Well I am big believer in so-called techno communism. The problem with communism in past was that people had to do dirty work, if we automate every possible job and create basic income we will end-up with some sort of communism. It wasn't possible to implement true communism in the past and still I think we are not ready to implement it just yet, but 50 100 or maybe 200 years from now communism will be superior, another problem with past implementation of communism was lack of democracy. We need true democratic communism based on technology and freedom.
I had similar experiences, effect was much weaker after 4-5 days but I think it was better for work. Initial 3-4 days were very similar to taking cocaine, I was too high to do good work.
It's not black/white situation. Sometimes only part of the meeting will be relevant to you. By using laptop or any device you show no respect to the person that organised the meeting but as well you might losse a lot. I agree that people tend to organise to many meetings but doing anything else on that meeting is not a solution. Sadly (as I am developer too) I realised that developers often thing that they are to smart to do anything else to code and this is the only good way of spendign their time.
I am, believe it or not (i'm not sure I believe it myself sometimes), socially aware enough to realise that there are different cultures, personalities, etc etc, some of whom believe various actions are "disrespectful".
I get that. I really do. But there's so many things on that list these days. Its what I feel if i'm told to close a laptop when its quite clear i've already made a decision on whether what is being said is relevant to me or whether i have better things to do. I'm also aware of the social power/authority plays involved in such, as well as traditional etiquette.
But i'm also getting to that stage of life where I'm no longer as concerned about whether some numpty feels i'm disrespecting them by prioritising my time against their preferences or being "rude" by being practical.
I'm aware you can't do this in many workplaces/contexts where you basically have to be submissive/concordant with a workplace culture that says otherwise.
But my life is too short for me to worry seriously about such things anymore. I don't go out of my way to offend, nor do i take said actions as some kind of social/political power play. If a person doesnt want to work with me because of that or gets offended, well, rack another one up on the board...
Its not black and white, granted...but I think its more statistically valid that people who make a big fuss about such are more likely to be on my own "waste of time/oxygen" list...
Easier solution: quit demanding "respect" by asking people to pay attention through irrelevant stuff to appease your ego. Some meetings will have things relevant to different groups of people over time, and you don't need everyone's full attention for the whole meeting.
It's not always a choice. Even when it is not overtly made mandatory, it often have "political" consequences if you are seen as detaching from what happens in the team. Being physically present has significant signalling effects.
"You guys can probably handle this without me. Do you need for me anything else?"
Or, if that is not acceptable due to workplace hierarchy, talk to your manager and explain the problem. If being present is a political necessity, chances are so is not secluding yourself behind a screen.
I wish that that someone did some tests between old and new software, I bet uptime of old software/hardware would be higher than our current tech stack.
I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior (even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.) Hardware-wise, there's memory protection and virtualization, whereas old Unix, Windows, etc. all let you crap all over any piece of memory because there was no efficient way to prevent arbitrary machine code from doing that. Security also improved tremendously, in relative terms.
So we're far from unhackable, never-crashing software, but then cars, too are still relatively dangerous, just much less so than they used to be.
(Now one interesting thing that I wonder about, though, with all those thank yous going out to the government, Ralph Nader and other deities in sibling comments, is just how reliable this crash test is; meaning, what happens if you try other angles, which are not in the standard test.)
>I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior (even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.)
BTW, Java does have implementation-defined or unspecified behavior (for instance, using the same objects from different threads without proper coordination), but there's much less of it and it's easier to avoid.
That's true, and it's true of most languages, and unfortunately people trip over it even when they can totally avoid it by hiding threads behind other abstractions. So yeah, silly of me to have forgotten it.
That said, AFAIK language-level invariants in Java (and Python, etc.) cannot be violated by the lack of thread safety; meaning, you can still inspect every live object and see its state. Program-level invariants might go to heck, for sure. So what I should have said is more along the lines of "memory safety" than "lack of undefined behavior"; I'm not sure what the shortest and most precise way to put it is, though. (It does not quite end with memory safety but it doesn't quite get to lack of undefined behavior, either.)
Much of development and the stack has become better. I still remember writing code in Pascal when I'd been much younger when my program would randomly stop working. Eventually I would insert an empty line between two lines of code and suddenly it'd work again.
A lot of work has been put into tools and our general ability to write better code (although whether we do so or not is a different issue).
Also consider line counts, driven by functionality demands. A Unix from the 1970s has a kernel with maybe <10KLOC? Linux is more like 15000KLOC. If due to bugs, Linux crashes twice as often as that old Unix, then on a line for line basis, each Linux line is still 750x more reliable on average than the old Unix lines.
One would argue that they understand it well, and default to calculating the consecutive maximum penalty or concurrent minimum allowable by law to suit the sensationalism they constantly add to every headline and article to sell because when the news is run like a business, you will get the news that sells the most, and never hear about the important things that don't attract consumers' attention. Unless it suits the need of the propaganda machine, but that's another discussion altogether.
Not every killer should go to jail for life, but (let's say) some do; thus, the maximum is life. Maybe these brothers deserve 20 years, maybe they don't, but bringing people into a new country, where they will be dependent on you, in order to take advantage of them, is a serious offense. 20 years seems reasonable to me.
(Edit: changed "charge" to "offense" since that is a pattern of behavior rather than a crime.)
I'm not convinced of the value of life imprisonment (or of imprisonment). I only meant to state that the maximum sentence is not related to these perpetrators, but the worst possible perpetrator of a given crime.
I think we seriously undersentence criminals who cynically and cruelly hurt people for money, but don't happen to use physical violence to do so.
