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I am not a huge fan of joke-y replies like this, but bravo. Perfect.

They could still be impeached by the legislative branch.

The thing authorizing that -- the constitution. So unless the legislative can ignore the "interpretation" for the purposes of impeachment, the court can simply "interpret" the part that you think authorizes impeachment to just mean something like "the meaning of life is 54."

To be honest I am not sure if you are even discussing this in good faith anymore. The idea that the Supreme Court could render impeachment of them null and void and the legislative and executive branches would just be :shrugging-emoji: is a little silly.

Yes, the court’s job is to interpret the law. But the Constitution is not code and the judges are not the CPU. Ultimately, the rule of law will always be dependent on people.


The problem is that I don't believe that the court is arguing in good faith any more. In which case silly interpretations don't seem beyond the realm of possibility.

I'm assured by lawyers of both parties that this is not the case. And since I am not a lawyer their understanding is worth a lot more than mine. But as someone who does have significant credentials in philosophical and scientific reasoning, I can say that legal reasoning is not at all what I am familiar with.


The justices would be jailed by the executive, swiftly, if they refused to acknowledge impeachment.

Yes, exactly, the executive can ignore the court's interpretation, including an incorrect interpretation of impeachment (perhaps interpreted in such a way that impeachment as you know it would be impossible), if it violates the constitution.

The executive cannot ignore the court's interpretation on their own.

Christ, are you in high school? This shit is covered in like sophomore year social studies.


OK so the court can then simply declare an "interpretation" of impeachment that makes it impossible, or meaningless then, or perhaps also interprets any such jailing by the executive as illegal. Since they are the ones that get to decide what the text written in the constitution actually is interpreted to mean and apparently their "interpretation" cannot be ignored.

The court can say whatever they want, but they'd be saying it from jail.

Highly recommend the podcast “Advisory Opinions” if you are interested in Supreme Court analysis.

I also recommend that podcast but I would suggest balancing it with '5-4' podcast or 'strict scrutiny'. Sara and David do a very good job explaining both sides and the law but there are times I think advisory opinions could spend more time on the arguments made by the other side or the weaker portions of their supported view.

Strict scrutiny is fantastic

Oof, I couldn't stand to make it through one episode of Strict Scrutiny. It was a political podcast dressed up as if it were a legal podcast. Not interested.

You can’t talk about the Supreme Court/US legal system and just omit politics. They also don’t make any sort of promise to be neutral or objective top to bottom.

They aren’t judges making decisions, they’re talking about the law on a podcast.


Apple is allowed to share data among its apps. Third-party app developers are allowed to share data within their apps. If third-party developers want to share data with _other_ third-party developers (aka the advertising ID), then they need the explicitly request permission. It is fairly straightforward.


I dont think this answered my question, but fun anyways!


Because they directly negotiate deals with those companies that other smaller players can’t negotiate. The App Store is largely a “these are the rules for everyone” minus a few small exceptions.


I believe you mean lasagna.


pizza is portable lasagna.


The malware would have to prompt for biometric authentication before exporting.


So it just has to wait until you’re about to do a legitimate operation requiring authentication, intercept that to export the key, and cancel the real one with a bogus error (and you’ll just try again without any second thoughts).

MacOS has also no concept of secure desktop/etc where the OS can use some privileged UI to explicitly tell you what you are signing and prompt for PIN/biometrics. It’s in fact a well-known problem where legitimate dialogs for system/Apple ID password have no distinguishing features from fake ones.


Couldn’t any type of dialogue be faked? What are you suggesting is possible but not implemented?


Generally dialogs that require sensitive input provide some way for the user to ensure they are issued by the OS and not a random program. Windows historically used the Secure Attention Key (that's why domain-linked machines used to require pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del to login, to train users to only enter credentials in secure contexts) which is a key combo that the OS always intercepts and thus once pressed you can be assured you are typing into a trusted UI and not a piece of malware emulating the trusted UI.

Of course, this was back in the day when computers were primarily a productivity tool and not an ad delivery vehicle, so it's unlikely this problem will ever be solved.


Is that why most of the EU governmental websites have the same cookie pop up banners?


Lack of product ownership and cargo cult developers.

Legislation can’t change culture.


Goalposts moved.

The original claim was that the compliance was done for malicious reasons to change the law. Another possibility is that lawyers are a cautious bunch and advise their clients to take a less risky option when implementing a legal requirement. From personal experience, I would saw that latter is much more likely and would also explain why government agencies interpret these rules the same way when developing their websites.


So what happens if it ends up being nil? How does your app react?

In this particular case, I would rather crash. It’s easier to spot in a crash report and you get a nice stack trace.

Silent failure is ultimately terrible for users.

Note: for the things I control I try to very explicitly model state in such a way as I never need to force unwrap at all. But for things beyond my control like this situation, I would rather end the program than continue with a state of the world I don’t understand.


Yeah @IBOutlets are generally the one thing that are allowed to be implicitly-unwrapped optionals. They go along with using storyboards & xibs files with Interface Builder. I agree that you really should just crash if you are attempting to access one and it is nil. Either you have done something completely incorrect with regards to initializing and accessing parts of your UI and want to catch that in development, or something has gone horribly, horribly, horribly with UIKit/AppKit and storyboard/xib files are not being loaded properly by the system.


> … you really should just crash if …

See my above/below comment.

A good tool for catching stuff during development, is the humble assert()[0]. We can use precondition()[1], to do the same thing, in ship code.

The main thing is, is to remain in control, as much as possible. Rather than let the PC leave the stack frame, throw the error immediately when it happens.

[0] https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

[1] https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...


> Silent failure is ultimately terrible for users.

Agreed.

Unfortunately, crashes in iOS are “silent failures,” and are a loss of control.

What this practice does, is give me the option to handle the failure “noisily,” and in a controlled manner; even if just emitting a log entry, before calling a system failure. That can be quite helpful, in threading. Also, it gives me the option to have a valid value applied, if there’s a structural failure.

But the main reason that I do that with @IBOutlets, is that it forces me to acknowledge, throughout the rest of the code, that it’s an optional. I could always treat implicit optionals as if they were explicit, anyway. This just forces me to.

I have a bunch of practices that folks can laugh at, but my stuff works pretty effectively, and I sleep well.


Crashes are silent failures but as I mentioned: you can get a lot of your crashes reported via the App Store. This is why I prefer crashes in this situation: it gives me something actionable over silent failures on the client.


But nothing beats catching the problem before the crash.

Also, I have found App Store crash reports to be next to useless. TestFlight ones are a bit better.

But if I spend a lot of time, doing it right, the first time, we can avoid all kinds of heartbreak.


And you will find the problem very early if you crash. You are much less likely to find the problem if you don’t.

What have you found useless about the crash reports from the App Store? It would be really nice for it to have something like a breadcrumb capability, but typically the stack trace of the crash is sufficient to see what went wrong.


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