Zippogriff

> You still haven't stated anything other than your opinion.

That's all either of us have been doing. [EDIT] and an opinion can be a reason! They're not mutually exclusive. Do you need an itemized list of problems I have with webapps, with figures backing them all up (else they'd be opinions again, I guess)? I figured that'd been discussed to death, especially on HN.

> Having a choice is always better than not having one with regards personal preferences. That's my standard. What's yours aside from "I don't like web apps"?

I like being able to choose a platform that makes it hard for developers to get by with a webapp, pushing them toward native apps. See? I like choice too.

> Because not everyone agrees with you and web apps have many advantages over native.

But I don't care about those advantages (to the extent that they exist for users they're secondary effects of webapps being very cheap to make as cross-platform apps, so more likely to be made in the first place if cross-platform is a requirement) and like being able to choose a platform where it's hard to deploy a webapp instead of a native app, forcing the choice of "native app" or "no app at all" on the part of the developer, because I think it leads to fewer total apps but way more native apps than there'd otherwise be.

So why would I prefer PWAs become more capable on the platform? I see why PWA developers and maybe some users would.

To make things a bit more fair I'd definitely allow that plenty of business-types do get it, but I think enough don't that treating them all like they do before you know them fairly well is probably a bad move, career-wise, especially if you're not senior and important-enough to thrive despite pissing some of them off. Enough either don't understand or don't want honest estimating that the best you can really do is play the game wisely and hope it goes OK, until/unless you develop a rapport with a "good" one. I'd further admit that being one of the "good" ones may not actually be that useful in a business-type, overall, especially so far as their personal career prospects. They're just... to be approached differently.

You explicitly claimed it wouldn't be worse. Consider applying your own standards to that claim.

Consider also that it's possible to assert something without perfect knowledge of its truth. Usually context is sufficient to gather the level of certainty being expressed, or the implicit perspective from which it holds true, without hedging and defensively weakening every little statement.

> > Perhaps that's because you want the wrong thing for some reason.

> Allow me to make it very simple: You didn't give any reasons for your opinion. You just gave your opinion.

I'm glad you translated it because I'd never have gotten the second claim from the first. Phew.

> What about that speaks to "theory of the mind and epistemology" in your opinion?

Your entire objection, which seems to carry some unusual assumptions about the power and utility of thought experiments and the extent of the value of comparing similar, but not identical, things. Notably, it appears to reject them as being to any useful degree, even for evaluating a user-facing OS feature valid or enlightening.

> Gee, I wonder if your whole problem couldn't just be solved by letting you opt into the whole idea of PWA notifications?

Making them opt-in and off by default, ideally with no way for the app to tell whether they're enabled, would be an improvement, but allow me to repeat my reason from my post which, you claim, contained no reasons: I do not want features that make webapps more viable on iOS, because I do not like webapps and prefer an environment that makes me less likely to encounter them for any reason. So simply not having the feature would be even better.

[EDIT] nb. I entirely get disagreement with my position on a variety of grounds, but I find such apparent failure to even engage with it, and rejection that it is a position, harder to understand.

Yeah, I get that and name narrower ranges in a business context (trying to keep the upper bound from getting too much lower) because most biz-school types don't get that, and tend to think you're full of shit, being passive-aggressive or otherwise deliberately obtuse, or else it doesn't actually matter and they just wanted a happy number to put on a powerpoint and now you're making their life more difficult for no reason.

For that matter they tend to be pretty bad at anything even adjacent to experimental design, but god help you if you point out that the data they're so proud to present to the C-suite next week is, actually, meaningless (rare is the C-suite that'll catch it and call them on it, anyway, so from the perspective of the presenter it's almost beside the point; a disturbing amount of "data driven" leadership is pure fairy dust).

For a good proportion of programmers I'd expect education and professional work experience to have them comfortable with wide estimate ranges being typical and honest for many "90%" estimates, but business-social experience having convinced them, correctly, that honest estimates aren't what a hell of a lot of people actually want and do, "make us appear ignorant or incompetent" (from the book), in actual fact from the perspectives of people who control our budgets and wages.

