We’ve been a C# house for several years, decades really, and I’ve always preferred it to JAVA so I’m actually excited for Core.
But we rarely use it. Not because it’s not great, rather because we’re more productive with flask or Django. For Core to really make sense for us, it’d would have to stop being so damn low level, but I guess that maybe it can’t without sacrificing too much efficiency. More importantly it needs better libraries for things that aren’t “built-in”.
I can certainly see why .NET developers welcome it, because they finally have good cross platform ability. At least until they need to do authentication on a non-standard SAML token, that though easily supported by ADFS but is a bitch in any .NET setup.
I know we aren’t most use cases, being the public sector and running a gazillion different tech stacks at once, but .NET has never played well once you stepped outside it’s comfortzone and it’s always been so low level that writing library extensions were a bitch. And that may have worked out, so far, but I just don’t see why people stick with it when there are more productive alternatives.
I say productive, because I don’t think .NET core is lacking technically, but delivering solutions on time and with minimum maintenance requirements afterward is just easier in python or JAVA and I’d imagine others as well.
What exactly do you mean by low-level? Can you give a clear example?
.NET is an ecosystem of languages, runtimes, and tooling with Visual Studio being regarded by many as the best IDE. Add in the vast MS suite of Windows, Office, Azure, SQL Server, and the rest and you have one of the most productive frameworks to build anything for desktop, mobile, games, server backends, and even databases.
We moved over to .NET Core since v1.0 to consolidate on Linux/K8S and it's been a great experience. ASP.NET Core is also a very good framework for building webapps, SPAs and APIs that has more functionality in the box than pretty much anything else we've seen.
Nuget is turning into a solid package management system and there are great 3rd-party projects like IdentityServer for authentication, have you looked at that?
I've worked in many languages including C#, Python,Javascript, Typescript, Haskell and while I understand Python and Javascript are amazing for prototyping, I don't see the advantage in the "on time with minimum maintenance" which Python has against C#.
As many other sibling comments have asked, can you give examples of what you mean? What issues have you had with finding/writing libraries, what tech stacks have you encountered .NET not playing well with, and exactly what language or framework features are "too low level"? As it is your post is too lacking in details for me to understand where you're coming from.
I can however offer a simple possible explanation for your experience: you are more proficient in other languages and frameworks because you know them better.
We're using .NET Core, but not really. The tooling is much
better than what existed before, so we use it, but still compile against the full net471 framework - for now.
It’s having to explicitly tell the computer what you want. C# is obviously not C, but it’s not python either.
By the time we have an app running in Django, we’re not even finished with Entity modelling in a Core web-api.
I do think stuff like Blazor.Net is promising, but we’re not a technology company, we support thousands of employees who only care about how digitisation can make their lives easier as fast and as stable as possible.
.NET isn’t the best at that, at least not for us.
Dont get me wrong, I don’t dislike .NET Core, it think it’s great, I just don’t see how it benefits me.
>.NET isn’t the best at that, at least not for us.
You're comparing apples and oranges, djanjo is a web framework, for creating websites, .Net core is a cross platform compiler and the standard library that goes with the C# programming language, which includes some stuff for creating websites (along with desktop, CLI, services etc). Django might work best for you but I want to create a bunch of micro services I'm not going to use it, am I? Not to mention Django works well as a general purpose solution for general purpose websites, If you're building anysort of heavyweight, enterprises level web architecture you're going to want a hell of a lot more control that what django provides for you.
I specifically said python, flask and Django, the guy I was replying to then asked for an example, where I used only Django, and now you’re using that against me?
Obviously we don’t use Django for everything. But like with web-applications, a python script or a flask application is always more productive for us than .NET.
I don't disagree that django and flask are good general purpose web app frameworks, but theres a mile gap between "Not the best for general purpose web apps" and "not good for anything", which is why I highlighted the following question
I've never used flask and I haven't used Django for a long time, but I'm not sure what you mean by C# being too "low level". What higher level features is it missing that Java or python provide?
I find I'm most productive in C#, but probably mostly because it's what I use every day and I like the tooling.
I have no familiarity with Java but I'm not surprised you are more productive with Python, Flask and Django (although you are conflating languages and frameworks to some extent here) versus C# and .NET Core's way of building API's and web applications.
I have been developing in C# for years and I still prefer Python's simplicity over C# and .NET. C# and .NET just seems to have too many concepts, indirection, and 'enterpriseyness' for my liking. This is alleviated by things like LINQ, but still an issue for me.
I doubt python or Java are easier than .NET it’s just a case of what you are used to. I’ve tried Ruby on Rails and find .NET easier. Probably because of experience.
i know a few companies using .net core for example checkout.com
could you elaborate a bit more on what stops you from using .net core? I have been writing web apps since version 1.0 and had no issues.
I’m completely out of my field, but I never understood why it was so hard for us to imagine that other animals were capable of having rich inner lives or even being self-aware.
To me it seem obvious that other animals would also possess various degrees of cognitive ability, I mean, we do.
I suspect that it's cultural and derives from our economic relationship to animals. I remember seeing a film as a child that depicted a native hunter killing a deer and profusely thanking the spirit of the deer; attributing intelligence and identity to the deer would predispose a hunter to pay close attention to the animal's behaviour and give him an edge in hunting it. In cultures with domestcated animals bred for compliance with human will, it is less advantageous to view the animal as another mind. Instead, we see them as tools to be used and discarded. To do otherwise would compromise our ability to extract maximum economic advantage from use of the animal.
The issue (today) is not whether animals have cognition, but the extent and nature of that cognition.
In the present case, the research question is whether animals have a conception of self. This is necessarily a fuzzy concept.
The test that has been used many times and with many variations basically involves providing a mirror and a condition that is only noticeable as applying to oneself by relating the image in the mirror as representing one's own body.
However, the test probe is merely an instrument used to measure an underlying construct. That is, there is an assumption that to solve the test particular cognitive processes are invoked.
But a test probe may be solved using processes or strategies other than those for which the probe was designed to measure.
Cleaner Wrasse fish have many instincts that reflect school behaviors, especially in young fish. School like behavior: One fish turns, then it turns, suggest strong control over behavior by the sight of other fish..including those seen in a mirror.
I suspect this mirroring system is having an influence on the fish's behavior here. It sees another fish with a skin condition (a mark), which may have activated cleaning behavior in itself.
I’m not so sure that’s the case though, as for example Talmudic law prohibits castrating animals. A gelded oxen is much calmer and easier to work with than a bull. I think it certainly varies from society to society, but ancient agrarian traditions also respect animals in ways you might not expect.
What is interesting is that Talmudic law goes to the trouble. There's no point prohibiting something that people wouldn't do anyway. There must have been considerable pressure to castrate animals, and some corresponding spiritual dismay at the lack of respect for them this entailed. So I wonder if it doesn't confirm the premise, rather than refute it - the Talmudic authorities may have been trying to preserve earlier value systems against a changing society.
Humans aren't perfect economic machines. A single example doesn't necessarily refute the claim. And even then there might be some other advantage to not castrating oxen that isn't being considered.
> And even then there might be some other advantage to not castrating oxen that isn't being considered.
I supposed you could come up with one. Your OP basically gave you a really knowledgeable counterexample, rooted in a rich field of study in anthropology (treatment of animals), in societies that long predated capitalism.
This is actually a pretty common pattern in HN.
When the HNers hear something like: "According to this book that the recipient of the information (the HNers) didn't read, here's an illustrative example of how rich the study is."
They respond: "But capitalism."
You've adopted a world-explaining model (capitalism) that works most of the time (that "single examples don't necessarily refute") not because it's powerful, but because it requires extremely little knowledge. That's really why derivatives of this line of thinking (think LessWrong/singularity/Paul Graham worship) are so widely adopted. Not because the ideas are right. It's that the ideas work for people who don't read, or are just really god damned rich, or who don't really know anything, or think they 'know enough,' like true hacks would say.
The downside is that when someone tells you this fascinating tidbit of Talmudic law, instead of typing in "anthropology of the treatment of animals in historic societies," the reaction is, "Well fuck this guy's knowledge."
One name for this phenomenon is "first principles." A great, positive spin on knowing nothing! This forum's discourse has declined exactly because of first principles, and others have observed the same (characterizing their criticism as a criticism of "first principles thinking.")
How is it you equate the assertion that "Humans aren't perfect economic machines" with "But capitalism."?
The usual criticism of acolytes of capitalism is that they do (unjustifiably) think humans are "perfect economic machines". You seem to be inverting the normal attack and I can't make sense of it.
If I understand it right (it's 4:30am so my ability to phrase this might also be shoddy):
You removed the context from the thread. The context was that humans have an capitalist-economic focus (as in, distinguished from other economic systems like gift economies, marxist economies, etc.) on animals-as-use, and thus this influences your ability to reason about them as animals. The viewpoint is inherently capitalistic because it assumes that animals have become a good to be sold, and that it was more advantageous for humans to see it as such. Your (or whomevers') assertion "humans aren't perfect economic machines" was inherently an argument for the arguments for the capitalist viewpoint, which the person you were responding to was calling unfounded.
