I mean if you’re going to write algos that trade the first thing you should do is check whether they were successful on historical data. This is an interesting data point.
Market impact shouldn’t be considered when you’re talking about trading S&P stocks with $100k.
Historical data is useful for validation, don't develop algos against it, test hypotheses until you've biased your data, then move on to something productive for society
is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec
I doubt it’s for any reason at all. The obvious explanation is that they just developed and tested these extra firmware features against Apple devices because that was the product decision. Since nobody was tasked with targeting Android they might not have even noticed that it wasn’t perfectly spec-compliant if those states were never encountered, nor expected to be encountered.
No there isn’t. I’ve said this a million times before, but usually just downvoted: this is about reducing support costs, not increasing revenue from lock-in. This is not a theory, I’ve sat in meetings at Cupertino and been told first hand.
Support is very expensive. Say what you want about Apple, but they provide absolutely stellar support, especially with the stupidly inexpensive Apple Care insurance. This is only cost effective if they can make reasonable predictions about how their devices will behave in any given scenario. Interfacing Apple hardware with non-certified (MFi, BLE, etc) third party hardware has a non-trivial risk of unpredictability high support costs, either from excessive Apple Care claims, customer support communications, or just overloading the Genius Bar.
Reducing support cost could easily explain the motivation of the entire walled garden if they are sufficiently high.
That's tautological. Everything that is not supported is so because supporting it has a cost. The question is what is the cost? It seems quite obvious that the marginal revenue from airpods would be overshadowed by the revenue of getting a user in the ecosystem.
Having to test the AirPods with more standards compliant devices, having to waste time to tell customers to fuck off if their phone/laptop/toaster is not standards compliant, having to waste engineering time to investigate non compliant aliexpress phones/laptops/toasters, wasting time to implement additional functionality for Apple customers because it has to go into the spec first
Yes, all that is a part of the cost equation, which points to the same thing, namely, that $200-$300 widgets are not worth selling to the general public; they would rather sell them to a customer who will spend a lot more in the ecosystem. Same as razors and blades or consoles and games.
Customer support costs are higher at Apple than its competitors, because they provide a better support experience. This is not a tautology, it’s one of their core value propositions
They couldn't just write (and make people aware at point of sale, ofc) 'no support for using devices with non-Apple Computers products' into Apple Care. They had to purposely break compatibility?
You can still connect AirPods to an android device using Bluetooth, you just don’t get the seamless connection or support for Spatial Audio that use the extended protocols
> Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
Because they needed a way to get audio to the AirPods wirelessly and to work with their devices? That’s a pretty good reason to use Bluetooth.
I doubt they got together and tried to scheme a way to break Bluetooth in this one tiny little way for vendor lock in. You can use the basic AirPod features with other Bluetooth devices. It’s just these extended features that were never developed for other platforms.
HN comments lean heavily conspiratorial but I think the obvious explanation is that the devs built and tested it against iPhone and Mac targets and optimized for that. This minor discrepancy wasn’t worked around because it isn’t triggered on Apple platforms and it’s not a target for them.
It reminds me of the USB keyboard extender that came with old Macs. There’s a little notch in the socket so you can only use it with Apple keyboards. At the time I thought it was a petty way of preventing you from using it with any other device, but apparently the reason they didn’t want you to use it with other devices is because the cable didn’t comply with the USB spec.
Yes, USB extenders are not spec-legal (because the device isn't built expecting to be extended).
But you can have an extension cord which accepts USB on one end but doesn't accept USB on the other.
So the keyboard has a superset connector so that it can go in regular USB and notched USB, because it is verified to work right when using the extension cord.
This design also means you can't plug one extension cord into another to get an even longer distance (which the keyboard wouldn't expect). Pretty clever solution.
Truth is, no one has the full facts so any reasons as to why this was made the way it was is pure speculation. Only a fool would move to condemn or endorse what is not yet fully understood.
As someone who's implemented custom Bluetooth protocols, it's actually quite easy to condemn an Apple manufacturer ID check to expose custom services.
And what do you mean by "conspiracy"? I would be shocked to find out this was done by some lone wolf and wasn't built with broad (even if grumbly) consensus in the relevant teams. That's how corporate software is built.
Every time someone opens an argument with the classic appeal to authority “as someone who has…” you can almost certainly expect to have that person miss the point of the discussion entirely.