Ah, right, I've always taken that effect in software estimation to be a result of business people hating how wide an actual "90% accurate" estimate is. Not many managers will accept "8 to 30 months" as a 90% estimate at the start of a project with a fairly typical set of unknowns. Especially they seem to really hate ranges that aren't quite a lot narrower than the size of the lower bound. But maybe it's actually driven by the people doing the estimating.

For my part I definitely tend to squeeze my "90%"s down to more like "30-40%" when asked for a "90%", for that reason. I might try out an honest and accurate estimate on someone I kinda know, and suspect won't quietly re-evaluate me as a useless moron or "one of those asshole 'programmer' types who doesn't get business" in response, though.

> Perhaps that's because you want the wrong thing for some reason.

I can't really parse this but from the best sense of it I can get, I reckon the most correct response is, "no, u".

[EDIT] Oh and also:

> You have never experienced this, so how could you possibly know? Also, no it wouldn't.

It's really incredible how often relatively straightforward conversations on HN end up veering, pointlessly, into theory of the mind and epistemology.

What's supposed to be the take-away from this? Is it to prove that knowing one or two bits of trivia and maybe a formula, by rote, can make your (unaided) estimation of related things vastly more accurate? That's all I'm getting from it, but maybe that's what's intended.

Examples: if I didn't happen to have an accurate-enough figure for the diameter of the Earth in miles, plus a formula for the surface area of a sphere, plus roughly the proportion of the Earth's surface that's land, all in my head, there's no chance at all I could produce a useful-for-any-purpose-whatsoever estimate of "area of the Asian continent" without researching it (at which point I could just look up a fairly exact figure, without knowing any of that). Year of Alexander the Great's birth, well I happen to know roughly when Aristotle was active and that they were alive at the same time. Otherwise, again, I'd produce a useless-for-most-any-purpose guess. Total US currency, I bet knowing something like the current annual GDP of the US would at least narrow that down, and is something someone might plausibly have at hand (I don't, my guessed range on that would be hilariously bad). If you have a sense of blockbuster movie budgets and/or returns, which one can acquire from paying attention to entertainment headlines, it's easy to come up with a reasonable range for Titanic's box office receipts. And so on.

Is the point that trivia's highly valuable, actually, if you have to estimate a bunch of arbitrary stuff purely from memory?

I don't know whether it accounts for the entire "housing's more expensive everywhere" perception, but it sure seems like the only houses that exist near good schools and are cheap on a per-square-foot basis are giant, so still not cheap, thanks to a combination of zoning and developer incentives. It's not like we could live in a significantly smaller house if we wanted to.

Another change is that smaller houses have giant rooms. If you want a 4-bedroom in a decent school district (so, around here it'll be 80s construction at the very earliest, probably late-90s or later, or else in one of a couple very rich and expensive areas that have older houses) you're in for a giant house. A 1960s middle-class 4-bedroom probably has about the square footage of a modern 2-bedroom. Sqft./room is way up across the board. Further, floorplans that look nice in a walk-through or in photos but are incredibly wasteful of all that "cheap" square footage are the norm.

1) I don't want to see the prompts to allow push notifications from a webapp, nor to have to go disable them. I just never want them.

2) Generally I'd rather none of the software I use be webtech, so anything that makes it easier to deliver webtech to my phone/tablet is a step the wrong direction. Yes I'm willing to have less total software in exchange. The point is that I don't want apps that are or will be native, to be webtech instead, which may happen as more features are added to webapps. IMO allowing stuff like React Native and Phonegap is something I'd even rather they didn't do (and I've been paid to develop both native and React Native apps, plus worked on a very early and somewhat successful Phonegap-but-more-native solution that ultimately fizzled out). My ideal situation is that if anyone tells me to try out some app or to use some app to communicate or share something with them or whatever, personal or business, it's a webapp 0% of the time. It's either native or it doesn't exist, so no-one can bug me about it or cajole me into using it.

In short, my UX on iOS is better without them even being possible, so why would I prefer they be allowed?

