HN user
So what is ycombinator biased towards?
Unless you have not noticed a lot of news are being censored systematically on HN when they touch certain topics, some of them is giving SV/IT a bad PR, or poor work conditions in IT , political POV...
references: http://hckrnews.com/ (use all button) http://hnrankings.info/
Oh, and people need to know they are not alone. Meetup to speak.
People don't need an union if they are happy with the situation.
But they may need first to share their concern in a place where confidentiality is granted (because we all have loyalty penalties made especially to block the possibility of sharing information). You might need a lawyer advice on how to make people able to share their mind freely.
People suffer, but they cannot talk met googlers and facebookers they were looking like citizens of former soviet countries fearing the snitches.
You will probably want a low tech organization to ensure a strong privacy of the meetups (word to mouth).
You may want people to sign anti-snitch agreement (that blocks leaks).
You will want to make all your possible to protect the confidentiality of the attendant of the meeting in early stages.
Well good news, a profession is about agreeing on a minimum platform, and this is either called ideology to harm it or a "manifesto" to make it look sensible, so I beg you humbly to call it a manifesto.
Then, I think every laws are local.
It thus mean to open local unions based on the immutability of laws that grant you power.
Than it is a classic of union: mutualize (crowfund as it is called nowadays) the costs any legal dispute than can be won on any of these points of agreement.
Each and every country have their preferred form of legal structure that helps doing so.
But thanks to the power of "global internet communication" and international convention (Bern/Geneva) regarding IP law some topics can be mutualized internationally.
It is all about creating local sections and more global chapters. So, I would strongly recommend starting it in your own neighborhood using logical synergies with other confluent interest such as "consumer unions" (like EFF) and legal expertise, public schools.
You create a section, ask money to fund lawsuit, make your adherents choose the lawsuit they agree to pick, and go head on with corporations that pick on coders. Eventually funding strikes.
then you can do PR, go to public school tell the truth about the work market (no lies), help legal system have a fair access to information, take part in benevolent action profiting your local community...
done that, been there, it is a all lot of sweat and tears. but it works.
defining what the job is.
If we are legally liable, than we must have full power on any decision that can lead us to jail.
We have to be able to justify the stuff we do.
remember we have 200 dependencies not because we love it but because we are forced into them. Yet when an incident occurs in production because of these dependencies we are sacked/sued held responsible for it.
Why we have 200 dependencies in the first place?
Because someone who never coded is hired to tell us what to do (a marketer, an «architect», a urbanist, a CTO that never coded) tell us to add these dependencies and they are not LIABLE.
But when it fails, it is our responsibility our liability. And we are thrown like kleenex. As hell if I do agree to be blamed for something I do oppose.
Yes there is this new generation of ninja rockstar coders, but I am fucking boring coder: I don't want company to sink because I cannot afford it, I want a paycheck to feed my own, I want to come back every night to see my family, and I know why I want to be conservative: because it is proven to work.
Having a profession is :
- having responsibility that fits your authority; - being paid for every hours spent to produce, including commuting for your work; - having hygienic work conditions that wont harm you (fuck crunches, open-spaces, poor chairs/lighting); - having standards in cleaning (yes cleaning is important, stuff like nice PR, documentations...); - LIABILITY we have to accept we are liable for things in exchange for authority; - ETHIC, we must have the right to refuse to code programs that in our knowledge opposes the common laws (like privacy, embezzlement, fiscal fraud, consumers rights to be informed...); - the respect of IP laws, I am bored of seeing people STEAL free/open source software and claim it is theirs, it we take part in doing so we are negating the value our very own work... - having our name granted to a creation we made...
And to make is worse, I propose that being a coder should not be related to a diploma but an apprenticeship.
I see no justifications, no evidence sustaining the idea diploma worth a bit in IT so let's drop this shit. There is a S in CS standing for Science. A corporation should help either take part in better education in university or supervise a meaningful apprenticeship based on metrics not wishful thinking.
