giovannibajo1

It’s not ridicolous to call it impossible to do in 30 days. In fact, my startup with 10000 users wouldn’t be able to do it in 30 days!

That’s a tech-centric view. For most people a browser is defined by its features like tab handling, account syncing, preferences, extensions, etc. Nobody cares about the HTML engine, only developers. The fact that it’s possible to change the default browser is an important user-level feature.

The point is that people would follow YouTube videos that promise CRACKED SPOTIFY to change that choice so that they can download a copy of a cracked version of Spotify filled with malware. That in turns reflects badly with Apple because it would be assumed that the platform is not secured and cannot be trusted with private / sensitive data (both in B2C and B2B settings). If anything, I think we should at least agree that it’s Apple’s choice whether run this risk or not on their own product.

They have proved that, already. They could have reverted the direct payment system, kept only Apple IAP, and then sued even for damage recovery of 30% since the beginning of the lawsuit (or even the beginning of Fortnite on iOS). Apple has clearly written even in legal documents of the lawsuit that reverting the direct payment change would have been enough to keep operating Fortnite on iOS fully featured.

I think they just went through applying the agreement, which says that the account will be terminated in the specific case of willingful infringement/circumvention. If they had not tried to apply it, it would have been hard to prove to the judge that they always apply the agreement to the letter, which is an important part of this lawsuit (they need to prove that the rules are clear and equally enforced — something that they know it’s not always happened).

Since Epic has 2 different accounts, Apple could have terminated only one of them, leaving Unreal Engine intact. But Schiller’s declaration says that in these cases they have always terminated all accounts that are owned by the same company / conglomerate (I can easily see this is useful in some cases). So again I feel they were in a corner: they had to follow what they have always done, so that other companies couldn’t prove a ad-hoc enforcement of rules (termination rules, in this case).

I’ve more experience working with iOS Reviews. Anecdotally, I was able to discuss with a real person, get at least some insights, and I even went through an appeal and won it.

It really sounds like Google is refusing to provide information, and just point to a specific rule which is too generic to really understand what it’s going on. That’s a pity. I hope you get some traction on HN to solve this

Yes but Apple has stated that it’s a special program for video subscriptions that other developers can and has joined even before Apple (eg: Canal+). The terms are not public but it looks like they’re made available as an option to developers that have apps in that market. It looks like the discount is available if your app implements all features in the Apple video ecosystem (AirPlay2, Apple TV native app, etc.)

Thanks for the article, it provides very good insights.

In the article, there are a couple of passes that mention “benchmarks” where Firefox was faster than Chrome. It sounds like those benchmarks, albeit I assume they were correct, were actually providing a distorted reality of what “fast” actually means, because I distinctly remember people (including myself) switching to Chrome in early days because it was simply objectively faster. It sounds like the existence of those benchmarks have had a net negative on Firefox: it provided a false confidence that the browser was “fast”, and possibly delayed the refactorings that eventually managed to really speed up Firefox again.

You mention that Chrome used “UX tricks” but I assume what this means is that Chrome developers were actually driven by more correct benchmarks: the ones that actually translate to a better experience for the end user.

Since I’m always intrigued by the topic of false benchmarking and how complex it is to do correct benchmarks that don’t fall into traps, I’d love to hear what those benchmarks you mention were measuring, and if you agree that they gave a false assurance to the Firefox team.

I’ve been using Tucows for many years. They resell Comodo code-signing certificates for ~75$ / yr (less if you buy multiple years)

I think this is more typical in public administration. Employees just follow the existing rules/laws because it’s not their job challenging them, and decision makers are mostly concerned on shifting away blame from them. Nobody wants to be that guy that ordered to stop searching for a bomb, the day that a new bomb will be placed. The only reason why one should stop doing it is to gain efficiency (= be more productive but doing less useless things), but the efficiency metric is non existent in public administrations.

I’d start from allowing multiple mutable references. Second would probably be something about relaxing lifetimes but I can’t properly articulate it right now.

Please, turn this into blogpost. I’ve had very similar feelings for some time.

I tolerate the borrow checker because I want to use Rust’s other features. I think Rust with no borrow checker is much closer to my dream language than it is right now. Rust with an optional borrow checker is in fact even better.

