3 years ago Google killed off Android Things[1] and told everyone to migrate to IoT Core. Now IoT Core is dead. But don't worry about all that, just connect with your Google Cloud account manager! They'll tell you exactly which Google platform you should migrate to next.
This reminds me of a David Letterman skit where Letterman was working at a Taco Bell drivethru. He told a customer that they were out of several drinks in a row and then said something like “ma’am, I need to know what drink you want so that I can tell you we’re out of it” in response to the lady asking what drinks did they have.
Reminds me of an old Soviet joke. A guy walks into a shop, sees how empty it is and asks "You're out of beef?" The clerk explains, "No, the butcher's shop across the street is the one who is out of beef. At this store, we specialize in being out of fish".
Yeah IoT definitely seems to be following Google's messaging strategy - if the platform isn't a runaway success, delete it and start again. Maybe people will love the new platform!
"spoiled" in the sense of having gone bad, maybe. It does appear this is a deeply ingrained cultural assumption they aren't getting rid of (no clue if they try). The usual meme is of course "nobody gets promoted for maintaining a not-so-successful service"...
Is it possible those heuristics could accidentally trigger for browsers other than Chrome? I had an old account where I normally used the android app, then one day I logged in with Firefox on desktop (with adblocker) and my account was banned about a minute later.
At a business level, can you share why the ToS forbids third party clients at all? We all know that "trusting the client" is not a viable security plan, so why does it matter what client people use?
> At a business level, can you share why the ToS forbids third party clients at all? We all know that "trusting the client" is not a viable security plan, so why does it matter what client people use?
Because if something breaks for a user and they complain, the company cannot diagnose it or fix it. Simply dealing with the complaints would be an extra cost on the company.
And when they decide to change part of the API, you have an unknown number of users that would be broken.
> Linux is really hurt here by the total lack of any unit testing or UI scripting standards.
> standards
I've been very impressed reading how the Rust developers handle this. They have a tool called crater[1], which runs regression tests for the compiler against all Rust code ever released on crates.io or GitHub. Every front-facing change that is even slightly risky must pass a crater run.
Surely Microsoft has internal tools for Windows that do the same thing: run a battery of tests across popular apps and make sure changes in the OS don't break any user apps.
Where's the similar test harness for Linux you can run that tests hundreds of popular apps across Wayland/X11 and Gnome/KDE/XFCE and makes sure everything still works?
> Surely Microsoft has internal tools for Windows that do the same thing: run a battery of tests across popular apps and make sure changes in the OS don't break any user apps.
And hardware, they actually deploy to hardware they buy locally from retailers to verify things still work too last I checked. Because there is always that "one popular laptop" that has stupid quirks. I know they try to focus on a spectrum of commonly used models based on the telemetry too.
And crater costs a bunch, runs for a week, and it's not a guarantee things won't break. I'm not sure it runs every crate or just top 1 million. It used to, but I could see that changing, if
And in case of closed source software, that isn't publicly available, crates wouldn't work.
Crater's an embarrassingly parallel problem though, it's only a matter of how much hardware you throw at it. Microsoft already donates the hardware used by Crater, it would have no problem allocating 10x as much for its own purposes.
There are certainly more things written in C than in Rust--the advantage of being fifty years old--but the standardization of the build system in Rust means that it would be difficult for any C compiler (or OS, or libc, or etc.) to produce a comparable corpus of C code to automatically test against (crates.io currently has 90,000 crates). But that's fine, because for the purpose of this thread that just means that Microsoft's theoretical Crater-like run for Windows compatibility just takes even less time and resources to run.
If you want to compile a large fraction of C/C++ code, just take a distro and rebuild it from scratch--Debian actually does this reasonably frequently. All of the distros have to somehow solve the problem of figuring out how to compile and install everything they package, although some are better at letting you change the build environment for testing than others. (From what I understand, Debian and Nix are the best bets here.)
But what that doesn't solve is making sure that the resulting builds actually works. Cargo, for Rust, makes running some form of tests relatively easy, and Rust is new enough that virtually every published package is going to contain some amount of unit tests. But for random open-source packages? Not really. Pick a random numerics library--for something like an linear programming solver, this is the most comprehensive automated test suite I've seen: https://github.com/coin-or/Clp/tree/master/test
> But that's fine, because for the purpose of this thread that just means that Microsoft's theoretical Crater-like run for Windows compatibility just takes even less time and resources
Huh? I don't follow. There are more libs to test and they aren't standardized. How does that mean theoretical Crater will take less resources?
Did you mean excluding non-testable code? That doesn't prevent future glibc-EAC incompatibility.
