dakna

> The issue is that the root topic is so sensational–probably the most sensational of all topics right now

Agreed. It is incredibly hard to have a discourse about this.

Thanks for the clarification, and also for all your excellent moderation on this platform.

I don't think "sensationalistic post" is an appropriate label for a guest editorial by Heiko Maas, Germany's Foreign Minister, published in one of the largest news magazines in Europe with a distinctive reputation for revealing political misconduct and scandals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Spiegel

I was surprised it was flagged and it goes to show how hard it is for a US-centric audience to evaluate foreign news sources.

Please optimize your website for mobile use. I visited your main landing page on my phone and was not able to read anything but the larger headlines without zooming in. In my opinion this adds friction and increases bounce rate a lot. Depending on your traffic, it could be well worth it to add some CSS media queries to make this layout more responsive. I think plenty of people check websites out on mobile first, then come back later if the service is useful for them.

Wearing a mask is the only halfway feasible change that has an effect on virus spread that enough people are willing to do in the US. The virus is largely under control in other countries, but they were able to enforce much more draconian measures.

There is a significant difference in effectiveness between cloth masks, surgical masks and n95 masks. You might want to read up on it at the CDC: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-0948_article

It seems to work in other countries.

Neither CNN nor Fox is quality journalism, "quality" being the adjective you left out.

The NYT also issued an apology for their coverage about WMD which was not rigorously fact checked. One of the reporters, Judith Miller, later joined Fox News.

Quality doesn't mean 100% correct all the time, it means significantly better than the alternative.

Comparing the coverage of different sources is part of how you can reach your own conclusions, instead of blindly adopting whatever opinion is broadcasted to you.

I think what we see here is the result of social media A/B testing on how to get votes, and this playbook is now followed by the rest of the world.

In a democratic society, you have to influence the public opinion to stay/get in power. Propaganda is free, information costs money.

If the majority of voters are not willing to pay for quality journalism, you have to get them engaged by fueling outrage and projecting fear. It doesn't matter what side, as long as there are sides you can join and identify with.

Combined with the fact that American politics do have an effect on the quality of life in other parts of the world (trade wars and refugee crisis for example) and the working (aka non-capital) class suffers in most western societies, it is very easy to project similar fears and foster divisiveness.

> Regulations require keeping records

Who decided to be compliant at this stage of the company, you or whoever is in charge of business operations?

> I felt responsibility to make the product as solid and maintainable as possible

Was this responsibility conveyed to you or did you make this decision on your own?

I'm clearly making an assumption here, but this reads like a case where both sides had a misunderstanding about how engineering time is spend. They trusted you with some autonomy to get things off the ground and found out you are making business decisions on your own that don't fit into resource constrained startup operations. There is always a trade-off and corners can be cut, and my advice is to be upfront about the general approach about those and find out how much they are willing to invest in robustness and product quality at a certain stage.

> noticed that they even have some kind of built-in HTTP client abstraction

It goes one step further, you can have platform-neutral code to parse the API returns into Kotlin models.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/10/kotlinx-serializat...

A lot of business logic is shared in the domain layer on each platform client (and possibly on the server), and I think re-use of that is/will be Kotlin's main selling point.

Add SQLDelight for shared data access code on clients, and you can cover a lot of ground with one codebase.

No, they are not supposed to get things right.

They are supposed to evaluate scientific theories by checking testable predictions to find out if the theory is the correct explanation about how things work in our universe. Which means that scientists try to proof themselves wrong most of the time.

A prediction is also often multidimensional and can be accurate about what will happen, while being off about when it will happen. This article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction uses the solar cycle as an example of that under the Science category.

> But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront

Reminds me of a novel that was written over 100 years ago:

> The Trial (German: Der Process,[1] later Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.

What you describe is basically an intentional community with a revenue stream from a software product. Something I'm interested in, but unsure how to make it work.

There are intentional communities that support themselves with their own, often agriculture based, products sold on the open market. Plus the usual homesteading.

The skills needed for this kind of work are not highly specialized and in general not well paid, therefore levelling the playing field for everyone in the group.

I think the opportunity cost for IT professionals building a SaaS to support the community is a lot higher, and while I would love to see that work, the chances of key community members dropping out to make more money for themselves is fairly high. I'm not sure if a simple time based system for everyone involved is fair, given the high upfront investment to get the skills needed for IT work.

My personal opinion: There is no inside-the-US view on that, it changes based on the filter bubble you and your peers live in. The party in power is still in power and did a pretty good job making it harder to find out what is an actual fact and what is an alternative fact, so it takes more time and willingness to verify any claim. Instead it comes down to perception, beliefs and tribe behavior.

Depending on where you drill, you might end up in a situation where some layers come into contact with high-pressure water and start swelling, resulting in raised surface levels. Most prominent example I know of, is the city of Staufen in Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staufen_im_Breisgau#Geothermal...

https://www.thelocal.de/20170818/this-historic-german-town-i...

