Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | SXX's commentslogin

Yes, but it wont work for sharing mobile internet because VPN doee not apply to tethering unless you have root. On Android there is also WiFi direct, but it's not very reliable and require proxy / not work for everything.

That is harmless 99.9% of the time until you get swatted. Takes a one phone call in the US to get you at gun point of a very trigger happy people.

You dont even need anyone evil . Might be just dumb and misinformed by AI news slop that people of your kind are evil, dangerous, etc. Whoever you are.

The problem with no anonimity is that not all people are rational even if they're dont have shizophrenia or something worse.

You can be a small guy doing your small thing and sharing it online. Unfortunately you never know when and why you gonna become a supervillain in eyes of craze.


Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands.

It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.


Why are hundreds of thousands keys a reasonable amount for a developer? I am not in the video game business so I fail to see the use case.

Yeah, you need a much smaller number for e.g. giving access to journalists/media pre-release. But the key mechanism is also used for any legitimate sales or giveaways that happen outside the Steam platform.

If you buy a Humble Bundle, you get a set of Steam keys for the games in the bundle. If Intel/AMD/Nvidia are doing a promotion for a free game with a purchase of their product, they give you Steam keys. Etc.


How keys are used explained in other answers already. Number of keys you can request would obviously depend on how successful is your hame on Steam. E.g I doubt Valve would generate 100,000 keys for a game with zero sales, but likely under 10,000 is possible.

Other than selling keys they can also be used for marketing. If you for instance have a game with multiplayer, lots of DLCs or IAP then giving away keys for base game make a lot of sense: even if only 1% of people who grab the key gonna play it they can still eventually buy other copy for a friend, etc.


Developers can sell those keys outside of Steam and they are redeemable for a copy of the game on your Steam library.

Except last few times it went so well for the countries where "intervention" happen.

Also are they in favor to replacing this dictator with another pro-Trump one?

Current US president have a weak spot for every dictator and authoritarian leader in the world: El Salvador, Russia, Hungary, etc.

Might be not the best candidate to deal with dictators...


So Maria machado, the recipient of the Nobel peace prize in 2025 is a would be dictator ?

We have some interesting precedents to compare notes with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi

That did not quite go according to plan either. Definitely not a dictatorship but not exactly clean and the end result is not so far off from where they started. Venezuela could easily end up worse than it is today.


Why do you believe some civil opposition leader will end up im power after foreign military intervention?

Usually people who end up in power are ones best at shooting others invluding shooting civil politicians.


> Also are they in favor to replacing this dictator with another pro-Trump one?

When your options are being poor, starved to death or dissapeared during the last 25 years, you take any chance for a change


Whats wrong if US population has voted for this? There was no surprises this time - everyone can expect what is going to happen.

Didn’t the majority of people vote to “drain the swamp” and “bring down the cost of living”?

People had nearly a decade of experience with Donald Trump as a known political entity and decades of receipts and lawsuits prior to 2016 to speak to his amoral and corrupt nature. If they didn't know exactly what they were buying into they were idiots. He isn't exactly a master manipulator.

Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.


I actually don't want to suffer just because my neighbor is racist.

I'm not saying I support either. I am just looking at US politics from outside. But this is how your democracy system works.

You asked, "Whats wrong if US population has voted for this?" in response to someone complaining that the system is not working, and so I explained it: the rest of us are not represented. I'm unsure what point you're getting at.

My point is: presidents are not delivered to your country by president delivery alien space ship. A lot of people voted for him and this is a fact. You cant just blame everyone of them for being dumb or racist. If you dont like their choice that means you should starting to do something about it.

Authorithorianism also not just happen - it take years to build and destroy institutions. It took 20 years to build fascist regime in my country.

Sorry for not making it clear enough.


And there are literally app farms pushing hundreds consealed illegal gambling / casino / betting apps to app store daily. Apple approves every single one.

They are then getting removed in days / weeks, but it just proves their review process is a joke.


This is not only affects Epic. Basically any other app, game or SaaS developer can now earn more money because payment processing costing them 1-3% instead of 30%.

And small companies are hit by 30% platform tax the most. More money for small compsnies mean more competition.


Not necessarily.

For starters, small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.

I'm also not sure where a small company can find a payment processor that will only charge 1%. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.

If you have a $4.99 in-app purchase that will cost you 44 cents per transaction to use Stripe vs 75 cents to use Apple's IAP.

But Stripe does not act as a merchant of record so you are responsible for remitting sales tax yourself. Registering for and remitting sales tax in every jurisdiction where you have nexus adds huge administrative overhead to a small company.

If you want to avoid this overhead, Paddle will act as a merchant of record for you, but then you're paying 5% plus 50 cents which adds up to 75 cents on a $4.99 purchase anyway.

Linking to external payments also reduces conversion rates (https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/iap-vs-web-purchases-...) compared to using IAP.

Taken all together, depending on their pricing structure, small companies may very well be financially better off sticking with IAP rather than linking to external payments anyway.


>small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.

When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.

But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes.


> When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.

I'm not sure about the timeline, but in general the reduction to 15% for small developers was due to market signals as much as it was anything else. Both Apple and Google need small developers to continue to create new apps and if the 30% is onerous to small developers (which I think it probably is) they'll lower it to attract more products and services.

> But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes

When you think about it, there's maybe half a dozen companies that truly could put in similar work to Apple or Google in creating and maintaining these stores and platforms at the scale and with the features and security that they have built. Most people are going to stick with Apple and Google, except when one of those large competitors like Meta decides to bypass those stores and create its own and continue to nudge folks to their store for various features or downloads or whatever. It introduces friction for no obvious benefit to customers.

You can argue that 3rd party app stores will be more permissive in what they allow, but most of the things that people complain about "scary surveillance" or other onerous regulations for example have to also be followed by any legitimate App Store. So all you've really done is create worse versions of the Apple or Google App Store that siphon away applications. It reduces the profit margins of Apple or Google but it doesn't benefit customers.


I've always wanted to do some small business, maybe an app but to get started feels so daunting. This information you provided is great and makes me feel like there's room to know more.

Are there any good places to grow this kind of knowledge? How to use payment processors? How to actually setup a business and get paid yourself?

I don't want to get into the whole founder ethos, I just want to make something and get paid for it.


10 years is way too long for Google. It will be gone in 5 replaced by 3 other AI cloud services.


You're right. How naive of me.


I mean Bard barely lasted a year. Arguably Gemini is just a rebrand of Bard, but Bard is still dead.


If you look at web traffic when making Gemini web requests, you'll see that Bard is still in the URL (so are LaMDA (pre-bard) and Assistant (pre-GenAI)):

gemini.google.com/_/BardChatUi/data/assistant.lamda.BardFrontendService/StreamGenerate


That's interesting! I wonder how many parts of their other dead projects are used in current projects.


Bing Chat suffered the same fate


Tbh I never even heard of that!

Didn't they also just shut down Vertex and Gemini APIs to launch a new unified API this week?


I can't find any news about this. That's not wholly unusual given the context. Do you have a link?


Finally that turf war ends


lol already forgot about bard like it was ancient history


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: