slavoingilizov

GDPR applies whenever you're providing services to EU citizens, regardless of where you have operations. If you want those people to read your stuff, it applies to you.

And before you say that's crazy, look at US tax laws.

Yes, my statement was very broad. But the point I'm trying to make is that regulation is usually reductive, not additive. It is definitely needed in many cases, and the state should interfere when necessary to ensure safety and fairness. But regulation is never the reason innovation happens.

The spirit of the author's comment was that if you regulate for something becoming compelling, it would become compelling. That never happens. You can't regulate your way to being innovative. I think it was Ben Evans who said the difference between the US and EU is that the US sees regulation as necessary evil, while the EU sees it as an exciting project. Hence the different outcomes.

"Since all communication platforms are now free, the only way to get people to use competitive European software and services is to also offer these for free, and to make sure this technology is very good and compelling"

I have never seen a government or any regulation deliver anything "good and compelling", or take any other action to "make sure" someone else delivers it.

How exactly do wells and cisterns prevent wildfires? Like many others this technology treats the symptom and doesn’t solve the problem.

You can blame Cloudflare for not meeting their promises on free tier. But you can't blame them for "hiding" the errors. You are responsible to monitor your service, and it's good practice to have that happen externally from your environment. If you have a public API, monitor it publicly. Things like Pingdom and synthetic monitoring exist for this reason.

This is an important comment. Would you put an engineer in charge of a bank product? What about a medical service? It's one thing to be consulted, it's another thing to be the decision-maker.

I agree with the premise of the article that more engineers need to be in powerful positions, but some domains are just too complicated and require substantial domain knowledge to make "product" decisions. It's the collaboration between product and engineering that's important, not switching one for the other. The biggest problem I have with the article is that it presents the problem as too binary with only 2 possible outcomes - someone being in charge.

Tech companies put engineers in charge because the engineers are the domain experts, not because they figured out some secret sauce.

So why not force the opening of the walled garden in law then? The EU has PSD2 now which forces all banks to have open APIs. We have multiple Plaid-like competitors providing the platform on top of those APIs. But it wouldn't have happened without regulation.

Generally innovating through regulation is bad and I don't support it. But I think the aversion to it in the US is what creates these monopolies in the first place and in this specific use case, I think it's a faster way to solve the problem.

This is an example of what becomes possible (no card details and low fees):

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/truelayers-payments-api-le...

Can you run docker and virtualisation software on these? I read a comment about Federighi mentioning that there's no EFI or dual boot, which I can't find now, and I assumed there's no virtualisation at all.

By "trick" you mean the only approach every chip-maker has been following for decades? Literally every single one. It's called binning.

The problem explored by the author is quite an interesting one. Developer experience is indeed fragmented, varied depending on the toolchains chosen and not always good.

However, I have to disagree with the iPhone analogy. The consumer mobile phone market doesn't have any similarities with the developer tooling and software platform market. For one, Apple has always preferred to set trends and _tell_ people how to use their devices rather than provide openness and flexibility. Developers thrive on flexibility - shepherding them to the one true way of doing things, even if it provides a better experience, would unleash the inner forces and wrath which made open-source a thing. Also - the problem of "listening to music while taking a call" has vastly reduced complexity compared to anything done by developers. I don't think you can apply the same learnings. Each market and each customer segment require completely different business models and the iPhone bundling and "do few things right" strategy just isn't right for such a vast ecosystem of developers who are all doing so many different things. Yes, they are all deploying code to production. That's not a market. And to see the differences, compare the SDLC at a regulated bank to that of a 50-person startup with proper automation - you'll find they are light years apart. Not because the banks suck as devs, but because they are in a different market.

Which one are you using?

This is a great article. Even if you disagree with the conclusion and recommendation, it shows what you need to look out for when buying a monitor.

I had to go through a similar exercise recently. The DisplayPort / USB-C / Thunderbolt story is just insane. I was looking for a monitor to use with both MacOS and Windows. HDMI can't do 4k @ 60Hz, DisplayPort cables never tell you which version they support.

I ended up with LG UHD 4K 27UL650, which I'm very happy with, but switching between Mac and Windows is still difficult, because this monitor only has 1 DisplayPort input. I've settled to using HDMI for Mac and 30Hz instead of switching cables all the time.

