sovande

> I almost never buy an app from the Mac App Store when it's also available directly.

Unpopular opinion, but I always try to buy Apps from the Mac App Store. It is easy to purchase and with buyer protection. You can easily install the app on another Mac and it updates automatically and all my apps are in the same place with just one account. But most importantly, Mac App Store Apps must run in a sandbox which is much more secure, than just downloading an app from the internet which might run with root privileges on your Mac.

I did purchase Soulver 3 though because I wanted to support the developer as I have been using Soulver 2 almost daily for 10 years. But sure enough, the in-app purchase experience did not work and crashed when going to PayPal. Ended up purchasing through the web-site. The downside now, is that my Soulver 3 App has megabytes of Paddle API frameworks embedded in it that is not used, and Little Snitch reports that Soulver 3 tries to connect to paddle 2 times every freaking time I start the app. Very annoying and unnecessary.

Soulver 3 has actually been a bit of a disappointment. They rewrote the parser and math engine in Swift and a lot of functionality has been lost in the process. I'm sure this will be addressed in further releases, but for now, it has no iCloud sharing and you cannot share documents with the iOS app. Bit flicking operators does not work anymore, which was so useful for programming. It has gained support for date time calculation which is very nice, like 'today + 30 days', but Numi does this better and also has a 'now' variable for current time you can do calculations with. The new Soulver 3 UI could be better and I especially find it annoying that the window has a rather large fixed min-width and I also don't like the different color for the right column. Numi is a a copy of Soulver, but has bypassed the original. Unfortunately, I found Numi after I purchased Soulver 3, but I have ditched Soulver 3 for Numi. Numi has more functionality, looks much better and has fewer bugs. Edit: I don't like that Numi is not available on the App Store either. Numi is created by a developer from Belarus, which is a country only slightly better than DPRK and I would very much like to have Numi in a sandbox.

The app had a ranking of 50 in the productivity category June 8 and was out of the MAS US list June 11. Thats all for the last 365 days. So I guess not many is willing to pay. I salute the attempt fight the race to the bottom which the App Store has become, but I agree with OP, this app is probably not the standard-bearer. 9.99 for a TODO list (and judging from the video not very good) is too much. I mean, iStat Menus is 9.99 although amputated on the MAS.

It links directly to the Mac App Store which open MAS on my Mac. It's kind of rude. Their web-page does not contain any text describing the product, there is a simple video which could be linked instead. The product is at least 1 year old, judging from comments in the App Store. Usually a Show HN thing is a bit fresher. I agree with OP, this feels less like a Show HN and more like "oh by the way, we should post a Show HN the buy button".

> where the sun doesn't rise for a part of the year as well

That would be the same place a few months from now. This is strange though, it's not like this guy is the first above the polar circle using a Mac. I suspect it must somehow be related to him being a tourist with a different region and timezone settings or maybe the location services got confused.

> Caesar was not fighting to gain

Who knows? I believe you are right that he was forced into action when the Senate pulled him back from Gaul [1] with the intention of bringing him to court. If he did not have a plan to set himself up as a dictator, at least he pivoted beautifully once he saw the opportunity and Pompey folded. That at least was a true startup move. 1. edit: Gaul not Germany

By crossing the Rubicon with his one legion, Caesar put himself on a path of no return and in open conflict with the Senate and Pompey who vastly outnumbered him military. There was no guarantee that he would succeed. Upon crossing he declared "alea iacta est", knowing full well what he set in motion. Edit: My point here, is simply that not everyone would cross the Rubicon. Most would turn around, deeming the risk too high. Related to a startup, the risk for failure is high if you look at the statistics. If it is a "sure thing" you are not really doing a startup or you are conned. A startup kind of by definition has to be a high risk venture. Like PG's example of a merchant ship going to the East Indias in the 17th century.

I don't disagree, once you have crossed the rubicon. When Julius Caesar _actually_ crossed the Rubicon, the risk was immense and there was no guarantee of a successful outcome. That's what I mean, going all in on a risky adventure is not for everyone and if you analyse and think too much about it, few will want to take the jump. However, once you have crossed and are in the "battle" then of course you will use all the tactical advantages you can and try "shifting odds of success".

One trait most successful founders have is not being overly analytical. This correlate with higher education as well, the higher, the more analytical. Creating a successful startup is basically a lottery and it almost does not matter what idea you come up with. In this metaphor, smart and analytical people will not buy a lottery ticket because the cost vs the chance to win is just too small. But if you don't buy a lottery ticket you most certainly cannot win the lottery.

> coup de grâce

"Funny" that they have a french word and a french statement as the second and third example. But maybe not and it is intentionally, 'whois' says Registrant Country is FR. In any case, very cool and works impressively AFAICS. Wonder how long it will stay up until our Google overlords sends a cease and desist

The second book introduce the "The Dark Forest Theory". By that alone it is worth reading. This take on the Fermi Paradox and how it is weaved into the plot is very well done. The second book is also interesting from a SF perspective, describing the treat against earth and the phases and solutions earth goes through. The parallel development of the protagonist Luo Ji is also interesting with a satisfactory and clever conclusion.

Not the OP, but I'll chip in with my $.02. I really want to like Firefox, but everything UI feels wrong (on macOS). From tabs, where the close button is on the wrong side (right) and if you click the + button to open a new tab the cursor ends up over the new tab, not over the + button so you can click again to open a new tab. The whole UI looks and feels non-native. Pressing ESC in full screen mode does not bring the window back to its original size. In-page search opens a clunky (javascript?) search field in the bottom status bar. Firefox does not support proper macOS dark-mode (try cmd-O). Cannot print to PDF. (Magic mouse) gestures does not work. No automatic keychain integration for login forms. Fonts are rendered different than in Chrome and Safari, e.g. thin fonts are tick and font's in general look more ugly (something with antialiasing?). The list goes on and on. Basically Firefox feels like browser version of Slack.

A better metaphor is probably to look at an API as a design blueprint. For instance a blueprint of a house. Describing in detail all the components that goes into creating the house, plumbing, electricity, rooms etc. Clearly it is a lot of work to come up with such a design.

Sure, we need naive wish lists, but for open source to be more than a curios historical blip and not fall into a Venezuelan disaster, the least we can demand of FSF and OSI is to give us a proper open source license so those who want to _do_ open source work can also succeed commercially. They need to understand and address problems faced by MongoDB, Redis, Elastic et. al. and support their needs with a new license (something better than AGPL). Not flat out dismiss the problems and swipe it under the rug.

"Descartes reasoned that since animals are not rational, they are not conscious, and since they are not conscious, they cannot even be aware of pain; their piteous howls during the horrible experiments he conducted on them were to him mere reflex, the unfelt expression of material reactions akin to the shrieking of a teakettle."

The Cartesian world view on biology has been catastrophic to our fellow mammals and even today aspects of this perspective survives. Physiologically, humans are not very different from other mammals, even if we want to be. We all have a limbic system and that means we all have the same emotions. Animals have feelings and emotions. When things happen to them, they react with emotions be it sorrow, anger, happiness, fear.

MongoDB used to use AGPL, but apparently that was not good enough. Not sure why?

A geo-stationary satellite can stay in orbit for billions of years. I’m surprised this was not mentioned in the article at all.

re2c is a hidden gem and it is used in libzdb to parse URL's https://bitbucket.org/tildeslash/libzdb/src/9402bd5757d1db34... and SQL Date strings https://bitbucket.org/tildeslash/libzdb/src/9402bd5757d1db34...

The next step is to innovative _away_ the smartphone I think. Who wants to lug around a large smartphone anymore? Apple’s Watch series 4 with LTE feels like a great step in the right direction. I come to love it since I got it around Christmas. I find myself leaving the phone home more and more and pounder returning my new XR. Then I think we’ll see glasses with LTE and meaningful AR.

Apple's GameplayKit has several examples

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...

Styrbord is not germanic, but old norse and literary means the rudder (i.e. steering board), which, as you said, was located on the right side of the ship. Viking ships could therefore only dock on the left-side, hence port for the port side.

> What kind of apps did people use back in the day when desktops weren't hidden all the time?

Emacs to the left and one xterm window in the bottom right corner.

If you want to go down this road, doing mobile cross-platform native, Xamarin seems much more compelling. It is supported by a very good IDE and has proper licensing for distribution on the app stores. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/xamarin/

Because you have to license your iOS App as GPL if you want to use this framework. GPL is not compatible with the AppStore terms. They say they plan to dual license with a (free) commercial license in the future...

Swift has easy access to pthread mutex and you can do that.

serialQueue.async { // Critical section } is GCD's way of doing the same with the added benefit that the calling code does not have to wait.

Problems in the parent code could be solved by using a mutex instead of GCD in this case. The code _has_ to wait for the access token to be loaded and not blocking does not make sense here unless you also introduce some kind of Promises.

Yes, sorry. I managed to click on the wrong link in the HN iOS app.

That’s a very Cartesian world view on biology, luckily abandoned a long time ago. Animals where merely automatons and scientists dissecting dogs alive could gleefully ignore their cries as nothing more than automatic response stimuli. Today we know that physiologically humans are not very different from other mammals, even if we want to be. We all have a limbic system and that means we all have the same emotions. Animals have feelings and emotions. When things happen to them, they react with emotions be it sorrow, anger, happiness, fear.

Using probability is a good start I think. As I understand it, CERN should be able to find new particles below about 2–3 TeV in energy. It hasn't and physicists say it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. You'll need to build and accelerator around the Sun to reach those energy levels. With that in mind, does it make sense to build something slightly larger than LHC? At billions of dollars?

I thought particle physics were coming to an end? After CERN found the Higgs boson then nothing. The ROI of a more powerful accelerator is abysmal. It is impossible to know how large a new collider needs to be and if anything interesting will be found. Use the money on a moon-base instead and then mars.

Your post is like a reverse shit sandwich. There is some meat between the crap. In the context of meetings, though which this article was about, I think PG is right on the money. Though it is hardly breaking news.

I do not fully agree with the premise that C programmers don't know what's best for them and need to be educated to switch to C++. I do agree that C++(14++) isolated is a better programming language in many ways compared to C. The problem is that a programming language seldom is used isolated, but is part of a toolchain or is used in an environment with other technologies.

In this situation, C is a much better choice because most other languages have nice interoperability with C, but seldom, if ever, with C++. For example, as an iOS developer I can use C and C-libraries very easy with Swift, while inter opt with C++ is not possible at all and probably never will.

The main thing keeping me away from C++ is that it does not have a stable common ABI. This makes it very nearly impossible to use C++ to create and distribute a shared library. I even believe Google developers internally are prohibited from creating C++ libraries for this reason. So I'm sticking with C for low level stuff. It's a perfect glue language and fast. For higher level stuff, why use C++, when you can use Swift, Java, Haskell etc etc?