Hacker News Reader

ninedayson How freemium almost broke our business

It is actually incredibly clever and never thought about it until now. I can relate to so many services I have spent some time curating, managing, triaging, etc ... It helped me create an emotional connection with the product I am using and certainly will generate an emotion if the service will closed or if they introduce features that break the existing user flow.

ninedayson Nintendo is trying to patent some broad Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

Couldn't disagree more with the first 2 paragraphs. It feels like saying Apple publishes a slightly different version of its iPhone every year. I think you will find plenty of differences - even major ones between the first iPhone and the latest one. Same thing with Nintendo games. IMHO, Nintendo is probably the best developer in the world and have proven this again and again. Completely agree with your last paragraph though.

ninedayson My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

There clearly was a discoverability issue with 3D Touch. When you knew which app supported the feature, it was awesome but there was no way of knowing in advance if there was support for it before using it. Long pressing an icon or anything just to see that nothing happens was just frustrating. Long term effect was that users probably felt this wasn't reliable/supported enough to use the feature at all or at least not in the scale Apple wanted.

edit : fixed typos

ninedayson Apple M1 Pro and Max Surprises

If I had to guess, I would say that the HN crowd is not fond of unverified claims that are not backed by any source other than the person personal opinion.

> "Obj-C is a much better framework language than C++. How and why is that true?"

Anyone could throw these sort of claims about absolutely anything and doesn't elevate the debate at all.

> "I honestly think Objective-C is a big part of Apple's OS success."

How and why is that true? Same thing.

ninedayson TSMC and Google push chipmaking boundaries with 3D 'stacking'

The very first paragraph : > “ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is working with Google and other U.S. tech giants to develop a new way of making semiconductors more powerful.”

The title is unfortunately misleading as it makes it look like only Google and TSMC are “pushing the boundaries” whereas it also includes other tech companies.

ninedayson QA job interview questions for managers to ask

QA here. The article is decent for someone who has little to no experience in the field and wishes to know more about QA practices or processes.

ninedayson Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

> then content creators realized that GR is stealing thunder and started dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no Reader and no RSS.

Funny how anyone can define History.

ninedayson Firefox is showing the way back to a world that’s private by default

Am I the only one seeing the irony of having The Verge talk about Firefox and privacy when the website is bloated with tracking scripts?

ninedayson Most Amazon-Owned Private Label Brands Have No Warranties

> Seriously, who cares about a warranty on a $6 thing?

Just because you do not care doesn't mean it should apply to everyone.

My parents would definitely use a warranty on a $6 thing if it had one because they do not spend blindly all their money on one-time items that cost $6 each. Sorry but I have to disagree with your reasoning.

ninedayson Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales

The problem with this reasoning is that it doesn't apply to countries outside the US. Take Europe for example where the healthcare system is miles ahead compared to the US yet Europe is clearly not the most innovative space because of this.

ninedayson The Failure of 3D Touch (2018)

The fact that iPad never had 3D Touch adds another argument as to why developers never truly adopted the feature.

ninedayson Goldman Sachs reportedly spent $300M developing the Apple Card

and it reassigned thousands of engineers across the company to fix a security vulnerability earlier this year, delaying other Marcus products by months, The Journal reported.

I wonder if it was related to the development of Apple Card.

ninedayson French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games breaks European law

Ultimately people will vote with their wallet if they truly want this or not and no matter how long I look at this, I don’t see it being the future we are heading.

ninedayson Google DeepMind Co-Founder Placed on Leave from AI Lab

Maybe the goal was to find a way to get a lot of medical records and it didn't make much sense to continue Deepmind Health once that goal has been achieved - hence the move to Google Health.

ninedayson After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

Yet another feature being removed that noone ever remembers using.

ninedayson Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

> WebKit that was forked by Google because they couldn't collaborate with Apple?

You say "they couldn't collaborate" I say "Google really wanted to compete".

Remember that it was Google who decided to perform a fork because they had a different approach than Apple for how "multi-process" should be implemented. Google had an implementation that they didn't want to integrate into the Webkit branch - hence the Blink fork.[1]

Also Apple would have been happy if they could use the Google's implementation instead of using their own - they said that repeatedly [2]

You can also find more details of the story here. It looks more and more obvious that the decision to create a WebKit fork was more political than technical : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/blink-goo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490661

ninedayson Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team

> There is no open source in iOS and the entire platform has an anti open source culture.

