skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Biggest Polish IT company was bankrupted by this. Optimus SA was called Polish Dell&Yahoo combined in the nineties. They manufactured computers, made multimedia/education software and games, distributed software/games, IT contracts/system integration, POS systems deployments, ERP, consulting, biggest web portal, biggest online communicator, biggest search engine.

.. then one day in 1999 ministry of education announced a huge contracts for school computerization program, and specifically requested "no VAT" prices (22%) from all bidders. The only way to achieve this was exporting/re-importing Polish build computers, something Ministry itself not only suggested, but was publicly proud of securing.

Year later local prosecutor accused Optimus of evading $2m VAT, froze all assets (~$100mil company in 2000) and arranged SWAT to arrest CEO, leading to inability to pay wages/service debt. 3 years and multiple appeals later investigation was closed without so much as "sorry". This wasnt even the only company destroyed same way. Another one was JTT, mayor PC hardware distributor https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/JTT_Computer?...

In 2011 CD Project reverse merger with corpse of Optimus SA to get on the stock exchange. https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/CD_Projekt?_x...

11 years later (2014) CD Project managed to "win" ~$300K settlement for court mistake https://crn-pl.translate.goog/aktualnosci/cd-projekt-dostal-...

Same year mayor shareholder of defunct JTT received ~$10mil settlement, which was immediately overturned. It only took them another 7 years to finally get ~$1mil just last year https://www-pb-pl.translate.goog/mci-otrzyma-5-mln-zl-odszko... for the destruction of a company worth ~$20mil in 2000.
Wow, this is a pitiful take.

> Clearly you’ve never been in this sort of situation where the prescribed action is very close to what will get you sued or killed.

Clearly not, but why would that matter? I recognise three things. First, the purpose of police departments should be to protect citizens, not abuse them. Second, officers should be trained to de-escalate, not to shoot first and ask later. And third, the US clearly has issues with the use of force by their police.

> This is no different than saying “all men are rapists” or “all women are gold diggers

Is it customary among men and women to excuse and enable immoral or even criminal behaviours?

It is not. But the same cannot be said about police departments and unions.
Paradise by the Dashboard Light was a number 1 hit in the Netherlands and Belgium. It's been a long time favorite at school dances and parties; guilty pleasure kind of material. Fun fact, Radio 2, the national broadcaster's music station in the Netherlands picked up this news when it broke, today, saying that Jim Steinman was him, but he was rather the composer of that song, and he died last year or so. Meat Loaf's real name was Marvin Lee Aday.
There need to be ad blocker blocker blockers!
"What's for dinner?"

"Leftovers!"

"What? Meatloaf? Again?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjuQBIuzW4s
An even more infuriating effect I got is when I make typo during search. For example, I might want to launch League of Legends. I press super key, enter "Leageu of", see right logo, press enter, but instead of launching the entry that it definitely knows about, it will start a bing search, with my typo corrected. In edge of course, because we cannot change that as well. Thanks, microsoft.
I don't care about "all the governments in the world". I care about my own government most.

And as long as private companies are unable to collect medical data on me and medical confidentiality holds, they won't be able to obtain any such data.

I also certainly don't want some company putting ideas into the heads of my relatives - or my own - about what medicine is appropriate over the advice of medical professionals. The first step would be obtaining data on people's medical condition in the first place, so let's shut it down right there.

They can go directly advertise to doctors who have the required background to actually make an informed decision, but if they trick my gullible grandmother into paying for something that is likely not the optimal treatment, then we have a massive fucking problem.

And that goes for more than just health ads. Most ads are clearly appealing to people emotions instead of rationality: They tell a story of a happy family instead of showing you a fact sheet. They don't exist to "inform" people of their options and help them make a rational decision. If you are going to argue anything else, then I suggest we have a watch party of some randomly selected ads and see whether you can still look me straight in the face, arguing the same, afterwards. Most arguments for the benefits of advertisement are contingent on the idea of the "rational consumer" - as far as I am concerned that ship has sunk and was full of holes to begin with. Even if people were largely qualified to make rational decisions in specialist areas, a sizeable amount likely still wouldn't.

But I don't care as much about people wasting money on some "manscaping" garbage, nose hair trimmer or whatever inferior garbage is currently sold at upmarket prices. So another weasel gets rich? Whatever. It's health where I start to take issue, the weasel grows six legs and becomes something I want to take the boot to.
Your complains are not about subscriptions really. They are about shady commercial practices.
If you put yourself into a descriptive standpoint you will see that Andalusian has distinctive features: in phonetics (the most salient being they use open/close vowel sounds to mark plural/singular), in grammar (inversion of direct object & reflexive), in words and expressions (many of them are known, but never used in other regions, thanks to sharing a cultural background, TV, etc). Although, functionally, it is mutually intelligible (at least 90%) with other variations of Spanish. The functional aspect is what I would use to separate whether two ways of speaking fall into the same language or not.
Microsoft developers found a way to do it, without having to make any compromises or impact user-visible performance in any way.