Well, work conditions are worsening everywhere. Stress it our daily bread now. Stress == non alignment between responsibilities and authorities, like a dieselgate software engineer being ordered to make it, but s/he will end up the only one in court.
Short anwser, - realign your sense of responsibility with your authority. - ask for better work conditions, including time for your family life.
This is calling since it is a global problem for a global solution.
I know I will be downvoted for this (HN censors anything going in this direction), but as I cared: it is calling for a union of software developers.
We all genuinely suffer what you describe and I don't think we worsen. I do think these are our work conditions, and alone we are f*cked.
Your family matters You matter Yes work organization in IT is FUBAR and manager don't take responsibility but they have no incentive to respect you more than the shareholders.
Now, you can burn out like a slave or fight for your self.
I have 19 managers, none of them understanding the job at hand and a family I can't see because of 3h/day commutation.
Else the job is fine.
Ho! And I inherited a fork of 500k slocc using 5 languages and so much frameworks I can't count them anymore.
I am the janitor of a huge codebase with a management under acid, but it pays enough for me to not sleep under the bridge, so I guess I am happy.
Since I got the pattern of downvoting, I am bored.
I thought first they were smart and it was funny to understand what wwould made you upvoted/downvoted.
Then I understood it was plain propaganda/censorship whether you were taking an opinion refuting the godliness and virtues of VC/startup/entrepreneur.
HN is the modern pravda except it is liberal instead of being sovietic.
Same shit
turn over.
A "normal turn over" in IT is 10%
In normal companies it is less.
If more, flee.
This already happened circa 1780.
In Europa merchants were taking advantage of the numerous measure of length, weight, volume to make customers unable to be comparing.
There was 117 measure of length used.
So as a result, Louis XVI who was influenced by the early liberal set on course the project of the international system. The idea was a market is more competitive if states regulate the obigation for merchant to make measure comparable.
Hence came the meters, kg, liters and the decimal system.
It was adopted by the republican after the king was overthrown because they were also willing for a fairer competition...
It has always stroked me as weird that USA never saw the inherent liberalist advantage of simple measurement system.
I have made a hook in my coder life as a mover.
PRO: It was indeed a breeze and stress free. CON: without social help or illegal secondary activities you don't earn enough to sustain your life (pay rents, food, clothing and that's all).
But, it has been the moment of my life I was the happiest to work everyday.
Maybe that's how you could make a vacation. It helps you forget everything about the business brain washing that is strong in the IT, it clears your head of the noise, and you might come back more efficient, and retaining more employees by sharing their day to day concern of working to make a living and not living to work.
My take is simple, life is too short to not try to live some of your fantasies, some may actually prove to be fruitful.
Simply remember that there is no success in trying if you don't accept you also may fail and be disappointed.
I was lucky, may you be lucky.
I code, do ham, wine, gardening cider, bread, pastry, cooking, music, bike fixing, knitting, sometimes write and compose. The secret: being ruined and not having money for buying any of these goods.
Let me tell you, you sometimes you would like to stop having to be an active producer.
It is a rich person problem to not be able to produce in whatever field (intellectual or physical).
I keep a diary: with following info day : arriving : departure : time of lunch // travel time.
Why ?
I noticed after 43h in a moving window of 5 days my focus, irritability is up to the roof and I make way too much mistakes that can lead to a dramatic mistake.
My work contract is 37.5 so everytime I reach too much overhead I talk to my manager ask him if he will need me one day to make extra efforts in case of emergency?
He says yes, I say I will abide but if we are working under normal load, than he needs me to rest and give me my time back.
He then picks on me, saying it is my responsibility to not stay to long at work, I make him notice it is because of the company management I have to stay late and the deadline.
He grumbles says it is not the right time.
I go to see the CEO say the same thing
They give me my family time back. I stay quite rested (add 2h30m / day (when the rail company has exceptionally no problem) of commuting with the worsts train lanes of Europa (1M commuters/days)) so it actually feels like commuting is working. Teleworking is denied for lack of control.
Oh! and lunch time is not counted as worked hours except for the other managers. (so I stay away from my family 10hours per day, I see my wife 5 hours a day).