People really have short memory and unfortunately have too much biais to even make a simple Google Search to get some informations. Trying to define this as "one is better than the others related to X" is childish at best.

https://developer.apple.com/opensource/

Warm vibes,

ninedayson $4M per hour at Walmart

And yet, IMHO, none of what you listed is a reason enough for creating this unseemly situation.

ninedayson Hong Kong Airport shuts down as protesters take over

"Not sure what the HK protesters endgame is here." People are fed up about how the system works and about their life and the life of people they know. They want things to be "better" without having to clearly define and write a 167 page law that will probably not benefit them.

People are expressing their dissatisfaction and IMHO that's a valid justification for protesters and good enough for me.

ninedayson Uber Freezes Hiring of U.S. Tech Staff as It Seeks to Cut Costs

You should tell that to Jeff Bezos.

ninedayson HK police fires rubber bullet at protesters and civilians at point blank range

Same thing happens in France where police are filmed gazing and beating some people out (even old people)[1]

Someone already lost an eye few months ago.[2]

President guard is disguised as a policeman and beat some people on the streets. [3]

And on and on. The issue is that people are starting to lose trust in how the police and the gouvernment operate and are seeing that some actions don't seem fair to them.

[1] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDom3fi67ew [2] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMXeosboyjg [3] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benalla_affair

ninedayson Airbnb introduces new search tools for business travelers

"I'm honestly shocked that business travelers want to stay in AirBnBs."

"it almost always makes more sense"

"most of the time"

"if the hotels are outrageously expensive for whatever reason."

I don't understand how you can be so shocked when you, yourself, already listed the reasons why people wouldn't want to stay at a hotel.

Because for all the time where it doesn't "almost always makes more sense".

I remember one time where I traveled to a big city for a couple of days and had the unfortunate experience to find out there was a big conference during the week and the prices of hotels have increased dramatically (making it non affordable for almost all human being)

Airbnb can be a superior offer in that case. You will not witness the same degree of price discrepancy between the price of airbnb room and a hotel room (a hotel room price can change to 4x its normal price in case of special event in a city).

ninedayson How Much Water Do You Need to Drink?

I spoke with several of my friends who are doctors and for them, there is no general rule that applies to everyone ("you should drink at least X").

However, the most common rule is "if the color of your pee is not "clear/transparent" enough, then you should drink more water".

The "darker" your pee is, the more you should drink.

ninedayson Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

Amazon cares about counterfeit products as much as YouTube cared about copyright videos in its infancy. It's just here to enable growth until they start to fight it.

ninedayson Ask HN: Why is Google search different on mobile Firefox compared to Chrome?

Because there are multiple evidences for years that Google purposefully degrades the user experience for people not using Google Chrome in order to entice them to switch. Happens mostly for Firefox but it also happens for Chromium (basically, almost all non Chrome browsers)

Check how long it takes for Gmail to load on Firefox to have a sneak peek on how the UX is degaraded.

ninedayson Jony Ive is departing Apple, but he started leaving years ago

1. Because in most Apple videos, the product is the most important person in the room. Ive is a great storyteller when it comes to design (probably the best at Apple) so it makes sense that he is the one telling that story. Steve Jobs was by far the best keynote speaker at Apple so he did most of it himself.

2. Because the organisation is now structured with the design team reporting directly to Operations which is unusual as designers at Apple didn't use to report to anyone (except the CEO).

ninedayson Jony Ive is departing Apple, but he started leaving years ago

AirPower and the macbook butterfly keyboards are probably good examples of what is not working in terms of design. The balance between thinness and function is not right the last few years at Apple and change is most definitely welcome. Still Ive departure is hard to swallow and marks a huge shift in Apple's history. Time will tell if is the right move.

ninedayson Why Google+ Failed

It failed because the point was to unify the privacy policy of all Google services (which means data collection would be less spreaded out across the different Google services). The Google+ front (the product users used) was more an excuse for people to sign up and agree to the terms. It had some interesting ideas but was never on the path of success after the initial goal was completed.

ninedayson College students are overestimating how much they can make after graduation

In my experience, private schools are responsible because they say "you will make X per year when you'll graduate" and they can charge insane tuition fees because of it. Once the student is in debt and has now graduated, he realises that he makes less than what the school advertised while being in debt. All these young people freshly graduated already took a mental toll before even beginning their career.

ninedayson [dead]

The title is misleading at best. The quote per the article is :

"Although there are no known exploits affecting customers at the time of this writing, customers with computers at heightened risk or who run untrusted software on their Mac can optionally enable full mitigation to prevent harmful apps from exploiting these vulnerabilities. Full mitigation requires using the Terminal app to enable an additional CPU instruction and disable hyper-threading processing technology."

Not all Macs are affected by this patch and the reduce in performance will affect those with a hyper-threading CPU.