captain_murdock

I had never heard of Y Combinator until Hacker News. As far as brand building goes, most investment companies could only dream of Hacker News.

On top of the holes in your financial argument, you've overlooked something in your competitor argument.

A competitor could replace most of Apple's current products in 5 years, but where will Apple be in 5 years? They'll be five years ahead.

> we see that a majority of people who install an ad blocker don't actually do it to block ads (that's just an added bonus). They are actually doing it to block tracking.

This line severely damages the credibility of the article. I found the article interesting up until I read it. I stopped reading once I read it because I couldn't trust anything else the author says.

I highly doubt this statement is true. It may be true in very privacy-focused circles and amongst some circles of IT professionals, but I highly doubt it is true for the population.

If you make a statement this left-field, you've got to back that up with credible research and I highly doubt that statement was based on any credible research.

Grab some popcorn and give this a read: https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15345.

@pixiuPL thinks he's king of the world, but gets rightfully put in his place.

I'm not sure about the answer to your question about different fees for microtransactions, but with their pricing, you would never get charged 25 cents. The minimum charge is $1.

The first four pages are $1, which I'm assuming is partly to cover that issue of their charge getting eaten up by payment fees.

You can read some more discussion on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804018.

One of the ideas is that most ML researchers want to publish their work and Apple wasn't allowing it. Allowing ML researchers working at Apple to publish in this journal was they only way they were get more ML researchers to work for them.