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Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have.

Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.


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Paris was a shithole 40 years ago, too. It's only free speech if the .gov says so.p Rapists get set free in all countries all the time.

> companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law

This is hilarious. This reminds me of Soviet propaganda. "No, there was no Chernobyl disaster. Please disregard the corpses. Yes, the centrally-planned economy is doing fantastically, better than expected. Reports of famines and shortages are imperialist propaganda."

(Mind you, the Soviets are not alone here, but the blatant chutzpah of Soviet propaganda is perhaps more conspicuous to the Western eye than the Western varieties of PR and psychological manipulation.)



Thank you for your brilliant demonstration of survivorship bias.

How many people were punished for Enron? For the subprime crisis? Etc.

In the US, you just give a little money for the president's ballroom and you are pardoned. Or you settle out of court because your justice system is crap.


The CEO of Enron was convicted and died two months before sentencing and the COO got 12 years.

Interestingly the chief accountant of Enron ended up getting a job in Europe after he got out of prison.


>Interestingly the chief accountant of Enron ended up getting a job in Europe after he got out of prison.

But, but ..Europeans here said they don't tolerate crooks.


The parent poster is implying things that aren't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Fastow


Yes, European companies break the law too. However, the comment this was about literally mocked the companies that are actively trying to follow the law.

So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.


That comment mocked German customers; it didn't mention companies at all.

I read it like the customers where German based companies.

Obviously B2B given the context

Law has no virtue in and of itself.

It also ultimately a expression of might makes right (sad as this is) and as the current culture supports a decline of western might, it also undoes the law - first international, than domestic. We simply decided to burden our might with these restriction fictions, others feel not at all compelled to follow.

I expect to see further selling out of these laws, as the economic prosperity declines. I can perfectly see german law limiting german companies from developing and selling AI products, while at the same time allowing us companies for a "pay our retires and pension-plans" kickback.


In Europe, those are scandals. In the US, it's another Tuesday.

If we keep moving the goalposts you can make any argument

What goalposts? Your sitting president, himself a conman is pardoning fraudsters left and right while he and his family enrich themselves with public money and extortion.

> Your sitting president, himself a conman

Joke's on you, I'm European not American, so "your president" in this case would be the unelected Ursula and she would technically be a con-woman, not a con-man.

Not sure what your argument was supposed to prove with this cheap jab though.


Ursula Van der Leyen was elected. Trump too.

If you argue she wasn't elected by the European population, well, Trump technically isn't too.


Shhhh, don't tell them, it'll be funnier at the end.

What's "the end"?

Let me rephrase this: companies want to avoid breaking the law unknowingly, because their US providers are going to break the law without notice, willingly or unwillingly.

Plenty of corporations are willing to break the rules, but never for free.


> because their US providers are going to break the law without notice, willingly or unwillingly

This is a weird hill to die on because it's not true. I can't find anything to support your world view and if anything evidence points to the contrary. Europe has a deliberately more complex legal framework, usually in the hopes of keeping out foreign competition (although it's dubious whether or not that actually works).


> I can't find anything to support your world view

Just look at US laws pertaining to data that goes through US companies.


Only "the greatest country in the world" has laws that allow firing for NOT doing overtime.


Their engineers are excellent? Have you seen the leaked Claude Code codebase? Juniors write better code than that.


So you are saying that a plumber does not in fact need to know how to be a plumber?


Same for me. Been fully agentic for half a year or so, still remember the myriad of programming languages and things just as well if there's no AI present at all. Hard to shake 15 years of experience that quick, unless maybe that experience never fully cemented?

Maybe the difference between actually knowing stuff vs surface level? I know a lot of devs just know how to glue stuff together, not really how to make anything, so I'd imagine those devs lose their skills much faster.


Ah, yes, the [insert super inconvenient and complex thing to do that most people don’t know, want or should do] will solve it! And when that fails, surely the user can just write their own OS, right? Bunch of skill-issued complainers we the users are.


Well, the hope was always that those of us inconvenienced by M$ would all collectively contribute to making Linux distros more convenient for everyone. But we can't ever seem to get inconvenienced enough to actually sufficiently mobilize and/or coordinate such an effort.


It does seem like linux is having its moment right now. there's the money and effort valve is putting into KDE making the steamdeck and steammachine polished for their hardware which helps all users of KDE. cachyos is making having a rolling distro really smooth and snappy on old hardware and making games work mostly ootb. stuff like winboat and wine will let you use the few windows apps you need. you are kinda stuck though if you want to use something like fusion360 or solidworks. freecad has improved quite a bit but it's still like gimp where it's slightly worse UX in a lot of ways.


Valve is doing great work.