Their brilliant trick to achieving this -- wait for it, it's so simple -- was nothing more than simply... sitting in the same building that Bing is served from! With a mere 1ms latency over 100 Gbps fibre from their office to the Bing servers, there's no pesky latency or packet loss to interfere with the instantaneous UX response times and deterministic behaviour.

Those pesky users are just "whining" and need to learn to sit at Redmond, just like they do.
Couldn't agree more. I was working in a company that didn't allow local checkouts. You'd have to work in a remote VM. Next step was going to fully remote desktops (i.e. dumb terminals). For security reasons (whatever). I hated every moment of it as it made feedback times longer and for doing anything at all you needed to beg the IT people. But the weirdest part is that other devs didn't seem to mind. (Not to mention all the spyware crap installed on our machines and the whole mentality of security over productivity. All of it -security- sold to us by third parties as a service (nvm how absurd it is to trust N other companies to keep you secure). Anyhow this place was surreal but I'm afraid it's not the only one).

So to answer the question of how we came here: The same way anything in the commons sphere rots and dies. Not enough people care enough about it. They're OK giving away control one way or another and companies are more than happy to sell it as a service. What user gets in return is diminishing but once the process starts it's kind of runaway I'm afraid.
How our content abuse defense systems work to keep our members safe
Another fun fact: the name Aran, like many place names in the western half of the Pyrenees (especially north Aragon), derives from proto-Basque languages that used to be spoken in the broad area. In particular, the name Aran comes from "haran" which means "valley", making Val d'Aran (or "Aran Valley") a tautological placename:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...
To be clear, the problem here is in equating “evidence” with randomized controlled trials. We have plenty of evidence that parachutes work, just not in the form of RCTs.

David Gorski of sciencebasedmedicine.org calls it “methodolatry”:

https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1484220420295376900

https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1479900075602194445

https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1483268592674217986
As a consumer, do you need to participate in these transactions?

I bought MS Office (non-subscription) and honestly Google Docs/Sheets (free tier) works for most of my needs.

While Apple wants to push subscription apps, you don't need to subscribe to them. I don't. If the value is there, sure subscribe to them.

Apple is pretty in your face with selling their services. I get nagware iCloud storage limit subscription notifications that I can't dismiss. They are pushing for Arcade, TV+, Music, etc. sign -ups in their OS settings. I haven't paid for them and don't intend to.

Just because these paid subscriptions exist does not mean they are entitled to your money every month.
You know what makes well targeted ads? Sponsored reviews for products, or inline ads on related sites. Showing me ads for the latest iPhone when I'm reading articles about mobile phones,or tech.

I don't know if I'm an outlier but almost all the ads I see are for products that I will never buy, or that I've already bought. I was looking for a recipe on my partner's phone last night and there was an interstitial ad with Amazon items - all of them were variations on a consumable that we had just bought 6 months worth of, and they were not cooking related.

We can have targeted ads that are appropriate, but we don't need invasive tracking to so so.
> Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first.

This reminds me of an experience with Windows 10 a few years ago.

I tried to start cmd.exe and nothing happened. Tried a bunch of times more. Still nothing...

I was connected to a WiFi network that allowed ping to the entire Internet but not TCP connections. Then I switched to a WiFi network that allowed TCP connections to the Internet and 20+ cmd.exe instances started all at once.

I thought: "Wait, that can't be true", but it was reproducible.

This makes me wonder if launching programs takes longer on a slow internet connection.

I do not know if this still happens as I have only used Windows 10 on a handful of occasions since then.
My local shop is an AutoMat[1] that requires you to BankID with a QR code before the doors will open. I’m realistically not going to take my laptop, a personal hotspot, and my BankID card machine there to get in.

[1] http://www.auto-mat.nu
To get modern media working, you have to separately download the HEVC codecs, the HEIF codecs, Dolby Vision, Dolby Audio, and I think I'm missing something I forgot.

4K BluRay support is gone permanently because they dropped the DRM component from Windows 11.
files transfer, installing apps unwelcome in the main store, using proper contextual content blocker
2/3 of passengers on first flight to Covid-free Kiribati diagnosed with virus
To make the matter even more interesting, the term "Aran" is a basque toponim for "valley". So, Val d'Aran means "Valley of valley". It seems that basque was spoken there between XII and XIII according to wikipedia
Rather, from the article:

"The singer, whose real name is Marvin Lee Aday, was born in Dallas."
> It's so incredibly silly how owning a smartphone isn't even a matter of preference any more; people just expect everyone to have one. I don't really need one, despite loving train travel and independent exploration on holidays. Paper maps work fine, preparation using a normal computer too.

