vec

I'm not a lawyer, but intuitively it seems like the more control they exercise over their products the weaker the claim that they're just a middleman becomes. Wouldn't a record of being directly involved in quality control significantly damage their case in the event that a lawsuit does occur?

> I guess I didn't need X after all. I just had to write a bit of code.

I guess I don't need functions and variables after all. I just have to write a bit of assembly code (for some definition of "a bit"). When the complaint is that a language is insufficiently expressive, noting that anything is possible at the cost of being more verbose isn't really a refutation.

A huge chunk of that probably goes to, well, videos or hi-res photographs to be used in building the UI. Hi-res splash screens plus a bunch of hero images plus 2+ prerendered sizes of each display element for different pixel densities plus a dozen 30 second tutorial videos can easily add up to a couple hundred megs of assets alone.

There's an argument that while rendering engines are huge, monolithic undertakings, the actual browsers wrapped around them are fairly trivial. Assuming they use the same rendering engine under the hood, a relatively lightweight, tightly integrated platform-native browser (i.e. Safari or Gnome Web) might be a better user experience than a cross-platform behemoth like Chrome.

Extension support and depth of extension library have traditionally been the big pain point with switching to a minority browser. Moving extension support into a browser independent standard removes a lot of the selective pressure toward a monoculture.

A standard package format would be nice, but this looks like enough to let developers publish once and have their build tooling do most of the work of packaging for different targets.

That's the origin of the phrase, yes, but in the US the phrase "Fourth Estate" has been bastardized to mean "Fourth Branch of Government".

No one would go out of their way to, but it's pretty common to have these cases break because no one's ever bothered to test them. On screen keyboards don't have characters no one will ever type, fonts don't have characters no one will ever display, sorting and string manipulations may not bother to handle accented characters correctly if there will never be accented characters, etc.

No one actively thinks "I'm going to intentionally omit solid unicode support"; we just don't bother with it until we feel there's a good reason to, and by then it's often too late.

Does it though?

I'd like this to be true, but in practice it seems like most people (me included) strongly prefer hearing songs they already know most of the time, enjoy songs more with repetition, at least up to a point, and are more than willing to learn to like almost anything with high enough production value.

Some people are music snobs as a hobby and most go on discovery quests from time to time, but it honestly seems like most people most of the time want music they don't have to think too much about or devote too much attention to. Indie-only channels can't really deliver that.

I'm not even a Go developer, I just played with it a bit a couple of years ago and used it for a small one-off internal API thing, and I can think of a dozen real-world use cases for generics off the top of my head.

  * type-safe containers (linked lists, trees, etc.)
  * higher order functions (map, reduce, filter, etc.)
  * database adapters (i.e. something like `sql.NullColumn<T>` instead of half a dozen variations on `sql.NullWhatever`)
  * 99% of functions that accept or return `interface{}`

I appreciate that they seem open to the idea for v2, but "the use case isn't clear" is absurdly out of touch with the community. Using `interface{}` to temporarily escape the type system and copy/pasting functions just to adjust the signature a bit were among the first go idioms I learned, and they both exist solely to work around the lack of generics.

True, but that's not a gender issue per se. Women-only programming groups are based on the theory that women are not being well served by co-ed programming groups, as a combination of socially enforced gender roles plus an understandable discomfort at being the only woman in a room. All male groups are generally frowned upon because there's no reason to think the average male would be prevented from participating in a technically co-ed but heavily male group.

I suspect men-only clubs for traditionally female dominated fields, something like an all male kindergarten teacher group, would be broadly accepted as reasonable.

Below operating costs. Rent plus utilities plus relevant salaries plus amortized cost of equipment.

This is confounded a bit because a lot of medicine involves lots of expensive equipment and staff with huge student loans to pay down but low day-to-day operating costs, but for a lot of specialties there exists no set of insurance-independent prices that allow a normal clinic following industry standard practices to operate without losing money.

To be fair to doctors offices, this is in part because some insurance plans (Medicare's the biggest offender, but then again Medicare's the biggest everything) pay doctors below cost for certain procedures. Doctors cope with this by systematically overcharging other patients' insurance companies when they're reasonably sure the patient has already hit their copay for the procedure.

Essentially, health insurance for the poor isn't formally subsidized well enough to make it actually workable, but doctors have professional ethics that disincentivize them from refusing care. So the system has evolved a clumsy, ad-hoc mechanism for wealthy patients to cross-subsidize poorer ones.

American health insurance sucks.