That is the only diary I am keeping.
If I get overworked/burntout, it costs nothing to the company, but I will certainly get fired sooner or later and have a hard time finding a job with a sort of depression running.
Wow, this sites supports spamming which is illegal regarding european law.
https://github.com/EnMarche/en-marche.fr/blob/master/src/App...
Got one of this email that was oblviously sent by a member of "enmarche" in bulk the mail address domain was pointing on an obviously cybersquatted domain in .fr which is illegal on this TLD (fr law)
So they are proud to have made a tool obviously usable for commiting felony.
Our president supports infringing the laws.
That's the reason, I think ethic and liability should become a must in software industry. You cannot say, I ignored it would happen and it is not my fault.
Memory fragmentation due to dynamic non fixed size data structure and multithreading is an old foe. That may not be fixable in c/c++
Worker A allocates dynamic stuff. Algo take a segment (0+sof(str)(ofA) + n) Work B Allocates to create same kind of data structure (fragment of a JSON) [ofA, OfB] Wk A resume allocating, boundary of [0, ofA] exceeded, no free contiguous space up or down [Ofb, OfC] allocated Wk C enters wants to alloc, but sizeof(string) make it bigger than [0, OfA] so [ofD, ofE] asked .... and the more concurrent workers the more interleaving of memory allocation go on with fragmented memory.
Since malloc are costly the problem known, a complex allocator was created with pools of slab and else, probably having one edge case, very hard to trigger having phD proven really complex heuristic.
CPU power increase, more loads more workers, interleaving comes in, edge case gets triggered.
And C/C++ makes fun of fortran with its fixed size data structures embracing any new arbitrary size arbitrary depth data structure for the convenience of skipping a costly waterfall model before delivering a feature or a change in the data structure and avoiding bike shedding in committees.
Human want to work in a way that is more agile than what computers are under the hood.
Alternative:
Always allocated fixed size memory range for data handling, and make sure it will be enough. When doing REST make sure you have an upper bound, use paging/cursors, which require FSM, have all FP programmers say mutable are bads, sysadmin say that FSM are a pain to handle when HA is required, and CFO saying SLA will not be reached and business model is trashed, and REST fans saying that REST is dead when stateful.
Well REST is a bad idea.
No but you have enough info to make it in the comments
including the nmap/curl commands
You can also when you are smart do it by swapping movement in compensation agencies.
When one ton of gold is supposed to leave germany for USA, it is accounted as leaving registered in accounting books as a +1 ton in USA fed reserv, but it actually stays on the territory and countend as -0 in germany... as long as the amount is not credited.
if flux of swap goes the wrong direction (more sell than buy from USA) then you also have to physically transport some gold.
You miss the point. The value of money is based on trust and belief. Hence the word fiducial (fiduceo) money.
One part of a market is holding your promises. If you don't all your current transactions are considered shady (standards& poors, ...), hence the notation agency on currency: it measures how likely you are to reimburse your debt.
USA being one of the largest emitter of bound on the market, the word they are being crooks on an important topic would damage on the long term reputation hence the value of their currency, hence triggering a strong recession + hyper-inflation.
In the case trust in USA Feb bank (which is private) is broken, USA may turn abruptly in Venezuela.
Since most notation agencies are in the USA, it might have a domino effect creating major chaotic fluctuations between currencies, hence automatically triggering a safe backing off from every hedge fund out of their countries ...
If USA lose the trust of the market since globalisation is labelled in US$ it means either people are going to diversify to Swiss Francs, Euro, CAD, Pounds ... and a big loss for USA.
No one want this. Not the big european, asian groups.
Workers and modests people would be totally glad, but it would mean a 1929 situation in the USA for sure, and in a lot of connected economies.
So no one wants this.
http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/dont-mess-with-switz...
Aircraft caverns :) F18/A Hornets and modern equipments.
With 100 Millions he still can create the company that will hire him.
Well 2ble highly unpopular opinion: russians are a tad baked in a very passeist ideology that may make them do a good things while they have ill intentions.