It's just like electricity, or having/not having a landline phone 40 years ago.
I've included --json in a custom redefinition for years, glad to see something like that coming to the official binary!

curl() {
args=()
for arg in "$@"; do
case $arg in
--json) args+=("-H" "Content-Type: application/json") ;;
*) args+=("$arg") ;;
esac
done
command curl "${args[@]}"
}
It just means that you don't own the software that you run. Always having to have an account and sign in and pay the subscription tax otherwise you lose access to it.

Now with games becoming digital, if you break their 'terms of service' they can lock and ban your account; taking your 'digital' games away or even locking the console. (Unless you paid for the physical version.)
The only real way out is quitting the country iirc like lavabit. Though even then it's either too late or not in accordance with shareholders for most companies.
It's the same with Scots (as opposed to Scottish Gaelic). Is it a dialect or a separate (although closely related) language to English? If Scotland becomes independent, Scots would very likely gain full language status for as much political as linguistic reasons.

Then we have "Italian" and "German". If these countries had not undergone unification in the 19th century would Duolingo be offering courses in Venetian and Bavarian?
It's PyInstaller: https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Or containers.
People need to know that when they read about "Sweden" it's often about the central parts of Stockholm. Plowing is not a culture thing it's a political decision for public roads.
> I see and hear of GDPR violations everywhere (here in the UK, pre and post Brexit). Despite the threat of legal action, companies still ignore (too small to care) or are ignorant of the rules. At the end of the day, Big Tech still owns all the personal data in some way or another getting around EU restrictions.

Companies may ignore law, but fines are being issued, so they do it at their own risk: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

> The annoying cookie banners where everyone just clicks "accept all" because no one wants to go through a list of checkboxes. This is classic EU strategy to problems: just throw more bureaucracy and administration at a problem.

These cookie banners are (slowly) being deemed illegal: "Accept all" and "Reject all" must have the same prominence and accessibility. GDPR is forcing companies to care about security and about how they use information about their users and, probably for the first time, it's forcing companies to be transparent with how they are processing their users' data. And it's not requiring company to do anything you wouldn't expect an honest person to do when you give them some personal information, it's not just throwing bureaucracy at a problem.
Have you heard of Cambridge Analytica and the psychological manipulation of UK voters fears and doubts?

Targeted ads can with a/b testing do automated manipulation at large scale.
I’m running a super simple translation management system where people can manage, host, auto-translate their translation files. How I supposed to run my app without subscriptions?

In last 30 days, I transferred over 280 GB of translation data from my service to end-users around the word. Should I tell DeepL, Google and AWS that they should offer me their services for free or what?

EDIT:

I apologize if this sounds too passive-aggressive, but I'm tired of hearing that subscriptions are bad. Thanks to subscription model, we can have many smaller service providers who simply have fun from working on something (like me). If you think that giving someone $5/mo for a cool app is too much, then okay. You don't have to do it, no deal. ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯

PS Great example of solo-developer is the InkDrop creator. He is working on this note-taking app since ~2016. https://www.inkdrop.app
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area

> The European Economic Area (EEA) was established via the Agreement on the European Economic Area, an international agreement which enables the extension of the European Union's single market to member states of the European Free Trade Association. The EEA links the EU member states and three EFTA states (Iceland, Liechtenstein, and *Norway*) into an internal market governed by the same basic rules.
I believe usage-based subscriptions are going to be replacing tiered subscriptions.
That is decidedly not a "targeted ad". Recommendations are different.
13 year old me loved his music (and I do now). I remember it was Beauty and the Beast (if I remember right) that launched "I'd do anything for love" into most people's hearts. Well, it did to mine.
The alternative is spending limits on the account, including being able to set it to $0 to essentially make it a "free tier" account.
> If I plan to buy something I will never do it from an ad

How much of your choice in products is based on word of mouth? How do you know those purchases are not as a result of ads. How many purchases are because of "brand familiarity" that is likely influenced by advertising over time (e.g. if you asked me to buy you an energy drink I would likely buy a Red Bull

> in my experience it always leads to the most obvious predictable and boring ads.

