TravelTechGuy

Agreed. Another important lesson I learned when delivering code to a non-profit org, and them asking me to convert my final invoices into "donations" to the org.

Sadly every consultant can tell you at least one (hopefully only one) story about clients who refuse to pay. Either outright, or with some excuse about you "not delivering", or they "not liking" what you delivered. I have one of those stories as well.

My SO has her own story - she ran into a guy whom she later found out does it as a policy: hires people, never pays, threatens to sue them if they publish their story. Her lawyer told her to just forget about it.

It's then that find out the limitations of our legal system: if the client is international, forget about it. If they're out of state, prepare to deal with an expensive legal process taking place where the laws may not always favor you. And even if it's local, and you won in a small claims court - good luck collecting.

I have periodic payments built into all my contracts, with the final payment taking place after acceptance tests, but before me surrendering all materials and code. I won't say this is a 100% bulletproof solution, but the alternatives suck.

OMG. We truly live in the stupid timeline. How do I get back to the prime timeline from here?

Your last sentence should be a t-shirt.

It is a very sad story.

Our company committed to open sourcing all of our code (it's in the web3/blockchain space), and we had, and continue to have, spirited discussions about which parts we should maybe license differently, as they contain novel IP.

But my main question is: if your code is open-sourced, and the community contributed: fixes, features, actual new products - what gives you the right to close it? Are you going to go back and compensate every contributor? How can you justify revenue made on the backs of contributors.

Side note: if what Prusa is alleging about Chinese patents given for open-source code produced in the west, and then having international priority, is true, I think the UN (or whoever handles international patents) should look into that. We can't control what goes on in China, but we can damn well make sure no Chines company makes money outside of China, with co-opted IP.

I do not understand why people keep building in that space. Not only is it a niche market, but it can be completely decimated by Google/MS adding a feature to their interface.

Add to that the non-existing costs of switching between these offerings. I was using the Calendly free tier, and when a feature I wanted was moved off the free tier, it took me all of 30 minutes to move to zcal (most time spent fixing web site, and email signatures).

Perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Maybe there's a social aspect that escapes me, but I would love to hear from someone building in this space about their motivation and long term goals.

IMHO this ban will never pass. The only law all these people are always sure to vote for is the one increasing their salary and benefits.

But beyond that, even if it passes, I expect so many violations that it'd be as if it didn't pass.

If we've learned anything in the last 6-7 years is that if there's no shame, law becomes less relevant. It's enough to look at some of of the current crop (and I'm doing my absolute best to prevent myself George from dropping Santos actual names here) to understand that the believe they're above any law.

We need a GDPR in the US. Yesterday. All the people who treat our private data as their own will stop and think twice if they face the chance of losing billions for breaking privacy laws.

And every data collection should be turned from opt-out to opt-in - by law.

How to pass horrible bills:

1. Stuff them with truly horrible ideas. 2. Wait for public to scream. 3. Remove half of the horrible ideas (keeping the core crap, like no FOIAs, privacy violations etc.) hidden and spread amongst hundreds of subparagraphs. 4. Present this is as "fair compromise". Convince idiots from both sides of the aisle that this is good for national security. 5. Pass the law. 6. Profit?

Self custody is hard. And even professionals can make mistakes.

Most people don't think about it: they have a bank holding their "balance", a broker "holding" their stocks, an employer "holding" their salary, and maybe even a crypto exchange "holding" their tokens - until they don't.

Only when you get into the nitty-gritty of self custody, you understand it's a security hassle: you need to save a seed for crypto, or boxes of gold ingots, or precious art in special climate-controlled packaging etc.

People traded this insecurity, this chance of losing it all in one unfortunate event, for the warm comforts of having someone else custody your assets. But ask Greek people in 2008 (or Lebanese people now) how does it feel to come to a bank where you've had an account until yesterday, and find out there's no money to go around.

We're starting to see some strides being made into simplifying and securing crypto custody (MPD, Multi-sig etc.). But at its core, if you want to truly hold your asset, you will need to keep ahold of something (safe key, seed phrase, physical item etc.).

Makes even more sense if you treat it as a foreign hostile takeover.