To my limited understanding, this could have been prevented by a better geological survey.

I thought you meant native desktop apps, not web apps.

I remember when ExtJS was positioned in the late 2000s to mimik rich desktop UIs and I think there are still lots of component based frameworks to use and pay for, if Bootstrap doesn't cut it. The prices are steep though.

> Businesses really want cheap rich desktop-like GUI's for productivity software

Can I ask where you you see this demand, is it industry specific?

I was under the impression that the benefits (easy deployment to a known runtime aka the browser, open ports (80/443) in the firewall, large developer pool, potentially cross-platform use) outweigh the UI shortcomings and budgets were shifted to web-based productivity software.

The average price per square meter is roughly the same in Berlin and Washington DC. The real estate market in San Francisco and the bay area is an outlier. Houses in second and third tier cities in the US are actually cheaper than comparable cities in Germany, even before you take all the additional transaction costs in Germany into account.

Netlify allows you to drag and drop a folder only using a browser. It works great for the output directory of static site generators or a set of hand-coded HTML files. No CLI required.

Someone already did.

> Daniel Gilbert (born January 17, 1962) is an American billionaire businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is the cofounder of Quicken Loans and founder of Rock Ventures.[3]

Downtown, but to a larger extend Midtown and Corktown changed a lot. People want to live there again.

Getting discounts for habits that reduce healthcare costs is not unusual, gym membership or health coaching sessions are already incentivized and you get some money reimbursed. These are one-size-fits-all, the amount of discount is not personalized.

I'm not an insurance expert, but I think services like this, that generate personal data over time, pose the risk of calculating the individual insurance risk much better if the insurance underwriter can evaluate this data on an ongoing basis. It has the potential to skew the risk distribution for all other insurance members in the pool including premium adjustments for people who are not handing over their data.

Thanks, appreciated!

> We were essentially going to fail/give up by taking on consulting work. The decision to integrate with Slack was a bit of a bet-the-company move

> they wanted that desperately. Some teams even pre-paid us to build it for them

Congrats to the successful pivot. At this point giving demand validation another try instead of shutting down makes a lot of sense, given you already invested heavily and had a list of potential users. Happy to hear it worked.

> Getting in on a fast growing platform early

This depends on good timing. As a small team or single developer you don't want to invest months into building a plugin or service for a platform that won't take off. And at the time the platform has great traction, chances are that someone already took the higher risk and implemented something close to your idea.

I would be interested in knowing more about the decision process that made you confident enough in 2015 to pour resources into a Slack plugin, if you would like to share that.

I think Chromium/Chrome won because it was the better tech product and also mostly open source and free to use. Closer to web standards, faster to use, isolated process rendering etc. This was and still is fueled by lot's of money, coming from platform economics, not from a walled garden strategy in the sense of AOL (proprietary standards, locked down access). Users actually like it, because it's free and works well. Developers like it because it's actively supported including dev tools and has a large enough user base to treat it as the default platform. It's just not possible to have a competing product based on the same open standards if you don't have the same amount of cash to give it away for free. And IT budgets are cash-strapped outside of the VC bubble too, it makes sense to choose the market leader and code against that platform. Similar to the old "Best viewed with Internet Explorer 3" back then, but now at least with better standard compatibility.

Most studies I read about the decline in insect population in Europe compared to a baseline from around 30 years ago. Here is one source (written in English) about areas in Germany: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves

> just to prevent competitors from having access to them

They don't ignore the market, they use their resources earned from participating in that market to keep and/or improve their current market positioning. Which is exactly what their shareholders want, and is fair game until treated as a monopolist.

Air pollution results in a higher death rate and is a public health issue. Light pollution is certainly a problem, but probably not on the same scale.

Congrats on launching, especially with a physical device. Quick question, if I commit to the promotional pricing now, can I scale up and add more users to my plan for the same price per user after Aug 1st?

There is class A,B and C real estate. My guess is that demand surges for class A due to solvent buyers and low interest rates, while payments are missed in B and C.

Average percentages usually don't paint an accurate picture.

Yes, it's a set of libraries under one package name. With Google's massive investment in refactoring it has a pretty big surface already, from persistence to UI and almost everything in between.

https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/packages

It's current implementation uses classes that are part of the Android layer, mostly the old support library plus some new abstractions like LiveData and Room and Navigation. I see no reason why you could not use the public interface of that library as a compatibility layer for application level code and let it run on a different platform.

Not today, but given the fact that you can't just kill the worlds most used operating system, you either use virtualization like Apple now does again for ARM (and before when replacing Motorola with Intel) or you change the underlying dependencies of the libraries used and compile again.

I think Google realized they needed a compelling cross-plattform solution because React Native started to gain so much traction.

In terms of migrating away from Android, I think they will use the newer AndroidX packages as the future abstraction layer, which would enable them to replace the underlying runtime with something more native for each platform. It would be a compilation target for Kotlin as well as Dart. All while not deprecating the massive amount of production code out there. But, this is also just a guess.