HN user
I have an LLC on Brex, but haven't gotten an email yet. I'm not sure if that means if I'm in the clear or if the email just hasn't rolled out yet.
Would be great if you could send an email to _all_ customers, including the ones who weren't affected as a reassurance, so we could either rest in peace or get the migration started ASAP.
The original complaint was mostly around layout patterns. I'm not super familiar with XAML, but "offloading that all into writing custom C# code to lay things out at pixel locations" certainly doesn't sound like a great dev experience, and definitely doesn't sound very responsive. Does XAML have anything comparable to flexbox/grid for building responsive layouts?
I enjoyed the post and appreciate that more people are looking for privacy focused alternatives to traditional vendors.
Though I'm disappointed hear that one of the conclusions seems to be there's no privacy-focused chat vendor that does something as simple as not collecting identifying information on users until they interact with the chat app, with integrated consent collection (which is essentially what they've implemented with their fork).
Maybe the wider HN community might know of such a service?
This is maddening...
Why does Google, with all the resources at its disposal, choose to cheap out like this when competitors in the video chat space (from tiny startups to gigantic corporation of similar size) have offered near native resolution video chat for ages?
Are they even _trying_ to compete?
Would be great if you could make your pricing public. Call-me pricing immediately disqualifies a vendor from consideration for me, and I suspect I'm not alone.
I think one difference is the existing giants have smarted up to the fact that new competing startups can be existential threats to their business like they were to their former incumbents, and have started putting much more focus on gobbling them up with cash before they become fully fledged competitors instead of trying to out-compete them.
Am I the only one who clicked on this thinking it's a compilation of Rich Hickey's comments in Clojure source code?
Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.
To set expectations, it's been more than 10 years since I started learning, so I don't want to make it sound like it was an easy/short process for me either.
But regardless, here's a few notes from my experience that might/might not help:
I'd recommend starting out by consuming untranslated material only for titles that you can enjoy without actually fully understanding every piece of dialog/text, and being at peace with the fact that you might not have understood everything, as long as the experience of consuming the content was still enjoyable. Light-hearted slice of life comedies and titles that involve mostly mindless action can be good candidates (you can give the first episodes/chapters of every new title a try without translations to see how it goes). For everything else, definitely keep using translations.
Number one priority should always be to enjoy the content. If you're like me then that's what motivated you to learn in the first place, to enjoy the content more, so be sure to not confuse the end goal with the means you're using to get there.
Slowly, over periods of years, as you watch/read more titles without translations, you'll get better and better at picking up on contextual queues to fill in vocabulary that you don't already know, not by explicitly looking things up, but from pattern matching on actual usage. This will massively accelerate your learning as time goes on, and will also gradually expand the pool of content that you can enjoy without translations, forming a virtuous cycle. Eventually you'll find yourself no longer even thinking about the meaning of words/phrases in English, having learned their meaning from their context in Japanese speech/writing alone.
Some mediums are better suited for this process than others. Anime is especially great because it progresses on its own without giving you time to stress about the meaning of every word of dialog and look things up, which forces you to exercise those pattern matching muscles. Most other mediums let you progress through the story at your own pace, so you actually have to exercise restraint yourself. Of those, manga is probably the easiest to start out with to learn reading since it's still a very visual medium with lots of non-textual contextual cues, and shounen manga especially has furigana over every kanji so you can learn their pronunciation. Visual novels are also great in that they let you exercise both reading and listening skills simultaneously, but are probably not quite as good for beginner-level learning in either area compared to anime/manga. I'd leave fully text-based light novels for last after you're comfortable with reading manga with no furigana and visual novels, as they're pretty impossible to enjoy until you've built up a really solid foundation for reading.
At the end of the day I think there's no substitute for sheer time spent and volume of content consumed, but as long as you keep enjoying the content and the process of learning itself, you'll eventually get there. Have fun!
It feels like a specialized voice control interface with a limited set pre-programmed functionality accessible through specific hard-coded keywords (which is what I assume Teslas could be equipped with for this purpose) might have a much easier time getting things right compared to an open ended general purpose virtual assistant that has to deal with completely arbitrary voice commands and unbounded ambiguity.
You can make it better by trying to restrict your entertainment material to the second language, but this usually involves seeking out kids' shows to try to find something comprehensible at your small vocabulary level, and to me it ends up feeling more like work than entertainment.
