642 karma · joined April 5, 2011
As those of us who target iOS know, they're not transparent, but it's not arbitrary. Thank god. We'd never hear the end of unsolicited opinions about the Touch Bar and HN's annual subscription to the year of desktop Linux.
> ...Then why does Apple advertise its products using Google Ads?
Congratulations, this cracks top 5 oddest Apple hater argument ever posted in this land of many of 'em.
Obligatory disclaimer for everyone else: IANYL. Mostly, because armchair lawyering on the internet is the worst.
That said – sure, estoppel is absolutely an important part of the judicial/common law canon. It's also often a last ditch effort when multiple other theories of the case fall through. In fact, before estoppel was mentioned, I thought OP was going for unclean hands, which might be truly the last hail Mary, and absent much more, estoppel is equally far down that list.
Not sure which is worse: Dunning-Kruger here or if OP is actually in a position where (s)he should know better. All the Wikipedia and common law cites make me thing maybe a foreign attorney best case scenario.
tl;dr: Extremely broad but rarely used as such legal principle is cited as reason Apple is legally DOOMED! From that misleading jumping off point, OP gleefully takes the giant leap to asserting that an otherwise novel and highly disputed antitrust case involving the App Store et al. is open and shut when it very much isn't.
The hubris of those who believe other people should be forced to release their (not already subject to a copyleft license) work is the very antithesis of FOSS principles.
The market will decide. Your comment is just on the user-hostile side of assuming it will prefer your technology choices.
That said, as a fellow lawyer, coder, and legal toolmaker, I'd posit there's more of a middle ground than you laid out:
> It's easy to sell a lawyer some technology that their counterparts are using to run circles around them.
Of course – it should be easy to sell lawyers on established technologies! In fact, one could argue competence REQUIRES lawyers/firms to adopt said technologies. It's not wrong to be disappointed with what's being defined as tech adoption in this thread by industry defenders:
> security standards, word processing, LANs, spreadsheets, aggregating data & metrics, owning an iPad, ...
These are bare minimums and best practices in every other industry, and celebrating attorneys for meeting an extremely low bar is no better than technobabble.
> It's hard to sell a lawyer some technology with a change-the-world, techno-solutionist pep talk.
Stipulating there's a difference between snake oil and actually meaningful legal-specific technologies for practicing attorneys/firms, then yes, certain players in the industry will be more conservative about adopting new innovation. Conversely, a functioning market would also imply the opposite: those who responsibly bet on the next big thing, whether in an operational capacity, to drive costs down, or with the consent of their clients.
Sad to say, that's not the current state of the legal industry. Sure, I'm likely biased since I'm still on the vendor side irrespective of how much we aim to make well-built software with solid UIX focused on the practitioner. Nonetheless, firms remain extremely risk averse, hierarchical, obsessed with profits per partner above all else, and long live the billable hour.
Once again, it's complicated, and no one really has the nuance or all the answers, so we all fall back to a bit of a stereotype which makes that middle ground elusive. Ultimately, however, it's really the industry that suffers, and I wonder if/when it will ever change, what the impetus will be, and if it truly requires another global economic meltdown to shake things up.
I've mentored aspiring entrepreneurs in the legal tech + services space for a number of years now and go out of my way to provide additional guidance (and some well intentioned ribbing) to those who pitch any sort of legal referral idea.
The concepts are (without fail) derivative and lack novelty, equivalent to pitching "Uber rideshare, but for [INDUSTRY]" without more to sophisticated VCs.
The problem is very real, but the margins are so thin that venture shouldn't be anywhere near it. Solutions should be non-profit and left to those heroes in the A2J space (whose funding should be significantly increased).
Think most agree expressive syntax while minimizing boilerplate is at times going to require sugar. It's interesting you bring cognitive load into the question – perhaps I come at it more from an architectural light than PL fans, but that load seems largely correlated with one's purposes and patterns in using the language.
On that front, Swift has lofty and broad goals (including DSLs), but that surface area doesn't make the language worse. To take your other example, KeyPath Functions don't change anything about KeyPaths; the concept is and remains no different than anywhere else it's implemented (whether in Swift or in another language). Beginners can still use the concept, skill comes with understanding how/why it works, and mastery comes with knowing when/how to use it simply.
If Swift achieves said goals, one needn't be able to understand the last mile of any specific domain where it's used as a language. But it'll be quicker and easier than coming from another language, and the sugar will still be as sweet.
>Using the Network Extension framework instead of an NKE very likely allows us to build a version of Little Snitch which requires no Kernel Extension at all. That is a good thing.