I've read a lot more about "how dumb it is to use mongo over PG" than the opposite, I think the burden of proof is on the mongo-lovers these days (not that anyone has to prove anything to randos on the internet)
Why mongo is dumb has been written up about ad nauseam - from data modeling and quality issues, out of control costs, etc. It's been a known toxic dumpsterfire for well over a decade...
No one care about this story at large. It's a pretty bad argument to make among the population that does care. Every HN user can leave Firefox and it'd still be running.
Fortunately, history has shown you don't need a majority of users decrying something to get noticed.
If the hypothesis is that we still need knowledgeable people to run LLMs, but the way you become knowledgeable is by talking to LLMs, then I don’t think the hypothesis will be correct for long..
We need knowledgeable people to run computers, but you can become knowledgeable about computers by using computers to access learning material. Seems like that generalizes well to LLMs.
I predict that in 6-12 months we'll all be back on VS Code. I would hate to have Microsoft as a direct competitor, especially in a space they care so much about (developers + AI).
This thesis has existed since Cursor first started, and the gap between them and VSCode has only widened since then. It’s worth spending some time thinking about why that may be before having such strong conviction about their demise.
You can't really name a list of features that cursor has that copilot doesn't. It's more like: Cursor appears to heavily dogfood their features, VSCode's copilot seems to check the feature boxes, but each one sucks to use. The autocomplete popups are jarring. The copilot agent doesn't seem to gather the correct context. They still haven't figured out tool calling. It's really something you have to try rather than look at a checklist of features.
I think your knowledge is a bit outdated? Cursor definetley still has an edge, but VSCode Github Copilot UI has come a long way and using the same underlying models for both the results are fairly similar and change only in ux niceties
I tried copilot agent like 3 weeks ago. If that much has changed since then, props to Microsoft.
Zed is very nice, it’s just a totally different workflow. I think people who work in a domain where AI is not particularly strong would be better off with Zed, since Cursor’s way of reviewing edits is a little clumsy.
What about on the speed front? VS Code's biggest problem is with how slow it is. I'd already be done and on to the next (and maybe the next thing after that) by the time it finally gets around to things. I like the concept, but I only have so much time in a day.
Yeah idk what "gap" every cursor user talks about. I installed cursor, it didn't work on wsl closed that chapter asap. Went to windsurf, enjoyed it but it's credit usage scheme was very confusing, nearly pressed the buy button until I went back to try copilot.
Copilot is good enough, even the free tier gets whatever annoying tasks I don't want to do done. Anything more complex I already have a Gemini and ChatGPT subscription so I just do the old copy paste.
Their main supplier (Anthropic) is also a direct competitor (Claude Code). I love Cursor but boy, what a tough place to be in. It's hard to see how it works out for them in the end.
Code isn't as strictly competitive as the IDE's are. Code even has solid VS Code integration. It's effectively a plugin, just one that isn't tied to any one IDE.
Hacker culture is still around, not so sure about startups though.
We still have TCP. We still have Linux. We still have gcc, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and more. Now, that last mile connection is still looking dicey; if a lockdown is applied, it will be applied there.
This is a bit flippant, but maybe hacker/startup culture just moved from being applied to tech to being applied to politics? It seems like the technofeudalism promoted by some could apply a similar ethos.
Hacker culture and startup culture are two entirely different things, with entirely different worldviews. The overlap in the Venn diagram isn't as large as many think.
Aannd… it’s flagged. Yeah I agree, the discussion here has been pretty clean and reasonable so I don’t understand why this gets shot down. I do understand that politics doesn’t really belong here but changes like this absolutely have follow on effects on business and technology and deserve room for discussion.
Yes, please show me more political drama, especially of the US-based comedy show you guys call "politics." Can't get enough of it. Only 60% of my HN feed has "Trump", "DOGE" or "Musk" in the title, that's not nearly enough for my taste, I'm gagging to see more of it. There must be some conspiracy going on, I'm sure of it.
> I’d argue that the most valuable companies of the AI era don’t exist yet. They’ll be the startups that harness AI’s potential to solve specific, costly problems across our economy—from engineering and finance to healthcare, logistics, legal, marketing, sales, and more.
I feel like the author's concluding point contradicts himself. There is a gold rush and OpenAI is selling shovels.
I’d say Nvidia is selling shovel factories (training hardware), OpenAI is renting shovels (trained models as a service), and DeepSeek gave everyone a shovel for free.
But Nvidia is also selling steroids (inference hardware) that everyone will need to use their new free shovels.
Market impact shouldn’t be considered when you’re talking about trading S&P stocks with $100k.