I suspect I'm probably not alone in this given how popular Japanese anime/games/manga/lightnovels are among non-native speakers, but outside of 1 year of Japanese class in high school where I was taught some fundamentals (could probably be replicated in a 1-month online course), I managed to acquire, pretty much exclusively through media consumption, enough proficiency to consume most Japanese entertainment I'm interested in today, rarely ever feeling the need to reach for translation (watching untranslated anime, reading untranslated manga/light novels, playing untranslated games, etc). In fact today I actually find translated material extremely frustrating and actively seek out non-localized Japanese versions of games to play so I can enjoy the original text.
Though of course I can't really claim to be a fluent communicator in Japanese because consuming media passively doesn't really exercise the brain and face muscles needed to communicate to others. When I went to Japan last year I was actually able to understand pretty much everything that was said to me, but really struggled to formulate responses (luckily I was able to eventually communicate my ideas for the most part, but I'm pretty sure it was dead obvious that I wasn't a native speaker). Writing in Japanese without some kind of IME is as you might guess a complete non-starter for me as well for similar reasons.
Fair enough, I guess both Chrome and Safari were holding us back until a few months ago haha.
Really ecstatic to see that it's going to be in Safari soon though! Thank you so much for sharing! Really made my day.
This is why I love Hacker News.
I'm not familiar with Teslas at all, but it sounds like a voice interface might help work around some of these limitations, a la Alexa/Hey Google. Maybe they already have it?
Widespread flex gap support will probably eliminate 95% of grid usage in my apps today: https://caniuse.com/flexbox-gap
And what a surprise, it's just Safari holding us back again. =_=
As much as I appreciate Mullvad's stance around privacy, I don't actually use a VPN for privacy (I use Tor for that), but mostly for bypassing geo-restrictions on my entertainment devices for games and streaming services and whatnot.
For that use case, I can't justify paying double/triple the price as other providers that offer 2/3x the devices for the same price. The provider I use now, Surfshark, offers unlimited devices for about 1/3 of the price, and also recently started offering WireGuard, it would be financially irresponsible for me to choose Mullvad which would effectively 10x what I'm paying right now for the same number of devices.
FWIW I understand that their account number mechanism is superior from a privacy perspective, and that there's no way to support unlimited devices while combating fraud using that mechanism. It's just not the right set of tradeoffs for my use case.
I love everything about Mullvad except their device limit, which is unfortunately a deal breaker for me. 5 is completely inadequate for my use cases.
I honestly don't understand this either...
Youtube knows exactly which videos I've watched and which I haven't.
Why does it think it's a good idea to ever recommend videos that I've already watched?
It's a tragedy of the commons situation. Microsoft might be _able_ to provided effectively limitless funding to power these free workers, but if enough people choose to abuse this, Microsoft might no longer be _willing_ to provide that funding, so everybody would be deprived of a useful resource because of the bad actors.
In practice the biggest issue I've found with git+pinned hashes as dependencies is most public sources of remote git repositories allows the repository to be taken down by the author at any time, i.e. an author can turn a public github repo private or simply delete it at will.
Whereas most public package registries generally don't allow removal of publicly published packages outside of special circumstances, so the references will be more durable.
I wonder why Fortnite doesn't also make a WebAssembly version of Fortnight and deploy it on fortnite.com?
Then Apple would get jack shit from any sales there, so they can fight this battle with them while still offering access to the game for Apple users.
I'm probably missing some esoteric limitation Apple places on web-based games to cripple this use case.
The thing is, an open ecosystem that allows users to run any software they want on their devices already exists, including on Apple devices, in the form of the Web.
And despite all of its flaws it's the most successful software deployment platform the world has ever seen, to the point where even Apple can't afford to not include it on their platforms when we all know they'd rather not, because it's simply too valuable to consumers and would make their devices obsolete if they didn't include it.
There's no central gatekeeper for the web, and sure, it has its dark corners, but it has not devolved into absolute chaos as you so adamantly suggest all such ecosystems would, and continues to deliver such an incredible amount value to consumers and businesses alike.
The web was only possible because it was developed in an era before everybody was using closed down devices where the manufacturer dictates what software you can run on it. And at this rate, if the web ever falls out of favor (and Apple for one is doing everything it can to make sure it does), you can definitely be sure that nothing like it will ever be allowed to exist again.
