> Yet you can't use a credit card to buy cannabis pretty much anywhere AFAIK.
Every dispensary I've visited here in the northeast accepts cash and debit cards, I assume they don't accept credit due to higher processing fees and higher risk of chargebacks rather than processors being problematic (otherwise they would not accept debit since they get ran through the same system anyway).
That's not true at all. I live in the northeast and my dispensary simply can not take credit cards even if they wanted to; credit card companies are liable for the transaction and they don't want to run up against federal law.
Some dispensaries can take debit card transactions, and they have to do so through "high risk" processors... companies like Square will not work with them because of federal law.
Its hyper regional. And when processing solutions are found, they may be gone the next month. You see a similar situation with groups like Eaze in the SFBA. Some months they just don't have a debit option, some months they do.
>credit card companies are liable for the transaction and they don't want to run up against federal law.
This. And while it's obviously not the same thing at all, since cannabis is a schedule 1[0] substance, the US government could treat processing credit card transactions for cannabis companies the same as they treated HSBC[1] or worse.
As such, until cannabis is moved off of schedule 1, Congress acts to make cannabis legal at the federal level, and/or the US Department of Justice makes it clear that providing banking services to cannabis companies will not be prosecuted under money laundering laws, US banks won't jump into the pool.
Your assumption is wrong, they are being refused by Square, Stripe, etc, etc. CBD are also in a grey zone which cause them tons of problems accepting credit cards. This isn't because of higher processing fees.
How does that make any sense? I put my card into the reader and it debited from my bank account. I didn't pull cash from an ATM and there was no ATM present in the business.
In my country, one can perform debit card transaction with 'cash back' - if I'm in the grocery store buying $50 of groceries with my debit card, and I also want $30 of cash, they can charge my card $80 and hand me $30 from the drawer.
This was a great boon for banks a few decades ago, as it functionally gave them a huge ATM network for free.
The debit card system understands this sort of transaction, and doesn't charge the normal x% processing fee on the cash withdrawal portion of the transaction.
In other words, retailers can create transactions that are effectively ATM withdrawals - without an ATM.
And the really nice thing about this is that there are no fees.
If I just need $80 or so (I think the limit is $100), it's faster to go to the local Walmart and buy a candy bar or something and get back $80 cash than to go the closest ATM owned by my bank to avoid the double dipping fees.
Our local grocery store (Fred Meyer, aka Kroger) has started charging a fee to take out extra and get cash back. Not a lot, but a bit annoying. I used to get cash that way all the time, but even for a nominal fee I just avoid that store now. I am weird, yes.
That doesn't really make sense. My bank's ATM has to be refilled with cash and they don't charge me. Likewise, I doubt the Walmart self-checkout is sorting bills and only dispensing $20's: they also have to be loaded with cash separately.
The only charges I encounter are from using my bank's card at another bank's ATM.
It probably depends on the type of account you have with the bank. I certainly don't pay ATM fees so long as I use my bank's own ATM but perhaps there are more bare-bones account types that do.
No they shouldn't. There are high-risk payment processors that will serve foreign intelligence operations like wikileaks, fascist political donation services, fraud-heavy industries like fiat to crypto onramps and socially regressive businesses like porn. There's no need to regulate low-risk payment processors as the industry is not monopolized in any way and it's trivial to find one that will take your money.
I don't see why an argument needs to be made for it? Being anti-vaccine is anti-public safety and an active attempt to undermine the stability of the country and society. It should be viewed as terroristic.
It protects visitors on compromised networks--and that includes things like ad injectors at coffee shops that might push nasty code to them, not just people dealing with oppressive regimes and so on. It also provides some benefit around "well, that page is HTTPS, so it's more interesting"--if every page is HTTPS, the signaling value of switching to HTTPS is destroyed, and that is a good thing.
HTTPS everywhere is a positive, and it is a good thing to do.
“Specialists” drinking the Kool-Aid look most depressing. Don't you find it strange that each time each proponent believes it's important to mention a stereotypical script kiddie on a public WiFi, something that doesn't bother a lot of people at all because of they way they connect to internet, and hasn't been a common occurrence even in the days of completely broken wireless security protocols?