> You seem to be inverting the normal attack and I can't make sense of it
Capitalism doesn't assume that humans are perfect economic machines, indeed, it relies on them not being that. Otherwise, accumulation of capital would probably either be impossible for any single person to do, or it would be much more evenly distributed than it currently is. Indeed, the entire industry of stock-trading assumes that you can 'beat the average', which under the axioms laid out, is not what a logical, perfectly rational machine would do.
It's hard for humans to understand that people not in their tribe have rich inner lives or can be self-aware, let alone animals. We're wired to believe almost anything if our interest depends on it. We have an interest in pillaging other tribes and eating other animals, so it's easy to convince ourselves that they are non-player characters. It makes doing those things more pleasant.
Perhaps too off topic, but I’ve often wondered how the descendants of Vikings, once considered the most terrifying raiders of the sea, are now some of the most egalitarian and nonviolent nation states.
I'm no historian, but my best guess it that it's just correlation and that the main underlying cause of "civility" is wealth. When your citizens are struggling to survive, they (at least in their own minds) don't have time to think about women's rights, racial prejudice, etc. The progressive countries of the world just happen to be a few decades ahead on the technology timeline. There are obviously other factors, but I think that's the big one.
Wealth is probably the immediate cause, but in time, it seeps into the mentality of a people. The result is a society where trust in other people is low, everyone treats everyone else like they are out to cheat you, have little civic spirit and don't want to spend energy for the betterment of the whole. They would vote with whomever gives them bigger short term gains, damn with the future and consequences, other people will inherit them. It's hard to turn a mentality around, you just have to wait for older people to die and be replaced.
An interesting side note on this, the descendants of the Vikings were also the Norman's, that later invaded England, and even sailed around to Southern Italy and conquered a place down there as well (I think it was somewhere roundabout Sicily?). They developed the state of the art castle building techniques, sailing techniques, extensive trade networks, and even some interesting governing techniques (women had land-owning rights) that enabled them to conquer and hold much of Europe over time. It might be that they were "the most terrifying raiders of the sea" because they had cultural values that prized technological advancement and decently good governance, and then spread out to nicer climates (good motivation to try something new...). Interaction and adoption of values from other cultures probably helped bring down the violence after a certain point. And like someone else pointed out, when you get wealthy and own the kingdom, you typically want to develop a culture of preservation rather than raiding.
Setting circumcision aside, AFAIK anesthesia is not possible when doing surgery on infants, so with serious conditions, it's either operate without it or nothing.
Therefore, believing they don't feel pain is a matter of expediency allowing doctors to save lives.
We routinely anesthetize infants with either local or general anesthesia. Here is a 2015 discussion from the American Society for Anesthesiology comparing regional with general: “General anesthesia safe for infants, does not impair neurological development, study finds” - https://www.asahq.org/about-asa/newsroom/news-releases/2015/...
People have been imagining animals have complex inner lives for thousands of years. It's a natural thing for us to do in our want to relate to things.
People disagree with each other, sure, but I think that's fair that people disagree on a contentious topic. There is hardly an answer to whether fish have complex inner worlds yet.
Are you talking about scientific thought about it?
>possess various degrees of cognitive ability
I can't say I agree with this. I agree with you that perhaps people failed to recognise and test for variances within the species. (Im not in this field either so I can't say for sure...) but again, the majority of people would know that different animals of the same type don't have different quirks and differing intelligence. Anyone who has had some pet fish has recognised some as being more shy or more aggressive than the other. Cow farmers know some of their cows are dumber and smarter than the other.
To take that thought and say "well therefore some fish have rich inner lives and others dont" is a bit of a stretch to me. I would suppose that there is a limit to their capacity and variance.
Sure, Chimps, Dolphins, Elephants - very easy to convince people they do and I'd believe it easily.
Convince me that a trout does? I'm not so sure, and would need to be convinced in some way. I can imagine it, but I won't believe something just because of my want to anthropomorphise.
While I can understand that many people are too dismissive of animals as being basic or unfeeling, that doesn't invalidate the idea that animals have a more limited mental capacity for what we perceive to be conciousness, and that includes sense of self at least somewhere along the line of complexity.
There is a poster here somewhere who maintains that because animals don't have a language, they cannot think; presumably extrapolating from noticing that they themselves think in words (edit: found it - "Animals don't think, because thinking requires language...").
From what I can tell in the animal research game, it's like AI; every so often someone posits some qualitative property that only humans do as the difference twixt animals and humans, and then an observer sees that qualitative behaviour in an animal (or sometime has seen it years or decades before).
Frans de Waal's books on this are very readable. The big ones of previous years - empathy, planning, tool-using and so on - all fall pretty easily.
I've had the experience of talking with a friend and having a conversation along the lines of "Do you remember the guy that was in that movie?". If there's enough shared context, I might "know" exactly who they are talking about, but not the name of the movie or the name of the actor. I'm internally apprehending some kind of abstract "node" to which properties are attached, but not immediately available for recall.
I'm not thinking about the phrase 'that guy in that movie'. I'm not thinking about the name, because I don't (yet) recall it. I apprehend a connection between a person-node and perhaps as well a recent-experience node, the latter being an unsymbolized apprehension of the recollection of having shared an experience.
If I focus on the apprehension, I can begin to recall its properties.
To abuse a computer science analogy, it's as though there's some kind of abstract associative cache between nodes, linking them to other nodes but referring only to their object-ids. To further abuse the analogy, raw object-ids are a private type that have very few public methods. Mostly:
- more_or_less_the_same_thing_as(oid1, oid2)
- randomly_select_a_few_related_oids(oid) returns set<oid>
- recall_concrete_properties(oid, timeout) returns maybe<propertyset>
These apprehensions don't have an appearance or a sound, but they have a... brain feel? They have connections between them, and they have rough quasi-shapes, and can "fit" or "not fit" into certain other apprehended "structures".
Depending on what mode my brain is running in, I can generally render these apprehensions into words. Sometimes I can't seem to get them to cross the idea->word barrier.
The half-remembered movie is a great example. I see an actor whose name I don't recall. I remember that I've previously seen him doing something in some other movie. I do not at any point think the words "he played that FBI agent who was a reformed alcoholic chasing down a serial killer who leaves little whiskey bottles at the scenes of his murders" but all that is suddenly right there in my mind. I didn't think of any of those words, but all that is right there in my head.
Is recalling memories thinking? If not, if I then act on those memories, is that thinking?
While semiotic has become something of a joke, it has been seriously investigated[1]. We don't really think in language or even in symbols, it's rather a lot more complex than that.
There are a lot of people who think that it's literally impossible for someone else to have a different inner experience than they do. As someone who's mostly aphantasic and only has an 'inner voice' when communicating or using it as a tool to focus, I quite like this article on the subject: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pristine-inner-exper...
It's because it causes an uncomfortable degree of cognitive dissonance to imagine that animals have self-awareness and rich inner lives, and also justify killing and eating them.
I'm not a vegan, I eat a lot of meat--I just feel uncomfortable when I think about it this way.
just a minor nitpick: the technical definition of murder is the unlawful killing of another. in most cases, the killing of animals is not unlawful and therefore can't really be called murder. also depending on the source of the definition, murder more specifically refers to the unlawful killing of a human, specifically. if you remove the need for it to be a human then there certainly can be cases of killing animals that count as murder, for instance killing endangered species, or hunting without a permit/hunting a species out of season, or the killing of an animal with clear malice (eg animal abuse). but still, for most intents and purposes, the killing of animals can't really be called murder because the majority of animal death is merely to provide food and as such is most certainly not unlawful.
Lawyers are partially responsible for the dismissive attitude that makes certain humans feel superior and justified as treating others as instrumental. It is likely that present day legal concepts impede progress and deeper understanding and appreciation of the world.
Lawyers write laws that ensnare us in self-righteousness and complacency.
It is totally fine for me to determine that there are things which are legal which are unethical.
I will not wait for the law to catch up to the idea that people are not property. I will not wait for the law to classify for me which life forms are means to an end and which are ends in themselves. The American legal code has been used to justify countless injustices against indigenous peoples and does not deserve to own our language. It does not deserve the privilege to declare what is murder and not murder.
Lawyers, yes, but religion also plays a major part.
> "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
So righteous people felt entitled to exploit animals with no regard to their inner lives, and exploit nature with no concern about the ecological disasters they might cause.
Only now, after we 'multiplied and filled the earth', have come to a point where we can't just ignore ecology, there are limits and constraints we now understand. So we developed new ethics that would help humanity survive.
id probably consider that to be murder as well but there are two concessions that have to be made:
1.) we are making that evaluation within the context of modern society where the ownership of slaves is generally seen as inhumane and atrocious, and that people are not property. the context in antebellum society was extremely different and as such one could make the claim that during such times, that wouldn't have been considered murder by a majority of (slave owning) individuals.
