realtalk_sp

Very cool. Good luck with the project!

I think the nuance of what I was implying got lost there. It seems likely there is no inherent purpose to human life and that we're simply an accidental byproduct of the natural laws of our reality.

Yet the closest identifiable thing we could conceivably call a "purpose" is gene propagation. I should have clarified that this isn't necessarily a "good" purpose. In fact, much of what is programmed by evolution is arguably net detrimental insofar as it is readily exploited.

> I would say that death+reproduction is a better solution to preserving genes than immortality.

It's just the solution nature came up with. It's also optimal at a population level and far less so at the organism level.

Again: it is strictly preferable (by a very wide philosophical margin) to exist than to not exist. Of course, anyone who believes otherwise would be welcome to not participate in the concept of biological immortality.

The only reason we exist is because our genes "wish" to remain immortal. Not dying is the fullest realization of our biological (and likely only empirically valid) purpose. Science also suggests that consciousness ceases with death. It seems strictly preferable to exist as opposed to not exist. Looked at this way, pursuing immortality is utterly rational. In fact, it's surprising this isn't our highest current priority.

Would also like to know the team size. Sounds like 3 people with a good amount of experience. But it's a very impressive accomplishment no matter how you look at it.

Agreed. The final total number of deaths projected back in April [1] is about half of current deaths. It stands to reason that the problem is significantly worse than what our top epidemiologists expected and should be addressed accordingly.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/09/830664814/fauci-says-u-s-coro...

Seems possible Apple will announce plans to take a cut of ad revenue once they're the middleman tracking all conversions. I can't imagine they're happy that so much of the money being made off of their users is out of their reach.

Wow it's almost like Apple designed their rules so that most of the key businesses in this world don't pay an insane 30% of their revenue to Apple. Almost like Apple say...doesn't want to discourage important institutions from providing services Apple's customers might expect from iOS. Crazy coincidence. /s

This is a really ambiguous, unusual, and (in my opinion) inappropriate use of the term "customer acquisition".

The App Store is a marketplace that connects people developing for a platform (iOS) to customers using devices compatible with that platform. It is also the only marketplace that does this. In this way, it is best thought of as a (monopolistic) distribution channel.

I think the overarching point that's emerging here is that those profits are a consequence of monopolistic rent-seeking...

Apple's cost to maintain this ecosystem can't be anything close to the insane $50B in App Store revenue they hauled in last year.

Do you have any statistics breaking down how frequently mobile users access email via a PWA versus a dedicated app? Also surveys on the difference in user experience?

If not, please refrain from disingenuously advancing obviously problematic ideas. It adds nothing to the conversation.

When you really stop and unpack this, you can see that this is a non-issue. Adding an object or a field to the schema (the most common operations in a growing schema) never interfere with dependents and can be performed independently of client adoption.

The remaining coordination issues can be solved by documenting or using e.g. a '@Deprecated' decorator in Typescript. And, of course, you can always just remove a field to see where the code has dependencies on it (where code breaks during compilation).

The concerns about shared code may apply in some cases, but the global schema is not one of them, in my experience. I do agree it takes a bit of extra thinking to do this correctly but it's really not that difficult.

I find it odd that so many people are relying on the "well they do it too argument", as if Apple has a monopoly on monopolistic business practices.

If you want an example of a horrible middleman in publishing that's slowly being extinguished by rebelling counterparties, take a look at Elsevier.

The other half of that coin is HN choosing to restore posts that have been flagged unnecessarily. That doesn't seem to be happening. It may not be a conspiracy but it's definitely still a problem.

They would have to start by not demoting submissions with comment threads that explore this issue. This submission from 6 hours ago with 124 upvotes and 212 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23568095) is not showing up in the first 120 items on Hacker News and I have no idea why. I've posted in a few places asking @dang to explain and I'm just getting downvoted. Extremely troubling.

EDIT: I just got up to submission 270 and still don't see it. That submission has almost certainly been hidden somehow to prevent further discovery.

EDIT 2: I highly suspect Apple is somehow putting pressure on HN to do this. The way these submissions are being 'controlled' is really disturbing. And it would make perfect sense for Apple to try and control discussion on HN. We basically destroyed TripleByte in just the past month. Anything scandalous affecting developers can turn into a company-melting shitstorm via HN.

Yup seems like that just happened and they're still charging the $30. That means $108 lost to Apple in the first subscription-year and $54 every subscription-year thereafter. I'd be surprised if Superhuman isn't trying to find a way to pivot their customers onto their own billing behind the scenes.

The fact that Apple is scrubbing text communications and discussing certain sensitive things with developers only over the phone is supremely shady. Deleting old communications is a classic tactic employed by organizations that anticipate lawsuits and associated discovery. It's amazing that they've formulated a comprehensive set of internal business practices directed at sustaining this racket.

The realization that this permits end-to-end fullstack type safety and allows some awesome things (like surfacing breakage at compile time in response to changes to the data model) is a quietly brewing revolution.

Can you point to some worthy examples of this as proofs of existence? And I mean something truly novel, and not simply a different way to do something we already can do.

@dang Other submissions related to Apple and Hey are not sticking to the front page (or within the top 50 submissions) even though they are highly trafficked in terms of upvotes and comments. Could you please explain why this is happening? I want to believe I'm mistaken here but it seems like they're being nuked to prevent discussion on the topic (perhaps because it veers towards being critical of Apple).

