Languages and runtimes often grow beyond their original scope. And since the introduction of Dirty NIFs to the Erlang VM five years (or so) ago, integrating with native code (which is what powers a lot of data analysis and machine learning tools in high-level languages) has become a real possibility. There is a similar-ish discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35572128
I used them both, and think 3 was better. GNOME, on the other hand, was OK at version 1 (contemporaneous with KDE 2, which I still liked better), and went to shit at version 2 (contemporaneous with KDE 3).
Recently a host charged me a cleaning fee, left me a negative review about not cleaning. I requested that the cleaning fee be refunded, since it was clearly fraudulent. AirBnB declined to refund the cleaning fee. I will never use them again.
I wonder what can be done to prevent companies like AirBnB, PayPal from becoming so user-hostile over time.
What can be done is prevent them from becoming near-monopolies with a captured audience.
Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification" - his term.
The basic idea is that in the beginning, new companies are all about their users, luring them away from competitors, providing the best experience for cheap, with great service. That captures them. Think amazon, underpricing everyone, shipping for free, taking all returns, making a loss for years until everyone just uses amazon to search for products.
Once you have their market, you shift gears, from serving users to serving your financiers, selling the user data/user attention/user experience to them: Amazon selling ranked listings in the search that all the captured customers now use as a default search engine. This makes every seller use amazon to sell. You have to, to reach the captured audience. And you have to pay amazon to be seen.
And finally, using this machine you built, with captured customers and captured sellers to squeeze the most of it. Amazon copying the best-selling items and top-ranking their own products, without of course charging itself fees for either the listing or a cut of the sale, as the do with third parties.
AirBNB don't have a monopoly. Aside from obvious alternatives like hotels, VRBO is quite good and I used it successfully in the past.
I suspect the real reason this happens is a mix of recruiting ex-tech firm employees (they seem to treat abuse as if they were running a social network), and some internal data that shows just one or two bad experiences can cause a host to drop out permanently. There are way fewer hosts than customers, so if one customer repeatedly creates bad experiences then they need an ultra-tough policy as otherwise they'd burn out their supply of hosts too quickly. Hotels don't have this problem because they're much more committed to being hosts, such that a few bad customers occasionally won't cause them to simply shut up shop.
I was traveling and hopping from one city to another in Europe, and when I went to rent my second Airbnb using a perfectly good American credit card, they blocked me for "fraud reasons". I booked a 5* hotel which was even cheaper than the Airbnb apartment and carried on with my trip. I suspect their anti-abuse system bites them pretty often.
I didn't get scammed but did find the service too annoying to want to use it again. Actual price is very different from quoted nightly rate. Can't tell the actual location of the place before I book, wtf. Got to the place and didn't know the combo to get in; isn't that something the booking email should say? Apparently supposed to log into the site again, go to a chat, and contact the host; it's not simply over SMS.
I get that I'm not paying the extra money for a hotel with 24/7 pro staff, but there's gotta be solid automation in place of that. To each their own, I'll just pay for the hotel.
I recently rented a house from booking.com and it was like night & day vs. airbnb. Other than a snafu on the door code (which was resolved in 5m), the place was in a quiet neighborhood, the place was very well appointed (mid-high end everything) and it was roomy. Also not a single thing to do when we left - we pre-paid a cleanup fee included in book price and there was no checkout list other than to text a number saying we had departed.
Left feeling quite impressed, almost like it was a hotel (but better, it was quiet).
Equity compensation and what it's valued at is a big factor in choosing to work at Stripe. If they start letting RSUs expire, it will make ~everyone value their equity significantly less; Stripe would likely have significant difficulties finding and retaining talent.
It's not in the company's interest to piss off employees who can't afford to exercise their options without being able to sell them.
My company recently got bought by a privately owned company. Because of the ownership structure of the purchasing company we weren't allowed to exchange our options or let new ones vest so my company's board approved cancelling and reissuing everyone's options with an acceleration clause so they'd completely vest at completion so we'd all get a full payout. They did this because they knew if they didn't that there would be an exodus of employees before the purchase went through.
Employees represent a large % of the value of the company, if they all leave you just have a bunch of tech that no one else knows how to maintain or use. Institutional investors typically have such a large proportion of the shares that it's worth it to them to not just screw over employees because the employee sticking around and keeping shares is worth more than they'd save.
In some ways, yes, but I think if you game it out, you see how the company loses in a number of ways. First, repetitional risk. Second, it’s likely that a liquidity provider would emerge who could offer, basically, to buy call options from individual holders for enough premium to cover the taxes due on exercise. (Stripe would not want an unaffiliated 3rd party accumulating a large position)
If they don't let them exercise, the existing employees will rightly see it as funny money and not actual compensation. They won't be employees for much longer after that.