Of course, you reposting the same inaccurate rant multiple times throughout these comments (including reposting as the top comment grew) signals you're aiming to perpetuate your anti-Apple fervor, but here's to dissipating said FUD for those of us who use/love Little Snitch.
Now, I could point out that absent any rationale, your comment fails to make the conversation "more thoughtful and substantive", as requested per HN commenting guidelines. However, I'd also remind everyone that HN isn't moderated by replying to comments you feel break the guidelines. Quite the opposite: "don't feed egregious comments by replying," if you really believe a comment is that bad then flag it.
However, said guidelines also remind us that critical comments are teaching moments and can be inherently good. Wit is frequently a valuable component in criticism, and there's a different between wit and mean-spirited snark. Thus, we're left with maybe the most important guideline: Assume good faith. I genuinely believe the article OP is well-intentioned, and was hoping the comment parent would provide some additional justification or perhaps reflection based on the distinction between good ideas and BigTech overreach. Instead, meta-commentary.
Regardless, have a good day.
HNers go on and on about big brother Cupertino all the time, but ooh some (well intentioned but misguided) refurb/recycling shop writes an article and all of a sudden critical thinking goes out the window.
One might accuse me of being the “apologist” you speak of (IDGAF), but if you’re correct we live in bubbles even here on HN, it’s much better and more honest if we don’t pretend the other doesn’t exist.
Better to build full native but rely on cross-platform architecture, design patterns, common backend/infrastructure, etc than settle for hypebeast cross-platform abstraction magic with dependencies on overburdened and leaky by definition integrations back to native SDK. The former yields all the proven benefits of native apps and strong platform vendor support with a contingency plan if said ecosystem launches a competing product. The latter leads to a world of hurt.
Specifically, the article misses the mark wrt Swift. Swift is open source and truly cross-platform. SwiftNIO, Tensorflow, and the server-side Swift projects are a great example of how far one can go assuming a willingness to invest in the language completely devoid of any Apple API involvement.
It truly seems like the next major breakthrough would be if SwiftUI could (relatively easily) be implemented for desktop Windows or *nix. Sure, the article notes people tried the same thing with GNUStep or WinObjC, but you were always truly tied to or ended up missing Cocoa, Foundation, and the Obj-C runtime. Conversely & ironically, swift-evolution, spm, and many of the most "Swifty" parts of the Swift ecosystem come to the other toolchains long before they make it into an annual Xcode release.
It's always the same – this time out:
• Guy installed beta software and it was buggy. STOP THE PRESSES!!!!
• "I'm a pro user, I've functionally given escalated privs to apps that steal my data, every Electron container POS ever written, and 100 open standards only Chrome supports. How DARE Apple ask desktop users for permissions on upgrade!?!?!? Keep that security stuff for smartphone users – filthy casuals."
• Forgot Password. #classic
• Somehow my hostname changed during a system update.
And the cycle continues. Comments section without fail: 4-5 commenters who maybe used a Mac once are somehow experts on MBP keyboards, no one likes the Touch Bar, software quality, here's a Linux laptop I like (obligatory distro discussion in reply), "Services Company", a WWSJD for good measure, blah blah blah, Apple is DOOOOMED!
Sure, the public at large loves drama, but the ethos of Hacker News supposedly assumes some higher quality of posts + commentariat due to an audience of those involved in building software, startups, products, and hacks that require technical knowhow. Rather, the tendency of the vocal minority who post these anti-Apple Medium articles and comments is quite perverse:
- rail against the mythical "manager" strawperson who hates software quality and is just out to steal money, jobs, or some other vague emotional rallying cry from all us hard working devs.
- "empathize" by infantilizing the industry and software engineers. Neither devs nor tech companies have any responsibility for speaking up on scope, making well-justified technical decisions, keeping in mind the end user or world around them, or voting with their feet, etc.
You hate to see it. Since it's the exact same platform war crap that's been going on forever, it's always big, bad, Cupertino that's at fault...
...and yet, I've been using Catalina (on a separate machine until a late beta), treat my personal accounts as production, assume every process and line of code might be a potential attack vector, and support reasonable software policies which respect I'm both an end user and a software professional.
Isn't perfect, but stable enough for both development and production, just like software since time immortal. Not broken.
Nor do I expect they would or should try to "let this slide" due to the fear of antitrust investigation. Hacker News loves to deploy the walled ecosystem FUD, but given the iOS security model has proven itself technically absent any consideration of trustbusting, I expect them to stand on their convictions and fight the antitrust battle head on, not death by a 1000 pinpricks.
Encourage folks to learn more technically and use the developer tooling as is, then you can sideload whatever you want!!! Beyond that, it's not that hard: Don't abuse developer-facing tooling & workflows to allow consumers to do stupid things.
