It really depends on why you want to join a startup/where you are in your career. If you are young, you probably want to focus on gaining experience and build your network. If you are older, you may value financial aspects more.

    The Army decided some years ago to give every Company (~140 people) a Raven drone for recon. However, it's a huge deal if it gets lost (if the GPS guidance were to suddenly fail), so no one ever uses them to avoid the fallout associated with losing Army equipment.

That sounds like a serious problem?

Like many things in a large bureaucracy, the rules and norms are written in the blood and tears of previous generations. It has pros and cons. On the pros, you can usually count on everyone to not lose equipment. For the cons, you spend a huge amount of time dealing with inventories and maintenance.

- At most Army schools you will fail if you lose any equipment. Ranger school does a 100% equipment check at the end of every mission and will fail you if any equipment is missing.

- One of the more common ways for an officer to get "fired" (moved out of command early with a neutral or negative rating) is to lose property. This is harder than it sounds since even a Rifle company commander you might have a few million dollars of equipment. For mechanized units (tanks), it's much harder.

Same in Denmark, at least for DUI. You'll get roughly 10 x BAC x monthly salary (post tax). A local footballer famously got hit hard by this, with a fine of DKK 842K (~ USD 130K).

> It's a bit heartbreaking at first (you spend hours/days/weeks working on something, and then a fellow hacker comes and cuts of the unnecessary pieces), but in the long run I'm grateful we do that.

The single hardest thing about programming, I'd say.

In many (most?) ways the best edits of code are the ones where you can get rid of lines.

How does that benefit you though?

I'm sure Microsoft had the same reasoning about IE.

Google strikes off a right balance between annoying and convenient. It's kicking off all Privacy concerned people, Ad Block people, overopiniated people off it's platform indirectly.

Websites get less money from Firefox users per user then Chrome users. If Firefox users make less money, going to future, devs will not optimize for it.

If the only remaining Firefox users block Ads and block analytics, I do not think google or some other search engine will pay to them to keep their default. There is literally no benefit of having such people on your platform.

> devs will not optimize of it.

Yep.

I have been a FF user since.. well, Netscape. Yet, FireFox-specific bugs have always been a lower priority.

Because, it's "a bug effecting 100 users" vs "a bug effecting 900 users"

When you consider FF users are harder to monetise (admit it, we generally are), you can start saying "a bug effecting ~50 potential customers, vs ~800".

*(fortunately, now that IE/Edge is out of the picture, those types of issues are rare)

We might be harder to monetize with ads but are we harder to monetize beyond that? I'm a Firefox user and you'll have to pry ublock from my cold, dead hands but I do pay for a bunch of online services.

I think the main problem with Firefox is the tiny user share, not the composition of said share. We need to make Firefox more mainstream and the problem will solve itself. Unfortunately it's an uphill battle, Firefox is not cool anymore.

Websites work best in the browsers that the developers use to build it, and that will be the only way Chrome can fail.

"Sorry boss, I won't be fixing BUG-332 - I don't use that browser"

That was not what I was suggesting. Fact of the matter is that it is easier to get it right the first time in the browser you work in than the browser you don’t. A growing backlog of Chrome bugs and a shrinking backlog of Firefox/whatever else browser front end developers switch to with product teams pushing feature development over bug fixing and then suddenly Chrome is the “unreliable” one.

Sorry for being flippant. I knew what you meant, and I do agree with you.

IE lost users because it was abysmal. And the reason for that was they wanted to keep people on the desktop.

Who knows... if IE was already as good as early Chrome, perhaps there would be no Chrome.

IE 6 was superior in every way, there truly was no competition at the time.

Then they didn't bother to do anything for close to a decade and "suddenly" everyone had passed them.

Google on the other hand seems to be actively making things worse. Might not take so long time for chrome.

One can hope.

Not really. IE's "killer feature" was ActiveX. Which meant that any browser limitation could be worked around.

But there was competition, that's why they made the original effort. Once the competition was killed, they stopped.

Sure, they wanted it to be the best browser - but not better than desktop.

ActiveX wasn't really used outside of enterprises. It was also used for creating wave-effects on an image, cool stuff.

The desktop was never threatened, most people were on dialup. Javascript was about changing link colors, not creating "software".

Since IE was so much better than the competition it didn't really matter that it got monopoly. Until it stagnated. Same as today, since Chrome was so superior it didn't really matter that all other browsers faded into niches. Until google started abusing it.

Maybe we should start prioritizing open software rather than waiting for a monopoly to be formed?

The reason for why Fusion 360 is "free" isn't because autodesk are nice guys, it's because that's an effective way to ensure that they won't have to deal with competition in the future.

IE became abysmal because principled developers didn’t want to continue to work on it. It wasn’t always so.

" ... so I transitioned to an automatic"

Clever.

Somewhat related. I wonder how often someone would plant false information that would cause a panic sell-off, then buy on the dip, before everyone realise that it was a lie? It's like the opposite of inside information. (Does this particular scheme have a name?)

* Edit:

A quick googling suggests this is fairly prevalent. Must be keeping the SEC busy.

A recent one is Musk going "I'm thinking of making Tesla private at $420 per share" - regardless of whether he's going through with it or not, it bumped the price of Tesla stock up by 10%, and people made a lot of money off of that.

Yes, it's the good ole "trap street". Works for combating scrapers too.

"A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left) (...)"

Hm interesting, I read that he had some quirks regarding his writing and some crypted texts, I glanced over the papers and didn't see that particular sentence.