My stance on high-powered magnets is the same as on high-powered motorcycles.

Sure, you can have them, as long as you and all your passengers/bystanders have signed an organ donor agreement.

Windows naysayers (so, yeah, that's pretty much all of you: no need to raise your hand: just flag this comment, post your outrage in internal YC groups, and the universe will carry on regardless...) will disregard WSL as being confusing, too little too late, EEE, etc.

But, in the real world? The 'Store' version of WSL (or, as you should call it, GNU/LSW, of course...) is actually pretty good.

Previously, I mostly used WSL (néé GNU/LSW) to get a proper `dig` and `curl`, but in recent builds, I can actually run most previously Linux-only software that I'm interested in, as long as it targets Ubuntu x64.

So, progress, I guess?

The article makes a good point, were it not for security auditors (SAs).

SA: You leak information and therefore violate policy by disclosing on the login form whether an account exists or not!

Me: Yeah, but figuring out if an account exists is really simple anyway: just a query to a different endpoint...

SA: NEVERMIND, MY LAD: disclosing account existence upon login violates BEST PRACTICES!

Me: OK, yeah, whatever, we'll just change the error message to "something you may or not have entered may or may not be valid information, try again, or not"

SA: cool beans! WE ARE NOW INDUSTRY LEADERS

Every well known credit card / credit data breach has been of a PCI-DSS compliant party.

To any SAs reading this: you're not secure because you're compliant.

The big issue there is that they store credit card data at all.

And of course that some simple public number is enough to authorise payment.

Avid Windows user here (yes, I know, and you know where the downvote button is: better: just email your YC contacts to ban me once and for all...), and I yet have to see a single truly noticeable ad across any of my Windows installs.

'Promoted' start menu apps on a fresh install: sure. That's like Amazon Search on Ubuntu.

Promotional text on the lock screen? Sure, once in a while. But it takes a LOT of effort to actually click on that.

Desperate 'make this browser your default' prompts from Edge? Sure, every now and then, but since Firefox and Chrome do it as well, that's pretty much a muscle memory 'No' from me.

Now, on my fully paid-for iPhone 13, I got an urgent notification from the Apple Store today. It made my phone buzz and my screen light up, while I was otherwise productively engaged. Apparently, there is a sale on. Apparently, I can't turn these notifications off.

So, me, a lifelong Windows user, got distracted today by an ad. From Apple. Make of that what you will...

Amazon search on Ubuntu was widely criticised also and has since been removed. Between that and Snaps, Ubuntu has lost the position as "recommended Linux distro for newbies" to the likes of PopOS and Manjaro, so it arguably wasn't consequence free either.

Chrome and Firefox don't get the same ability to make sales pitches if you search for Edge, choose to download Edge, try to install Edge, or update your OS.

Can't speak for the Apple store ad, I haven't seen it but I like in a market which is often thankfully overlooked by invasive marketing pushes like this, and I'm not even sure if what used to be the one Apple store in the country is still open.

> Chrome and Firefox don't get the same ability to make sales pitches if you search for Edge

This is just plain false. If I open Edge and search Google for just about anything, there will be a prominent ad prompting me to switch to Chrome.

Every. Time. I'm not sure where Firefox puts the focus for their ads (MDN? Fortunately, I don't need to visit that often or ever), but...

> Now, on my fully paid-for iPhone 13, I got an urgent notification from the Apple Store today. It made my phone buzz and my screen light up, while I was otherwise productively engaged. Apparently, there is a sale on. Apparently, I can't turn these notifications off.

An app with the word "store" in its name giving you a notification for a sale is hardly the same as ads embedded in your Start menu or lock screen.

There was a notification on my lock screen. It buzzed my phone. It lit up my phone's screen. That's not intrusive, i.e. worse than some additional text on an UI surface that I already interact with?

It's not intrusive because, contrary to what you think, you can very easily disable notifications for that app, just as you disable notifications for any other app in iOS. I have, and therefore I didn't get this notification that you mentioned, but if I open the app I can see a banner at the top of the app for the sale. Therefore I can assume that turning off the notification is indeed possible.

And, I mean, it's an Apple Store app. The app is optional, you can uninstall it if you want; if you have it on your phone, it's not ridiculous to think that you'd want to be alerted to a sale. Ditto for Amazon, or Best Buy, or any other "store" app. It's for shopping, that is the soul purpose of the app. I'd even go so far as to argue that a shopping app giving you notifications for a sale is a good thing (because, if I presumably chose to install that app for the purpose of shopping there, why wouldn't I want to be aware of the fact that the products I presumably want to buy are cheaper?). IMO these aren't even really "ads," they're just notifications from an app doing exactly what it's designed to do. While ads can be delivered via a notification system, notifications and ads are not the same thing.

However, multiple, persistent ads embedded into various places around the OS, with no clear way to remove them -- not to mention pre-installed third-party apps acting as their own advertisement (such as Candy Crush) -- are categorically different on a completely different level, but if you can't see that or don't care then more power to you I guess.

> Promotional text on the lock screen? Sure, once in a while. But it takes a LOT of effort to actually click on that.

Ads don't need to be clickable. Most ads aren't clickable.

How many people do you think are on HN who earn their paycheck because of advertising?

0. I install it and it Just Works. I'm just a C# wageslave, so my experience may be atypical, but:

1. I download and run the vscode installer, either on Windows (boo, hiss, I know), MacOS (boo, hiss, I know) or Linux (some recent Ubuntu, boo, hiss, I know, should build my own distro and then complain vscode doesn't work, but, sorry, busy busy...)

2. I clone a repo, open the .csproj or .sln; vscode offers to download and install the (boo, hiss, proprietary, I'm sure, I know, I'm sorry, not sorry) bits required to deal with that

3. I do my work, compile, run, debug, all fine, no issues, can set breakpoints, inspect variables, get InteliCode<tm> (yes, boo, hiss, should learn to appreciate code without helping wheels, sorry, not sorry), check in my branch, create a PR, be done with my day (boo, hiss, yes I know I should be tweaking my dotfiles and such, but, you know, busy, busy)

Confusing the AppleMobileBackup utility for fun and profit

I'm pretty sure that declaring https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory/tree/master/data to be MIT-licensed does not actually make it so... (these are disk images of the relevant FS releases, which are still under copyright as well as provided under a proprietary MIT-incompatible license)

TL;DR: A Microsoft contractor basically endorsed piracy, in a weirdly-recursive-enough-to-be-legal way...