appleshore (u/appleshore)

appleshore commented on YouTube bans coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts WHO advice bbc.com/news/technology-5... · Posted by u/topoftheforts

Barrin92 · 6 years ago

Neither does the US. Taiwan is only recognised by IIRC 12 natinos, mostly small island states. This has become another weird internet talking point as international recognition pretty much unanmiously switched to the PRC in the 1970s.

appleshore · 6 years ago

All due respect, but this is lunacy. The way the guy reacted then hung up is unconscionable. The WHO is clearly corrupted by China's money.

And the US is still connected to Taiwan and provides them military support. And we have a $250M 'de facto' embassy there.

Honestly, I'm so shocked and dismayed by your comment, that I think I want to stop participating on Hacker News. Your perspective is relativism ad infinitum. This is the thing I fight most against.

This isn't a community for hackers & painters anymore. Eternal Relativism is impossible to win against.

appleshore commented on Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers manualdousuario.net/insta... · Posted by u/rpgbr

cosmotic · 6 years ago

“This is to help people view photos in Instagram and understand how to have the best experience on the platform, be part of the community, connecting and interacting with people and the things they love”

How does blocking access help people view things? How does blocking access help people understand how to have the best experience? Access is a better experience than access denied. Creating an account and lurking does not help anyone be part of a community. Most online communities are almost entirely lurkers. Creating an account doesn't lead to interaction. There's no way instagram isn't aware of these facts; I'm not a professional social network product manager and I know these things. There are other motives here than what instagram claims.

appleshore · 6 years ago

Another way to say this, how does lying tell the truth? I don't understand corporations that decide to lie like this.

I noticed Facebook Messenger does this fun thing where you can open it, start to read a message and then it says "BAM--YOU MUST UPDATE". The fact they intentionally designed it this way makes me want to delete Messenger forever.

appleshore commented on Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers manualdousuario.net/insta... · Posted by u/rpgbr

bmelton · 6 years ago

Honestly, I think I prefer not having access to something like Pinterest[1] which lets you have some access for a bit and then as soon as you try to interact with the site in any meaningful way (usually to leave it) they insist you sign in.

At least with this I know the expectation up front, rather than having it sprung on me by surprise.

[1] I've avoided Pinterest for awhile that this may not be the way they attempt to capture accounts any more.

appleshore · 6 years ago

My disdain for Pinterest is at unrecoverable levels because of this and the fact they display interesting photos without any details or source listed even if logged in. I often wonder the difference between people that become antagonistic for being forced to signup vs people that are persuaded.

appleshore commented on U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests reuters.com/article/us-us... · Posted by u/antpls

aspenmayer · 6 years ago

Anderson Cooper: After the trial, you discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had let on?

Dan Maynard: That's right. Yeah. After the trial we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson, less than three weeks before the attack, to him "Tear up Texas." Which to me was an encouragement to Simpson.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-in-garland-texas-what...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack

appleshore · 6 years ago

Perhaps this could be justified but at least tip off the fellow agents and law enforcement there that there's two men with machine guns approaching. Instead, the FBI agent watched them exit their vehicle, then he fled the scene, was pulled over and almost shot due to how he was dressed. They put a mask over his head and he disappeared. Luckily no one died.

appleshore commented on Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/fovc

dumbfoundded · 6 years ago

This is a libertarian talking point. The idea is that government control of money leads to less private innovation. We had the industrial revolution in the late 19th century while on the gold standard and now with government-controlled money, most of the long term innovation like renewable energy, nukes, the internet are all funded by the government.

It has almost nothing to do with this article.

appleshore · 6 years ago

Low interest rates certainly lead to non-optimal housing development. I completely support massive government funding of energy, nuclear, technology and research.

But I don't support the NY Fed and the bank CEOs controlling the open markets, setting the interest rates and flooding dumb "elite" investors with cheap money so they can build bad systems. Having 1 of 12 FRBs dominate the monetary system is a flawed idea, especially when that 1 is Wall Street. Financial engineering is dangerous and antithetical to real research, development and progress.

appleshore commented on Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/fovc

xiphias2 · 6 years ago

Money (in the form of buying power) can't be created from nothing, so whenever a bad idea/execution is funded, it takes away buying power from companies that have better execution, but less access to cheap loans.

As an example I personally know a CEO who had a great idea, great exececution, but a new competitor startup was funded with millions of dollars of cash that threatened to sue him in the US. He didn't have money for lawyers, so he became in a bad position very fast, even if he was quite certain that the competitor didn't have any case against him.

Another example is cheap loans driving up ad prices and rent in SF, which I have seen often talked about here.

appleshore · 6 years ago

Interesting concept. Perhaps we can name this the Swordfish Law: cheap money drives out good ideas.

appleshore commented on Patreon lays off 13% of workforce techcrunch.com/2020/04/21... · Posted by u/abakker

jhwang5 · 6 years ago

Goes to prove again (and again) that product success is weakly correlated with engineering effort / quality

appleshore · 6 years ago

It’s so extra in its absurdism that I’d rather believe in sinister intent than systemic stupidity.

The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.

appleshore commented on Patreon lays off 13% of workforce techcrunch.com/2020/04/21... · Posted by u/abakker

asiachick · 6 years ago

I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful.

There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content.

Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page through again.

It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has arguably the superior UX of those 5 options.

Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.

Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.

I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this use case.

Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.

appleshore · 6 years ago

The world is bad UX which I tend to think is a conspiracy.

For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic.

Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.

appleshore commented on U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests reuters.com/article/us-us... · Posted by u/antpls

sneak · 6 years ago

Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States?

“National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation.

This is just government spies trying to cover their ass whilst they continue breaking the law. They've conveniently mixed it in with "but terrorism!" to ensure that they get to continue breaking the law.

appleshore · 6 years ago

Yet an FBI agent can literally encourage the first ISIS attack in the US and it’s covered on 60 Minutes but no one bats an eye. We’re left just to assume this is the only time it’s happened. While the 3rd terrorist arrested months later assumed the FBI agent died in the attack — which is how involved he was.