jeremyt

How do you keep track of what info needs to be deleted on restore without violating GDPR?

Well then, you’ve never been the target of a lawsuit.

Forgive me if it doesn’t make me comfortable that the decision whether to file a lawsuit against me or not is left to some often uneducated and inexperienced regulators.

Complying with the majority of the law isn’t good enough when you can be sued for not complying with a small part of the law.

It’s like complying with 99% of securities laws and forgetting to comply with the insider trading laws. That’s not a defense.

I’m not confident in anything I’ve written ever to have it picked apart by a team of expert witness programmers. Maybe that means I have no business working at a startup. Maybe we should think about the implications of that.

Great, so now we get to spend money on lawyers and time in the courts to decide what information falls under “OK to keep for a good reason”

Absolutely. It just isn’t easy.

Again, I was in my early 20s and fresh out of college. I had no idea what I was doing.

It’s not that I was trying to cut ethical corners or do things poorly, I just didn’t know what the right way to do things was. Computer science education is often very theoretical and high level and not at all practical .

I’ll be the first person to say that I was not the most experienced and or talented programmer in the world, but do we want to prevent such people from starting companies?

And secondly, not all PII is the same. We stored names and addresses and phone numbers and websites. Not exactly medical histories or DNA profiles.

It’s only a strawman if you assume that everybody knows the right way to do everything. There was nobody around when I did my start up to tell me how to do all of this stuff.

Honestly? During the first year of our start up, I didn’t have time to understand all of that stuff so I just put a checkmark on the sign up that users were over the age of 13, and moved on.

I’ve been reading hacker news for about a decade, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs and/or technical people on here anymore.

The number of people who are saying it’s no big deal to comply with this huge law, especially for very small startups, is mind boggling.

Let’s just take one feature: the requirement that you can permanently delete all of your information. Most early-stage startups use the (in 2008, when I did mine) best practice of “delete=1”. Changing your whole database over to permanent cascade delete is only easy if you’re a very experienced programmer or who knows what he’s doing. And that sets aside the fact that even if you know what you’re doing technically, there are lots of business logic problems with just deleting things out of the database and anonymizing users is very tricky.

I was not a great programmer when I started my first startup. I was learning as I went along.

We couldn’t afford a lawyer, and the amount of time for me (the only programmer) to go through and read all the regulations and make all the requisite changes in the product I would estimate might take on the order of a month or two, which if timed poorly would’ve killed our company. I say again: at an early stage startup with one programmer, you cannot have that one programmer spending two months on compliance.

It’s just gotten to the point that there’s one comment after another responding to this regulation or that regulation or this situation or whatever with “well, just call HR“, or “I can’t believe you don’t have a company policy for that!”

Or “well just ask your lawyers“. It ain’t that easy. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to have “your lawyers” go through the GDPR, tell you what you need to do, and deal with all of the edge cases and gray areas? $20k or $30k doesn’t seem too high.

My biggest fear is that all of these complex bureaucratic laws are just raising the bar for doing a startup. Maybe the days of two people doing a startup in someone’s garage should be in the past? If so, that makes me kind of sad.

Regardless it’s not obvious that GDPR is the right policy or that it’s well designed or clear.

Don't listen to what people say...watch what they do.

https://toshitimes.com/newly-appointed-goldman-sachs-vice-pr...

Yes, there is, but it's not worth my time. I'm invested in crypto, so if I win, I win.

On the contrary, we are about to start the second wave of things. The next wave will be an order of magnitude larger than the last, and this will continue until Bitcoin and blockchain has disrupted the vast majority of current industries.

You sound like an Internet hater after it failed to find a killer app besides email for most of the mid-90s.

Then, in 2000, as Pets.com was imploding, no doubt you would've dusted off this consistent criticism: "I am sure that internet stocks are worth many thousands of dollars and I am sure that there are people putting together new scams, however, the word on the street and by the watercooler is that internet stocks are passe. People have moved on."

Ten years later, the stock market is dominated by tech stocks.

If your criticism was based on actual knowledge, I'd give you credit, but it sounds like you have no idea what you're talking about, and you're using derision as an excuse not to educate yourself.

Indeed, I think $8500 per Bitcoin is a bargain. Come check with me in a year.

SF should be ashamed of the way they treat the poor and middle class.

No, my position is that supporters are naive and uninformed, not dumb.

Great, and I'll be the first person arguing against FDA regulation of dietary supplements.

How many people die every year from dietary supplements? Not many.

It's not the governments job to regulate quality. The free market is doing that just fine with sites like labdoor.com

Lasik eye surgery. Veterinary care. Cell phone service (as opposed to landlines). Consumer electronics. Computer software.

I can already hear your objections..."But there's some regulation in all of those!"

Yes, but it's much less than in other fields. The fact that the government is so pervasive that it's very hard to find an example of a truly free market is not an argument against a free market.

Hacker News is so full of pedants that I can't use a word without hedging.

Ok, "virutally unregulated compared to human health care". That's what I meant.

Veterinary care. Cheap, quick, high quality...free market and unregulated

I don't believe that anyone here, without looking it up, could explain what exactly "net neutrality" means, without falling back on talking points and vague aspirational language, rather than what actually is written in the regulations.

For starters, the FCC did an end run around Congress because they couldn't get Congress to pass it, so they had to take previous regulations intended for telephone service and cram a square peg into a round hole with all kinds of promises not to enforce certain parts, etc.

I'll bet 90% of the people reading this comment don't even know what that means.

First of all, the government has its hands in almost everything, so any list small enough to fit into a hacker news comment is necessarily going to be "cherry picked".

I'm not one of those people who thinks we don't need any regulations. I think they need to be a last-resort when everything else has been tried.

Everything else has not been tried here.

I mean, 5G and the SpaceX satellite internet plan are right around the corner.

There’s a genius way to lower housing prices. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?

Takes about 30 minutes to sell BTC or ETH for dollars.

There is evidence.

https://examine.com/supplements/magnesium/

I don't buy this for a second.

I'm suggesting that she moves so that she won't be homeless. If she were to move, she wouldn't need a dense concentration of microwaves and bathrooms.

She doesn't work, so opportunities to work are irrelevant, though, I wonder why a well educated person with a Masters degree couldn't possibly figure out how to make a few dollars here and there with online or remote work.

And several people in this thread have already explained how she could afford an apartment on her income, so pretending that doing so would be difficult doesn't make any sense.

Finally, I don't see the argument that living in an apartment in the suburbs would be a "worse quality of life" than living in an SUV in a Walmart parking lot and surfing the neighborhood for free microwaves and bathrooms.

What social safety net? She’s homeless. Whatever social safety net existed has either been exhausted or is no longer present.

I’m open to hearing about what special situations she has that has made it impossible to pursue the obvious options. Those things should’ve been included in the article, but they were not.

In the absence of such details, the article is basically just vaguely pulling at heartstrings.

Why does literally every other comment keep assuming that she has to commute?

The story says that she makes $1300 a month from disability and doesn’t have a job.

Why does she need to drive three hours a day?

I don’t know. It still seems to me that there are options here, and this woman has chosen not to pursue them, for whatever reason.

I would also take issue with your assertion that living in a car in a Walmart parking lot is stable or predictable.

This looks less like involuntary homelessness and more like a lifestyle choice.

Two hours then, or three. What difference does it make?

The goal here is to find something that’s better than staying in your SUV in a Walmart parking lot.