> The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.

Hello Fresh, at least, has 8 or so available recipes per week. They'll pick 3 for me, but if I choose I can log in to their site and pick for myself.

I started using these services (originally Blue Apron; more recently Hello Fresh) with the express goal of learning to cook. I originally planned to continue the service until I had a catalog of recipes I knew I liked and enough skill to do for myself. I met my initial goal six months ago, cancelled my subscription, then restarted it a couple of months after that.

I found that when I had to choose a recipe to cook, I just wouldn't end up doing it. I'd forget, or put it off, or make some excuse. I know I'm happier when I cook, I have enough skill now, and I go to the grocery store at least once a week anyway. But it turns out it just didn't happen most weeks. I ordered pizza or microwaved frozen food or ate out and felt like crap for not eating well.

There's something incredibly powerful about defaults. I'm not paying for recipes and ingredients. I'm paying for someone to tell me "cook this tonight". And I do. I cook more often, eat healthier, and end up happier at the end of the week. And maybe that's not true for everyone, but I'm more than happy to pay an extra $20 or so over sticker cost for the nudge.

Tipping isn't about scruples. Businesses with scruples would pay their employees a fair wage and price accordingly. And then immediately go out of business as everyone flocks to the competitor that's magically 20% cheaper (before the essentially mandatory 20% tip).

Tipping is entirely about being able to advertise a lower price than the actual customer cost. Unfortunately that is extremely effective, so if one company in a market accepts tips all the others basically have to.

Of course the perfect is the enemy of the good, in this as in all things. That said, if you don't feel that you can start a business and run it both legally and ethically, maybe consider not starting a business.

Nobody forced Travis Kalanick to found a company that couldn't work in the then-extant regulatory structure. Nobody forced him to work around the problem by just flat out ignoring the law and hoping he could lobby to get it changed before he got called to task for it. Nobody forced him to come up with a long-term profitability plan that required being able to eventually charge monopoly prices. Nobody forced him to try to undercut his competitors by doing an end-run around employee protections. He always had the option to go be an angel investor or something instead.

He chose a model which could not be done ethically and upon realizing that decided to pursue it anyway. I'm not certain what that makes him, but it sure doesn't make him a victim.

A lot of jobs in the US pay biweekly, which comes out to a nice, round 2.166 paychecks per average calendar month. Paperwork here generally either asks for annual income or asks both paycheck and length of pay period.

100% of $0 is $0.

I'm not saying that should be the only punishment. I don't even think it should technically count as part of the punishment. I'm just saying that if the prosecution can demonstrate that you (or your employer) profited from a crime, then you should always lose those profits in addition to whatever punishment the court deems appropriate.

I'd accept a minimum statuatory fine of 100% of the profits from your criminal activities. White collar crime, when discovered, should always be a net loss for the plaintiff's balance sheet.

It's not perfect, but if you make ten billion dollars from fraud, I feel like first you should lose the whole ten billion dollars as a matter of course, after which we can start discussing what if any punishment is appropriate.

For good or ill, that's actually a pretty widely accepted legal principle in the American justice system.

Jury trials are used to determine guilt or innocence, and judges are extremely hesitant to second guess a jury decision under any circumstances. Appeals aren't for relitigating guilt, they are for ensuring that the original trial was conducted fairly and properly. Furthermore, there's a strong bias in all circumstances against reopening closed legal matters. In general, the US court system prioritizes consistency and finality above correctness.

On paper at least, the proper legal remedy for someone who was convicted, who does not argue that their trial was conducted properly, and who nevertheless maintains their innocence is a pardon or commutation from the governor.

This undeniably sucks, but the alternative is to have the court system essentially DDoSed by felons demanding frivolous retrials.

Checklists and acronyms help some people, so more power to them. But I think the central observation of most of the anti-cargo-cult articles boils down to a simple maxim of "don't use a technology unless you understand what it's bad at".

There are very few technologies that can reasonably be thought of as strict upgrades, and the few that do exist (i.e. MySQL to Postgres) tend to be incremental enough that switching rarely justifies the migration costs. Instead, many solve one or two exceptionally dramatic problems (gargantuan datasets, huge write volumes, partition tolerant master-master replication, etc.) and are willing to make equally dramatic tradeoffs to achieve it. Saying Technology X is good at Problem Y is only half the story.

In my own practice I've found that forcing myself to stop and explicitly enumerate both the pros and cons of a new technology is usually enough to get my professional intuition to kick in. And 99 times out of 100 it tells me to just use boring old SQL and move on.

