Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45079504

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Even if vindicated, the process can be costly.

Importantly though, the law does not suffice with "careful". We *think* we have our bases covered and are careful to try to ensure they are but we're not sure how to *know* our bases are covered. There's the fear that some logs that we believe are anonymous might be considered identifying by some data scientist armed with techniques we've never heard of. There's the concern that some third-party library might dynamically pull in a font-set that comes from a US-based CDN based on some user configuration that we don't foresee. There's the anxiety of asking "Did we forget something? Is the DNS server in us-east-1?" when trying to roll out new features.

These are all strawmen, but they represent the kind of anxiety we feel. Having done our best to respect the requirements and the spirit in which they were written, there's the fear that we were imperfect in our awareness and that that something could cost us a fine that would have gone to someone's salary.

I would very much condemn the indiscriminate collecting, reuse, and selling of personal data, but I would also caution that those of us wanting to play by the rules find them lacking in precision.

I'd really rather have time invested in making the memory footprint smaller again.

That’s a bold opinion he has there.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115295

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

They have some fascinating papers about it, if I recall.

And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.)

To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.

Oracle gets consideration because teams want to have a lifeline if something goes wrong or (worst case) someone else to pin the blame on when it does. And this happens because some businesses are actually so big that that level of comfort doesn’t even dent the budget.

Oracle actually has some nice parts and some rough edges (a statement that applies equally to PG and SQL Server too, for instance), but it comes with a king-sized security blanket.