_csoo

I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures.

Substitute "software" for DeFi. Every single day we're playing with fire through low quality code and bad security practices. DeFi just exposes the real financial costs and consequences of terrible software development. How many countless dollars and hours and data have been lost through bad code?

tech companies in Canada pay peanuts

This is because:

- Canadians are happy to accept whatever wages they are given (the "smart" Canadians move to the US to get higher salaries)

- immigrants to Canada are happy to accept whatever wages they are given

With those two factors, you're not going to make a lot of money in Toronto unless you're working a US company (Google, Amazon, and so on) and even then it'll be less than US counter-parts.

Berlin is a better choice because you can easily travel around Europe and there are more markets. It's also a faster flight back to India if you're visiting family.

However, once a Canadian citizen, there is a possiblity to get transferred to a Silicon Valley arm of a US company from Canada (using the TN visa) and hence receive a higher compensation.

This is what I'm talking about. The employer will dangle this prize in front of you for as long as they can and will continue to hold off on promotions and keep your salary the same for as long as possible. This is why Canadian salaries remain low, because there will be another sucker that comes along and will also be offered the same "we'll give you a promotion in a few years!" or "we'll transfer you to the US soon! very very soon!" line and they'll accept it.

How would you compare between the two countries for building a career in tech for an immigrant?

Is immigration required? Because if not, all you need is a good internet connection, a good computer, and knowledge lots and lots of knowledge to distinguish your skills from others and get the higher freelancing rates.

"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies.

WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races.

And it's better than that, there's people with years and years of experience in modifying and creating plugins and themes so once you have enough $$$ from the basic setup, re-invest into the business and get better developer support for all the GPL'd plugins and themes you're using.

Shopify is just the next closed-source iteration of WordPress and Magento. WordPress has one of the largest platforms and they've taken over (and open-sourced) blogging, content management, learning management systems, and ecommerce. They and Magento are better examples of a platform than Shopify.

In the long-term, "platforms" like Shopify lose because they don't have nearly enough developers. They have ~3000 "apps" listed in their app store: https://apps.shopify.com/browse/all?pricing=all&requirements...

WooCommerce has 285 plugins, and WordPress has 54,000+ plugins. Magento has ~5000 plugins.

It would be cool if Stratechery took a look at free/open source on the platform/aggregator spectrum.

My favorite conspiracy theory (which I totally believe) is that mattress stores are mostly for money laundering. No market can possibly support as many stores as there are, and every time I go by one, they're empty.

Here's more fuel for that fire.

If you look at Sears in the last 10 years, the number of shoppers seemed to dwindle and getting smaller and smaller. Except for a spots in each store, there wouldn't be many shoppers at all. So the economics don't make sense...and then bam they're going bankrupt.

Now look at rug stores; there are a few of them where I live (Toronto, Canada) and every single one, without fail, has very few customers and has a sale on. Usually it's "inventory clearance" or "going out of business" or whatever. But they just continue to sit there.

There are a lot of industries and niches in industries where the economics do not make sense on the surface but I suspect there's some perverse set of incentives that make it possible. Maybe some weird tax loophole, or some kind of government loan or grant, or some weird combination of laws (or lack of laws and regulation) that make it possible.

Embrace the weirdness?

feels like the old warez dayz

Do they do blu-ray?

I found this to be the case when writing a Cucumber test for an Emacs package. You can see an example here: https://github.com/omouse/org-doing/blob/master/features/org...

It was more helpful to write "Given I have an non-existent file" than to write "(not (file-exists-p org-doing-file))". One can be read by others who don't understand Emacs-Lisp and they'll understand the concept, while the latter can only be read by Emacs-Lisp developers. With the Gherkin syntax I'm free to move my tests over to another text editor and implement code that's specific to the text editor. For example, I could use my tests to implement the package for VIM or Atom (something I might do on a weekend).

The best part is that you have the spec under version control and locked down instead of spread across.

At work no one is really updating the functional spec of our project and it means we have information that's falling through the cracks and is in separate emails or IMs. Executable version-controlled specs have to be maintained but at least they're in one spot.

That's okay. Free/open source software in general is still considered to be utterly radioactive but there's enough developers out there willing to work with and on it that it isn't a problem. There's no reason why we should let corporations direct what we use and work on all the time ;)

If you're complaining about the legality of incorporating the leaked code, you aren't ready for a world where free software rules. The end game of free and, to a lesser extent, of open source software is to live in a world where copyright and patents no longer apply to software. Basically, software will be treated like mathematics.

Incorporating the leaked code if it is indeed highly useful brings us closer to that world. It's forced expropriation but I think we need some of that, especially since companies like Oracle are trying to limit how much open source software they produce.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's an outlaw version of FreeBSD or IllumOS that's released over Freenet or Bittorrent or patches are encrypted and traded over IRC if the leaked code proves to be very useful. In fact I would hope that that happens.

Basically we need socialism. Everyone should be guaranteed a standard of living (including a house and food) at a certain level that will increase as our productivity increases. The freeloader "problem" won't be seen as a problem. We should actually be looking it as the model for the future...how can we increase productivity such that we can support as many people as possible who want to be lazy or who want to pursue what they love?

Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life.

Uh, wage slavery? How much of a person's salary is spent just on the basics such as food and clothing and gas and education?

The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage.

This is how the system is structured; there is a permanent underclass that will accept any wages. Even more educated people will lower their wage expectations when the economy appears bad. This means that companies can get cheaper labour at any time to pick up slack or as replacements if their current workers get too uppity and demand a living wage.

it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed.

