Readit NewsI don't think salutations seriously matter in most (English-speaking) countries. Even in professional settings, I receive emails that address me by my first name.
Even still, if you must record the relevant salutations, you can ask for the salutation to use rather than the gender or sex.
It doesn't matter for English website because you usually send out emails with "Hi Joe".
Once you internationalize you will need this because in German it's an absolute no go to address a stranger by their first name (at least for B2B services).
And internationalization is on the road map for a lot of companies.
leifg commented on Ask HN: What do you talk about in 1-on-1s with your managers? · Posted by u/gofreddygo
I have weekly 1-on-1s and I do enjoy them. I work for a big-ish company and half of the team works remote full time.
Similar to other comments, we chat a lot about personal stuff and crack some jokes. But I also make an effort to note down things that I want to ask about. Sometimes it's about what the vibe is on the business side, sometimes it's about my career or feedback on what I did recently and sometimes I ask mundane things such as "do we have a stock image account for my presentations".
Something arbitrary with no value went from a random Internet forum to $300b market cap and a legal currency for a nation-state. That’s something!
I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome.
Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation?
I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!
I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk about that.
A good metric is: "people are using it".
That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops.
So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".
I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after which you are allowed to say "There is no value".
It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology.
The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.
So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?
leifg commented on Lufthansa bans AirTags in checked luggage onemileatatime.com/news/l... · Posted by u/N19PEDL2
Knowing German I read through the sources. This article is pretty misleading.
The [primary source](https://www.watson.de/leben/urlaub%20&%20freizeit/879935671-...) is a slightly clickbait article asking the questions: "Are AirTags allowed in checked luggage?".
They reached out to Lufthanse asking them. They responded: "Luggage trackers are electronic devices so they have to be turned off when the luggage is checked".
It is unclear wether they really understood how AirTags work and that they are not active trackers.
There are a bunch of other magazine echoing this response but I have yet to find an official statement by Lufthansa explicitly banning AirTags.
I recently quit being an independent contractor after 5 years and returned to being an employee. Let me outline my experience going from employee to contractor and back.
In general: I have been a software developer for 14 years. I love writing code but I also like to figure out the root of the problem and come up with the best solution. I started freelancing in Germany and continued to do so in the UK and the US.
The initial reason to go solo was mostly feeling based. I imagined being super flexible about what I could work on and wanted to have more time off even though it was unpaid. Additionally I thought I could spend some time to specialize in a field in order to get higher rates and maybe come up with a product idea. I also justified this move to myself with "I at least gotta try it". I was lucky to find a client pretty quickly and enjoyed the networking and finding follow up opportunities.
However a couple of things became pretty clear to me very quickly: the easiest way to work as a freelancer for me was to basically continue to work as a generic software engineer that knows $language for a client 5 days a week and then invoice them. I didn't really spin up additional income streams and I didn't even take more time off.
However there were a few things that kept me from returning into a regular job: The increased income (in my first year my income effectively increased by 50% even though I was doing the same work), the opportunity to switch "jobs" more often without it being perceived as being a flaky employee (this one is kind of a hack but nobody ever questioned why I was only working for 3 months for a particular client).
Things ultimately changed after I moved to the US because the calculation now wasn't only about pure money. I also would have to factor in health insurance cost (in Europe this is essentially the same wether you are freelance or not), there are other benefits like 401k contribution and employee stock buying programs that I needed to consider. But ultimately I was missing working on projects long term rather than just coming into a company churning out code. I also enjoy not having to write invoices anymore or doing a more complicated tax return or figuring out what kind of insurance I need. I am also glad that there is now basically no need for me to do any kind of marketing or sales related work.
In total I had 9 full time clients and a few short term projects (1-2 days). The short term projects were some of the worst days as a freelancer because the project was timeboxed and every time I scrambled to deliver on time.
In general I would say if you are an hourly/daily rate based contractor the only two reasons that I saw as an advantage was: more money and seeing more different projects. If you are willing to put up with the admin overhead of going solo I definitely recommend it, especially if you have a talent or are willing to do marketing and sales related tasks. I suggest however to be honest with the income calculation. If you compare your current job to something like 220 billable days as a freelancer (not unrealistic) you are going to see a big increase. But if you take into account the benefits and compare this to a competing employment offer, the income difference might not be as big.
No, it's not, but each ticket issuer would need to design and implement their own authenticity check mechanism.
I think you misunderstood the tone of my original comment, which was that NFTs introduce an extremely marginal benefit for the ticketing use case while bringing in all the negative aspects of something based on a permissionless blockchain AND still requiring a trust relationship with the issuer to be established out of band.
> I think you misunderstood the tone of my original comment, which was that NFTs introduce an extremely marginal benefit for the ticketing use case while bringing in all the negative aspects of something based on a permissionless blockchain AND still requiring a trust relationship with the issuer to be established out of band.
Fair point, I didn't see that.
I would however make the argument that in reality NFTs wouldn't introduce any benefit.
Digital tickets and a centralized software that takes care of reselling completely solves the issue of fake tickets (at least on the technical side). None of this requires NFTs.
I was working for a UK steel supplier and they would address all their email recipients with their first name. We had to change this when internationalizing into German. If you want to sell to Germans you are much safer to use a more formal tone.
Slightly related to that is the formal and informal you that exists in a lot of languages.
I was also working for a German fashion startup mostly targeted at young women. In German it was fine to address everyone by first name and the informal you, but when translated the page to French, we could keep the first name but had to change the informal you to the formal one.