newaccount74

Probably because forgetting to pull the handbrake is a very common cause of accidents?

I don't think I even paid them more per hour. The problem was that all the other companies only want to hire full time programmers, so I was able to hire them by offering a job with fewer hours.

Also, they complained that their previous job was super stressful because the sales people kept making promises to customers that were really hard to keep ("of course we'll implement this in two weeks") and so they were constantly scrambling to meet impossible deadlines.

so early websites couldn't even place text over images

I take offense at this! We weren't that stupid back then! We just put the text 5 times on the page, with position: relative, 4x in the outline color, each copy with a 1px offset in a different direction, and the final one in the text color. That trick worked with pretty early CSS.

I don't know about the situation in Spain, but what a lot of people in Austria mix up is that there are different types of terminating contracts.

In Austria, the employer can terminate a contract immediately if the employee behaves in a manner that would harm the employer.

If the employee does nothing wrong, the contract can still be terminated, but you have to give notice 6 weeks ahead (or longer if the employee has worked at your company for a long time).

People get these things confused and think employees generally can't be fired without a reason, but that's not true. They just can't be fired on the spot without a reason.

Labour protections doesn't mean you are protected from being fired.

You have to pay people the minimum salary depending on their trade, you have to give them 5 weeks of vacation, pay overtime, pay for health insurance and so on.

Employers can't exploit their employees, but employees still have to do their job.

But there is also a big area of the economy where employers ignore the law and treat employees like shit. For example, service workers are not generally treated well in Austria, and many are afraid of losing their job so they don't complain to the authorities.

That's a myth. How is it hard to fire someone?

I live in Austria and you can fire people for pretty much any reason. You have to give them 6 weeks notice, and there are some extra protections for people who are old or who have disabilities and who have been working for your company for a long time, but even then you can fire them.

You can even fire people for getting sick a lot.

And that's assuming you directly hire them as employees in the first place. Many people work via agencies or as contractors, and they have practically zero protections.

I hired a developer who just wanted a cushy job and I offered him a cushy job.

I offered 4 day work week, no on-call, no overtime, but paid less than their previous employer (because I couldn't afford it).

I am sure lots of people value things besides salary.

The billing department knows exactly what you were running, but they only tell you once a month...

We recently flew to Gatwick and I was pleasantly surpised how quick everything was. Barely any waiting times, the hardest part was figuring out which train to London needs what ticket.

Do you think that websites really don't track you if you switch all the toggles?

Interesting. Maybe that's one of the reasons. I think there are multiple root causes. Another common issue I see is "failed to get app specific key"

Every year I battle with a few permission related bugs in my app. Somehow macOS will randomly block some file accesses on some machines in some circumstances.

Take security scoped bookmarks. The only way that sandboxed apps can persistently access files outside their sandbox. It's an important feature. It's broken on some Macs. I know from logs that about 0.5% of my users run into this bug. It's been broken for years, and every time I report the problem to Apple they ask me for steps to reproduce or and Xcode sample project. I have no idea what to do, it's a bug in ScopedBookmarkAgent or in SecKeychain somewhere.

With Sequoia, they managed to break the feature for about 10% of users. That was apparently enough to get Apple to pay attention, so they fixed it in macOS 15.1. I think it's back to 0.5% now.

Somehow Apples own apps aren't affected by these bugs. Bugs that mostly affect 3rd party apps seem to slip through a lot more easily.

The security tech in macOS is unreliable garbage. And people praise it, they just think 3rd party apps are buggy. But for a lot of my bugs, the bug is in the macOS frameworks, but users come to me and complain.

It's no wonder that many developers don't sandbox their apps. It's just perpetually broken.

I wish they would make their tech reliable.

Presumably with a blood pressure monitor?

I'd love a replacement for Salami and Bacon. I don't think there is a healthy alternative that comes close.

I think that people really like violence, but no-one will publicly admit it. People want others to suffer. Nobody really cares about making the world a better place, or saving the climate or whatever. People just want a better life. But they have no perspective of getting a better life, so they will settle for everyone else to get worse.

It's the only way it all makes sense. I don't think that all those voters who vote for Trump and Putin and Erdogan and all the other autocrats think they'll have a better life. But they know that all those other people are going to suffer, and it makes them feel a bit better.

The most dangerous man (or woman) is someone who thinks they have nothing to lose.

People feel dispair, and therefore they vote for people who will make others suffer.

Wait until they hear about people travelling in camper vans that cook their own meals and just park by the roadside for sleeping! Or even worse, bicycle tourists who bivouac by the river, they don't even buy gas!

Dorms and hostels have multiple beds in a room, and guests share bathrooms & kitchens. This is similar.

There’s no restrictions on notarized apps that I’m aware of.

Notarized Mac apps have to used the hardened runtime, which comes with a few restrictions. For now, there are no content restrictions for notarized apps on the Mac. Let's hope it stays that way. But there are very significant content restrictions for notarized apps on iOS, and who knows how long until Apple introduces them on macOS as well.

But macOS requires app notarisation. They again made it harder to run un-notarised apps this year. If you look at the iOS side, it's clear that Apple has no qualms adding content restrictions for app notarisation, and it is more than just a malware check. It could be just a question of time until Apple decides to stop notarising Mac apps that do not use App Store payments.

Why not? Hostels work like that, and they are just fine. Lots of women staying in hostels. Usually they have woman only rooms and mixed rooms.

It's more like a dorm room / hostel, but with a privacy curtain.

Accomodations like this are common for low cost travelling, the only difference is that these are for medium term stays.

The problem with popular tools is that they have more bugs that can be fixed. So bug reports are pretty much worthless: You know that there are 1000 bugs out there, but you only have resources to fix 10 of them.

By asking users to provide reproducible test cases, you can massively reduce the amount of work you have to do. Of course that means 90% of bugs will never be reported. But since you don't have the resources to fix them anyway, why not just focus on the bugs that can be reproduced and come with a test case...

We should probably look at developer salaries / hourly rates rather than GDP. Most of the people in developing countries don't need IDEs.

But yeah, if you work for low rates, then you have to work more hours to pay for your tools.

Or if you have tax exempt revenue, like B2B sales to other countries.

Yeah, the reason that governments are introducing revenue-based taxes is because companies found a lot of loopholes to avoid paying profit-based taxes. This creates an unfair advantage of foreign companies compared to local companies, who have to pay taxes on their profits.

I wonder how they are going to game revenue based taxes?

The problem with "sales tax", or "value-added tax" in Europe, is that it applies only to consumers.

Businesses can directly deduct any VAT that they pay from the VAT that they owe. If they pay more VAT than they owe, they can get it back.

This means that Google, Meta, etc., who make almost all of their revenue from B2B transactions, effectively pay no VAT.

The "digital services" tax changes that, by introducing a tax on those revenues.

No. If you have money to pay for developers, you also have money to pay for tools. Especially since software licenses are going to be a tiny fraction of what the developers cost.

Are other fields really better than psychology in that respect?

I failed to reproduce published work everytime I tried. In one case I was only able to reproduce results by using carefully selected starting parameters I received privately from the author; in another case the author just told me that the algorithm was very unstable and required a lot of tweaking (not mentioned in the paper) to work, and another author didn't tell me about the boundary conditions used in the paper that were left out because they were too busy. Those were papers from physics & computer graphics.

The cynic inside me assumes that non-reproducibility is pretty much the default for most published papers.

I cold emailed a blogger that I learnt a lot from and showed him my app. He liked it, mentioned it, asked a friend with lots of followers to link it. Then it spread by word of mouth, and a few weeks later I had 1000 beta testers.

Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.

If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.

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