2.) another element of the definition of murder is generally the existence of malicious intent. i would say that it's fair to see the taking of life of slaves as something that generally was done with malicious intent, that is to say as an authoritarian method of controlling the rest of the slaves by using the killed slaves to show them who is in control. of course, again, this is being framed within the context of modern society, but I think this argument could be much more easily applied in a manner that is independent of the general values of the time, because im pretty sure that malice as a concept has remained a lot more consistent that what is lawful, over time.
Words have multiple meanings applicable in different contexts. Murder is not exclusively a legal term. Your parent comment clearly was not looking to make a legal argument. Was that not obvious?
it was obvious, just as it's obvious that the first words i said were that it was just a minor nitpick based on what the technical definition of the word "murder" is. i wasn't per se trying to make a legal argument, more making the claim that murder itself is defined as an unlawful act. obviously it can be used in other contexts, but then again, so can basically any other word in any language if you're willing to warp semantics enough to suit your purposes.
> obviously it can be used in other contexts, but then again, so can basically any other word in any language if you're willing to warp semantics enough to suit your purposes.
Sure. But this isn't about "warping semantics". The word predates our current legal definition. It's used frequently outside of legal discussions. The parent was trying to make an argument contingent on the legal definition so nitpicking about proper usage under that definition is pointless as best.
yes im aware. it's just that i think maybe that murder isn't the most effective terminology because of the simple fact that most of the taking of animal life in the context of providing food to the population isn't performed with any intentional malice, and even if murder isn't being used in a legal context, another important context within it is general malicious intent. i can see that maybe some people who are against the food industry could easily convince themselves that there is malicious intent and directed evil in the way that said industry works, but I'm almost 100% positive that in the overwhelming majority of cases that the only intent that exists is to provide food for the population, or arguably one of financial superiority. something something evil is banal something something
Ignoring 99% of your reality frees up tons of attention for attention-demanding tasks like engineering and officework. Not to mention somewhat insulating you from the toxicity of urban life.
It's an attention-management-strategy that's popular and efficient for cultures like ours.
Of course it's evil as hell too. So we compensate with an appropriately self-serving "well they're just dumb animals" narrative.
I'm not so sure about that. Certain species pf crows and parrots have long been understood (even by non-scientists) to have general/abstract reasoning abilities. And people who actually study them seem to think that we often underestimate them [0] - probably because of widely held myths like the 5 second memory one.
I haven't read Hawkins' book yet, but he and the vicarious crew tend to conflate "neocortex" with "general intelligence" in their public talks. Birds and, it seems, the vast majority of animal species rely on predictive models of the world to navigate it - even if their "model-builder" doesn't look exactly like the mammalian one.[1] It makes complete sense to me - if a lizard loses a leg, it quickly learns how to walk with just 3 legs. If a finch is born with slightly larger wings than normal, and it also loses some of its tail feathers at some point, it quickly learns to adjust its motor patterns to suit the new conditions. You solve problems like these with sensory-motor models, not with hard-coded algorithms.
There is a massive segment of the movie market (primarily aimed at children) where the starring characters are anthropomorphised animals which live rich inner lives and are self-aware. This is almost Pixar/Disney and Dreamworks entire very successful business model.
So I don't think it is really so hard for most of us to imagine ...
I think imagine is probably not the best word to convey what the parent is talking about. Maybe "take seriously". We also have plenty of movies involved anthropomorphized inanimate objects, but (almost) no one believes they have any kind of inner lives or self-awareness.
Well even before animated movies, there were books, first that comes to mind was Charlotte's Web (1952). Winnie the Pooh (1926) has a talking owl.
I'm not particularly well read, I'm sure others could come up with better/earlier examples. If you go back in history, Eve was supposedly tempted by a talking snake.
I too am outside of my very (very very very) narrow five things that I can do BUT I've had the same question as you so allow me to throw some of my thoughts your way.
It starts off with a rough guess about something hard to define and because it's so hard to define no one ever changes it but it's not as though the rough guess was ever correct. That's the part we forget. I think it's similar to the Turing test which to some people has become like a blindly dogmatic rule for machine intelligence. I don't think the Turing test was ever meant to be used how it's used today. I think it was just a rough guess. More like a "yeah, something like that" kind of thing than a definition.
Part of it has involved controversies over language, culture and consciousness, and part of it has been not wanting to anthropomorphize animals as having human personalities, since being human has a lot to do with thinking in language derived from culture, and that we're apes with vision as our dominant sense instead of smell.
It also works better than agile when you’re buying software and you can’t just sign on on something without knowing what it’ll cost. Which is 99% of the time in the real world.
I think the golden middleway is somewhere in between, where you do the upfront analysis and figure out what to do, why you’re doing it and with whom, but don’t lock everything down tight in an unchangable requirement specification.
I think methologies like service design can be really great, if you don’t know what you’re trying to do. I think agile methologies are decent for the actual development of software, but a software project is so much more than that, including benefit realisation.
I think it’s embarrassing that we can plan and build a organic house for thousands of employees, and deliver on time and within budget, but we can’t build a piece of software to handle the digital workflow of labelling and storing documents.
Hell, we plan city infrastructure and succeed, every year without going over budget. But building a piece of software to digitise vacation registration? Fuck no, that’ll go one year over time and cost four times what we expected, even though you could rightly build the same thing in a few months as a single focused developer.
I’ve seen all sorts of project management models in action, none of them work for software. But agile is especially stupid from the buyers perspective. When I buy a new house I wouldn’t sign a contract for an unknown amount of finished rooms within the agreed upon timeframe and budget either.
Mostly though, I think software developers just need to do better work, and stop blaming the project management for their own inability to deliver good work in a timely manner.
'Mostly though, I think software developers just need to do better work, and stop blaming the project management for their own inability to deliver good work in a timely manner.'
Even if this is the case, PM still responsible for blown deadline, because they did not estimate their teams delivery velocity correctly.
They should either:
a) give longer estimate, if their team quality is low.
b) pay more to hire better, more productive developers.
A good PM will also account for uncertainty in devs estimation, by padding etc
Predictability of delivery is what ultimately counts, not giving optimistic deadlines.
> When I buy a new house I wouldn’t sign a contract for an unknown amount of finished rooms within the agreed upon timeframe and budget either.
You hope you don't. But halfway into construction, everyone might realize the blueprints attached to that contract don't cover some detail you really need. Then if you want that done, you'll have to pay extra. That's why change orders are so common in construction.
I am agreed on gameplay, not meaning to be critical and certainly not wanting to hurt feelings. But it feels more like some game that comes in a Christmas cracker than something with any long term value. I did manage to complete the original Trivial Pursuit in one turn, 'blue' squares (geography) being the big help. How come that was so compelling? People actually wanted to play it, at the time you would have more players than places at the table, having to double up into teams.
The rewards on this game are not there, there is no compelling secret sauce.
Graphics are certainly not the be-all and end-all. I spent 24 hours (or was it 36) without sleep playing Universal Paperclips to the end when that came out, this is a text only interface:
Geography trivia is very much my thing, I knew the capital cities of every country and all the U.S. state capitals when I was aged 10. This knowledge has actually been incredibly useful as when I meet anyone from any part of the world I have something positive to say about where they are from even if I have never been there.
If I had to refactor this game then that is what I would try and instil - 'quality trivia' that can't be instantly Googled. I think the key to it is to have highly unusual trivia, e.g. how it is that so many people have swimming pools in Harare. Sometimes 'facts' might not be 'fact based', e.g. how the finest pastries in the world happen to be in Hungary. In an age when information can be Googled there needs to be more, an understanding with story narrative. All of this requires time to research and write, not good if you want to churn out an app, but essential if you want to deliver a transformative experience as per 'Universal Paperclips'.
Yeah, for some reason on my firefox mobile (stable) the history list disappears immediately after releasing the long press, making the selection of a specific history item impossible :S
In any case, why does the site pollute the history with what are effectively noop items?
If the intention is to prevent the user from going back to previous question, it would be better to change the behaviour of the request and make t client side rather than highnacking the back button like most slide show websites do.
Edit: I couldn’t even spam back to get out, it would go back and then pull me forward to next question. I had to just change the URL back to HN.
I’ve made the opposite switch this year, completely abandoning windows for my personal use. I still use it professionally, being in the European public sector you’re married to MS and it’s quite honestly a healthy relationship for a lot of reasons, but boy have I never grown used to Windows 10.
I really love unix, I probably should be using Linux instead of a Mac, and I did earlier in my life. But with age I’m growing fonder and fonder to things just working, like when my wife sends me an iMessage and I pops up on my Mac. We could probably get something similar working with some other setup, but as long as we stay working the Apple ecosystem, well, it just happens automatically. Just like popping a thunderbolt cable in hooks me up to my 4K monitor with no setup required and no problems when I swhixh between different modes. Something that took ages to get working in Linux and didn’t really work for all the apps that didn’t support the change of resolution.
