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He did until they paid him off, fired people he doesn't like and his buddy bought it.

Like Comcast (Philadelphia) acquired NBC/SNL in 2011?

Wasn't there a former Comcast employee as CEO of "X" initially?


Trump stated this today:

> My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME! Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE! Oh well, far worse things can happen.


Goes to show that paying bullies only buys temporary relief.

Grandpa forgot that they paid him bribes but his handlers will quickly remind him of it.

Yes, because that's a pragmatic and realistic solution.

I hope this signals a move away from Liquid Glass. It's an absolutely awful design. Android has enough of its own problems that I'm not in a rush to switch, but I'm really not happy at all with this new design direction Apple has taken.

It's kinda funny that 20 years ago the Mac cases were translucent plastic, and the UI was brushed metal, now it's the opposite, lol.

interesting observation, indeed funny!

I don’t know how Samsung has been getting away with it for so long. They have this stellar reputation as a premium brand when they are more akin to Roku. Their software experience is among the worst in the industry. Their hardware isn’t as good as people perceive it to be either. I bought 5 of their TV’s and there aren’t 2 that display colors the same way with the exact same settings. The quality is abysmal.

I saw a set of reasonably high end 'Colour True' monitors, and they all looked markedly different until they were profiled. Did you compare to a set of other companies TVs before deciding Samsung was garbage?

What does testing some other brand have to do with anything? If I put 5 of the exact same TV’s next to each other and they all look different, they are objectively bad quality. Maybe someone else makes something better or worse, but the ones in front of me are still bad. I literally had all these screens next to each other displaying the same image. It was not possible to adjust them so they all looked the same. The lighting inside the screens wasn’t even consistent. They had different hotspots.

Because I think you will find that all brands suffer with this. It seems wrong to say Samsung is bad, when you have no benchmark suggesting any other brand is better.

If other brands suffer from this, they would also be bad quality.

Or is it just a limitation of the technology?

This guy is the Jim Cramer of tech CEO's.

Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development. It's not like everybody is going to become a vibe coder and there won't be a need for SaaS or low code solutions. I think tech people overestimate the capability and willingness for the average Joe to vibe code or engage with technology beyond the minimum required.


> Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development [emphasis mine].

Visual Basic has never been well-regarded as a platform for "professional software development," so the analogy doesn't fit in that aspect.


I think that's the point they were making.

The point I was making was VB was never considered a tool "for hackers to be much more productive," only a tool "for less technical people to create software."

I knew some hackers who used it back in the day. They were the types who were good with computers and could write shell scripts, but they were not professional programmers. They knew how to do what they needed done. The people I know today who are into vibe coding kind of fit that same mold. They want something done and they do it themselves, but they aren't necessarily good at coding or enjoy doing it.

Ehh, I dunno, it was really, really popular back then. I would bet that a non-trivial number of apps were built using VB by actual software engineers. Couldn't find concrete numbers but this article claims at its peak, 2/3rds of all business apps on Windows PCs were in VB: https://retool.com/visual-basic

I recall seeing inventory management systems, airline booking apps for travel agents, custom CRMs, internal LoB apps, check-in kiosks, vending machines, etc. with the tell-tale VB UI, especially the typical VB error dialog after a crash!

I messed around with several other UI toolkits of that era -- AWT, Swing, Qt, Flex/ActionScript -- and none was as productive as VB for simple apps. It was just the right amount of simplicity and development velocity for the myriad simple use-cases that were perfectly happy with rigid layouts.


People vibe code, for sure. But what are the results? Vibe coded apps without maintenance that nobody can repair as the code is such a nice mess…

>>apps without maintenance

This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'.

This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake.

Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.


That happened with VB (and particularly with VBA), too.

Linux was dealing with SCO just a few years later. There was also a period where Microsoft was out to destroy Linux.

The difference is that Linux was well supported by the corporate world when the SCO/Microsoft lawsuit took place

I would like to try Lobsters, but they don’t have open registration and I don’t know anyone already there.


Ask on the IRC channel for an invite (and probably link your HN profile to prove you aren't crazy)


Crazy?

Maybe not the best choice of word, but we're all familiar with people on the internet who are poorly behaved and would not be welcome in just about any community.

You don't need an account to lurk.


If you lurk, they eventually will do an invite party. Or join their chats and ask there.


What language do you put that list in? Would you still want to show it to every visitor when you know most of them speak a particular language?

I use to do some work in this area. The first question is difficult and the second is no. We had the best results when we used various methods to detect the preferred language and then put up a language selector with a welcome message in that language. After they made a selection, it would stick on return visits.


> What language do you put that list in? Would you still want to show it to every visitor when you know most of them speak a particular language?

Judging by... a large number of websites, you make the list available in a topbar, and each language is named in itself. You don't apply one language to the entire list.