Especially since Stripe has steadfastly refused to go public so far...
The extent of Microsoft's love for Linux might be debatable, but the company certainly doesn't like NTFS: they tried to replace it with ReFS in Windows Server 2012, but that never really went anywhere.
Apparently, the NTFS source code is so insanely complicated that maintenance is a problem even within Microsoft. Due to the usual recursive kludgefest of backward compatibility requirements, a greenfield cross-platform replacement would also be more trouble than it's worth.
Upsides for whom? I believe it highly depends on who you ask and what their use cases are. Being able to shrink at all (i.e. XFS cannot) and shrink _ONLINE_ , per-directory files compression, rich ACLs - some sysadmins need those, some not, for average Joe - doesn't matter is it NTFS or something else.
If Ukraine somehow takes any Russian territory (defined as post 2014)… it is almost guaranteed nuclear weapons would be used to stop the Ukrainian advance
> If Ukraine somehow takes any Russian territory (defined as post 2014)… it is almost guaranteed nuclear weapons would be used to stop the Ukrainian advance
Nuclear weapons haven't even been used when Ukraine has hit Russias actual territory (in Russia) so why would they use nuclear weapons against Ukraine retaking its own territory?.
Russia has “annexed” additional territory post-2014, some of which was subsequently taken by Ukraine (and some of which was already controlled by Ukraine when it was “annexed”.)
I'm not so sure. The whole point of an exercise like this is to demonstrate power, or to acquire resources. Neither tactical nor strategic nuclear weapons would help with those objectives. Ukraine's army isn't isolated to a single spot — tactical nukes wouldn't even be as effective as WW2-era area bombing, and a whole lot more expensive. Strategic weapons would deny resource acquisition to RU. The use of nuclear weapons (of either kind) against civilian centers would be problematic, I think? The US "got away" with its use of nuclear weapons (first use; the US was the only major player left; etc.)
I don't think Putin would attempt to use nuclear weapons to preserve Russian control over the Donbass. Crimea is less clear (after all, Sevastopol is the main Russian Black Sea naval base), but his sham annexation of the four oblasts makes it less likely in my eyes.
It's hard to see a case where the use of nuclear weapons would improve Russia's situation, especially where Ukraine is seeking to recover territory almost everyone other than Russia agrees is rightfully Ukrainian. The story changes a little more if Ukraine were striking at the heart of Russia, but that is not a realistic option.
Vietnam doesn’t border Russia/USSR, and Vietnam isn’t a former Russian territory with millions of native Russian speakers.
Western countries need to ask themselves: is funding a major proxy war against the second most powerful military in the world in our long term strategic interest?
> Western countries need to ask themselves: is funding a major proxy war against the second most powerful military in the world in our long term strategic interest?
I mean, why wouldn't it be? It's directly degrading an adversary and competing power. It's a lot faster than indirect means and it's a lot cheaper than going into combat ourselves. Sure, you could spin that as "imperialist Americans using poor Slavs as proxies" but really the "proxies" want the same outcome as America. Why shouldn't people with aligned interests work together?
> Western countries need to ask themselves: is funding a major proxy war against the second most powerful military in the world in our long term strategic interest?
Russia is a gas station that happens to have nuclear weapons, not the 2nd most powerful army in the world.
"Russia is a gas station" - have no idea about it now but in the time past they've managed very decent space exploration, science, education and some other things.
That was aeons ago, in a different country, in a different world. And apart from that, anyone outside the Soviet Union could only see what their propaganda wanted them to see.
It was the Soviet Union, not Russia. They really are different things, for example the Space Programme was mostly the development of the R-7 rocket, which was designed by a Ukrainian (Sergei Korolev).
You probably heard about the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. The Moskva was made in Soviet Ukraine, in Mykolaiv. Not in Russia. Shame they mismanaged it so much since then that just a few guided cruise missiles did the job.
The military budget of Russia is a far cry of the military budget of the Soviet Union. The scale is not even comparable, arguably the per-soldier performance went down as well.
"Second most powerful military in the world"? What world is that? Russia isn't even the second most powerful military in Europe or in Asia. At this point, Russia is on the verge of being the second most powerful ex-Soviet state.
Russia has the most nuclear weapons of any country, the largest airborne assault force in the world, the best missile defense system in the world, the second most nuclear submarines (and second best), the third most fighter aircraft, the most tanks.
Russia has a great domestic arms industry/natural resources and can resupply itself in isolation.
People need to realize that Russia's defense is primarily setup to defend its borders.
Any country other than the US would not fare well in a nuclear war with Russia, including China.
China hasn't been at war since the 70s. No one knows how well they would do in a conflict.
You simply cannot ignore nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a great equalizer, that is why North Korea cannot be invaded from South Korea, despite South Korea having a much better "conventional" military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wolke