A Message from the Amazon Books Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.readersunited.com <comment><USER2> Author here. My publisher is one of the "big five" (not Hachette), and although my books are not affected by this dispute directly, it could be only a matter of time before they are.

The problem, as I see it, is that Amazon has so much of the market share not only for e-books but for regular books that they can dictate terms that are highly favorable to them.

While you could argue that those terms also benefit the reader -- for now -- the fact is that ultimately, consumers aren't served when one monolithic company gets to effectively call the shots. It may not be a monopoly in the legal sense, but in practice, it has many of the same negative effects.

<comment><USER3> You're entirely correct. The difference between their historical analogy and the present case is that the present dispute has nothing to do with the technology (e-books have already been pretty universally embraced), it has to do with who benefits from its use.

They're using the domain "readersunited" to imply that it's readers who benefit, which is only true in a very zero-sum way because Amazon is keeping all the power to cut author/published margins so hard in the future, and not at all true in the typical sense that a new technology can cut costs and introduce benefits for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that 's 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger._

This doesn't prove what Amazon wants to claim it does.

1) Authors don't just earn royalties from ebook sales. They also earn royalties from hardcover/paperback sales.. and if dropping the ebook price causes lowered paperback sales, then the authors could earn less.

So merely showing that lower ebook prices increase ebook sales does not prove Amazon's claim that lower prices increase authors' royalties.

2) Amazon's test may not even prove that it would increase ebook sales. Hachette earns money from the sale if the book is sold at BN, Amazon, or any retailer. If only Amazon lowers it's price to $10, then Amazon may just be getting additional sales that would have gone to other retailers. So the only thing Amazon's test proves is that Amazon would be better off in a fictional world where Amazon has the lowest price in the market -- 33% lower than any other retailer.

<comment><USER5> The assumption here I think is that a book at $9.99 might attract people who wouldn't buy it at $14.99. I'm probably one of those people, particularly with fiction books (computer science books/math books/etc are another issue). There are so many choices that are far below the $14.99 price, that unless it's from a favorite author I'd happily pass up the higher price for another book, or another form of media (like a game). It doesn't matter what other retailers offer the price at, $14.99 is simply too high for an e-book, and I only read fiction books as e-books. I might be the minority, but given the expertise of Amazon at selling books, I think that Amazon probably has a valid point.

You're right though, that it doesn't completely prove the point, but I think it definitely makes a point. People who wouldn't buy the e-book at 14.99 are probably unlikely to go out and buy the same book from another retailer for 14.99. The question is if it really increases the market share of the book, or if instead lowering the price on amazon makes everyone who would buy the book would just go to amazon for the cheaper price. (Given that e-books cost nearly nothing to distribute, I would think that the price drop would pretty easily pay for itself though)

<comment><USER4> You may be one of those people (where a price decrease would induce a purchase), but your personal value judgement is not relevant here. Personally, I don't read fiction, so the value of a fiction book is $0. Does this mean that the appropriate price for ebooks is $0? Obviously not.

Amazon has put forth a number that is an aggregate.. it takes into account your value judgement, mine, and 100,000 other peoples judgement of the value of an ebook.

Which reminds of a 3rd case that could affect Amazon's test: people do not purchase a generic ebook. They purchase a specific ebook, and the value of that ebook very much depends on the content. A poorly written book is worth less than a well written book.. and a book on a popular subject is worth more than a book on an unpopular subject.

If the book (or books) Amazon tested were more mispriced than the typical book (so they showed a larger increase in sales because $10 was closer to the actual value of the book.. whereas maybe $12 (or $20) represents the value of the average book).. then when all books are lowered in price, the result may be a decline for Hachett and the authors.

So I've put forth 3 cases that may affect Amazon's test. If just 2 in 13 people are affected by ANY of these 3 cases, then Amazon's conclusions are wrong, and the net result would be a decrease in revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The movie ticket vs. book price example in the article above seems like it comes from the article below. This is a great read regarding the history of the paperback. I know this is a complex issue, but I really do feel Amazon is on the consumer's side. $15+ for a non-transferable ebook is ludicrous.

[http://mentalfloss.com/article/12247/how-paperbacks- transfor...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/12247/how-paperbacks-transformed- way-americans-read)

<comment><USER7> > I really do feel Amazon is on the consumer's side. $15+ for a non- > transferable ebook is ludicrous.

Hmm. I agree that that price is in many cases too high. But as you say, that's because ebooks are non-transferable. Is creating and selling the devices and marketplace that make those ebooks non-transferable also on the consumer's side?

Amazon could have adopted EPUB for the Kindle instead of making their own ebook formats, and they could have pushed for higher-priced-but-transferable ebooks without DRM. They haven't done either at any point. It looks to me like Amazon is only on the consumer's side when they can strongarm the consumer into spending more money at Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's regrettable that some of the authors are losing sales, but I think that Amazon is basically in the right, for the following reasons:

1\. Their arguments with regards to price elasticity are supported by (admittedly, Amazon's) data, and are intuitively plausible. Cheaper books sell more, yielding more revenue. The cost of production is substantially lower for ebooks, so passing on some of the savings to consumers seems fair, and further, so long as a literate public is seen as a good thing, there's intangible benefits to consider as well.

2\. It's a dispute between two businesses, and Amazon has a legal right to not list/stock books. Honestly, it's like a caricature out of _Atlas Shrugged_ \-- you have to sell our books at these prices (of which authors get < 10%) or you're somehow the villain... as opposed to a business that just does not want to sell on those terms. Further, their contribution to the livelihoods of the authors is probably greater than the "value-add" of a publishing house. If sales and distribution from a website is such an easy thing to do, then how is it possible that a single company feels reasonably secure with delisting so many supposedly desirable books? The amount of effort necessary to make 2-day delivery so much cheaper than going to Borders is immense. They also built the Kindle (as well as its ecosystem) and sold the device at a loss, which has helped make the ebook market so big.

3\. The "authors" are the only really sympathetic characters in this drama, but they appear to have no agency of their own. Why not move to a different publisher, or publish on Amazon? Because Hachette won't let them out of their contract? I can see why they would want to group together to avoid getting trampled between the two companies, but why side with Hachette? Unless their objective is "fewer books sold, higher prices, and smaller royalty payments", their collective bargaining power would seem to be better put towards forcing Hachette to either agree to terms or release them to find other representation. Agitating on Hachette's behalf is probably the easiest way to get money flowing again, but it's hardly the right thing to do.

Given that Amazon's suggested model could be more profitable for all parties, why are the publishers resisting? I suspect that it comes down to the fact that if ebooks become the main method of book distribution, the value of being a publisher would decrease substantially. Amazon (or similar businesses) could handle the printing and distribution, marketing, editing, type-setting, and similar tasks could be passed to firms whose sole purpose is that task.

Regardless of how this shakes out between Hachette and Amazon, I can't really see a future for monolithic publishers.

<comment><USER9> It could just be bad writing, but Amazon's point about elasticity reads like a sleight-of-hand trick to me. They say:

> So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular > e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same > e-book at $9.99.

So, 74,000 people choose to buy the cheaper book. Great! But without the price cut, those people might have bought other books. Maybe some other $9.99 book, maybe some $12.99 book, maybe none at all. Growing the market _for an individual book_ is only impressive if you're selling the book to people who would not have bought a book at all, not if you're competing with other books on price.

> The pie is simply bigger.

The 'pie' they're referring to here is not publishing revenues in total, but revenues for a _single book_. This feels sneaky because when people refer to the 'pie' as an economic metaphor, they generally mean the total across a sector or the economy as a whole. That's probably not codified anywhere, so it's not possible to say that Amazon's usage is definitively wrong, but it's something that can be easy to misinterpret in a way very favourable to Amazon's argument.

Now, maybe Amazon really does mean that revenues across the whole industry would go up if prices were lower, as books take market share away from other sources of entertainment and information. If so, their example case is a bad one, because it doesn't demonstrate this. It feels a bit like they're talking a big talk about promoting books against other forms of entertainment, but when talking facts and numbers they're giving a subtly different story.

EDIT: I should say that I broadly agree with the rest of the OP. Ebook pricing does look high to me, and I would like to see lower prices. The general 'vision' that the OP puts across is one that I like, I'm just not sure how much it aligns with the reality of what's happening.

<comment><USER10> I think what you're missing is that Amazon's point, that lower ebook prices are generally good for all parties, applies to _all_ ebooks. They do use the phrase "a particular e-book" in their example, but I assumed that the real desire is for all ebooks to get a similarly proportional discount.

Of course, even if we just consider a price drop on a single ebook, it's still a valid point that this helps that ebook compete against other ebooks that don't change their prices, and there's nothing wrong with that.

