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I think it’s missing the European Union/CoE in “Other” - probably the African Union too, in terms of institutional recognition.

I am a fluent English speaker who spoke not a word of Dutch for my first few years in the Netherlands. Got contract work, friends, and in the end language and citizenship.

One example is anecdote, not data, but I know an awful lot of EU and non-EU people both in the big cities and more regional places who landed without any local language and made successful lives and integrated effectively here.

There are harder places to do this but it’s getting easier by the year, especially in the countries that need people who speak other languages for global trade.

I’m amazed that the Fast Fourier Transform is from the mid 1960s - when we studied it University I had the impression that it was from the golden age of fin-de-siecle mathematics.

What recent algorithms with transformative applications have been discovered sine 2000?

There is so much consultancy FUD about DORA. It's not going to impact freelancers or most SMEs.

The regulation mostly expands regulation - there are already EBA requirements around outsourcing for a smaller list of financial institutions - in the European Economic Area (EEA, sort of EU plus) to ensure financial institution operational resilience (ie to ensure they won't fall over when technical or operational issues occur internally or in their tech supply chains).

The regulation, amongst other things, is concerned with direct or indirect use of "ICT third party suppliers" and requires that financial institutions keep tabs on that, make sure that they've got the right contractual stuff in place, are doing risk management, and are testing their "digital operational resilience".

Most SMEs won't be hit by this at all.

If you are classified as a crypto asset manager, or are a critical supplier to a fairly generic list of financial institution types, you'll be in discussions already with your clients to help them rule you out of scope since you aren't going to be critical to their ongoing operations.

There will not be badges or accreditation any time soon as far as I understand. If you're in scope, it's all going to be contractual between you and your client, and mostly to ensure that you're doing risk management with YOUR suppliers and can do incident response and reporting. All stuff serious businesses should be doing already.

See the EBA's information page [0] and look for RTS on ICT TPP. Again, it's not going to be the SME's responsibility unless you're a DORA financial institution.

[0] https://www.eba.europa.eu/publications-and-media/press-relea...

My surprises: Generate weekly flash reports because self deception is a force as strong as gravity. Good sales people are game changers, but there are very few about, most seem to string you along and deliver hot air. Marketing is not fonts and colours, it’s a key partner to product (analytics and insights) and sales (B2B means trade events and lining up the right meetings by hook or by crook)

I think also, it’s not just “people”, but “people that you hypothesise have a problem that you’re aiming to solve”, and perhaps even “… and have money that they can and want to spend on solving it”

But Africa/Ceuta time aligns with CE(S)T for longstanding national administrative reasons, I believe. That’s why those other cities are listed, since Africa/Ceuta time is not linked by policy, regulation or legislation with any African time zones…

Time is one of those human constructs that isn’t strongly bound to geographic or perhaps even physical reality. Look at the International Date Line or Chinese timezone maps for examples that are “bigger” than Africa/Melila and Africa/Ceuta.

We should all be glad that people are thanklessly doing the hard work to keep the TZ databases updated.

Eight years ago this was a hard sell to some regulators, no more. You still need to walk them through the outcomes but even in black letter jurisdictions it’s being accepted.

I was quite taken by the elision of the formation of Adobe - that particular gap informed quite a bit of my understanding of how PostScript’s choices came to be and led to a bit of rabbit hole brurrowing around the departures from Xerox.

Consider something like Mobilizon[0] - it's ActivityPub based, like Mastodon, but apart from the federation capability, might have the feature set you're looking for?

[0] https://joinmobilizon.org/en/

The sibling post gives a good account of the 90:90 challenge.

The last part of any semi-difficult project nearly always takes much longer than the officially difficult “main problem” to solve.

It leads to the last 10% of the deliverables costing at least 90% of the total effort for the project (not the planned amount; the total ad calculated after completion, if that ever occurs)

This seems to endlessly surprise people in tech, but also many other semi-professional project domains (home renovations are a classic)

This thread has been a bit of an eye opener for me in terms of community management and engagement. Bravo!

Excellent find, I’d never heard of Zipf’s law.

GP was talking about something else though, the 90:90 rule is related to an extremely common planning optimism fallacy around work required to demo, and work required to productise.

imore is really unreasonably difficult to read with intrusive cookie walls. I gave up one paragraph in.

I wasn’t familiar with the terms “write everything twice” and “compression-oriented programming” although I’ve done it before.

It’s a brave person who stakes their business on swimming against perceived common wisdom. I’ve seen it succeed, at least for a while, at some startups.

The cognitive load of managing expectations of clients, investors, etc who are trained to expect the stand way of doing things seems to get too much though, over time.

The interview is really a good read, profiling somebody who is fascinated and perhaps a little scientifically obsessed by exotic marine mammal teeth. It turns out that there is at least one person for every possible thing, I suppose.

Amsterdammer here. Totally doable, helps if the hills aren’t too steep. Powered vehicles do come and go where I am (street cleaning etc) and it’s possible for planned things like house moves or demolitions. I imagine Paris will do similar stuff.

The old repo looks like it’s been renamed to

https://github.com/porter-dev/porter-archive

They've probably forked the cloud product, and are leaving the old OSS version up?

This all sounds very good for open markets and capitalism. As a consumer I should benefit, and well-run hotels too, I suppose, if I were ever to stay in one.

They’ve all changed massively in other ways during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries too as linguistic and cultural diversity began to significantly dwindle under “modern nation-state” style cultural policies, try finding young Oc speakers in the southern half of France these days, followed by the collapse of multinational states (mainly the Habsburg state of course) followed by brutal ethnic cleaning and genocide that’s still going on in old pockets of that ex-empire today.

These places have experienced continuous and significantly rapid linguistic and cultural change for centuries now. If anything high levels of literacy and experience of integrating minorities by force over the last centuries might be making this latest set of changes fairly gentle and manageable…

I’ve had reports of Zoom interview where an earpiece has fallen out and my interviewers heard advice on how to answer the question audibly present. Kind of dumb, how hard is mixing the audio?

We once detected a DDOS because all our office phones went down. Silly attackers didn’t realise that our (money-making) APIs weren’t colocated with our public website and phone system.

Which rules do you think are missing and which shouldn’t be do e for tech presentations?

Interestingly I’ve heard this observation about American managers in US multinational businesses in Europe, that they seem to performatively do the long hours, for the sake of their own managers view of them, but that little of it is actual productive time.

I’ve not really observed it myself, and I’d suspect that part of it might be very different styles or ways of working. But maybe there’s a grain of truth there.

It’s irrelevant if you get “value” for the “services rendered” - and that’s in the broad, so a little reputational negativity can be nicely countered by a more aggressive tax minimisation approach for example.

And if you want an easy pass will you go for the cleanest or the least clean?

Wow. I’ve never had to show ID at Dutch hospitals or clinics. My GP does the referral (!!! great GP!!!) or I turn up at A&E and the (medical) intake has begun. I speak Dutch though, maybe that makes a difference?

Edit:spelling and clarification on intake

Yes. Live translation services are provided for the minority of formal stuff that’s done in German. Drinking beer in the alternative track, everybody understands each other after a couple of drinks even if they didn’t before.

Which simple considerations to the design of the infrastructure do you recommend to decrease the eventual cost of using DataDog?