emdowling

EU tech regulation actually addressing an issue effectively? I wouldn't hold my breath, but there is a first time for everything.

I live in the UK, where we've had instant, free, interbank payments for the last few years (we've had free interbank payments for > 10 years, but the instant part came in a few years ago as part of the Faster Payments scheme).

Spoiler alert: it has not eliminated the need for credit cards. The credit card system has a lot of flexibility and integrations to make for a superior user experience in a number of situations. For example, a lot of banks let you create virtual cards for specific purposes (eg: I have one for all my online subscriptions, and another for merchants I've not dealt with before). Not to mention Apple/Google Pay and their integration into basically every single online payments platform.

It sounds like this person has worked with some truly mediocre product managers. I’m a PM, from a self-taught engineering background, and I’ve worked with many mediocre folks too across all disciplines.

I view my job primarily as risk management. A great team of engineers and designers will face a huge number of risks to shipping great products, like not having the right skill set to articulate their vision to get others on board, or having lawyers impose requirements or restrictions on what can and cannot be done. My job is to manage that, to help bring out the best in the team so they can get on with the actually important work of building and shipping great products.

I judge success by how redundant I am. My goal is to not be needed, for the team to have the right context, confidence and support to make good decisions without me.

I love working with engineers to level-up their skills so they can do just this; I work with my EM partners to understand the strengths, weaknesses and goals of each engineer, and try and find ways I can help them progress.

In an ideal, utopian world maybe I’m not needed. I can understand that argument. But in most cases, doing truly great things will run up against challenges and risks, and a good PM works in partnership with their team to overcome them and is a net value add.

The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/). Clean layout, no ads for subscribers, native mobile apps that perform well. Overall, it's my favourite source for general news.

You’re not wrong; that is the blog’s style. I enjoy the format for exposing me to a cross-section of opinions from across the internet, on topics I find interesting, with very little work on my part. That’s probably more an indictment on Twitter’s product stagnation than a shower of praise on this blog and it’s author.

I can guarantee that the vast majority of implementation time was more likely due to verification and auditing of the solution, rather than the solution itself.

In a former life, I worked as a stage and orchestra manager, including a few contracts with some of Australia's most well-known professional orchestras and opera companies. tl;dr: They work harder, for longer hours, than the vast majority of people in tech.

They will spend a full working day in rehearsal, then go home and spend a few hours doing solo practice. They will spend hours of time (often uncompensated) notating scores ahead of the first rehearsal of new work or production.

As others have pointed out, the economic model for orchestras and just about any live performance cannot support high salaries. Many musicians will have instruments worth thousands of dollars, so they will have loans against them. Then there is the venue and equipment hire, the transportation costs and the wages for the crew behind the scenes - people to set up the stage and run the show (like me), lighting and sound designers and operators, etc (14+ hour days are not uncommon).

It is a very hard way to earn a living, and on top of it all most jobs are contracts measured in weeks or months, not full-time positions. Not only do you have to be unbelievably talented and passionate about it, you also have to possess superhuman resilience to handle the lifestyle. I have nothing but respect to people who do this job for a living.

Amongst other reasons, lack of support for anti-cheat systems (like EAC and BattleEye) have stopped big-name games like Destiny 2, Fortnite and others from easily porting to Linux. The Steam Deck has started to change that, prompting the ecosystem to slowly come around.

The fact that they were both unpunished for finding loopholes in employment law

Why should companies or people be punished for finding and using loopholes? By definition, loopholes are perfectly legal. They may be against the spirit of the law, but they are still legal.

I’d go so far as to say it is one of the most successful open-source projects of all time, and a poster child for how OSS should be run. From the beginning, it has cultivated a welcoming community that produced a range of tutorials and learning materials for all skill levels. It’s evolution has been steady, and it has seemingly found a way to be successful and impactful in a space where closed-sourced competitors are vastly more well-funded.

I distinctly remember how incredible it was when Big Buck Bunny was released with all assets and project files freely available. I learnt so much from that, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was a catalyst that led to many, many people gaining the skills and drive to produce new creative works. I hope Blender continues to inspire and enable many future generations of creators.

That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m not saying we shouldn’t raise taxes for the ultra-wealthy, just that we should also spend time on solving the structural issues that prevent efficient and effective allocation of capital, both new and existing.

Raising money is one thing. Spending it is another. So much energy is spent on policies to do the former, and seeimingly very little on how to do the latter far more efficiently. This policy proposal makes for a fantastic soundbite, but how will the additional revenue be allocated in a way that actually leads to better outcomes?

Simply increasing the top of the funnel is not going to make all the downstream inefficiencies and inequalities go away.

You've got to be kidding. The version offered on Game Pass is the "Standard" edition, that isn't just a "free to play", "stripped down" version of the game. It is 95% of the game! The remaining 5% is almost always cosmetic items, like skins or cars, that really do not impact the core experience.

There are some exceptions, like Destiny 2 I believe, where the meaningful DLC is excluded, but that is not the rule. Game Pass is an incredible deal.

Pre-ProductHunt, HN was the place to launch your product[1]. Having a "Show HN" post reach the front page was (is?) the ultimate brag, and founders would always mention it in seed/Series A pitch decks if it had happened to them. Being featured on HN would usually mean being contacted by a TechCrunch reporter, and that was a Big Deal. So, you'd use your personal connections to make sure everyone upvoted your post. If you were all in the same location (eg: co-working space), you'd tell everyone to use a VPN or tether to their phone to avoid being IP-blocked[2].

Then, ProductHunt came along with the pitch to be more curated, and to speficially solve the launch promotion problem. Now, people have figured out how to game it, just like they did with HN.

I fully expect the cycle to continue with a new ProductHunt with the same value proposition. For Web3, Twitter seems to be doing that job pretty well.

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[1] The launch of my own startup (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196585)

[2] Source: I was in 500 Startups Batch 5, and we were all advised on how to upvote each other's HN posts in a way to avoid bans.

Different challenges appeal to different people. From his background, he seems motivated by high levels of ambiguity, rather than maintaining mature products. By all outward indications, he is leaving Apple on a high and has no doubt helped develop a multi-year roadmap for the Apple Silicon team. He accomplished what he set out to do, and is simply excited by the opportunity to do something new in his field of expertise.

This. Especially for compound lifts (eg: back squat, bench press, deadlift, cleans, etc). Building good technique and form is essential to avoiding serious injury and making sustainable progress. Having a trainer, even 1-2 times a month, is a good investment if lifting is a part of your routine.

Having dealt with The Guardian and others like them to cancel, I say "I will not explain why I wish to cancel nor will I reconsider my decision. Please cancel my account. My account number is x, my email is y and my address is z."

I usually have to repeat it 3-4 times before they finally give in and do it.

According to the article, the treatment needs to be injected directly into the tumour (although this may change in the future) so the focus of these trials is melanomas. They tested on mice with both melanomas and lung tumours, and found that it reduced the size of the lung tumours even though it wasn't directly injected into them. Seriously exciting!

Yes, exactly. Expect to spent at least 10 years as a first officer before getting a shot at Captain. I’d wager that Covid has pushed that out to 15 years. I have family and friends who are pilots, and the landscape is brutal with yearly pay rises falling far short of inflation in a lot of cases, and bonuses being minimal or non existent for the last few years

As of 2022, PSC is shifting to every 12 months not 6 in an effort to better support longer-term projects and thinking. Promotions will still be assessed every 6 months.

In the UK, it is like this for the vast majority of tax payers. Certain criteria, like earning over £100k, mean you need to file a return. The government will usually send you a letter informing you that you've met the criteria too, as they know how much you earn each month.

At any time, you can log in and easily see how much the government thinks you have earned and from who, and which tax rate (tax code) is being applied to you. You can correct this as well if it is wrong.