The manual labor would be greater, yes, and that's a problem. But the original point of this thread was about dismissing the idea of Crater at scale, which is unnecessary 1) because it's an embarrassingly parallel problem, and 2) because you're probably not going to have a testable corpus larger than crates.io anyway, so the hardware resources required are not exorbitant for a company of Microsoft's means. Even if they could only cobble together 10,000 C apps to test, that's a big improvement over having zero.
This still has nothing to do with Linux. Unit testing isn't standardized in most languages. Even in Rust people have custom frameworks!
The Linux Kernel does have such a project doing batteries of tests. Userspace may not, but that's not a "unit test" problem. In fact it's the opposite, it's integration tests.
Another similar site is https://www.rtings.com/. They do very scientific, thorough quality tests. I've only used them to buy monitors so far, but it looks like they're starting to branch out from tech -- they have new categories for blenders and vacuums.
Hopefully they don't go the same path as the Wirecutter. Started out great and small and independent and slowly started watering down reviews as they branched into more and more areas. They are now owned by the NYTimes and the quality of the reviews is much more hit and miss.
rtings is trying to push a subscription now. I was looking up wireless mice latency, and after looking at 5 mice, I had used up all my free views of "advanced metrics" like click latency.
rtings does good work, I'd pay a flat fee for it. But a subscription for a website I check every 2-3 years when I'm upgrading some tech? I'll just clear my cookies.
> I was looking up wireless mice latency, and after looking at 5 mice, I had used up all my free views of "advanced metrics" like click latency.
If you're specifically looking at mice, you might want to check out RocketJumpNinja. The reviews are pretty biased towards suitability for FPS, but they are quite in depth, and the reviewer is pretty knowledgeable.
This is an extremely personal question. The business that excites me would bore 99% of the world, and same goes for you. If you don't already have an idea what you're excited about, just put the money in VTSAX.
It would bore 99% of the world, but that still leaves something like 75 million people who are interested and I would wager a decent number of people here would fall in that 1%.
I’ve found that even seemingly dull things can get very interesting when you get deep into them.
> why does nobody have the decency to simply accept Bitcoin in their local farm as payment
Farmers do not accept payment in any currency on their farm. They sell futures on the commodity market before the growing season begins to lock in a price and hedge against volatility.
> you need to download a 400GB blockchain on your device
You can use light wallets such as Electrum without trusting a third party, and with no loss of security (though it potentially sacrifices privacy).
Even if that weren't true, a 512GB drive costs $10 these days. That shouldn't be a barrier for anyone.
> This means you will need a custodial solution like lightning
Lightning is not custodial. You do not need to trust any counterparty.
Please don't take HN in high-indignation/low-information directions, or post snarky one-liners.
It dumbs down discussion, as well taking it off topic and turning it nasty. Important topics deserve better than that. Unimportant topics too, actually.
Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier. The war on fats caused substantial damage to the health and environment
> stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick'
Except it isn’t. Try letting melted cheese, or pretty much any starch (pasta, rice, oatmeal, etc) sit in stainless for a while and then see how non-stick it is. It will glue itself to stainless but on non-stick it will slide right off.
I’m not arguing in favor of non-stick, and avoid it when possible, but we can’t also be making inaccurate claims either.
Cast iron and stainless are so completely different that this comment doesn’t belong in this thread.
Also, cast iron, even when seasoned, would still stick quite a bit in the above scenario (and I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d want to cook starches like that in cast iron).
I don't think "the war on fats" is to blame for the rise of PFAS-based nonstick pans. Have you actually tried using both? A world of a difference
Also, vegetable oils are incredibly high in omega-6's which compete with omega-3's for the same enzymes. In general the literature suggests we should be consuming about a 4:1 ratio for Omega-3's to Omega-6 fatty acids. Corn-based oil, for example, has a 1:60 ratio
I think avoiding excessive vegetable oil intake is still a good idea
The nonstick pans today still have PFAS. They removed PFOA but there are hundreds of similar chemicals that they can use instead, which reason would dictate are just as toxic but which so happen to have not been safety tested yet
Interesting: this sounds like BPA-free plastics -- a lot of these have BPB and BPS which animal and cell-line studies have found just as concerning, but hey you can slap a "BPA-free" sticker on them!
It's a complex issue and I'm not here to advocate one solution or another. However, there is important information that the public ought to be aware of
These days I would bet all internal/debugging features are gated behind asymmetric crypto-based challenge/response. And it's probably physically impossible to decap a <10nm chip and inspect visually. I don't see a way around it other than hoping for implementation bugs. It might be the end of the road for the hackers :(
[1]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-...