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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how people on HN can support companies like AirBNB, Uber, Lyft who flagrantly break laws to bring a new product to market that is arguable better than the old way of doing things, and then at the same time not support a company like Corellium for doing the same thing because it's Apple.

This is clearly a sorely needed product, Apple even agrees because they tried to BUY the company and when they said no they want to take their ball and go home.

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Often people who support breaking Law A will nonetheless oppose breaking Law B, not because they're hypocrites but because they consider A unjust and B just.

If one could either choose between supporting all laws or opposing all laws with nothing in between, the history of civil disobedience would be different indeed!

> Apple even agrees because they tried to BUY the company and when they said no they want to take their ball and go home.

I don't see that as apple agreeing the product is needed necessarily. Mostly based on their tendency to keep an iron grip on the ecosystem.

Apple's behavior would suggest more that they tried to buy the company first because it would hopefully be both safer from a PR standpoint and also cheaper/safer from an outcome standpoint than a protracted legal battle (depending on the specifics, it's possible EFF will have a horse in this game).

>because it's Apple.

I think you're being assuming here.

The pattern is evident, and it becomes more clear if you look at individuals' comment histories.

If you’re going to do this please make specific allegations instead of posting this pathetic nonsense.

Or email hn@ycombinator.com like the guidelines tell you to.

You might be right, but I believe the main sentiment still holds about hypocritical support of one vs the other.

I don't think so. In my experience, people here are just as critical to Apple as other companies.

From some very crude statistical sentiment analysis, they're somewhat more critical of Apple.

Link to said analysis?

I wrote a script for this a while back to analyze them with nltk:

  #!/usr/bin/env python3
  
  import nltk
  import nltk.sentiment.vader
  import json
  import urllib.request
  
  companies = [
      "apple",
      "google",
      "microsoft",
      "amazon",
      "facebook",
  ]
  sample_size = 10
  
  
  def get_json(url):
      request = urllib.request.Request(url)
      request.add_header("User-Agent", "Python")
      return json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(request))
  
  
  def allcomments(json):
      comment = json["text"]
      comments = comment if comment else ""
      for child in json["children"]:
          comments += allcomments(child)
      return comments
  
  
  if __name__ == "__main__":
      for company in companies:
          sentiments = []
          print(company)
          for item in get_json("https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=" + company + "&tags=story")["hits"][:sample_size]:
              tokens = nltk.tokenize.sent_tokenize(allcomments(get_json("https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/" + item["objectID"])))
              sia = nltk.sentiment.vader.SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()
              scores = sum([sia.polarity_scores(token)["compound"] for token in tokens])
              sentiment = scores / len(tokens)
              print("\t" + item["title"] + ": " + str(sentiment))
              sentiments.append(sentiment)
          print("Average: " + str(sum(sentiments) / len(sentiments)))

Apple gets low scores because of China, mainly. Plus they lack the many open source projects that buoy up companies like Microsoft.

Impressive

Exactly. Corellium wouldn't be what it is right now if their product didn't fill a need, and Apple is mad because they're not getting a slice of the pie.

> Apple even agrees because they tried to BUY the company and when they said no they want to take their ball and go home.

I think this was gonna be a case of buy and shut down. there's nothing stopping Apple from releasing something like this themselves and undercutting Corellium. instead they're doing the opposite and have removed emulation from XCode.

Clearly someone at Apple has decided an emulated iOS is too much of a threat.

> instead they're doing the opposite and have removed emulation from XCode.

what?

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