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Interesting how so much negative sentiment creeps out when there's a true European competitor to the big US tech companies.


They're Swiss, so while technically in Europe, they are not in the EU. Maybe they're closer than the US, but they're still a foreign tech company in the EU.


Switzerland has a unique deep integration with the EU even though it is not a member. It is not like the UK.


Yeah, there's another thread showing a similar trend. In a strange way it's making Trump's incessant nonsensical big-upping of himself and the US as-a-whole make sense in a cultural context that I hadn't thought was as pervasive as maybe it is. It explains that polls still show 30% support.

I don't think I'll ever be not surprised by this.


Due to some comments the CEO made regarding a few Trump decisions there are a number of people that believe that the company supports the current US government and are looking for any link they can to prove it.


It's crazy watching so many Americans not see the parallels here.


It's been a long time and our memory only goes so far back. I'm not even that old, but the time between WWII and my birth is waaaaay less then my current age. Jimmy Doolittle was still hosting Christmas specials on TV when I was a kid. Nobody knows who TF that even is now. I doubt half of America has even heard of the Third Reich. Sure, they know that "Nazi" is some kind of insult, but the rest is history forgotten. The last educational film on the matter was Indiana Jones III.

Those of us who remember history will continue to fight, and our numbers aren't small. Maybe one day we can begin to repair the enormous national and global damage that has occurred.


It's pretty much the UN concentration-camp conspiracy theory that rightwing nutters have been pushing for decades, except that now it's their guys doing it so it's all OK.


You should do more writing! I really enjoyed this and the way you write!


Yes, sir, blog away, we need your wisdom.


Another +1. You have a really nice writing style!


Try Migadu. It’s great.


I find their pricing model strange. I can completely understand why they would want to limit outgoing emails per day. But limiting incoming emails per day feels strange, even if the limit seems reasonable.


You can really tell the parents vs non-parents in these comments.


Indeed.. All those people that have kids but are not fit to be called a parent so they need the government to do their job!


Neither of those examples result in social ostracism from peers.


I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?


With respect, you’re very out of touch.

Connecting online is the primary social space for many kids nowadays, not in person.

Some parents (or those without kids) have a bit of a naive view and think ‘social media’ and just imagine Facebook, instagram etc - things they understand and that don’t provide much connection.

The kids connect using private accounts, completely different apps, or even just inside the chat of other apps like games, if that is where your specific group hangs out.


I agree with what you're saying (including saying that arcfour is out of touch and doesn't really know what they're talking about), but... I do agree with them to an extent. And I have a kid (with another along the way). Kids adapt. They want to be on social media, or games, or Discord, or whatever because their friends are. If they have enough friends in real life doing something fun, that becomes where their specific group hangs out. The number of people you need in that group before it crosses that threshold is really low... 4, 5 people? That's all you need to have a tight knit friend group.

I've seen things like after school D&D club at the elementary school down the street where my son now goes to preschool. I'm optimistic that by the time he's older, there will be even more groups like this and more opportunities for him to have friends where they're doing activities that aren't mediated by screens.

To be clear, I'm not weighing on in on whether or not I think a ban is a good idea. I tend to think it is. But I do think the idea that there's nothing parents can do from the ground up without the help of government (which I'm not opposed to!) is also a bit misguided.


That's rather rude of you, especially since I was actually a kid and grew up during the mass proliferation and ubiquity of social media, to suggest that I am "out-of-touch" compared to... you? (who are likely much older than me, or at best the same age) is pretty ridiculous. I was on Twitter and Facebook at like 12 years old, I've experienced this. And to dismissively suggest I don't know what I'm talking about, on what basis do you say that? The basis that you just disagree with me...saying that a law for this is stupid and an example of paternalistic government overreach? Many people who decidedly do know what they are talking about agree, just as there are many who disagree and know what they are talking about; simply because you are on the other side doesn't mean I must be clueless.


With all due respect, I suspect you don’t have teen kids. Almost their entire social life is organised online.


I don't, but I do have friends, and did have friends when I was a kid growing up during the rise and proliferation of social media and the beginnings of algorithmic content distribution, so I am familiar with it.


> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?

Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.

Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.


> Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it.

Ah, bliss...


This seems to run counter to the anecdotal evidence that some say grounding has on healing. I assume grounding is discharging the body (if to be believed) whilst this article would have us believe we should add charge. I don’t have a dog in the race, it’s just interesting.


That's not how any of this works


How does it work?


The GGP comment is sort of all over the place, but I will try my best (there will be a few simplifications.)

Electric charge of anything is both absolute and relative, but we mostly discuss it in a relative sense. In this case, you could apply (say) 600 mV potential across a 3mm wound, with (say) one electrode on the left and one on the right. Let's say you have a battery taped to your arm with wires leading to the wound (DO NOT try this at home! Playing around with electricity and open wounds is generally insane and could be deadly in nonintuitive ways!) - the relative potential of your body, relative to the surroundings, does not change. The left _of the wound_ is at +600 mV relative to the right, and the right -600 mV to the left, but your body's overall potential relative to your surroundings is unchanged, because again, everything is relative.