Improvement in experience is very subjective but I agree with the author on everything except maybe the 120Hz.

Such a sad writeup.

Having a journalist glorify some 10x gurus in a specific team and diss every other software developer in the world is not going to solve the problem at all.

It's a shame though - because the topic is a really important and interesting one, which deserves discussion. But not this type of dramatisation.

The most important sentence only comes at the end (and is the reason you can't trust the solutions proposed):

> And money is not the critical constraint: the groups $35 million per year budget is a trivial slice of the NASA pie, but on a dollars-per-line basis, it makes the group among the nation’s most expensive software organizations.

You work with the constraints you have. Eliminating the constraint doesn't solve the problem - it redefines it.

I agree. I'm not suggesting tech isn't important at all. I'm just trying to provide a counter point to the OP, whose argument sounds very one-sided.

You can't build the next FB and Amazon without great tech. But they are not in the tech industry. Tech is the key ingredient (out of many)

OK. I'll try to play devil's advocate here.

Disclaimer: I think of myself as an engineer.

I do believe your frustration comes from observing actual issues and you're right to express your disappointment. However, I can see a lot of cynicism in your tone, and I feel there's a huge amount of judgement on those "cons" without trying to peek behind the curtain on what makes them behave like that.

To provide a different viewpoint - I've often seen this desire to do tech in a tech-first way fail massively. Many of us consider ourselves techies, so we believe we work in the tech industry. But we don't. We work in Finance, Productivity, Mobility, Food and similar industries, even though we're engineers. Apart from developer tooling and some exceptions - those industries are not about the tech. Countless times, I've seen engineers spend valuable resources (their own time) delivering the perfect tech solutions for non-existing problems (or over-engineered and expensive solutions to real problems, which could have been solved without tech much easier) Without the "cons" of UX, business development and product management, people like those would always disconnect from customers.

I do believe we should all try to find what motivates us and for many people here, this would be tech innovation. But dismissing the other roles in the companies we work with is just an endless utopia chasing, never productive.

I've been lucky to work with some great non-tech people and learn a lot from them. And from 10+ years in the industries (plural), I've seen many more examples of over-engineered and useless tech than failure of "cons" to grasp why engineers should be put first.

Then I guess they are not good enough?! I use them (without other tools) and I'm happy, but do fairly simple python development. There's a reason many people choose other tools if these don't cover common cases.

Yet someone has made the decision to do bundle them with the language and provide a default. I'm not suggesting we have common governance, but these decisions need to be made.

The missing ingredient to really, REALLY solve these problems once and for all is an authoritative decision to switch package formats and run the whole dependency resolution stack by the core python language contributor team.

I get backwards compatibility and open-source governance and bla-bla, but the reality is that this cannot be done by a third-party library author and needs to become part of the core stack, including proper support rather than just shipping a tool which covers 90% of cases. It's crazy that apart from venv and pip, nothing else comes with python and you're left on your own.

npm + the registry is part of node

apt-get + registry is part of a normal linux distro

budnler comes with ruby

This is a solved problem elsewhere. What we lack is a fully-supported, agreed upon, working DEFAULT choice, so people don't have to make their own choices. I don't know if not having that DEFAULT is a function of how the python community thinks or its diversity, but it's painful to watch. I've almost given up myself and seen many newcomers give up because of a trivial problem like this.

I've tried many different apps over the years. I was in the "manual entry is better" camp until I stopped due to friction several months later. The only app I've used which I haven't given up on is Emma (https://emma-app.com/). On it since beta and been doing that for more than 1year. It automatically pulls all your accounts, categorises spend and gives you analysis on what you can do to improve.

Many others promise that, but fail to deliver. Emma works for me, consistently. At the end of the day each of us manage our finances differently and the workflows have to be personalised. It's about finding the one that makes sense to you rather than "the best".

You're overestimating banks abilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

What proportion of the GDP before 1990 was from power production then? Your argument is anecdotal. Those reactors were vanity projects, not big contributors to economy.

Another Bulgarian here, living in London and contributing to the problem.

