HN user
How dare any worker demand a living wage. Look at minorities. They are poor and you need to be just as poor to not be a nazi.
This isn't even a strawman in this case, since the company in question is literally cutting pay to its workers for the sake of minorities.
The capitalists are very good at starting a race war to keep workers from uniting.
How does increasing the pool of labor not decrease the price of labor?
This is economics 101.
At this time, we think it’s important we put our money where our mouth is, and direct some of our discretionary funds — such as those typically used to fund a spot bonus program (which is separate and distinct of our annual bonus program) — to bolster our efforts to ensure our products and services are accessible to the people who need them,” she said. “This requires making a few small sacrifices, but why wouldn’t we do that?
You're a Nazi if you want to get paid.
I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.
Pretty much, I was planning a system for bug bounties in 2011, after doing some back of the envelope calculations it turned out you would need 150% overhead for a $10 bounty with human due diligence and using master card/visa/pay pal. Oh and you could never support any project that has anything that the banks don't like, which then included porn, lgbt rights, fair use drm exemptions and a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember any more.
So you either had to convince people to use some alt-coin that wasn't a pyramid scheme, then build an escrow service on top of it, then use that service to fund the bug bounty program. Or you could just do everything terribly and end up with Patreon (which for the above reasons will get even more creator hostile in the coming years).
His critique was that you would need astronomical amount of data, like a gigabyte, to model the US economy.
Computer systems have gotten fast enough that a 00s Pentium 4 can handle all of the US economy, with the rest being a problem of gathering inputs.
Don’t think western governments are any better.
You are welcome to move to China if you think they are better.
After all I moved to the West because I thought it was better.
For no fault of her own, Katharina’s life is in shambles: her career is over, and her friends distance themselves for self-preservation. In desperation, she tries to meet with the reporter who has been hounding her. The reporter tries to extort her for sex, whereupon she shoots him. Remorseless, she turns herself in to the police for justice.
I think this describes Gawker more than the current howling mob. There is someone to blame at the end of the day, and there is a clear malevolence in motives.
Today what we have is closer to the medieval village in winter where there is nothing to do but go to the town square and watch the witches be humiliated.
B) If the "western world" is the bar, the bar is low.
And yet China manages to fail this low bar stunningly. To the point that they are running actual concentration camps for Muslims. Something no Western government has done, and the last one to do finished paying reparations to the victims 4 years ago, 70 years after it happened.
If you're going to be the one that explains to shareholders why their dividend is dropping each year but will only asymptotically approach zero so they should not fire you, by all means try. Somehow I don't think you'd be successful.
Because two people cooperating can kill one person who isn't and end up with 1/3rd more resources each.
Belief in infinite growth stems from an inability to understand how the exponential function works.
There is no such thing as indefinite growth, there is logistic growth between steady states. Pretending that immigration is always good is like pretending that drinking water is always good. Useful when you're in the Sahara, less so when you're drowning.
The US is currently in a situation where the labor market has an oversupply of people which is why real per hour worked wages are still at the level they were in '72. Adding more immigration now will only lower the living standards of the people already here, this will be the case until we increase the carrying capacity of the US economy with better labor laws, more government spending on fundamentals and better targeted research.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
Success is not a meaningful metric.
Gopher is a success when you browse wikipedia on it.
Kind of funny you're not banning any of the spam CPC accounts here promoting nationalistic, ideological, and political flames the second you point out the CPC is the only country in the world running actual concentration camps for minorities.
I love unix for what it was. But it made a lot of concessions for 70s hardware that we're stuck with.
It is rather unfortunate for us that everything that's come afterwards has been in some way even worse.
The former Eastern Block has factory bread that tastes better than most artisanal bread in the West. Same for all other foods.
The problem is not that there is some magical loss of essence when something is made by a machine, it is that mass market products in the West prioritize looks over function: strawberries that are the size of eggs and taste like cardboard, bread that is white and puffy but mostly air and mush, milk that is pure white and tastes like chalk water.
And in our industry, UI that look amazing on video and images but reduce your productivity to that of a brain damaged chimp.
The problem isn't that things are machine made, it is that we are making the wrong things because the wrong things look better in ads.
The difference is the screen refresh rate.
On 60Hz my wired and wireless mouse feel exactly the same.
On 240Hz, yeah, there is a lot of difference.
For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it without paying enormously.
The 'bread' you get in the Anglosphere is a crime against humanity. Not because it is machine made, but because it comes with a philosophy: looks matter more than taste.
Meanwhile Eastern Europe still uses the old soviet factory bread and the thing tastes like manna when you get it fresh.
The recent rebuild of a section of the Bay Bridge took 11 years and went 2,500% over budget. Whereas the original entire bridge was built in 5 years, ahead of schedule and under budget.
To use an analogy from heart surgery:
Fixing a car is easy.
Fixing a running car is hard.
There comes a point at which starting from scratch is better than trying to fix the original mess. Which in our business means the company goes out of business and is replaced by something new.
What does that software look like?
Since we're dealing with fiction, from a Deepness in the Sky:
The Qeng Ho's computer and timekeeping systems feature the advent of "programmer archaeologists":[1] the Qeng Ho are packrats of computer programs and systems, retaining them over millennia, even as far back to the era of Unix programs (as implied by one passage mentioning that the fundamental time-keeping system is the Unix epoch):
>Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex - and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
This massive accumulation of data implies that almost any useful program one could want already exists in the Qeng Ho fleet library, hence the need for computer archaeologists to dig up needed programs, work around their peculiarities and bugs, and assemble them into useful constructs.
So to answer your question, a mess of standards going back millennia with glue-code everywhere. I blame the separation of documentation and code for the coming dark age.
Since we're doing science fiction: put it on the dark side of the moon under the secret Nazi base.
Even the guy who started this site had something to say about shitting on orthodoxy:
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
But they tend to burn down whatever they are around before moving on.
It's rather depressing. I think it feels like living in the 60s, everyone knows that nuclear war will be a disaster and everyone expects it to happen tomorrow. At least I have a first class ticket on the Titanic.
Or we've been around long enough to hear the same bullshit (a technical term) enough times that we are allergic to how different it is this time.
I've still to hear why Rust is better than Ada and I caught the tail end of that madness.
No. Delivery is free right?
(But yes because it isn't.)
The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is zero.
Let me know the name of the apt mirror you're running. I'll be sure to point the couple hundred machines I admin for their hourly updates.
The real price of software includes the price of delivery.
Users would rather not pay that, so we are stuck with craptastic spyware that is selling their data to google, facebook, the NSA, the Chinese communist party and that organ harvester from Moldova.