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The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?

There is more to the New York Times Company than meets the eye [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Ne...


That's the parent's point...

As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.

International prestige and internet-centered strategy (online games, lifestyle...).

It's notable that they blame "our upstream provider" when it's quite literally the same company. I can't imagine GitHub engineers are very happy about the forced migration to Azure.

Having worked there around 2020-2021 there were many folks not happy with being forced to use azure and being forced to build GitHub actions based on azure devops. Lots of AWS usage still existed at that time but these days u bet it’s mostly gone.

I would imagine the majority of Github engineers there currently joined post MS acquisition.

That doesn't necessarily mean they're happy about Azure as a backend.

I've been a software "engineer" for over 20 years, and my personal experience is that software engineers are basically never happy.

> personal experience is that software engineers are basically never happy.

Being happy means:

- you don't feel the need to automate more manual tasks (you lack laziness)

- you don't feel the need to make your system faster (you lack impatience)

- you don't feel the need to make your system better (you lack hubris)

So basically, happiness is a Sin.


I’ve used AWS for almost 20 years and I can tell you it’s more stable than Azure

I have zero doubts.

True enough. The world is never as predictable as the computers we program, and the computers we program are never as predictable as we feel they should be.

Plenty of happy engineers at the other cloud. :)

I presume you mean the Oracle cloud?

Nobody is happy with Oracle anything! It has some users because it is free. It has paid users because Larry Ellison bribed the government. Nobody would choose it voluntarily.

No, gcp. Was a happy customer for many years, now I work there.

A bunch less today than a year ago.

Autonomy, decent pay, non toxic environment and non bullshit job.

It isnt actually all that much but most devs who have all of these I've come across are happy.


Agreed. I've had this more often than not, and while every job has its little gripes, if I have those things the rest is well, just part of the job.

> notable that they blame "our upstream provider" when it's quite literally the same company

As in why don't they mention Azure by name?

Or as in there shouldn't be isolated silos?


A few years ago I talked to an developer advocate for Azure. I wanted to know why it took for ever when you wanted a new public IP. My take was that it felt like they went out on the internet to look for an IP to purchase from a 3rd. party. The answer I got was that do to the silos within Microsoft it might as well be a 3rd party supplier. The slowness is exactly because IPs are/were a managed by another Microsoft entity, who views any interaction, even within the company, as hostile.

I get your point, but it just sounds a bit funny when it's an artefact of corporate structure that it's true.

Like imagine if AWS was composed of separate companies for different services - Fargate was an Heroku acquisition say - and then they all went down and blamed their 'upstream provider' because they can't work without say VPC or EC2 availability.

I think that's all GP meant, it just reads a bit funny, not that it's wrong.


Yup, they didn't mention it by name, it was stated as "our upstream provider".

something about antifreeze in the dogfood

Your definition of "trivial" is not everyone's definition of trivial.


True, but the point remains that defining the whole as "down" when a subset is dilutes the value.


github haters (who still use the platform, for free) are the worst


Rosetta Code is what you're looking for, I believe: https://rosettacode.org/


It's an incredible show but the finale "season" catapults it into my personal top 3 children's shows of all time. They did an incredible job of bringing it full circle and tying a bow on it. Tumble Leaf doesn't normally make you cry the way Bluey does, but the finale will have you bawling.


He co-founded and sold Segment. You think he was just at OpenAI to collect a check? He lays out exactly why he joined OpenAI and why he's leaving. If you think everyone does things only for cynical reasons, it might be a reflection more of your personal impulses than others.


Just because someone claims they are speaking in good faith doesn’t mean we have to take their word for it. Most people in tech dealing with big money are doing it for cynical reasons. The talk of changing the world or “doing something hard” is just marketing typically.


Calvin works incredibly hard and has very little ego. I was surprised he joined OpenAI since he's loaded from the Segment acquisition, but if anyone it makes sense he would do this. He's always looking to find the hardest problem and work on it.

That's what he did at Segment even in the later stages.


Someone putting their work project over their newborn in this circumstance (returning early from pay leave no less) is 100% ego driven.


Newborns need constantly mom, not dad. Moms need husbands or their moms to help. The way it works is you agree what to do as a family (to do it or not to do it) and everybody is happy with their lives. You can be a great dad and husband and still do all of it when it makes sense and your wife supports it etc. Not having kids in the first place could be considered ego driven, not this.


Incredible that you've managed to post this from the 1950's


No, he's right. I just went through newborn phase right now and the only person that needed is mom. Kid wanted nothing to do with me. He just wanted food and sleep.


Your poor partner.


The Café was my second home as a rural teenager into Macs and programming at a time when no other kids were. The 90s being what they were, my mom even let me fly solo to meet other Café members at the old MacHack conferences (in Dearborn, Michigan!).

I have nothing but fond memories of the 90s Mac community. It really was a special time and place. I hope my kids find their equivalent of these spaces.


A lot of the content of that book has been thoroughly debunked. A good starting point if you’re curious: https://www.platformer.news/anxious-generation-jonathan-haid...


That’s a pretty poor starting point if you expect the reader to leave with the position that Haidt’s been discredited.

I’m curious, have you read the book?


Debunked isn’t the correct term here. That would imply that the data is false or it’s misinformation. Instead the article you linked states:

    On the other hand, data on this issue is mixed, and some studies contradict one another.
So a better way to talk about it is that the data doesn’t yet make a cut or dry case one way or another.