In the sense of absolute electric charge (of the body and the wound) essentially nothing changes. The electric current of the wound stimulation is a _flow_ of electrons, but there is no net movement.

"Grounding" (see "energy medicine", "earthing" etc) is mostly based around the sales of overpriced "healing" products that plug into the wall. Like many conspiracies there is a kernel of truth there - there _is_ actually a real, measurable difference (in potential, current flow, and how electric fields behave in your body, among other things) when you are electrically grounded vs. insulated from the ground - but the mechanisms and effects are a bit complex to explain in a comment. For more on the subject you might want to read on capacitive coupling.


This is really easy to fake though and employers kind of have to take your word for it that the documentation you provide is real. I'm assuming a digital ID scheme will just bring all the data together and make it instantly verifiable for employers. I would normally be suspicious about this sort of thing but I do think a lack of a single entity bringing all the data together is limiting us technologically in the UK. What Estonia have done is awesome, it'd be cool for us to work toward something like that!


I have had many jobs and scenarios where I need to provide proof of residency and I have never once had a share code like you mention @mytailorisrich like this. The reality is that it doesn't happen like this. Usually about 6 months into your job someone forgets you haven't done the necessary checks and reaches out for you to send a couple of sketchy photos of your IDs so they can upload it to their HR system and forget about it.


No, it is not easy to fake.

As @vinay427 mentioned this is most digital now so you get a "share code" from the Home Office, which you provide to your prospective employer. In turn they go to the Home Office's website, input the code, and should get your picture, details, and entitlement to work.

That's on top of having a passport to go with it.


If you're a foreigner on a visa(or an EU settled status resident), yes. If you are a British person(or pretending to be one) then you just need to show your employer your British passport(or one of several other acceptable documents), and obviously faking a picture of a passport is pretty trivial. And since employers generally don't have access to the system that can verify passports they take your word on the document being valid.


As someone who's just got their new British passport, faking the 3 pictures on it, and the whole passport itself, does not look trivial at all...

I think it is much, much, much more common to have dodgy employers/landlords who do not carry out the checks at all because they are fine exploiting illegal immigrants, and no type of ID card would solve that...


>>As someone who's just got their new British passport, faking the 3 pictures on it, and the whole passport itself, does not look trivial at all...

A lot of employers just want a photo/scan of a passport. I'm not saying making a whole fake passport is easy, it's obviously not - but modifying a picture of a passport is not exactly rocket science.


Yeah most employers just take photocopies of the ID for record keeping purposes and that's it.


Most people are paid cash in hand if they're working illegally realistically. I'm not sure that would change. But in enforcement it might since you could theoretically make it a legal requirement to produce the ID, that's the norm in many other countries.


Nah this is over come with data.

E.g. if a firm is doing better than its peer group with less employees on the books, something is suspect.


Honestly the biggest problem is that government requires companies to verify identity of their employees but doesn't give them any means to do so. There was a recent case where a fish and chip shop owner was fined £40k for employing someone without a legal right to work in the UK, and the owner said the guy literally showed him his British passport, turns out it was a fake - but how was he(the business owner) supposed to know, if the government doesn't allow him to check this?


Articles in this case all say that the illegal worker only provided a photocopy of his alleged British passport.

I.e. the employer did not properly and seriously carry out the checks as he didn't ask for the original, hence the heavy fine.

"The business did not see the original copy of the man’s passport, which its owner, Mark Sullivan, said was a “clerical error”" [1]

As I commented previously it is hard to counterfeit a modern British passport in a way that looks genuine and obviously any checks require sight of the original passport...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/22/surrey-chipp...


I literally just got a job with a big British corporation and all they wanted was a photocopy of my passport, no one checked the original. So this practice seems at least relatively common.


This just means that incompetence, or worse, is widespread (not a surprise, though).

Then they will feign ignorance when fined 40k+.


THats only if they ask for it.

I changed job recently, and they just wanted a passport.


Why do they have to take your word for it? if you present a few forms of id (drivers license, etc) can't those be checked against a central DB?

is someone forging physical ID cards and also getting them real numbers somehow?


The people who have to do the check (businesses and landlords) don't have access to the system to check those numbers, or any training on what a real identify card or passport looks like.

A relative had this problem when renting out a spare room. How was she supposed to verify the Colombian passport shown to her?


I’m gonna do it I’m afraid and plug my own UK based one (it is paid though): https://davzie.com/products/contracts


You're right, I think a better UX would have been to let me select which photos I want to use like a normal camera roll picker and to just automatically make that photo available to the app requesting it rather than me having to first go and approve which photos to make selectable and then going to select it after.


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