It wasn’t always like this, I actually really liked windows especially 2000, XP and 7, but since then it’s been a struggle to stay with it. So my story is almost the polar opposite.
Like hardware, where do you find a decent high quality windows laptop with a trackpad that works for the price tag of a 13” MacBook Pro? Sure the surface book is a sexy machine, but it’s almost twice as expensive and it can’t connect to my 4K monitor or an external egpu? Sure the xps13 would make Linux easier, but it’s trackpad is worse and it’s build quality is risky (coil whine).
I’m not really a Apple fanboy. I hate the walled garden, as much as I love what it does, but everything else is just so much worse. What I really can’t imagine though, living within a windows 10 environment, even with git bash.
Plus, most Apple products are actually great value if you factor in their lifetime cost.
I bought a used iPad two years ago. It must be four or five years old now.
Well it is not great at all considering how hard it is to repair current apple stuff. After 2 years of warranty you are just wishing it doesn't break. Don't get me wrong i have 6 year old macbook pro and its still a great machine. But i also know lot of my coworkers with new apple machines that break all the time. If you bring your machine 3times to repair shop in first year - well you can be pretty much sure something will happen very soon after machine is out of warranty period. And then you pay massive amounts.
Apple is basically trying to make subscription hardware with 2 year cycle. That's not nice value + it is also not ecological at all.
TBH Apple stuff is about the only thing you can repair as repair shops are nearly exclusively focused on Apple because of the large volume and long lifespan of their models.
Good luck getting a Samsung Note 2014 repaired (I tried) or a Lenovo laptop that needs say a mainboard or some BGA replacement.
While I don’t agree with how Apple restricts 3rd party repairs the reason they are the only one you hear about is because they are the only one with a 3rd party repair ecosystem to begin with.
I guess it depends on country. Probably in US. There is only one authorized service dealer in my country. On the other hand most of the PC market brands has lots of repair shops. And lot of them will do even old machines, hunt parts on ebay or china and repair with that. It's actually not that hard (the parts nofficial apple repair shops use are from china anyway). There are so many eshops where you just put serial number and get what you need.
There is big reason for this though. I am from quite poor european country where hourly rate for technicians is much much lower than in US so repairing lot of things make economical sense. In us this might make sense only for high end premium machines.
What I dislike is the telemetry, the fact that they install so much garbage by default and even when I remove it they reinstall it with the next update and I fear they will start pushing ads in the future.
Other than that I'm pretty happy with Windows for desktop and Linux for server.
If you want a trackpad as good as the macbook one there is no alternative. I really like the Matebook X Pro, it is a beast.
You mention some of it, I genuinely don’t want my OS to install short cuts for candy crush and mind craft when I’m not looking, it’s more than that though, because I really don’t like my corporate windows 10 either and it’s free from all of that.
We don’t even suffer from the faulty updates because we don’t roll them out right away.
I can’t put my finger on it, I wish I could, because it’s not terrible constructive to say that it just doesn’t feel nice to use. But that’s how it feels. It certainly also lacks the unix command tools. Git bash was a nice addition, though it’s hardly the same as a real unix terminal, but mostly it’s just that using windows 10 feels wrong to me.
I worried about the walled garden but to be honest it's been pretty benign since it was introduced. If I look at the software I've bought in recent years its nearly all been outside the store.
The only downside for me is the cost although you can mitigate that by avoiding new and selling on carefully when you have finished with it.
I did try quite hard to switch to Linux but it lacks the polish of macOS. It was better than Windows in most respects though.
In particular, it seems to me you can get all your data out if desired. Contacts are .vcf; Calendar is .ics or whatever; pictures in Photo are good old jpeg (and explicit exporting is supported); Music is mostly pretty standard formats and not DRM'd anymore IIUC (videos - don't know, never used); documents, ok, Pages/Numbers/Keynote you'd have to export into some other format, while MarkDown and LaTeX etc. of course are ok. Getting passwords out of Keychain Access might be a bit tricky?
I don’t listen to a lot of music since I listen to podcasts while in transit and at the gym. I augment my music collection with free Spotify a little but would feel locked in to one provider if I didn’t own anything. The prospect of finding and rating what I like again would keep me with one provider, even if another’s price, content, or features were enticing.
I worry about that so I never buy anything that’s not transferable in the first place. I can count on one hand the number of paid apps I’ve bought in the Mac and iOS app stores combined.
> like when my wife sends me an iMessage and I pops up on my Mac.
Works the same on Windows. For Android Hangouts you just have to allow desktop notifications in GMail. But it's actually better, if you enable Google Voice, you can make phone calls from your computer, and you can receive phone calls on your computer.
Google Voice has the distinction that you can call any US line for free, and that you have a real phone number (which you can transfer out) that you can receive calls with on pretty much any device.
It's what truly allowed the iPad to be a big iPhone.
Can confirm WiFi calling works great. I've used it in multiple points on the globe without cell signal. Telegram also is a drop in replacement for Hangouts and iMessage. I use it on Android as well as iPhone.
At this point in time Apple really doesn't provide a compelling reason to me to use them. They lack a ton of polish, podcasts, family sharing management, dongle hell, and uninspired hardware that makes a lot of trade offs in order to be trendy are why I'll be moving back to Android. I guess in the end for me that's just a better market fit.
To the linux v Microsoft v MacOS there's really little difference aside from gaming and MS Office. If you're running servers or coding an Ubuntu purpose made laptop or server will generally work. If you need PowerPoint or gaming then you need Microsoft, and if you like a Unix environment or own an iPhone then MacOS and dongle hell is your best
bet. From personal experience I've had the most problem with Apple products but ymmv. I know people who've never had a single issue and don't mind the dongle.
A decade? Off the top of my head, in the last decade Apple has pushed high-density and color accurate displays, fast SSDs, dropped the DVD drive, adopted three revisions of the Thunderbolt standard, and set the standard for most other laptop manufacturers.
Samsung launched the first mass market laptops with SSDs. I'll absolutely agree on their monitors, DVDs were already on the way out but it was a smart move for their target market. Claiming thunderbolt as a win seems a bit will since they are known for ditching their own standards often.
I can't say I'm seeing much innovation that isn't design related specific to form factor. Their software has stagnated, iTunes and Apple music are a hot mess of garbage. Aside from removing the headphone jack to force people into higher priced headphones, I'm having a hard time finding the value and the market seems to be agreeing.
I don’t think the web has changed and I think HN is the perfect testament to that opinion.
Almost all of the interesting content I consume online comes from personal self-build blogs, HN or real news papers like the NYT.
I don’t think the content is worse, especially not when you pay for news. Now the NYT is a poor example of this, but the Danish equivalents, Information and Weekendavisen are not, in that one turns off it’s advertising when you subscribe and the other is simply not available for free.
I think in terms of the internet, you get what you pay for. For news the price is money, on HN the price is your ability to be relevant and fair and on personal blogs the price is the time it takes to find them, support them and make interesting responses to them.
The key thing that has changed for me, is how to find interesting things. HN is really the only option I know of, unless you get extremely lucky on a search engine. Because modern search results are so influenced by Alexa rankings and advertising that they very rarely lead you to the gems on the net. I do think the amount of shitty content on the internet, and unregulated/moderated social media makes the problem a lot worse, because it’s harder to find interesting things in an ocean of shit. But ultimately, I think there are as many interesting things on the net as there has always been.
I do find it interesting, that none of the websites I love the most, are powered by any of the popular JavaScript frameworks, well aside from the NYT, but to be fair, the thing I dislike the most about the NYT is it’s intrusive JS.
> I think in terms of the internet, you get what you pay for.
I'm coming round to this perspective. After years of reading "free" news sources I decided to experiment with paid sources. I subscribed to the Times (UK newspaper) and the Economist. The difference in content-quality and design is immense. I particularly like the Times's website compared to the Guardian and other free online newspapers.
As an example, the Times publishes stories in daily editions, much like a traditional newspaper. They may be updated throughout the day, but, as a paywalled publication, there is no pressure on it to publish a constant stream of hot takes and low-grade commentary (as you find in The Guardian) throughout the day to get eyeballs on adverts.
It was apparent to me a long time ago that most of the web was just a massive direct marketing platform. At the moment I pay for email and news but I expect the set of information and resources I pay for in the future will expand.
However, paying for news doesn't really solve the "fake news" issue as fake is in the eye of the beholder.
> poorly researched clickbait or got take opinion columns
Sounds more like the Guardian than the Times. Why would the Times need to publish clickbait? Its articles are behind a paywall and it doesn't have advertising?
It certainly does have advertising - it's comment is written for the print version, and readers can still read two articles a month (with advertising) without subscribing.
It has the ill researched bigotry from the likes of Janice Turner whipping up populist hatred of sexual minorities, and a series of impossibly bad technology reporting echoing the lobby lines of the current government based on nothing more than a vendetta against online companies for business reasons.
> I do think the amount of shitty content on the internet, and unregulated/moderated social media makes the problem a lot worse, because it’s harder to find interesting things in an ocean of shit
The change is not that the good content is gone, it's that the noise level has risen significantly. That "ocean of shit" is the change you don't think exists.
