adrian_mrd

The best way to think of Chrome these days is that it is a Google web browser, as in, it preferences products and services made by Google.

Edge is similar in some ways, but modern Chrome is not a web browser per se but a web browser clearly built by Google with Google’s corporate interests at heart.

The disconnect for many - including myself - is that we remember the first few years of Chrome. How revolutionary it was and how it provided a beautiful path off ‘the terror’ that was Internet Explorer. Modern Chrome is not the same browser, philosophically. Modern Chrome is a Google web browser and integrates the best - and increasingly by default - with Google’s many products and services.

100% agree with this based on my experiences.

Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science.

Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’.

Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing.

Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)?

I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants.

Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.

You raise some good points and there are likely many reasons for the total price of electricity production eg retailer margins, transmitters, age/quality of infrastructure, regulation at different tiers (state, federal, local), etc, in addition to the ones you raise.

But if you are factoring in total costs for nuclear, you also need to factor in the security risks and costs (eg terrorist threats to nuclear plants), costs to dispose of nuclear waste, inability to provide housing close to reactors, etc, as well.

Whilst the suggested UI fixes will help, this seems less of a UI problem, and more of a checks are inherently insecure problem.

Most western countries have moved away from checks - with the exception of bank cheques or money orders for certain, specific cases.

TL;DR

For 2020, Rolling Stone decided to elevate many seminal hip-hop and rap LPs, and upvote some alternative rock LPs at the expense of many classic rock albums.

“In technology, there are zero black members of the senior leadership teams of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

In total, there are just four black chief executives among the 500 largest companies in the country.” - from the article

From The Verge’s report [1] “Google said that it chose PDFs over web pages because they could be more easily downloaded and shared with workers in the field.”

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206318/google-location-d...

One of the better managers I have had in the past, when he setup weekly 1:1s, said that the agenda for our weekly 1:1s would be “about whatever you want to discuss”.

Key word: you. Key point: the agenda was employee-led, and it encouraged open and honest feedback.

Many managers focus on what ‘they’ want to discuss in 1:1 meetings, but the best people managers, in my experience, also ensure that the employee’s views are represented.

A lot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinat...

Interesting European startup, LandLifeCompany, whose mission is to: “restore the world’s 2 billion hectares of degraded land.”: https://landlifecompany.com/

I wonder if any of their technology was used in these planting days in Ethiopia?

Sure but Gates still wrote the check via Epstein, right?

Not sure if that illustrates that Gates was accessible or that it further illustrates the point that the super-rich (including their entourage of lawyers) travel in small, connected circles.

Adjacent: that’s well-written PR spin from the Gates’ camp:

> “Epstein was introduced to Bill Gates as someone who was interested in helping grow philanthropy. Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively, any account of a business partnership or personal relationship between the two is simply not true. And any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grant making for Bill Gates is completely false.”

Note the part “Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively” which implies that Gates was a victim or at least an uninterested party in this affair. If that is true, why then cough up $2 million dollars via Epstein? Why does it matter if Epstein was aggressive or not if Gates wrote the check?

Some follow-up questions that Gates should answer to clarify his role:

1. What correspondence or communications did Gates have with Epstein regarding the $2 million donation to the MIT Media Lab?

2. What correspondence or communications did Gates have with Epstein since his conviction in 2008? Best option would be to list all of the times Gates (including any representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) met with or liaised with Epstein since 2008 - including via any intermediaries or third parties and electronic communications.

3. What is the definition of business partnership in Gates’ above refuttal?

4. What is the definition of personal relationship in Gates’ above refuttal?

PR and disaster management ‘gurus’ often wordsmith their clients’ way out of these affairs.

Gates should at least clarify his role here. Otherwise, his position as a philanthropist also seems tainted.

Reads fine on iOS: Safari, Firefox Focus and Chrome. What browser and OS are you using?

Thanks for that.

So really their (FSF/GNU) issue is not with JS at all, but with devs who don’t licence their code under a free software licence? In other words, who enforce the copyright of their own algorithms?

What I also find a bit confusing (inconsistent?) with this stance is that a dev can do a reasonable amount of interesting things with HTML+CSS+SVG (obviously there are limits on the ‘interaction’ side of things), and assumably devs can also licence their HTML+CSS+SVG under whatever licence they wish: so then why pick on JS?

Thanks for that link and info. My reading is that it seems the GNU’s/FSF’s issue with JavaScript is that the code is not always available (to view/peruse):

“It is possible to release a JavaScript program as free software, by distributing the source code under a free software license. If the program is self-contained—if its functioning and purpose are independent of the page it came in—that is fine; you can copy it to a file on your machine, modify it, and visit that file with a browser to run it. But that is an unusual case.” [0]

JS code can obviously be client-side (generally readable in a browser via View Source, but not always, unless I am mistaken) or server-side (not generally readable, unless explicitly shared by the devs).

But based on [1] and [2] and [3], it appears that JS the language is owned and maintained by ECMA, which is a not-for-profit standards org.