You can put the .git directory outside the working directory. Might be helpful. Sync the working dir with a sync service, but the .git dir with... git.

Indeed, there must be some reason no such thing has materialized from the market, despite ongoing problems caused by its absence.

I'd guess it's one of those things where network effects make it hard to get off the ground, and given the nature of it, especially hard to get off the ground without government buy-in from the beginning, as so many of the ways it'd be useful for saving time and money and reducing risk are tied to interaction with the government. If a market-based solution for it were desirable, for whatever reason, defining some clear and interoperable standard at the government level would probably be necessary to make the market viable, no matter how much latent demand there may be.

Further, imagining the user experience of a non-heavily-regulated/standardized ID market, it seems like it'd necessarily be so hellishly bad it'd never gain adoption. Having 5 different IDs and sometimes having to get new ones or drop an old one seems no better than using credit cards and our social security numbers as IDs, like we do now. It seems to me the epitome of something that can't possibly be any good as a market solution, unless it's so monopolized or regulated that it's indistinguishable from a government solution, except somewhat less straightforward.

I believe that individual teams believe that, and I believe that some decision-makers are interested in doing enough to keep from losing those users too fast.

Looking at the home page, though, it's very clear where the focus is. The only link I can even find to the Plus option is in the footer and it's not even clear it's not a business plan (truly, why would any of the plans on a site that brands itself entirely as "Dropbox Business" not be business plans?

Someone who didn't know otherwise would assuredly bounce off the site having ascertained there are no personal plans. That has to have been a deliberate choice. I guess it could be some kind of grievous mistake to have somehow entirely failed to account for someone interested in an individual plan visiting "dropbox.com" to find it, except it fits with the rest of the publicly-visible moves coming out of Dropbox.

I think where that's a losing proposition for them is that other ecosystems are more tightly integrated and generally a better deal, if that's what people want. Apple user with more than one device of any sort? $2.99/mo for the lowest tier of iCloud storage is a no-brainer, and everything will work with it, nothing to install. All-in on Gsuite and doing everything in the browser/Android/Chrome? Duh. No question what you use. Windows/MSOffice? I haven't used it but I bet OneDrive is pretty nice and well-integrated on there. Certainly they don't stop spamming you about it.

Those are what you pick if you want lock-in and bundled features. Dropbox and others are what you (used to) pick if you want to work cross-platform with a heavy focus on sharing real files, not tools. I think that's why the bundled tools strike so many as a bad idea: if we wanted that, there are more sensible options for it already. I get that they're kinda stuck trying it if they want/need huge growth, but it seems destined to fail, to me.

> Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows.

I think everyone outside knows where it's headed, and it's either enterprise-ware (clearly that's what they're aiming for, as they literally rebranded the whole thing to "Dropbox Business", it's right there on the home page) or slow death probably ending in an ignoble acquisition. Too much investment involved for them to just keep delivering the same service that made them a household name, taking a small and steady profit.

> Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.

They're not all-but saying that, they are saying that, if you're a non-business user.

You're not alone. Overwhelmingly the most common reaction when the topic of modern Dropbox comes up, among people who pay attention to it at all, is best summarized as "ugh". I think the only thing keeping people on it is inertia. It hasn't quite gotten annoying/bad enough to be worth the time to switch to something else, but the trend is clear and has shown no signs of reversing.

Even their rebranding to "Dropbox Business" everywhere basically says "individuals and solo/small business people, please do consider leaving, we aren't doing what we started out doing and aren't for you anymore".

Exactly. It's a terrible tool for that job and wasn't designed for it, but there's such a great need for something like that, that businesses and governments have grabbed onto it anyway, for lack of something better.

Despite what might be described as an absolutely huge market signal that there's desire and need for this, resistance to actual national ID is so high among elected officials that propositions for it have, so far, always been DOA. Maybe national IDs really are terrible and it's worth the shared-over-the-population pain and expense not having one causes in a modern society and economy, IDK.

