Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | tpmoney's commentslogin

It’s really only “misleading” to the extent that any offset/credit scheme is also misleading. Inherent in the words “net zero” is the fact that emissions will continue, but the claim is that something else will be done to make the total effect the same as if zero emission occurred.

It’s no more misleading than “my net income was $X” is misleading because my gross income was $X + $Y.


The touchbar was great when apps used it for useful things. It’s main sin was replacing the physical escape key and I suspect if even just that key had remained physical most people would have been fine with the touchbar because most people don’t really use the f-keys by touch. Most of the time when I’m using the f-keys, it’s to use the debugger for an IDE. And that’s where the touchbar really shined because instead of remembering whether f6 or f5 was step over, the touchbar could just display the expected symbol.

Personally I’d love to see the touchbar make a comeback either as an addition to the fkeys row, or as a set of e-ink/oled physical buttons where the fkeys are. Allow the displayed legends to update while still keeping the physicality.


Whether or not you agree with their position on JIT, their claim is more complete and nuanced than that. Their actual denial states:

    We have reviewed your submission and determined that your request falls outside the scope of
    Article 6(7) DMA because it is not seeking interoperability with a software feature accessed or
    controlled by iOS or iPadOS and used by an equivalent Apple service. Apple does not itself
    offer emulation functionalities on iOS or iPadOS and it does not offer JIT compilation for non-
    browser apps on iOS or iPadOS.
Specifically they are arguing that since the only application on iOS that is allowed to do JIT is safari and that since they already have access to that JIT capabilities for other browser apps, the DMA does not require them to create a broader JIT capability for all applications.

That’s not a wholly unreasonable stance though I can certainly see how the EU might argue that the capability existing for browsers at all implies it should be available for all applications regardless of their purpose. This does make me wonder about the swift playground app. Is that not using JIT to execute the swift code?


    the process can stretch across months or years before developers see any practical benefit, even though the underlying right to interoperability is already supposed to exist
Not that I don’t think Apple is being petulant and maliciously compliant, but just because a politician passes a law declaring something to be so doesn’t mean that it is so. Apple built their platform for years assuming a lot of these things are and would remain private. When you design private APIs and locked down features, you make different choices and design decisions than if you make open APIs. Any interoperability was going to take months or years to get to, no matter what.

TFA claims that it needs to be built into the platform from the start. Which would seem to disqualify most Apple platforms.

This is both the best and the worst thing about the internet. On the one hand, it's amazing how many completely niche things a person might really care about that they can find a community for online. The MAME project doesn't just capture the arcade games everyone thinks about, but it captures things like the old Tiger LCD handhelds, and mechanical games like coin pushers and pinball machines, and even those old bartop trivia games. All because the internet allows a small group of people who really care about those things and preserving those things to coordinate and work with others who care just as much as they do. Heck most of the retro gaming world works on this.

But at the same time, the internet massively amplifies the effects of a niche being taken over by its most extreme members. The middle between "dabbling interest" in a topic and "this topic is my life and I all I do is eat, drink and sleep this topic" erodes very quickly. If you only care a little or only care about a part of a topic, the internet can be almost as isolating or dismissive as the real world around you too. Some of that is a lot of internet communities are actually a small handful of people who are growing together, so they've already covered the same topics over and over that newer entrants might want to cover. But some of it is also just a level of care or obsession that many people won't ever reach. Popping into a "Show HN" thread, especially about something that was built that has either A) been built before or B) isn't clearly built with a business case can be a very depressing experience as "super carers" tear the thing being shown off to pieces for choosing the wrong language, or the wrong library or the wrong security model. And I get that some of this is just people trying to covey hard won knowledge, but it does sometimes feel like the equivalent of having an astronomy club where half the people are amateurs with back yard telescopes and half are people working at and with mountain top radio telescopes all having discussions about the best equipment to buy.