Indeed. A few weeks ago I went to youtube.com and was met with horrible videos (clickbait, fake news, yellow journalism, reaction videos, et al) on offer until I realized that I was logged out and it was showing me what the general public sees. I hadn't seen that before.
I always found it rather interesting how similar Buddhism is to Christian, and how different they are typically taught.
The teaching of Jesus and Buddha are really giving you the exact same advice. Self-sacrifice, honesty, hard work and being decent while you accept all the shit life throws at you and let it pass, because it will, are the ways to live calmly and fully in between the eternal struggle chaos and order.
I personally think the eastern approach was easier to comprehend than the western. Ying and yang are two dragons locked in eternal struggle, one is chaos one is order but within each dragon is a small piece of the other. Let too much of one dragon into your life and you will suffer, and since chaos lives within order (and vice versa) it’s also a fruitless struggle to chose one, because the other will always find a way to creep in.
You’ll find the same essence in the bible and the moral struggle between good and evil and a God who never tells you what he wants, but to me, it was much less clear. Perhaps especially because 90% of religions scholars are assholes and in the west you don’t meet the eastern assholes but you do meet a lot of shitty priests.
Same, it's interesting once you see the ~hidden truth between many religions where they're basically saying the same thing. It's not the EXACT same, and that's where everyone disagrees, but I also feel like many people who are really into religion kind of "miss the forest for the trees" and focus on the exact specifics vs. the general messages and tones / themes.
To me, this is similar to how some people are really into audio and examine the minute details, while others are into music and appreciate the aesthetic qualities of it. This is not to say that either side is "better" or "more correct" or "the right way to enjoy music" or even that you can't have both!
The most enjoyable times I've ever had listening to music have been on objectively not the best sound systems. I HAVE had the pleasure of going to clubs / parties with very high-end sound systems, and I have some great gear set up at home, but I appreciate them in different ways.
I still don't feel that I've really nailed what I'm trying to say, but I hope that makes some sense to others and hopefully gives even one person a bit of a new perspective, or a hint that there is another perspective to these things :)
I'm not a Buddhist, but I think you've got that completely backwards. For example, the 5 moral precepts in Buddhism are refrain from: harming living things, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, lying or gossip, taking intoxicating substances eg drugs or drink. No mention of god anywhere. As far as I can tell, in many (most? all?) sects of Buddhism there is no god. Buddha is just the first fully enlightened being (and in many sects, it's achievable by anyone -- eventually).
As there is no dogma in Buddhism, it's really difficult to casually learn what Buddhism is about. Usually people will throw a hundred books at you and say, "Well, that will get you started" (at least in my experience :-) ). However, I think you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick.
We’ve been a C# house since .net 2.0 and having recently moved a lot of our things to first JS and then python I think it’s the tooling.
Visual studio does a lot of things for you without a CLI. Want to deploy? Right click on your project and do the UI wizard for it. I mean, even nuget has a gui.
On top of that C# comes with a ton of easy to use features from its library. Like AD integration is just a library that gives you everything you need, at least until it doesn’t and you have to write your own bits and things get hard, but until then everything is easy and it’s much easier than using an open source library for it. I think any C# programmer could use its basic functionality from VS without ever looking at its documentation, and while Django and flask integrates with AD as well, you can’t really say the same thing about them.
You don’t get that with most tools. Ironically I think the fact that .net core has moved to a more CLI sort of environment has made visual studio a worse option for it than visual studio code, but we aren’t really going down that road, so what do I care.
I do care about python support for visual studio code, and it’s damned awesome.
I think you are correct here, but also consider what a typical Java and C# programmer's are developing, they are writing line-of-business application's they are not data-mining, or doing a lot with algorithm's.
As you implied they are also less typically less exposed to doing the low level thing, however no one will test you if you can use the EntityFramework in the IDE while everyone will test if you can use SqlConnection, Open , Execute a query and parse the result "by hand"
I think that would explain why they aren’t performing on par with python developers. I also think a lot of python developers started with C, and that typically makes you a better programmer, because if you’ve suffered through memory allocation and finding the paths of least resistance, you’ll never forget.
I don’t see why JAVA or C# should perform worse than JavaScript developers in terms of data structures or algorithms though. Documentation, CLI and environment, sure, but building things?
You could say something similar about go, but I think people who are choosing go, are choosing go. And by that I mean they are thinking about their options, most C# developers that I have known, simply throw C# at everything, even when they shouldn’t.
I use C# and Visual Studio a lot and I think it really makes me dumber. In my C/C++ days I used to be really good at reading docs and quickly setting up configurations but now I am used to the IDE doing a lot of handholding. I am some work with node now and I notice that in this environment you have to know the command line and read a lot because things are less polished.
I wonder when Facebook is going to get disrupted. It seems to me their key feature is having everyone connected, and while anecdotal, my friends list sure hasn’t been affected by these scandals.
What has been affected is the perception. It’s no longer considered cool to have a Facebook account. Meet-ups and interest groups are still heavily used in my social circles, but it’s almost always with an apology for being on Facebook.
Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.
Facebook on the other hand serves as a modern day yellowpages and meetup combined, but with its popularity dropping and people slowly adopting privacy concerns, it seems like the right company with the right business model could displace Facebook.
Of course you could say something similar about google and how it’s search engine is so terrible at finding anything interesting.
Maybe it’s my little anecdotal world playing tricks on my perception, but to me, the whole web seems ripe for another revolution.
Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now make a WhatsApp group which everyone gets invited into.
I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up.
My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp.
The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones.
They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core 'social media' offerings and I can't see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and/or simplicity aspects which make it so popular.
In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they'd released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they'd be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.
iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place.
So that's pretty decent market strategy on Apple's end, i'd say.
I'd kill for a way to use iMessage on my Windows desktop, so Apple is doing a great, albeit frustrating, job selling the Apple ecosystem.
Wish I could at least use icloud.com. Even went as far as to look into how hard it would be to use VMWare to get a OS X desktop going. 4 GB and a processor core would be worth it, but unfortunately it looks difficult.
Well, yes and no. The iMessage app is really, really awesome when you’re sitting with your Mac. Until you want to message someone with an android phone. :p
More difficult than just getting the VM up and running, IIRC. Something, something, hardware security key to get iMessage working. Or something. Anyway, there are workarounds with which others report having success, but at that my point my interest ran out.
You could get an old macbook that still runs iMessage, hook a KVM switch up to it and use it as if it was local (through a connection over a VPN or something). It sounds like a lot of work, but if you really must have it...
In the most recent builds of Windows 10, there is a new Windows Phone app what enables you to link your iOS device. Not sure if that's exactly what you are looking for but you can use iMessage on your Windows Desktop. Good luck!
The Windows Phone app only works well with Android devices. Messaging sync with iOS is not supported yet according to their website, and I doubt the Windows can ever get the iOS API access needed to make it work.
I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.
think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors
Well, they did that with Onavo didn’t they? Snooping VPN traffic to see who else their users were using. It remains to be seen if they can be as astute without that backdoor.
Agreed about iMessage. Didn’t mind deleteting my Facebook and Instagram accounts (with couple of hundreds of followers) but WhatsApp is almost a requirement in some respects (work, school, family over seas). Would love to get rid of it ASAP for a product from a source I can trust... wish Mozilla were in the messaging business...
Ditto, I was pleasantly surprised to see a huge number of people at work / industry acquaintances already on it when I switched it to my default SMS app. I love how SMS/Signal are seamlessly together in one app if you choose to combine them.
Signal requires a mobile phone number. The iPhone app isn't bad, but it's buggier than Messages and doesn't rotate. The desktop app has the usual Electron problems.
iMessage arguably serves as lock-in for the iPhone user base. If it were supported on android, many people would switch to the less expensive Android + iMessage ecosystem, likely enough to really make a dent in their cash cow
There are many reasons to move off iphone (not least the lack of earphones), but imessage is so integrated with SMS that I don't know anyone who considers it different on any level other than geeks knowing it intellectually. On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example. Personally I, and wife, and motherinlaw, are on SEs because my mother's android phone is crap. It's just stopped ringing again -- last time required a software update.
iphones still Just Work. In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good. People buy iphones because they are good, not because of messaging lockin.
However that aside, across android and iphone, people constantly use whatsapp though because of groups and simplicity.
>People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good.
This is quite the overarching generalization. Especially on a site like HN where there are tons of financially well off people choosing to use Android. Do some people buy Androids because they are a cheaper alternative to iPhones, sure. Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down, like having access to things like Termux, the ability to flash their own ROMs and root, etc? Absolutely. I don't even want to make this an Apple vs Android thing, but please don't reduce a valid choice down to people's financial situation.
Statistically the average selling price of an Android phone is $200. Even Samsung’s ASP is $250.
An “overarching generalization” doesn’t mean there aren’t outliers. But most people aren’t buying Android phones so they can flash ROMs and run Termux.