Another quote from the article you linked

    Haidt argues that waiting for stronger evidence could be even more dangerous. He writes: “If you listen to the alarm ringers and we turn out to be wrong, the costs are minimal and reversible. But if you listen to the skeptics and they turn out to be wrong, the costs are much larger and harder to reverse.” … as a mother, as someone who writes about the harms of tech and tech companies, I see his point.
So even if we don’t take the data to be 100% convincing, it’s by no means “debunked” and something that we should just completely ignore.


Why is it funny? Homebrew is the de facto standard terminal packaging tool for macOS.


<cries in MacPorts>


I also use MacPorts, but certainly have often noticed that Homebrew has some package that MacPorts doesn't.

I guess there's nothing stopping me from moving to Homebrew other than familiarity.


I haven't looked at Homebrew since that got started. The philosophical difference at that time was using macports and having a consistent and managed */local/ collection of tools with self contained dependencies vs. adding new tools with dependencies tied to the current Mac OS release.

I still use MacPorts for that reason and it is easy enough to create a local portfile for whatever isn't in Macports.

I find this to be the easy way to manage networked development computers.


I used MacPorts a decade ago, but at some point realized that Homebrew had more packages that were kept consistently up-to-date. Switched and never looked back.


I switched away back to macports when homebrew decided to get rid of formula options. To be honest, I always find homebrew frustrating, it feels that they've often made technical decisions that are not necessarily the best but they've been much more successful at marketing themselves than macports.


If I’m reading the formula docs right, only homebrew-core packages don’t support it (due to CI not testing them). That part does suck, though.

Other taps, like homebrew-ffmpeg, offer a ton of options.


oh, I actually hadn't realized that this is what they settled on in the end. ffmpeg is the quintessential package where options make sense so good that that's still supported.

The other issue I experienced with homebrew around that time were related to having different versions of openssl installed because I had some old codebase I had to run (and for performance reasons didn't want to use docker). But that's definitely a edge case.


I hear a lot about people moving to nix-darwin, is it popular or am I showing my own bubble


I’m a full-time Mac and iOS developer, have been for almost 20 years, and this is the first I’ve heard of it. Might just be my bubble, but I don’t think it’s a huge thing yet. (I’m going to check it out now!)


I use nixpkgs on MacOS, is nix-darwin is a different project?

I love Nix but it probably has too many rough edges for the typical homebrew user.


Its a different complementary thing. It lets you define your macos settings the same way you would on nixos


it's worth noting for Homebrew users that it also has a nice built-in module for managing a Homebrew installation by generating a Brewfile for you. So you can transition at your own pace, if you like


I've never heard of it until now, but will check it out! :-)


I never even heard of nix-Darwin. Interesting.


Apple should do like this library, re-release Homebrew with their own name on the README and people would lap it up.


>Why is it funny? Homebrew is the de facto standard terminal packaging tool for macOS.

It's funny because a multi-trillion dollar company can't be bothered to release a native package manager or an official binary repository for their OS after decades of pleading from developers.


They released "App Store" for the average Joe. We can all agree it is not suitable for power users, but at the same time what would power users gain over existing solutions if they were to introduce something?


You can brew install mas (I think) and then install/manage Mac store stuff via the cli pretty easily


They did, they sponsored MacPorts. (And then Swift Package Manager.)


So you want them to Sherlock Homebrew?


"Sherlocking" can be unfortunate for a developer, but it's odd to view it as an inherently bad thing. A package manager is a core OS feature, even Microsoft has WinGet now.


> A package manager is a core OS feature

It has become a core OS feature. Historically, you see the set of core OS features expand tremendously. Back in the 80’s drawing lines and circles wasn’t even a core OS feature (not on many home computers, and certainly not on early PCs), bit-mapped fonts were third part add-ons for a while, vector-based fonts were an Adobe add-on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Type_Manager), printer drivers were third party, etc.

I think that’s natural. As lower layers become commodities (try making money selling an OS that only manages memory and processes), OS sellers have to add higher layer stuff to their products to make money on them.

As to Sherlocking, big companies cannot do well there in the eyes of “the angry internet”:

- don’t release feature F: “They don’t even support F out of the box. On the competitor’s product, you get that for free”

- release a minimal implementation: “They have F, but it doesn’t do F1, F2, or F3”

- release a fairly full implementation: “Sherlocking!” and/or nitpicking about their engineering choices.


it's odd to feel empathetic when someone has their livelihood taken from them?


Well, without charging for it, right?


They should do it to become the de facto platform for programming.


I'm just not looking forward to the inevitable subscription billing dark patterns that are almost guaranteed to be rife in alternative app stores. Call to unsubscribe, early cancellation fees, unsubscribe "errors", etc. Say what you want about the App Store, but the fact that you can quickly and easily see all your subscriptions in one place along with how much they cost and the ability to cancel them easily is incredibly nice.


The exciting thing will be a real open source repository. An entire app source with no dark patterns of any kind.


If those stores comply with EU law, that shouldn’t be the case. See for example https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_.... I can see how stores will pop up that don’t care about laws and regulations, but I would be hesitant to pay for anything there.


have you seen spotify’s new app in europe?

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-01-24/the-dma-means-a-bett...

they pushed hard for apple to open up in order push more ads.


It's not "more ads". It's what Spotify has literally been offering forever, but couldn't show to people because Apple's rules literally prevent anyone from linking to any payments/purchases outside of App Store.


Good news is that nobody is forcing you to use the alt stores. You can stay in the Apple App Store all you want.


And hope an app you need to use is always available on the Apple App Store.


Is this not the case on Android?


But then there's the flip side of how inflexible the app store subscriptions are: https://www.hey.com/apple/iap/


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