Having lived in Australia, the US and UK, I've found the UK system to be the easiest to understand and navigate. Australia isn't too far behind. The US is just a mess.

This is fantastic and congrats on the launch. I'm a little bitter as I just spent an hour yesterday creating an Apple Shortcut to create a note for my next or current meeting, but Hera obviously does so much more than that.

Ignore the naysayers. Being an Electron app is not a dealbreaker for 99% of people and I see the feature list and just say "Yes, yes yes!" to all of it.

One question that is vital to me: where are the notes stored? Is it in the cloud? Are they encrypted? I ask because my company has rather strict controls on this, and does not want sensitive meeting notes being stored with third parties that have not been verified.

Looking forward to watching this tool grow and develop.

You've nailed the complexity of this. On privacy, people are rightfully spooked about this for all the reasons you've mentioned. On safety, people are really happy about these initiatives as accounts backed by user identity are less likely to be used for harm. On security, leaks of these databases create issues to other sites and companies (eg: if Company X is compromised, then identity documents could be used to disable/bypass 2FA for Bank Y).

To make it even more complicated, regulators often hold contradictory views. They want to see increased safety, but in the same breath will announce actions against companies for violating privacy. This is a super-difficult balance to strike.

Specifically for Stripe, I trust them. So if I see that a new start-up is using them rather than rolling their own solution, that increases my trust. But it means there is now a big giant server in the cloud with millions (billions?) of identity documents that is worth a lot of money for hackers.

It’s very telling that Europe, having largely failed to play on the same level as the US and China in big tech, now seeks to compete through regulation not innovation.

I’m not a Brexit supporter, but the EU’s bungling of Covid and the subsequent vaccine rollout, and the ridiculous level of regulation it is trying to impose on firms it cannot produce itself, is making me more and more comfortable with Brexit.

As a FAANG employee, I'm excited about visiting our new theme park in Florida. Hopefully it'll be open in time for our next planning offsite.

This is surprising. The company is still growing at a very fast rate, especially in their "whale" segment (customers with ARR over $50k). I'm curious about why they want to take the company public, as VC funding shouldn't be hard to come by with these numbers. The founders have not sold any stock so far in the two secondary sales ($50 million at Series D and $30 million at Series E). Intriguing.

It is important to remember context. At the time, Apple was absolutely not a services company. In fact, their services were terrible (eg: MobileMe).

All of their revenue came from selling devices - the improvements year over year were more significant than they are today. Each year would bring new features that would open up entirely new market opportunities for developers and it was happening at such a pace that even Apple engineers could not keep up. Apple needed developers to sell devices much more than they do today.

Steve's argument that having an intermediary between Apple and developers would delay the implementation of new technologies and capabilities is entirely valid in that context. Of course, the context has now changed - Apple is increasingly a services-oriented company, and that means their objectives are to both sell more devices AND sell more services, which puts them at odds with developers who were typically responsible for providing the actual services that ran on top of the platform.

The 2010's was perhaps the single most transformational decade in technology, and while the shift from devices to services may be obvious now, it was far from obvious back then. Steve's clarity is even more impressive when you consider the era in which it was written.

Reading this essay again (via Wayback), I'm struck by Steve's clarity. His writing is concise and simple - my favourite bit:

Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

What strikes me is that he simply states Apple's goal - to sell more devices and make more money. He doesn't try and sugar coat it about serving some greater purpose, he just states what everyone knows to be true. It is refreshing, given how many business leaders seem reluctant to publicly admit that their goal is to make money.

Secondly, it clearly broadcasts what problems they are and are not trying to solve, and where their priorities lie. Love it.

This sounds like a similar situation to Telstra in Australia, which was forced to split into two entities - one a wholesale network provider that was open to all operators, the other a consumer operator that (supposedly) operates under the same rules as everyone else.

TIL. Thanks! I've only lived in the UK for 6 years so don't know much about the history before that. Appreciate it!