Two years ago I moved from Albuquerque to Denver, explicitly for work related reasons. The difference in available engineering jobs is night and day.

ABQ is a starkly beautiful midsize city with an unusually high number of nuclear physicists. That's necessary but far from sufficient for being a tech center. And as far as I could tell, the city's ideal is for a relatively small number of relatively large employers, not in hundreds of 5-20 employee firms.

Besides, if you're interested in working for one of those firms, let alone starting one, Denver's only six or seven hours north.

The problem is that most of the union benefits are really hard to opt out of. I benefit from an improved payment schedule, better overtime rules, a safer work environment, nicer insurance, etc. whether I'm a member of the union or not.

Don't think of it as club membership, think of it as a negotiator's fee that's baked into your employment contract.

It is undeniably true that HR departments exist for the benefit of the company, not its employees, but I've never quite understood why that leads to the bad outcomes it does.

If an employee complains to HR of harassment, it seems like the most coldly rational, protect-the-company reaction they could have would be to do everything in their power to prevent the complaint from going public and creating a PR nightmare. Taking the complaint seriously is in their power, usually make the complainant go away peacefully, and makes you the "good guy" in the court of public opinion if it comes to that.

Furthermore, given a situation where one of your staff is abusing their position in any way, I would think most companies would rather find that out from their HR department than from the local newspaper or the district attorney.

So why isn't that the default strategy for HR departments? I understand that not every HR director is necessarily competent, and that large enough power discrepancies can overcome a lot of good intentions, but it seems like best-practice HR procedure is to essentially sweep problems under the rug and hope they go away instead of making an effort to honestly address them. That can't possibly be a good long-term strategy, can it?

Arguing about purity is only pointless and sanctimonious if the water isn't contaminated. Being unable to break a several hundred megabyte codebase into modules isn't a "tap water vs bottled" purity argument, it's a "lets not all die of cholera" purity argument.

So if I set the DNT flag on my browser, your advertising network will neither set any cookies nor serve me any beacons or tracking pixels nor collect any other analytics data from me whatsoever?

Can I or a neutral third party audit your internal database to verify that my browsing history is not being recorded by you? Do you provide a list of all third parties with which you share information with so I can attempt to audit them as well?

What dispute resolution procedures do you support if I have reason to believe that you do, in fact, hold some of my personal information despite my express request? How would you respond to a request to purge an individual's records from your logs?

--------------------------------------------------------

I don't mean to put you, personally, on the spot. I'm sure your firm is perfectly ethical, and that you do listen for and take some action to honor DNT requests as far as you see fit. I'm also sure that were I at an advertising firm I wouldn't have any better policies. It's not your fault this is a stupid feature.

That said, to almost anyone outside the webdev community "Do Not Track" doesn't mean, "Track, but Anonymize" or "Track, but Don't Personalize", it means "Don't Create A Record I Was Here". I've yet to run across a single company, advertising or otherwise, that interprets it that way, though.

"Mayor #{city_official} wants to raise YOUR TAXES to line the pockets of their friends at #{local_construction_firm}. Call your alderman and tell him to vote NO on Proposition #{proposition_id}!"

"Mayor #{city_official} wants to pass JOB KILLING REGULATIONS that could put #{comcast_employees.count} of your neighbors out of work! Sign this petition opposing Proposition #{proposition_id}!"

"Mayor #{city_official} wants the GOVERNMENT to take over YOUR INTERNET. Vote NO on Proposition #{proposition_id} to keep your internet free!"

It's not that hard if you don't care about fairness or accuracy.

Not the OP, but I'm guessing they live up the road from me in Longmont, CO.

Comcast does indeed hate this, and spent roughly $300k on questionably ethical political ads[1] in a city with less than 100k residents.

[1] https://muninetworks.org/content/longmont-votes-again-comcas...

Of course this isn't a surprise to any of the HN crowd, but it is still good to have publicly documented.

Plus it sets journalists up to ask more pointed questions. It's the difference between "What measures are being taken to ensure the security of Mar-a-Lago during the President's visits?" and "Given ProPublica's dismal analysis of Mar-a-Lago's normal security, what additional security measures are being taken during the President's visits?". The first is a softball, the second applies real political pressure to get it right.

Asking to get paid in Bitcoin is already a stiff barrier to entry for most users, so probably not. $300 feels close to the upper threshold where people who already care enough to not balk at the Bitcoin requirement also won't balk at the sticker price.