What is/was common is internet providers' interest in making money on personal behavioral data in the traffic they transfer. DPI boxes to passively gather statistics or actively inject ads (and even rewrite existing ads) have been offered and tested since the 2000s across the world. Scale of big ISPs would make them Google's (&Co) competitors on personal behavioral data market, and mobile ISPs would combine it with location data, too. Moreover, they would be able to use Google's own tracking cookies to track individual users instead of inventing the classification systems (either by observing them in clear text, or by injecting scripts). The security and income of web services is the real reason for the global “HTTP is deprecated, switch to HTTPS” campaign, not you and your “privacy”.
Ad injectors on public wifi is a marginal 'risk' considering this page is targeted to professionals and informed hobbyists anyway, who will predominantly just be browsing from home, work or with a VPN that tunnels traffic through either a server they control or a service provider's server whom they trust anyway.
There haven't been any notable language features added since java 9 besides some basic syntax sugar (which is already covered by stuff like lombok anyway).
For features and performance you might as well just target .NET 6. It has things that have been perpetually 'too hard to implement' (read: oracle doesn't want to pay their engineers to impl it and will sue you if you do it yourself) like value types, generics without type erasure, no checked exceptions, etc. and with .NET 6 performance is better than OpenJDK across the board.
Yes - .NET 5 and 6 both have runtimes and SDKs available for Mac and Linux. At least in my opinion, Linux is the preferred deployment platform for it now unless you have a specific (usually older) library that only works on Windows.
> .NET 5 finally delivered Linux support but only eleven months ago
The previous versions in this stream (.NET Core 2.1, .NET Core 3.0 and 3.1) also run fine on Linux. For web server / API server workloads, it's been stable for a lot longer than 11 months, and people do indeed "bet the farm" or "run the business" on it, quite happily.
Technically, this starts with .NET core 2.1 on 2018-05-30. The prior version, 2.0, released on 2017-08-14, wasn't _quite_ there yet although some people were happy with it for production use.
.NET has been on Linux for years now. And my company is using it in production on Kubernetes (Linux/Debian). Its crazy how dependable and fast it is. Startup times are amazing and its only getting better each year. We're looking to upgrade to .NET 6 in production by January.
Have you even seen the benchmarks compared to Java and other languages?
I can also confirm that I’ve been using .NET on non Windows OSes for years and it works really well. However the Benchmarks are rigged. The code they wrote for that one benchmark for in the top is a complete cheat. Check out the source and compare it with the other ones from the top 10. .NET is fast but Java is truthfully still faster.
Then use Kotlin, and take advantage of the jvm and the ecosystem, and avoid basically all the stuff you listed about the java language.
"no real reason" is a stupid take. I could list multiple, but a big one is that there are hundred java developers for each dotnet developer in my city. The java env is well tested and well understood, if anything one should argue why not use it instead of a hip and trendy alternative.
Their point about using .NET were not really valid since one of the big and best reason to use Java is that you already have a Java codebase, but things like value types and generics without type erasure aren't solved in Kotlin, so Kotlin isn't really a good answer to his not really valid point.
In what way? It's slower and has less features than the .NET runtime.
> "no real reason" is a stupid take. I could list multiple, but a big one is that there are hundred java developers for each dotnet developer in my city. The java env is well tested and well understood, if anything one should argue why not use it instead of a hip and trendy alternative.
So, your only credible excuse for using java is inertia from boomers and middle managers refusing to adapt from the standard of the early and mid 2000s?
> So, your only credible excuse for using java is inertia from boomers and middle managers refusing to adapt from the standard of the early and mid 2000s?
If you come in and freely migrate all of the Java codebases to .NET while maintaining code quality and functionalities, I'm sure many people would let you do it. If you don't understand why people stick to one language, that means that you've never worked on a big codebase, or completly ignore the business side of the developer job. In both cases, that's a lack of wisdom on your part.
I guess you missed the 'new development' part of my original comment? Obviously it would be nonsensical to port a large extant codebase to a new language and tech stack if it's just being maintained.