Now… maybe we could condense the 10,000 pointless distros down to a dozen? Oops, nope. Now 10,001, except this one has the menu bar in the middle of the screen and it moves around.


The distros are not pointless. For every one of them there was a human being that wanted something to work differently and the nature of open source let them do it. That should be celebrated and the day we loose that flexibility would be a very sad day.


This. Not to mention that for the mainstream users there are mainstream distros that are largely the same they have always been: Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, so I never really understood the issue of having tons of distros out there for enthusiasts.


I think that both perspectives are right. We should celebrate diversity, but there's also power in consensus.

There needs to be some competition between ideas, but if every bit of disagreement about direction ends in "I'm going to build my own distro, with blackjack and hookers", then we as a community won't ever end up building something that can compete with the megacorps.


This.

It takes leaders. And people with vision. It seems the lack is there, and not at technical makers.


I mean, the super-easy option would be to just use BitLocker for FDE. No hassles, just works. But I fugured since everyone here on HN hates MS I wouldn't even bring that up. Don't trust MS? Enroll yourown keys


Yes use Bitlocker, the thing that uploads the encryption key to OneDrive "for convenience" thereby negating the whole point of FDE in the first place


by default, yes. Can be disabled with a single click. That's something that even your Grandma can do, as opposed to installing VeraCrypt (with dozens of options on what to encrypt, and how, and when, ...)


Well no actually I do not think either of my granmothers could have done that, nor would they have even known (or cared) what a Bitlocker even was.


So are you also not allowed to move away or? I find it pretty messed up that your life as a man is literally owned by the government.


No, it literally says the law says you must seek permission if you wanna leave for more than 3 months and the govt must always grant you this if not in a war. And if you fail to seek permission nothing happens. You can ignore it without consequence.


>And if you fail to seek permission nothing happens. You can ignore it without consequence

The consequence is you violated the law, and they can have you at any time, even retroactively, for that.

That they don't is merely a detail. If it really has "no consequence" they should remove it.


A lot of laws head this way. Sweeping chances but not enforced so people ignore it, then later there's nothing stopping the government going back 7 years after select individuals. Just because it wasn't ever enforced doesn't mean it isn't illegal. An example is disguised employment laws for contractors in the UK (IR35)


Yea, you violated a law that is not enforced. Like how you are violating the law if you give some money to the neighbors kid to mow your lawn or if you cook some pie and you give it away to a friend without having proper certifications (at least in Sweden on paper you need to have certification to do that. Of course it is not enforced)

And no, Germany does not allow retroactive criminal punishments. That’s more something that happens in Russia, China and probably soon America


Civilized countries don’t allow retroactively increasing the penalty for breaking a law. Does Germany allow that?


The penalty doesn't have to be increased, it just needs to be selectively enforced.


You'd need to have some unenforced penalty first though.


There is no penalty.


No, Germany punishes according to the laws at the time of the crime. It is not possible to retroactively enforce new criminal statutes.


I think it's like they want to have it on the books now so they can use it later. If they try to emergency legislate during wartime people will protest and/or flee the country the day before it starts applying.


At least Germany isn't looking at entering any wars at the moment...


All nation states are like that. They monopolise power and violence, and will defend that monopoly by sacrificing their citizens' lives if another state tries to infringe upon it.

I think it's clear that the interests of citizens and their state typically do not align. Unfortunately, most states have cultivated and propagated a different idea for decades, which is why so many people have a different perception of their state than the reality.


No idea why you single out nation states, all states are similar.


States before nationalism generally used mercenaries to fight their wars. No soldier was dumb enough to think they were protecting their family.


Vast over-generalization


Nation state is just another word for state, no? What state is not a nation state?


The states of the United States of America are not nation states.



Yes you are: the article says that the permission must be granted in general by authorities (I guess no war and not active military) and no penalties for breaching it.


You are, but it's a shit law and surprising to still exist in Germany. Per the article it's not a new law, has been in effect since the 80s, and there have been no repercussions for violating this law.

Instead, my 2c, should have changed it to a notice you have to send the military, at most.


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With all your respect the guidelines also mention this:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I'm self-hosting Forgejo on my own home server. It's super easy to do via Docker or as a single binary executable. I even have CI/CD runners on it, which was also very easy to set up. Definitely recommend for those who might not want to rely on someone else, be it Codeberg or not, but still get the same quality as Codeberg (as they literally run Forgejo themselves).


You are aware that EU is not a single country, right? I know American education is third-world levels these days, so unfortunately I have to ask this.


4 Member States Opposing

23 Member States Supporting

0 Member States Undecided


That's literally the entire Microslop Winblows set up screen flow. There's no "no", only "confirm".


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