As a community of founders and makers, I'm sure we can all imagine what a sad world it would be to live in if we had to first convince some platform gatekeeper that our idea is worthwhile and make sure our ideas don't conflict with their interests before being allowed to turn our ideas into reality and deliver them to users, let alone having to pay a cut of our revenues to them for the privilege.
This has been attempted before. Wind Mobile (now Freedom Mobile) was an upstart carrier that attempted to compete. They ended up just getting acquired though.
Their Wikipedia article paints a pretty bleak and accurate picture of the "competitive" landscape:
Freedom Mobile Inc. is a Canadian wireless telecommunications provider owned by Shaw Communications. With 1,767,155 active subscribers (as of the end of February 29, 2020) in urban areas of Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, it is Canada's fourth largest mobile network operator with 5% market share.[3]
Founded in 2008 as Wind Mobile by the telecommunications company Globalive, Freedom was one of several new mobile carriers launched in Canada in 2008 after a government initiative to encourage competition in the wireless sector alongside Mobilicity (later acquired by Rogers Communications) and Public Mobile (later acquired by Telus).
That's only the difference between a monopoly vs duopoly though, and as far as the app developer is concerned I'm not sure it makes much of a difference.
Reality is anyone releasing a for-profit app aiming for mass appeal can't afford to ignore either the Android or iOS ecosystem. They have to release for both, so there's no real competition involved.
Since so many of the screenshots show them running a separate Android app on each screen, I wonder if the apps themselves actually run simultaneously.
Or if it's like Android apps on my Chromebook where only a single active app actually runs, while all other apps get suspended in the background, even if they're visible.
The latter would make this concept pretty useless so I hope they actually solved this and are planning on upstreaming the changes so all future devices can benefit.
There's no way to predict in advance who's going to become a government official. When they do, and if they used WeChat before then, the damage is done. Material on those close to the officials can also be used against them in similar manner.
Again, not condoning the restriction of personal freedoms, but the national security angle is not totally without merit.
Private chats can contain sensitive material that could be used to extort/blackmail government officials and/or business leaders, and in-app payments can be used for tax evasion, money laundering and bypassing sanctions. That in combination with the fact that TenCent or any large Chinese corporation is essentially an extension of the government means that WeChat can very plausibly become a threat to national security if it gains widespread adoption.
While I agree with your stance that this is infringing on personal freedoms of American citizens, and I too wish our leaders wouldn't always so eagerly infringe on personal freedoms in the name of national security, the national security claim itself does have merit.
I'm bullish on the concept and business model from an investment standpoint, I think they are likely going to become very successful, but as a consumer I can't say I'm looking forward to delivery platforms being flooded with these "cloud kitchens".
It seems to be designed to enable mediocre restaurants to "pivot" at a moment's notice and rebrand themselves after building up a well-deserved crappy reputation, ready to start anew and fool more unsuspecting consumers. On the other side of the coin, well-loved restaurants could disappear at a moments notice because the owner/chef got tired of making the same type of cuisine and want to experiment with something new or more lucrative/trendy.
I think the agility this model offers restaurants is both a blessing and a curse in this sense, as with traditional restaurants the physical presence involved makes the brand more enduring, for better or worse.
My hunch is that you're probably correct about the heat effects of wireless charging on battery lifespan to some degree, but I'd love to see more emperical studies on the topic. Especially comparing it to usage of wired quick charge solutions that tend to result in much higher spikes in temperature than wireless charging, but over a shorter timespan. It's not obvious to me that one would be more harmful to battery lifespan than the other.
Newer wireless chargers also usually have some form of active heat management (i.e. fans), and anecdotally my phone only ever gets lukewarm to the touch, even with a somewhat bulky case on it.
At the end of the day though, I personally wouldn't mind having to upgrade my phone slightly faster than I would otherwise in order to enjoy the convenience offered by wireless charging, but definitely speaking from a position of privilege here.
Ah yep, the good old Nexus 4, that's how I was introduced to wireless charging as well.
I'm not a huge Apple fanboy by any measure, but one thing I do appreciate is that they consider wireless charging to be a table stakes feature, and include it even in their "budget" phones. They clearly understand how dramatically it elevates the user experience.
Compare that to every Android manufacturer who either don't offer wireless charging at all or gate it to flagships, it's a really sad state of affairs for someone like myself who won't even consider a phone without wireless charging today.