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thorstadt

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The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs 10 years ago
  Computers have taken over tons of ridiculous and complicated tasks already, it's silly to think your specific niche is the special case.
Liability and government regulation are some of the biggest concerns of the trucking industry, and could prevent automated driving from taking hold for decades. Anecdotally, I've spent a lot of time talking to technology directors in trucking companies, and this sort of automation is hardly on the radar.
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The evil unit test. 14 years ago

As an example of exploratory development that's very difficult to do test-first, I've been doing a lot of image processing work lately with the objective of improving the legibility of photographs containing text. Trying to find a way to automatically test the output before putting together a solution is a unique problem unto itself, since any given set of input parameters could potentially "solve" the problem for some images but not others.

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The limited world of iOS's auto-renewable subscriptions 15 years ago

Alas, unfortunately it's not that cut and dry. We're SaaS, and were able to get through 4 or 5 releases of our app without Apple seeming to care about our model. Eventually we got a rejection stating that our application would be pulled if we didn't remove a reference to our website from the app (we can collect payment information on our website if you log in with an account you've created on the phone). The app reviewer stated that we should look into implementing IAP subscriptions.

Since we didn't want to confuse our customers by giving them no information on how to subscribe, and the app store is a valuable marketing channel, we decided to implement auto-renewable IAP subscriptions per Apple's recommendation and documentation but got rejected for having the wrong purchasability type. We then had to go implement non-renewable subscriptions (which are more complicated and provide a worse user experience, in my opinion) and got approved for sale.

One of our developers filed a bug report with Apple about the documentation regarding purchasability types and received a response that they would improve it. I guess I'm fine with sharing revenue with Apple if they make it really easy for users to subscribe (which IAP certainly does), but it'd be nice to understand the Right Way from the beginning.

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ArchLinux, Not Just For The Elite 15 years ago

Hmm, I don't really think so. Arch packages are distributed as pre-compiled binaries (not counting AUR), and the emphasis is on simplicity (not customization or performance). I've found I can get Arch up and running satisfactorily in about an hour.

The intersection of Gentoo and Arch is that they both require more configuration than your average Debian-based distro, and they both have rolling release models, but in my opinion that's about it.

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