As a customer who has managed to fall in between cracks quite a few times. I would say N26 customer service needs some serious work.
At one point they literally lost some of my money and then said it was returned but I wouldn't be able to see a transaction for it because there wasn't one. That is probably the worst but other times have seen me on the phone arguing about stuff that really shouldn't need arguing about.
I like the idea but having people give you their username and then generating the password for them is clearly a security risk since it's easy for that to be hacked and the save the passwords it's generated for people.
Maybe I'm not meant to see the change as I'm an adult but the only change I saw was Google Suite repeatedly telling me that under 18 year olds weren't allowed to use the service. So just denying them access to things has changed.
Make a goddamn effort to figure out why someone's project is worth time investigating? Literally, that landing page has a video and links to articles. I don't want to spend minutes watching an ad. I went to the about page and read the info I should have read next to the video and understood what was what in 10 seconds.
Expecting people to make an effort to find out if a product/project is useful to them is basically asking not to have as many users. Basically, you just wasted your time building the product.
Some of us value our time. And this is not a techincal project it's an end user project. So as an end user I want to know quickly if it's worth my time. Even on a techincal project I want to know a rough overview within a minute or so of reading. Marketing is all about giving people the info they need fast. Marketing is about selling the benefits and telling of the pains it solves. If you're unable to do that for your project, why did you build it?
And I think the person who spends their time reading techincal documentation to decide if a social network is worth using is probably sadder than the person who goes and reads the about page. Not got much else to do?
GPL is copyleft, they're mainly doing additions and modifications to code that is GPL. They have to publish their code. I believe they try to be sneaky and hide how they add it but it's all open source.
The support contract between RedHat and the subscriber isn't anything to do with the GPL. That's a separate document. They could terminate your support if you buy a red car. They can't stop you from buying a red car (distributing the source to RHEL) but they can terminate your support and perform no further distribution of GPL'd software to you.
Terminating support contracts for using your rights could easily run afoul of other laws in different regions as anti-competition. It only takes 1 region to take this approach and the code is out.
Making a support contract dependent on restrictions on distribution sounds a lot like imposing additional conditions on the GPL, just with extra steps.
I don't buy that. They're not restricting their subscribers from distributing the GPL'd code. They're restricting who they choose to offer support to. They're not adding any conditions to the GPL. You can exercise your rights under the GPL. You just may not ever get support from them again.
Actually I think (I don't know that it's been tested in court) that this is a known security vulnerability in the GPL, as long as they only decline to do any further business with that customer (including renewing their subscription), rather than reneg on a already-agreed-to deal.
Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, and even twitter were never competing for the space that Facebook has. The main space Facebook has is social advertising and there is no competitors and anyone tries to enter that market gets attacked by Facebook since Facebook runs it. Try starting a company that will allow you to buy influencer ads on Instagram and uses the API the influencer can grant to you to correctly identify how much money to pay the influencer. Facebook will remove your API access the minute it realises you're trying to do advertising and they're not getting a cut. Facebook are very open that their problem is they're not making any money on it. We understand their reasoning but it's againist the law to then sue companies for trying to get public data and the other attacks. If Google can't rank it's own products higher in google search Facebook shouldn't be allowed to remove API access solely because you're providing a service they don't even provide and don't even want to provide.
Chances of people dying from my web app is super slim. Chances of people dying because I bladly wired their house is and it caught fire is a lot higher.
Chances of me dying while developing my web app is super slim. Chances of someone frying themselves with wiring something up when they don't know how is a lot higher.
chances of being miserable in an administrative job^W^Wordinary life because some software product you have to use is making your job worse rather than better are close to 100%.
If you only count deaths, yeah, bad programming has negligible impact maybe. If you extend it to general suffering, it's quite a drag on everyone actually.
And incidentally, good programming can make a world of a difference, too.
So wanting to select for good programming, with even just having a good minimal standard, is a reasonable goal.
The problem is that we're not even sure what makes good programmers and how to spot them, as evidenced by the continuous stream of "I think..." and "Well actually" stories & comments here on HN.
Is bad programming a net negative? I'm not convinced (and it's not just because I'm a bad programmer, I swear!), I think if you only had good programming, you'd have very little programming and that would be concentrated of the areas that the powers that be deem most important: military, finance, police, factories.
Having bad programming gets you a lot of programming. I'd rather have a million people who can each build a house a day that will stand reasonably reliable for ten years than having a thousand people that can each build a house a day that will stand for a hundred years.
GP doesn't say it's never happened, just that the typical programmer isn't going to kill someone with a buggy password complexity validator. By and large, the standard programmer does not hold life and death in their hands when navigating callback hell.
Again, the typical programmer doesn't kill someone when they write a bug. Judging from the backlogs of each company I've worked at, not a single PaaS, SaaS, BaaS, CaaS, DaaS, FaaS, GaaS, HaaS, JaaS, KaaS, LaaS, MaaS, NaaS, QaaS, RaaS, TaaS, VaaS, WaaS, XaaS, YaaS, ZaaS, or other would have a living customer base if one bug == one death.
There are edge cases and there are certainly plenty of times when software bugs can kill people. However, to say that the typical programmer holds life and death in their hands with every keystroke is an extreme over-exaggeration and I think you know that.
