sidstling

$3900 is our max target, but we could buy a second car for that.

I wonder how much cost plays in, I mean, my fiancée and I are adult middle class millennials and we’ve been saving for two years to have a wedding, and we’re planning a relatively cheap one.

I read the article, and I’ve been spending the past 20 minutes looking at the SPA framework.

I’m still not sure what it is or why anyone would use it. It looks extremely complicated and verbose.

I ride my bike to work every day. It’s a 25 km journey, so with 250km a week I think I ride quite a bit. The fastest I’ve ever gone was 58,8km (ran out of hill before I got to 60) and holy cow that was scary.

I can’t imagine getting to 80, must’ve been terrifying.

Very true, and I do still prepare for presentations.

For me though, the side effect of practice has been how I can now naturally put my thoughts to speak and deliver the points I want the way I want. Both of these things seemed almost like magical abilities to me 10 years ago.

Practice, practice, practice. I used to be unable to do presentations, unless I had practiced them out loud twenty times in the days before the presentation.

I wouldn’t write a script and stick to it word for word, I’d make slides and general points and then practice them out loud until I got them right.

After a few years of doing this, I only had to practice a few times.

Today I can stand up anywhere and talk about anything to anyone without notice. But it was a long road getting here.

I still get the same feelings of anexiety, but the way they effect me has changed with the practice. Where they’d once made me mumble and lose my train of thought they now motivate me. I still get red cheeks once in a while, but I’ve learned to laugh it away.

So practice, practice, practice, but it’s a lot of hard work. I mean, practicing a 30 minute presentation 20 times takes maybe 12 hours, and if you’re anything like I was, there is no short cuts.

In what world would you close a billion dollar income stream to “win”?

What have you won?

China running out of things to tax, doesn’t mean America has actually gained anything. America was stronger, but that doesn’t create jobs.

I think it’s sexists, but I also think that targeted advertising should be allowed as long as Uber hires women drivers who want to drive for Uber.

I think there will certainly be some issues if it becomes a trend though. I mean, most programmers are men, most doctors are women and if you target your adds based on that, you’ll only further increase the current norms.

Frankly targeting sex makes little sense for most jobs, doesn’t it? It’s be more reasonable to target interests, qualifications, education and current job status. I mean, Facebook knows what job and car you have, it might even know how much you drive, wouldn’t it make sense for Uber to target that instead of sex? But maybe they combine it all.

The problem with these American views into Scandinavia is that they are always political. I mean, do you even have non-biased news over there anymore?

I say this, not because the article is wrong, but because the best school system in the world, the Finnish, does exactly the same thing as the Swedes.

It’s a tad ironic that an article so against social constructionism is pretty much constructing it’s outlay of reality. You could look at Finland and construct the polar opposite article, but if you want anything based in realism, you should probably look into why it works in one country and not in another.

Don’t modern mining pools work exactly like coin voting? The entry level is buying hardware instead of digital tokens, but it’s not like proof of work is a democratic process anymore either where every small timer has as much to say anymore.

It’s also a little weird to read about economics from cryptcurrencies that you still can’t use to buy beer.

Do the galaxy models have headphone jacks?

This, I see people calling the removal of the headphone jack a colossal failure, but if phones are selling, then how can it be a failure?

People have a natural resistance to change, 20 years ago my city saw major protests when it wanted to close a road and open up to the river underneath it. It would be a colossal failure, naturally it wasn’t and today no one can imagine the town without the nice nature stuff.

I think the headphone jacks are in that category. They weren’t really great, and now that they are gone, only niches really miss them.

The AirPods are such a nice product. I mean, Apple basically made Bluetooth not suck. They are locked to the Apple ecosystem, but they connect seamlessly across your devices, and Apple has frankly once again embarrassed the rest of the tech sector by making age old technology actually useable for people who don’t want to fiddle around.

Now, if removing the headphone jack had been a failure, it would probably have come back, and everyone else, the one-plus included, probably wouldn’t be removing it.

