jakobegger

Surprisingly, Apple doesn't care a bit when developers fuck you.

One app that I bought on the app store for 60€ just refused to start one day if I didn't buy an additional annual subscription.

When I complained to Apple, they just told me to contact the developer.

They take 30%, but they don't care one bit if what they sold you actually works.

I agree that 10min is a threshold. We have a bus line nearby that has a 15min interval. It's close to useless for short trips, and I only use it rarely.

The busses with 10min interval are okay. The average wait is still longer than I'd like, but it's not quite as frustrating.

But a 5 minute interval should absolutely be the goal. It's probably not possible for many bus lines because of traffic, but for rail and tram lines its not a problem.

With a 5 minute interval public transport becomes more appealing than driving.

One reason why wait time is so important is that people often need to change lines. If you want to take two busses with a ten minute interval, you have to leave 20min early to make sure you get there on time. That makes driving a lot more attractive...

I asked the same question a week ago and got some great answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22032891

TLDR: There are many different types of simulators.

Why sell an update for x when you can sell a full sim for 20x?

A 5km run is probably between 30-45min activity. If you run at a medium pace, I don't think that would be an issue.

If run as fast as you can, I agree that you should take breaks.

I'm pretty happy about the fact that everyone has an expiration date built in. I know of very few people in power who don't start abusing their power in some way eventually.

Eventual death puts some limits on the amount of bad things one person can do.

Many organisations suffer from their geriatric leaders, who have amassed too many followers and too much power over the years. But at some point they die, and there's place for change.

> replace tipping with higher wages

I'm not suggesting to "replace" tipping with anything. I'm saying you should pay waiters enough so they don't depend on tips. Tips are a nice bonus, but they shouldn't be necessary.

Which is the situation in most places other than the US.

Here in Austria waiters are grateful if you tip them, and they might think you're cheap if you don't tip, but they still make enough to live even without tips.

Ha, same here. I thought my catering side job was pretty sweet (7€ an hour!) until I once scratched someones car on the way to work and it cost me 350€, which was more than I had earned in that job.

I've since realised that cars are very expensive and you should probably not take a job that requires a lot of driving around in your own car if you don't get reimbursed for it.

I don't think the system will fix itself by banning tips. That doesn't help anyone.

What society should do is require a decent base pay (regardless of tip). That way I know that my server can make ends meet if I tip them or not, and tipping them becomes a curtesy, not a necessity.

> Germany didn't even have a minimum wage until fairly recently

We don't really have a minimum wage in Austria either, but wages are regulated per industry. So employers are still required to pay certain wages, even though we don't have a general minimum wage.

And there's no such thing as including tips in the wage, tips are always extra.

(There is one major loophole, of course, which is hiring people as contractors, but that requires convincing the authorities that your employees are not really employees)

I remember that! It's such a great feature!

Unfortunately it doesn't work correctly for the PDFs I get from my accountant.

It's one of those features that are really obvious, but probably surprisingly hard to implement.

I think this is how a lot of enterprise software is sold. Potential customer says "it's missing x", sales person says "we'll build x in two weeks", product is sold, devs have to figure out how to build x in two weeks.

That probably doesn't work for physical products.

No, they just aren't affected by the old bugs. Most bugs affect only a small fraction of users, because bugs that affect many people are usually found during QA. So the majority of your users will not be affected by the existing bugs.

If a customer doesn't change their workflow, they aren't going to suddenly stumble over an old bug.

But if you keep pushing changes, eventually you'll introduce a new bug that does affect them.

There's no way around it: The more you change software, the higher the risk of introducing bugs.

That applies even if the changes are just bug fixes for old bugs. Every time you fix a bug that I wasn't affected by, you risk breaking something that I do use.

> this feels like a business or management issue

It's not a management issue, it's deeper than that.

Whenever you change something, you risk breaking something. It doesn't matter if you have unit tests, integrations tests, code review, staged rollouts or whatever else. Every time you change something, you risk breaking something. It does not matter how good your QA process is.

> improve processes and legacy code

Refactors are also a major source of bugs, so you should do that only if there is a serious problem with the old code.

The problem is that the code is constantly changing. With SaaS, customers have no choice but to always use the latest version, so eventually they'll run into a bug. Because constant change means that errors slip through eventually.

With traditional desktop software, customers aren't forced to update. They can just keep using their version of the software, and rely on the fact that it's not going to break suddenly.

But it seems to me those conspiracies often only affect a small (but vocal) minority of the people.

I recall a similar issue when they started to introduce a prescription database in Austria. There was a lot of fearmongering in the media, doctors spreading pamphlets against dangers of surveillance, etc.

But when I talked to people about it, nobody really cared about it. People might have read some article in the newspaper, but I don't know anybody who actually bothered to opt out of the system.