I agree that some topics can be dominated by outspoken 'experts' who don't have very good social skills. They can be hostile to newcomers as they try to keep their little club exclusive. They can also ridicule anyone who tries to introduce a new idea or direction.

But hopefully, the club itself will have enough reasonable members to keep those people in check.


This is kind of a revisionist view of software. I think most of the consistency we remember from software past is because skipping the OS tollboxes and doing your own custom UI was hard rather than because most software developers cared about consistency. Yes the OS vendors did, but one doesn't need to go far to find applications that very much did their own thing. "Bubbly" and "goopy" UIs of the sort "Kai's Power Tools" exemplified were all over in the 90's. Everyone's favorite Winamp was famously not using the standard UI toolkits and had a heavily customizable UI. To say nothing of the many software packages that used the standard toolkits only far enough to give you a window that was then filled with some sort of Macromedia or similar UI that was then completely proprietary to the application itself (think encyclopedia and other educational software of the day). Even the OS vendors couldn't help themselves sometimes (looking at you QuickTime 7)

If older software was more consistent, it's only because the OS didn't provide nearly the same degree of customization options that HTML and CSS provide developers today. Not because of some pride in consistency.


At least in the goopy days it was VERY clear what was and was not a button.

But is that a function of the cars or a function of the urban density? One imagines that the suburban and rural areas that are rated highest quality of life are almost all car-centric

Cities have existed for much longer than automobiles have and have somehow prospered since millenia. I don't think the recent invention of automobiles has anything to do with proper functioning of cities.

I agree, so it's a good thing I wasn't arguing anything of the sort. Just pushing back on the idea that just because "cities" with the highest quality of life ratings are non-car-centric that we can infer anything useful about whether cars in general and personal autos in particular are generally good or bad. It seems entirely possible that cars could be a net good up to a certain population density.

Except that former message takes too long to read, especially if you’re actually driving at the time.

I had the unhappy experience of driving a car with collision warnings. I got 3 in one day. It would be nice after the fact to know what it thought was happening.

I think this is less about “respect” and more about the general change in business attitudes that happened over the 90s and the ability for software to be more verbose.

On the attitude side, software development, developers and management shifted heavily from stodgy “IBM suits” to “renegade / hacker” teams. That shift showed in more than just dress codes, it showed in how software talked in general and in how companies talked to their customers. And more screen real estate, more dynamic software and more dynamic interfaces meant communication could be more verbose. “PC LOAD LETTER” is plenty succinct, and most people hated it.


> And more screen real estate, more dynamic software and more dynamic interfaces meant communication could be more verbose.

Could have been, but the opposite happened. Instead of changelogs, one has "bug fixes and performance improvements". Instead of KB686848 and KB7849867 one has "cummulative update"


Surely the poster child of the 90s for 'not IBM' was Google. And that worked because it removed things.

So yes, I agree somewhat, but I think it's more a corruption of that original ethos by said suits. But I suppose that's true of everything on the internet.


I would argue that behavior is idiomatic for macOS but not idiomatic for web browsers. Keyboard navigation of all elements has never been the default in macOS. Tab moves between input fields, but without turning on other settings, almost never moved between other elements because macOS was a mouse first OS from its earliest days. Web browsers often broke this convention, but Safari has from day one not used tab for full keyboard navigation by default.

And this highlights something that I think the author glosses over a little but is part of why idioms break for a lot of web applications. A lot of the keyboard commands we're used to issue commands to the OS and so their idioms are generally defined by the idioms of the OS. A web application, by nature of being an application within an application, has to try to intercept or override those commands. It's the same problem that linux (and windows) face with key commands shared by their terminals and their GUIs. Is "ctrl-c" copy or interrupt? Depends on what has focus right now, and both are "idiomatic" for their particular environments. macOS neatly sidesteps this for terminals because "ctrl-c" was never used for copy, it was always "cmd-c".

Incidentally, what you're looking for in Safari is either "Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage" setting in the Advanced settings tab. By default with that off, you would use "opt-Tab" to navigate to all elements.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: