Am I missing something here? Paying $1000/mo rent for a remote space seems insane. At best, that's 15% of your take-home salary. You're basically forcing yourself to work 15% more than you would without an office.
I'd take the extra 15% of free time over the hit in the "socialness" of my office space. I can get that social fix during that time instead.
> Industrious seems nice. It would be a good option if you're a Lawyer or CPA or something where you need to keep up appearances; i.e. clients physically coming in and talking to you.
I don't know that Industrious is the right place for a lawyer or CPA. Maybe a rather nontraditional one. But I would expect someone like that to prefer traditional "Class A" office space a la Regus.
> However, as a software engineer, it seems like the only benefit is social. And with that, from a financial standpoint, it doesn't make much sense to me. You're basically paying to work.
Well, if you buy the premise of the articles—both the parent and mine—then that benefit has value. It has a lot of value to certain kinds of people. By the sound of it, you do not have such high psychological needs. :-)
I didn't talk about it in my article, but the OP did in his: getting one's social fix outside of work isn't that easy, particularly if it's work-related socialisation that is the deficiency you're trying to address.
Having said that, even Industrious doesn't magically fix certain existential problems. For instance, I'm in VoIP, so I have relatively little to discuss or collaborate on with the usual array of people who commonly inhabit such places: SEO/web marketing firms, web developers, miscellaneous ad and marketing agencies, etc.
Industrious had less of these than the typical coworking space, and the tenants of that nature who were there were less obnoxious, but still: being in an exotic and highly technical niche removes a lot of the benefits of shared work culture and water cooler talk, the ability to bounce ideas off officemates or answer their questions, etc.
edit: $1000/mo is pretty steep for a one-person office. Industrious didn't charge me quite that much. But it was pretty up there.
Whoops. I probably should have proofread my comment before submitting. Your response seems almost nonsensical now that I've butchered my original post D: Sorry about that.
I doubt it given all the IT people, including HN readers, saying the college grads usually cant program worth anything. Whereas, the people who learned a creative, building skill by building straightforward or creative solutions to various problems often program better. Surprise!
The vast trove of empical data out there on activities like programming suggest that practice is main way people get better. There's also a sizeable anount of evidence saying ideal practice is a series of problems that increase in difficulty, a bit harder than before, and not insurmountable. Plus, learning techniques & observing examples from experienced professionals.
College isn't likely to teach you much programming skill at all. Now, programming practice + a college education in CompSci concepts can make for a programmer with more tools in the toolbox (taps head). It's not a substitute for repeated, informed practice of act itself.
You actually didn't say anything. You implied 7 arguments existed that would dismiss the comment. Your comment itself was a dismissal with no content. So, I instead argued against it by using the status quo of evidence on going to college vs practicing a skill for building a hands-on skill.
And the only platform that works on my windows desktop, macbook, work Linux machine, Android phone, iOS tablet, Xbox, TV, and watch with an "install time" measured in seconds, a top of the line security sandbox system that takes very little effort from the user to configure correctly, a very visible badge telling you if the connection is encrypted or not, and an incredible amount of easy customization by the user which is so powerful it can completely change how an app looks with zero input or permission from the app creator.
Reliable low latency transmission of audio and video is also one of those things that looks easy unless you try to actually get it working in practice.
I think the reason is that if we ever get a real solid web platform it will start competing directly with all of the vendors proprietary operating systems. So there are billions of dollars worth of reasons to maintain just enough incompatibility and spotty featuresets.
I mean I have been waiting for two decades for it to happen.
As someone who has stayed far away from the perils of web development, will this be the step that finally makes it sane again? I figure the sooner the DOM + JavaScript/EMCAScript die the better; and with asm.js and WebGL I thought that day finally came... but nope. 3 years later we're still scuttling around bad design decisions of over two decades ago.
- Machine readability. Graphics scraping is gross, but DOM is by default a machine parseable format.
- For web pages which are actual documents, it makes total sense and is in fact a pretty clean implementation of a document and styling system. Especially in comparison to stuff like Microsoft word's doc format. If you would like to dispute the point, I challenge you to design something better. You don't even need to implement it, just make a compelling design. Or link to somebody else who has.
The second point is the only valid defense of the DOM, in my opinion. It's just a static document formatting language. And it should have stayed that way. Webpages like the one we're on right now should have been the furthest it went.
The problem with the DOM is that it tries to solve two problems at once: encoding of semantics, and encoding of layout.
I'd say we should forget about the former, because ML techniques can extract semantics to a great extent. IMO, the DOM should be considered purely a layout tool.
Depends on your definition of 'sane' ;) The web platform now is not much different from normal desktop or mobile operating systems (with one big advantage: hassle-free software distribution, just click on a link).
They all have terrible and outdated APIs, but cannot leave them behind without breaking backward compatibility. And you can either use the OS's standard UI framework (they are also all terrible without exception, just like HTML/CSS), or you can use a 3rd-party-framework like Qt (== JS frameworks), or you can whip up a bare GL window and do all the rendering yourself (== using WebGL). Or you can use a combination of those.
Some HTML5 APIs are pretty bad (everything except WebGL basically), but so are most 'native' operating system APIs.
For asm.js/WebAssembly created from C++ code, you'll have to be very careful and disciplined to create small 'executables' fitting for the web, since avoiding code bloat is not something many C++ programmers care about.
In conclusion, just like every other runtime environment, the web is a terrible platform but you can still do amazing things. The main advantage over all other platforms (IMHO) is extremely simple software distribution both for the developer and user, and it is one of the last truly open platforms (the other one being Linux).
PS: replicating the DOM inside a WebGL context is a dumb idea though (except for research purposes), because this will be a lot of redundant code that needs to be downloaded to the client.
We have canvas for like ages. Nobody wants to implement a "better" GUI than the DOM because it's an immensely difficult task with little to no benefit.
WebAssembly will eventually have a DOM API and then JS will not die its growth will just slow down and plateau.
I find it very strange that you see minified, basically completely unreadable JS as better than C (straw man, it's actually "any programming language") and assembly.
If we aren't being disingenuous, it's "any language you want versus JS" and "minified, obfuscated JS versus assembly".
The web has a free software problem (either that, or native code has a free software anti-problem because distributing portable precompiled code is so hard), but I find minified JS no more or less acceptable, as a language to read, than assembly generated from an optimizing compiler.
That said, minified JS on the web runs in a sandbox with a sane security model (yes, browsers don't implement it 100% right, but at least there's a model there). Optimized native code without source does whatever it likes to any file on my single-user machine, and we're expected to be okay with that (cf. https://xkcd.com/1200/). If I'm asked to choose between running one of the two, my vote is with the web app, no question.
I wonder could all WebAssembly code be shipped in secure containers and make it run similarly to how Google sandboxed the whole Android framework inside of Chrome OS?
Is the security of WebAssembly worse than that currently? Or is it somewhat similar?
Yup. As someone who can't tell an angular from an angle grinder but has read the ABI specs for every platform I use... the web does a lot of things right, and native code and assembly is where we see ourselves tethered to the bad design decisions of over four decades ago.
native code is not the problem... there are many libraries that abstract over platforms just like the web does.... the problem is people who make software that does not abstract away platform specifics
I don't like DOM, either. But whenever I see comments like this I want to ask: what do you propose as an alternative? WASM is more of a replacement for JS, DOM still requires a replacement if we hate it so much that we want to ditch it.
While this is true, it is the closest thing that already exists to a basic income, so it should be the first place to go for material to study before/while setting up a more controlled experiment (assuming a highly controlled, completely reproducible experiment actually can be set up in social/economic sciences).
Even in a UBI setup, it's the government's/public's money, not the recipient's, right up until the point where it changes hands. A wealthy family can (and often does) make just as strong of a guarantee for a stipend as a government can.
I don't believe the two scenarios to be as similar as you do.
Wealthy families are able to provide a layer of security that a government stipend never could. You can blow away your monthly stipend from your wealthy family on drugs and alcohol instead of paying the rent, and you're unlikely to end up living on the streets as your family will fold and send you more money. (anecdote: over the last 15 years I've met over a dozen people who were and/or still are like this)
When comparing wealthy family stipends to government stipends, the guarantee needs to be the same. Instead, wealthy families are generally able to guarantee a minimum stipend for their dependents, while governments would be guaranteeing a minimum==maximum stipend for their dependents/recipients.
It appears you're referring to when I said "(assuming a highly controlled, completely reproducible experiment actually can be set up in social/economic sciences)". I'm not making this assumption, I'm questioning if a meaningful experiment can actually be formulated and performed.
If a meaningful experiment can not be performed (and I'm not saying that it can), then examining and observing how people born into rich families operate would give better, or at least no worse, information than an uncontrolled, non-reproducible experiment would. And it might actually be cheaper to study those with money already rather than give people money just to be able to study them.
I think we could get some insights even with a broken test. But it has to be made by open minded scientists other wise people will interpret it as final truth.
Problem is that a "good economy" is a subjective idea. It won't matter if open-minded scientists review it 'cause people are going to interpret the results how ever they want anyways.
Edit: I'm not really aiming to contradict you. I would like to see it analyzed in an unbiased manner.
I think it's completely useless. The only results I care about are in the long term (30+ years). This is essentially a 2 year salary giveaway. Not even close to UBI.
I'd take the extra 15% of free time over the hit in the "socialness" of my office space. I can get that social fix during that time instead.