On the other hand, the “slowing down phones” meme is outdated - it was a choice between slowing them down and then shutting off completely. All batteries degrade over time.
I don't want to argue about Android vs iOS at all. You should buy what you like, I just provided a couple reasons why I use Andoid. I'm assuming your numbers are worldwide since you did not provide a source. If they're US centric, I'd be very surprised. Living in the US, I know plenty of people with Pixel 3s and S9s. These people did not buy these expensive flagship Android phones because they were cheap. There are plenty of valid reasons to buy them.
If Samsung were selling high end Android phones in volume, how many cheap crappy phones are they selling for the ASP of all of their phones to be $250?
I don't know how many expensive phones Samsung sells, but Google hardly sells any Pixels at all. Last time I checked, they made up less than 1% of Android handset sales.
So in the case of Android, you would have phones with replaceable batteries running old OS’s that the manufacturer abandons unpatched security holes.
Give me a phone that can run the latest OS for five years that I can take to the Apple store and get the battery place for $79 ($29 until the end of the year) any day.
Besides, the processors that are in most low end and midrange Android phones are so horrible compared to 4 year old iPhones, I can’t imagine them keeping up with new software.
No updates is another issue. But it is a problem created artificially. Somehow my 10 year old Core 2 Duo I'm using as HTPC is still getting updates and is working perfectly fine.
> Besides, the processors that are in most low end and midrange Android phones are so horrible compared to 4 year old iPhones, I can’t imagine them keeping up with new software.
Again - it's mostly software problem.
I have Motorola Moto E LTE(2015 - 2nd gen) with 1GB of RAM and it's working perfectly fine with Lineage OS [without google services] + F-Droid. I'm using it for Jabber communication (Conversations), podcasts (AntennaPod), GPS (Osmand), e-mail checking (mostly notifications from my bank ;)), calendar (DAVDroid), searching web (Firefox) when I want to check something on the go (bus/train timetable, address etc.) and everything works fine.
My friend had same model and he replaced it because everything was slow with "official" android.
I also have to change my phone. Reason? Battery. Changing it is difficult(https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Motorola+Moto+E+2nd+Generation+...) and paying someone to do it doesn't make any sense (labor + new battery would cost more than this phone is worth...).
No updates is another issue. But it is a problem created artificially. Somehow my 10 year old Core 2 Duo I'm using as HTPC is still getting updates and is working perfectly fine.
The issue is not artificial. Before around the Core 2 Duo, processors and hardware were getting faster at such a rapid clip and the software was taking advantage of it that you really had to upgrade often to use modern software.
My Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop from 2009 has:
8GB RAM - still the standard amount of RAM on most consumers.
A 1920x1200 display - it was one of the last laptops that had screens with that resolution before everyone moved to 1929x1080 and that resolution is still better than the average consumer laptop.
Gigabit Ethernet - most laptops these days don’t come with Ethernet at all and for those that do, gigabit Ethernet is still the standard.
250GB hard drive - of course now hard drives are SSD but most laptops still only come with < 500GB hard drives.
In 2009, an almost 10 year old computer would have had much lower specs than what was then a modern computer.
You see the same ramp up in mobile hardware that happen with computers. It just happened a lot faster.
And it doesn’t matter why the Android ecosystem is such a mess when it comes to upgrades. But it is.
Not only is the 6S from 2015 still getting official updates - so is the 5s from 2013.
Also, the processors in iPhones are so much better than in the typical Android phone, the phones have more headroom for upgrades.
> Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down
Please read up on this point in detail instead of going by sensational headlines. You’d get a more comprehensive picture about how batteries work the same on iPhones and Android phones, and why Apple put in some software changes.
My partner switched to a Pixel because she got tired of having to restore her old iPhone from backup every 6 months when it complained it was running out of space - inspite of the fact that she wasn't doing anything that should be gobbling up space.
I've been android forever, and my experience of Android phones has been they are solid for about 3 - 4 years, and then they start showing their wear. But I'm pretty hard on them. There are lots of significant drops that occur in that time. Drops that would shatter most iPhone screens.
> when it complained it was running out of space - inspite of the fact that she wasn't doing anything that should be gobbling up space.
The reason could’ve been found by going into Settings and looking at the storage usage. The only case that annoys me on iOS is the download of a new version of iOS without permission and taking up space. But even that can be deleted from the same place in Settings (though this behavior shouldn’t be there in the first place).
Trust me, she tried that. She tried pretty much everything. There was nothing listed in settings as taking up the storage. She took it various apple repair shops and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. They were the ones who told her to just periodically do backups and factory resets.
That seems to be the way these conversations always go:
1 "iPhones are too expensive, people should buy cheaper Android phones"
2 "I buy cheap Android phones and the quality is terrible"
3 "You can get good quality Android phones, you just have to pay iPhone prices for them"
Every time a conversation about price vs quality comes up, the conversation starts at the price, goes into the quality, and then ends up at the same price and quality as the competition.
This is the exact conversation I have had with myself and others multiple times. If I'm going to pay a lot of money, I'll just stick with my iPhone.
The Google Nexus line really could have changed things. It was inexpensive, a great phone, and ran vanilla Android. I moved from an iPhone to the Nexus 5. It had some quirks, but for the price it was great. Then Google started chasing the iPhone money, and pushed me back to iOS.
I had a Palm Pre then was with Windows Phone for a bit, but the only Android phone I've owned was a Nexus 4. I liked it (for the price) and would have stayed with the Nexus line if the prices had stayed in the Nexus price range. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the hardware, I actually still use the Nexus 4 today to test my app on older Android versions.
But by the time I needed a new phone, the Nexus 6 was twice the price of the Nexus 4. For that price, I switched to the iPhone.
I went from the Nexus to the Pixel line and I couldn't be happier. The main thing I noticed is that the Pixels pull you further into the Google ecosystem (the assistant, hard-integrated Google calendar/weather, etc) while the Nexus phones tried to be a "pure" (read: vendor independent) experience.
Depends on where you are but here iphones are the new "grandma" phone -- phones you can get for $0 and are idiotproof. They're simply not fashionable anymore.
> Depends on where you are but here iphones are the new "grandma" phone -- phones you can get for $0 and are idiotproof. They're simply not fashionable anymore.
Good thing I don't care about fashion or if I'm carrying a grandma phone (do I need a glittery case or something to be cool again??). I need something that is fairly quick, works, and I don't have to tinker with. It helps that I prefer iOS, and there is an Apple store within walking distance from my office.
You just need to unlock Xiaomis and install Lineage OS. The unlocking process is the most ridiculous I have seen, requiring a windows tool that works only after you've tried their Android version a week. And the tool requires some black magic to even work. The Xiaomi OS talks to many Chinese tracking servers all the time regarding to Blokada reports.
I have a Mi Mix 2 and I love the phone. Just be aware of the unlocking procedure before buying one of their phones.
I wouldn't say LG and HTC are the cheapest phones you can get. The parent comment recommended Samsung S series or the Sony Xperia series, which are $700-$900 phones which is squarely in iPhone territory.
I'm using the Sony Xperia XZ1 compact, a truly excellent device which launched around $580 USD and which I bought new for $450 last year. It's a bit cheaper than the non-compact version that more people know about, but has all the same specs and internals, just a smaller size and smaller screen. After a full year of use and updates it doesn't seem any slower than when I bought it, and because it has a microSD slot I will never run out of space.
That music thing is quite annoying. I can add books from Dropbox or other places into Books app but not add music from anywhere into the Music app? Long ago I heard this restriction was put in place to reduce music piracy, but over the years I’ve concluded that Apple wants people to buy music from it (or subscribe to Apple Music), and doesn’t give a damn about what users may want.
>In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit.
As some of the other commenters alluded to, there really are a huge variety of different devices. I'd be curious as to whether the folks you knew were buying e.g. Google's Nexus or Pixel devices which IME have generally felt higher quality to use, or whether they were Samsung/HTC/Huwaei-branded devices.
I've used Motorola "Moto G" phones since I've had smartphones. My current phone is from 2015. They are low-cost, but seem well made. Never had any problems with the hardware. I've been happy with them. The downside is they don't get updates over the long term.
I could afford an iPhone, or a flagship Android phone, but the value proposition isn't there for me. Mobile just isn't a very important thing for me. I use it for basic communication with family and friends, navigating/maps and that's about it.
If you spend $200 on a phone instead of $1000, you get five years of OS upgrades by getting a new phone every year. If you luck out and one of your phones does have upgrades, you can skip a year.
Because the Android ecosystem doesn't have a strong upgrade ability, app developers generally target a wide variety of OS versions, so when you do get cut off from app updates, it's really ancient versions, like gingerbread.
You don’t have to spend $1000 on an iPhone. You can get an iPhone 7 right now for $449 and if history is any guide, it will still be getting OS updates for at least 3 more years probably more.
Seeing that my iPhone 6s bought in 2015 for $750 is still faster than most modern Android phones, I don’t think OS upgrades are going to be a problem.