A quick look at some of the funding sources for the $44b, and the distinct direction Twitter took post-acquisition suggest (to me at least - personal opinion) that Musk is promoting certain (alt-right) agendas. It could also be that the goal is to burn Twitter to the ground, as it has been touted by the US government as a “freedom tool”.

I can easily imagine Mohammed Bone Saw solving potential outcries of future heinous acts, by making sure there’s no outlet to discuss them.

Again, just my private opinion.

Some more background: the companies were engaged in fighting over regulations, and on a personal basis between the 2 CEOs. It went down to really childish levels at some point.

But one thing is undeniable: SBF (FTX CEO) was trying to weaponize US regulation against his biggest rival CZ (Binance CEO). CZ retaliated by selling the FTT token, exposed the fact FTX was over-leveraged, and took over.

This is, as the kids on Twitter say, the embodiment of the old "F#$k around, find out".

Along the way every FTX client who couldn't withdraw, and every crypto user losing value got screwed - but why should these 2 characters care? The space just became more centralized, and whatever smidge of trust was left after the Celsius debacle has evaporated.

re: the performance review: don't know about your work place, but the first quarterly review I got at [insert name of large known company], my manger sat me down and explained she is budgeted a certain amount of bonus points for her 5 team members, and required to "grade on a curve". Hence, 1 team member will be "above average", 3 will be "average", and one "below average" every quarter. And for fairness, she rotates the names. I was deemed "below average" since it was my first quarter, but the good news, she said, is when she nominates me for "average" next quarter, she'd add a "shows improvement" comment to it!

Bare in mind, real actual money was tied to this stupid scheme, and you had to spend at least 2 hours writing a document explaining what you've done for the company, the team and the product, to justify your "averageness".

I lasted 3 quarters in that social experiment. And I'll laugh in the face of corporate recruiters till the day I die.

Sad story, though not uncommon. I heard many eBay horror stories involving buyers' scams.

Frankly, selling anything on Amazon is crazy. But if you do have to, vet your buyer. Look at their previous purchases and feedbacks. Avoid the quick deal that will blow in your face.

The bottom line is that eBay (and Amazon too) are more focused on the buyers. Buying on eBay is great, because you have 100% buyer protection. There's no seller protection at all.

I'd recommend sticking to either local selling apps (like Craigslist etc.) where you can verify the buyer (though stay safe and do it somewhere public), or through online communities that manage access and feedbacks (there are several on Reddit and Facebook).

The nightmare scenario for a financial institution is someone getting a mortgage, paying it off early, and not getting another mortgage.

I think the nightmare scenario for financial institutions is people buying houses for cash. No mortgage, no down-payments, no middlemen. The west coast right now is seeing an increase of such transactions. Add to that the slew of services trying to get around realtors, and the future may be bleak for such financial institutions.

One can only hope...

1984 changed the way I perceive language and culture permanently. The notion that if certain words no longer exist in the language, then the associated idea will disappear from the culture was Earth-shaking to me.

Another idea that book drove home was the power for the media and the utter control of your life a government can exert when it completely controls it.

I really liked the story, and it's well worth telling it, and highlighting the heroes (and anyone who was there is a hero in my book). But the writing style was kinda hard to follow. It reads more like a stream-of-thought piece rather than an organized story.

Jumping back-and-forth in time, repeating side stories again and again, introducing new characters, and then re-introducing them, skipping major parts in the middle, only to come back to them later (or not).

All in all, it's a story well worth a good Atlantic article, or even a movie script - but I'dthink long and hard before putting time in the future to reading an "article" by this "journalist".

But there's no easy way to inject this AbortControl into existing libraries, or use it easily with async/await. I'm looking for an easier standard.

Not sure if it had been mentioned already, but I think we could benefit from cancellable Promises.

Many of the modules and libraries currently support Promises, and `async/await`, but try to find a way to cancel a long-running Promise. Some libraries have resorted to using their own mechanisms, and some (e.g. `axios`) resorted to using a withdrawn TC39 proposal.

I'd like a standard, easy way to cancel a Promise. I know it's not simple, and Promises can wrap around other Promises, etc. but if I'm e.g. uploading a large file to a server, there should be an easy way to provide my users with a "cancel" button that works.

If that's the approach they're taking, why not just cancel the day Friday all together?

Seriously, instead of finding and fighting the root causes of the problems, they treat the symptoms.

Reminds me of the old Jewish folk tale/joke: when people in the town of Chelem complained to the city council that many people fall off the broken town's bridge, the council got together, deliberated for a week, and decided to build a new hospital under the bridge.

Next stop: electricity company liable for people using their product to power computers that violate copyrights.

Side question: is anyone tallying the damage caused by the music/film industry to the public by creating crazy precedents in the name of copyrights, DRM etc.? I mean the DMCA alone was horrible, but now they're going all over the world and creating havoc.

So the author copied data from one Microsoft site (LinkedIn) to another Microsoft site (GitHub).

Both sites use PII to target people and companies: how many annoying emails have you received from LinkedIn this week? And I mean the creepy ones, suggesting contacts based on minute details from your profile, or encouraging you to import all your contacts so they can be spammed?

But I guess if a user does it, it’s doxxing. I wonder if this is political, or maybe Medium and GitHub are just trying to avoid a potential fight with a federal agency.

Can confirm. If I have a secondary DNS specified in my router, other than my pi-hole, it becomes useless. My guess is the router is either measuring response time, and goes with the most efficient, or otherwise round-robining the requests. Either way, requests bypass the pi-hole in such quantities that it became useless.

PS: someone here mentioned that this behavior is OS-dependent - nope, this happens on the router level, and all devices in my apartment suffer.

I couldn’t help but think that if Palanteer employees ever decide to quit based on their company’s questionable decisions, there’d be no one left to work there.

I would consider this contract to be more "legal" if it contained the other side of the equation:

By looking at the ads and executing the code we download to your computer, our site assumes full responsibility for the code, ads and content, and will reimburse you for any damage (physical, material, emotional) caused to you by the software we serve.

We will not blame it on the "ad network", or "ad exchange" or a "google". Nope - if you got it from us, it's ours. So feel safe in deactivating your ad-block and surfing our site, because we got your back!

Came here looking for the first “hello world!” Program, ended up learning something.

It's funny reading this article after seeing one of my questions from 2011 edited today, to remove the word "Thanks!" from the bottom.

I've been on SO since 2009. I can confirm the community is getting harsher, less patient, and more exact. HOWEVER, I can see the other side. I see tons of questions that are not fit to be on the site: one-liners, opinions, "help me with my homework", and utter spam. Not to mention people who clearly did not search the site, or even Google (many of Google's results come from SO), and ask a simple question asked a thousand times before. Bad questions and answers will stay online indefinitely, coming up in your future Google searches.

There has to be a balance. Comments should be less hostile, but posters should vet their questions before asking.

Perhaps the suggested structured form is the right way to go. If people will take some time to document their effort, and code, they'll gain appreciation for the time spent by someone reading their question and providing an answer.

PS: +1 on using Zuckerbot in an article not about Facebook :)

I wasn't really trying to go down the "what about" route in my comment. I think these companies (and many more) are part of the same issue: collecting so-called "shadow profiles" on non-consenting "customers", and not providing (meaningful) ways to opt out.

As for the article you pointed to: it deals with the fallout of the leak. I want to deal with why were they allowed to collect that information to begin with.

Just one question, following Zuckeberg's congress show-and-dance: are the next CEOs to be called in front of the committee the ones from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion?

Because the way I see it, they're collecting millions of "shadow profiles", with no consent, no remedy, no removal procedures. Furthermore, they sell that data to 3rd parties at will.

I'd also look into a possible connection between one of these and Facebook. I imagine if someone crosses your social profile with actual credit records, real name, address, car, etc. then you have nothing private left to protect save the thoughts in your head.

”For roughly a week in January, Coinhive was found hidden inside of YouTube advertisements (via Google’s DoubleClick platform)”.

I’m shocked, and very surprised to hear that malware code is disseminated through innocent ads put out there by a user-loving, “do no evil” company. /s

Now, can we please finally conclude that an ad blocker in your browser is mandatory?