<comment><USER11> Lower e-book prices are certainly good for Amazon. It's unproven if they're good for everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we "just talk." We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. "

And the solutions they then present are very admirable. However, it was still amazon that took the unilateral action to punish authors, and it was likely the backlash from that that motivated those three noble solutions. It's a shame amazon had to poison the well with that move, because everything else points to Hachette being dumb and making bad decsions that hurt authors.

"Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store."

Hachette stonewalled. Amazon took action. Sales of Hachettes' titles. Out store.

Clearly, the authors did not factor into these moves.

"the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that's 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger."

That's great, but it's not a justification to hurt authors. It may be more revenue and customers for amazon in the long run, but these are authors who have put their souls into their art and worked for years. Jeopardizing their release window and sales for a percentage is evil and out of touch.

<comment><USER13> You keep propagating the myth that it's all Amazon's doing.

"Amazon took unilateral action to punish authors" ?

The contract between Amazon and Hachette expired.

They started negotiating a new contract. They can't agree to terms hence Amazon limiting Hachette's stok because, well, they no longer have a contract to sell Hachette's books on Amazon.

There was nothing "unilateral" about it. Amazon doesn't agree to Hachette's term. Hachette doesn't agree to Amazon's terms.

Amazon didn't "punish" authors. It didn't even "punish" Hachette. 2 giant companies failed to agree on distribution terms.

It's regrettable that authors are collateral damage here but how do you put the blame fully on Amazon and none of it on Hachette?

Especially given that Amazon is the party that proposed a way to compensate the authors during negotiations. 3 proposals, actually, all of which Hachette rejected. Because Hachette cares about their authors so much.

<comment><USER14> I'm not doubting that's the case, I honestly don't know - but Amazon could have been much clearer about that. Using the language "when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store." makes it seem like a deliberate and voluntary action on their part and seems really dumb if your claim is accurate.

<comment><USER15> It does not seem all that even. As I understand it Amazon is demanding Hachette to sell their books at a certain price. This is highly unusual. Amazon can demand higher percentage of the sales, etc. but controlling the price of your product? As a business I would never agree to such conditions. And due to Amazon's massive reach, this starts smelling like blackmail. Why do author's side with Hachette? I'd speculate that people are concerned with having a single player with such massive power, and this episode confirms their worst fears.

<comment><USER16> "As I understand it Amazon is demanding Hachette to sell their books at a certain price. This is highly unusual"

how is this different from Walmart deciding at what price it sells its suppliers' product. Almost all the retailers decide the final selling price of suppliers' products, that is the reason they are able to undercut mom&pop retail stores. Only exception on supplier side is Apple and to some extent Bose who have the brand leverage to dictate their prices to retailers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> John Scalzi comments further: [http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/08/09/amazon- gets-increasing...](http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/08/09/amazon-gets- increasingly-nervous/)

I particularly like the point that self-pub authors ought to be happy that Hatchette is at higher price points, since it leaves the more lucrative markets for them. This is a tribal dispute for most authors on both sides.

</comment><comment><USER18> As an author I support Amazon's position because as they say, books compete with the video game, TV, movie, etc. markets, and keeping consumer book prices lower helps grow the book market relative to other forms of entertainment, and I would argue that books benefit society more than video games and TV (but not necessarily movies).

<comment><USER19> Please look a little but further than your own self interest. Do you really want one entity having a monopoly on book distribution?

<comment><USER18> I agree that long term, there is a danger in Amazon becoming even more of a monopoly. That said, I find it ridiculous that a non-transferable eBook can sometimes cost very close to the cost of a hard cover print book.

I was not making my previous comment out of self interest, BTW. In 25 years of being a published author I have only made chump change (less than $150K) on my writing. I earn my living as a software developer. I write because I enjoy it and through writing I have met some very interesting people who I would not have had a chance to meet otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was also sent as an email to people with a KDP account

<comment><USER19> lol, and they dare to mention Orwell? Are you kidding me?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The best source of 'cheap' books is the library. The only cost is a little bit of inconvenience. Yet library usage is dramatically down over the last few decades. This suggests to me that there is little demand for cheaper books.

The biggest 'cost' to reading a book for many is not the money spent to acquire the book, it's the several hours of leisure time required to read the book, time that could be spent doing something else.

This suggests to me that the overall book demand curve is fairly inelastic.

That Amazon sees more elasticity is not surprising: they're conducting experiments on part of the market. Price has a big influence on what book people buy and where they buy it; but I hypothesize that it has little effect on whether or not they actually buy a book.

<comment><USER21> If you include the value of your time, the library is a more costly option to acquire a book than Amazon for many affluent readers. And most libraries have a small fraction of the books one might want.

The fact that people are choosing an efficient way to get the books they want is hardly evidence of inelastic demand.

<comment><USER20> You're saying that time is valuable. The cost of the book is the dollar price + the time to acquire + the time to read it.

You're saying that the middle cost is significant. That suggests that the latter cost is also significant. Therefore lowering the dollar price of the book has little effect on the total in the above equation.

<comment><USER22> Grossly misguided equation. The cost of the book is the price + the time to acquire. The benefit of the book is in the enjoyment of reading it -- which implies that readers don't see time spent reading as a "cost", unless you believe they're seeing reading as a benefit and a cost at the same time. Believe it or not, people actually enjoy the process of reading and seeing a work unfold, not just checking a completed book off the reading list.

<comment><USER20> The cost is the movies, video games, time with family etc that you didn't enjoy because you spent time enjoying the book.

Let's put it another way. When do avid readers start reading a new book? When they finish or get bored of their previous book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://screwpulp.com](http://screwpulp.com) has a solution to the ebook pricing problem based on market economics. New books start out as free, then as more copies are downloaded the price goes up.

<comment><USER24> [https://unglue.it/](https://unglue.it/) works in the opposite direction, by releasing books as free Creative Commons works after a bounty has been raised. You can buy your own DRM-free copy for a few bucks, while helping the book reach a free release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Authors should be allowed to price their IP as they see fit. End of story.

</comment><comment><USER26> Amazon is solving a problem that the individual author or reader does not share: they are making the delivery of books more efficient to the marketplace.

Books are in a strange place because the time invested consuming them far outweighs the equivalent cost of purchasing the book. I am not limited by price to the number of books I can consume each month; I am limited by time. Already many readers end up buying more books than they can read. In addition, free books are available at this place called the library.

Music, movies, and the rest of digital content is not like this. You can pick up a video game and play it for an hour, then put it down. (In fact, the stats show most apps are only used a few times, then never used again)

In an author-reader relationship, the author is trying to provide enough value for the reader to spend dozens of hours and many days consuming the material -- and more to the point, the express purpose is to somehow change the mindscape of the consumer. Good books require lots of time and change the reader forever.

So what Amazon is effectively doing is destroying the concept of reading by making it nothing more than an extended version of an mp3 song. But since you can't just consume a book in 3 minutes, more books will be sold and more books will remain unread. Books -- long form content -- will become superfluous. It's all low attention span, immediate pleasure consumption now. I imagine we'll see more and more readers buy an ebook and read a few pages and stop. The nature of reading will change.

And while this might result in more _overall_ book sales, it doesn't do much for the individual relationship an author has with a particular reader.

There's nothing wrong with making books like every other form of digital content. Everything is bits, and bits gotta be free. But as a consumer of good books, Amazon does not have my best interests at heart. It's just playing a numbers game. My best interests actually might be books that cost 100x what they currently do: make me feel some pain and spend some careful thought about what I'm going to spend my time on.

I am not interested in delivering the maximum number of unread ebooks to the most number of non-readers. I am interested in choosing those 5 or 6 books each year that are worth my investment in time to experience. And as an author, I am not interested in maximizing sales. I am interested in maximizing _impact_. Amazon is friend to neither of us.

</comment><comment><USER27> There are more comments on this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156303)

</comment><comment><USER28> Pfft! Amazon using godaddy to register a domain! Seriously? What happened to route53? Too expensive?</comment>


Immutability and Value Objects - <AUTHOR> http://hangar.runway7.net/immutability-and-value-objects

<comment><USER2> Values are stateless and immutable, objects are stateful and mutable. Strictly speaking, the term 'Value Object' is an oxymoron. Unfortunately, in Java you can define values only in terms of classes and objects which leads to continuous confusion. The distinction between values and objects remains unclear for most Java developers.

<comment><USER3> In the first research forays into what became OOP, objects were conceived of as being immutable by definition. That quickly went by the wayside as it ran up against a number of practical hurdles. But even then, in earlier true OOP languages such as Smalltalk there was simply no distinction between values and objects. In classic OOP, everything is an object, period.

Later on, languages such as C++ and Java muddied the waters (imo) by throwing their own distinctive interpretations of what it means to be object-oriented into the ring. One of these 'innovations' was the idea that values and objects are somehow distinct. This idea has nothing to do with OOP orthodoxy and, everything to do with C++ maintaining a strong semantic distinction between the procedural type system it inherited from C and the object-oriented type system it introduced.