So then I’m still a bit confused as to who whose lawyers would be coming after you if you published some JS code on Github or your own web-site? Not the ECMA’s right?

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecma_International [3] https://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-owner-of-javascript

Serious question: why is JavaScript not free (as in ‘freedom’ to use)? Who is the owner of JS and do web browsers have to pay for it?

edit: tried to make my questions clearer :)

Amidst all the ambient craziness of our ever-changing world, I raise a glass to Hacker News, the team who moderate it and to all who wish to make it a community driven by erudite discussions :)

A lot of farm land seems ripe for planting trees. Does anyone know of any organisations who work with farmers in the USA, Europe, Oceania, Asia, Africa or the Americas to help reforest farmland?

Would be useful to note how many users of Teams do so, where their employer pays specifically for it. My guess is that most users of Teams are effectively corporate ‘Microsoft shops’ who effectively get Teams for free with their Office365 bundle.

Another useful statistic to ascertain: how many startups or small businesses use Slack compared to in large corporates?

Any suggestions for what to do on iOS?

Unfortunately, it's not always so easy to not share contacts with certain services. For instance, WhatsApp works just fine with a telephone number but it actively encourages users to upload their contacts - assumably consumed by (the) Facebook (group of businesses) as part of its social graph.

I recently ordered a small device from Amazon, it was poor, so I gave it a 1 star rating with a short, negative review.

About a week later, I received an e-mail from the seller (via Amazon's payments communication system) asking for me to delete my review in return for being refunded the total amount, and stating that I could keep the device.

Whilst I didn't take up their offer, I assume many others did which shows how Amazon is 'not flooded with one-star reviews'.

From bjelkeman-again's HN profile: "CO-founder & co-director at http://akvo.org ... We build open source data systems which we run as a service that are used in international development and increasingly in country governance."

From https://akvo.org/ "With our unique approach to development, we help our partners design their projects so that they can capture and understand reliable data which they can act upon."

> On privacy, Zuckerberg has become an exponent of Europe’s behemoth rulebook, known as the General Data Protection Regulation. That approach is badly flawed in its own right: It undermines innovation, burdens companies, annoys users, and offers few benefits.

Outside of the authors' views on Zuck.co, this is a myopic view of GDPR. In reality, GDPR empowers, rather than annoys users, and the regulations actually gives EU citizens some degree of control over their data - which is of increasingly huge benefit, especially their interactions with Orwellian companies like Facebook.

Thanks for sharing this. It was a great appendum to the article and useful to understand the practicalities of how some surgeries/appointments in the USA medical system are funded (and how some medical practices/clinics are private equitied).

> I think this legal arms race is a consequence of America's overly-litigious and profitable legal system.

I would concur with this. From the software firm's perspective, there is less risk in being overly cautious (i.e. EULAs) than to have less restrictive and open rights.

Maybe there is a need for a standard common-law contract that provides a set of 8-10 basics and then any companies have to specifically spell out what is different in their personal EULA - and the user can either accept or reject those additional terms? A true accept or reject, that is, and not just two buttons ;)

But then why are EULAs allowed in countries that are far less litigious?

Are other countries compelled to adopt the EULA for their citizens (convenient!), lobbied or pressured via free- or other trade agreements with the USA (soft/smart lobbying!), or are we, as users to blame for pressing 'accept' without any lobbying efforts of our own?

Sounds like my kind of comedy jam!

I also like the idea of the 'Nightmare Letters' such as this one for GDPR: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce...

Would be of interest to note how many users have submitted such requests/letters, since GDPR took effect in May of this year.

If lawyers, and by extension, the management/C-level teams of software firms - who either direct, endorse or approve what the lawyers put in the EULAs to begin with - can stick it to users, why shouldn't users be able to stick it back to them?

Agree. Related thought: the influence of lawyers in tech firms - witness the draconian EULAs users are 'forced' to accept with a false binary choice of accept or not - and the role that corporate law staff have had in software development, by effectively limiting the rights of users.

It seems to me that many technology firms copy-and-paste the soul of EULAs to protect themselves (against the worse cases that may arise) with little thought about the effect these long list of restrictions cause. It often seems it cascaded from Microsoft's use of EULAs from Windows 95, Office 95 and onwards, because it was the norm to consumers in that 'monopoly' environment.

The role of lawyers in suppressing ideas, choices and debate - be it in healthcare (the USA dermatology sector as per the OP article) or in technology - the Hacker News set - warrants further debate.

Especially if ethics are to play a greater role in the future of technology - as seems to be the general consensus of forward-thinking governments and progressive technologists.

The issue is often that Employee Engagement is driven by (and wanted from) Human Resource* departments who tackle it like another checkbox to tick.

Real employee engagement comes from understanding that employees are unique and often have similar but different needs when it comes to what motivates them (money, ego, success, quality, output, social, etc.). The data often doesn't reflect the fidelity needed here.

* or, Human Resentment, as the joke goes.

Me.com launch? That happened under Jobs' watch...