damnyou

Yes, Go is a fundamentally broken language too. As is C++, as is C. Sum types are the absolute bare minimum a language must have for me to not consider it broken beyond hope.

Go in particular is really unfortunate for a language so new. The language's weaknesses have dropped my estimation of its creators by several notches.

Like Java, Go is a fundamentally broken language and its mistakes, starting from not having sum/option/result types from day 1, make it impossible to fix.

edit to respond: as the commenter below pointed out, dynamic languages can express sum types just fine (though statically verifying e.g. null checks isn't possible without some sort of gradual typing effort). This is why they are superior to traditional statically typed languages like Java. But even better are languages which have static sum types.

To put it plainly, Java is a fundamentally broken language and its mistakes, starting from not having sum/option/result types from day 1, make it impossible to fix.

edit to respond: calling them "bells and whistles" is a deep misunderstanding of what sum types are. They profoundly change how every single piece of code in the language is written, starting from how nulls are handled, and cannot be retrofitted into an existing ecosystem. (You can add them later, but baking in sum types from the start is very different. In particular Java would not have its terrible exception system if it had sum types.)

Hmmmmm, I'm pretty sure by that measure Vladimir Putin is the wealthiest person in the world. On top of his own wealth, most of which is unreported, he can use state power to acquire whatever property in Russia he wants.

I don't think Russia hacked servers or anything like that. But the fact is that Russia made a very large and active effort to interfere in the US election, as laid out very clearly in the Senate report. It's not something we consider stealing in the ordinary sense, but that's only because it's significantly more sophisticated than what the MAGA mob is currently trying to do.

(The US has interfered in other countries' elections before, of course.)

Yeah it happens sometimes. It sucks. It's where incident reviews come in, and feature flags are still better on balance for many apps.

I'm talking about feature flag based rollouts, which don't involve going through Apple or Google.

As far as I know all the big apps the OP is complaining about have server-side feature flags.

No. what it signals is that app releases are decoupled from feature releases. Of course people know when a new and important feature is being released, it's just completely independent of when the app store update goes out.

Logic Pro doesn't have server-side feature flags.

Assuming there are good rollout and incident review processes in place, this isn't much of a problem in practice.

Control over 95th+ percentile latency.

My understanding is that people were given the choice of either quarantining in a government facility without phone tracking, or using the app. That seems more than reasonable to me.

App stores are monumentally complex works of infrastructure. It's inevitable that they'll take years to get right, and Steam still isn't quite there yet.

> I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be.

It'll only work with an iPhone.

Indeed, only the state can succeed at decentralization. That's why we need some amount of centralized, democratic decision-making as well. But redistributing wealth as UBI is a good way to redistribute power across society (an unalloyed good -- power should be broadly distributed) while avoiding most of the worst parts of central planning.

I share your concerns about centralized management, which is why the money should be redistributed in the form of a UBI to enable decentralized decision-making.

Apple should open up its app store to GeckoView, then. It would be great to have both WebKit and GeckoView as options.

On top of the limited, static lists, you cannot both use content blockers and sync your bookmarks and history with MS Windows or GNU/Linux at the same time. That's pretty broken.

It's really easy to do this on Android—Firefox with uBlock Origin is brilliant.

On the contrary, a Pixel 5 is actually a fantastic phone. It's the smoothest-feeling phone I've ever used -- the 90Hz screen makes a huge difference. Tip: go to the developer options and change the animation durations to .5x to make the phone feel blazing fast.

Plus a Pixel integrates a lot better with non-Apple operating systems, both MS Windows and GNU/Linux. MS's "Your Phone" and KDE Connect are both great.

The only way to do adequate ad blocking is dynamically. Static lists are not sufficient.

I'm not justifying anything, I'm merely stating what I think is an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models: they have automatic price discrimination built in. Subscription models do not have it built in—developers have to do extra work to introduce price discrimination. I think this is a demerit of subscription models, though not one that outweighs the demerits of advertising models.

Sure. We're not talking about Facebook here, they'll be fine. We're talking about random sites and apps. How many apps on the Play/App Store actually implement differential pricing by region?

This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.

In general I'm not a fan of advertising, but one of the most important things it does is level the playing field across income levels and countries. $5/month would be outrageously expensive for a very large number of people, most of whom are not on Hacker News, and any discussion of replacing advertising with a subscription model has to start from that basic fact.

I'd be more sympathetic if the money were mostly going to the engineers and researchers who did the work, not a bunch of corporate fat cats.

printf debugging (i.e. listing code execution traces) is better than a breakpoint-based debugger in most situations, in my opinion.

The rich and powerful have lost their moral compass, yes. The way to fix it is for the state to partly seize their wealth and partly deficit spend, and transfer all of it to the poor.

If you are starving, stealing food is at the very least perfectly acceptable, and many would say just. I'm not aware of any ethical frameworks, even the most hardcore libertarian ones, which would claim otherwise.

Right, exactly.

That is very different from "first, do no harm". That is a cost-benefit calculation that many of us are familiar with in our own professions.

"First, do no harm" just encodes status quo bias.