Java simply followed C++'s lead on that front, albeit unnecessarily since Java lacks the characteristic (linking with C binaries) that motivated that feature in C++. Thus, there was an incredibly popular language which advertised itself as object-oriented, but featured wooly non-standard (for OOP) semantics for no apparent reason.

Which naturally invites some retconning. Hence the idea that the concept of objects is anything but purely orthogonal to the distinction between value and reference semantics. Without such stories, one is stuck with the more historical story that a central, but often obnoxious and confusing (for learners, at least) feature of the two most popular languages in current usage is simply a hack in one case, and a foolish consistency in the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More nitpicky feedback:

       assertEquals(oneMeter, tenCentimeters);

Of course the code is not wrong per se, it will simply throw an exception, but it still made me frown. I wonder if you really meant to write this.

Anyhow, this is a great article! I value the clear wording.

</comment><comment><USER5> thanks for the posting.

Quick feedback: you use "lX" as a variable name. That makes the code barely readable, because the letter l looks VERY similar to the number 1 in most systems.

It might sound nitpicky but it does distract from the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip :) ... will make an update.</comment></comment>


Show HN: List of serverless failure stories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cristim/serverless-failure-stories <comment><USER2> Really don't understand why anyone puts a side project on a pay-per-use provider when 99% of the projects would be perfectly fine on a $5/mo max vps. Although I also use a prepaid cell phone provider, so maybe I just hate the idea of blank checks.

<comment><USER3> You get 1 million free lambda invocations per month, completely free of infrastructure headaches for simple projects.

You can also make a CloudWatch alarm on billing to throttle your lambda functions at your specified price point. It's only a blank check if you want it to be.

<comment><USER4> > It's only a blank check if you want it to be.

Doesn't AWS force customers of their free tier to provide a valid paying method (i.e., credit card) to be charged once any limit is surpassed?

<comment><USER5> You can throttle serverless services by invocation count. AWS will alert you when an account exceeds a budget, Azure used to let you put a hard limit on the spend, not sure if they still do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The scenarios linked to from the GitHub page are not only related because they deal with serverless technologies. They're akin to one another because, in every case, testing was flawed.

In the first, there was no testing, aside from the trivial. Oddly enough, a lack of formal testing is described as being a symptom of not having "a local version to play with." In the second, the test environment was used in production ("So that we didn't have to wait for the timer to fire "naturally" when we were testing, we were using RunOnStartup = true"). And in the third, there is no test environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's a great summary.

We can add a tl;dr with the root cause for each item in the list. Feel free to send me a PR with this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coming at this from a purely computer science standpoint, I am concerned about "manualization". I don't have a better word for it yet, but it's when humans monitor and control services at a granular level instead of letting a compiler partition and parallelize code internally.

So with AWS Lambda, humans have to decide which microservices should be put into lambdas, and how much they need to be split up (based on the AWS Lambda Limits, which increase over time).

Whereas in a language like Elixer/Erlang or Go, we write code at a high level and the compiler chops it up into threads and spreads it across as many processors as are available dynamically.

I feel, rather strongly actually, that the manual approach is a code smell. Which means that serverless leans towards being more of a trendy solution than a formal one built from first principles. Which means that given time (usually 1-3 years with web tech) we'll see something arrive that looks like a compiler and lamda-izes code somewhat automagically.

That said, there is a window of profit here where anyone who jumps on serverless and knows how to use it can generate cashflow.

Knowing all of this, I would look at previous evolutions of other web technologies for pitfalls to avoid. Having never used AWS Lambda, this is what I would do:

* Treat lambdas as single input/output executables like in the shell. Analogously to avoiding how AngularJS got mired in two-way data binding. This lets us use vast prior experience in data processing graphs rather than having to analyze complex webs of nondeterministic logic and side effects.

* Start from the beginning with development, staging and production environments. Just because it's lambda doesn't mean that we throw out everything we've learned about reliability just to run everything "serverless".

* Don't succumb to premature optimization. All logic can be reduced to functional programming, the highest expression of which is the 0th order functional programming of spreadsheets (which I saw making the rounds of HN the last few days). Write all code to not depend on global shared state. Even if it feels a little inefficient at first, try to do everything declaratively, as functional transformations on data rather than imperative steps storing temporary state (in class member variables, as an unfortunately common example). Then analyze the code near the end of the project and decide which functions might work better as lambdas. Maybe they are utility methods that don't justify having an entire container overhead around them. Maybe they are just glue code that swizzles one interface into another like GraphQL. That's something you'll have to decide.

I've seen problems with highly-partitioned code where versions of included services get out of sync, the friction of dealing with things at the service level outstrips any gains found by separating the code, and it becomes nearly impossible to trace the codepath across services. It becomes obvious that whoever wrote the code wasn't familiar with things like the Actor model. It's fine to break the rules once one is familiar with them, but serverless has a fair amount of brogramming thrown in and the move-fast-break-things mentality is just not compatible with reliable software engineering IMHO. I know, I know, Facebook and Amazon made billions with that approach, but guys like me have to clean up the mess and it's anathema to finding career zen.

Edit: P.S. I forgot to say why monolithic code that is parallelized/optimized internally is usually better (for both rapid-prototyping and long-term). It's because the closer that code is to fully abstracted and statically-analyzable, the more reliable, reusable and resalable it is. This is my rudder after many years of programming, but I look forward to hearing any other opinion someday that might replace it.

<comment><USER8> > Whereas in a language like Elixer/Erlang or Go, we write code at a high > level and the compiler chops it up into threads and spreads it across as > many processors as are available dynamically.

I haven't used Elixir/Erlang (though I've read a fair amount about them), but it seems like the BEAM languages would be an ideal model for serverless because processes don't (have to) know which thread, core, or machine they're running on.

When people deploy Elixir/Erlang in production, do they use a single distributed instance or do they run separate instances in their own containers/VMs like you might with something like Node?</comment></comment>


Introducing /etc/os-release - End to distribution specific release files - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/os-release.html

<comment><USER2> On the one hand the idea is good. In libguestfs we go to huge lengths to deal with the release files of many different Linux and BSD distributions[1].

On the other hand, when was this discussed? Are _all_ the Linux distros and BSD on board? OS X? Windows? (I'm serious)

/etc/os-release has all the problems of /etc/lsb-release, but even fewer people will use it (if you count distro numbers rather than users, hardly anyone is using lsb-release).

This file _could_ have been a lot more useful _if_ it had been discussed with people who might consume it. As it is, we'll be parsing this as a fallback, but continue using distro-specific release files.

[1] [https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/84a4160fd30c46...](https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/84a4160fd30c46575b93f87f6ffc7cc556b0af93/src/inspect_fs_unix.c#L51)

<comment><USER3> And if not then this xkcd comes to mind: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

<comment><USER2> Yes, and this too: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author complains 'lsb_release -d', the standard from ten years ago, isn't always there.

Proposes alternative to fix this, by changing to a new system , which will solve this problem, once it's always there.

<comment><USER5> That lsb_release is "an optional package in many distributions" is only a minor complain:

> There's already the lsb_release tool for this, why don't you just use that? > Well, it's a very strange interface: a shell script you have to invoke (and > hence spawn asynchronously from your C code), and it's not written to be > extensible. It's an optional package in many distributions, and nothing we'd > be happy to invoke as part of early boot in order to show a welcome message. > (In times with sub-second userspace boot times we really don't want to > invoke a huge shell script for a triviality like showing the welcome > message). The lsb_release tool to us appears to be an attempt of abstracting > distribution checks, where standardization of distribution checks is needed. > It's simply a badly designed interface. In our opinion, it has its use as an > interface to determine the LSB version itself, but not for checking the > distribution or version.

And I guess distributions are far more reluctant to install a shell script than adding a file to /etc

<comment><USER4> > It's an optional package in many distributions

If only Linux packaging system had some kind of dependency system. That way systemd and other LSB needing packages could require lsb. You could even have some kind of automated packaging tool, or perhaps modify yellowdog updater, to fetch those dependencies automatically.

<comment><USER6> Attempting to install redhat-lsb on CentOS 6 drags in:

      alsa
      cups
      ghostscript
      gstreamer
      pixman
      qt
      fonts
      poppler
      and more (102 packages in total!)

Now, this is on a server, so I have no use for audio, printing, streaming, pdf creation, nor any sort of GUI components. Do you really think it's reasonable that all that needs to be installed just to tell me what version of the operating system is running?

<comment><USER4> > Do you really think it's reasonable that all that needs to be installed just > to tell me what version of the operating system is running?

(assuming redhat-lsb is the package that owns $(which lsb_release) )

No. Red Hat should fix that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I see no problem with having a centralized file to get OS information from, I do have two issues with the file that's proposed here:

One is that I believe it shouldn't be in /etc which is generally used for configuration data, not for static distribution info. I'd put it somewhere in /usr/lib or /usr/share.

