wannabag

For anyone interested in how this can be changed, here’s an example from the Nordics.

In the early 2000s, the Swedish tax agency, Skatteverket, started a journey from “tax police” to service. This was a radical change that affected every aspect and function of the bureaucracy. It went from far down the list to the second most trusted agency (after the Swedish Armed Forces) in 2023 [1].

As a citizen, the differences are notable. I came to Sweden after the change, and my previous experiences in other countries were very similar to the friction-filled endeavor implied by the author. The people I dealt with were similarly unhelpful, unconcerned, if not downright undermining my efforts to comply.

This is all a result of a system that breeds friction. Citizens and bureaucrats alike simply play their part. Moving to Sweden was an otherworldly experience. My first mistake, and resulting interaction with the agency, was met with compassion and understanding from a bureaucrat who then made an effort to help put things right. It’s hard to describe how radically different the situation felt. Anger, frustration, and helplessness were gone. Instead, I felt like sending flowers to Karin, the bureaucrat (I really should have). I’ve become a better citizen, more likely to comply going forward.

I wish more agencies around the world would take note, especially now, in a world trending toward fewer human interactions and increasing digitalization. Bureaucracies and technology alike should continue to be built to improve collective human experiences, not break us apart.

[1] https://chef.se/artiklar/skatteverkets-forandringsresa-nagra...

Apologies for the poor quality link, my morning Googling wasn't very effective.

Another Mozilla-made-a-decision thread, another list of complaints.

I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.

I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.

Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.

I can't help but be reminded of the latest hostile move Slack / Salesforce pulled, it was just a few months ago, in the name of security, they locked the data even further, limiting our ability to do what we please with our own data.[0]

I happen to work at a MS company, still we’ve been courageously holding Teams at bay, but Slack removed a key reason for us to push for keeping it around. If Slack listens here, reach out; you're about to lose another large customer.

[0] https://docs.slack.dev/changelog/2025/05/29/tos-updates/

Yes, just rewording is enough in this case. It will fail if it tries to be clever with the code interpreter as mentioned.

I used:

"Extract the important dates and times from this pdf in Swedish"

[..]

"Great now generate the content of an ics formatted file, just the text, with the schedule above"

[..]

"Now use the code interpreter to create a file with the above content then save the file as an .ics extension"

I had the exact same use case two weeks ago but I had received a pdf file from school and was sitting at a cafe with only my phone.

I use ChatGPT, and while the article is correct to say that it will claim that it cannot generate .ics files directly in the code interpreter it is however very much capable of solving this particular problem. I did the following (all on my android phone):

1. Had it extract all the useful dates, times and comments from the pdf 2. Prompted it to generate the ics file formatted content as code output 3. Prompted it to use the code interpreter to put this content into a file and save it as a .ics extension

It complied through and through and I could download and open the file with the gcal app on my phone to import all appointments..

For completeness, the claim that the code interpreter cannot "generate" ics files is because the python environment in which it runs doesn't have a specific library for doing so. ICS files are just text files with a specific format, so definitely not out of reach.

Oh, that's an interesting app and in French too... is that something you plan to have on Android as well?

And that city be Mons, right?

Can anyone with a better understand than mine compare this experience to the one brought up by a Chinese team in nature in 2017[1]?

I know close to nothing about this domain but these two experiments sounds very similar except for the setup (fiber vs. communication with satellite).

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23675

That's a fair reminder but it's also worth noting that there are on-going research in the field of improving storage density for hydrogen. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/ee/c8ee0...

Indeed, I've seen anything between 1-2 meters and a small moose (SI unit of distance in the local zoo)..

Let's face it, Amazon's review system is broken at the core. I have the perspective of a seller on Amazon and, as such, you simply don't exist without _positive_ reviews. For the story, it all begins when you start with Amazon as a channel. Ads would be an option to kick start a presence but you actually need some traffic (you actually need the "buy box" which is just Amazon's way to legitimate you as a seller) to be able to advertise (this is true at the very start on a given Amazon market). So you, or people you know, place _fake_ orders to get started and if possible add a first review which, naturally, is fake. Once you have that going, congrats, you are selling on Amazon. From there on it's a uphill battle to gain traction and it all comes down to better position for your products. This is not different from any market really but there are specific hurdles along the way. Amazon tracks the number of "defects" on your product which counts things like A-to-Z claims or... negative reviews (and more stuff I won't bother you with here). If you hit a threshold (1% of claims _or_ negative reviews) you start seeing a nice warning telling you that your account is at risk of deactivation. Additionally, a similar threshold or trend, unsure tbh, will result in a temporary loss of the buy box mentioned earlier (60 day look back window for the above-mentioned threshold). This means that you disappear! (no ads, remember?).

