Hacker News Reader

Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

I have no sympathy for US, and I know I'm going to be downvoted to hell from EU-conservatists, though: Don't expect anything comparable to US big tech with all those innovation-stifling regulations that EU has.

If Europe wants to do anything that can compete with US big tech, they should get rid of those regulations first.

View on HN

have a specific regulation in mind?

Not the person you’re replying to, but the main problem is the “thought that counts” approach. The EU gives you regulations about spirit and intent, and the only way you know if you’re in compliance is either getting fined after the fact or spending many millions of dollars engaging regulators to negotiate features before the ship, and even if you have the time and money to do that, their recommendations aren’t binding (they can still fine you).

It creates a better-safe-than-sorry culture where companies would be crazy to take huge financial risks to ship advanced tech in a market that’s about 15% of the world.

EU Ebike regulations are the worst on the planet, our cities are dense and traffic is slow, but we've wasted an opportunity to replace half the cars in European cities.

First consider the 16 mph / 25 km/h speed limit - have you ever seen a road sign with such speed limit? Lowest 'normal' speed limit is 30 km/h. The result is, you are either impeding traffic, or a truck tries to overtake you, misjudges distance and kills you. The lowest speed limit and the ebike speed limit need to match.

Second, the 250W power limit is an ass pull. Imagine you are Cycling up a medium-steep hill - 15% incline. 250 watts gives you 3 miles per hour. Let's say 10 miles per hour is a minimum acceptable speed, that requires 800 watts of power. And god help you if you are overweight or carrying groceries or a child as a passenger.

And ebikes cost £2,000 and £4,000 for a cargo bike because we have imposed 60% tax on importing bicycle parts from China.

Just get a speed pedelec (45km/h, no limit on power but stay on the road) if you want to go 20km/h faster than other cyclists. Going that fast on a bike line is super dangerous

In UK it cannot be insured, it’s technically legal but in practice there is no insurance for them so you are still a criminal

Also electric scooters and mono wheels are illegal

Wait you said EU regulations suck and now you're talking about some obscure island nation not in the EU?! :-)

We have EU laws on the books But different mentality

They don’t gel very well

Basically everything around data in EU. Make one small "mistake" (which would be perfectly OK in SV) and you're done: millions in fines so you either go bankrupt or go to jail. Almost no one, naturally, wants to take risk.

Who has been sent to jail? Who has gone bankrupt?

This is just blatantly false. Source: I have had to work with regulators in various companies in reference to GDPR.

You are given ample warning if you're found to be in violation of GDPR, you are then also given instructions and guidance on what you did wrong and what your next steps are. Depending on the severity, you're given ample time to fix the issue. ONLY AFTER ALL THIS, which can take months, are you at risk of getting a fine, and they start off tiny, like 5 digits usually unless it's an egregious fuck up. If you continue fucking up, the fines escalate yes, but that's how it should work.

Let's not forget that none of this is something that got snuck into law out of the blue, it was known for years it was coming, and yet companies were STILL given leniency and ample opportunities to fix their behavior.

Guess what, no company I have ever worked for got a fine! Fancy that, almost like this is just FUD from people who only give a shit about making maximum money for the least amount of effort, screw the people we're harvesting data from amirite?

Also, jail? Name literally a single occurrence of this ever happening. I fucking WISH we'd be putting people in jail for the shenanigans they like to pull, but unfortunately it's only tiny fines for the most part.

The youngest FAANG company was 15 years old by the time GDPR was put in place.

Even before GDPR a lot of data protection rules existed (e.g. in Germany).

can we build software and services without mining people’s identities? it just won’t be as profitable, and frankly a lot of the innovation is consumer hostile. it’s certainly worth trying to dont you think?

It was tried:

For example, before Facebook, in Germany there existed studiVZ, schülerVZ, meinVZ (basically the same social network of the same company for different audiences). But this social network wasn't a commercial success, even though for some time it was much more popular in Germany than Facebook.

Generally, many successful German software companies were simply bought by US-American companies:

- SuSE was bought by Novell

- DLD (company: Delix; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Linux-Distribution ) was bought by Red Hat

- Star Division (the company behind Star Office) was bought by Sun (which again was bought by Oracle)

- In 2023, Software AG was bought by the private equity company Silver Lake

- Recently, Hornetsecurity was bought by Proofpoint.

So, innovation in the EU (contrary to the assertions everyone seems to be making here) that was absorbed by bigger companies from the US (making it an acquisitions/capital/monopolistic issue, not one of startup ease)?

There are good people making good software all over the world. We just need to start using it more instead of this crap being thrown at us by big tech

Sure, I'd love to use an open source model locally that's trained on fully ethically-sourced data... once it's on par with ChatGPT or Sonnet.

For now, that "crap" big tech throws at us outperforms the "non-crap".

I'd love to see competition though, K2 is a nice step.

It means less data, and let's be realistic, under otherwise equal conditions, means less-accurate inference.

One can try it, but it will never be a fair game.

one of my friends claims his career would be at a different place if he had played politics and back stabbed his coworkers.

I don't know what to make of that.

> consumer hostile

If these practices were invented in China/Russia we would call them deceptive and fraudulent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com