird? A country of law and order and checks and balances rightly allows orders like this to be contested.

India, used as the example, has a very flawed democracy and a high degree of corruption.

EDIT: LOL, downvoted to oblivion by the HN India contingent. As provided elsewhere, India's democratic and corruption rankings are mediocre.

Because the story is an absurd lie. The guy has gotten 100+ upvotes for that hysterically dumb bit of fiction.

HN has proven to be outrageously gullible time and time again, and this one takes the cake.

>When you move into iOS town, the only store within a thousand miles is the App Store.

A thousand miles?

I've switched between iOS and Android multiple times over my smartphone life (Android to iOS to Android to iOS). The switch is trivial. Yeah, it is like going between Walmart and Target, and not knowing the aisles layouts or having the loyalty card, but it's a pretty easy barrier and you'll figure it out quickly enough.

All of this moping and crying speaks as if Apple drew everyone in and then suddenly changed the rules of the game -- some master bait and switch -- and now everyone is finding the gates locked. Yet it has been the same rules for the entire ascent. Everyone who has bought an iPhone in the past decade+ knows that there is one app store, it's curated, etc. None of this is new. Every developer who made an app knew the way the store works, the rules, Apple's cut, etc.

Apple is on the wrong side of history with some of their current positions (cloud gaming as a big example of Apple being wrong), but this whole thread feel like people who want to force their way by grossly exaggerating their grievances and opposition. Many of these comments read like an absurd parody.

"On iOS I guarantee that if the App Store had even one alternative, many apps would do the same and bail on Apple, and you’d see a similar ghost store."

This earned a serious out loud laugh. Are you actually being sincere?

An app store that is widely trusted, and that has been the most successful, most profitable venue for independent developers in history (by a magnitude) is going to be abandoned because you, the developer, find it a hassle? Epic Games, as one example, has made far more from the App Store than any other platform...yet it's their target? LOL.

Uproarious stuff. Reading through these various absurd, fully detached from reality comments (I most like the highly upvoted fan fiction nonsense - "I have a super successful app on the App Store and I'm abandoning it because the Android Play Store is such a greener pasture" -- everyone pretends that the Play Store doesn't have virtually the same policies)

Some developers of fringe stuff might abandon it, and every other developer would welcome your departure. The rest of us will enjoy a trusted, lubricated, very successful platform.

Sidenote - everyone always goes on about the 30% cut. Right now my Costco has iTunes cards for 85 cents on the dollar (e.g. $85 for $100 gift cards, and clearly Costco is getting a cut of that amount). This deal is fairly regular, and gives buyers a sense of "value", and fills up lots of grandparents storage until birthdays and Christmas roll around. And then another few billion appear in developer accounts. What a crime.

To the dead reply to me - lol. Saudi Arabia's geopolitical power is entirely predicated on the US acting in its interest, which was a premise that only held when the US was dependent on oil imports.

Saudi Arabia's economy is non-existent and hyper-unproductive, and its military is farcical. While it has some modern hardware, it has F-15s being staffed by profoundly incompetent princlings (just another example of the broken nature of the society, where it is the absolute inverse of a meritocracy. Incompetence and nepotism from top to bottom).

Saudi Arabia is irrelevant, unless maybe you're some Indian guy looking for a job where you live in servitude as a slave in some foreign nation. When they do deplorable things it just doesn't get a lot of notice because it's entirely expected. They got to prance around with an imagined importance when they could squeeze the oil spigot, but now...eh. Those days are long gone.

Saudi Arabia exports oil but apart from that is generally just completely irrelevant. It is a terrible, despotic regressive craphole, but it doesn't have context enough in the world to come up a lot.

Deprecation is too kind of a word. Traditionally deprecated means that it is no longer a best practice/canonical. It's nice to see deprecated flags when building new code because you know you found an out of date bit of documentation and you should look at what may be a better approach.

Deprecated APIs, functions, etc, in many orgs hang around forever. They might not be ideal, but they still work for code written before (or even code written after that might have some perverse reason).

Google (outside of Android) doesn't deprecate, they rip it out. It makes things easier for them, as this post details at length, but it makes it harder for the rest of the universe.

"Epic gave Apple over $360 Million dollars in the last twelve months just to list the game in it's app store"

The stat you cited was for two years, not one. Further, they paid $99 for a developer account "just to list the game" (and any other games they want to list). The fees you are mentioning are only for transactions that occurred on the Apple device. Their "v-bucks" can be bought on other platforms and are cross platform (for some platforms - Switch and PS4 do not allow cross-platform in-game currency). But strangely Fortnite gave no discount on their Windows app, for instance... (almost like they set up this whole ridiculous charade just to play the crowd).

Now add that anyone assuming Apple is actually getting that full 30% is deluded. Apple sells iTunes cards at Costco often $100 for ~$80. They have lubricated the market to encourage grandparents, etc, to give their relatives gift cards, and created a system where people feel confident enough to buy. Those gift cards become vbux. Without Apple's and Google's system, they would never have made a fraction of what they've made.

I hardly think Apple is innocent in this -- their position on cloud gaming is absolutely wrong -- but the horde that is suddenly falling in line behind Epic is uproarious. Sweeney is playing this crowd like a fiddle.

Your comment does not correct that statement, and uses erroneous data to claim otherwise.

