kinkrtyavimoodh

or Maps

I am sorry to say this but your friends should really give a thought to why they are still working there. I understand that people have families to feed and mortgage, but they should at least consider changing jobs if they are software engineers.

I am tired of a social equilibrium where the default state of things is that companies or governments will do ridiculous, abhorrent things and then maybe if there is a loud enough backlash or protest they might revert some of it.

Like this results in just complete DDOS of the backlash / protest system.

And maybe that's what they are hoping for.

IANAL so please correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't counterfeiting imply that the scamming party is claiming to sell something else while actually selling fake goods? Such as passing off their random shirt as a Gucci shirt? Or mixing chemicals themselves and calling it a Versace perfume.

In this case the other listing isn't claiming to sell BeltBro, they are claiming to sell AAROMANO. The fact that they stole the copy etc is wrong but it sounds like a different problem. But there doesn't seem to be any misrepresentation or counterfeiting.

Did you mean to say "more homogenous"

While that is true, I think that some of these things are tied to local culture too, which is why the Coastal distinction does have some merit.

If you generally are in the Bay Area or LA you rarely see the level of obesity you see in say Houston despite the fact that both areas despite being rich have their fair share of the poor too.

Similarly for smoking. It's exceedingly rare to see public smoking in the Bay Area.

Similarly for diets. When traveling in the South I was amazed at just how ridiculously unhealthy the average food eaten by the average person there was. Everything deep fried, laden with calories, consumed along with sugary drinks.

Coastal America and rest of America might be a better way to cut it.

Sounds like a bit of an unpopular opinion in this thread but I think pay-for-what-you-use plans with reasonable per GB charge and a slightly higher per GB charge above a certain number seems reasonable, irrespective of your opinion of Comcast.

Something like 30 dollars for a residential connection, followed by 2.5 cents per GB for the first 1024 GB, and then increased to say 4 cents per GB for another 1024 GB.

If you use 1 TB, you pay 30+0.025*1024 ~ 55 dollars.

Why should we subsidize those who download tens or hundreds of TBs?

No one thinks this is unreasonable for electricity, why is it unreasonable for data? Bandwidth issues affect data too.

I am in my late 30s. Our generation had very little access to computers growing up but we used what we had to tinker and experiment with them. I mean sure many people just played games but there was enough to do for those of us who were interested.

The current generation is basically digitally connected from the day they are born and yet the 'general purpose computing devices' they have access to are walled gardens like phones and tablets. And with the way Apple is going about it, even Macbooks will soon join the ranks.

Getting locked out of my money because automated algorithms miscategorized some activity by my account on some completely unrelated Google product as 'spam'?

Thanks but no thanks.

That is true for all lawsuits.

The more damning implication is that Apple, one of the world's most highly valued brands, a brand name that has historically commanded 50%+ gross profit margins on commodity goods sold as luxury goods, is losing a 'popularity' contest to a video game company. Talk of changing times!

TikTok is a social media app that focuses on 'creating' interesting content 'in the moment'.

Instagram is about interesting content but more in a very curated museum sort of way. "Look at me when I am at my best"

Snapchat is about not-necessarily-interesting content that focusses on being in the moment. "Look at me shooting the shit"

TikTok is about showcasing talent in the moment. Even the prettiest instafluencer can't just stand there doing nothing in a TikTok video. The focus is on creativity and doing something creative. "Look at me showing you something entertaining / interesting / educational or all of the above."

Since you pretty much have to catch the attention of the viewer from the very first second (or you will get swiped up), there is none of that "Hey guys how's it going" bullshit that plagues Youtube videos. Extreme content density.

[1] Purely merit-based admissions [2] Very selective, with a total enrollment under 3000 [3] They focus much more on the hard sciences. They are primarily a technical institution.

Reformatting your hard drive and installing a new operating system is just the beginning of it.

Such a drastic change of OS basically disrupts your whole workflow while you get used to the new one. Everything from where to find things to keyboard shortcuts to UX paradigms.

> we are talking about Google today

We were talking only about Google yesterday and probably will tomorrow too, but sure "we are talking about Google today".

> We are talking about a a) political unit governing the lives of 450m people and b) a company.

No, We are talking about a a) political unit governing the lives of 450m people and b) a company affecting the lives of 2 billion.

Apple iCloud

This is a completely legit reason to not trust Google with your data, but won't it apply even more when the service is free?

aka "1/3 will use Baidu and 2/3 will use Bing"

Apart from what others said, Sundar Pichai was a management consultant at McKinsey before he joined Google.

Surprised to see the level of anger here about this.

This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).

Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free shit" product model for two reasons—

[1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it's more likely to be killed if it doesn't get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company.

[2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.

> It doesn't make any sense to compare niche productivity tools to it.

It makes complete sense to compare because Apple likes to claim that it imposes its rules and guidelines perfectly uniformly.

Both of these factors are less relevant than the fact that almost every internet connected Indian uses Whatsapp.

True. Say or think what you want about them, they know how to build, deliver and maintain good end-to-end products.

Google, otoh...

People who are not from these countries (Kenya etc.) might not know that the following are already true—

[1] Many people buy phones on loans, because even cheap phones are quite expensive for the average Kenyan.

[2] These phone companies _already_ use device policy based apps to control usage for those who have not paid. The difference is that these apps are actually predatory, they are free to siphon off data and what not, and have the usual shadiness that you expect from apps made by relatively random corps who care way less about user privacy than big cos.

What this solution seems to be doing is providing a way to enforce the device lock policy at the OS level that actually lessens the vice-grip that these companies have on the user's phones and limits the power of the company to only block the phone from use, as opposed to the earlier model where they could do whatever the fuck they wanted on the device using their installed software.

Section 5.1.2(iii) of the App Store Review Guidelines has a special exception for Apps with a 1 billion install base from a country where the government doesn't give two hoots about your App Store Review Guidelines.

I mean the only reason this seems sarcastic is because the web predates the App Store by a few decades and so we are used to the web working this way. If the concept had come up after the App Store had been published, Apple would have done exactly this.

True, but none of these things exist in isolation. Culture is created by people, it is not a geographical feature like mountains or lakes.

The Silicon Valley wasn't nominated as the tech hub overnight, it became one through an organic process thanks to a mix of good weather, access to capital, a pool of talented employees etc.

Don't take any of that for granted (well except the weather I guess, but with Global Warming and earthquakes who knows).

It will work out well fiscally because giant companies will suck it up and pay, but it looks like a bad strategy from a forward-looking point of view.

You want to incentivize future growth too, and you want to make sure that 20 years down the line, you have the new FAANGs of the world giving you millions in tax dollars, because history has shown that the largest of companies can eventually die out, and tech is full of graveyards.

What this does is, it collects money from today's FAANGs while disincentivizing future startups from starting here.

This is akin to the boiling frog fable (yes I know it's fake but the point of the fable stands), except the city is the one putting itself in the cauldron and raising the temperature by chipping away bit by bit the things that make the bay area a good place to live and invest in.

No they are not. The average job profile might be a bit lower but FAANG has plenty of high paying job opportunities in India.