So, you can probably imagine how strong your incentives are to get any positive review juice out there. What is shown in the tweet is actually against Amazon's terms[1] but there are more (and less) subtle ways to get what you need including things mentioned in comments around here and you really don't have that much of a choice if you want to stand out in the noise.

With all that being said, whatever you think of delivery related reviews for instance (especially in covid times which has added a lot of uncertainty to the whole thing), they hurt businesses exactly where it hurts. And that can be extended to negative reviews in general even when these are legitimate warnings for other potential buyers. Imagine now for a second that you rely on low volumes of orders, the number of potential genuine reviews is also low and with the Amazon thresholds you are therefore literally at the mercy of a few bad reviews without a cushion of positive reviews to fall on. So yeah there is a market for fake reviews, duh...

[1] not the best link but there is a screenshot showing the terms in the thread where it says that you can't ask for positive reviews or give something in exchange for it.. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/new-asking-for-rev...

Same experience here... I even told them and they continue pushing.

Yes, I didn't express that correctly; I know about the second price auction and what I was referring to is that since Google does everything in their power to get you away from keyword level bidding and into their "smart bidding" solutions you have no _direct_ say in what the traffic costs (AFAIK it's still possible to use keyword level bidding but Google will email you very regularly to try to get you off). This fact is even more obvious in non-competitive markets as I was trying to point out.

Couldn't agree more, the adtech is where the monopoly lies. I worked for a doubleclick / ads 360 competitor and it was so plain that Google used its dominant position not only to squash competitors like us but also to further obscure the auction mechanisms. Today it's a challenge to specify exactly what you want to bid for a given keyword, in part for the better since it dramatically reduces complexity for advertisers but it does remove a lot of the control and hands it back to... Google. Ultimately the auction is completely irrelevant since Google decides which ads will show and by extension whose ad money they'll pocket. In addition to that, Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in broader matches). While one could argue that it's up to them as a publisher to decide what a spot is worth, this mechanism is completely obscure and you will only ever find out in hindsight through what you pay for the traffic.

In Sweden, by law, some milk and milk derived products have to be enriched with vitamin D[1]. This targets products that are common in the diet of Swedes.

Additionally, vitamin D in oil is literally handed over to parents for children up to 2 years. It is recommended to continue with supplements beyond that.[2] The recommendations are based on age groups, diet habits (including the above mentioned milk products) and sun exposure.

It's worth mentioning that this is the case since before COVID was even a thing. Vitamin D deficiency is recognized as a general health issue for its known relation to various sickness.

[1] in Swedish: https://www.livsmedelsforetagen.se/nya-obligatoriska-regler-...

[2] also in Swedish: https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/livsmedel-och-innehall/narin...

Comparing death rates across countries is highly misguided because is depends directly on the testing strategy. The sickness is not different in Sweden than in Denmark and neither country's health care system is overburdened (even in Stockholm, worst hit region of Sweden) which would otherwise be a strong contributing factor to a higher death rate. So there is little reasons to believe that there should be a difference, let alone such a stark one.

I live in Stockholm, Sweden, so while I acknowledge my bias I'd bet my money on the fact that other countries will change their approach rather than Sweden starting to follow others.

While there are some undeniable social (think multiple generations in a household), geographical and cultural (swedes are notorious in keeping their distance from other swedes) differences at play here, other European countries have gone for a "people can't be trusted so we must restrict individual freedom". While there is certainly some good reasons to think that this will work the means used to implement this have some really sad consequences. Look at France, people are getting fined and in some cases brutalized; protests are sparking in places where strict measures have been implemented, not because they are unfair but because they affect people unfairly! Easy for well-off people to "leave early, far and for a long time" but far from everyone has that luxury (oh if you understand French, check out Twitter on the "lockdown diaries" parodies and compare that to how people in the suburbs of Paris are being treated!). This is without even starting to talk about how the economic impacts will be spread amongst social classes. To me Sweden has chosen the most socially (in this case as opposed to morally) fair route to handle this crisis.

