jhall1468

This was never about choice, which they've always had, this has always been about both having their cake and eating it to. When French publishers inevitably see their traffic plummet, they will almost certainly sue Google for it.

Everything you've said here is effectively worst-case scenario and you are treating that pessimism as skepticism when they aren't the same thing.

So let's be clear on a few aspects of this that are bordering on absurd:

1. The actual incentive for Amazon is building a remote healthcare business. The idea that Amazon is going to somehow force providers to direct you toward "cheap" treatments is asinine. Why in the world would they care? This is entirely separate from Amazon's insurance, which it doesn't own.

2. No they can't. Twice now the premise of your argument is that Amazon is somehow able to dictate what healthcare providers do. They can force a nurse to overstate the dangers of pregnancy? Are you serious?

3. This is either the most naive statement you've made, or a bold-faced lie. I'll assume the former. The treatment itself is provided by Oasis Medical. They are not owned by Amazon. Amazon owns the technology. Oasis owns the care, including, patient records.

I'll agree with one thing you said: people don't understand privacy. This is no exception. While invasive invasions of privacy only require a visit to a website, medical privacy has been default on for decades.

Another thing people on HN don't seem to understand: There is an enormous different between skepticism and pessimism. The latter makes it incredibly easy to ignore the content of your messages as nothing more than a conspiracy theorist. There are probably a sea of valid complaints about this program, unfortunately they get buried under a sea of absurdity that the world outside of HN completely ignores.

It's unfortunate.

And that's exactly why this isn't as cut and dry as it seems. Fintech is definitely more tech than fin. They are just taking the big tech models, and applying them to finance. They are tech companies that happen to sell financial products. Taxing that differently than a tech company that happens to sell database products makes little sense.

Seems HN is primarily comprised of people without families that can just quit their job and it's not big deal, all in the name of their particular set of moral standards. You can tell when they say things like "it's not hard" when deciding to quit their job.

For the fast majority of people, it is hard. Most peoples ethical guidelines shift rapidly when the alternative means harming their loved ones.

It's definitely not hard to proclaim things aren't hard. Reality is often different.

Which is exactly why this is such a horrible idea.

I think you are crossing a sea of assumptions to get to "pretty good".

And I'm not misreading your comment on purpose, trust me I had to read it 4 times just to make sure I wasn't crazy and I was actually reading what I thought I was: someone advocating that bottom of the food chain employees be criminally liable for code they write.

You are making an us-vs-them argument, to be sure. Your "us" is consumers and your "them" are employees, rather than corporate executives that make the decisions.

I'm not a lawyer. I expect if I'm being asked to do something, it's been vetted by our corporate legal team. I should not be expected to know every aspect of criminal and civil law to protect myself from my employer.

What you are suggesting is absurd, but fortunately, I think most would agree with me on that.

This horrible precedent and pushes the blame for everything downstairs. Meanwhile, corporate execs have the very corporate shielding you're advocating that engineers don't. Maybe you think they too shouldn't have such protections, but how you can advocate for personal liability for programmers without first implementing personal liability for executives is beyond me.

This so incredibly short-sighted.

At some point consumers have to get some of the blame here, right?

This isn't a veneer. It's a signature check to ensure a package is what it says it is. Have you seen the hassle npm routinely goes through because of this? A centralized, trusted server is a sensible "default" setting. The fact that they offer a self-hosted solution is a great benefit.

> You can only be secure if your privacy is protected. That is the causal relation between these two needs.

Nonsense. I can have a completely secure system and everyone knows who I am. I can have an entire insecure system with zero means of identifying the owner and thus, remain private.

You aren't just conflating privacy and security, you are implying a casual relationship between them. Both are nonsense.

If you're in the minority, you should expect to have to do more work to get the right balance of security and privacy.

So on one hand the reviewer is saying modifying the users.js setting without explicitly saying what it does, even though it required a separate process, was a bad thing to do. And their way of rectifying that is to do the same thing, only this time without any user interaction.

And that's assuming product quality is really lower. The only evidence of that I've seen is anecdata.

Going to www.nytimes.com is roughly the equivalent to driving in front of someones house. It's certainly not my fault if they leave their blinds open while they are naked. Now maybe they thought I was someone else due to the car I drove, but that sure as shit isn't my problem.

Equifax is an entirely different issue. If you leave the door open to your house, that sure as hell doesn't give me the right to go into it. I can look at it, I can even tell everyone "Hey, that door is wide open." But I can't go in do shit without permission to be there.

It's natural to gravitate towards things that interest you. Some people are driven by gaps and learn things regardless, most people do not. That's not even controversial.

And that's my point. If you're self-taught you have to be willing to learn things you find completely uninteresting (or boring, hard, whatever) if you want to be as well-rounded as a CS graduate. Most successful self-taught programmers do exactly that. Most people don't.

Learning to think outside the box and learning about specific specialties that you don't find interesting aren't even remotely the same thing. If you read what I wrote, you'll notice the example areas I gave. None of them were "thinking outside of the box", they were fields that didn't interest me.

The value they bring is that I learned a common language. I can talk to ML engineers or Compiler Engineers in a common language because I have experience in those fields that I wouldn't had I taken a different route. That isn't even remotely a requirement for my field. It's just useful for discussions with other people.

Maybe you'll spend hours and hours learning compiler design and implementation so you can have a friendly conversation with a colleague at lunch, but I'm not going to. Formal education forced that on me. That's been healthy for my professional networking, but that's about it. I still consider it useful, but had I skipped the CS degree I wouldn't do it. Nor would most people.