robinjfisher's comments

Yep. Went to find a YT video and came back to find Paul was dead. Couldn't bring myself to start again.

"A" UK campaign.

Lots of coverage around the time of the Queen's death and unsurprisingly in the news now given the coronation. Little to no media coverage at any other time and has very little public support albeit growing support in certain demographics.

I don't think the article is sarcastic given the nature of their app.

Where does one draw the line though? ESG[1] is becoming increasingly important to investors and I already see financial institutions instituting controls in their apps around gambling [2].

When should large companies with sufficient reach implement opportunities to address social harms?

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-an... [2] https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/19/gambling-block-self-exclus...

I am just waiting to hear back from a customer on a support ticket request where functionality in my app is not working as expected.

They sent me a screenshot of what should be a form in a modal but the modal has failed to load so it has loaded just the form in a new page looking pretty unstyled. The JS for the modal uses fetch() so possibly why it broke.

I'm 95% sure that the browser in the screenshot is IE10. I pointed them to this announcement if only to make them aware of the security risks in running IE10 but it beggars belief that anyone would choose to run IE10, individual or enterprise.

I'll link up Stripe's docs for SCA[1] as they have been very helpful for me in getting Leavetrack[2] set up for SCA.

PSD2 is the Second Payment Services Directive from the EU. A directive is required to be implemented in national law no more than two years after it is passed and whilst there have been delays, the past 12 months have seen a ramping up of banks implementing Strong Customer Authentication.

3DS (3D Secure) is like 2FA for debit/credit cards. In my case, I bank with Monzo and if a transaction requires 3DS, I have to open the Monzo app on my phone and confirm it. There are other aspects to SCA e.g. if I have used contactless payment frequently, I am more likely to be prompted to enter my PIN to confirm I still have my card.

[1] https://stripe.com/gb/payments/strong-customer-authenticatio... [2] https://leavetrackapp.com/

Quite - the criminal justice system is woefully underfunded and COVID has only exacerbated the problem. The means testing leaves many people facing no choice but to plead guilty or risk bankruptcy.

This book is a chilling insight into the state of criminal justice: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Barrister-Stories-Law-Broken...

I've made this point on LinkedIn and I'll make it here - bad software did not send postal workers to jail.

Read the judgment: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hamilton...

The Post Office knew Horizon had faults and had a legal duty to disclose its knowledge to the defendants when prosecuting them. They failed to do so.

Paragraphs 81-90 are frankly unbelievable and I question what Post Office's own lawyers were doing.

Paragraph 91(iii):

A memorandum dated 22 October 2010 by a senior lawyer in POL’s Criminal Law Division reported the successful prosecution of Seema Misra. The memorandum complained that the case had involved “an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system” which, the author said, the prosecution team had been able to “destroy”. He ended the memorandum, which was copied to the Press Office, by expressing the hope that “the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon”.

The prosecution team had "destroyed" it because they had withheld crucial evidence supporting the allegations against the Horizon system.

The Seema Misra case is what started the unravelling because her husband called a journalist, Nick Wallis [1], who has spent 10 years investigating and reporting on this case.

It's a scandal of immense proportions and three convicted individuals died before seeing their convictions quashed. It is very sad.

[1] https://www.nickwallis.com

> but in the UK these people would have been unable to get a public defender

Absolutely not the case. If one cannot afford a solicitor one will be appointed.

The answer to this question is that senior executives within the Post Office knew that Horizon had faults and deliberately withheld the information when prosecuting the sub-postmasters.

This is a fundamental breach of the prosecutor's duty to disclose any evidence that undermines the prosecution case or supports the defence case. This duty continues to exist after conviction so timing of knowledge is irrelevant.

The judgment is telling in that there are records in which Post Office officials made statements that minutes of meetings about faults in the Horizon system should not be taken so as to avoid having to disclose them in proceedings.

It is corporate failure on an unimaginable scale and three convicted individuals have died before having their convictions quashed.

Yesterday's judgment is long but very readable. I would anticipate further fallout and understand there may be a live police investigation on the basis that several individuals may have perverted the course of justice by either proceeding with prosecutions or omitting material evidence from testimony.

> "In the UK and the EU, the GDPR requires organisations to inform recipients of the pixels, and in most cases to obtain consent for them. It’s not enough to just have a privacy policy somewhere that details this."

No it doesn't and yes it is.

Nowhere in the GDPR or in the UK implementation does it say that recipients need to be informed of pixels in and of themselves.

What it does say is that when you obtain the recipients' personal details you must provide them with a privacy notice setting out what data you collect and what you do with it. The privacy notice needs to be provided on collection of their data (when directly collected) or within 30 days of collection if from a third party.

There is no reason to not obtain consent to tracking but to suggest it's the only lawful basis on which to process the data is not correct. Subject to completion of an impact assessment, one could make a case that it falls under legitimate interests depending on the degree of processing of the tracking data e.g. the more that such data is used to inform further targeting of the individual vs. say aggregation of data for improving engagement.

I agree with your underlying point though - I turned off tracking (I use Postmark for transactional emails) because I don't really care about open rate and click rate etc. If my customers want to ignore the emails from the service it's up to them.

This was explained on the feed. It's from a lower-res safety camera mainly used for object avoidance on the ground. High definition images will be available later.