That being said, it's morally very difficult to defend this strategy in the face of a higher death toll amongst seniors in care homes. I cannot come up with a single argument that I don't know will get shot down immediately and that is a good sign that it's probably not morally optimal. We live in a time of humanism and human life comes first, rightly so but even with that said, it shouldn't hide the picture and justify every consequence out there. The approaches in many countries are incredibly reactive and short sighted in that regard.

As a Dane living in Stockholm but with family in Belgium I would start living on that train. This would be amazing..

"In my opinion AWS Console is one of the best designed from all cloud providers out there. GCP is years behind, even with $100k credits I just can force myself to use that pice of unusable crap. Probably Material Design is here to blame, as it's terrible on web."

I hear this for the first time; to me all the Amazon related interfaces I've used have resulted in poor user experience at best. This goes from the store to AWS and sellerscentral should really get a special mention. In AWS, I always felt that everything was super cluttered and important things hard to find, nowhere near intuitive. This goes for high level concepts as much as component behaviors like lists in s3... So, I'd be super curious to hear what you found that was so good. Care to share?

Sometimes, I don't agree with n-gate and just feel home in the comment section of HN... Thanks

The rest of the time I stay away...

I have a similar background and the wealth of the content that's not in English is incredible and often missed.

From an outsider perspective, the time it took for British media and the political class to take note of the European sentiment on the issue of brexit was around 1 year. It was as if they just found out there was an non-English web out there..

I had one of these in my student dorm in Shanghai ten years ago. If I'd raise my hands too close when shampooing I could feel the shock coming... I took cold showers most of the semester.

I agree with you but in my opinion this could be seen as another symptom of societies with proliferating unaccountable leaders (in the so-called free world). We may think of some as harmless showmans that are all bark and no bite but they are dangerous precisely because they set precedents with what they say, how they behave and especially because of the lack of consequences thereof. We can only hope that it's about to change...

I second the above comment, this is indeed the difference between a team and what shouldn't be a team. If people at a standup are talking about unrelated things then they indeed shouldn't be having standups, much less be considered a team in the first place. What's happening in standups and probably other meetings are symptoms of a structural issue people are either not seeing or failing address.

My rule of thumb for assessing a team is based on two simple questions: 1. Do people in the team work towards the same goal? 2. Do people in the team depend on each other? If the response to both questions is positive then by all means, have standups. In other cases, have a good look at whether it makes sense to call them a team in the first place.

Funny enough that Google is exactly in that position. Google owns a company called double click who does adword bidding optimization in between other things. As I work in the business, one thing that is clear is that the only way to do that efficiently is to keep track of conversion data. This puts Google in a highly unfair position since they manage the auction and own the data which drives the auction. That said, this is not even close to what Google knows about businesses in general...

Monsanto — and farmers who want to use dicamba — have been fighting back. In Arkansas, where state regulators proposed a ban on dicamba during the growing season next year, Monsanto recently sued the regulators, arguing that the ban was based on "unsubstantiated theories regarding product volatility that are contradicted by science."

Meanwhile in Europe, countries are considering signing free trade agreements with Canada and US (CETA and TTIP). How would anyone in their right mind want to open up the door to allowing companies to sue governments? (if you wonder, this is part of these trade deals and the kind of attitude Monsanto is putting here is exactly what they could reproduce once their products are "threatened by regulations")

Yet, only the far left are fighting this in bigger European countries. I'm not sure people grasp the implications! I'm not politically aligned with the far left but this is clearly a loss of sovereignty against the power or money. Kind of gets me wondering what the point of voting would become...

Ok, maybe I'm a little left leaning (in European terms that is)

I like the high level CEO view of this problem since it's a good reminder that the overall phase needs re-think. That said, what this article hints to in the title and misses is that there are inherent problems for startups that are in fact related to the number of employees.

Some commentators touched this subject as well and rightly so, when you reach around 20-40 employees you start having problems that are organizational. If not addressed properly these will cripple growing startups and in some cases even prevent them from reaching the next stage.

I went through a couple of these failures myself and I can't stress it enough when discussing problems related to growth; there is a point when you can no longer communicate or work in the same way and you can't expect things to self organize. It takes quite some reorg including some hard decisions to get to a stable stage or in the best of case, transit smoothly but that takes someone very well aware of all the pitfalls.