I’m not for or against it by the way. The AirPods would’ve worked with the headphone jack. I just think calling it a failure or a fiasco is silly when it’s so obviously working out great.

I think they are highly overrated and underrated at the same time. I think that useful opinions based on the practical experience of making stuff work, are extremely undervalued.

A lot of opinions aren’t bought by experience though. Opinions on the best x, are largely useless in my eyes, and easy to come by. You’ll see it in almost any HN discussion on a specific tech these days. I mean, when is the last time you saw a HN thread about JavaScript where half of it wasn’t a debate on why JS is good/shit and how WASM is the next Jesus?

I wouldn’t call all of those opinions undervalued, because they have no real use and serve no purpose. X is typically terrible and unproductive, but it’s also lovable and very productive. With almost everything there are pros and cons, and the only truly valuable opinions on anything are from people who make it work or crashed trying and then succeeded by doing something else.

I think this world needs a whole lot of “talk is cheap, show me the code”, but once someone actually does the work, I think we should learn from their experience. I think HN has been great at sharing the useful opinions, at least so far.

This was a semi-useless opinion by the way.

I’ve picked up node and js more seriously recently, coming from .Net and C# and I’ve been wondering why people in my learning material are relying so much on third party libraries for very basic things.

I’m probably a little old fashioned, but I didn’t even know moment existed and I’ve been fooling around quite a bit with JS dates recently. It didn’t take a long time to write the .ToString(dd-MM-yyyy) module, that was the only thing I really needed aside from the standard library, but I guess it would’ve been faster to import moment.js.

I view any digital distribution platform where your content is tied to the platform itself as renting rather than buying. Makes things much simpler.

That's why it was so disheartening to buy the x-com remake and find nothing but a steam activation code inside the box. I don't feel like I own that game because it's tied to an online account.

I know that you can just keep a local copy of it, but it's still tied to the platform and if you wanted to go to a different platform, you couldn't take it with you.

The story isn’t about immigrants, they are still willing to work the jobs, as you point out. Instead it’s an example of how the narrative of “if immigrants didn’t cause low wages then Danes would work the jobs” isn’t always true.

It’s not just that it’s hard labour either, it’s also that handling fish is extremely low prestige.

So the story is more about the nuances and complicated nature of the job market. It’s easy to blame immigration, and it’s not like immigration doesn’t have an impact, it’s just that there are a lot more forces at play.

It’s more complicated than that though. In Denmark where I live, we have trouble staffing certain industry jobs. Jobs like gutting, freezing and packing fish or general slaughter houses.

It used to be that these were low paying jobs, packed with immigrants. Since you need a social security number to work, and we’re rather good at finding people who cheat the system, illegal immigration workers isn’t really a thing in factories. But the system and legalization was still exploited so paying immigrants less was possible.

Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect.

As a result a lot of our slaughtering houses moved production and enrichment out of the country, but the really interesting thing is the fishing factories. They couldn’t move or outsource production because they need to be located close to where the fish are caught.

Despite the pay hike they still can’t hire enough people without relying on immigration. It turned out that nobody wanted those jobs, even when they pay really well.

Ps. Im not sure what fishing factories and slaughtering houses are called in English but I hope you get the point.

I guess the outtake is that it's better to read the book than the article about the book. :)

Is Fidesz really a comparison point though, for anti-establishment parties? They held power in 1998 and they saw their biggest increase in votes in from 1998 to 2002.

I mean, you definitely have a point, with them going from from 42.03% in 2006 to 52.73% in 2010, but they weren't born out of the crisis like their American counterparts, and while they started out anti-establishment, they kind of became the establishment in 2002.

I'm not saying the financial crisis didn't have an impact on Europe, it absolutely did, I just think it's much more nuanced and complicated than the article outlines. On one hand you have countries like Italy, that fit the bill perfectly, on the other hand you have the Scandinavian countries like my own, where we didn't really see a rise of populism because it was already here, in fact we kind of saw a decline. For a while anyway, because right-wing populism is certainly on the rise now, but is that really the delayed effect of the financial crisis or is it something much more complicated?

