They can definitely do better, for example the Dutch government runs its own Mastodon instance: https://social.overheid.nl/overview The slogan being "Messages from the government. For everyone."

Applying for/getting a permanent residence permit in NL didn't require going anywhere.

I think it's the sort of thing Master Boot Record should do

“The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately”

― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

I lived in mildly rural NZ back in the day and it was the same, addresses were "name, street, RD# (rural delivery route number), town" and your mailbox had your name on the side (and a flag you could put up if you wanted mail collected.)

Some time roughly mid-nineties we got numbers but originally they were just for emergency services, only later were they also for post, but I seem to recall the whole rural delivery system may have changed somehow around then too.

RD addresses are still the same. Downside is you have to pay extra for rural delivery because the posties get danger money for avoiding the sheep-eating wetas.

It works for Wal and Cooch!

(I am a Brit and a massive fan of Footrot Flats)

That's not really true. Especially in the more touristy places, credit cards are generally accepted and it'd be unusual for it not to be. If you're out in a village in, I dunno, Brabant, then sure. But the places that visitors are likely to be I'd expect cards to work.

I think even AH accepts credit cards these days, though I haven't tried it myself.

> My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only.

I don't know what a few years back was, but I can't believe there was a train in NL that was cash at all for quite some time. In the past over 10 years it's always been an OV-chipkaart, and you can get an anonymous one that you pre-load with money. I'm not even sure if you can pay with cash, short of buying a ticket/loading the card from a person at a desk.

> Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget).

iDeal, which Wero is based on.

About the only thing I use cash for in NL is paying for my barber as he doesn't take any card, and I'm pretty sure that's black money.

Germany has always had a bit of a relationship with cash, I'd always keep €1-200 in my pocket when I went there, though this is changing now.

> I think we will manage without Visa just fine.

There is also Cirrus and Maestro which are run by Visa and Mastercard, which appears on a lot of debit cards around the world, though I don't know exactly how it works (i.e. do the cards tend to use the local network within the country and only go to the cirrus etc. networks when international, or do they do it always?)

There was a "shadyurl". The site itself seems to be long gone, but this'll give you some context: https://www.mikelacher.com/work/shady-url/

There's an example shadyurl link in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14628529

Funnily enough the domains appear to have been bought up and are now genuinely shady.

I'm pretty sure Turbo Pascal/C/etc and perhaps vim had syntax highlighting (though perhaps not the other bits) before the first VS release, I'm surprised they hadn't encountered it already.

It wasn't that it was "new" (you're correct, it wasn't). The complaint was that Microsoft engineers were going to use it "as a crutch".

Also, VS (codename Boston) was used as the de-facto internal development IDE for a few years before it we released it to the public. There were also arguments about shipping those types of features publicly.

I've been on the other side of that (not google), taking people to lunch who are interviewing. Usually you're picked because they're from the same country as you or something like that. At least where I work it's not like those messages. Instead it's lunch because food is good to have, and if you were lunching with them you weren't involved in the interview process at all, and it gave them a person to ask questions of and get an unbiased-as-reasonable response. If there were real red flags I'd probably raise it, but otherwise I had no contact with anyone in the hiring process regarding that person at all.

I don't know what percentage of companies use the lunch in an on-site interview for evaluation, but definitely some do. Either with express feedback into the process, or because it's the hiring manager taking the person to lunch, and this is shaping their opinion.

I suppose some could also use it as a refresher break, from their battery of antagonistic one-way LeetCode hazings, or a chance to give the person a more comfortable feeling about the company (not otherwise permitted by their hazing process).