I think the problem is that journalists like reporting on controversies, so they end up writing a lot about issues that only bother a few people, and if you read the article it looks likes it's a major issue when it's really not.

On the contrary, my job taught me that desktop software can be extremely reliable and does not actually break all the time. Many of my customers use versions of my app that are a few years old without any troubles. When the user is in control of their environment, software doesn't suddenly break.

That's not to say software doesn't have bugs. Only that bugs don't appear suddenly.

Most bugs are caused by two things:

(1) Changes to the code that accidentally break unrelated stuff

(2) Changes to the environment (eg. OS vendor releases a new version which changes how some API behaves)

I think (1) is more common.

So I think that the reason why SaaS have problems all the time is that typically devs are changing stuff all the time and accidentally breaking things left and right, not that software is inherently unreliable. And since users can't keep using an old version that works for them, they'll stumble across every bug eventually.

Can someone explain how Airplane Simulators for pilots work?

Do simulators have the same hardware as real planes, or do they have a software model of the airplane?

If you simulated a broken AoA sensor, would the simulated plane behave similar to the real plane? Would the MCAS system have the same bugs in the simulator as in the one in the real aircraft?

Can you try new scenarios in a simulator, or can you just try scenarios that the simulator was designed to run?

In her blog post she says that they had a long relationship, decided to have a baby, and after the baby was born he began another affair and left her to care for the baby alone.

I wouldn't say "he tricked her into having a baby", but it's not exactly nice to leave someone after a baby was born and not provide any support at all (she had to fight him in the court for child support).

> After our son was born, I received a call from HR notifying me that one of us would have to leave the legal department where David was now Chief Legal Officer (...)

This sounds like the worst possible policy I can think of. Get pregnant from your boss, and HR kicks you from the team! How does that help anyone?

You could probably say the same thing about 90% of scientific papers.

Almost all research is narrow in scope, and more research is always needed.

And calling other research fields "nonsense" is also something that researchers from all fields do.

I already knew some basics of vim, as I've been semi-regularly using it for a long time to edit files on the command line. Everytime I ssh into a server I use vim to edit text files. I can get everything done that I need to do.

My struggle with vim is that it just slows me down. I'm used to the way that text editors work on the Mac, and I'm really fast with them. Working in Textmate or Sublime or Xcode or even BBedit feels natural to me. But as soon as I switch to Vim, everything feels difficult.

I think a big problem with Vim is that it's really hard to learn when it's not your primary editor.

Countries with public rail systems (or railway companies that are largely owned by the state) are usually way better than privately operated railway lines. Private railway service almost always sucks (crappy trains, high fares) and is only profitable on the most popular routes.

OK, it's been about an hour. I learned the following:

- there's a visual mode for selecting text

- I can now yank and paste text in normal mode

- I learned to use :split and :vsplit to open new files, and ctrl-w to switch between them

- I learned a few new navigation commands

- I learned that there's a replace mode (R)

Definitely useful, and I hope I remember everything the next time I open vim!

But I still feel like I'm just scraping the surface. One hour is very little time to learn about the power of vim.

> one hours is defiantly enough to get to know the main Vim bindings

I'm going to do an experiment. I've been struggling with Vim for a long time. I need to leave in about one hour. Instead of wasting time here on HN, I'll now spend an hour learning Vim.

I doubt that this will get me very far, but I'll let you know how far I got.

Can someone explain why I would use this over Shairport Sync [1]? Setting up shairport is so easy, and it works great with iPhones and Macs as audio sources (which happens to be what I use).

Is Snapcast just more compatible with Linux clients, or are there any other advantages?

[1]: https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync

Most neighbours are decent folks, so security may not be necessary. For example, I had an open Wifi for years, so the neighbours could share it if they wanted. I also had passwordless Airplay speakers, and only once soneone tried to play music on them. (Was fun)

At some point I unfortunately had to add a password because someone else used all the bandwidth...

First of all, I don't live in the US.

I pay taxes to my government so that they build infrastructure, run public services, etc. Foreign governments normally don't do anything for me, so I don't pay them taxes (unless I'm travelling or doing business abroad, etc)

I can think of no scenario where it would be acceptable that my government intercepts and manipulates a device that I ordered. If they would do that, I would protest and complain loudly.

Also, I'm not "ruled" by my government. The government provides services and creates laws for the people. I don't live in a dictatorship.

If your own government sends you a manipulated device, is that really better than a foreign government sending you a manipulated device?

Or a journalist saw a chance to get famous quickly and didn't bother to verify the sources.

The story was so good that everyone wanted it to be true and nobody said that it looks like an incoherent mess.

The chip on the photo of the article is just some random component (was it a voltage regulator?) that the journalist bought from Digikey or Mouser or some store like that.

No suspicious chip was ever found on a Supermicro board.

The story is fabricated, and it's impossible to check because all there is are rumors from unnamed sources.