habith

> Bing is obnoxious, and it's asking me to cognitively process 100 different things other than the only thing I care about: my search results.

Google (privacy issues aside) is terrible in that regard as well. I just compared Bing, Google and DDG (https://duck.com) for a random query "c++ headers".

On my current resolution and scale (1980x1080, 125%) I can only see 1 result on Bing and Google before having to scroll. The rest of the screen is filled with inline answers and other irrelevant content designed to keep you on their site.

DDG on the other hand reminds me of the very old Google days, 4 results, no busy layout and when there are ads they're unobtrusive and clearly labeled.

All my devices and browsers are actively not using Google. The only Alphabet property I begrudgingly use for personal reasons nowadays is YouTube and the UI/UX there makes me run to TikTok after short sessions.

Honestly, between ChatGPT, site specific searches I rarely need to use a search engine to begin with, and when I do it's DDG for its layout and quality results.

> The government is banning a business from the country, which I'm sure we've done before.

Ah yes, the great firewall of America. We've finally caught up to the totalitarian regimes that ban Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the rest.

What a time to be alive!

Meta hired a firm last year (Targeted Victory) to malign TikTok: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/meta-cant-buy-ti...

Gecko and SpiderMonkey still exist, despite all of the terrible Blink/V8-only implementations out there…

Gave “him”?

Uh, couldn’t link directly to Microsoft? https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...

> "In addition it's probably a good idea for Secure Boot to be enabled for the average user if you can."

That's a hard pass for me.

Why thankfully? What if you cannot access your local library for a myriad of reasons?

> An optional appstore with verifications is one (great) thing, making it mandatory is another.

Sure, and it's great that Android has side-loading and it would be nice if Apple offered that too without a Mac/Dev License and XCode. But, given the option between the two ecosystems, I continue to choose iOS.

> There are still some holdouts that don't upgrade to the newer api on purpose but that's why google is bumping the minimum api version to publish on the store soon

I've heard a similar argument 4+ years ago, this was supposed to be fixed in Lollipop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461466

I'm pretty sure it's about the ethics of altering humans and a fear or a resurgence of eugenics.

That aside, I'm also pretty sure someone reviewed his work and found out that his HIV-immune mutation was not done correctly, it's a bit late for me to find a link, will update later if you're interested.

Edit: Nvm, someone else posted a better answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798764

Be careful, a few fraudulent transactions and the teams would start thinking you're just trying to get out of paying your bills instead of helping you out.

Lots of banks have virtual cards now that you can generate for one time use or for subscription services with a dollar/expiration date limits. I highly recommend seeing if your bank has such a feature.

According to Google Stripe was posted on HN 130 times in the last month. I'm guessing for someone who uses HN daily this might skew their world view to assume that Stripe is everywhere.

> The cost of Apple's gatekeeping -- their review bureaucracy -- is entirely their own doing and benefits no one.

That was actually the reason I ditched my Android and switched to an iPhone a few years back. After writing an app for both platforms and seeing how terrifyingly easy it was to get on the Play store ($25 and 4 hours after uploading the apk) vs Apple's more rigorous review process which took close to a month, checked out our company's DUNS number and _actually_ tested/used the app.

Also the cluster hell that is the forced Android permission system and how intrusive the most basic ones are vs. Apple's opt-in "Read contacts? (Yes/No)" while using the app are why I'd never go back.

> Older IEs don't have Array.indexOf()

IE8 and older to be specific[0]. But, if you're supporting IE8 still you have bigger problems at hand.

Microsoft stopped supporting any version lower than IE11 as of January 12th of this year[1]. So unless all of those older IE machines are accessing an intranet (and only an intranet) their risk of being hit with malware is way higher than average.

For my clients I do a cursory IE9+ review, but if anything lower is a requirement then it's an additional fee to make a site work with it.

In a few months it'll be IE11+ and the same fee structure will apply to anything lower (I'm just waiting for IE10 to wind down a bit).

[0] http://caniuse.com/#search=array.indexof

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE...

> many startups in reality do start paying at or above market

I think that's the key phrase here. I don't know if they paid at or above market rate and that would be where I'd start looking before passing judgement.

Your company's job postings suggest "competitive salary and meaningful equity", which is a much better signal than Heyzap's posting[0] i.e. no mention of compensation whatsoever (I personally prefer a salary range to know if the discussion is even worth our collective time).

They're a small startup so the data is incomplete and meaningless, but assuming the one salary posted on Glassdoor ($65-75k for a marketing manager) is accurate, I think it's fair to say that their compensation package was quite low and heavy on equity.

> I'm not too upset about employees who have been making market salaries not getting much out of an acqui-hire

I completely agree with you. If you're getting market or above market salary then equity shouldn't be an issue whatsoever.

[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/software-engineer-heyz...

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Heyzap-Salaries-E493011.htm

> You mean like how Google got ECC forward-secure TLS deployed across the whole Internet?

Did you finish reading the article?

> Facebook’s WhatsApp has brought end-to-end encryption to more people – over 800 million – than any other service; and Google’s engineering team has been a leader in securing much of the web in the post-Snowden era.

And then they go on saying:

> But this is much more than an engineering fight – it’s a political one where public opinion is crucial.

Do you think the average voter knows what ECC forward-secure TLS is? Heck, I'd like to think I kind of know a little about the subject but I know _nothing_ compared to you and a bunch of other HNers.