I think there are a lot of people who don't understand just how much retailers mark up some goods. But they're starting to get the idea now that D2C is increasing and you can see items sold directly by businesses at prices much lower than on e.g. Amazon.

You're describing stores that exist in a competitive ecosystem with price variation. The analogy breaks down because "buyers of products" doesn't map one-to-one with "owners of iPhones" and because distribution of physical goods actually has significant costs.

Assuming you are in fact in the tech industry, you should know that near-zero marginal distribution cost is one of the core principles underpinning software economics.

I'm also not arguing that Apple shouldn't pass some of the costs it incurs to provide apps (e.g. APN, engineering costs, etc) on to developers and by extension on to consumers. But it should be priced fairly and transparently.

A flat 30% fee without the ability to itemize that for customers or signal the existence of alternative payment methods is just wanton, nefarious extortion.

The 'right' solution would be to charge a specific, itemized "Apple device usage fee" that's separate from and in addition to the primary fee for a service itself. Apple deserves to take a portion of revenue specific to the provision of a service to its users. I can't see an argument where it deserves to take a portion of all revenue developers receive.

But Apple is not permitting this because it would pull back the curtain on their rapacious practices and their customers, having already paid a significant amount of money for their devices, would almost certainly be quite angry about it.

Spotify is a good example of the distortion occurring because of this misguided system. They're charging customers $12.99 if they subscribe through the App Store instead of the $9.99 they would pay outside of it for exactly the same service. So, right now, some Spotify customers are being needlessly pillaged by Apple when, unbeknownst to them, they could get the same exact service at less cost. Spotify apparently had plans to email affected subscribers to alert them about this nonsense situation, but I don't know what became of that.

> They charge 30% because they've amassed 1 billion extremely valuable users who are willing to spend money on apps in their marketplace.

Apps that are made up to 42% more expensive (NOTE: the 30% fee applies to all in-app purchases and the first year of subscriptions) in a way that's entirely opaque to those users. The fact that you think this is okay is the only thing I find absurd.

You also seem like someone who is for some reason predisposed to be an apologist for Apple's monopolistic business practices. You certainly don't represent what would likely be the average/majority sentiment of Apple's customers, were they sufficiently informed.

Some people here seem to be responding to all of this inappropriately.

The simple fact is that Apple is injecting itself as an intermediary in the payment process and extracting a preposterously oversized commission for no meaningful added value.

And it's easy to see that Apple knows what they're doing is wrong. They strictly prohibit developers from signaling that there's an extra cost for purchases made through Apple's system or that there are alternative payment options available. A well-informed consumer would be a clear threat to Apple's gravy train.

This system should have never emerged to begin with. It's highly unethical and, given the direction things are taking [1], will likely be found in violation of antitrust laws.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains...

Isn't Superhuman using TestFlight to get around the App Store problem? That was the case last I heard of it.

Yes they are morally indefensible. Many of those decisions didn't make sense to me and yes I expressed outrage about it to friends.

But your point is also a straw man. For the most part, there are still prohibitions on large gatherings of people. These protests have been blessed as an exception. Why? Because the government's hand was forced by political expediency. In essence, the government has failed to protect the people from themselves.

And let me flip the question on you: why do we need to protest so urgently now, during a global pandemic? Why can't it be postponed until after we've resolved that problem and can permit it to go about safely?

I'll answer that for you: BLM has found outsized effectiveness because of coronavirus. Because people have more time, and are feeling less economically secure, and are more emotionally vulnerable. They were better primed to respond to the movement and organizers are capitalizing on that at the direct expense of human lives, even if that isn't obvious to them.

Worst of all, history suggests that these protests and the consequent loss of life will buy Black people next to nothing. Categorically the wrong solution to a very complex problem.

You're digressing from the core, indisputable truth: these protests, in the present environment, will result in a significant number of deaths. Sure we won't start to have a sense of just how many until a few more weeks have passed, but we can say with relative certainty it will be "significant".

The reason people are dodging this is because it makes these protests morally indefensible, on balance. This is terribly inconvenient if you've entrenched yourself in a particular way of thinking and no longer wish to question it.

The comment thread here, and the national attitude more generally, is the literal embodiment of cognitive dissonance. Science and facts are only useful insofar as they are convenient to our ends.

I suppose, in light of the shortcomings of human nature, it would be a lot easier to make the point that needs to be made if we were dropping bombs on coronavirus victims and broadcasting the carnage instead of rolling them up into statistical output. Their crime, apparently, is dying in a way that isn't direct and emotionally resonant enough for other human beings to grasp the magnitude of it.

This is a baffling argument.

Far more lives are threatened by coronavirus today than will be threatened by police brutality over the next several decades [1]. You're basically saying that immunocompromised and elderly persons are acceptable collateral damage.

One thing that's been lost in the noise is that death by police brutality is a vanishingly small problem: less than 0.0003% of the population per year (and most of those are White people).

And the ultimate irony is far more Black people are going to die as a result of these protests (since Black communities are disproportionately affected by the virus) than will be saved by whatever temporary curtailment of police brutality this yields.

Those are the real facts. Not the alternative ones you and people like you would like us to focus on. It's like it suddenly became acceptable to wantonly suspend rationality because it suits certain interests.

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