This is a good article, but fails to show the breadth of the topic. I also disagree with many of the comments here, which (expectedly) are on the pessimistic side. This pattern of a big spike in migrants when a country joins the EU isn't new. The Polish, the Czech, the Hungarians all experienced this. It might be frightening to project a % of the population leaving yearly far into the future, but it's almost certain that the trend will not continue. There's a trend of economic equalization which starts after a country joins the EU, and this makes it less and less attractive for people to leave over time. So although I don't see net positive migration soon, the current numbers will not be the same long.

Every time a country becomes better off, the most entrepreneurial and driven people reap the benefits first. This is already showing in the big cities in Bulgaria and some of the comments about salaries here agree. Of course it is true that the not-so-skilled haven't benefited yet, but I think this is also going to happen and the current environment will give birth to much innovation and job creation, which will permeate society and give good reasons for even the poor to stay. These processes take time and Bulgaria hasn't yet gone through the full cycle, so we can't judge it yet.

It's true that there's plenty of corruption and bad practices, but if I compare today to what was happening in '97, it's in a different league. We went from rampant hyperinflation and drain of national reserves to small racketeering. If the bar is zero corruption, that will never happen. The good thing about the economic progress from recent years is that it's driven by industries which the mafia can't control. It's no wonder that Software and IT services are such a big employer and contributor, because it's not a business with large tangible assets that can profitably fall into the hands of the wrong people. This means that corruption and mafia have less and less impact on the quality of life of the average citizen. The situation in key strategic industries (e.g. energy) is obviously very different and won't be improving quickly, but that's the case in many developed countries as well.

There are still many things which need to be improved when it comes to quality of service and administration (at least on a public level), but these are solvable problems. I have high hopes and I'm optimistic about what's coming, with an eye open to return one day. And for those who haven't visited yet, I would whole-heartedly recommend it.

And when exactly did the news become public? In my experience it usually takes minutes/hours between the event and the mass media covering it. I can bet it isn't insider trading but algorithms reacting to news faster a human can.

While I've absolutely seen this, I've also seen many technical people not really understanding what the 80% do and assuming they don't do anything. You might be right for your own company/job, but I always take comments like this with a grain of salt.

Many roles are needed to counter-balance others and implement good governance, although they look like they are just getting in the way. As I've gained more experience in senior roles, this becomes more and more obvious and choices that would have been baffling to me when I started out as a dev make total sense now. So... quantifying usefulness is not a numbers game and any opinion here is subjective and biased.

Some of the meetings I've had have had 10x impact on what any individual contributor would have done during that time, if the meeting didn't happen.

I think it's a fallacy to think of work this way. It doesn't really matter what % of your time you spend "working". What matters is the results you achieve. These can only be measured in periods longer than 1 day, so I wouldn't trust any recommendation or finding based on the answers of this question.

Only for their Metal subscription, which is paid, not free. Irrelevant comparison.

https://www.revolut.com/introducing-revolut-metal

I admire how you've managed to do this easily (and avoid writing code for everything). But the fact that you have to do it shows how broken and lethargic banks have become.

In the UK, they are starting to wake up. The new "challenger" banks which exist here all do this as a hygiene feature - see Monzo, Starling, Revolut. With Open Banking mandating open APIs for all banks, this will become the norm soon. The fact that American banks and regulation hasn't jumped on this is a symptom of something very wrong with the system.

I sincerely hope the launch of Apple Card or similar services disrupt consumer finance in the US as well and set a new bar. And when the above mentioned banks come to the US (which they are currently working on), you should absolutely switch and delete the 100 lines of python as well.

This will depend a lot on where you are.

In the UK, many FinTech startups have started launching current accounts targeted to freelancers and small businesses. Some examples:

https://getcoconut.com https://www.tide.co/

Obviously if you're in the US this won't work, but you haven't mentioned explicitly.

Historically, the citizens of the UK and former British Empire have never managed to pull off a revolution. I don't know if complacency is ingrained in the culture (plenty of evidence for the opposite), but the French started beheading kings when they were not happy. The UK still supports a figurehead monarch. No evidence of correlation or causation, but just saying.

No it doesn't. Apple Pay can notify you if you've connected the Amex there, but the notification doesn't come from Amex app, at least on iOS.

Edit: It seems the functionality is there, but it doesn't work for Contactless, which is the majority of transactions I've done.