In the past it has sent command line arguments and the path of the current working directory, among other things, according to comments on that issue. Even if Microsoft doesn't intend to deliberately collect sensitive data, they don't seem to think it's worth putting much effort into preventing accidental data leaks from broken anonymization, unreliable opt-out mechanism, etc.
yeah, you got it. My city has very little job listings requiring .NET for actual back-ends. Whereas, there are like a thousand Java jobs and almost half mentioning Spring
These discussions inevitably end up as a flame war sooner or later.
Regardless, i actually compared Java with .NET and their web frameworks as a part of my bachelors', everything from synthetic benchmarks for encryption and data processing and transformations, to things like shuffling JSON around. Now, it's all in Latvian and was a number of years ago, so it's not entirely relevant at this point, but i did have some tangible findings.
In short:
- both Java and .NET (then Core) are inconsistent in their performance - there are certain things which are slower in one technology than other by not using external optimized libraries. For example, Java had problems with writing deeply nested dynamically generated JSON with JavaEE libraries (now Jakarta), whereas .NET Core had problems with handling large amounts of text
- their performance was largely comparable in most other tests, neither was faster by a factor of 10, like you'd see with Python and Ruby compared to either
- thus, it's largely a matter of choosing the actual frameworks that you'll want to utilize properly and consider both the job market and business factors (familiarity with the tech stack, job market etc.)
- in summary, they're close enough for it to not be a technical decision most of the time in real world circumstances (save for a few exceptions), but rather is a decision that depends on social elements
Since then:
- i don't believe that the observation of them being "close enough" has changed much, both in legacy code and otherwise
- .NET Core and now .NET 6 has improved bunches with its runtime; Core was so successful it's essentially the future of the platform (i feel bad for developers who'll be tricked into working on legacy code with the old .NET and IIS, versus the new one and Kestrel)
- JDK has improved bunches with its runtime and GC; the runtime situation is a bit complicated and cumbersome, considering the OP's article, but overall it's pretty usable, especially with frameworks like Quarkus
If you jump around the different tabs that compare which frameworks do what better, on average:
- .NET is better for plain text
- .NET is noticeably better for data updates
- Java is noticeably better for JSON serialization
- Java is noticeably better for single DB queries
- Java is noticeably better for multiple DB queries
- as for cached queries and other use cases, there's more variance
- neither is better than the other for it to matter a lot
These are probably better than me linking the bachelors' because it's done in a better controlled environment, with more resources, and a lot of people contributing to the source code of the benchmarks: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/tree/mast...
In short, you're not necessarily wrong - there have indeed been great improvements to the .NET platform and it's good to see it finally being a capable and performant tech stack that you can use on *nix. But you're also not right: Java is getting similar attention, even though it's still lagging behind a few years in regards to "having its stuff together" (e.g. going from Oracle JDK to a more stable model + the JDK 8 to newer version shift, which is similarly painful with old .NET versions).
To lighten the mood, i'd consider suggesting that anyone also have a look at Go, which is similarly performant and allows you to build runtime independent executables by default, which is easier than in either .NET or Java. It's also pretty easy to write and has seen good use for the development of tools, since its startup time is a tad better than either that of Java or .NET as well. Here's the three compared: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...
As if implementing value types in a backwards compatible way that also modifies generics to work with them would be a trivial task..
Also, Oracle does pay plenty for the development of Java, and is a (surprisingly) good steward of the language, let’s drop all the blind hate.
And both in terms of GC and JIT, the JVM ecosystem is ahead, the reason they can be so head-to-head is that the CLR doesn’t hide lower level controls all that much, allowing for better hand-tuned programs (at the price of the resulting code not getting “automatically” faster in a possible future release)
> read: oracle doesn't want to pay their engineers to impl it and will sue you if you do it yourself) like value types, generics without type erasure, no checked exceptions, etc.
All of this is currently being implemented in project Valhalla...
I never buy into the tech stack argument that things are being worked on (e.g you mention Project Vahalla but I see this across many languages and tools). Seen this argument used on a number of different technologies. It compares a future state to a current state to put the favored tech (the future state) in an equal or better position. It usually punishes innovative platforms as well; because it dismisses any reason to take them up.
