> it quite often can take 24-48 hours for your physical SIM to activate
In my world, I land in an airport, purchase a SIM card and it works before I leave the airport (or the operator’s desk). It’s often that way with eSIMs purchased via Airalo.
The delay could appear when your transferring your number, but even then you can still use a temporary number until the old one overrides it.
Pre-paid SIMs are different they are usually pre-provisioned or have an expedient path since there is less KYC and other checks that need to be performed.
Atwood and Spolsky themselves boasted repeatedly that SO, for a long time, was just a Windows server and a SQL Server with some C#.
The key element in the success of SO was not technical: it was Spolsky and Atwood leveraging already-established (Microsoft) audiences they had, to create a virtuous circle of sharing that snowballed for years.
I think OP may be referencing SO has multiple products outside the core QA site that may be more headcount-intensive or at least have more costs outside a few .NET servers and a well tuned database.
Not to mention an international presence benefiting from 24-hour on-call rotations that would benefit from international offices and other fixtures that are very expensive to maintain.
I sounds more like neither one of you has had that choice. Most people, given the chance, would rather add a zero to their savings rather than “doing the right thing for society”
Then we should not depend on people making the right choice. We should limit the opportunities people have to choose between "more for me" and "do something useful for society".
> Then we should not depend on people making the right choice.
Broadly speaking, any system that depends on an unbroken chain of good people who do the right things out of the goodness of their hearts is bound to fail much sooner rather than later. So I agree.
The system should be designed so that people taking action out of their own interests nevertheless advances society as a whole. As Adam Smith put it: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The system that was designed this way is capitalism, warts and all.
> One idea here is more progressive taxation.
I'm not sure how that conclusion follows from your premise. If you want to set up incentive structures such that people chasing their own interests also ends up being useful for society, then you want to make sure that people voluntarily pay money for goods and services that they value. The supplier of that value makes money, the consumer of that value is better off, and society as a whole is enriched as a result.
This also means that the state takes action to break trusts and monopolies, and (more difficultly) guards against regulatory capture, all of which end up making it so that people involuntarily pay for goods and services that they don't necessarily value. Rent-seeking behavior such as this is one of the highest economic ills.
"More progressive taxation" does many things, but it is also exceptionally good at enriching the politically well-connected, often in the form of rent-seeking behavior I described above. Look at world government spending as a fraction of GDP[0] as a good proxy for "more progressive taxation", and tell me between France (58.5%), the US (38.5%) and Singapore (15.4%), which you consider a well-run country where people do more useful things for society.
I don't think that's true, and I think you're revealing something about yourself vs. the majority of people (besides the fact that most folks, especially in the US, don't have enough money for an extra 0 to mean much). I think of the teachers, social workers, public defenders, volunteers, and civil servants who sacrifice greater earning potential because they believe in what they're doing.
It's like folks who claim people are motivated only by money: no, you're only motivated by money. Most folks see money as a means to an end, namely, a safe, normal life lived with loved ones.
Implementation is very much part of the rules. Apps cannot download and execute external code… unless it’s JavaScript in a browser.
Nothing in the article suggests that WeChat apps are not plain websites, so it seems that they don’t know the rules nor the alleged rule breaker’s technical side.
I wouldn’t exclude that WeChat really does get a pass from Apple, but the article does not clarify this important point.
A lot of these superapp mini-app can be just a link. It can be an in-app browser with static link to a college level javascript games page, maybe with credit purchase through native code going back and forth with URL parameters and callbacks. If you're doing superapps you're likely going for a janky bag full of features so that'll be fine.
> I don't totally understand the concept of having an everything app. Isn't the OS the "everything app"?
Why are you downloading apps from the App Store instead of running separate OSes? This is the same concept, just one level down.
Really, WeChat is just a browser with extra APIs and a website catalog.
> Do people like the wechat experience because you have one login and don't have to go through an onboarding process in every mini-app?
I’m not fully familiar with its history, but from what I understand Tencent added more and more “apps” to their chat app and eventually let third parties into it. This is exactly what Facebook did in 2010: we also had third party “apps” on Facebook. They were also just iframed websites with extra APIs.
> I’m not fully familiar with its history, but from what I understand Tencent added more and more “apps” to their chat app and eventually let third parties into it. This is exactly what Facebook did in 2010: we also had third party “apps” on Facebook. They were also just iframed websites with extra APIs.
It's crazy how long ago this feels. FarmVille legitimately took over the country for a bit.
> I try to use private browsing tabs as much as I can.
I regularly open websites and searches in private mode, but cookie notices are killing me. iOS Safari doesn't even share cookies between private tabs, so there's one notice per tab, even if you already accepted/denied it.
Given you use private browsing a lot it might not be something you’re willing to trust, but I find Consent-o-Matic[0] to be fantastic and indispensable. I have it set to blanket deny all non-essential cookies and the mobile web is a far less miserable place now.
I tried it for a couple of days and found that it clicks the wrong button, landing me on a secondary “cookie page” where I have to still manually tap. This happened on Google.com and I think YouTube and Yahoo (or some of its properties). I tried several cookie extensions and often either they don’t work or break the website (hiding the notice, but leave an invisible wrapper that causes the website to be completely unclickable)
In my world, I land in an airport, purchase a SIM card and it works before I leave the airport (or the operator’s desk). It’s often that way with eSIMs purchased via Airalo.
The delay could appear when your transferring your number, but even then you can still use a temporary number until the old one overrides it.