Brick & mortar kiosks are the DVD Netflix of fast food.
Which is why I feel for the guy and hope he solves his burnout problems, but there’s a tons of misdirection going on here. Once you strip out the inspo photos…it seems he’s trying to build some sort of CI tool he calls windmill – sure, fine. Let’s evaluate accordingly…
> I had hacked together a continuous delivery pipeline using Jenkins and Apple’s Command Line Tools and I thought there must be a better way to do this.
And yet, no real description of what that might be. If you dig into it, he’s basically trying to automate allowing contractors to sign code using their customer's code signing certs by having them install something on dev machines + build servers. Which is an interesting experiment…EXCEPT that’s 100% against the terms of the Apple Platforms Development Agreement and the iOS / code-signing security model.
Apple’s been clear on this for a while now (and seemingly to him): If one exports an iOS app using dev/ad-hoc profiles, it has to be for limited distribution among individuals within the same business entity (very manual, UDIDs, physical connections to Xcode, etc) Or using TestFlight. He never addresses this, and the HN community is happy to make him the misplaced martyr of big bad Apple restricting indie devs. Maybe, just maybe, he’s missing the bigger picture. Why could that be...?
> I had just left my job and I was thinking of quitting the software industry too.
Oh.
> Still, I had Windmill to carry me forward. I took a leap of faith and jumped into the unknown, being all poetic. Windmill allows me to have freedom of expression, be creative
Uhh...poetry is nice, but we were talking about CI. As his target audience, I'm not looking for tooling that strokes an author's ego about freedom of creative expression. I am looking for meaningful, well-built utilities. I expect Apple as the OS vendor and App Store operator to maintain the security model so I can continue to build software on a robust and secure platform.
> My dedication to see Windmill through and in the process take control of my life and destiny. You see, Windmill as I envision it, is more than just a Mac app. Literally and figuratively speaking. It’s hard to put this into words, no matter how much I try. It’s a vision after all. My dent in the universe.
This is exactly why it's a terrible idea to derive self-worth based on a software project, regardless of what the project is or what platform it's for. When that happens, it's too easy to avoid level headed introspection and retrospection on what one is building.
tl;dr; Article's author is trying to publish a misguided iOS CI tool to the App Store. Idea has some big conceptual issues (both UIX and technical architecture), looks like a bad Xcode + TestFlight clone, liberally rips off of Apple's dev toolchain IP, etc. When faced with such things, doubles down on inspospeak rather than accepting the reality check. Now is blaming Apple.
Balance one guy's opinion against the 30+ major iOS deployment/distro/CI/automation tools & frameworks out there on awesome-ios alone. Contributors to fastlane, Carthage, CocoaPods, etc are still going strong and the dev ecosystem is better for it.
When a given product/technology just fundamentally doesn’t work, or even worse is a security nightmare, you don’t get to write it off as a risk that didn’t cost much. Especially since that last part isn’t true in most cases.
Also, this reeks of elitism: the technorati crowd in SF who can afford such things get to have flagship devices for their “very specific, highly demanding applications.” Meanwhile, “most users” of the most revolutionary invention of our lifetime only need to use their phones for “email and instant messaging.” Filthy casuals. (Can’t believe the comment actually went there).
Call the Pixel 3a what it is: Alphabet’s product marketing teams do an absolutely terrible job leveraging their brand(s) to explain their device offerings or even why they’re making their own hardware. As such, consumer confusion leads to laggard sales of a flagship device.
Trying to leverage what they have, Google introduces the Pixel 3a to take on what looks to be a growing midrange market. If it works, more power to ‘em, but let’s focus on facts and price points, not vague assertions about who needs what level of performance masquerading as questions from throwaway accounts.
This is almost undoubtedly untrue.
There are many independent or local restaurants in most regions that cost the same (or less) than the chains you mention. Ethnic restaurants frequently deliver more bang for the buck. In all of these non-chain categories there are “nicer” options that deliver a better atmosphere, food, wine, whatever the citizen in question is looking for.
As for the chains, they should have at least one thing to offer: consistency. No one is faulting folks for having a guilty pleasure, or working a chain into their routine when they’re looking for a known quantity meal.
But some people never break out of the mundane that consistency brings. The types who are too afraid to try things because they’re supposedly “fancy.” Or because they don’t look like they 2nd generation immigrants who run the restaurant down the road. The kind of folks who go to a Buca in Honolulu or Applebee’s in Times Square; those places are expensive as shit, and living a life like that is truly terrible.
Instead, the author does some overly verbose and hot take dance to propagate clickbait, which is then shockingly submitted to HN. Call this garbage for what it is.
FTFY