AnonHP

I've seen a lot of commenters on HN like Fastmail and have nothing but praise for it.

But I disagree with

> all come with a modest price tag

The price tag may be modest for some people, but is not for everyone. If someone needs one mailbox per person in a family, the costs go up a lot with Fastmail. There are cheaper alternatives that have been around for long (though probably not doing things like developing new protocols such as JMAP). Some of these alternatives may also be suitable for people who don't want email to be hosted in the US.

HN is not designed well for desktop either. The voting buttons are too small and close to each other. I’m sure every HN user on every platform has clicked wrongly many a times.

HN is not backed by a large organization/company and does not have money to employ a few people to redesign the site and make some long desired and badly needed improvements. /s

While you’re complaining about link sizes, did you notice how tiny and close the voting buttons are and how bad the general accessibility of HN is?

In a way, I think all this bad design prevents people from using it too much…and that may actually be a good thing.

If this answer seemed pointless, that’s because nobody can answer this question properly on an Ask HN post. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com may probably get a more appropriate answer.

> IMO, there isn't much importance to sideloading at personal levels.

As someone who has jailbroken iOS devices in the distant past, the conveniences and user interactions supported by Activator and SBSettings more than a decade ago are still not on iOS yet (and will likely never be). I believe there is a lot of value to have sideloading while also recognizing that there could be a higher chance of malware and the lost.

> If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone.

Not just any Android phone to use out of the box though, right? You may need to tweak or even install a different distribution/flavor like GrapheneOS. In other words, different Androids have their own versions of walled gardens.

A little on Meta:

> It’s worth remembering that Meta isn’t in this to make a games device, nor really to sell devices per se - rather, the thesis is that if VR is the next platform, Meta has to make sure it isn’t controlled by a platform owner who can screw them, as Apple did with IDFA in 2021.

Also, Meta wants to be the gateway to connect businesses with people (the primary requirement for the company) and to connect people with people, slurping every bit of data it can from all its sources in an attempt to become like the Eye of Sauron (unsure if this analogy holds).

As such, Meta has self-imposed limits on what its headset can ever be.

Nope. Seems like even the M2 chip and the RAM it has (on iPad Pro) isn't enough for Apple to consider adding multiuser support and quick multiuser switching. I keep waiting for this every iPadOS release, and it's disappointing not to see it.

Someone replying to your comment doesn’t change your karma points. Someone upvoting your comment may probably increase your karma points (the may probably is because of the undisclosed algorithms that attempt to compensate for gaming the system).

In other words, looking at karma won’t tell you whether someone replied to your comments or not. There is nothing on HN to indicate replies unless you dig into your comments history. There nay be other sites or browser extensions that could help on getting notified.

Tangentially, from a user’s point of view, Catalyst apps are kinda like Electron apps. You can spot one just by using it for a short while. The user interface inconsistencies and the subpar keyboard support (even below the base level on macOS) make it unpleasant to use. Apple’s own Catalyst based apps on macOS highlight its weaknesses. As a stop gap arrangement, it may have some value. But I can’t stomach the thought that this would be the permanent way to develop iPadOS and macOS apps.

I, like some other people, hate all these subscriptions (and prefer local-only where feasible). That’s one of the reasons I haven’t considered Fantastical. But its feature set is indeed a lot richer.

This looks handy, but then I saw this:

> Read-only, a feature not a bug

> Grila can't and won't modify, add or delete events in your calendars and reminder lists. You can go fast and reckless with your typing, there's nothing to break.

I hope this changes in a future release (perhaps with an additional keyboard shortcut), since managing calendars and viewing calendars using multiple apps doesn’t seem seamless. Over a period of time, users may just go back to the app that allows the creation of calendar events.

Quick thoughts:

Nice effort, and the format of the diagrams looks good. I do find the description close to impossible to read due to the use of all caps, monospace and most of all, lack of line spacing. I haven’t thought more on this, but within the constraints of the card sizes if this part could be improved, that’d be great.

Does this assume specific units for the measurements of weight and circumference? If yes, what are those and how would one change the formulas for other units of measurement?

Apart from that, I think the bigger ongoing folly here is this whole Metaverse thing.

> “The splits of many multibusiness corporations involve a form of corporate speciation. A corporation that was previously viable reaches a point where the ecosystems of its different businesses have diverged and the CEO can no longer develop a viable strategy for all of them. The original species needs to split into multiple new corporate species that are better able to pursue their specific opportunities.”

This is not strictly biological: Companies grow sort of like unicellular organisms, absorbing things they can, and then transform into complex multicellular organisms. The complexity of companies and their reach typically grows over time until they reach a stage where it’s no longer possible to be managed well (as the author indicates). They then split to create smaller companies that are easier to manage. Those smaller companies again grow by mergers and acquisitions to become large and complex, and have to be split.

