makeitsuckless

It's interesting how this is described as a potential "bureaucratic nightmare". Having to follow the law of the country your doing business in has been standard operating procedure for, well, basically all of human history.

Somehow the tech industry seems to think it should be exempt from that, even if it means being allowed to piss all over the basic civil rights of citizens of modern Western democracies.

Yes, this is a problem that needs to be solved given the reality modern cross-border online services. But it can't be solved by the corrupt political elite simply selling their citizens hard fought rights to corporations operating from countries that lack respect for such rights.

I personally think it's gorgeous, but it stands and falls with the people who live there.

It's just like I sometimes see pictures of what in the US are ghetto suburbs and I think: this could actually be a lovely neighbourhood. (As a European who has lived all his live in densely populated urban environments it baffles me how people can't turn a neighbourhood where everyone has a free standing house with a yard into a pleasant place to live.)

Well, if you have a weak mind and someone with authority has a strong opinion...

> But the usage of "===" is fairly uncommon in most PHP programs.

I don't code PHP anymore, but the use of "===" has been standard practice for ages, and checking for it fully automated.

It's one of the many areas in which uninformed people like to criticize PHP for bad practices that in reality have been left behind a long time ago and are only still supported by the language for backward compatibility reasons.

I just visited Ars Technica without the usual self-protection.

I get greeted by a salvo of dozens of third part trackers from the likes of Doubleclick & co.

Ars Technica operates as maliciously as any other publisher. There's no "careful consideration here", just blatant disrespect for the privacy of their public.

Just because you're okay with the exploitation of information by making access artificially scarce doesn't mean that those who aren't are "entitled".

Since the arrival of the internet, that business model stopped working in the interest of society in general.

We're no longer funding the wider dissemination of information, we're either funding artificially limiting access or being asked to surrender our privacy instead of just money.

This may make perfect business sense, but in my view, societies interests go before business interests.

And yes, I also fear that without an alternative model we're going to have a hard time encouraging the production of that information within the framework of the free market.

But I rather face that challenge than to accept a society where information disappears behind paywalls and our privacy is being demolished by commercial surveillance.

Just because what the public wants is selfish and generally short sighted doesn't mean they're wrong to want it.

Because he doesn't say anything.

There's nothing in the entire post to believe or not to believe, it's all extremely evasive. It pretty much screams "something happened I don't want to or can't talk about".

I would have been a lot more understanding if he bothered to explain how protecting people's privacy against malicious exploitation hurts people that "don't deserve to be hit".

Without any reason other than vague hints, this sounds like someone got to him.

I'm not buying any of this. He suggest he feels bad about his product, but at no point explains why.

Except terrorism doesn't instill terror, as proven by the terrorism in the previous century, when we just defiantly went about our business the same as before. And I say "defiantly", but it doesn't take much bravery if you know that the odds of being blown up by terrorists are so much smaller than having an accident during your daily commute.

The government and the media are the ones that leverage terrorism to instill terror.

Terrorism as a tactic in itself is a proven failure. It requires the support of media and government to have any impact.

Which makes the conspiracy theories of our own governments deliberately encouraging terrorism quite realistic.

Especially given that it has happened before (CCC, Gladio, etcetera). Western governments have never shied away for faking or aiding terrorism, it's remarkable that we keep referring to this as tin foil hattery despite a) the long track record and b) the simple fact that they are the only ones who profit from it.

Hence, it's not a stylus, but an actual active pencil-like device for drawing.

But yeah, lets not let the facts get in the way.

(Wow, even an attempt to engage by asking a question gets downvoted by HN's pro-Google brigade...)

Anyway, assuming you believe Google effectively has a monopoly (as the EU commission does), this is yet another example where Google abuses that position to favour itself over everyone else trying to recruit. Very similar to the way Google manipulates shopping results (but sneakier).

I'm not even saying I agree with that logic, but it will almost certainly be added to the things various regulatory bodies will investigate. Apparently it's already taboo to even mention that on HN.

> "Google used it to identify me before I had even applied anywhere else"

Add another item to the list of anti-trust charges Google is facing around the world.

> "they respected my privacy"

No they didn't. Not even close. But if Google is full of people with these notions I understand the major disconnect Google has with privacy regulators outside the US.

Still doesn't support OpenTherm, and therefor useless (or at least of limited use) for much of Europe.

Being a cyclist in Amsterdam, the lack of driver eye contact and understanding of body language is what worries me about the application of self driving cars.

Amsterdam traffic is a chaos in which pedestrians and cyclists mix with cars, and the former two frequently (some would say always) ignore the rules. Not out of some anarchistic impulse, but for mutual convenience. Especially with cyclists, for whom coming to a full stop and accelerating again is both "expensive" and risky (accelerating cyclists tend to swerve), relying on eye contact and mutual understanding of intent rather than following the rules of the road by the book results in safer and more fluent traffic.

I imagine a current generation Google self-driving car in Amsterdam coming to a grinding halt and not being able to move backwards or forwards.