(Often "undersentence" means "completely ignore." Unjustly evicting a family from their home is no less destructive than burning it down while they're out, but the former doesn't even seem to be treated as a crime.)
I personally could care less how we sentence these criminals, because I thinking changes in sentencing tend to have little effect anyway.
We should be more concerned about fixing the immigration system so our regulations don't give employers like this the leverage to exploit their employees.
Calling it fraud suggests that; 20 years in prison is an excessive punishment just for stealing money. But H1B is actually a large fraction of the way to slavery, and slavery is a worse crime than murder. So in this case I'd be fine with them getting the full 20 years.
Last I checked the terms of H1B, workers under it were not independent by a very long shot. Not outright slaves, granted, but the term 'indentured servitude' could reasonably be used.
Mislabeling the current situation as "slavery" or "indentured servitude" won't help your cause. You can say these regulations create the incentives and opportunity to exploit immigrants by effectively making it difficult for them to shop for a better paying job.
I see it as voluntary servitude in the hopes of making a lot of money. AFAIK nothing stops the employee from simply walking away (i.e. going back to his home-country).
Unless you live in North Korea, nearly any unjust law can in principle be avoided by 'simply' leaving the country. In practice, this is a sufficiently costly step that we still correctly say that unjust laws infringe on people's freedom.
2. Practically important publicization of #porteouverte effort
3. Updated chronology of news as experienced by Parisian local
4. First-person account of person who was present at theatre shooting
5. ... content-light junk starts. More than halfway down the page.
There's interesting commentary in this HN thread that I'm not seeing upvoted to visibility on Reddit, so it is valuable. But there is a ton of uniquely valuable stuff on the Reddit thread, and that is consistently the case in these live serious news situations.
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And 10 minutes after I posted this, the top comment on this very HN thread and all its replies are all empty sentiment. "vive la france", "hearts go out", "be safe", etc.
I don't want to sidetrack this with an HN vs. Reddit debate.
The top story about this on Reddit has 14500+ comments. I couldn't really skim through them all in between the server timeouts, but it appears that the majority of them are non value-add.
As a story like this ages, my personal experience has been that the quality of comments on HN go UP while the quality of comments on Reddit go DOWN.
In regards to the parent post of this thread, I think that HN provides a valuable outlet for posting stories like this, and I personally feel it is within the overall HN "charter" for stories. It could turn out that this specific case balances out differently, but my personal opinion is that overall HN discussions for a given HN-worthy topic are more valuable than the comparative Reddit thread.
Not to say that this thread doesn't provide value but the Reddit thread is full of useful comments including information from people who are in paris. No memes or useless comments that I can see.
Please read the HN guidelines and you will understand that this site is not just about tech. Indeed that's the most important thing to understand about it.
Landing probes on Venus has been a low priority because it really offers poor value to send something all that way only for it to die within a few hours of landing in the acidic pressure-cooking hell that is Venus' atmosphere. Venera 13 and 14 lasted 127 and 57 minutes respectively. That sounds awful, but the design goal was just 32 minutes! Perhaps our inability to have any kind of presence on Venus' surface has reduced interest in orbital missions too, which is a shame.
Until we can get close to self sustaining infrastructure sending people into space seems really pointless. If we could even get something like Biosphere 2 to actually work that seems like a solid first step.
BIOS-3 seemed to work, but Dried meat was imported into the facility, and urine and feces were generally dried and stored, rather than being recycled.
Because with limited resources for space exploration, it makes sense to actually explore someplace where humans could actually land in the near future and maybe has life. Any serious exploration of Venus would be pretty demanding.
Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were standins for open war with the Soviet Union, so they got more war-like funding and focus. 'Terrorists' aren't going to be shown up by space travel and no one believes we're really at war with the Chinese so no one is willing to throw money at it.
The US has never really funded anything that isn't related directly or indirectly to war, that includes Space Exploration.
So people should not become freelancers, based on your single bad experience, make sense. I was expecting some data backing up your statement or at least proper story.
tl;dr - This guy is freelancer and few days ago he was contacted by stupid client who thought he will work almost for free.
I was just telling about my experience working on odesk (read biggest freelance website). This is not first case of stupid client and I'm not first day there.
What kind of backup? Link to my profile? Ok will update post now.
Sergey, one advice - please do NOT work for $15/hr. All it takes to charge $XXX/hr (or $8X-$9X/hr ) is just to ask for it. Seriously. And keep away from odesk/upwork/etc.. race to the bottom sites. Search and contact prospective clients yourself - as if you'd looking for standard job. No middle-man is needed here.
It's still free, no one is forced to use this. Companies exists to make a profit, if Facebook offers something for free of course it's not driven by philanthropy. I believe internet.org is better than no internet at all. Hopefully people in developing countries will be offered alternative in the near future but to get normal internet they need to earn enough to pay for it - internet.org is free with means people using it are the product.
Then I would go for another ISP, that's the point I can choose because I live in Europe, but If I could choose between no internet and free internet from Facebook I would go for free from Facebook if noone else want to provide internet for people in Africa.
Internet.org runs on top of existing ISPs. Anywhere it's accessible, other ISPs are available in the same region too.
"No internet" vs "Internet.org" as the only two options, is not a choice anywhere at all.
Those ISPs have bought public spectrum to provide telecom and internet services. Public spectrum being used to make services of foreign companies free, while making other traffic expensive, is something a democratic population should be concerned about.
This is about not deceiving users and attempting to usurp the definition of the word "Internet". It'd be fine if they called it Facebook Net or whatever.
