hn_check

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She was asked by CNN, given that she's running on the Biden-Harris ticket. No one particularly cares whether you care or not, but she is clearly a rather important person right now and was asked this question given that public health has marched to political drums rather than safety drums lately.

You could have simply given your opinion, but leading off with a dismissive "ignore the haters" (where haters are apparently people who didn't enjoy it) made your comment carry zero weight.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

The chart does not see to show every bitrate for every target resolution, but rather is show where the 4K stream would have to drop to a lower resolution given insufficient bandwidth.

"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.

"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?

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.

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-apparently-cancelin...

Note that Microsoft is not backing Epic in their court case against Apple, because that would be quite the glass house given the xbox (which is a 70/30 split, with virtually identical restrictions as the App Store). Instead they are merely backing them for the injunction to prevent Epic from losing immediate access to development tools.

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.

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.

https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi

India is no benchmark. There are far worse countries, but if someone cites India's actions as an example, it falls flat.

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.