Here's the first page that popped into my head as one that would probably offer multiple languages (and it does!):

https://www.dyson.com/en

They've got the list in a page footer instead of a header, but otherwise it's an absolutely standard language selector. It does technically identify countries rather than languages. The options range from Azərbaycan to Україна. They are -- of course -- displayed to every visitor.

Why would you want to force someone to consume your website in the wrong language?

And why would the list be in a single language, again?


You’re looking at it with the perspective of someone who understands the language the site defaults to. Most non-native speakers have a hard time finding the link and they leave.


No, I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who has needed to use that language selector in the past. Understanding the language the site defaults to wouldn't help, because the selector doesn't use that language anyway.

> Most non-native speakers have a hard time finding the link

You might notice the colorful flag right next to it.


Flags are a terrible way to indicate language. At best, they are unclear. At worst, they can be offensive.

Assuming you are a US company catering to non-English speakers in the US, which flag would you use for Spanish? Which flags would you use to differentiate between Mandarin and Cantonese? What would you do in Canada where they speak English and French? Show a French flag?


Except they're recognizable across languages. Faced with a UI in a language I don't know, going to settings -> languages -> my preferred language is a total guessing game. Meanwhile, if I'm confronted by a UI that has a tiny flag icon in the top, I know I can click on that and get to something familiar. Yes, someone looking to get offended can nitpick your flag choice, but a Spanish flag vs a Mexican flag for Spanish will at least let the user get to something closer to what they know, even though there's quite a bit of difference on the ground between Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Mexico. If your internationalization team is well funded enough to offer both, then show both flags. Same for UK English and American English, Chinese Simplify, Traditional, and Cantonese. And yes, Quebecoise French and French in France. Offer as many flags as you actually have translations for. If you can have a Chinese flag and a Hong Kong flag, users will appreciate it. Having a two level menu is also an option. Click on the Canada flag, which then offers Francaise and English is also an option.

Well, one of us has done research and work in this area. I don’t know what you’ve been doing. All of your suggestions perform poorly in the real world.

You can determine user's language from IP address location. Of course, there are users with VPNs, but they probably are used to seeing foreign content. For example, Youtube shows me advertisement in a language I don't understand despite my language header saying I only understand "en-US" and "en" languages. So this header is unnecessary, even Youtube ignores it.

Also, when using VPN, Google typically uses a language based on IP address, not my language header. I assume the header is only useful for fingerprinting today.


> You can determine user's language from IP address location.

There are reasons why it might not work (VPN is only one of them; there are others such as places with multiple languages, people traveling to foreign countries, and others), although it is also a bad idea for other reasons as well.

If the user specifies the language then you should use that one. I think it would probably be better to use the following order of figuring out which language you should want:

1. If the URL specifies the language to use, then use the language specified by the URL.

2. If the language is not specified by the URL, use the language specified by any cookies that are set for the purpose of selecting the language.

3. If the language is not specified by URL or cookies, but the user is logged in and the user account has a language setting, use the language specified by the user account. (If TLS client authentication is being used, then you might consider adding an extension into the client's X.509 certificate to select the language.)

4. If the language is not specified by URL or cookies or the user's account, or the user is not logged in, use the Accept-Language header.

5. If the language is not specified by URL or cookies or the user's account, or the user is not logged in, or the Accept-Language header is not present or cannot be parsed or does not specify any language that the request file is available in, then use the default, such as the language that it was originally written in.


> You can determine user's language from IP address location.

I live in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. I do not yet speak enough Telugu or Hindi or Urdu to be useful, and cannot read Hindi or Urdu at all; but I’m a foreigner who grew up on English only, rather rare around here, so let’s consider native Indians instead. Many can speak these languages but not read them in their native scripts, only romanised (in which case they can probably speak English tolerably). And many (many) come from other parts of India (or even Nepal) and can’t speak Telugu. Or are Muslim and at least prefer to deal in Hindi, often not having very good Telugu. And so on. It’s messy.

Some IP geolocation doesn’t even get the city right—I’ve seen Noida suggested, which is up north in Hindi territory.


To be fair, that’s true of many languages and programming domains. The web, in particular, is one where you have to keep pace or end up out of the field.

Java and C# are a couple other popular languages where the same is also true.


There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Every enterprise OSS company operates like that. People paying for support and funding the project get to make requests. Anyone else can submit a PR or be happy with the free software. It’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.

Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.


The "no guarantee of fitness for a purpose" people put on the terms of software they sell is bullshit. There is something wrong with selling software with some functionality and then requiring customers to buy other pieces of software to make that functionality work.

That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.


You could ask the company to remove that clause for you, but it may come with two or three extra zeroes at the end of the price tag because of the legal and support ramifications that come with it.

You could make such a clause illegal, but then all software would have to come with those two or three extra zeroes.


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