These two examples are interesting. They're both cases where what was being created was a system where software was an important component, as opposed to the software written by the vast majority of us where the hardware components of the system are always the same (monitor, keyboard, etc.) This is the same distinction in Diamond v Diehr for when software might be included in a patent. I always thought the US Supreme Court made a good decision there. Unfortunately they were later overruled by lower courts. (For legal experts out there about to correct me and say that lower courts can't overrule higher courts, I wish you were right.)
web apps are a small fraction of the software development world. Software Engineers are responsible for code that runs in hospitals, aircraft, power switching stations, and many many other safety critical systems. In many cases code that was never written for safety critical work is deployed in those environments. What OS and software runs the elevator controls in a hospital or military base? We never know the real impact of our work.
That's really not true. At NASA for example there are standards that need to be followed when designing a system, implementing the code for it, reviewing and testing it, and releasing it. [1]
Yes there will always be bugs but no practice or method is invulnerable to this.
Software in general, in these high risk environments, has been extraordinarily successful in terms of reliability and safety.
At NASA, sure. You can't say that with any certainty for all the other systems in the world where software has a huge impact on daily life and human wellbeing. We can't know for sure because there is no regulation or independent monitoring.
Medical tech has similar standards as does flight control and many other mission critical code bases. Static analysis requirements, limits on certain trusted compilers, libs, etc.
I think you may need more time in the field and observing the reality here. There are unbelievably high standards and practices in many places. Maybe CRUD codebases for a consumer website has critical failures but that doesn’t really matter. People will stop using their site if it’s too large a problem.
Software is different than many technical and engineering fields. Codebases change over time as new requirements come in to extend functionality. Things can be patched. When standard engineering practices are required they are implemented. Yes, mistakes happen too but bridges fall down on occasion.
The whole point of my last comment was that the impact of bad software cannot be fully understood if we don't have ways to monitor and measure it. You are correct that many industries have high standards and many other industries have no need for any standards as market forces will decide, but there's likely a huge grey area in between that we don't know much about.
Judging from the error description, deleting cookies would likely not help in this case. This sounds as if sessions are mixed up on the server side - deleting your cookie will only remove your session token, not remove the session server-side. You’d need to actually send a logout request to the server.
>This isn't a case of users knowingly using a tool to scrape data for their own use, the users installing the extension are, at most, mules, for the extension makers.
I feel it's reasonable for the average person to figure that a plugin that pays them for using Facebook and Twitter is paying for the data generated from those sessions. There is already a case with LinkedIn where courts are allowing data scraping even though LinkedIn disallows it and forced LinkedIn to stop blocking it.
I feel like this is a case Facebook should lose. Facebook wants complete ownership of the data from Facebook for marketing purposes because obviously if they're the only ones that have the data they have a monopoly. But preventing others from gathering competing data seems to be a breach of Antitrust. And Facebook execs will openly admit this is what they're doing. They've shut down multiple influencer related companies who completely backed down from a cease and desist from Facebook. And they're refusing to allow anyone to grant influencer agencies access to their data. This is Facebook telling people who they can give their data to. As well as Facebook saying companies can't scrape public information and then sell the statistics. And statistics can't be copyrighted.
> courts are allowing data scraping even though LinkedIn disallows it and forced LinkedIn to stop blocking it
Courts only said "If your server responds to an unauthenticated GET request, that's on you". Linkedin is free to stop providing that data or move it behind a login wall, they just don't want to because it helps them with SEO. Contrast that with these plugins that are absolutely accessing data behind the user's login.
Also with regards to the antitrust assertions you make, Facebook is absolutely not required to share their data with anyone. People give their data to FB, FB can do what they want with it (as long as it's within the ToS). Facebook can't stop me from also giving my data to someone else outside the platform, but they do not have to facilitate that process in any way.
> Courts only said "If your server responds to an unauthenticated GET request, that's on you". Linkedin is free to stop providing that data or move it behind a login wall, they just don't want to because it helps them with SEO. Contrast that with these plugins that are absolutely accessing data behind the user's login.
Yes, exactly. Basically saying if LinkedIn was providing the data they couldn't block the data for specific people. In contrast, these plugins are collecting data that someone has chosen to make available to them. This is Facebook attempting to stop people from giving data to their competitors. This is anti-competitive. Overall the LinkedIn case said that if the user made that data available then that is on them. Not that it was an unauthenticated request, but that the data was made public and there was no attempt to bypass any privacy filters.
> Also with regards to the antitrust assertions you make, Facebook is absolutely not required to share their data with anyone. People give their data to FB, FB can do what they want with it (as long as it's within the ToS). Facebook can't stop me from also giving my data to someone else outside the platform, but they do not have to facilitate that process in any way.
One of Facebook's services is to provide that data to other services so you can use those services with that data. Saying no you can't share that data and not provide you that data in export is well, anti-competitive. This is saying "No, we don't want you to give those people that data." This is anti-competitiveness. Suing companies and preventing them from competing is predatory. You make claims that Facebook doesn't have to do these things, I feel like Facebook should be forced to allow these things. Just like we force Facebook to do other things like delete user data or make user data available (which it actually isn't doing completely last time I checked because you can't export your data and then have the exact same data on your own system.)
I feel it's reasonable for the average person to figure that a plugin that pays them for using Facebook and Twitter is paying for the data generated from those sessions.
I suspect that, to date, you've mostly met above-average people.
The average person, in my experience, has no such expectation or understanding. All they know is "free money!"
Well the difference between "hey my dad works at Xbox and will ban you" and this is this is now past tense. So it would be a case of you getting banned on Xbox and someone going "Yea that was my dad".
At one point they literally lost some of my money and then said it was returned but I wouldn't be able to see a transaction for it because there wasn't one. That is probably the worst but other times have seen me on the phone arguing about stuff that really shouldn't need arguing about.