I forget which famous Unix personality the quote / story comes from, but it amounts to "The perfect program is the one you write after you finish the first version, throw it in the garbage, and then handle in the rewrite all the things you didn't know that you didn't know."
That rings true to my experience, and TDD doesn't add much to that process.
The way I look at it is a matter of attack surface and attack distance. Digital vastly increases both.
You have layers and layers of technology in even the simplest modern computers, and core network infrastructure subject to tapping or worse.
And much of this that can be done from anywhere on the planet.
Analog requires physical proximity, a strength and a serious inconvenience. But it also has the property of being legacy, in that you are now immune to state of the art digital methods, and susceptible to older ones that may be out of institutional memory and practice.
I'd argue that real anonymity requires disconnection from digital networks in this age.
I.e. cash, rural, paper letters for last mile
The internet is by definition centralized and the government has privileged access, from a surveillance perspective. Luckily, the number of people who really need this level of anonymity (i.e. I am wanted by every world government as a top priority) is pretty low.
Per the article, that would have required him opening a laptop during their meeting and twiddling the mouse around to prevent idle.
Legally, that may impact.
But practically and provably? I can't imagine he wouldn't be in the same situation, albeit with Upwork claiming they'd detected patterns of abuse during his claimed time, and still putting this on him. Or maybe not. Futures not taken, etc.
Isn't this the eBay problem in a nutshell? In that, it's the coordinating party's job to combat this as best they can, because they're in the most information privileged seat?
If Upwork thinks Robin and the freelancer are the same person, they're the ones best able to sort that out, no?
Presumably the freelancer doesn't have access to the full activity history and profile details of Robin, but Upwork does.
And if they do believe that, this seems a bizarre outcome. Why would you allow someone you believe to be a scammer to remain on your platform?
The hierarchy of information and scale here, from most to least, seems to obviously be: banks, Upwork, freelancer.
Or, to put it another way, requiring the freelancer to pay this begs the question: "What could the freelancer have done to avoid this?"
To which the only answer is: everything Upwork is abstracting away and doesn't want their freelancers doing. Do a background check on the client. Obtain the client's actual payment methods and verify them with the bank. Etc.
All of which are literally Upwork's functions in this arrangement, because like PayPal, they exist to centralize and decrease friction between two semi-trusting parties.
And when that goes bad, it's bullshit for them to transfer the consequences of that onto someone who lacked the access to detect or fix it in the first place, by Upwork's design!
It'd be like Uber requiring a passenger to pay an insurance claim, because their driver was involved in an accident and didn't have auto insurance.
Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product...
... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store.
B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.
I'm not a frequent Walmart delivery customer, but my impression was they didn't take buy-online/ship-to-home or buy-online/ship-to-store seriously until the Jet acquisition. Which Walmart bought in 2016?
Amazon is Amazon because they didn't let size dull their edge.
Unfortunately, that cuts both ways. There are a lot of ways to be exploitive, to your and your customers' benefits, when you're a $113 B revenue/quarter company, that simply aren't available when you're a startup.
Hell, Walmart pioneered the "How'd you like to sell in our stores?" + "You need to reduce prices, or it'd be a shame if we, your biggest customer, had to drop you" two step. And Amazon pioneered hyperscale logistics efficiencies. Both of which only work if you're giant.
If we want a return to competition of yore, I think it's only going to happen if we (a) prevent "extra-large" companies from having in-house logistics & (b) prevent predatory contracts and pricing when a size disparity exists (e.g. Walmart/supplier).
And given both of these are pretty fundamental to the way many companies work, I'm not even sure they'd be feasible.
My experience has been there's a small Venn sliver of people who are both diligent enough to continue an extended thread and sociopathic(?) enough to completely ignore what the other person is saying.
That said, HN probably beats the average on finding those folks too. ;)
Tbh, I expect most of the downvotes are from people who weren't gaming in the late 90s.
The only other clue I have is that it was apparently someone who was super productive and wrote a ton of the early common Unix tools.