The data so far have been pretty checked, and pretty alarming on the actual state of democracy. To be honest it looks like NSA/CIA are now copying the worst of the KGB bad practices that made USSR being tagged dictature.
Russians thinks democracy cannot reform themselves and it will lead to chaos as the truth about USSR made USSR crumble down by losing their allies in the western world.
Is it sure?
Let Russia spend money thinking they undermine democracies while actually helping them being stronger.
Hell may be paved with good intentions and bad intentions may also results in good deeds.
Anyway, when you have lived during cold war it is fun to see Russia and USA swap their place.
It was a fun read, but I can outsmart him in a non fact based analysis that might be closer to the truth.
In its blog circa 1813 at St Hélène Napoleon posted on YikYak never credit to malice what can be simply explained by incompetence, and while trying to dominate the world with a huge army, I discovered that my machiavelic plans were anyway countered by having huge organization that tend have incompetence at critical points.
Well, Napoléon may have been right. The estimate headcount of all the US agencies are 3 000 000 workers, a huge amount of the population if you want to keep stuffs secret.
If not enough, you have at least 5 big agencies and a lot of small one.
You also have a tendency to have the patriots like Snowden attracted to secret services and army.
Some of them whose opinions may diverge as much with their agencies heading as their sense of duty is strong.
Plus without uncovering any big secrets, since 1986 commercial war with Europa and the WTO agreement on stopping to subsidize companies with public money, NASA, DARPA and secret services have been used as a way to discrelty fund part of the economy (namely IT, aeronautic and military industry). And let's no lie to ourselves one of the biggest part of the agencies' job is economical intelligence to favor the interest of some companies.
So, well, these subsidies are a resource increasingly taken by the services :) and some companies want this money.
Subsidies used to go in road infrastructures where mafia was happy to have its share. Urbanism used to favor real eastate....
There are a lot of enemies inside the USA against the services and their power over this huge budget of theirs.
My take on the issue is that maybe russian ... mob ... constituted of USA citizens could totally be involved, but as much as any other economical agents in the USA.
The problem of having too much money is that you'd better live in the shadow to not become the target of jealousy.
It may be knowing how much CIA and NSA have been involved with IT companies (as both suppliers and recipient of subsidize and probably economical intelligence) that other sectors of the economy like .... real estate, agriculture, energy, distribution want to have their place under the sun back again.
So, going back to Napoléon, I do think that the leak in secret service employing that much persons not all trusted requires so much duplication of information and internal leaks to simply get the work done on a day to day basis, that leaks are just a simple expression of a probable incompetence that did not scale up very well.
Yes, the russians may have opportunistically played with it. But clearly the biggest problem first is to have huge mammothean bureaucratic agencies.
Voilà, me too I made my own I don't know nothing I will tell you everything analysis based on wind.
:P
When you have digged a tad in the hell of the clocks/timer of a x86, it is very easy to saturate your capacity of having reliable timestamping
Modern computers are not only CPU bound, they are also interrupt bound, and sadly very limited in "available reliable timestamp" capacity. And controlling which clock you use is hellish.
And if the availability of a monotonic raw clock was not enough, I feel bad that in 2017 we still rely on 8254.
Documentation for having a reliable clock on every OSes is close to 0.
Without reliable clocks, without reliable synchronisation, we are anyway unable to provide "good" distributed systems at low costs (yes GPS is a solution that can be easily hijacked).
x86 has won because of legacy supports, but the legacy support means we are stuck with outdated components
It is weird no computer so called scientists know science.
Any detection system are characterized by the fact they will fail at detecting true positive, and tag false negative as true.
That is the 101 of science, there is a COST for detection and failure.
Biometrics are based on detection hence they can fail according to their sensitivity (false negative) and the cost of cheating (false positive). This analysis vary with progress.
AI too are detection systems, they also fail and can be defeated, it is just a question of balancing a cost/benefits analysis with a good budget. Hence criminal organizations and governments will tend to be the firsts one to exploit theses systems because they have larger budgets.