It’s not clear whether they will continue to be assigned to Rust, though. At least, I didn’t find this explicitly confirmed anywhere.

If anything, I’d love to know how many Mozilla employees were working on Rust full-time as their paid job before the layoffs, and then after. I can’t find these numbers cited anywhere.

Pietro’s sibling answer seems to be that Mozilla will transition to be a sponsor — I’d love to know whether this means they will keep investing development time (and how much).

The feature is useful for desktop applications that want to help the user compose a mail to the customer service, including some report logs as attachment.

Notice that the user is still required to actually press Send in front of their default mail client with an open window showing the full email and attachments.

I don't think there is a cogent risk that general computing open platforms will go away soon.

PCs can be self-assembled without buying them as an appliance from a specific vendor, and you can at the very least install Linux on them. If you care about Windows, Microsoft is adopting open source more and more, you can have install Ubuntu within Windows right now, I doubt they will change course on software installation.

I do have a Linux box in my home and successfully use it for many tasks. This doesn't mean that I feel that all devices that have a CPU in my home must absolutely run unsigned binaries compiled by me.

Fortnite is available on several different game consoles and platforms (most of which, by the way, have a 30% commission fee). It used to be the case that it wasn’t available on iOS, and it was a planetary success already. Customers that had a iOS device and absolutely wanted Fortnite had to resort to use another platform, eg. buy a PC or a PlayStation. Now we’re back on the situations where we were before: Fortnite won’t be available on the iOS platform (like it’s not available for others), and customers will have to play it in other platforms.

I’m not sure how this shows a monopoly. On the contrary, I think it will be hard for Epic to prove that Apple has a “monopolistic power” on Fortnite distribution when they got billionaires through it even before it was ported to iOS.

EDIT: downvotes on HN for stating an opinion?

FWIW, AirPlay can send a H264 video of my desktop at 60FPS with ~0% CPU impact (hardware accelerated), good enough to play many games on TV.

Use Safari. Turn on the developer settings, and find the setting to disable VP9 in WebRTC. That will force Meet to stop using VP9 and switch to H264 for which MacBooks (and Intel CPUs in general) have a hardware accelerated decoder and encoder.

Well, it’s still a joke that Google Meet will stream desktop / windows at 4 FPS. I would be curious to know whether they really think the feature is good enough.

I think Apple point is that users that need being protected from themselves without even realizing it are far more than those who might get a benefit from root without getting burnt. Since the two things can’t exist at the same time, they’re going for the road that makes the majority happy.

I would classify this as using an in-band signal rather than an out of band signal. Twitter used to have this same problems ages ago. I don’t remember the details but it was something like DMs being standard twitter messages with “/dm” at the beginning.

On the other hand, programmers are very good at wasting weeks creating incredible software architectures to try the latest library they read about or try a design pattern, or in general over engineer something so that it’s “better designed”, more generic, more “flexible”, and so on.

In other words, if a project manager sets an expectation that a task is a “task that takes two weeks”, the developer will somehow manage to use about two weeks to make it, that is find the “best way” to do it given that timeframe, where “best” is probably evaluated under some kind of metric which has nothing to do with product or user value.

Sometimes the question “explain me why it should take more than two days, when i know it takes two days to do just that in the context of a minimal MVP” goes a long way in making programmers focusing on delivering the maximum value for the product.

So I think there is actually some value in having a technical person continuously challenging developers in shortening their path to implement a feature.

Third-party apt repositories are a security nightmare: you are giving a third party unrestricted semi-silent root access to your computer. I can trust my distro provider with this, but it should be strongly discouraged for third-parties. Instead, installing PPAs to get updated builds of standard packages seems considered “normal”. At least, this doesn’t hold true for snaps.

Small note: the runtime hash function is available in standard library (hash/maphash) since Go 1.14. You don't need that introspection magic to access it.

It doesn’t work on MacOS though

Read the technical documentation and try to design an attack scenario, before deciding that it certainly can be abused

I’d like proof that humans are better at recollecting two weeks of random encounters on the streets, compared to an imprecise Bluetooth app.

Immuni (Italian app) has been analyzed and certified as GDPR compliant by the Italian privacy watchdog, that has a technical department that is actually able to read and understand technical documentation.

It's not under an open source license, though. Any idea why?