App developers being forced to support older OS’s is not a good thing for the platform. iOS Developers can target the latest OS and all of its features and still support 5 year old phones.
I love how this thread is acting like 5 years of software compatibility is a lot. It shows how low our expectations are in the world of handheld computing. I have computers from as far back as 2000 that I can still run Linux on and use productively. I wouldn’t even consider buying a technology product if I thought I’d be replacing it in a year. 5 years should be a minimum.
Yes I can run a Plex Server on a circa 2009 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop running Windows 10. Back in 2009, I wouldn’t have wanted to run anything on a computer from 2000. In 2000, I definitely wouldn’t have still been using my 68030-16Mhz Mac LCII from 1991.
My mom is running the latest version of Chrome on a Mac Mini from 2006 that I put Windows 7 on. How much luck would you have had running the latest web browser on a computer from 1994 in 2006? In 1994, I had a PowerMac 6100/60 (PPC 601-60Mhz) with 24Mb of RAM and a 250Mb hard drive with a 486 DX/2 daughtercard with 32Mb of RAM.
Today, I can use a 5 year iPhone 5s. Back in 2013, I would have been masochistic to run an iPhone 3G.
Like most people are going to “unlock the bootloader” and find a build that works with their phone.
On the other hand, the day the new OS version or security patch is released for iOS, anyone in the world can go to the settings app and update their phone.
While I agree that this is nice, many people upgrade their phones every 2-3 years anyway, just because of the hardware/battery. For them, this is not a selling point.
I do think that people buy new phones when they break, or become unusable. And that does seem to be 2-3 years on Android, but iPhones last longer - and with battery replacement, which this year has made very popular, they last even longer. iPhone 4,5 and 6's are still the majority of iphones in my extended family and less techy friends - and they were bought new.
Anyhow - the main reason I even commented was that people in the antique iPhone camp /regularly/ say they'll never go to Android cause the phones don't last. I really think people would like to keep their phones for as long as their laptops. And iPhones are the way to do that and that it is a selling point.
Most of my upgrades except for the 5 were not hardware related - directly.
The first iPhone I bought was a 4 in 2010. I “upgraded” to a 4s because I got a much better deal through my employer to use Verizon and the 4 had separate GSM/CDMA versions. My son used the 4 from the time I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile until 2013 and upgraded up until iOS 7.
My next upgrade was to the 5 and again it was because of a change of carriers and Verizon wouldn’t unlock the GSM part of the phone for domestic use. The 5/5C were the last 32 bit iPhones.
I consider the first 64-bit iPhone to be like the first Core 2 Duos. At that point the phone was “good enough” and fast enough for most people.
My first 64 bit phone was the 6s in 2015. My son is still using it now with an Apple battery case. I would have kept it, but I needed a larger screen (iPhone 8 plus) to watch text heavy technical videos
and the battery life is much better. I don’t see any reason unless I physically damage this phone that I won’t keep it for another 4 years.
I’ll probably replace my 9.7” iPad before I replace my phone and I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon.
If you buy a cheap Android phone you are going to get cheapness. In my experience the kind of experience you have with an android device is pretty much driven by the cost of the phone.
I personally own a Sony Xperia XZ ( which is now over 3 years old), but it had a price comparable to an iPhone when i bought it with better specs.
1. Better front camera ( 13 megapixels ) and the rear one has a 25 mp sensor which captures great photos.
2. 192khz/24bit audio. Being an audiophile I hate the fact that apple does not support hi res audio. This phone had a headphone jack and is really good at playing flac music or hi-fi audio from Tidal.
3. Well designed - The back is made out of alkaleido which sounds like a marketing gimmick term, but it really does change colour in a subtle but nice way. iPhones haven't changed much in design over the years and they don't really look as attractive as they did previously.
4. Google cardboard - Android has some good VR applications which run on google cardboard. Heck you can even use TrinusVR on Android and VR stream games wirelessly from your PC . Can an iPhone do that?
Apple hardware works well only with Apple hardware. Every day you pretend otherwise you will be reminded that your life is bad unless you bend over and accept the fact that you'll get annoyed by your own hardware constantly until you relent. People buy Android phones because the promise there is, at least, that you might get a device that belongs to you.
I think you are over simplifying the situation in assuming that if iMessage was open there would be a mass exodus from the iOS platform. The people looking for the cheapest phone solution have already switched to Android (or were always Android). iMessage may serve as some lock-in, but there are many other reasons that people prefer iOS and Apple devices.
As another datapoint, iMessage is probably the least useful thing to me in the whole ecosystem. Apple has nowhere enough market penetration around here (N Euro) for it to be useful as anything more than an SMS app.
I live in the US but have many friends from northern Europe and I've noticed the same thing. The only thing I use WhatsApp for is communicating with my European friends, and every single one of them prefers it over text or iMessage even though they all have iPhones.
I seriously don't think that that is true. Sure, you'd find some people who would. But not the majority. iMessage is great, but it's not the reason people buy iPhones. It is one of the reasons.
The irony there is I keep iMessage turned off since I want a platform agnostic, lowest common denominator (as in social availability) messaging system, and I can get that with SMS via a Google Voice number.
The difference is in encryption. WhatsApp has end-to-end, while other FB products obviously do not. Also, the current lack of ads. It's an improvement even if not a perfect solution.
I think what I'm saying is specifically it is facebook whatsapp like it is google gmail or apple messaging.
it appears that people often refer to this as different companies and they are not.
it being e2e encrypted does not change who owns, makes decisions on where the future of it goes, and if it will continue to exist in 5 years. it is still facebook and not 'whatsapp' by itself above and in many areas people refer to whatsapp and instagram as different entities and they are not, I'm concerned with people acting like it is.
It seems to me that Apple could deploy iMessage and FaceTime versions for Android whenever they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is probably that they don't want to cannibalize sales of their own hardware.
This is a company, and as such their core driving force is money. If you are framing them as having different driving forces that will make their behavior on occasion seem really weird.
>My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp.
Facebook should become a compute platform like AWS/Azure that specalizes in compute services for social services, including but not limited to authentication, spam detection, censorship/moderation tools, social graph, storage, bandwidth, localization, learning, ranking.
iMessage on Android would be huge. Do that, then introduce a meetup feature and I swear half the people I know who "have to use Facebook" would delete their account. FB would shrivel up in five years.
I feel like this would go about as well as BBM's Android release a few years back. Non-iphone users would use it for a bit then switch back off as the novelty of "yet another ecosystem messaging app" wears off.
The proper way to do this is to convince people to switch to an app that integrates other messaging platforms as well: people switch to Signal and stay on it because they send all their normal SMSes run though the app as well. Then as their friends switch to Signal their conversations are painlessly migrated, everything looks the same, you just get a bonus "lock" icon.
The thing to keep in mind about facebook is that the average user isnt a tech person.
My parents use facebook nearly constantly. That wont change anytime soon. I don't know if they could list a single facebook, "scandal" that happened this year. It's not that they are dumb people they just don't care. Their friends use it so they use it.
To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos.
I think Facebook's more likely to lose out because apart from messaging, its organization and events and business finding tools simply aren't that good or well-surfaced within the app because Facebook has prioritised the world of feed clickbait. Don't think it's security concerns that have my friends doing event invites via Whatsapp group threads as often as via Facebook's dedicated event invitation service. But the average person having a number of old friends whose only reliable contact information is their Facebook is a pretty big moat.
> To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos.
If you were being dishonest, what would you think differently.
I think most people are vaguely aware their data on Facebook is being misappropriated, but they don't understand the implications of that, especially in the long term.
The challenge, and it seems most of the informed are stuck on how to resolve this, is explaining why this is a horrendously bad situation.
Just today at lunch with a phd mathematician (ie someone way smarter than me), I was struggling to get past his 'I've nothing to hide, why does it matter' attitude about fb and messenger android apps.
The standard response is: what if your friends do have something to hide and you end up questioned and detained because you had conversations with them. What if the sites you visit outs an embarrassing medical condition?
While I am no mathematician and not at all smart, I work in the tech industry. But I share the attitude of your mathematical friend. Let Facebook do what they please with my data; there's nothing important there.
It's not the data misuse that repulses me from Facebook, but the overall shallowness of conversations, its feed contents (I don't care about what my friends liked or responded to; I am content with just seeing their posts, thank you very much). So there's a lot to dislike about Facebook apart from how they treat our data.
There must be something important there because Facebook is making money off it. But it’s YOUR data and that money is yours too. Facebook is STEALING from you. Mark is the greatest con artist in history.
Facebook is making money off the fact I still visit their website enough to show me sponsored content (much like most of the rest of the internet does), and the data in theory means purchasers of its ads get better bang for their buck. I'm not convinced the fact that I'm a 30something single male currently located in a particular area is something anyone would pay me for, and granting Facebook right to use those facts plus data from ad-retargeting networks to show me ads and sponsored content (some of which I haven't even managed to block!) for free use of their web platform seems like a pretty fair trade to me.
tbh I'm not even convinced half the data is actually that good for the ad platforms: the fact that I invariably report obvious ICO scam ads as "it's a scam" seems to have triggered Facebook to show more of them to me.
