> A key feature of a platform should be that the developers choose when a deployment happens.

Agreed. When I was on a platform team we wrote tools to take a process that used to be done by a deployment team (change a DNS record was a helpdesk ticket) and move it into a self-serve system (PR your desired DNS changes in, upon merge, the system deploys the changes), which kept audit happy because 'dev' wasn't touching 'prod' in the unfettered way SOC2 people stay up at night worrying about (even though Enron happened because of bad managment not Office Space but anyways), while still giving Devs effective control of when and where they wanted to make production changes, whether relatively ad-hoc or as part of a CI/CD pipeline.

Humans could approve the self-service PRs, or if a list of in-code rules had been fulfilled, the PR would be auto approved (and potentially even merged but everyone but us was too afraid to set that part up).

So I'm pretty (very?) young compared to most HN luminaries. I've never even started a company much less did something HN famous like writing the LGPL. But I love to hear these discussions.

I'd love to ask the elders this: when did you first start doing group chats, as in multi-user chat rooms with roughly permanent de-anonymized identities?

So, I was in jabber IM rooms in my first job, we didn't use cell phones, but there was an IT department chat, a companywide chat, etc.

Later technologies include lync/skype4biz, hipchat, teams, slack, and zoom.

Limiting myself more to the article's definition (mobile-first group chats), I'd say it was Google Hangouts, GroupMe, WhatsApp, then Signal, now its Signal + discord + FB messenger + all the millions of apps that just should be parts of libpurple / beeper.

But for those of you who remember eternal september, when did the group chat as those dot com babies like me know it first start out?

> Maybe that's the global social depression everyone is talking about. Dunno.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with this, is this a reference to something like [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935605

> The company has previously said that its practices do not violate antitrust law. In defending its business practices against critics in the past, Apple said that its “approach has always been to grow the pie” and “create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs and every ‘crazy one’ with a big idea.”

Tell that to Beeper Mini who had the crazy idea of growing the pie of iMessage users, following the original protocol seamlessly through adversarial interoperability.

It is quite debatable over whether Apple should be forced to allow another company to make money using adverse interoperability and server runtime costs etc.

In the same way it was quite debatable over whether IBM should be forced to allow another company (Compaq) to make money using adverse interoperability and reverse engineering IBM's BIOS.

I'd argue that the second debate was settled in the right way, and am partial to Apple being forced to interoperate as well. If you run a service with more than, say, 5% of a market, and that market has a network lock-in effect, you should eventually be considered a public service and have to interoperate.

Pidgin / Blackberry Inbox / WP7 homescreen / Matrix bridges and other services that unify incoming and outgoing text and binary messages for 1x1/group chats should be table stakes, not selling points. Email and IM, whether on PC, mobile, XR, whatever, vendor agnostic!

The Hacker News mic drop strikes again. I have nothing super substantive to add except to agree with your point and add that yes, it feels like work to put in the formal policies and procedures, but when the stakes are high enough (rocket to mars? its high enough), even the work that doesn't intuitively feel 'worth it' to someone is DEFINITELY worth it.

"It's a waste of time" is very often a fallacy, especially when the risk cannot be easily undone.

I (mostly mentally) complete the phrase "It's a waste of time" with "what's the worst that could happen?", and when I'm actually saying the phrase out loud, stare at whoever said that for 5 full seconds.