It’s the nature of the market and the competition dynamics that companies go through these cycles periodically.

It takes a lot of focused effort and staying private (and preferably not taking VC funding) to resist the temptation to absorb many other companies and become unwieldy and complex.

> One of the most popular and most intuitive ways to evaluate an NGO is to judge how much of their spending is on their programme of works (or "mission") and how much is on other things, like administration and fundraising. If you give money to a charity for feeding people in the third world you hope that most of the money you give them goes on food - and not, for example, on company cars for head office staff.

This is popular because it seems simple. Take one number and judge an entire organization by it. Don’t even look at growth or impact.

> Mozilla looks bad when considered in this light. Fully 30% of all expenditure goes on administration.

This whole reference is very simplistic, especially since it’s closer to the beginning of the article. It would’ve made sense after explaining more about what’s happened with Firefox on features, what it has offered to standards, etc.

I’m not happy with Firefox losing market share or with the layoffs that happened. Monetization by Mozilla Corporation is nowhere close to what Google pays it to be a preferred default search engine, and not addressing that is a huge issue.

What I don’t agree with is starting the article with a few basic points and going on a tangent on sites like Charity Navigator, which focus on providing easy lists based on one simple number like administrative expenses. I stopped reading the article after these paragraphs.

I’m not at all surprised by this. Instagram has banned accounts for no good reason (no policy or TOS violations) for a long time. Seems like the bots just went wilder this time around.

Social media accounts are not your own. They’re leased to you at the pleasure of the bots and “machine learning” algorithms that determine what’s appropriate (for their owners to make more money) and what’s not.

A few more incidents like this is all we need to bid good riddance to this platform that treats its users with so much disdain.

Whatever “support” Instagram pretends to have deleted its tweet sometime later.

I’m getting this error when I visit this site:

> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

I’m on a phone browser (Firefox Focus).

> Mac is not an OS you can use unless you buy the entire package, and then you have to live with many of its limitations. It absolutely sucks at multitasking (not that most average users care about this one, but anyone coming from windows will struggle).

I know that macOS is not very keyboard friendly in general, but I’d like to know more about what you mean by “it sucks at multitasking”.

NextDNS is always free for DNS. It also provides 300,000 queries free every month dor working with ad/tracker blocking configurations. Once this limit is exceeded, DNS continues to work but blocking doesn’t until the next month or until its paid for. The paid subscription is about USD 2 a month or USD 20 a year.

Good to hear the reaffirmation from Mozilla that the blocking WebRequest API would be retained. A little over three years ago, Mozilla had promised that it wouldn’t just blindly follow Google on Manifest v3 to the letter. [1]

Considering that uBlock Origin works best and can do the most in Firefox with this continuing support, I’m glad Mozilla is still walking the talk on this one.

We need at least one browser that makes the web usable, and that might as well be Firefox with uBlock Origin.

Edit: Oops. Missed providing the link reference below earlier.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest...

> Google and Facebook don't sell your data directly, as it's bad business

You may want to check on this belief more thoroughly, at least with Meta/Facebook as a start.

> there is no way to migrate messages from Signal messenger from Android to iOS

Talking only about iOS and Signal here. What you describe is entirely Signal’s decision not to allow backups and restores (on iOS Signal made an explicit decision not to allow any sort of backup and restore). Signal only allows transfer of chats from one iOS device to another when both devices are in close proximity. If Signal wanted to, it could’ve asked the user to enter a strong password, use that to encrypt backups and store them anywhere (iCloud or Dropbox or on a Mac/PC).

Many apps provide backup and restore. Heck, WhatsApp, which uses the Signal protocol, recently implemented cross platform backup and restore for chats. So it’s not technology that’s stopping anyone. Signal is just adamant on not doing it because security.

And perhaps small pox and other viruses from dead and frozen bodies in permafrost?

> Current policy prescriptions are going to kill a lot more people than the warming they are trying to prevent.

If you think climate change is real, I don’t understand how you can believe that the current prescriptions (which aren’t even addressing the problem head on) will kill more people than the effects of climate change. The effects of climate change will probably kill at least several tens of millions of people and more likely the count may an order of magnitude more through direct and indirect effects (including displacement, riots, disease, etc.).

I’ve thought the same for a long time seeing his blog posts, but I haven’t seen anyone say it before online (until now). There’s a kind of narcissism and sense of entitlement (plus prestige) I’ve sensed in his writings and endeavors.

These have much better cameras, crash detection and some more improvements over iPhone 13 Pro (the chip is from the 13 Pro, not from the 13).

Could you expand on the non-standard behaviors? Long ago I noticed that using tags in Gmail causes a mess because they seem to appear as folders on an IMAP client. I’d like to know what other issues exist with respect to its IMAP implementation.

Two words: cash flow.