Unemployed is only bad if it means starvation or homelessness. In a socialist, communist, or anarchist society unemployment would be okay. Unemployed workers wouldn't starve, they would still be allowed to live, and they could take part-time jobs/unpaid internships and learn new skills without worrying about making ends meet.

There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges.

So your solution is to train people to become effective human resources for businesses to consume? That doesn't help. We already do that.

You're saying that workers need to learn how to be better workers so that they can prosper. You're saying that they should make themselves as appealing to businesses as possible and somehow, you're assuming that this will give them higher wages. The only reason people get higher wages is because they demand them either through a union or through an informal agreement with other workers that they won't work for less. This is true in the IT industry and is one of the reasons why IT workers don't see a need for a union. We all have agreed never to work for a shitty wage. We know that we can just take our skills elsewhere or start our own company or whatever because we stand up for ourselves.

That makes it a very good embeddable program, but then I do like Free Software.

double the expressions but they're simpler to understand perhaps.

he obviously hates dealing with regular expressions and I do too. It's only natural.

Jesus fuck, the first comments I see here are complaints about the code.

What about the concept? Is it any good? Is it worth working on?

Reading it, it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer.

Unsurprising, most programmers are poor.

It's hilarious that Miguel thinks RMS is fear-mongering when there is rightly something to fear. RMS has it right when he says,

However good or bad the CodePlex Foundation's actions, we must not accept them as an excuse for Microsoft's acts of aggression against our community. From its recent attempt to sell patents to proxy trolls who could then do dirty work against GNU/Linux to its longstanding promotion of Digital Restrictions Management, Microsoft continues to act to harm us. We would be fools indeed to let anything distract us from that.

It isn't fear-mongering when there is something to fear. Miguel also has a short memory and doesn't remember all the times Microsoft has spread FUD about GNU/Linux and free software.

I don't like cults. I don't like the 'cult of closed software' any more than I like the 'cult of open software'.

What you're saying is you don't want to make a concrete decision and you want options to be open to you.

This is not a war, and anybody that is trying to make it look like one is manipulating people.

It's a war between many businesses, non-profits, users, developers, etc. Do you want to be stuck with Microsoft Windows everywhere? Or Intel's x86 hardware everywhere? Intel, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will all do what they can to kill the competition.

That's not manipulation, that's the truth. You can try and ignore it, but computer history is full of conflict between various companies who tried to force their ideas and "standards" upon the rest of the industry and on their competitors.

Maybe you just hate the word "war". Call it competition then, or conflict, or a struggle, or whatever else you want.

No need for all this polarizing.

Yes there is. One idea is opposed to the other. How can there not be polarization?

This whole 'drama queen' episode has gone on long enough, let both deIcaza and Stallman go back to their respective IDEs (at a guess, Visual Studio and Emacs) and write some code to prove their point instead of all this prose.

This is actually Stallman's point, and it was also the open source movement's point. Code is not enough. There is also the discussion of freedom or the discussion of marketing.

You want to completely ignore the discussion. I don't mind, you can step out if you like, but what you're saying is exactly what a proprietary software company would like. They don't want discussion at all because discussion means legitimizing alternatives.

If you don't want to take part in the discussion, the confrontation and war of ideas, then don't take part in it.

Actually, thanks to market forces and monopolies of various sorts, you are eventually forced to use proprietary software. The example someone else gave was Microsoft Office file formats.

Here's a better example: almost all webdesign, graphic design, and other jobs of that type want you to have experience in Adobe products. So what ends up happening is that because people want the jobs, they learn Photoshop. Now it may be a great program, but it's still proprietary and you get locked into Adobe's upgrade cycle because the latest version is The Industry Standard...always, it's fucked up how that works really.

So if someone has had experience with the GIMP or some other free software, and can do the work just as well as a Photoshop user, their resume will be dumped because the Adobe name has a lot of weight. That someone will then figure out that to get a job, they'll also have to use proprietary software.

You don't live in a vacuum where you can do what you want.

The tools that we shape, will in turn shape us. The trouble is that if you release a project early, the people who use it or participate in it could become used to its current state and fight against any change.

You can see this with Microsoft products. Microsoft has to have its updated products compete with its previous products.

This is also true of Project Xanadu. If we consider the Web as an early form of Xanadu, we can see that it was released prematurely. There are lots of design flaws and over the years band-aides have been applied to them. There are still many people who fight against these band-aides (I'm looking at you IE6 users and corps who force the use of that browser). We're stuck using hacks for what should be easy. People are now used to do things the hard way and using hacks and cannot easily envision a system that doesn't suck.

The genius of the Lisp machines is in their extensibility and consistency all the way down.

This is also the genius of the Smalltalk systems.

Jealous of what? No profits, no business plan, fumbling with the developer platform and with Beacon (or whatever their ad platform was called)

I only started to enjoy Pink Floyd after I realized I didn't need to be a stoner to like it. Stoners and their mindlessness ruin good things.

This is turning into reddit. Please get rid of this.

Physical presence is valuable if used properly. Most stores aren't very inviting and it's hard to shop around for movies when you can only see the cover of the movie. The movie packaging doesn't tell you much.

Hm. An interesting idea is to have reviews of movies stickered on the cases.

"Officer Roland Holmgren, Oakland police spokesman, said the body has not been identified."

Dude, like oh my god, he could have led them to another body that just happened to be there! We just don't know!

I'm not sure what to think. On the one hand it's great that students are realizing they don't need to take something that seems pragmatic in college/university, but on the other, I wonder if they're really learning anything useful other than how to bullshit.

Agreed. Someone please delete this post!

Since when is Startup News synonymous with reddit?