I suspect some significant percentage of applicants may not have a disability, exactly, or always totally flub an interview in this way, but may do so often enough that it looks like the level of competence in the industry is much lower than it actually is, if one is taking one's personal experience with interviewees as an accurate measure of that. Add to this that assuredly some of the people confidently complaining about how 90% of their applicants can't write a for loop overlap with the ones generating complaints from applicants that some interviewers are themselves incompetent and asking broken questions (I guarantee you the people doing this think they're great interviewers and getting nothing but signal from their process, and they're probably also likely to exaggerate stories when relating them), then factor in a real tendency to take a 90% OK-to-good signal in interviews and practically forget it happened, taking the 10% bad as more accurate, and I think it's highly plausible the state of things isn't nearly as bad as some believe it is.

Tech interviews are remarkably scattershot in the form they take (outside well-known big companies), and are unusually anxiety-generating, even in the notoriously anxiety-filled field of interviews. Describe what one might (emphasis on might, part of the problem is that it's so often a surprise) expect in a tech interview process to some people outside the industry, and gauge their reactions. I definitely think it's likely they have even worse signal-to-noise ratio than is commonly thought.

[EDIT] Certainly I find it far less plausible that there's an absolute army of people out there, dwarfing the count of actually capable programmers, who are brilliant con-persons but too dumb to figure out that that skill itself is more valuable than programming, outside the top couple percent of programming jobs by comp, and apply it more directly to business roles that actively want it.

I think any expensive, unnecessarily-rugged-for-what-you-actually-do outdoor clothing counts, but yes, that name comes up a lot. I think it should be regarded as a mid-prestige brand to wear, for tech fashion, above, say, REI store brand, which is at the bottom edge of (and perhaps hanging somewhat over) acceptably hip. The top-end you probably can't find stocked in normal outdoors stores in the US (they're invariably European).

Ideally your rain jacket is appropriate for weeks-long alpine or warmer-weather arctic expeditions, and costs at least $250. It should pack down unbelievably small so you can excuse/brag-about the expense as an expression of "minimalism". You wear it on your $1000 bike for your 2km commute to the coffee shop to work on your MacBook. Shoes should be ready for many kilometers of hard, high-performance trail running, and should have been priced to match. Or else rock climbing or bouldering. No activity is more hip-tech-culture-approved and laudable than rock climbing, at least for now (the trends come and go).

There's that stuff, then there's the hipster-mimicking tech-fashion sect in $200 Japanese selvedge jeans and $300ish Red Wing Heritage workboots. There's plenty of overlap and mixing of the styles, though.

Don't forget the right hoodie. If the aglets aren't metal and the zipper's not a heavy, smooth-but-crunchy-feeling YKK, you've screwed up.

If in doubt, just shop REI and Patagonia. Little they stock will be too far off the mark.

It's a class-segregated sport in the US (not sure about elsewhere). This is called out in the tongue-in-cheek-but-mostly-accurate Official Preppy Handbook. For some reason it is "higher class" than racquetball, and, sure enough, racquetball courts are much easier to find in non-rich areas. Perhaps this is a case where the general principal from the same book holds true: the smaller the ball, the more Prep the sport (squash balls are smaller than those for racquetball).

Mark my words: if that even looks like that might happen, the advertising behemoths (chiefly Google and Facebook) will spend every last dollar trying to get some kind of human Internet ID program passed into law.

If our weapons (programs, scripts, "AI") become half as effective as theirs (the advertising giants'), they'll drop nine-plus figures paying to have ours outlawed, guaranteed. The only thing that might save us from that in the US is that national ID of any sort is pretty unpopular across party lines, and that's effectively what it'd be.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're already quietly laying the groundwork for such an effort.

The right jeans and sneakers (and hoodie, and "tech pants", et c., et c.) can even help. There's definitely a techie look, and it's not the same as poor-people/low-class clothes (which some of the same categories of items can fall into, like jeans and sneakers).

> They seem to think they will be working class for the rest of their lives and there's noticeable hate/resent for the rich.

Told to me by an Irish person:

You know the difference between an Irishman and an American? The American looks up at that big, shining mansion on the hill, and says, "someday... someday... I'm gonna be that guy". The Irishman looks up at that big, shining mansion on the hill, and says, "someday... someday... I'm gonna get that bastard".