Targeted ads are not the same as tracked ads. Shoe HN posts are targeted ads. "You purchased 600 dog poop bags from Amazon, here are 15 other variations of the same product that you might want" in a recipe article is targeted.
This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. Given that developers need to be paid, and resources cost money, there needs to be a way to rectify that gap between the consumer and maintainer. At one point we did so by paying for an initial version of software, and then paying for updates. Now that we don’t do that, but someone still needs a revenue stream to pay for the costs of maintaining and evolving software, the subscription model has emerged. It’s really not that complicated. Where it gets hostile is when you see a subscription model for something where the subscription doesn’t yield any evidence of effort from the provider. For example, a subscription to software that never sees updates nor has infrastructure costs. That’s just a money grab.

What confuses me is seeing this kind of question on the same forum where people often gripe about not being paid the 6 digit salary they expect to produce the software we use. How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.

PS: my comment comes off as advocating for the subscription model. I personally hate it with a passion: I’d rather pay for upgrades/updates to code, and pay for resources metered by my usage. My comment should be interpreted as understanding where the model comes from, not necessarily liking it.
I think a large part of the problem is that so much software (like Office) is turning into a service when it doesn’t need to be.

One significant advantage of SaaS over traditional download-and-run-and-pay-for-updates apps is the fact that everyone is always on the same version. In a large organisation, and across organisational boundaries, working around people using different versions of things is an incredibly inefficient use of time.

Office 365 is worth the money for that reason alone.
Set up Pi-hole with your own recursive DNS server using DNSSEC
The disturbing background of German health minister Karl Lauterbach
I never understood The New Yorker. This is in humor, is this supposed to be funny?
I think they might be referring to the dark pattern where there are two sets of "Legitimate Purposes":

1. Actual legitimate purposes for core functionality

2. A toggleable "legitimate purposes" under the ads section

Presenting the second option could be construed as malicious compliance or just dishonesty.

On sites where I've seen this, there is no one-click option to disable those, which should make them non-compliant with GDPR.
Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with any of that.
Is it encrypted on the wire? Or is that locked behind "enterprise" features?
Interestingly enough, my business makes more money with offering one time payments. I set the one time price to how much the subscription would cost over 2 years. Because my SMB customers were churning after just a couple of months, this switch 6x-ed my revenue per customer, but reduced my number of new customers by around 3 times.
So in total 2x more revenue with 3x less work :) [Setting up new customers took manual work, so not 100% SaaS]
> The future of gaming and the metaverse is cross-platform and free of walled gardens

Given that you mentioned Unreal Engine, why the web and not native?

I mean, this sounds like an awful lot of work to port something to the web, when it already runs in every platform.
> Another thing that I have learned is that alcohol is an upper at low quantities (1 to 2 standard glasses of beer), it gets your heart rate up, etc. It is a downer at larger quantities (e.g. drunk people at 10 standard glasses of beer). If you don't drink much alcohol, then you are most likely experiencing it as an upper, it doesn't continue that way.

> I like to drink 1 to 2 glasses as well because of what you said, but also because it's an upper.

This part of your comment reminded me of a very relevant and topical sketch from That Mitchell & Webb Look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTSCppeFzX4
> For instance, when I need to ask a team mate a question, they respond in slack at their convenience. At the office it takes 20 seconds.

This seems like something that can be pretty easily solved with a process change, no?
[1] looks like pretty typical altocumulus clouds to me.
But sir, in project mayhem we have no names
The world’s first digital nomad village, one year on
This looks very much like Covid denying fake news…
I can't do most of these things even on a smartphone in the US!...

- identify myself: The state I'm in has not rolled out any support for electronic IDs so short of "taking a photo of a DL (which the Nokia also would allow for) and hoping for the best", I can't do this with a smartphone either.

- ride the bus, buy tickets for trains: Ditto for transit. No phone-compatible NFC integration at all means I still need a good old fashioned transit card. Train tickets can be bought digitally via the browser, which probably doesn't count (and the Nokia could also do this).

Also:

- banking: While there are dedicated apps, I don't see how the Nokia would prevent you from doing this via the bank's website or over the phone. Banking apps are not particularly more secure than the website and usually don't offer anything beyond what is available there.

So really a lot of the features mentioned are not that commonly available even for smartphones!
Your local law enforcement is as likely to pull you over and confiscate any cash you've got in the car on the basis that it may have committed a crime.

Feels a bit like it is a zero sum game to me.
Yes, you can setup your own kubernetes if you want, using just ec2, but nobody wants to do it because it's easier to just pay.

I think k8s actually saves you money, because it allows you to use your resources better.
Articles like these tend to flagged, I think, because HN's progressives realize that they are an opportunity to be humble and honest and say "we had good intentions, but something is going terribly wrong" -- and they know they're not willing or able to do that. Allowing the article to stay and be discussed would let that truth shine, so it has to be squashed. Let's see if the pattern holds in this instance.