Second, I think that the linked documentation ([http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os- release.h...](http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os- release.html)) is incomplete in that it doesn't specify quoting behavior: The file doesn't say anything about when or if at all values need to be quoted but the has quotes on some string values (but not all) in the example.

Are the quotes part of the value and thus should be displayed? Or are quotes needed for values with spaces in them?

Yes. I'm nit-picking, but IF you have to start off a new standard, please be sufficiently precise in order to reduce the need for somebody else having to do the same a few years down the road.

Other possible questions: Do custom keys need to be uppercase? Can they contain spaces themselves? ANSI_COLOR is a nice idea, can we also have a background color? Are spaces allowed in front and after the = sign? Are spaces in front and after the = sign part of the key or value? Or are they to be ignored?

Maybe use a standard format like YAML or JSON or (god forbid) XML which already has things like this covered.

Yes. This is all really small stuff, but in the end it's this unspecified small stuff that causes everybody to implement their solution differently which in turn makes writing a parser needlessly hard (or even impossible if there are conflicting interpretations)

<comment><USER8> There is already a bug report for your second issue:

<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46021>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _recently the majority of the big distributions adopted /etc/os-release and many small ones did, too[2]_

 _[2] To our knowledge at least OpenSUSE, Fedora, ArchLinux, Angstrom, Frugalware have adopted this._

So "OpenSUSE, Fedora, ArchLinux, Angstrom, Frugalware" is "the majority of the big distributions" now?

<comment><USER10> Debian is quite notably missing from that list.

<http://bugs.debian.org/659853>

It doesn't have /etc/lsb-release either.

<http://bugs.debian.org/444678>

Instead the lsb-release program apparently simply outputs the necessary values without using a configuration file.

I'm guessing the debian version of systemd just patches it to handle debian, and not make it autoconfigure each time from a configuration file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> He complains about the lsb_release executable, but why not use the /etc/lsb- release file directly?

<http://linux.die.net/man/1/lsb_release>

<comment><USER12> As mentioned in that man page, the /etc/lsb-release file only contains details on what version of the LSB the distribution conforms to (if the distribution isn't LSB-compliant, the file shouldn't exist). It doesn't have the version of the distribution itself, which lsb_release finds in distribution-specific locations.

<comment><USER2> This isn't completely true. lsb-release contains everything that is in os- release, including the version of the distro in a neutral format.

However I agree with you that lsb-release is not much used, and in some distros is only present when some huge X-dependent LSB package is installed.

But hey, we _could fix LSB_! Instead of, you know, making up something new that will be as little used as lsb-release.

<comment><USER10> As far as I can tell Debian does not have an /etc/lsb-release _file_. Rather they have an lsb-release _program_ that outputs the necessary info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I loved this, from the FAQ:

 _Why didn't you call this file /etc/bikeshed instead?_

Nothing like good self-referential, recursive, meta humor. :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Relying on some hint system (whatever it might be) to infer how the system is configured is a bad practice; it could lead to faulty assumptions because the administrator is free to change anything post hoc.

Scripts that care where things are should do their own investigation and determine the locations of files and how daemons are configured themselves. In other words, use the primary sources.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I want to see (Or make) is a system that's extensible enough to be made compatible with current package managers simply through extension modules. (Something like VLC levels of customization.) But that has a native package format so that most software providers can expect to find this skeleton- package-manager on the system.

Though I'm not even sure if thats really possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I've never understood why most major Linux distribution creators chose to come up with their own /etc/*-release files. Why make it distribution-specific at all?

In all seriousness, what's wrong with the /etc/release file (Solaris) that predates Linux? The name is obvious, terse, and easy to remember.

</comment><comment><USER17> XKCD reference: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

</comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting that someone supposedly from Red Hat decided to drop support for anything without this. I just checked on a CentOS 6 box (closest thing I have) and it doesn't have /etc/os-release

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have examples of these extra fields he is talking about adding to this new file?

<comment><USER19> [http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os- release.h...](http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os-release.html)</comment></comment>


Dear Founders, Here Is the Real Reason Why Your Startup Will Fail - <AUTHOR> https://growthhit.com/growth/startups-fail/ <comment><USER2> Oh the irony, it's down.

Google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://growthhit.com/growth/startups- fail/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh shit yeah - I'd never have thought that a startup would need stuff like growth marketing and 'relentless focus on execution' to succeed.

TL;DR: Startups need marketing to work.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm seeing a "500 This website is unavailable at the moment" error page served by HostGator. Is this an article that happens to be erroring, or a headline editorializing about the dangers of errors?

</comment><comment><USER5> Because HostGator will mess up your hosting?

</comment><comment><USER6> Heh HostGator is the worst. I've never seen any host go down so consistently after only a few hundred page views.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow that font (montserratregular) looks horrid on my Win10 PC.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like its back up

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> . . . and were back. Sorry if it wasn't working for you all. I apologize.</comment>


Using Terraform to manage Kubernetes resources - <AUTHOR> https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/managing-kubernetes-applications-with-hashicorp-terraform/ <comment><AUTHOR> what do you guys think about this? good, bad and the interesting bits.... please share :)</comment>


Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-20/locked-down-lawyers-warned-alexa-is-hearing-confidential-calls <comment><USER2> Alexa _et al_ are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" _technology_. According to the bright-line rule from _Kyllo v United States_ [1], when a technology is "in general public use"[2], police no longer need a warrant when they use their own devices based on that technology to see the "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion"[3].

[1] [https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme- court/533/27.html](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/533/27.html)

[2] Used throughout the ruling[1], but especially section II of Justice Stevens' dissent.

[3] The ruling[1], 2nd paragraph

<comment><USER3> How so?

The ruling is about agents using thermal imaging technology to bust a marijuana plantation, performed from a car on a public street. The court stated that this does not constitute a search, since any random citizen could've done the same thing using commodity equipment.

Always on microphones that transmit via the internet (i.e. bugs) have been a commodity for... a few decades? But you still cannot legally bug your neighbor's apartment.

<comment><USER4> >Always on microphones that transmit via the internet (i.e. bugs) have been a commodity for... a few decades? But you still cannot legally bug your neighbor's apartment.

It has not been normal until the last few years for people to _typically_ have an Alexa-like device that is always listening for the "I'm about to make a request" signal, which frequently gets turned on by accident.

It's not ridiculous that someone might conclude in the future, "if you're in someone's house with such a device, you should reasonably expect that some part of your conversation might get sent to the third party", which would mean a diminishing of the right to such privacy in 4th amendment jurisprudence.

And frankly, the whole concept of using voice to activate it is reckless. It is unavoidable to have significant false positives. It should be done with a non-audio signal that can't be faked (up to the limits of modern crypto), like an authenticated EM signal to turn on the listening.

<comment><USER5> >It has not been normal until the last few years for people to typically have an Alexa-like device that is always listening for the "I'm about to make a request" signal, which frequently gets turned on by accident.

Google Now: 2012 Siri: 2010 Microphones in cell phones: longer than those two.

It hasn't only been a few years.

<comment><USER4> I'm referring to voice activated assistants, and I was referring to the case when the typical (middle class) household had one, which happened long after their initial release (and arguably hasn't even happened yet, depending on how you define "typical").

<comment><USER5> Siri and Google now are both voice activated. Who wasn't using Android or iOS when they launched?

<comment><USER4> Again, the question is how long it's been _common_ for the _typical_ person to have the _voice activated_ one in their home. Stop changing the question.

In any case, 4 years vs 10 years doesn't matter. The point is, a court hasn't addressed it in the context of changing norms, at which point I claim there is a danger that it will re-evaluate what counts as private, just as OP was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My girlfriend celebrates passover which involves discussing "Elijah". The way she pronounces that name (she's a New Yorker) triggers her Alexa device, to much hilarity.

More soberly: I had no idea what Elija stands for so I asked the device, which recited part of the wikipedia. It then said, "while I have your attention here are some notifications you missed" and began to recite the first of her messages from her work which are definitely _not_ for public consumption. (She was able to throttle it, but still -- what if I had asked and she had not been present?)

<comment><USER7> "Alexa, order a bouncy castle", if all things are setup, you may have just spent $200 on a nice toy for children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have no doubt they are able to hear anything happening in the room they happen to be installed in. But I doubt they listen for anything but their keyword, and I seriously doubt they listen, record and send off to their overlords what they hear on a massive basis.

However, they clearly CAN, and while they almost certainly don't on any massive scale, if they by their overlord or a security hack, did on a targeted basis listen, record and send conversations on, that would be very possible, and very harmful for whoever was targeted.

I can't imagine the NSA and other covert organizations not drooling at the chance to do just that. I'm also fairly certain those devices are not secure as by and large the tech industry has a complete failure rate at making anything computing related secure.

<comment><USER9> >However, they clearly CAN, and while they almost certainly don't on any massive scale, if they by their overlord or a security hack, did on a targeted basis listen, record and send conversations on, that would be very possible, and very harmful for whoever was targeted.