But unfortunately, we live in a society where people who can vote are really scared of terrorism and lack an understanding of how technology works. If a politician tells them we need to decrypt "all the things" for their safety they'll happily vote for them[0].

We need the celebrities of the tech world to reach out and explain why we need crypto in a way they can understand.

[0]: No link really, just watch any of Donald Trump's rallies and tell me if you think those people care about encryption.

> I pay $70 for AT&T's UVerse GigaPower fiber (300/300 right now) in Austin

Does that include the opt-out from tracking fee?

I don't live in Austin and don't have GigaPower, but I remember there was a kerfuffle around AT&T offering the service at two price points, cheaper if you allow them to track your web activities and something like $30 more if you opt-out.

Or, hopefully that whole thing just went away.

Edit: Link[0] to HN discussion

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743447

Likewise :)

My apologies if that was over the top, I meant no disrespect.

Excuse the poor pun but.. are you serious?

Facebook excluded several of your friends based on their terrible name policy. They run their walled garden however they want to. Your participation in it makes you (in your own words) a "peasant".

Yet, you're not trying to go all RMS about it and you continue to use it daily to give them more money/power?

Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

Say what you want about RMS, but at least he's principled and does/says what he thinks instead of conforming to social norms.

> I'd assume that the text is modified in units more complex than substrings and whitespace splitting?

Correct. Each letter in Arabic can have up to four shapes depending on its position in a word: initial, medial, final and isolated[0].

Also note that the sample text on the left contains Arabic diacritics[1]. These are usually omitted by native speakers/writers since they can be inferred from the context (the only exception I can think of is religious scripture), but they certainly add to the complexity of it all.

Needless to say, creating an Arabic mono-font is quite challenging. Kudos to the designer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Letter_forms

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics

> I'd love to see a plan to making the Hacker News site work great on mobile

Seconded. I'd also like to see something implemented to control the contrast on downvoted/dead entries.

Either collapse them ala reddit or give me the option to disable the low contrast view.

> I still can't quite follow.

FTC = bad.

FTC investigates companies for small problem while ignoring other companies that do way worse.

Hope this helps.

Very neat! Mind if I borrow some of the CSS for my cards trick[0]?

[0] http://cluecode.com/cards/

> The amount of bad faith people ascribe to basic usability functions utterly astounds me.

I think most of it comes from how Google (and the industry in general) has evolved. There was a day[0] when things were labeled clearly and the default behavior wasn't to vacuum up as much data about users in the name of basic usability functions.

The amount of trust people have in companies to keep their private information safe from prying eyes is what's truly astounding.

[0] http://images.devshed.com/sc/stories/Google_Desktop_Search2b...

> This also happens on iOS with spotlight. As far as I can tell there's no way to turn it off.

You can turn it off from Settings > General > Spotlight Search. Uncheck "Spotlight Suggestions" and "<Default search engine> Web Results".

The "About Spotlight Suggesstions & Privacy" link at the bottom of that settings page gives you instructions on how to do it too.

But you _charge_ per user pack, do you not? Can we purchase 17 licenses? How about 23?

We have around 20 Backblaze licenses that we pay a bit over $1000 per year for. It makes sense for them to advertise the price per user because they charge us that way.

This is akin to Pepsi sticking a huge sign over their 24 pack at the department store saying "NOW ONLY 99 CENTS PER CAN!" minimum 24, in increments of 24.

Anyway, like I said, the way the pricing is advertised turned an interested/potential customer away.

Thanks for your reply. Price x12 like you said is standard, it's the x10x12 that caught me off guard.

I think some language and price listing adjustments like you suggested would be a great improvement. Even if it's as simple as $32.5 per user pack per month (charged yearly).

I just looked at the pricing page on Gitlab.com and was genuinely interested in trying it out. But the pricing language and structure on the page turned me off instantly.

I thought to myself: "$3.25 per user per month? Sweet! I can throw $6.5 to try it out without the hassle of setting up yet another VM. Charged yearly? Eh, seems to be a bit of a commitment. Oh wait, in multiples of 10? that's $390 upfront with 8 extra licenses for a year!"

Compare that to Digital Ocean's pricing page: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

They list the monthly price first but they actually bill hourly. It seems more honest and upfront to tell me what I'm in for.

I understand that you're competitive compared to Github enterprise, but I think that page needs some work to make it more trustworthy and less salesman-pitch-y. Even Github lists that they start from $2500 upfront, not $3.25 + read the fine print.

Best of luck to you and congratulations on the funding.

Edit: And I just noticed that's actually for the on-site EE and that Gitlab.com is free. Oy vey.

I'd like to add that registering to vote is the first step.

Researching the propositions (and candidates for that matter) that get put on the ballot yourself (LAO[1], SOS[2], Ballotpedia[3] and Google) and ignoring media coverage/ads can make a huge difference.

The Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) is particularly useful. Their analysis of prop 1[4] combined with Ballotpedia's[5] summary was very informative.

[1]: http://www.lao.ca.gov/

[2]: http://www.sos.ca.gov/

[3]: http://ballotpedia.org/

[4]: http://www.lao.ca.gov/ballot/2014/prop-1-110414.aspx

[5]: http://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_1,_Water_Bond_...

Not only that but the last line on their privacy policy is fun: "This privacy policy is subject to change without notice and was last updated on March 15, 2013."

Thanks, but no thanks.