Our testers write a lot scripts in PHP and I have spent countless hours debugging stuff like this. A special kind of fun is to figure out what expressions count as TRUE or FALSE. JavaScript seems to have the same, slightly different, problems.
That seems a pretty odd choice in both cases. Adding a number to BigInt should return a BigInt. I am also always wary of languages that allow mixing of strings and numbers. From my experience this can cause a lot of problems.
We need legal action on this. Reselling data needs explicit user permission with the user being able to decline. This would be very burdensome but it seems to be the only way.
I think we need a legal framework around sharing data. Even if Facebook did everything right some other companies will mess things up. In the end a person should always be notified when his/her information gets shared with another party and have the ability to approve. This will make the business model of many companies difficult but so be it. I don't see any other way.
"but if they don't believe there's anything wrong, it's just going to be a pointless battle."
Also consider that the people there aren't dummies but know what they are doing. One of the biggest career improvements I have made is to assume people are competent until I get clear evidence of the opposite. This makes relationships much more pleasant.
I am dealing with this at the moment. We have a new contractor and he always wants to make big changes whenever he does something. Sometimes he may be right but I am getting tired explaining that maybe there is a reason why we are doing things a certain way and that the changes he is proposing often are just changes but don't really improve anything.
My experience is only with small companies and there you can take any phone number and it will be easy to get to the boss. With bigger companies there is a lot of strategy needed to get to someone who can make a decision.
What's your experience with people actually enjoying it or at least not hating it and finding such people? I have done cold calling myself but found it very exhausting to the point that I just couldn't do it anymore.
Cold calling can be extremely effective if you can make yourself do it. Some years ago I did that for a few weeks to promote a piece of software I wrote and I made a ton of interesting connections. Not just for my product but there are a lot of small business owners who are very willing to discuss business in general and you can gain a lot of business ideas that way. It can be very exhausting though if you don't enjoy talking a lot or take rejection personally.
This headline really cheapens their accomplishments. It's not enough to start a successful business with a lot of work but it has to be just seven lines of code or over the weekend.
I think you can only get this right if you deal with pretty mature processes that are well understood.