MikeTaylor

How tragic that the goal of startups isn't to make something useful but to get acquired (with consequent inevitable dismemberment and shuttering). Well done on the $200M, I guess.

It's amazing how much science just gets no funding to speak of. There are maybe half a dozen museums in the world whose palaeontology departments are not in a permanent budget crunch. There is no money to fund digs, to find new fossils. There is, critically, no money to prepare fossils out of the rocks. One very major natural history known to me had only a single preparator on staff: and the last I heard, that one preparator had been let go so that no fossil preparation at all was taking place, at least officially. And of course there is no money to fund actual research into the fossils that should be coming out of those rocks -- for example, dinosaurs, which you'd think would be a big win for any ambitious museum.

The part of this that baffles me is that there always seem to be untold billions to build particle accelerators. Spread the wealth, high-energy physicists!

And yet, it's what a lot of old-timey software engineers consistently did. Yes, we work in a more complex ecosystem than they did, but I can't shake my sense that 90% of the reason is that they held themselves to a higher standard. Heck, they still do in the Go community, where major versions are still a big deal.

I did wonder how much to soften this message, because yes, of course, there really ARE times when a breaking change is necessary. But I think those account for maybe 1% of the major releases we see these days. The rest are down to laziness, carelessness, or just not having thought about it at all.

Usually the best solution is not to ask for date of birth. I guess about one in ten of websites that ask me that actually have a legitimate reason for needing to know.

(In the present case, a UK Government website might well have a legitimate reason.)

Consistent for someone who uses the same site on lots of different devices and browsers. I wonder how many of those there are?

Not consistent for someone who uses lots of different sites on one device. There are about seven billion of those.

"Consistent experience across devices" is not just a waste of time, it's actively harmful.

Gee, it's a real head-scratcher, isn't it?