It's comparing apples to oranges - in this case .NET is also being actively worked on so may have other things by then. Compare current state only.
The truth is each platform has prioritized features relevant to its context. For what its worth in my experience while the JVM has many more JIT optimisations and the like it tends to need them more of them given the lack of some of those features you mention (e.g. value types). Whereas .NET code allows value types, better management of memory (i.e. Span), reified generics etc so the focus has been to allow the user to optimise themselves where required where still allowing for a decent performance default. Many of the optimisations in the JVM wouldn't have the same bang for buck in .NET and vice versa.
On a personal note I'm more of a fan of the .NET philosophy because the code is usually fast enough, and when I need to tune memory, avoid allocations, and do fast code it seems to offer more tools not in an unsafe context to do so. It allows a better "upper bound" of performance for core things IMO while keeping to bytecode/IL. Many benchmarks where the same level of application optimisation has occured from what I seen have confirmed this bias for me. YMMV
You’re missing the point. He claimed Oracle refuses to develop these features or will sue you if you do it yourself (they hired the guy who implemented fibers to implement them in the jvm), but they are actively working on it. The point of my comment was that OP’s claim was just patently false. I wasn’t claiming the JVM has feature parity or is better or anything of the sort.
But they ARE working on them and they ARE paying their engineeers to do it. They even hired pron to implement fibers in the jvm and didn’t sue him for doing it in quasar, which is the opposite of what you’re claiming.
> Records, switch expressions, multi line strings and that is only language changes.
None of those are features, they were desperately needed shorthands for common java idioms. This is like calling braceless if/for/while statements 'features', when they're purely syntax sugar that has fallen out of favor completely because there's been several major security vulns found in major projects due to their use and development oversight/code review failure (https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/02/24/anatomy-of-a-got...), to the point where most companies ban writing them.
Just off the top of my head:
* LINQ. Added to C# in 2007, Java didn't get streams until 2014.
* structs/value types, implemented in net framework and net core for 15+ years, but not present in java 17. Some oracle engineers have been working to implement them under project valhalla but it seems to be vaporware at this point after 8+ years of work.
* unsigned types, no plans to implement in java (though IIRC it was originally planned as part of valhalla)
* async/await
At the feature level Java is stuck in the mid 2000s. Nobody wants to do the actual work on keeping it competitive.
Thank God they didn't shove this crap in. When Loom ships (I believe the next LTS is their target, more or less), JVM will have the same concurrency story as Go does, without blue/green function split like in C#.
> unsigned types, no plans to implement in java (though IIRC it was originally planned as part of valhalla)
Not too comfortable to use functions that will compile to efficient byte code exists for them, but with the definitely coming Valhalla, it will be trivial to create a custom primitive class for unsigned ints.
> async/await
With project Loom, it will avoid the mistake of function coloring that async introduces. In a managed language, why not let the runtime automatically transform blocking calls to non-blocking, when it already knows what’s up?
> With project Loom, it will avoid the mistake of function coloring that async introduces. In a managed language, why not let the runtime automatically transform blocking calls to non-blocking, when it already knows what’s up?
Not saying it's a good or bad thing, but .NET and C# by extension has had these features for years (decades in some cases) while the only thing java has are half-baked prototypes and plans to 'maybe' implement things. In many cases these plans just get endlessly pushed back and new java major versions just become a pile of simple bugfixes which in the past were just pushed as minor jre updates.
It’s not like async/await is a must, they are on the surface just syntactic sugar.
In the background, coroutines are a strictly less useful feature than what will happen with Loom, and please show me any “promised feature” that were only half-baked prototypes? We do have one half of Valhalla (vector api) under an experimental flag with JDK 17 already, several language related JEPs were shipped already. That Loom and primitive classes take their time only mean that they are not vaporware, because these are actually ridiculously complex problems.
With your explanation everything is just a shorthand. All you really need is NAND.
Streams are a library feature, records are a language feature. Streams could be implemented outside, records could not (no lombok abominations are not records).
comparing braces to records/multi line strings/switch expressions is so funny that I won't even comment on that.