Besides the fact that they have better antennas, this is true for pretty much any device with a microphone and a processor with audio processing capability, no?

My laptop has a microphone and video. Surely Microsoft could just start recording with the with right windows update?

My Avaya VOIP phone has speaker phone, could do the same.

<comment><USER10> > My laptop has a microphone and video. Surely Microsoft could just start > recording with the with right windows update?

It's a commonly mentioned issue, and a somewhat regular occurrence with various malware or "security solutions".

That's why a number of laptops have either visual indicators or shutters (though mostly for the cameras, sadly hot mics are rarely a consideration), and a rare few have physical disconnection switches (again mostly for cameras).

<comment><USER11> Macbooks since 2018 physically disable microphones and webcams when the lid is closed: [https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-air- and-2018-m...](https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-air- and-2018-macbook-pro-disconnect-microphone-when-lid-is-closed-2018-11)

<comment><USER12> How does a chip "physically disconnects" a device?

<comment><USER11> Presumably power is disconnected by the T2 chip. Different from mechanical disconnect via a physical switch, but equivalently effective if you trust the T2 chip. (And if you don't ... well, you can't use the MacBook securely at all.)

<comment><USER13> You had better not trust the T2 chip, because it is vulnerable to the checkm8 exploit and the checkra1n folks have already demonstrated total compromise. The encryption functionality isn't affected if you have FileVault on, because your password is not stored anywhere on the device, but everything else, from basic SMC functions like mic/cam/fans/touchbar to secure boot to verifying the microcode and ME firmware before loading are totally useless now.

AFAIK, the T2 is always powered on even when the main CPU is off, so this could have ultra-long-term persistence.

<comment><USER14> Reference?

<comment><USER15> [https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/03/10/luca-todesco- teases...](https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/03/10/luca-todesco-teases- checkra1n-hacks-on-a-t2-equipped-macbook-pros-touch-bar/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a very reasonable concern. I used to have a Google Assistant in my home office. I've muted the mic and just use it as a Bluetooth speaker.

However, the much bigger concern should be your phone, which has a mic, is internet connected, and almost always listening. You need to also disable the Google Assistant, Sciri, etc. there too.

Oh, and that doesn't just go for your home. That's in the office, at a client, on the train, in an Uber... Everywhere you take your phone.

<comment><USER17> > Oh, and that doesn't just go for your home.

Once you're out of your home it's hopeless - then you have everybody else's devices to contend with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My understanding is that the "microphone mute" button on Alexa devices is a hardware switch that cuts the wire to the microphone, at engineering's insistence.

I'm rather short of praise for Amazon but if this is still the case, great.

<comment><USER18> Which is notably a feature of the Librem phones and laptops as well:

[https://puri.sm/posts/lockdown-mode-on-the- librem-5-beyond-h...](https://puri.sm/posts/lockdown-mode-on-the- librem-5-beyond-hardware-kill-switches/)

<comment><USER19> Oh man, shame they only offer their keyboard layout as US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 6 years ago I used to work for a translation agency.We used to get some very confidential (and very interesting) texts from banks. We were not allowed to put a single word into google translate from client files and this stuff is 10 times worse. Having a permanent mic from large corps in your home is never a good idea...

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't entirely get the cognitive dissonance of worrying about a microphone+speaker sitting on your table when you probably have a microphone+speaker+camera+face-scanner etc... in your pocket. Same story for most laptops.

<comment><USER22> Wrong threat model. Those devices only record maliciously if they're hacked. Smart speakers/home assistants inadvertenly record during normal operation. See: all the news stories about their owners discovering their recordings on their google/amazon account.

<comment><USER23> My iPhone has activated "hey Siri" before by accident too.

It just doesn't have a website where i can see all the times it was activated by accident AFAIK.

<comment><USER24> If you turn Siri off, it doesn't activate by accident, and the iPhone still works as intended. If you turn off Alexa, the home assistant doesn't activate by accident because it doesn't work at all.

<comment><USER25> You can turn it on each time you need too use it, maybe with a trusted voice activated power switch that isn't connected to the cloud.

<comment><USER22> At that point why bother getting it in the first place? The whole appeal of it is that you can just say "hey google" from anywhere in the house and it would answer you. If you have to walk over and turn it on, you might as well use your phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I got rid of smart speakers a few months ago after being enriched with everyone's perspective on this forum; tech is my hobby, not my career. I have zero regrets. It's a little inconvenient now to not be able to say "play [music]" or "play [show]", instead having to use a remote. But the peace of mind that I'm not being recorded is paid for en masse.

</comment><comment><USER27> Welcome to a world where the general consumer's choices coupled with more and more private capitalization of essential services dictates life for the rest of people.

In this case it's pretty easy: dont buy these garbage products to begin with. Phones, on the other hand, are a bit more difficult to find viable alternatives for in many cases

</comment><comment><USER28> Until we have a home assistant that can be operated without a connection to the internet without going to the cloud there is always going to be this risk. I don't see any of the big players actually designing a system like this other than Apple.

<comment><USER29> > other than Apple.

Microsoft _might_. I don't know what their cortana does right now though.

<comment><USER22> I doubt it, given their current track record with windows telemetry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I grew up in a communist dictatorship, where illegal wiretapping by the government is still an open wound in society's culture. Given that, I cannot understand who willingly buys this crap and puts it in their house.

A couple of days ago, I lost all respect for a coworker when we were in a meeting and somebody said something which woke up the Echo he had on his desk.

<comment><USER31> Do you carry a smart phone? Does it not have a microphone designed to have hands free conversations and pick up audio from a distance? Does it have the ability to constantly track your location? Does it contain most of your private, electronic communication?

If we're talking about illegal wiretapping, a smart phone is significantly more risky and problematic than a smart speaker.

<comment><USER30> This argument always pops up but I always forget what fallacy this is..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >The firm worries about the devices being compromised, less so with name-brand products like Alexa, but more so for a cheap knock-off devices, he added.

Speaking of Ring knock-offs:

In these days of self-imposed isolation, this hands-free motion activated connected door knocker seems seems pretty useful for scaring away unwanted visitors without spreading germs:

[https://blog.smartthings.com/how-to/smartthings-door- knocker...](https://blog.smartthings.com/how-to/smartthings-door-knocker/)

</comment><comment><USER33> The recorded conversations are accessible via Amazon. You can go and listen to them yourself, and delete them.

<comment><USER34> How do you know they are actually deleted?

<comment><USER35> And how do you know that's actually all of the recordings?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing! These very smart lawyers can't just unplug the things?

</comment><comment><USER32> >Amazon and Google say their devices are designed to record and store audio only after they detect a word to wake them up. The companies say such instances are rare, but recent testing by Northeastern University and Imperial College London found that the devices can activate inadvertently between 1.5 and 19 times a day.

How can a device activate 1.5 times a day? Does it have to activate right before midnight then deactivate the same amount of time after midnight? Technically that's still activating on a whole day. Or can some devices half- activate?

<comment><USER37> If the device activated twice over a period of three days, that's an average activation of 1.5 times per day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Heh, neighbor is a bank employee, now remote working, she unplugged her google home bun. Good call (sic)

<comment><USER39> What are bankers doing that's so secretive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why "Locked-down" in the title? It's pointless.

<comment><USER41> They gave all the context required to share it without the connection "Lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls" requires. This could be telling of Bloomberg's expected/desired readership.

Or, they wanted an alliterative title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Turn off Alexa?

</comment><comment><USER43> open source

</comment><comment><USER44> I want and expected it to listen to everything. Sure it can be used to harm me but it won't be a good business decision, on the other hand they can use the data improve the product and service for me.

<comment><USER45> Sending a copy of all data to the NSA is apparently a great business decision, especially when National Security Letters demand it.

<comment><USER44> Everything has a trade off, you have to look at it using cost benefit analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> No! I'm shocked. Shocked and chagrined. How unexpected!

</comment><comment><USER46> I find the title biased against Amazon to begin with.

As if having assistants from other companies listening in was any safer. Why namedrop Amazon's own?

<comment><USER47> They mention Google in the first sentence.

I think it's important to not overly freak out about these home assistants. Your phone company or video conferencing company is already listening to your confidential client calls. Your email provider is reading your email. Your internal applications run on Amazon's servers. Your upstairs neighbor has their ear to the floor. I think lawyers are used to thinking "as long as it's not in writing, we're okay", but with speech recognition getting better and better, your phone calls / VCs are going to show up in court someday.

<comment><USER48> I agree, freaking out is pointless.

You treat these things as third-party listening devices - bugs, because that is exactly what they are, and adjust your conversation accordingly unless/until it is unplugged.