But most of all, as a cyclist I wouldn't feel safe sharing the road with "drivers" with whom communicating via eye contact and body language are impossible.

To me, self-driving cars and liveable, human-scale cities are mutually exclusive, and I very much prefer the latter.

Either that, or eat the rich.

I resent the implicit conclusion that people who choose to focus their efforts on building a safe and stable life for themselves and their families, especially their children, are cowards and people who fail simply aren't trying hard enough.

Your life's strategy is simply one of many, and most who follow it fail anyway.

OTOH, excellent work by SentinalOne's marketing department.

Probably cost them no more than a decent lunch while they dictated it to the hack who's name is in the byline.

It's interesting how libertarians keep confusing their ideology with the law in a democracy.

You can get locked up for lots of irrelevant things in every developed country. Except in most countries that is seen as a last resort, so cops aren't particularly inclined to arrest people if there is another way, and judges aren't particularly inclined to jail people.

The problem is mostly cultural, not legislative.

In general, I would strongly recommend starting with doing Scrum strictly by-the-book, even though it may hurt initially. Don't try to tweak the process too early, or you are likely to fall back into bad habits. (You will very much need everyone's buy-in for that, which includes the acceptance that it may be a bumpy road.)

To be clear, I'm not a great believer in Scrum as such, and certainly not part of the "if it doesn't work you're doing it wrong" school.

However, I have found Scrum by-the-book to be an excellent way of very quickly identifying every obstacle that stops you from being truly Agile, because it simply doesn't allow you to sweep inconvenient truths under the rug.

Scrum makes every weakness and dysfunction painfully obvious. What you do with that can then be your choice (including ditching Scrum because it doesn't match your needs, which is perfectly valid), but at least it will be a choice, and not something that "just happens".

And whatever you do, do not skip the Retrospective. When it comes to building a functional team, that's the most important part, everything else is just a crutch. Basically, putting 7 smart and motivated engineers in a room and having them review their own processes every iteration will most likely also get you there.

I'll try not to put this in a way that may be interpreted as "gratuitous negativity", but I stopped caring about Google branded hardware a long time ago, since the odds of it being available in many countries outside the US sometime this century are near zero.

If those are your options, you shouldn't have employees, you should outsource the work.

And I'm not one usually in favor of outsourcing, but having employees is a whole different ballgame. If you can't let them fail, you're not building a team that will add value over outsourcing, so you're better off not taking on all of the complications that come with having employees.

Do not mistake Amsterdam city center with the rest of the Netherlands.

In the overcrowded center of Amsterdam, the locals know and understand "the dance" (the last thing a cyclist wants to do is come to a full stop every 20 meters, because it is much more "expensive" for a cyclists than it is for a pedestrian or driver, so instead of playing by the rules of right of way we do the dance of give and take), with the exception of tourists (who don't know the dance and give off confusing and confused body language) and cars (usually from out of town) stupid enough to drive in the city center in the first place.

Yes, customizability and security (including privacy) are my top concerns.

Which is why I first and foremost want my ideal browser to not be owned or beholden to a major corporation that will abuse it for it's own purposes, like Google, Apple or Microsoft.

Some nuance should be applied here: this is usually said in the context of startups.

In the first few years of a startup, there's no such thing as a mundane support role. The first person you hire for support is your future "VP Customer Support". The first few people will form the support culture and processes of a company for the future.

In this context, all hires should be A-players, because they are supposed to contribute way more than just fulfil the role in their job description.

> Today’s full-stack engineers have replaced yesterday’s sysadmins, DBAs, and webdevs altogether.

Seriously, when is this "full-stack" nonsense going to stop? With the exception of a few geniuses, "full-stack" is just shorthand for "less than mediocre at a lot of different things".

> Calling someone an employee doesn't suddenly create new money.

But not calling them employees somehow magically creates money out of thin air to be labelled "profit" for Uber, without any detrimental effects to the rest of society?

It doesn't differ. And it is the norm in most Western countries outside the US.

How is that "ironic"? Contrary to all anti-government rhetoric, most government agencies are by their nature more transparant than the average startup.

However, it's easy to be transparant about salaries when you deal with collective bargaining and don't have to generate your own revenue.

Especially the latter means that what companies are willing to pay tends to depend on the financial circumstances at the moment of hiring, resulting in differences that cannot be justified by performance or value.

It takes costly rounds of corrections before you can be transparant about that without causing major upheaval when you reveal everyone's salaries. It only works for companies with short, relatively linear history. Everywhere else, salaries tend to diverge over time for many reasons.

I have found the #1 source of architecture/reality mismatches over time being that "business" has deliberately kept developers only partially informed on a "need to know" basis.

To be clear, there was nothing malicious about it, it's just that many stakeholders only give their short term needs as input, not the long term strategy that's discussed behind closed doors in the board room. The big problem here is that non-engineers don't get that some strategies don't simply add to the problem space, but fundamentally change it.

"Why the fuck didn't you tell us sooner?" is one of the most common phrases in software development.