Bring Your Own Client • Hacker News Board

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#231

Post by asdff » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 7:09 AM UTC

eric4smith wrote: post #20

The main reason for using google docs is not it’s superlative editor... /sarcasm It’s the collaboration features. And no I don’t mean the multiple people typing the doc at the same time. It’s the ability to quickly share a document with a set of people that you want. Sure I use Vim every day, but without that git push and a trip to GitHub to invite collaborators I’m a man on a desert island waiting for that next week…

What about emailing your brother the recipe? That's ultimately the sharing infrastructure Google docs sits on top of.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#232

Post by Too » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 8:40 AM UTC

progval wrote: post #210

karatinversion wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Deleted my identical but less detailed comment) Then again, this was never the case in the EU, where bundling handsets with a GSM subscription was banned. But yes, we don’t have to imagine - and the change certainly didn’t come out of the goodness of the carrier’s hearts!

> this was never the case in the EU, where bundling handsets with a GSM subscription was banned. It is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#European_Union Last time I was looking for a phone (~8 years ago), in France, I had to check which ones were simlocked.

Usually you had he option at least. Either fork up full price for unlocked phone, or take the subsidized monthly rental of phone with a locked SIM.

And while the second option does lock you into one operator for 12-24 months you still had the choice of which operator to tie yourself to, I don't think I ever saw a phone model only available on single provider.

Finally no matter which operator you chose you can still call people from other operators, even if they initially tried very hard to make this less pleasurable by allowing free texts and minutes within the operator.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#233

Post by Too » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

megous wrote: post #204

BYOC for shopping online would be nice. Exchange formats for product aggregators sort of solve one part of the equation. But ordering is still an unsolved issue. It shouldn't be that hard to do. You may need maybe 5 endpoints. Get all product data for the whole stock, get individual product images, get order requirements (can include terms and conditions, desired information for the order, payment options, human cont…

I think you forgot the API endpoints that will tell you how few items are left in stock and how many other users that are looking at this item right now. Not all stores would be sophisticated enough to implement such endpoint though but luckily it is easy to approximate in your client using stock=Random.nextInt(1,2) and users=Random.nextInt(50, 2000).

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#234

Post by Too » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 9:03 AM UTC

throwaway316943 wrote: post #34

I’m reading Thinking Forth at the moment and there’s a part in the description of Forth about how it decouples words from their parameters and return types by only allowing stack manipulation. This means that all words share a common interface and so they’re infinitely composable. The reason I started reading this book is due to learning how WebAssembly works which turns out to be quite similar to Forth. It got me th…

  > make all code modules interoperable. 
  > Being able to compose an application or client 
  > out of many independent parts would be a dream come true.

You can stop dreaming, this exists and it's called json and npm install. Some would argue this particular implementation of it is a nightmare rather than a dream though :)

At some point you also have to integrate all this interop. Possibility to compose doesn't mean composition automatically puzzles itself together.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#235

Post by madpata » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 9:18 AM UTC

okl wrote: post #8

bombcar wrote: post #2

This strikes at something that people often WANT when they say "text files are better than the registry/binary formats" - they want to easily bring their own tooling to bear. Standard APIs let you do this - even if you have a "binary format" like MySQL or PostgreSQL (on disk) - nobody really complains about that because they have a defined API you can interact with.

Or SQLite, which I would recommend over some homebrewed text file format, see https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

Text file formats have the benefit of being easier to kerge sometimes. SQLite files are binary and hard/impossible to merge.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#236

Post by karatinversion » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 10:11 AM UTC

progval wrote: post #210

karatinversion wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Deleted my identical but less detailed comment) Then again, this was never the case in the EU, where bundling handsets with a GSM subscription was banned. But yes, we don’t have to imagine - and the change certainly didn’t come out of the goodness of the carrier’s hearts!

> this was never the case in the EU, where bundling handsets with a GSM subscription was banned. It is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#European_Union Last time I was looking for a phone (~8 years ago), in France, I had to check which ones were simlocked.

Huh, I lived in two EU countries so thought it was Union law, but turned out the national law in the two just coincided!

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#237

Post by chrisweekly » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #139

ivan888 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the better examples still seeing widespread mainstream use is email, and this even applies to multiple stages throughout the email ecosystem: sending mail, receiving mail, managing mailboxes. Imagine if email wasn't cross provider compatible

The surviving open protocols are like libraries: they were created before the space got commercialized. They got grandfathered in. If libraries didn't exist for centuries already, there is no way they could have been created under current intellectual property laws and IP economy. Similarly, new open protocols don't generally gain widespread adoption - and in the rare case they do, that's only because some companies…

Great points -- w caveat that RSS isn't dead! :)

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#238

Post by zo1 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

api wrote: post #97

kjrose wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it can happen if a significant enough open source project establishes a protocol early enough and doesn't get co-opted. That or a consortium of companies agree on some sort of standard. (See the work on pc buses in the early pc days) But you are right. When companies run under trying to get as many users locked in as possible during a paid for investors period. This model is precisely the opposite outcome expect…

For something to get traction, it has to have excellent UI and UX. So far open source hasn't been very successful at providing that since there is no economic model to finance the immense amount of work required for good UX.

UX is a trojan horse, now everything has to be mobile friendly for absolutely no bloody reason. You know what also works on mobile? Zooming, yes you heard me.

Just the other day I had someone, an old person, complain about how a "revamp" of an internet banking site. They rewrote their functional, working UI, with a site that was designed by "UX designers", and you know how he phrased his opinion of the new site? "They made the site for stupid people".

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#239

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#240

Post by tomxor » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #11

The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high that don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention. I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate wi…

I think the focus here is on the wrong thing, the "app", which makes ideas like legal intervention and other distractions feel relevant.

I think client interchangeability and ultimately user freedom is fundamentally about data driven design, look at all the examples: text is text is text... git is a file based graph of merkle trees. They are both highly abstract, portable, unopinionated data structures that don't describe APIs, UI or implementation - don't like git CLI? you can literally write a completely different one with different porcelain and use the exact same git repos as everyone else, people have done this. Text is the same, it's just more obvious because so many examples exist.

If you start with data and make it successful clients will emerge around it without the choice of making it interchangable.

The problem with things like google docs isn't the app, it's the opaque data format. And then there are formats posing as being open and portable like DOCX which is essentially a proprietary microsoft format forced open due to reverse engineering - all of it's details will no doubt be closely coupled to the history of MS Word features and implementation.