Look at it from a lawyer's perspective: imagine your privileged conversation with your client did leak. Your client sues you. If there was a surveillance speaker in the room _it doesn 't matter if it leaked because of it_. You just demonstrated extreme lack of care by discussing privileged information in front of a networked microphone.</comment></comment></comment>


New "Turning Tables" Technique Bypasses All Windows Kernel Mitigations - yaseen-rob https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-turning-tables-technique-bypasses-all-windows-kernel-mitigations/ <comment><AUTHOR> Any word yet on whether MacOS, BSD, or Linux are also vulnerable?</comment>


ITunes... for Android? - <AUTHOR> http://a1.blogspot.com/2011/04/itunes-for-android.html

<comment><USER2> I have an Android phone, and I just use TuneSync to wirelessly sync my iTunes library to my phone over wi-fi. Then, I can use whatever media software I want to play my songs.

Perversely, I only use iTunes on my PC because of... my car. My car has great iPod integration, with a dock in the center console that allows me to plug an iPod in, and then have the metadata for songs show up on the dashboard. It also has controls on the dash that allow you to navigate the menus, including a knob you can turn as an analog to the iPod wheel.

Since listening to music in my car is a primary use case, I'm then forced to use iTunes to manage that iPod, which makes using some other software to also manage music seem redundant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who knows whether there's any truth to this rumor, but I am interested in discussing such a development.

As far as I can tell from speaking with my iPhone-owning friends, the ability to easily sync their iTunes libraries to their phones is a major selling point. And we all know that the music sync/playing experience on Android isn't really comparable. So this move would make little sense if Apple believe that iTunes' exclusivity on the iPhone drives a lot of phone sales.

On the other hand, there are now a ton of Android-owning people who would probably buy a lot more iTunes music and movies if it were available seamlessly on their phones. Seen that way this move would make perfect sense.

I'm not sure I'm convinced of the latter. It's probable that a lot of Android owners already use iTunes for music and movies and just copy it to their phones manually.</comment>


React Native vs. Flutter: A comparison from real project experience perspective - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/react-native-vs-flutter-a-comparison-from-real-project-experience-perspective-1e7fbd56f217 <comment><USER2> Saying "Fuchsia OS is future" in your post is "Hard to Believe".

One simple line: Android is here for a long-long-long time until Oracle wins a lawsuit against Google.

The developer community base is extremely large and any OS is famous because of its community of developers.</comment>


iOS 7, thoroughly reviewed - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-reviewed/ <comment><USER2> So much effort was poured into just redesigning, repackaging basic apps on the surface. I think some of them look and exhibit functional behavior straightforwardly worse than before:

\- Smaller fonts and less obvious icons on the weather app

\- Less info on the world clock without the digital time text, which helps grasp the time at a glance especially when you're looking at several zones.

\- Smaller direction character font on the compass (why would anyone do that? It's like 40% of what it used to be and is only a single char!)

\- Less contrast across the entire interface with all white text; harder to discern differences.

... and at best a neutral change across the others. I haven't yet installed it myself, but the screenshots look disappointing. I am not dismissing the idea of removing skeumorphisms, but this particular implementation/execution seems like a step in the direction of less refined for Apple.

I have seen very few screenshots so far that made me say "oh that's so much better, wow". Several did make me say "Gosh, why would you reduce the font size there?!?! Why would you make the icon much less obvious?"

Just to note that I am not trying to be negative - I am certain with this much solid engineering talent, there will be features we'll love.

I hope I'm proven wrong once the OS is officially out and we're hooked in the following few weeks.

<comment><USER3> \- Weather app: Some fonts are smaller, some are larger, but you get a great looking animation that shows the current weather. In my opinion the app is much prettier than before, and more useful since you can see, for example, whether you need to bring a raincoat immediately.

\- Clock: Try tapping on the clocks: [http://d.pr/i/yrmI](http://d.pr/i/yrmI)

\- About less contrast: You can turn on bolder fonts in the interface.

I really, really like iOS 7. Especially on the iPhone, somehow on iPad I had more of a meh reaction, and I installed it there first. But going back to my iPhone with iOS 6 made me realize how dated that OS looks and feels.

Forgetting the looks, all the little new features and improvements are great, like all the new Safari stuff, command center and the improved app switcher. Apple says there are 200 new features and I definitely believe them.

<comment><USER4> > But going back to my iPhone with iOS 6 made me realize how dated that OS > looks and feels.

Isn't this simply emotion - based upon you already knowing that iOS 7 is newer?

If you showed iOS 6 and 7 to someone who had never seen an iPhone before, how would they figure out which was the newer design?

<comment><USER5> Design doesn't exist in a vacuum, if you showed iOS6 and iOS7 to someone who had never seen it before, they would surmise age by comparing to other designs they have seen.

In the same way you would see something that you've never seen before and go "that's so 80s".

Considering that Apple didn't originate the flat trend, and that the web has been going flat (or flatter) for a while now, I don't think it would take a genius to figure out which is which.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure the web is embracing flat, it's more like designers get bored and feel the urge to do something. They have to justify their paycheck and raison d'etre.

It's like the fashion industry, what is out of fashion comes back in because somebody says so and the catwalk is then flooded with retro fashion.

<comment><USER5> Oh yay, this again.

People use this tired old argument on us too - "what? Why is IT building the website again? Don't we already have one? Welp, guess they have to justify their paychecks somehow...", it's tiresome, reductionist, grossly ignorant, and textbook HN: everyone is useless except me.

Fashion isn't a simple cause and effect - it isn't designers dictating taste to an unwilling public. The influence is circular - design influences public aesthetic influences more design. The fashion industry steals plenty of ideas right off the streets, it's far, far from a one-way relationship. "Fashion" is just an endless cycle of the public influencing products and vice versa. Sometimes it will retread familiar territory, other times it'll do something new.

And thank god we have it. I for one am glad we're rid of animated GIFs and fluorescent green text, or do you think that evolution is also bored designers justifying their paychecks?

But nah, none of the above can be true, everyone's a useless parasite except the vaunted Hackers, hallowed be their names!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was going to complain about AirDrop being proprietary, but this is very disappointing. What is wrong with Apple?

> It's important to note that while AirDrop in iOS 7 and AirDrop in OS X share > the same name and underlying technology (both work by transmitting files > over a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection), they aren't actually compatible with > one another. You can AirDrop things from iOS to iOS and from OS X to OS X, > but not from iOS to OS X or vice versa. All the reports I can find say that > this situation doesn't change with Mavericks.

<comment><USER6> It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from your iOS device to an OS X device. Even though under the covers iOS and OS X work on files, iOS is sandboxed where OS X isn't, i.e. if you can't get to it via USB, you couldn't get to it via AirDrop anyway.

With that said, it would be useful to have some of the iTunes/iPhoto functionality for wireless(AirDrop) a la carte file transfer, but most people will just use iTunes wifi sync to get this effect.

<comment><USER7> > It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from > your iOS device to an OS X device

Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums. I used to do that constantly before I had an iPhone using Bluetooth, it was super- handy. Now I have to take a pointless long-cut through the internet with something like Dropbox. Royal pain when you're somewhere with spotty upstream internet.

<comment><USER8> > _Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums._

All the photos you just took are available via Photostream on all your other devices, assuming you have WiFi, which presumably you'd need for Dropbox. If you don't like firing up iPhoto or Aperture to see your photo stream on the desktop, there are "apps for that".

If you don't want an app, here's how to put a shortcut to your latest photos right on your dock:

[http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access- your...](http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your-photo- stream-without-iphoto-on-os-x/)

<comment><USER7> My iCloud account is already at data capacity (with a paid addon at that) with my iPhone and iPad backups. It's also a huge pain waiting for a million photos to sync when I want _just this one_. I'm also not happy with the privacy aspects of Photostream if I've taken private photos.

I mean, it works. But it's not elegant nor efficient. The Dropbox method sucks too. I often _don 't_ have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...

<comment><USER8> > _My iCloud account is already at data capacity..._

Photostream doesn't count against iCloud capacity.

 _" Q. Does Photo Stream use my iCloud storage?"_

 _" A. No. Photos uploaded to My Photo Stream or Shared Photo Streams do not count against your iCloud storage."_

[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486)

So the shared photo streams are effectively free photo album storage you can keep private or share with friends.

It also doesn't wait for a million photos to sync. It syncs the most recent one(s) you just took. It's hard to imagine more elegant or efficient than "it just happens without you doing anything".

It sounds like you're not very familiar with how Photostream really works. That's not unusual, a lot of my people I know complain about things that it turns out Photostream supports because Apple never really pushed or promoted it.

> _I often don 't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited > to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone..._

You're in luck; iOS has a switch to turn off 3G data and become a dumb phone.

If you're in the mood for the dumb phone style manual management instead of an automatic photo stream , there are several really great apps for popping single photos over or sharing the clipboard. I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.

<comment><USER7> I stand corrected on the Photo stream data thing. My experience with it is not that it syncs the recent ones first. My experience is they pop in randomly, then it stalls for half an hour for no reason. Maybe it's gotten better recently.

