joekrill

Ah, very good point. It would certainly be great if things were that straight forward in the US.

But you're just proving my point: if 95% is boilerplate, 5% is not. Plus you have to consider the circumstances. The same exact document might have vastly different ramifications depending on what else is involved - the work, product, other parties, etc.

I'm very happy for folks who haven't run into issues by not using a lawyer. But having had documents reviewed and realizing that things are pretty much never what they appear on the surface to a layman, I would never consider signing a legal document without having it reviewed by a lawyer. Nor would I assume some "boilerplate" document is going to cover what I, as a non-lawyer, assume it will.

Well there's the standby nodes with automated failover, and the fact that maintenance and security are fully handled. For a lot of people that's well worth the extra $10 a month. Plus setting up daily backups is one thing, but verifying that it is done correctly and that they are easy to restore is almost always skipped "until it's needed", which of course is too late.

Wow. Is that common? It seems a little unusual to explicitly call these things out. But I can't say a typically read a lot of EULAs, either, so I don't know.

My wife is an attorney and if there is ONE thing she wishes she could make everyone understand it's that there is no such thing as a "standard" or "boilerplate" legal document.

Can you elaborate on what it was about the EULA that was a problem?

Not to be confused with the relatively well-known JavaScript logging library called Pino.

I love the idea of this, but when I tried using Franz a while back it just felt like a second, specialized web browser just for chatting websites. Sort of similar to when a mobile app is just a WebView wrapper. Ultimately I feel like I might as well just use my existing web browser.

I'm not sure if things have changed at this point - maybe there is some added feature that makes this more appealing.

But that's so short-sighted. There are other things to consider. Word of mouth is powerful, and if you make it difficult people are going to remember that and tell their peers/friends/coworkers/whoever. And what's going to happen if you decide to pivot, create another product, or add additional value? If you made it so difficult the first time around why would I give it a second chance?

There's a lot of naysayers here: it's been tried, it can't be done, etc. But I have a hard time believing all that. They said the same thing about the music industry. The cable TV industry is going through a huge change now. I think someone can figure this out, and I wish anyone taking this on the best of luck! I think it's something we really need to counter the constant barrage of ads, privacy invasions, etc. that we have to deal with today.

Personally, I'd be happy to have some sort of pay-per-article "account" I could use as-needed. But it's really hard to decide whether something is worth reading up-front. And after-the-fact I'm guessing most folks will just not bother. So I'm not sure how you address that. But again, best of luck to anyone taking this on. I'm rooting for you.

I never suggested it should. I was simply commenting on calling this a "witch hunt" - I offered no opinion on how fair or just any of this stuff is.

I absolutely agree with you. But at the same time I'm really having a hard time coming up with a reasonable explanation for this from the company's point of view.

Unless the whole thing is an outright lie. It's a brand new Stack Exchange user. There's absolutely no legitimacy to any of the story at this point. People do this sort of thing all the time on the internet, after all.

But assuming it isn't totally fabricated -- even if the guy was completely unprofessional, rude, and/or vulgar (lets say, he stormed out and told everyone to go F themselves), I still can't see it being acceptable for them to cancel his return flight home if they flew him out in the first place.

But I don't think we'll ever get the other side of the story in this case because I don't think we'll ever get confirmation that this is even real.

Not quite. In this case she was, in fact, a "witch". She did the cyberbullying.

It's never made clear, however, if the first guy was actually guilty of what he was accused of. I think that's more of a witch hunt, because we're vilifying people based on a single accusation - without proof or corroboration. Of course there may be more to the story here, it just hasn't been told in this particular article.

Good point, caffeine was not a good example. Cigarettes (or smoking in general, whatever it is) and alcohol are really the primary "legal poisons" we allow, I guess. At least in most of the world. With alcohol actually almost encouraged in most parts.

I guess it depends what you define as "not ok". I mean, why is smoking 4-5 times a week not ok? Why is shooting up heroin 4-5 times a week not ok?

In the end, we're simply willfully poisoning ourselves. For some reason we, as a society, have decided that it's OK to poison ourselves with certain substances (caffeine, cigarette smoke) but not others (heroin, methamphetamines). We've made this socially acceptable. So if by "ok" you mean socially acceptable, thensure, it's ok.

I hope I'm not misunderstanding the comparison, but for me the takeaway seems to be: make the users job easier. That has always been what we're trying to do, hasn't it? Stop forcing them to enter _so_ _much_ _data_ by hand, manually. It's tiring for them. They don't want to do it. They will do what they can to avoid it. They will make mistakes or enter random data just to get it done. Using "ML" or whatever to classify things automatically is generally "good enough" and makes everyone much happier. Except the execs that seems to always want "perfect data" to analyze. Hopefully as we get better and better tools to do this (and it seems even simple categorization is usually sufficient, anyway), we will stop forcing people to do this stuff.

And I hate to pick at specific points that are more cursory to the article, but I can't help myself:

> Duplex feels like an extension of the gig economy; this is about college grads not wanting to waste their time negotiating with grunts.

I understand the sentiment here, but I don't think that's what's happening here. If there were a better way to do this sort of thing without "hacking" the human interaction I think we'd do it. I think Duplex has come about because many companies still insist on wasting everyone's time by forcing people to make time-consuming phone calls to perform very simple tasks. I don't think is about helping college grads not have to interact with "grunts".

> What kind of businesses run on very tight margins, that even some increase in the IT bill can cause them to fail ?

Well, Startups! That's sort of common for startups, isn't it? I realize the term is basically being used to describe almost all "small businesses" these days, but I think it's fairly common for startups to have very short runway. That would (ideally) get longer as the startup matures. But I don't think it's uncommon at all.

