241–250 of 262 posts
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It's amazing to consider this killer feature for _normal_ people is one of the kill-worthy features in my will never touch it category.
Whatsapp has replaced SMS as the defacto standard mobile messenger for 98% of users in Europe (or many other places). It doesn't matter if they do things badly, there is no way around them at the moment.
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> you don't need to share any ID My phone number is an ID. An ID I don't want to share. An ID that can be stolen by calling the phone company and saying you're me and bought a new SIM.
That can never ever happen in Europe. You can't just go ask Vodafone for a new sim with the same number because you lost it. You must be American.
This is part of a broader problem. Many "apps" from WhatsApp to Zoom are treated as public spaces by citizens. But, legally the app-space is closer to a private space. This creates a mismatch between reality and expectations. (Zuckerberg can delete his chat history and you could not until Europe passed legislation forcing Facebook to do so.) I suffered the "Windows only" of gubernamental applications that excluded Li…
Thank you for comparing to E-mail. E-mail federation has been a solved problem for decades. Why on Earth is it so chronically intractable for chat? It's as if every time a new chat app is created, the developer's #1 requirement is: "Must be incompatible with every other chat app" With so much, frankly, miraculous software systems out there in production, built by some of the smartest minds in software, it's just stup…
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>Working for a startup is an extremely risky decision. As a top engineer, you get shitty pay, and a really good options package that in most cases ends up being worth nothing because most startups fail. How about structuring it differently? If you e.g. don't receive options but actual shares? Hold those shares not by yourself but via a shell company. Then you never pay income taxes. Since you are in Europe, look up t…
> If you e.g. don't receive options but actual shares? Everything your employer gives you as part of your salary is subject to the salary tax. Whether your employee gives you options or shares, doesn't matter, you need to taxate them, and that requires assigning them a value. If your employer gives you options, you can only exercise them when the shares you buy have a value (via an IPO, acquisition, etc.), so you pay…
Imagine getting 1 million euros in shares, that you want to hold on for a couple of years because you believe they will be worth 10 million euros then. Well, to do that, you need to first pay 500k Euros in taxes (where you get them from is not the tax office problem). Then, if the stock goes from 1 to ten million, you need to again pay taxes on the 9 million win that you made (25%).
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> However, that's for an independent legal entity. If you want to start a business, you can simply register a business, even online [2] for about 25 to 100 euros. If you don't have wealth to protect you don't need a legal entity anyway. I'm not sure I follow. If your startup isn't even an independent legal entity, AFAICT you can't pay your employees with equity (e.g. stock options). If you could, the risk would be su…
You are right. I just wouldn't see those points as essential problems: * If you have co-founders, 25k shouldn't be a problem if you pool your money. A group of people who have worked for some years should have that much money or I would fear that they cannot hold budgets for the company * If you have employees, 25k is a month or two of their salaries. You are dead in the water if you don't have that amount of money i…
In Germany, yes.
The people that usually have the high-enough risk tolerance to build a startup are usually broke college graduates. For a group of 3 broke college graduates each with 10k Euros in debt from BaFoG, coming up with 25k Euros just to try an idea that in the vast majority of cases will not succeed is pretty much impossible.
I finished my masters in germany debt free with 22 years old. The first time I got 25k in the bank was when I was almost 30, that's after working 7 years full time as an employee.
My risk tolerance at 30 is completely different from the one I had at 22. At 22 I could have "lost" 1 or 2 years building a startup that fails, living with 500 Euros a month or less in a shared apartment with my university buddies, waiting tables to pay the bills in between, no problem.
But now that I have 25k ? There is no way in the world I would quit my job to start a company. I have a family that depends on me, and other things I can invest those 25k in (car, house, pension fund, ...).
If you want fresh and broke college students with nothing to do to attempt a moonshot, those moonshots need to be almost free. Only 1 out of every 10.00 or 100.000 moonshots will land your country a profitable company, so you need to have a lot of them.
Requiring people to come up with 25k euros upfront is nuts. If you already had a couple of moonshots succeed, and each moonshot created a generation of 300 millionaires like it happens in the valley, then chances are that some of these risk-friendly and nostalgic millionaires will sponsor some of these startups is high. But Germany would need to somehow create that ecosystem first.
I'm an Android lifer (all my smartphones) and now live in Australia. I use Whatsapp for 99% of my personal messaging and frankly, I love it. Same messaging experience for everyone (including emojis), great desktop app, easy backup & restore as you switch phones, was early on the reply-swipe functionality, easy forwarding, voice messages, . No, none of these are "killer" features, but it's honestly one of the purest e…
FD: I'm an iPhone user. (not a die-hard, but I haven't found a decent android I can get along with permanently). Aside from the number of people (network effects) on WhatsApp, what does it have over something like telegram, signal or any of the other cross-platform messengers? Devils advocate for a moment: Signal is pretty consistent, for a "no frills" chat solution, the UX is worse but it is still consistent across…
The last message in my Facebook messenger is almost a year old when a single person wished me a happy birthday.
My WhatsApp is 'a bit' more active than that with 9 different groups / people in the past 7 days.
I know only a single person that doesn't use WhatsApp. He uses Signal over privacy concerns.
In my experience Facebook messenger usage is a rounding error.
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> There's an article right now on the FP about the Netherlands helping GCHQ break Argentinean encryption. EU EU cooperation is different though than US EU cooperation. I will very much agree though, that GCHQ has been in bed with NSA for far too long and it's disgusting. But I think there's a clear delineation between: "Our government does shady things" and "Another nations government does shady things, and incidenta…
> I will very much agree though, that GCHQ has been in bed with NSA for far too long and it's disgusting. It's wider than that. It feels like UK politicians have always been the loyal pets of US presidents/decisions/agendas, and that is more obvious when EU has a different approach, and the UK just moves on its own. UK has been in bed with the USA (practically USA's little pet) for a long time now. Jean-Claude Juncke…
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Most probably bigger severance package than your yearly salary.
I am willing to bet that other than a few selected ones in management positions, the majority will get pennies.
[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/05/18/coronavirus-...
[1]: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engine...
They are 'America's Edge'
Let's consider the narrative ->
That one corner of the world (Silicon Valley) is so good at technology that it produces nearly ALL of the world dominating technology companies
*
Let's consider another narrative ->
While most countries were asleep at the wheel, the US (or some group of people in the US) figured out that the next wave of imperialism would be
- technology - data - surveillance
And they devoted all their resources to making sure these 'big data collection and surveillance companies' would be American companies
*
If you remember the example of the spy hardware company in Switzerland that turned out to be owned by the CIA
If you remember how US tried to fund a social network app in Cuba but failed to get traction
Then does it not make sense that all the things we think are 'accidents' are perfectly reasonable when considered as a collection of dots that link together
Cisco hardware = backdoors
Intel chips - backdoors
Amazon/Google/Facebook - data collection and surveillance
*
All the smart countries are gradually ditching Facebook and Google
If you look at actual innovation, there is now lots of great stuff coming out of Europe. China, etc
US seems completely focused on
A) data surveillance companies
B) advertising tech
C) 'Outspend everyone else to become market leader' type companies