> There must be something important there because Facebook is making money off it
I think there is a logical fallacy in arguments like this, which is extending conclusions made on large samples to special individual cases.
While there is no doubt that Facebook is making money (I would think, primarily from ads or from paid promotions of particular posts), and while it is true that, in order to better serve ads, Facebook is using their users' data, it in no way follows that Facebook is making money off me specifically, or that my data specifically is of any value to Facebook and not just garbage.
I don't think I am a valuable Facebook asset. I don't follow ads. And I am not a particularly social animal.
Whether it happens or not, if the disruptor doesn't have a business model not based on targeted advertisement, I don't see how it will be different once it becomes large enough.
My hope would be a decentralized service, where everyone hosting an instance determines their own business model, or a paid service. None of which will be as fast to iterate, and be able to crank out features as fast as Facebook can ...
Contrary data point: over the past month three of my friends have closed their Facebook accounts - and they are not technical people. So it's not only a matter of reputation.
I still have a facebook account, I just use it less and less. And while I don't think many of my friends have dropped it either, it seems they are also using it less and less. Most of my feed now comes from a fairly small group of people.
Well, Facebook has full pockets and a working cash machine. And at least until now the managed to identify threats. For example WhatsApp and Instagram were acquired. When G+ came they copied G+'s circle feature close enough with their contact grouping feature, when Snap didn't want to be acquired they added stories everywhere (WhatsApp, messenger, Facebook)
Yesterday's news tells us that competing with Facebook in the messenger field isn't easy (Google cancelling Allo)
For a long-term strategy we have to see how there diversification (facebook@work, Oculus, ...) works out and how long they can keep printing money.
I think Facebook is benefiting from everyone having learned their lesson.
The saw their trust woefully violated by Facebook, and they'll never give another network the same access to their data again. And, thus, stay on Facebook.
Discord definitely seems to be the preferred platform for the younger generation in my area. It just sucks that they have zero plans for text E2EE, at least the last I checked.
Anecdotically my experience in Italy is that everyone and their dog have WhatsApp, if you go into the over 50 many have WhatsApp and not an email (or at least never check it)
For sure Facebook main quality is being place where every one is.
But I believe you’re wrong about instagram. Living in Brazil, I feel that Facebook and Instagram are two sides of the same coin. It keeps people interested and “connected” when Facebook is going down.
From Orkut to Facebook, it was the same.
The difference is that Facebook bought its potential competitors before they were cool
> Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.
Is Instagram useless, or just useless to you? I understand that HN isn't Facebook's target market, but it's disappointing to read comments that dismiss its services and anyone who does find utility in them.
It will get disrupted when people realize the cost of putting their personal life online. The Cambridge Analytica incident was a good start but we need many more cases like it to start making a trend.
There are a lot of startups trying. Hopefully one of them will reach critical mass. I would be happy to leave Facebook but being involved in politics makes it a prerequisite to reach my audience.
I remember back when Facebook was only available to college students. I wonder if any startup would create another 'exclusive' network to increase it's perceived social value
When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar.
None of which is interesting.
Google is still good at finding specific things. Like when you commit an act of google programming or want to buy a book. But it’s really terrible and finding interesting content.
You could say that the web is flooded with shit, and be right, but HN is evidence that not everything on the internet is terrible, google just isn’t your portal to it anymore.
So we visit HN, but that means google has become yahoo, aol search and all those other search engines it replaced by being a combination of relevant, interesting and exploratively fresh.
I mean, 2018 was the year I adopted DuckDuckGo as my standard search engine, and it wasn’t because of privacy. Sure privacy helps, but to be honest, it was because it gives more interesting results. I’ll still use !g when I’m searching for something I know google will find, but if I’m just exploring a topic I’ll almost never use google.
>When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar.
None of which is interesting.
Can you be more specific and give examples of "things" you're searching for and what you mean by "uninteresting"?
For me, I have been issuing 50+ random searches on Google every single day for years. I've been using Google since 2000 and it almost always finds what I'm looking for.
Yesterday, I searched for "replace Moen faucet cartridge" and it returned plenty of pages showing exactly how to do it. A week ago I searched for "install Windows 10 from USB drive" and again, it found plenty of helpful pages that answered that question. And recently, I ran across a cook I never heard of before named "Alice Waters". A Google search told me she owned a restaurant and what her specialty was.
In my experience, the topic has to be obscure or brand new for Google searches to be useless. For some trivia, I did find a weird effect of the search algorithm for a person named "Bettina Warburg". She's a young woman who's given several presentations on blockchains[1]. However, for some reason, the Google, Bing, and DDG search results have a side box citing someone else that was born in 1900 and died in 1990[2][3][4]. Something about her is tripping up the search engines. Bing in particular has the odd logic of placing the photos of the still-living BW above the text of the BW who died.
I think the problem is the business model, not specifically Facebook. Are any of their competitors following and succeeding at a different model at scale?
A few years ago I would have made the semi-contrarian point that Facebook[1] was here to stay, for the long-foreseeable future.
I say "semi-contrarian" because remember, even 4 or 5 years ago Facebook seemed to be the latest corporate iteration in an ever-flipping lineage from AIM lists to Friendster to MySpace.[2] So the common gospel was: "Facebook" - such as it was understood - could be toppled any day now. Remember MySpace?
The counterargument was that the market capture was incomparable and the network effect was insurmountable. And that's still true, kind of.
But the way we use Facebook has changed. In short, it's gone from being a single service with a bunch of features to being an SSO gateway for a bunch of federated platforms. And that's not just a change in user perception, it's reflective of a completely different product strategy.
That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for Facebook so far, and I'm not sure what they could have done differently. But I think it leaves them vulnerable to any one of those platforms, or all of them, being usurped by new kids on the block.
Part of the problem is that none of Facebook's platforms are all that great in their own right.[3] But that alone doesn't make them vulnerable. MySpace proved you can have a terrible product and coast off network effect alone, while Google+ proved that without a network, you have nothing.
But wait a minute. Does any one of these platforms on their own have the network effect that "Facebook" itself once had? I mean, yeah, they've absorbed a greater user share than the 2012 webapp ever had. But that's not what I'm talking about. Is connectivity to "Facebook," and hence its network, a killer feature at this point?
To give one example: I have zero confidence anyone on Groups is a "real person," it doesn't offer any unique features, it's painful to use for anything other than reading a general quasi-chronological survey of recent posts, and it means nothing to me that 17 or 18 "real friends" happen to be a member of the group (how does that help me find a sublet?).
Right now I'm one of millions of people who "just use Facebook for Events and Messenger." Except I don't _just_ message people through Messenger, and I don't _just_ learn about events through Events, and the fact that "my friends" are "on" these platforms seems to mean less and less every day. But I'm still on them... for now... with gradually diminishing frequency... basically out of ambivalence.
Is this product direction sustainable?
[1] Any references I make to Facebook in this post refer to the core service - the website, the app, whatever you want to call it. Not the company, which I'm aware owns WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, and could potentially continue to coast off acquisitions alone.
[2] This is a myopically North American view: in Brazil it would have started with Orkut, in Southeast Aria Friendster held steady market share for quite a while, etc. The point is that we used to consider portal-like predecessors as a litmus of comparison for Facebook’s health, and now that doesn’t seem as salient.
[3] I mean, Groups _barely_ serves its job of being the sort of Craigslist-with-authentication into which it's evolved, in part _because_ it evolved into that role over time. The Events interface is totally cluttered and incoherent, and despite its ubiquity, it seems to get the lowest social engagement of any of Facebook's core products. Messenger is... fine I guess, but I have no strong preference for it over WhatsApp or iMessage, and having hypothetical connection to hundreds of "friends" I haven't spoken to in years isn't exactly a value-add.
We’ve been a C# house for several years, decades really, and I’ve always preferred it to JAVA so I’m actually excited for Core.
But we rarely use it. Not because it’s not great, rather because we’re more productive with flask or Django. For Core to really make sense for us, it’d would have to stop being so damn low level, but I guess that maybe it can’t without sacrificing too much efficiency. More importantly it needs better libraries for things that aren’t “built-in”.
I can certainly see why .NET developers welcome it, because they finally have good cross platform ability. At least until they need to do authentication on a non-standard SAML token, that though easily supported by ADFS but is a bitch in any .NET setup.
I know we aren’t most use cases, being the public sector and running a gazillion different tech stacks at once, but .NET has never played well once you stepped outside it’s comfortzone and it’s always been so low level that writing library extensions were a bitch. And that may have worked out, so far, but I just don’t see why people stick with it when there are more productive alternatives.
I say productive, because I don’t think .NET core is lacking technically, but delivering solutions on time and with minimum maintenance requirements afterward is just easier in python or JAVA and I’d imagine others as well.
But maybe I’m missing something?