This might be taken as hyperbolic, but the EU seems to have trouble building anything.

jongjong 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is where I disagree as a software engineer who has seen EU products built and not adopted... I've also built products myself which were fully functioning and scalable but not widely adopted. Building is not the bottleneck.

It feels like there is a limit on distribution. Just getting people to try a product is incredibly hard. Very hard to reach them and ads feel like they're only served to bots.

▲

DocTomoe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.

▲

jongjong 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes and my perspective is that GDPR has harmed EU startups and helped US companies by virtue of them being incumbents and having the resources to dedicate to compliance. Probably can't be fixed as easily now because of corporate culture around standards like SOC2 and ISO27001... Which I think are more harmful to security than helpful as they create complacency and hinder progress by creating barriers.

	▲	stavros 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's a decision to be made whether corporations should be allowed to do anything they want or not. The countries that choose to let them do what they want, will obviously give them an advantage over the countries that don't. You and I, however, are not corporations, so maybe it's in our best interest if they actually aren't allowed to do whatever they want.