ThePadawan

I'm sorry to hear you had such an outlier of an experience - I've never been met with anything except understanding when asking for directions in any of the national languages.

> we spend probably half an hour in Zurich trying to find someone that knows the place and speak German or French at acceptable level to give us directions. It was during the late evening and out of 15 people we stopped like one was swiss.

Stopped...successfully? And does Swiss German count as "an acceptable level of German" :)? I don't find it hard to believe that 14 people would pass you by (as people would in a major city), but I find it hard to believe that out of 14 people, none would speak the major national languages.

> London is based on being the word's money laundering capital, vacation playground and best buddy for Russian Oligarchs, Saudi Royals, CCP big shots and other wealthy dictators and warlords.

Having lived in Zurich for many years, those are fightin' words! /j

> The company can spend the cash as they see fit but if the item is refundable or use of the item incurs costs, they need some cash on hand to handle people digging up old cards and using/refunding them.

Right, and if you're heavily investing, you would want to minimize the necessary cash on hand.

I remember hearing that's why a supermarket had a scheme recently where they would redeem (virtual) bonus points for a rebate directly applicable to your purchase (as opposed to accumulating until some arbitrary limit before that would happen) - simply so the company could figure out what percentage of people would take that chance to redeem the points.

> Why they would expire I don't know.

I have a (not directly) related hypothesis I heard stated once about vouchers and bonus programs once.

If the operator takes your $20 to buy a metro card, they made $20 of income. The $20 of "value" the card now holds is accounted for.

Assuming a metro card never expires would means that the operator would have to account for this value to be in existence for perpetuity.

If 1% of metro cards never expired but still had 20$ on them, there would be an ever-growing amount of money-to-be-accounted-for which (I've been told) is a bit of a nightmare since it's technically a liquidity, but obviously unavailable to the company.

It's obviously shitty for the customer, but there's seemingly some sort of (tax/business) logic behind it.

German here: The 9 Euro ticket is a brilliant innovation compared to what came before and is now coming back after it: Extremely complicated fare zone issues.

I'm not trying to be rude, just trying to clarify: Saying that the 9 Euro ticket is easy to buy is like saying a 20 hour flight is comfortable, because you flew Emirates First Class.

> I imagine fare gates are much cheaper than controllers.

German living in Switzerland here: What's even more expensive is delays. It's unthinkable to me how to build a high throughput station with ticket gates. And that's not even considering the need for additional fire egresses etc. involved.

Switzerland is a bit more paper-averse than Germany. 80% of people on the train hold up a QR code on their phone for the employee to scan once aboard, 10% hold up their (credit card sized) travel card for them to RFID scan, and the remaining 10% have a paper ticket.

There is an interesting time span when even some non-Americans would have a fallback ZIP code memorized - 90210.

The original show (Beverly Hills, 90210) ran 1990-2000, and the remake 2008-2013.

As someone who worked in the space - there are standards and commercial solutions which all do lots of good work (some are now unfortunately having to break into the AI space, literally because manufacturers are too cheap to use standards).

But they all come at some cost - my employer decided to cheap out slash invest in a highly custom in-house solution instead that relied on lots and lots and lots of data entry.

On a smaller scale, my work life also improved significantly by going from

"a 60 minute meeting where no decisions are made because everyone just shouts at each other so you leave with a headache"

to "a 60 minute meeting where no decisions are made because everyone just shouts at each other but you can turn down the volume on Zoom"

It sounds really stupid, but that literally helped make a giant difference.

I worked at Switzerland's biggest online retailer whose USP was that it actually did strongly typed attributes really really well.

To date, it's still incredibly searchable. Want to find a 5.5" phone running Android 10+ and at least a 12MP back-facing camera for below $350? You can filter for it.

It was an absolute nightmare on the (normalized, backend) technical level, but a real pleasure to consume on the denormalized, frontend level.

That's really wild! I looked at the top 10 recipes on Chefkoch and they all have Quark except one labelled "NY style cheese cake" which uses all of Frischkäse and Quark and cream.

> Most of the cheeses I ate when living in Germany are available in the US in the cheese section of a reasonably nice grocery store

I was trying to express a more generic statement. Germany has Quark, which the US doesn't, even though it could (and probably does if you have a Polish supermarket). The US has half-and-half [half cream and half milk], which is completely unknown in Germany, but there are like, 4 different levels of fat content for cream.

I.e. if a German reads a recipe from the US that includes Heavy Whipping Cream, they just have to look up what that is and find something that is similar-ish. The identical product might not exist, since the dairy industry produces different products fitting specific legal definitions.

Touché.

See, there's a lot of nuance in German.

There is no equivalence between most dairy products between Germany and the English-speaking world. Most terms are just untranslatable because they refer to similar but slightly different concepts.

There is fresh white spreadable cheese ("Frischkäse"), but it's savoury, not sweet, and less fatty than American-style cream cheese. You certainly wouldn't use it to frost a cake. If you spread Frischkäse on a sandwich and handed it to someone as a "cheese sandwich", they would probably be a bit surprised but accept it as a cheese sandwich.

