There is literally one metric that counts with advertising, no matter what agencies, media houses or publishers tell you - sales. Everything else is BS. If your advertising does not increase sales (be it by increasing brand awareness, engagement, education, market segment creation, etc), you're just throwing money away.

Apple's falling out with Google over Maps was about GOOG wanting more data and Apple not wanting them to gather it.

I'd personally much rather have a single credit rating database, run by an accountable government body with clear rules and regulations concerning who has access to my data and how, along with a clear-cut procedures for updating and correcting the data, than the status quo: three private, opaque, for-profit organizations that are not accountable to any public entity.

As a friend who has over 1 million subscribers on Youtube and streams 20 hours per week on Twitch told me:

"Youtube is like Hollywoood, Twitch is Indie film."

Like you I would have guessed the opposite, but Youtube is much more lucrative for the content creator when your subscriber base is high.

I have open source code (about 13k lines of c/c++ for embedded platform) and I happen to interview 'badly' when I am put on the spot and asked to code up something in 15 minutes while someone watches me. that's not how I work and I fail horribly at THAT style of interview. note, I am fairly good (not a+ but definitely better than average) at coding in the real world - just NOT in synthetic white-board style interviews.

As a designer, this type of thing floors me. Every job I've gotten (and every job any designer has gotten) is based on their portfolio. Nobody asks if the person actually did it, or was helped, etc. They ask you to discuss what you did. That's been the standard for getting design jobs for decades.

I don't understand why developers don't have portfolio reviews like this as well. What they're asking of you is akin to someone asking me in an interview "draw us some pretty pictures". Most designers would find that an offensive disregard for the practice of design, let alone a disregard for the previous work they've done that should be the actual litmus test for getting the job.

Developers need to start putting their foot down and asking for portfolio reviews of code they've written and not be asked to do a side show act to get jobs.

The only way that could possibly be reversed is a group larger and more powerful than the owners of tech companies fighting to reverse it; that is to say, the organized tech workers will have fight for our own standard of living.

Many already have, they've become contractors. When you bill by the hour, most companies will not let you work more than 40 hours per week, and those that do, you get to bill for. It may not be time and a half, but it's payment for time.

You just need to take control over your own career to get out of the salary prison.

I guess you get to be picky and complain when you have an extremely popular game.

Yes that's exactly what you get to be. Why this is seen as some negative is beyond me. Notch built his company from nothing and hasn't taken investment or any of the number of things most companies want to do. He has enough money to tell anyone he wants "fuck you" and has every right to as a business owner. There's nothing wrong with that.

It's 6C in Warsaw right now... and last year we'd had snow for two months by this time.

A handful of data points does not a trend make.

Sometimes it isn't YOUR company's app you need to use. In the real world, businesses deal with OTHER BUSINESSES.

And if you want to use Google's app's you'll need IE10 or a modern browser. It goes both ways.

Yeah, that's a great way to increase the tax burden on the poorest while offloading it off the richest AND enticing them to not spend money. Do you even think about the second or third layer effects of any of your decisions?

That reminds me of an encounter I had with some vegan drinking a soy latte while I was talking to a friend about a new burger place I went to that had great, locally sourced beef, pork and vegetables. She launched into some spiel about how beef is bad for the environment since on the same acre you can grow 10x more soya or whatever. I replied saying that may be true, but here in Europe we're not lacking in arable farm land, and it might be shocking to learn, but importing coffee from South America and soy from Asia isn't exactly ecologically neutral either, is it? We didn't get along after that.

All of these are examples of laws that outlaw irresponsible/hurtful behaviors, not entire segments of commerce to outlaw a specific behavior.