It's still ridiculous that the answer to "I want to send this thing between these two devices in front of me" is "I have to send every photo I take to a server owned by a company somewhere".

Clearly Apple agrees, or they wouldn't have created AirDrop in the first place!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not a fan of iOS 7 design-wise, but my _biggest_ gripe is the battery. It's bad. Really, really bad. I think it's a combination of an actual decrease in battery life and iOS 7's terrible monitoring of it.

It's not uncommon for my phone to shut down after it's hit 8% remaining battery. Or I'll be watching a video with 45% left, and the next second it'll cut me down to 25%. There have been a few instances where I've gone from ~25% to _completely empty_ in a flash, leaving me with a dead phone much earlier than I'd anticipated. So now I really can't leave my place for more than maybe 4/5 hours without my charger.

<comment><USER10> So you're running pre-release iOS, and expect it to work flawlessly?

I made the same mistake with iOS5beta and it was a nightmare. Power usage was the least of my issues. WHen iOS5 finally came out, I noticed most of my issues had disappeared (the rest got resolved by 5.1).

tl;dr: The use of iOS betas for your daily driver are inadvisable.

<comment><USER11> iOS7 is released, not a beta.

<comment><USER12> Yes, and 'kyro' made comments talking about a trend that could have only been experienced during the beta. Having this many data points on battery life in a few hours would be a pretty neat trick, and a much more damning situation.

<comment><USER13> However, this review has tested it and found a drastic effect on the iPhone 5's battery life running the released version so it's not limited to betas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Battery life is down across the board compared to iOS 6._

This worries me. If it's because of the background downloading then at least it has a benefit (and is disable-able), but if it's the extra GPU cycles for the UI then that's a real shame.

<comment><USER15> Anecdotally, my phone's been ending the day at 30-40% on iOS7 when I usually ended at 10-20% on iOS6. I'm guessing I had a particular app that Apple's now handling differently.

<comment><USER16> I've had a similar experience with my iPhone 5 as well. It was significantly worse during the beginning of the beta builds, however now it seems to be better than iOS6 (for me).

I'm guessing it's something similar to you – a wonky app draining my battery that is handled better on 7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like iOS 7, but I'm a little worried about how app designers will do with the new look.

When you compare the apps currently out that have been updated, you can see a lot of companies are struggling with flat design. Something that seems simple, is actually very complex to pull off, but when done right, can be fantastic.

I think it will be a while before the ecosystem fully recovers and most of the best apps around have figured out how to execute flat design well.

<comment><USER18> In case you didn't see it, this thread links to a site that did a side by side comparison of how a lot of apps moved to the new aesthetics.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6400834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6400834)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> iOS versions have generally had a massively forward adoption rate. I read that 80% of iPhones were on the most modern OS. It looks to me like the lack of support for the 3GS will create a split in adoption of the OS, which will trickle down and create an even larger gap in the purchasing of new iOS devices. I think this split will occur due to the stability of the 3G iPhones. This is concerning to me due to my company having iOS releases for the enterprise. This means that our customers are purchasing iOS devices just for our app. This also means that we have to be backwards compatible with yet another version of the OS. In code, this is where Macros come in.

I am reminded of the days of Microsoft vs Apple where Microsoft had better backwards compatibility. I think that the use of these devices in the business world will echo the days past and the cheaper device, Android, will be the go to business device.

<comment><USER20> Why is lack of support for the 3GS any different than iOS 6's lack of support for the 3G? The 3GS came out in _2009_. I'm surprised it supports iOS 6; the 3G can't even run iOS 5.

<comment><USER7> The 3GS was still for sale new in box last year

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can see a lot of effort went into interactions and some screens. Then I'm left with the impression they just winged it on the rest [1].

The redesign of the messages app limited itself to removing the graphics. The app _still_ shows messages as bubbles, it's just bland now. I can think on a couple better design solutions for chat threads by looking at other apps and Adium themes.

The Newsstand is another example of redesign-WTF. It still has bad usability and small thumbnails, it just replaced the background with some random grey background.

Noteworthy are also those icons on the home screen. There's no consistency between them, as pointed by multiple designers already [1][2]. I can't believe Apple is pushing these as final.

Overall, it looks like a rushed job, not something I would expect from Apple. I see no compelling reason to update.

[1] [http://tristanedwards.me/what-ios7-should-look- like](http://tristanedwards.me/what-ios7-should-look-like) [2] [http://ianstormtaylor.com/whats-wrong-with-the- ios-7-icons/](http://ianstormtaylor.com/whats-wrong-with-the-ios-7-icons/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I... don't like it. So far anyway. I'm trying to keep an open mind since I don't have much of a choice anyway.

I don't like that buttons turned into labels. I don't like that my screens now look more cluttered without clear delineations between UI elements. It looks a bit like a toy now as well. It also feels a bit more sluggish on my 4s.

I don't know, maybe it will grow on me.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks pretty and useless. I've been using iOS since iPhones came out, I'm seriously thinking about moving to android. Google has a good deal on Nexus 4.

<comment><USER13> Had. By now the Nexus 4 is sold out in most countries and Google has no plans to restock as the N5 is coming out in early October.

The N5 is also far more likely to match the N4's launch price than it's final price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> iOS7 seems really slow. hitting the home button to wake the screen up takes way too long.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really dislike rendering active buttons as pure text. Moving away from skeumorphism does not mean removing every visual cue that differentiates active from inactive items. All the more so on mobile devices where "hover" cues are not accessible. Google is also guilty of this.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like the cleaner UI design and new fontset a lot. However, the background blur is distracting and counterproductive for the overall clean look. Maybe they just tried to much to top / set themselves apart from the Metro UI somehow?

</comment><comment><USER27> The new alert banner is enormous! It clearly seems to have been designed with the iPhone 5+ in mind. At least the new ringtones and chimes are sort of lovely and not corny like the "Classic" ones.

</comment><comment><USER28> And now we are starting to see Apple fall behind its competitors on central features, like e.g wi-fi calling. This feature is essential for the phones primary function, calling, in low-coverage areas. All competing mobile OSs already support wi-fi calling so this is disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER29> i click that link, see the image above the article showing an iphone running ios7 and i immediately have to vomit.

(nb: i love apple. used an iphone for 4 years. use only macs.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Fascinating how so many screenshots resemble the appearance of Windows Phone. Any case a welcome change as the old UI looked very toyish and dated.

</comment><comment><USER31> I find this funny. IOS 7 is the same as IOS 6 except for a few re-arrangements of features and a new look. I feel like Mugato from Zoolander.. Am I taking crazy pills? Their all the same! Ios 6, 7.. iphone c.. s.. it's really the same thing with tiny changes. And everyone is reviewing them like they are new phones or new OS.

<comment><USER5> > _" I find this funny. IOS 7 is the same as IOS 6 except for a few re- > arrangements of features and a new look."_

As someone who's spent the last 2 months porting code from iOS6 to iOS7, I disagree. The API changes (documented or otherwise...) are large enough that this really was more of a port than it was a simple update.

It may look like simple rearrangement (I disagree with that assessment, but whatever), but under the hood a great deal has changed.

<comment><USER31> If so that's great. But to the user who is looking at this OS, what do they know about this?

<comment><USER5> There are a number of things:

\- You wouldn't expect Apple to change core apps like Phone dramatically. It's a very mature feature that isn't going anywhere and is practically identical on every smartphone. You get a numpad, you get your contacts list, your voicemail, etc. All of which has been given a new coat of paint, but fundamentally hasn't changed much.

\- You see deeper changes in the built-in apps that aren't quite as mature/core. There is for example a large change in UX in iOS to move away from hard, distracting transitions towards more subtle transitions that imply information hierarchy. For example if you tap on a date in a calendar, instead of hard-wiping you to another piece of UI altogether to show you appointments, it dynamically expands the day-view _from_ the date itself. If you tap on an album in Photos it will dynamically expand that album to fill the screen with additional photos. All of this goes towards better educating the user on information hierarchy and is much, much less jarring than before. As a third party dev that's been working with Apple on iOS7 prep, I know for a fact that they're pushing this new UX hard - you will see more 3rd party apps go towards this model in the coming months. You see some uses of this in first-party apps, but users will notice most when 3rd parties start adopting this.

\- Many of the most substantial changes are under the hood and aren't being (visibly or ostentatiously) used in the stock apps, mostly because there really isn't a place for them. They will, however, power a new generation of apps in the coming months - things like a new backgrounding model will let apps do more while not in use, and also in some types of apps greatly reduce the loading/refresh time when you return to them. Or even more subtle things like dynamics, which will make scrolling feel very different in apps.

In short, users will feel some of these changes immediately, but ultimately the deep changes in iOS won't be felt until third party dev adoption is there.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Backbone + CoffeeScript book is ready - <AUTHOR> http://www.scriptybooks.com/books/backbone-coffeescript

<comment><USER2> Would it be possible to have a sample chapter on the website?