I mean, this is effectively called "life" (as it stands today). You have to trust people. You have to trust someone, at some point. That's why we have things like privacy policies and service agreements. There can ALWAYS be a malicious actor somewhere in the chain. Even if you were to hand write a clone of this app in assembly and compile it yourself: can you trust the compiler? Can you trust your CPU? Can you trust your monitor?

I've said this before, but that's just kicking the can down the street. At some point, unless you are inspecting every line of source code, every dependency, every dependency's dependency, and so on down the line until you get to the silicon, you HAVE TO put your trust somewhere.

I would think the biggest concern with "Serverless" would be vendor lock in. If a large portion of your SaaS product is "serverless" it's going to be very difficult to move when company A raises their prices, or company B comes in with a much more compelling product or price point.

Admittedly I don't know enough about the details to know how big of a deal this could be, or whether there is work toward a universal "serverless" standard. But I don't want Amazon/Google/Whoever suddenly raising their rates 2 years from now causing my startup to go under because the margins are so tight. And for those that say this will never happen, look at what Google just did with their Maps pricing.

Much fewer than I would like to have! My "to read" list is infinitely longer. Some highlights:

Factfulness by Hans Rosling - amazing book, as recommended by Bill Gates, and I see why. Very timely and important given the current social climate. A must read for literally everyone.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler - I've always been meaning to read some of the classic hardboiled detective novels, and what better place to start than with _the_ classic. Loved it. Very easy read. Looking forward to reading more of these.

Spanish Verb Tenses / Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions by Dorothy Richmond - I've been trying to learn Spanish and these are some of the best workbooks I've found.

Wool by Hugh Howey - A friend kept recommending this and it was so hard to put down once I started. It always kept me wanting more. It was a great journey, but at the very end things were becoming a little obvious, which is probably why I haven't gotten around to reading the other books in the series. But that definitely shouldn't keep anyone from reading it - it was a really great, fun read.

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann - 12 amazing essays, each great in their own way. I didn't want to finish this only because I didn't want to no longer have a story to look forward to! I picked this up after reading his The Lost City of Z, which was also a great read if you like modern adventure stories.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking - I love to reread this every so often. Maybe it's nostalgia?

How Linux Works by Brian Ward - I know Linux well enough, but certain things I never really understood and never bothered to look into. This book helped clarify some of the ways Linux works under-the-hood, and why, among other things. And it wasn't super dense - very approachable. Highly recommended to anyone who uses Linux but doesn't really think of themselves as a "Power User" or even "Intermediate".

Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep by David K. Randall - We know so little about sleep, and the research is constantly changing. Randall does a great job of distilling things for the layperson, though. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami - I was surprised how much I enjoyed this! What an amazing read. I typically don't enjoy this sort of book where everything seems to have some deeper meaning and it's very "out there" (for lack of a better description). But I couldn't be happier that this was recommended to me. I loved every page.

And I'll thrown in a dud:

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck by Mark Manson - I don't understand why people like this book so much, and I was a little annoyed at myself for reading it all the way through when I should have figured out a few pages in that I was wasting my time. A typical fluffy self-help book with no real substance, I thought. "Do Cool Sht" is another book in a similar vein that I had the foresight to bail on. I guess throwing a curse word in the title is the thing to do these days?

You're absolutely right. The big issue (for me, at least), is that it's a security nightmare. At least last I used it. It seemed there were security exploits popping up every day. Either from the core codebase, or from some random plugin everyone seemed to be using. I think that was just the nature of how their plugin system works? I'm not sure if anything's changed, but _maintaining_ a WordPress install is not fun and requires constant - almost tiring - oversight.

I saw the title and thought: "Finally, they're going to admit to what a mess they've created and propose a way forward". But nope, just a PR fluff post.

I don't see how this problem is limited to just NPM. This is a problem of any package manager. Or any software distribution system in general, really. Look at all the malware found on the Play Store and the Apple Store.

Unless you're willing to meticulously scrape through every bit of code you work with you're at risk. Even if you can, what about the OS software? How about the software running on the chipset? This is exactly why no one in their right mind should be advocating for electronic voting. There's simply no way to mitigate this problem completely.

But you also have to review the diffs of your dependency's dependencies. And their dependencies. And so on and so on.

But my point is you also have to trust that your underlying OS, or chipset, or even some other software on your computer doesn't have some way to thwart the entire effort. If the thing you're using the do your verification is itself compromised, then you're just as screwed.

But what about the code you run to verify the binaries? You have to trust that. Or are you reviewing every bit by hand?

> The only way higher wages lead to more candidates is by taking them away from other companies or other industries, and sometimes from other countries. So that is sometimes an option for certain employers, but not for an entire industry. It's a myth that there is a pool of workers who is "underemployed" because of low wages.

But that's only true in the short term.

> In a free market, if companies can earn more profits by hiring more people by offering higher wages, they will do so.

But we're not in a truly free market, are we? And we've already seen huge tech companies band together to keep profits artificially low. And that's just the one's that got caught.

> But increasing wages also reduces profit, and there just may not be enough room in the margins.

Corporate profits are at an all time high, and have been for quite some time. We're paying C-level executives insane amounts of money. Profit margins are surely not the issue here.

How could this even possibly be mitigated, though? At some point you have to trust something, right? This argument could extend all the way down to your OS, chipset, whatever. Unless you've built every part of your machine from scratch it's always going to rely on trusting a component you know nothing about.

Won't very good prosthetics thwart facial recognition? Maybe you can't change the distance between your eyes, but with the prosthetics she describes you could certainly change other geometries: forehead, chin, cheekbones, ears. etc.