Zippogriff

> You still haven't stated anything other than your opinion.

That's all either of us have been doing. [EDIT] and an opinion can be a reason! They're not mutually exclusive. Do you need an itemized list of problems I have with webapps, with figures backing them all up (else they'd be opinions again, I guess)? I figured that'd been discussed to death, especially on HN.

> Having a choice is always better than not having one with regards personal preferences. That's my standard. What's yours aside from "I don't like web apps"?

I like being able to choose a platform that makes it hard for developers to get by with a webapp, pushing them toward native apps. See? I like choice too.

> Because not everyone agrees with you and web apps have many advantages over native.

But I don't care about those advantages (to the extent that they exist for users they're secondary effects of webapps being very cheap to make as cross-platform apps, so more likely to be made in the first place if cross-platform is a requirement) and like being able to choose a platform where it's hard to deploy a webapp instead of a native app, forcing the choice of "native app" or "no app at all" on the part of the developer, because I think it leads to fewer total apps but way more native apps than there'd otherwise be.

So why would I prefer PWAs become more capable on the platform? I see why PWA developers and maybe some users would.

To make things a bit more fair I'd definitely allow that plenty of business-types do get it, but I think enough don't that treating them all like they do before you know them fairly well is probably a bad move, career-wise, especially if you're not senior and important-enough to thrive despite pissing some of them off. Enough either don't understand or don't want honest estimating that the best you can really do is play the game wisely and hope it goes OK, until/unless you develop a rapport with a "good" one. I'd further admit that being one of the "good" ones may not actually be that useful in a business-type, overall, especially so far as their personal career prospects. They're just... to be approached differently.

You explicitly claimed it wouldn't be worse. Consider applying your own standards to that claim.

Consider also that it's possible to assert something without perfect knowledge of its truth. Usually context is sufficient to gather the level of certainty being expressed, or the implicit perspective from which it holds true, without hedging and defensively weakening every little statement.

> > Perhaps that's because you want the wrong thing for some reason.

> Allow me to make it very simple: You didn't give any reasons for your opinion. You just gave your opinion.

I'm glad you translated it because I'd never have gotten the second claim from the first. Phew.

> What about that speaks to "theory of the mind and epistemology" in your opinion?

Your entire objection, which seems to carry some unusual assumptions about the power and utility of thought experiments and the extent of the value of comparing similar, but not identical, things. Notably, it appears to reject them as being to any useful degree, even for evaluating a user-facing OS feature valid or enlightening.

> Gee, I wonder if your whole problem couldn't just be solved by letting you opt into the whole idea of PWA notifications?

Making them opt-in and off by default, ideally with no way for the app to tell whether they're enabled, would be an improvement, but allow me to repeat my reason from my post which, you claim, contained no reasons: I do not want features that make webapps more viable on iOS, because I do not like webapps and prefer an environment that makes me less likely to encounter them for any reason. So simply not having the feature would be even better.

[EDIT] nb. I entirely get disagreement with my position on a variety of grounds, but I find such apparent failure to even engage with it, and rejection that it is a position, harder to understand.

Yeah, I get that and name narrower ranges in a business context (trying to keep the upper bound from getting too much lower) because most biz-school types don't get that, and tend to think you're full of shit, being passive-aggressive or otherwise deliberately obtuse, or else it doesn't actually matter and they just wanted a happy number to put on a powerpoint and now you're making their life more difficult for no reason.

For that matter they tend to be pretty bad at anything even adjacent to experimental design, but god help you if you point out that the data they're so proud to present to the C-suite next week is, actually, meaningless (rare is the C-suite that'll catch it and call them on it, anyway, so from the perspective of the presenter it's almost beside the point; a disturbing amount of "data driven" leadership is pure fairy dust).

For a good proportion of programmers I'd expect education and professional work experience to have them comfortable with wide estimate ranges being typical and honest for many "90%" estimates, but business-social experience having convinced them, correctly, that honest estimates aren't what a hell of a lot of people actually want and do, "make us appear ignorant or incompetent" (from the book), in actual fact from the perspectives of people who control our budgets and wages.

Ah, right, I've always taken that effect in software estimation to be a result of business people hating how wide an actual "90% accurate" estimate is. Not many managers will accept "8 to 30 months" as a 90% estimate at the start of a project with a fairly typical set of unknowns. Especially they seem to really hate ranges that aren't quite a lot narrower than the size of the lower bound. But maybe it's actually driven by the people doing the estimating.

For my part I definitely tend to squeeze my "90%"s down to more like "30-40%" when asked for a "90%", for that reason. I might try out an honest and accurate estimate on someone I kinda know, and suspect won't quietly re-evaluate me as a useless moron or "one of those asshole 'programmer' types who doesn't get business" in response, though.

> Perhaps that's because you want the wrong thing for some reason.

I can't really parse this but from the best sense of it I can get, I reckon the most correct response is, "no, u".

[EDIT] Oh and also:

> You have never experienced this, so how could you possibly know? Also, no it wouldn't.

It's really incredible how often relatively straightforward conversations on HN end up veering, pointlessly, into theory of the mind and epistemology.

What's supposed to be the take-away from this? Is it to prove that knowing one or two bits of trivia and maybe a formula, by rote, can make your (unaided) estimation of related things vastly more accurate? That's all I'm getting from it, but maybe that's what's intended.

