12 ms·
I remember another post that was very well-received where an individual hacker wrote his own homebrew iMessage client for his own personal purposes. HN really l
by runnerup 3y ago
I remember another post that was very well-received where an individual hacker wrote his own homebrew iMessage client for his own personal purposes. HN really liked that!
I think HN exists at an intersection of individual hackerism and business. If a project is clearly by-hackers-for-hackers it gets a lot more leeway for unsustainable concepts / implementations. But this is building a business on adversarial interoperability, and many people who LOVE the concept and technical achievements will still post mostly critical things about the business model because it’s fairly clearly a very very challenging business model.
- pilsetnieks 3y agoYou're allowed to admire the technical implementation while denouncing the business model at the same time.
- jorvi 3y agoIs letting our hearts bleed for trillion dollar companies really the best way to spend our finite compassionate bandwidth?
- catach 3y agoObserving that a particular business model is very likely to fail because of the conflict with another business model that happens to have much more powerful backing requires no compassion spend. But also, it seems to me that compassion is an involuntary reaction.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> also, it seems to me that compassion is an involuntary reaction. Compassion is very much a quality that can be developed and nurtured.
- catach 3y agoI believe you're talking about capacity for compassion, and I'm speaking of the triggering of compassion. I'd agree that both capacity and scope of triggers can be altered, but it seems to me that that's a process that takes some time and effort. Distinct from choosing in the moment "I am going to feel a certain way about this, right now".
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis is IMO the exact spirit we should have
- lostlogin 3y agoPretty much all Adtech comes to mind here.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoAre we talking about Beeper Mini, or Apple?
- toastercat 3y agoyoutube-dl, NewPipe, and uBlock Origin exist solely for the purpose of empowering the individual, yet they are constantly attacked on HN as being tools used unfairly to harm Google's profitability. Open-source projects like Matrix, PeerTube, Mastodon, are built to be free and open-source for the benefit of end-users and lack of vendor lockin. Yet each is derided on HackerNews for not being enough like their corporate counterparts. Yes, there are those here who don't do that, but as cynical as it sounds, I do think this site's audience is mostly folk who like the status quos set by FAANG-types and don't really care about hackerism outside of toy websites.
- aprilthird2021 3y agoI pretty much found out about all these from HN. I think most of their traffic / downloads comes from this site.
- simfree 3y agoReddit and other social media platforms almost certainly drive in order of magnitude more downloads of these extensions than HN.
- rezonant 3y agoReddit and other social media platforms are at least an order of magnitude larger than HN. That's a good thing honestly.
- 55555 3y agoThis is extremely false.
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoThe projects you listed are overwhelmingly celebrated on Hacker News! I'm sure you can find a critical post if you look hard enough—HN isn't a hive mind—but it's not a common sentiment.
- oneplane 3y ago
- _8j50 3y agoHacking? Hacking means whining when what you are hacking fights back? I mean go for it, hack away! I hope apple keeps android far far away from me though lol
- rezonant 3y agoPersonally for me it's people who buy Frigidaire appliances. They are the worst!
- _8j50 3y agoAppliances don't talk to other people's appliances. Beeper users on imessage would be unpleasant. I used android for like a decade, my takeaway is that you all can't stand other people not enduring the chaos with you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kelnos 3y ago> I hope apple keeps android far far away from me though What a bizarre thing to say.
- _8j50 3y agoWell, I try.
- dcow 3y ago> on adversarial interoperability In what world is interoperability adversarial? What the actual?
- lolinder 3y agoIt's adversarial because one party explicitly does not want to interoperate and can be expected to try to break interop. OP didn't coin the term, it looks like it comes from Cory Doctorow [0]. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
- dcow 3y agoCory is talking about it in the sense that the tech industry at large said “adversarial interop” is stupid and lobbied against it. It seems HN has lost the plot judging by the number of people on this thread defending Apple engaging in such a slimy practice. > Big Tech climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them. Anyway the comment I was replying to was implying that Beeper is the adversary which is not a correct use of the term.
- lolinder 3y ago> Anyway the comment I was replying to was implying that Beeper is the adversary which is not a correct use of the term. You can't have a single-party adversarial system. Each party is an adversary of the other: party A wants to interop against the wishes of party B, and party B wants to lock party A out. OP wasn't implying that Beeper is "the" adversary and Apple is in the clear, OP was just saying that trying to build a business around adversarial interoperability is extremely difficult and the outcome is unsurprising. Noting that the results are unsurprising does not imply that we condone the system that makes such results nearly inevitable.
- noirbot 3y agoAre you trying to ignore the state of what's going on? Beeper's business model was as interoperable with Apple as my neighbors cracking my wifi password to use for their household. The interoperability wasn't intended. Forcing someone to interoperate with you doesn't immediately make it all collaborative any more than a stranger walking up to me at lunch and declaring they're my friend now makes me want to invite them home after.