They owned ~0.39% of the internet address as a single institution. Which is a lot, given MIT is less than 100K users and world is 7Billions sharing 4billions IPv4.
Isn't the bull also the symbol of a impoverishment of workers?
In financial jargon:
Bulls are peoples betting in growth saying buy, and betting on more dividends given to share holders vs work costs.
Bears are the one selling. (Bad news too to be honest, but more for share holders than workers)
A long trend in bullish behaviour is related to the richs getting richers.
Since it is in the financial district and they were pissed, it looks indeed the girl can be seen as a counter guerilla meaning finance is a symbol of countering the excess of finance.
Which, if it were the meaning would be kind of a strong alteration of one of the meaning of the oeuvre.
Knowing that among the undeniable moral right of the author there is right to prevent distortion, mutilation, or modification that would prejudice the author's honor or reputation, the guy do not have a point, he is in his lawfull right! Denying his point is just undermining the very few protection of authors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#In_the_United_Sta...
As a coder whose work is protected by Author's rights I strictly see as dangerous to fight against hardly claimed rights that makes our value.
I do free software and I do not give up on my moral rights and I think as a worker protected by these rights we should be educated in author's right and whether or not we like his point of view, we should stand for his claim because that is a fair right.
Imagine you make a software or an essay saying HN is full of interesting bright mind, and someone defaces it adding contents to mean HN is full of pedantic idiots. Would you like this?
people don't want to pay
cough
rich people don't pay, poor people pay for them.
That's the base of the free internet model.
With the Tier1 ISP billing at 95th percentile, and ISP almost illimited subscription and the close to flat rate, the contribution of small internet users in volume is the biggest in proportion of revenues.
And with people like google not paying for their transit, it means someone has to pay. Who?
Every internet users.
Internet & phone are in all developed country a must have for administrative & job related tasks. In every country it is when you are poor a substantial cost, as well as computers.
For those who are growingly poor internet is expansive.
But for the happy few with latest generation computers internet is comparatively cheap.
Being rich is the art of making the poor pay for you.
It is not people don't want to pay, the poor cannot pay, and they are the biggest population.
Me I have an adblock not because I don't want advertisement, it is because my 2007 computers cannot load a modern web page under 15 seconds with ads enabled.
The modern economy is based on the redistribution of the money of the poorest to the richest achieve by (lack) of regulations where the strongest wins.
So, my point is there is no free champagne, someone has to pay, but I don't see why it should be the one not being able to buy a bier.
And call a cat a cat: commercial internet has not yet found a fair sustainable model.
not QUIC but HTTP2.0
You mean like in Bangladesh, people will be literally enslaved with debts?
Because the resources for colonizing space with .01% of the population will be synonym of the death of the reminder.
Resources are bound.
And it will not be viable to send resources from space.
Space colonization is just an excuse for subsidizing the military industry nowadays.
Yes.
Why we do web?
Because lazy sysadmins blocked all but http.
But we still need to communicate.
Let's do udp like streams on top of tcp.
And may be we need to open firewalls still to make A&B communicate without going through a Central stuff C to have no SPOF.
Let's invent STUN a way to trick firewalls into opening an incoming transmission behing a FW.
Our security seems broken.
Indeed.
What do we do?
We put more broken stuff on the web like JWT/OAUTH.
And the STUN bite into your security?
Either ignore it or use a «DPI» proxy.
But it breaks the purpose of secured communications and still does not solves the problem, and breaks TLS.
Wait we have IPSEC in IPv6, no matter that cryptographically it is considered weak, it is by default in windows, PS4, and we have open source server... that are buggy as hell with root rights.
Maybe PGP, SSH, roll your won crypto?
Good idea, no users know how to use them correctly, devops included...
And what about the multiplication of passwords and credentials?
Let's use broken application with root rights and bugs to serve as a wallet that has a good UI, or an good enough application no one can use because of the restrictions?
Money is based on trust. The real harm that can happen to IT is to lose the trust of the customers, hence its value.