But Frischkäse doesn't go in Käsekuchen. Maybe my description of Quark was misleading, but it is terribly hard to describe since it literally just does not have any equivalent product in the US. Imagine describing marshmallow fluff or root beer to a European.

Lingustic shoutout to Switzerland, where cheesecake contains actual [grated, hard] cheese.

For the German speakers: "Käsekuchen" (literally "cheesecake") in Germany, Poland and other countries of the region uses Quark, which is untranslateable, but is texture-wise somewhere between light cream cheese and pressed Greek Yogurt. It's not usually referred to as a cheese within Germany any more. So Käsekuchen is a sweet cake that goes well with red jam and fresh cream, or served with coffee.

Käsekuchen in Switzerland (again, "cheesecake") is a pie with a filling based on cream and grated hard cheese. If you want the sweet German cake, you have to order "Cheesecake" (using the English word!), not "Käsekuchen".

Funnily enough - I was building this application ...to replace Salesforce (for this business process, not company-wide).

Because the person managing Salesforce approved all requests to add any field, there were just 400 instead of the 5 I mentioned, and none had any validation - so no one knew which ones to fill with data, which ones to keep updated, and which ones absolutely to never touch because you would accidentally commit fraud because you falsified sales figures.

Not parent, but here's an example from a past project.

Customer: "Could you make the 'name' field of this entity longer? We need to add longer names."

Me: "Why?"

Customer: "Well, we want to name the entity '2022 - Spring - $500k - Contoso Inc. - Presale stage' so we can find it more easily."

Me: "So what you actually want is to be able to filter/search for entities by all those values, and you're just using the name as a workaround because it's all you have."

Customer: "Well that's how we do it in Excel."

> Banks have excellent security. But often the restrictions are so onerous that productivity suffers.

I once worked a very short stint as an external dev at a private bank (6 weeks).

The side entrance we used had a revolving door-style airlock with enough space for a single person to stand, protected by a card reader using unlabelled RFID-style cards.

This was obviously to ensure that for every person entering, there was exactly 1 card swipe, no one could hold the door for anyone else, etc.. Real claustrophobic in there, to the point where it was impossible to step through the revolving door, you had to do stutter steps while the door revolved around you.

So obviously this airlock was broken at least 60% of the time. Its replacement was a normal door next to it, which was left completely open instead.

Probably quite hard, seeing as all the Portuguese builders are over here in Switzerland (since they get paid very well compared to Portugal, but really badly compared for Switzerland) /hj.

(Probably similar for other EU countries with high relative purchasing power)

FYI I went through a large phase in 2020-2021 where I responded to around 75 job offers and overall had 1-5 calls with ~35 companies each.

My cover letter contains a standard phrase about "references available on request".

No one requested them.

That is freaking wild to me.

As a naive idiot not born in the US who has seen the weirdest separatist movements in Europe (not only a Bavarian one, a Franconian one [Franconia being a historical kingdom, now a collection of counties within Bavaria]), I'm constantly amazed the US doesn't have more separatist movements.

Texas and California strike me as the sorts of states to one day just say "You know, fuck all y'all".

It's so beautiful, it makes me think it might be a render - after I learned how many "photos" in IKEA's catalogues are actually just using physically-based rendering extremely well, and not being to tell at all, that thought keeps popping up.

I strongly believe there is also

a*) Get hired, collect paychecks until somebody notices, but then still stay employed because the KPI of a HR person in a fast-growing company is to fill seats, and firing people, no matter how terrible they are at their job, goes against that.

Now someone just needs to tell companies that the way to reward those is with significant cash in hand.

I've had companies offer $500 for a referral, if that person took the job and stayed with the company for at least 6 months (this was for a position with a salary of ~50$ per hour).

> and the researcher checks your references to make sure you aren't lying scum.

That sounds way more professional than any interviewing process I've gone through in the industry /hj.

Sometimes, the problem is just getting to that first call.

If a job offer results in 20 genuine applicants, the company might set up 20 calls.

If the same job offer results in 20 genuine applications and 480 fraudsters, the seconds spent on a CV need to drop drastically for a HR person to make the decision to interview a candidate. And if the fraudsters do well faking a CV, and HR only has time for 20 calls, there are going to be a lot of false negatives (genuine candidates not getting a call back).

As pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649569 , this is probably HN autoremoving numbers from the start of titles to combat blog spam titles like "12 reasons to switch to XYZ".

> Not to mention all the attempts to criminalize buying of sex, which is basically an ultraconservative position multiplied by -1.

What country/party has this position?

As a naive European, that sounds like you might be talking about the left in the USA that is still far to the right of the European idea of "left".

(Posting from Switzerland, where not only is sex work legal, it's regulated and taxed)

Thanks for qualifying.

After reading that article that in various places calls out...

- "The plus is widely taken as a symbol to represent self-identifying members of the community who are not included in the LGBTQIA acronym"

- "The plus in LGBTQIA+ not only represents other sexual labels and identifiers, but also the experiences of those within the community."

besides the quote you already mentioned which includes the weasely "Some say", I personally don't really see as a strong of a consensus as your first comment suggests, but appreciate the perspective.