Apple does not have more than 50% marketshare of smartphones in the US. In most analyses it is between 41-43%, with an absolute high of 46%. Android accounts for the rest. And of course worldwide iOS is dwarfed by Android.

https://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/smartphone-os-market...

EDIT: Of course this was down-arrowed. The citation of StatCounter is akin to claiming that the rodeo's parking lot has 80% pick-up trucks, therefore pick-up trucks have 80% of the market. It's absolute nonsense but it somehow appears on HN repeatedly. Never change, HN. Never change.

StatCounter measures web usage, not market share. iOS users tend to jump into Safari and browse the web from their devices more than peer devices, quite contrary to the conspiratorial noise often spread on here.

By actual sales of devices, iOS accounts for between 41-46% of the market. That users on iOS tend to use the web more from their devices doesn't somehow make it a monopoly.

And to be clear I don't think whether it's a monopoly or not is particularly relevant -- it's still arguably abusive, anticompetitive behavior -- but that misleading statcounter claim is used for disinformation on here daily.

The bit soliciting people to link to the site is not only desperate SEO -- the author claims they're moving away from relying upon Google, when actually they're trying to double down, seriously asking for "high-quality, earnest links from highly ranked domains" -- it will yield very close to zero natural click through.

People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an answer as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint.

We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will rightly get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.

Nah, I was actively soliciting people to follow it, doubly so given that it is an internal HN link and not an abstract article. It was just a subtle little chuckle of a post.

"I strongly doubt anyone will ever catch up with TSMC or Samsung at this point."

What timeline are we talking about here? 1 year? 5 years? Forever?

Yes, of course people will "Catch up" to Samsung and TSMC, both of which are relatively recent leaders in this field. There are are loads of foundries around the world, all of which have virtually equivalent level of complexity, but it is small (literally small) advances that give one foundry or another a competitive lead. And those small advances are certainly stealable, quite aside from independent orthogonal advances.

These "fire the bad customers" blog entries regurgitate on here with regularity, and it reads like a fan fiction more than an actual description of events.

Further some of the examples are terrible. If, for instance, you've made multiple product changes for a free customer, the problem isn't that the free customer exists, it's that you didn't have any check early on against doing that.

"Can you change this for me?" "No." Alternately, "Sure, that would be $2750 up front"

Etc.

Customers bothering you on WhatsApp? Again, maybe the customer isn't the problem...

The most recent, randomized studies of the NYC metro area finds SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in about 14% of participants when they randomly solicit people directly. Prior studies put out ads looking for participants, naturally drawing in people who "had that unexplained thing a few months back".

Even when directly appealing to people the participation rate is likely higher among people who suspect they may have had it.

We know that testing was very limited early in the outbreak, when NYC was hit, and that it caught only a fraction of the people infected. But all metrics are that there is still a huge victim base in the area.

The drop is more likely entirely behavioral.

a) The context is specifically in relation to communicability

b) Further, it was about New York City!

Extremely few sports are taking place in NYC, and even if we discount that, from the overarching context those sports having a tiny, tiny fraction of the communicability potential.

"NHL playoffs are incredible right now"

No fans. Playing in two bubble cities in Canada.

"NBA is just getting started"

No fans. Playing in one bubble city.

And I was talking about NYC. Zero NBA or NHL games are taking place in NYC.

In an average month in NYC, pre-COVID, there are dozens of enormous sports events. Hundreds of concerts. Tens of thousands of significant parties. If social interaction were on a scale from 0 to 100, and 100 was the before, right now NYC is at a less than 1. So when someone looks at NYCs current infection rate and presumes that means there is some herd immunity or the like, I don't think they're fully taking into account the reality on the ground.

The snark is adorable and comically out of place.

Swedish schools closed for the summer break just as COVID was peaking. They return in just over a week. Businesses are sparse because few people are shopping. Restaurants and bars were closed, and other than that have strict reduced occupancy.

But Florida man is sure that Everything Is Normal. It's hilarity. That "look they didn't close their schools"...when they were closed regardless. Hurr.

"And masks aren't mandated, but most people are wearing them?"

Masks are necessary when you're in close proximity to other people. Swedes aren't getting in close proximity to other people. Are you getting this?

The Cult of Idiocy that has overtaken the US isn't there in Sweden. Florida in their highest level of lockdown has dramatically more social interaction than Sweden minus it.

Sweden has adopted virtually every recommendations without it being mandated. This is an enormous difference from some Florida Man arguing why lockdowns are unnecessary. As much as people focus on face masks, in Sweden the sparsity of people given their response makes it much less of a necessity.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/i58jjj/helgtr%C3%A5...

There you go -- read about Swedes talking about their COVID-19 experience. It is a universe removed from normal, or what Florida-man-using-Sweden-as-their-no-biggie-example claims.

Here you go - https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/nastan-alla-fick-coro...

Someone had an ill considered party. Despite the amazing herd immunity nonsense this guy is arguing (again, contrary to the entire expert community), most of the partiers got COVID. Ooops!

I think we really are losing sight of the before versus now comparison. NYC is an absolutely ghost town compared to how it was. Everyone stays remarkably limited in their social contact. Professional sports are a ghost of what they were, running in an incredibly limited fashion. Travel is rare.

The same is true of Sweden as well, of course. Social interaction has collapsed to very close to nil, and any article that claims that things are "normal" is lying to push an agenda.