> and also what do you mean by oracle suing if you implement value types?
this one shouldn't need an explanation, oracle very commonly pursues frivolous lawsuits as a way of bullying money out of businesses that don't have the budget to fight them for years in various courts.
where does it say .net 5 was faster than openjdk? hotspot is a very sophisticated jit compiler that has probably 100 manyears put into it just in optimizations. given that .net added monomorphic/bimorphic call site devirtualization recently which is considered quite basic in the hotspot, it would be good to see real world usage comparison.
Where required there are ways to force it to inline/devirtualise yourself. For example using refied generics is one way I've seen - i.e. there is no interface/virtual casting since it takes a type that implements interface, rather than the interface itself. It allows you to make polymorphism compile time rather than runtime. Seem comparison libraries to Java (closed source) that have run much faster as a result.
I do find people comparing Java and .NET Core often are compare apples to oranges however. Working on both languages it is just my opinion but the .NET platform is newer - it has a better "base" even without the same man hours. Much of the engineering time in both ecosystems is spent optimising for code typical to that ecosystem which is affected by history/legacy like any other software system.
They do, people trade in phones for credit towards an iphone all the time.
Doing it without the meagre compensation they give now would be deeply unethical, Tesla tried something like that recently when a story emerged that someone was quoted for full out of warranty battery replacement for a broken cooling hose fitting on their cars battery and they refused to give any core charge even though the battery itself was still fully functional (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8-OkfCcRAo).
> The Apple Store and many of our Apple Authorized Service Providers offer same-day service for screen replacement.
The pricing available here (for guaranteed new, genuine parts and labor) is actually cheaper than the cost of genuine replacement screens available on ebay at first glance, the first genuine iphone 11 screen I found on ebay that wasn't a chinese offbrand or used assembly is $235 (https://www.ebay.com/itm/174952166934) whereas apple quotes $199 for a new 11 screen and replacement service.
That's repair, not parts, and it's only screens, not any of the other many parts that often fail.
Of course the pricing is lower than buying an ebay screen, because apple won't sell you a screen, so sellers on ebay have to procure them illegally. Again, a problem that apple iself created.
I'm aware. It doesn't really matter if the final repair service is cheaper than buying the part and doing it yourself and leaves a better, like new result rather than a repair job done by an amateur.
> and it's only screens, not any of the other many parts that often fail.
They repair any part of the phone that fails, screens were just the first example I found are trawling for a few seconds with google. Apple does cheap battery replacements and will swap motherboards too.
Look up Louis Rossman on YouTube. There are many repairs that are trivial for a trained professional that Apple just refuses to do, nor do they provide parts for. Replace a single resistor and an "unfixable" MacBook works like new again.
The characterisation of third party repair as "amateurs" is one of Apple's creation (obviously not just them but all tech companies). Apple will wipe your data, send your phone to China and replace your mainboard at best. An actual repair technician will fix what's actually wrong right then and there and not touch what isn't - including data.
I completely understand that you don't want to fix your own device or even if you only ever want to deal with Apple, but that shouldn't be the only option.
> Look up Louis Rossman on YouTube. There are many repairs that are trivial for a trained professional that Apple just refuses to do, nor do they provide parts for. Replace a single resistor and an "unfixable" MacBook works like new again.
I know who louis is, and contrary to your opinion replacing random surface mount components until the machine turns back on is not a repair. Generally most of his work is not even for machines that spontaneously failed, it's all stuff that's water/beer/soda damaged that Apple turned away. He charges more to do those repairs and they generally don't hold, because it's impossible to remove all latent moisture and corrosion once a board is significantly damaged like that.
> The characterisation of third party repair as "amateurs" is one of Apple's creation (obviously not just them but all tech companies).
The context was the end user buying parts and repairing their machine themselves. How is that not amateur?
> Apple will wipe your data, send your phone to China and replace your mainboard at best. An actual repair technician will fix what's actually wrong right then and there and not touch what isn't - including data.
Apple themselves say they do same-day repair, so I'm not sure why you're overtly lying about that here.
