In absolute numbers, their company probably follows more laws than most people on this forum, since they operate in many different jurisdictions. It wouldn't surprise me if the average HN commenter committed more felonies than the average Uber executive, or of Uber as a whole.
There are plenty of languages which have an (implicit or explicit) argument called something like "this" or "self" where the semantics of a x.y() call are "look up y on the x object, call it with x as the this argument". C++ fundamentally works like that (the look-up is compile time in the case of non-virtual functions, but like JS at runtime for virtual functions), Python, Java, etc.
The oddity with JavaScript is two-fold: firstly, the fact that it passes the global object (in non-strict code) given an z() style call (v. x.y() above); secondly, the fact that you can call a function with an explicit this argument using Array.prototype.call or Array.prototype.array.
What feels far more odd than that, though, is what the DOM does. It often acts as if there's been a method call, whereas in reality it's just called with an explicit this argument from C++. If you view a method dispatch as being a message (à la Smalltalk, a large influence on JS) then obviously an event's target is invoked as a message to the event. I obviously can't comment if that's what Brendan was thinking, but it seems like an obvious analogue.
I am the core developer. It's not abandoned at all. There are updates that haven't been pushed upstream, but no new features. Was going to support replication via an external consensus service (etc, consul, etc) -- but looks like implementing Raft directly into Tank for interfacing with other cluster nodes is a better idea, all things considering (no external deps., simplicity).
The reason this hasn't happened yet is that, other than lack of free time to pursue it, we(work) haven't really needed that feature yet. We run a few instances and they are very idle and we can also mirror to other nodes (via tank-cli).
Can you please please please use the etcd implementation[1] of raft and not the normal go-raft or consul raft implementations? They've done some serious business fault injection and integration testing with etcd as part of google's hosted kubernetes (GKE). There are still some lingering issues with consul at scale that make me a bit gunshy. Mesosphere did some of this work themselves: https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/10/26/etcd-mesos-kubernetes... , but I know that Google engineers have done tons of work on this as well.
Yes, but it's still stupid. Cloud hosting companies who are using hourly billing are used to spin instances up and down all the time. Imagine your app has a busy day and you need 500% more resources than usual, with the system of Vultr you will be automatically charged 500% of your regular usage only because of one days spike (obviously only if you are near the $0 balance mark)
- They are not a bank, so the money in your "account" with them is just an unsecured, general liability to you. If they go bust, they owe you money but you will never see it.
- If you want to withdraw that money from your "account" and they refuse, then your options are pretty limited.
Once they take it from your payment method, it becomes their money, not yours. That's a charge.
I am not disagreeing with what you say, but "charged" as it was used in the GP comment, it might have lead someone to believe that VULTR charge for usage per month.
To be honest, I have no idea what you are talking about. Your card is being charged and that's all I said. Sure you have credits to spend, but the cash you have no immediate need for on your Vultr account sits now there because of their billing practices.
> And if so, how does one know what is right and what is wrong?
It all boils down to life and death. Right is anything that promotes life, wrong is anything that brings death.
This usually translates to right being anything that brings pleasure, while wrong anything that causes pain. After all that's how the brain is wired.
On the other hand we are social creatures and sometimes there is conflict, something that is right for the individual maybe is wrong for the community. It is widely accepted that right of the many is greater than the right of the one, and hence we have the laws.
So yes, there is right and wrong, and they are very clearly defined.
The problem that the OP has, is that most individuals in his country do what is right for themselves but wrong for the many and hence OP feels like a sucker because she/he does what is wrong for herself/himself but right for the many.
But if we go back to the roots of right and wrong, if most of the people in the community choose to do the wrong thing, then doing the right thing is not doing the right thing anymore.
Confused? Let me give you an example. Let's say we have 10 persons locked in a room. Each day we give a stick of bread to a random person. The community has decided that every day they will share the bread among all of them, as it is the best for the community(nobody will die of starvation). In this case, when you get the bread it is very clear that the right thing to do is to share it.
Now what happens if the majority of the individuals in the room, don't do the right thing, and don't share the bread when they get it, but keep it for themselves?
If a person gets the bread is it right to keep it to herself/himself or to share it?
Surprisingly the right thing to do, both for the individual and for the community, is to keep it, as the community will not really benefit if that person starves to death.
Of course, something even better would be for that person to try to convince everybody to start sharing the bread again.
There are strong network externalities both to Facebook and to Google services. The more people use them, the better they are, and so much more higher are the opportunity costs of switching to other websites. Pleas won't change the incentives involved.
That being said, I think tech journalism overstates the amount of control which either Google and Facebook can actually exert over their users.
Google is to me what Facebook was a few years ago. I do have a Facebook account but don't want to use anything Google. Yet they have a sneaky way of trying to force you (and others) into it. I think it's scary just how well Google has done at shoehorning themselves into the education market. I frequently encounter kids that think google is the internet. They think all email is Gmail. They don't know other search engines exist. They only know YouTube, mostly because of Google's placement. They don't know there are other forms of Maps. (again, Google's placement of their own products.)
It's scary. Facebook hasn't gotten to that point. They've tried with mobile devices, and they were a flop. We don't see Facebook Maps yet or a lot of Facebook Videos or whatever being shared around.
I have been slowly migrating away from my gmail account and I intend to delete it very soon. I highly recommend Protonmail as an alternative web-based email provider.