I'm surprised that the guide doesn't address automated decision making about users. In my day job, we are using a scheduling platform for short-notice, short-term work e.g. social care. A job is loaded on the sytem and pushed to x users for acceptance (fastest finger first).

The system has a ratings module (not active yet) whereby clients can rate the worker and vice versa. The system then makes decisions on future job releases based on the ratings. Part of the reason for not having the module active is due to the issue of communicating to the affected users how those decisions are being made and providing them with a right of manual review.

As organisations increasingly rely on AI or ML to make decisions affecting individuals, so the need for greater transparency into those decision making processes so they can be communicated to the people concerned.

I've just skimmed a few pages of the site and frankly I'm amazed that they do not have 1) a video of an ex-offender talking about the the opportunity afforded by an employer using the service and 2) a video of the HR Director of Coca-Cola or AA or Facebook or...talking about how they found a great person through the service.

The recruitment of ex-offenders is such a story from both sides. Nobody really cares about the story of the top engineer getting a job at Google but there is a resonance with the story of the ex-offender who had looked for 6 months for a job and finally an employer took a chance on them using 70 million jobs etc...

I take the point but by their own admission, resume acceptance is at 50% when it could be at 80% so on that score they are failing to convince the client of the benefit of that diversity.

If I am a hiring manager and I am rejecting 1/2 resumes as opposed to 1/4, I'd question what the search firm is doing.

I'm not familiar with the video and will check it out when I'm at home.

If I was to say more on 10 BY 10 it's that I don't see the differentiator. Plenty of search firms are staffed by people with domain knowledge and the pre-screening of resumes by an expert or qualifying candidate interest prior to resume submission are not significant enough to differentiate in that space.

If I was to be cynical, I'd say that going through YC gives them access to a lot of prospective clients because I fail to see why any particular significant investment would be needed to start a search firm.

I see the TC article talks about a marketplace so perhaps there is a development down the line of what their solution looks like.

As I'm in the industry, my thoughts on some of the recruitment-related companies:

10 BY 10 - I don't get it. Their website says they are a contingency search firm with a value prop of having resumes filtered by people with domain knowledge before submission to clients. Also that they deliberately hit a low acceptance rate on resumes because they try to submit a diverse field of candidates. If the goal is to get the hiring manager the right person, then the best resumes should be submitted without imposing some arbitrary diversity requirement.

70 Million Jobs - love the concept. Big believer that proper recruitment practices can help rehabilitation of offenders.

ShiftDoc - marketplace concept in the healthcare space. Not sure of regulatory environment in the US but in the UK, these models will suffer due to regulatory issues over the status of the workers.

Gustav - I like this model. Offers a platform for smaller agencies to compete with the larger players. Will be interesting to see how sustainable it is given the commoditisation in certain sectors as the 3% take seems very high given pressure on margins in staffing in the US.

If I'd known that...

Didn't occur to me to even ask :)

Of course. Started as a side project, part of learning to code. Had my mom's company as first subscriber and then periodically people would find me and sign up. They were paying £13/month and it dropped into the bank account - nice side earner.

Never really had time to promote it and Adwords is just an expensive game unless one has data on conversion rates and can accurately calculate a CPA. So, it's kinda trundled along with me tinkering in spare time - upgrading the code base but not really developing it.

Recently did a Slack integration which has noticeably increased traffic (1-2 trial signups per day)[1] and that's driving more development requests and encouraging me to blog a bit more, promote on social etc.

I've also been working with some HR consultants who are selling to their clients. Long term plans are to build our more of a basic HRIS rather than just focus on absence management. Waiting for Digital Ocean to launch their object storage so I can see what that looks like versus S3 or similar.

Main challenge is to balance time between feature requests and marketing. One of the suggestions I received here many years ago[2] was to "internationalise" the language so need to have landing page which is more US-oriented e.g. PTO management.

[1] https://pasteboard.co/GDUbwPA.png QTD numbers from Stripe. So just over a month. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666318

I'm just beginning to push my product (it's been around for 6 years) and have certainly noticed the customer requests increasing.

I agree with a lot of the advice here and in particular I've just started building out the knowledge base in Intercom to mitigate some of the support queries.

Sales is tough but can be worth it. I've spent lunch hours walking round the business park where I work on the phone and those calls have led to multiple other leads where I've been working with a consultant rather than the end client. Putting the time in does help.

One thing I would say: be honest that the app is a side project whilst you grow it. I've found customers very understanding and willing to accommodate calls at specific times or accepting of slight delays in support queries.

Good luck.

So much this. When I started Leavetrack[1] in 2011, it was so difficult to get setup for recurring payments. I was using Chargify to handle the recurring payments/credit card storage, a company in New Zealand (I am in the UK) to handle the interface to my merchant account in the UK. Total costs:

- c. US$40 per month for Chargify (which kept increasing) - £20 per month for the payment gateway - £25 per month + transaction fee for merchant account

So happy when Stripe landed in the UK and I could migrate to a flat fee per transaction which scaled with me. Migrating is hard as you need customers to re-enter card details but an offer of reducing their monthly subscription due to savings in processing costs helped that process. :)

[1] https://leavetrackapp.com/