> I completely understand that you don't want to fix your own device or even if you only ever want to deal with Apple, but that shouldn't be the only option.
???
I'm 100% pro repair, I'm just not getting the hate on apple for their practices. They are by far the most pro-repair company in the smartphone space (definitely NOT in the laptop space however, though their in-store battery replacements for macbooks are still cheaper than buying genuine oem batteries for thinkpads, I wish they would go back to socketed ram and ssds but that clearly isn't happening), and are the only actual company that offers in person same day repairs and mail in repairs for reasonable prices. If you want to get a pixel repaired you have to go to shady third party chain stores that are contracted by google, and usually all they will do is replace the screen and see if it works (even if the fault is completely unrelated, you can search for people's experiences with pixel 3s spontaneously bricking and find thousands of horrors stories).
> replacing random surface mount components until the machine turns back on is not a repair
Definition of repair, according to Merriam-Webster [1]:
> to restore by replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
It seems to me like Louis' repairs qualify. A customer walks in with a broken Mac or iPhone, he identifies the part that is broken, then he replaces it. Do you have an alternative definition by any chance?
> He charges more to do those repairs and they generally don't hold
Do you have any actual evidence that Louis' repairs are unreliable? Do his customers eventually complain about them?
> Apple themselves say they do same-day repair
Okay, but what about the data stored on the old mainboard that gets thrown out?
> They are by far the most pro-repair company in the smartphone space
Again, we seem to have different definitions here. My definition of "pro-repair" excludes any companies actively lobbying against right to repair and implementing unnecessary software features to detect replaced parts.
> If you want to get a pixel repaired you have to go to shady third party chain stores that are contracted by google
Maybe if you (and others like you) would stop shilling so hard for Apple, turning a blind eye to their anti right to repair lobbying, and encouraging others to do the same by tenaciously defending their anti-user practices on public forums, we might actually have a chance at getting right to repair legislation passed, and then you could easily get your Pixel fixed, and your iPhone, too.
Apple's lobbying and precedent-setting makes everything worse for everyone, not just for Apple users.
What happens when Apple decides overnight to increase the price by a factor of 5? When you can't go anywhere but Apple for repair, whether or not you are overcharged is entirely Apple's decision. When you have actual choices, and actual competition to Apple's repair services, like you obviously should, it's not possible for Apple to do this.
You mean apple stores? They're everywhere that matter.
That said, I still won't buy an iphone until they at least get rid of lightning. It's extreme ridiculous that apple would keep a proprietary connector after migrating the rest of their product stack over to usbc. I have a pixel 3 currently and will certainly never buy another android phone again, the biggest issues I've had don't exist on iphones at all, namely apps being randomly killed or crashing on open due to running out of RAM and the battery degrading quickly (lost ~10% in 1 1/2 years of light use, not using the phone in any extremely cold or hot conditions and only trickle charging).
Well.. yeah? That's what happens when you allow organized crime to attack foreign businesses with impunity, encourage your citizens to murder gay and trans people, and destabilize every neighboring country by instigating false flagged 'civil' wars in them.
Of course, there are also important factors like the average worker being dirt poor. Who is buying an iphone on a 300-400USD/mo equivalent salary? It would take years and years of saving to afford one, or a choice to put yourself into hard to repay debt for a status symbol? I would imagine the average person there buys the cheapest phones possible and not the highest end name brand phones every few years like working and middle class westerners do.
Were you expecting a different answer? Do you think anyone who tells you a hard truth should 'seek professional help'? I guess when you end up utterly defeated in your own country clinging to national fervor only to come and post snark on places like HN and still end up own-goaling yourself it must be hard to cope with, snark is all you have left :'(.
Are you insinuating that Russia didn't cause the death of tens of thousands of civilians in east ukraine or that the anti-gay purges in chechnya didn't happen...? You're a real piece of shit if that's your belief.
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you.
I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).
Every dispensary I've visited here in the northeast accepts cash and debit cards, I assume they don't accept credit due to higher processing fees and higher risk of chargebacks rather than processors being problematic (otherwise they would not accept debit since they get ran through the same system anyway).