Examples: if I didn't happen to have an accurate-enough figure for the diameter of the Earth in miles, plus a formula for the surface area of a sphere, plus roughly the proportion of the Earth's surface that's land, all in my head, there's no chance at all I could produce a useful-for-any-purpose-whatsoever estimate of "area of the Asian continent" without researching it (at which point I could just look up a fairly exact figure, without knowing any of that). Year of Alexander the Great's birth, well I happen to know roughly when Aristotle was active and that they were alive at the same time. Otherwise, again, I'd produce a useless-for-most-any-purpose guess. Total US currency, I bet knowing something like the current annual GDP of the US would at least narrow that down, and is something someone might plausibly have at hand (I don't, my guessed range on that would be hilariously bad). If you have a sense of blockbuster movie budgets and/or returns, which one can acquire from paying attention to entertainment headlines, it's easy to come up with a reasonable range for Titanic's box office receipts. And so on.

Is the point that trivia's highly valuable, actually, if you have to estimate a bunch of arbitrary stuff purely from memory?

I don't know whether it accounts for the entire "housing's more expensive everywhere" perception, but it sure seems like the only houses that exist near good schools and are cheap on a per-square-foot basis are giant, so still not cheap, thanks to a combination of zoning and developer incentives. It's not like we could live in a significantly smaller house if we wanted to.

Another change is that smaller houses have giant rooms. If you want a 4-bedroom in a decent school district (so, around here it'll be 80s construction at the very earliest, probably late-90s or later, or else in one of a couple very rich and expensive areas that have older houses) you're in for a giant house. A 1960s middle-class 4-bedroom probably has about the square footage of a modern 2-bedroom. Sqft./room is way up across the board. Further, floorplans that look nice in a walk-through or in photos but are incredibly wasteful of all that "cheap" square footage are the norm.

1) I don't want to see the prompts to allow push notifications from a webapp, nor to have to go disable them. I just never want them.

2) Generally I'd rather none of the software I use be webtech, so anything that makes it easier to deliver webtech to my phone/tablet is a step the wrong direction. Yes I'm willing to have less total software in exchange. The point is that I don't want apps that are or will be native, to be webtech instead, which may happen as more features are added to webapps. IMO allowing stuff like React Native and Phonegap is something I'd even rather they didn't do (and I've been paid to develop both native and React Native apps, plus worked on a very early and somewhat successful Phonegap-but-more-native solution that ultimately fizzled out). My ideal situation is that if anyone tells me to try out some app or to use some app to communicate or share something with them or whatever, personal or business, it's a webapp 0% of the time. It's either native or it doesn't exist, so no-one can bug me about it or cajole me into using it.

In short, my UX on iOS is better without them even being possible, so why would I prefer they be allowed?

You can put the .git directory outside the working directory. Might be helpful. Sync the working dir with a sync service, but the .git dir with... git.

Indeed, there must be some reason no such thing has materialized from the market, despite ongoing problems caused by its absence.

I'd guess it's one of those things where network effects make it hard to get off the ground, and given the nature of it, especially hard to get off the ground without government buy-in from the beginning, as so many of the ways it'd be useful for saving time and money and reducing risk are tied to interaction with the government. If a market-based solution for it were desirable, for whatever reason, defining some clear and interoperable standard at the government level would probably be necessary to make the market viable, no matter how much latent demand there may be.

Further, imagining the user experience of a non-heavily-regulated/standardized ID market, it seems like it'd necessarily be so hellishly bad it'd never gain adoption. Having 5 different IDs and sometimes having to get new ones or drop an old one seems no better than using credit cards and our social security numbers as IDs, like we do now. It seems to me the epitome of something that can't possibly be any good as a market solution, unless it's so monopolized or regulated that it's indistinguishable from a government solution, except somewhat less straightforward.

I believe that individual teams believe that, and I believe that some decision-makers are interested in doing enough to keep from losing those users too fast.

Looking at the home page, though, it's very clear where the focus is. The only link I can even find to the Plus option is in the footer and it's not even clear it's not a business plan (truly, why would any of the plans on a site that brands itself entirely as "Dropbox Business" not be business plans?

Someone who didn't know otherwise would assuredly bounce off the site having ascertained there are no personal plans. That has to have been a deliberate choice. I guess it could be some kind of grievous mistake to have somehow entirely failed to account for someone interested in an individual plan visiting "dropbox.com" to find it, except it fits with the rest of the publicly-visible moves coming out of Dropbox.

I think where that's a losing proposition for them is that other ecosystems are more tightly integrated and generally a better deal, if that's what people want. Apple user with more than one device of any sort? $2.99/mo for the lowest tier of iCloud storage is a no-brainer, and everything will work with it, nothing to install. All-in on Gsuite and doing everything in the browser/Android/Chrome? Duh. No question what you use. Windows/MSOffice? I haven't used it but I bet OneDrive is pretty nice and well-integrated on there. Certainly they don't stop spamming you about it.

Those are what you pick if you want lock-in and bundled features. Dropbox and others are what you (used to) pick if you want to work cross-platform with a heavy focus on sharing real files, not tools. I think that's why the bundled tools strike so many as a bad idea: if we wanted that, there are more sensible options for it already. I get that they're kinda stuck trying it if they want/need huge growth, but it seems destined to fail, to me.