<comment><USER3> Yes, there is a sample chapter: [http://www.scriptybooks.com/books/backbone- coffeescript/chap...](http://www.scriptybooks.com/books/backbone- coffeescript/chapters/quick-tour)</comment></comment>


Four States Are Sharing Driver's License Info to Help Find Out Who's a Citizen - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/890798378/south-dakota-is-sharing-drivers-license-info-to-help-find-out-who-s-a-citizen <comment><USER2> WHy do they not have a normal citizen identity like developed countries all over the world? It's not like they don't want or need it, but now they are taking an unreliable and costly route which ultimately gets a similar (but substandard) result.

<comment><USER3> Opposition to a national ID is one of the rare subjects on which the left and right tend to agree, but for different reasons. Here's the ACLU's thoughts on the matter:

[https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id- cards](https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards)

The NRA links to a few articles in opposition:

[https://www.nraila.org/articles/20020515/we-don-t-need-no- st...](https://www.nraila.org/articles/20020515/we-don-t-need-no-stinkin- national-id)

[https://www.nraila.org/articles/20041222/do-we-need-a- nation...](https://www.nraila.org/articles/20041222/do-we-need-a-national-id- card)

[https://www.nraila.org/articles/20020711/reviving-a-de- facto...](https://www.nraila.org/articles/20020711/reviving-a-de-facto- national-id)

Here's an opinion piece Fox News ran in opposition:

[https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/5-reasons-why-america- should...](https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/5-reasons-why-america-should-steer- clear-of-a-national-id-card)

<comment><USER4> How does identification for federal services online work?

<comment><USER3> Varies by service.

I can't login to the social security website to get my statements, so, not very well in some cases. I locked myself out trying to prove my identity which basically amounts to providing information from your credit report.

To unlock the account, I'll have to visit a social security office and they'll apparently give me a one-time code. I haven't cared enough to go through the pain of doing this yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We have this in Canada because health care is provincially funded, and registered, but people have multiple residences across the country. Online registration renewal services recently include geo-ip checks for whether you are renewing your ID/cards from an IP address in the province. (give your parents a heads up if this affects them, they should do their renewals when they are in town.)

There is also the tax question of whether your house is your primary residence, and when you sell it it's a question of whether you pay capital gains on the sale based on whether you in fact live there or not. This is one of those cases where technology meets policy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm frankly astonished that "driving licenses" have so much info in them.

If I need to attest to my ability to drive (which is quite a reasonable thing to require of people while they drive), all that is needed is photograph or fingerprint, expiration date, class of qualification and any restriction (such as glasses). None of the other info has anything to do with driving.

<comment><USER7> Driver's Licenses are effectively all-purpose state (or national, in the case of REAL ID-compliant ones) ID documents with driving-related endorsements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this data sharing a consequence of RealID, or were these requests made independently of that?

<comment><USER9> This is independent of RealID and a consequence of the census department not asking citizenship questions during the most recent 2020 census.

New York state declined, and is having Global Entry signups from that state rejected by DHS [1].

Edit: @crooked-v: Agreed, the administration found a straightforward way to the data other than via the census dept (it boggles the mind that people thought the federal government wouldn't or couldn't aggregate this data, remember when they withheld federal highway dollars to extort states into raising the drinking age?). Throttled by HN, can't reply directly to your comment.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/us/politics/dhs-new- york-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/us/politics/dhs-new-york-global- entry.html)

<comment> crooked-v > a consequence of the census department not asking citizenship questions

The purpose of the US Census has never been to determine citizenship. It's also fundamentally useless for that purpose, as not only is it entirely self- reported data, but it also cannot legally be accessed by other parts of the government until 72 years after that census is taken.

<comment><USER10> "Legally"

But the power stucture doesn't seem to care very much about law.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03/secret- use-of-census-info-helped-send-japanese-americans-to-internment-camps-in- wwii/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's just great, when does Trump send out his secret police to have them removed from Trumphistan?

</comment><comment><USER6> I rarely carry any ID as it seems offensive to have to justify my existence. People who ask for ID usually find a way to do business with me without it.

I do have a driver's license which I leave in my gf's car in case I have to, you know, drive.

<comment><USER12> What were you being asked to present your ID for other than driving (or alcohol if younger) in the first place?

<comment><USER6> People ask all the time: to enter certain buildings, when using a credit card (in almost every case that's a violation of the card-merchant agreement). Entering bars and clubs or picking up liquor or some prescriptions (not even my prescriptions!). For many bars and clubs and at, say Walgreens for liquor they don't merely look but swipe...and in the bars the info is collected by the company that makes the swipe system (learned of this from a HN post, though I could of guessed). What business is it of theirs where I go?

I never hassle anyone — they didn't make the rule. I just say I don't have one and invariably to date (except entering a federal court house) I've been fine.

This includes flying. It'll be interesting to see if that "real ID" rubbish does finally get enforced. All the previous deadlines have been punted.</comment></comment></comment>


The meaning of CSS - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/Q3cUg29.gif

<comment><USER2> I debug my css on Chrome and it is a breeze. And with a reset I almost don't need to debug it in IE

</comment><comment><USER3> Flag. I can't, you can.</comment>


$5 Screen Mockup - <AUTHOR> http://5dollarmockup.com

<comment><USER2> Awesome. You started out on Fiverr? What made you branch off of that platform?</comment>


Ask HN: How to prevent audio downsampling with AirPods? - <AUTHOR> It seems that whenever I'm using AirPods (Gen.1) on an app that requires both audio output and input (microphone), the sound output seems to be automatically downsampled to what can be described as super low-quality MP3. Using e.g. the laptop microphone seems to fix the issue. This doesn't seem to happen with other BT headphones (e.g. with my Beats Studio).
Even worse, this is system-wide (e.g. bad audio quality is across apps, e.g. a YouTube tab or Spotify).
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> While Bluetooth audio streaming quality has gotten much better with standards like aptX and AAC, the headset standard (which is required for two-way audio) falls back to standard A2DP which is much much lower quality.

AFAIK there is no solution for this aside from disabling the mic on the headphones and only using your laptop mic or another mic.

<comment><USER3> False. Not a2dp (that isn't a codec but a protocol, and NOT the one used for headset profile)

Much worse

Cvsd(baaad, one bit per sample, similar to ADPCM) or mSBC( similar to mpeg layer 1 audio bad)

Source: worked on this for years.

<comment><USER2> That makes even more sense, thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, it is just a side effect of the only bidirectional profile in Bluetooth being the HFP profile, which is mono and generally sucks. You just can't get audio that sounds better than a 2005 earpiece over Bluetooth if you need a mic. I hope there's some serious engineering effort to fix this. I think there's some proprietary magic that makes that work better in iOS.

<comment><USER5> What crap. Triggering my rage at Apple's stupid headphone (headset) port elimination on iPhones :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The app ToothFairy has an option to force any BlueTooth audio device into "output only" mode, as a per-device setting.

You can option-click the built-in Volume menu to get to the Input selector more rapidly.

If you're on Windows, I believe you have to disable the Hands-Free device associated with each Bluetooth device? That's as reliable as I've managed it to date, anyways.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would guess this is the expected behavior as afaik the AirPods have to switch Bluetooth profiles from the stereo audio output A2DP to the mono audio input and output HFP to allow for mic audio

</comment><comment><USER8> I came across this problem the other day too. I was trying to make a website that used a peer to peer audio connection between clients and binaural positioning and just couldn't get it to work. I thought it was the code and after far too long realised it was just my damn Airpods switching down to mono when I turned on the microphone.

Only figured it out by listening to binaural audio in one browser window and turning on the microphone to record in another and it still stopped the binaural sound working.

No solution as far as I know, they only have 2 channels and when you need one for voice you lose one for your ears.

</comment><comment><USER9> Turning on your mic requires real-time audio and because Bluetooth is slow, the sound is compressed.

Hq audio through Bluetooth has some latency

</comment><comment><USER10> Apple has crippled gen 1 airpods with the 6.7.8 & 6.8.8 update. The thing just drops connections and sounds terrible. No way to downgrade them to the earlier version of frmware. Same thng with the newer airpods and ANC.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this solved in the new airpods pro?

<comment><USER12> No. It's an inherent problem with Bluetooth.

The airpods pro also suffer from crippling firmware updates that make everything worse and active noise cancelation effectively useless.

<comment><USER13> On Windows, the AirPods Pro maintain two connections with the PC, one using the headset protocol and the other using the better-sounding media protocol. It seems like they both work at the same time - I've had good experiences on video calls where somebody is streaming background music and it sounds the way it's supposed to.

Also the noise cancelation definitely works although it's impossible for me to objectively judge if it's different than how it worked in the past (seems super hard to know without a blind test given how brains habituate).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Headphone jack FTW</comment>