Exactly, I think it's a problem only if it leads to lower "engagement" by humans. I kinda doubt it will. Most reading and writing that occurs on the Web, by a large margin, is already very low-value, not noticeably better than a near-future "AI" will very likely be able to produce.

If ad impressions & clicks don't drop, Google, FB, and others won't give a shit where the content's coming from. If impressions & clicks go up (not an unlikely outcome, I'd say) they'll even encourage it.

The value of much writing, especially on the Web, is being what the reader happens to have found rather than whatever better thing they might instead be reading on the same topic. That is, if your cheap knock-off article is what people end up reading, for whatever reason, instead of the better one(s) you cribbed from, you win. Because the barriers to entry on reading are so low (click link, start reading) and most of the writing's low-value to begin with, people don't exactly shop around for their idle Web reading.

These articles may have substance, but simply be far from the best presentation of that substance. I think GPT-3 and similar projects will do a fine job at subpar regurgitation of existing info that's better covered elsewhere but still manages to capture eyeballs, which describes, I expect, something like 99% of all writing on the Web, including, and perhaps especially, message board posts like this, as people often remark when yet another 300-post thread hits the front page on [some tired topic the discussion of which plays out the same every time]. Long-form print isn't perfect but is somewhat better, since there are some barriers both to publishing and to reading and you're not giving the writing away for free so simply holding a passing reader's interest for two minutes means nothing. The web, though, and maybe even magazines? I wouldn't bet against machines doing much or even most of that writing within a decade. Consider: how much of an issue of, say, Cosmo consists of light re-workings of earlier, recurring articles? People already joke about that kind of thing. Machines can probably do that work, very soon.

For whatever reason, I like the flat edges on phones but not on tablets. I've got a gen 4 iPad Pro with the flat edges and a 1st gen with rounded, and rounded both looks better and feels more comfortable to hold. Meanwhile I wish my iPhone 7 Plus had flat edges.

Imagine if we did this for other things.

"Why do you want to sell me this apple?"

"Be... cause... I grow apples? To sell? And you said you want one, and are holding money?"

I'm 100% sure I've come off in a couple interviews like one of those "phew we dodged a bullet there, guy can't code at all" stories. Meanwhile actually I can and many employers have been very happy with my ability to do so, and I've had a long and reasonably successful career.

The problem's not even that I'm bad under pressure, and in fact I've repeatedly been told the exact opposite by people who've worked with me. The problem is specifically about doing a programming performance in front of an audience, in an interview rather than co-worker context. I'm god-awful at that unless I'm heavily prepped for exactly what's going on. No tools? I'll forget basic syntax, yes even in "a language I chose". Let me use tools? I'll forget how to use them, or get self-conscious and avoid things I'm not entirely sure will work, overriding my own muscle memory. It's a very specific problem but I doubt I'm the only one who absolutely can do the job just fine, but is also entirely capable of coming off like a complete "faker" in an interview.

[EDIT] to make matters worse I can talk about programming just fine in that setting, which probably adds to the "he's some kind of social engineering genius who learned to sound exactly like a competent programmer while somehow also not learning a single thing about programming" impression. It's not usually an issue, but I'm quite sure I've reinforced some interviewers' notion that it's a good thing they do whiteboard screening because they're overwhelmed with lying applicants, and that I was one of them.

I find Apple Books to be the only way I can read ebooks consistently. It seems dumb but I think the ability to freely fiddle with the "page" without turning it is what does it for me. I've got an e-reader but I kind of hate reading on it. Paper or Apple Books, specifically, for me.

Not doing so at least shortly after switching over their MacBooks has been really annoying. We're back to playing "which adapter and which charger this time?" USB-A + other-ports macbooks and lightning for iOS devices was better than the current mess, and they've gone years without fixing it. Oh and then if you find the right cable there's the matter of which port the charger itself has (A or C). Ugh.

"One port, except for this other one, and then also you'll almost never need either of those ports directly so you'll have two adapters for everything".