I don't think I agree with the article. Not from a European perspective. I'm Danish and we've had anti-establishment parties all my life on both the left and right side of the political spectrum. The populist rightwingers most similar to Trump and the teaparty saw their dawn in 1998 where they got elected with 7.4% of the votes. In 2001, three months after 9/11, they recived 12%. In 2005 it was 13.3%. In 2007, before the financial crisis they got 13.9%. In 2011 they got 12.3% and then in 2015 they got their current 21.1%.

If you look at the data, our right wing populist party saw a small decline following the financial crisis. They saw two major increases, one following 9/11 and one at the height of the European migration crisis but at this point our economy had fully recovered.

I think it's some what like this around much of Europe. Back in 2001 we got critiqued by the European Council because we elected a racist party to government, but Austria recieved much sterner critique at the same time. In Eastern Europe the local economies have seen huge increases along with right-wing populism. Greece, who took the worst of the financial crisis, turned to the intellectual left, not populism.

I think the article is probably on point about America. The tea-party saw it's dawn in the years following the financial crisis. You had the occupy movement and now you have the alt-right. We didn't really see similar movements in Europe though. I guess we do today, and I think we're unfortunately receiving a lot of bad influence from America. I mean, I can go on the Danish subreddit right now and see people complain about the MSM. Which makes no sense, because our media-landscape is completely different from the American. On facebook we have anti-vaxxer and flathearter groups, mostly using sources like infowars or breitbart because we simply don't have nonsense-media equivalents in my country. At least not yet.

So I guess, in a way the article isn't wrong, but all the nonsense is happening in an economy that's mostly better than before 2007.

I think context is king with these articles. It’s not a sneak peak into the lives of the wealthy, it’s a peak into the very vip section of a casino. The article itself is written mainly to sell the drama and the sleaze, and it’s purposedly focusing on the worst bits.

It’s fascinating, sure, but I think it’s also kind of useless informationwise, when you take the context into mind. If anything I think it’s more sad than sickening. I doubt those rich bastards are very happy, and no one is helping them find a better path in life. In fact the casino seem to have build an environment that specifically enables their bad behavior because it’s profitable.

You have a point. I work in the public sector though. Last week I facilitated workshops to analyze how the administration can better implement an IT system as well as the organizational change-management for thousands of employees. If they listen and actually spend the necessary resources (they won’t), it’ll mean better quality for patients and a better work environment for our employees. For me that’s worth a lot more, but like I said, everyone should find their own path.

I just worry about the longer prospects of getting in to social media content creation, and where it leaves you if you want to change paths. I’ve been on quite a few hiring boards and I’ve never seen social media followers benefit anyone. We’re not the most obvious sector where it would benefit you, but I have a friend in journalism and when I discussed this with him, he said they looked at it, but also that the platforms make it so easy that success on YouTube doesn’t necessarily teach you anything useful.

I think I’m more in agreement with you. I personally think some educational youtubers would make good teachers. I also think they’d never get hired, however, because they don’t have the right education and because they are competing with people who have actual teaching experience.

Like I said, everyone should do their own thing, and I respect youtubers for following their dreams and succeeding. I’m just worried about the longevity of it, and I’m mostly worried because I don’t want my own children to get trapped in something that might not last them. I loved video games in my teens and my early twenties, today I haven’t played one in years. Of course not everyone will burn out on their young adult hobbies like I have.

I respect people who have the ability to entertain thousands of viewers, I really do. At the same time I’m really happy that wasn’t even an option when I was young. I’m sure I would have spent even more time playing video games if esports, twitch and YouTube had been a thing in the 90ies.

I know, I know, not everyone is alike, but at age 35 I’m really happy that my job involves serious adult challenges, and that my success in life isn’t depending on thousands of teenagers pushing a like button.

Don’t you take this bit about out of context? If the premise the article builds around faulty tests is correct, then stuff like unit-testing is mostly a waste of time since you’ll still need to fix things when the servers are burning.

We’ve done TDD, projects with coverage only vital parts and no software-tests where I work and there is no difference in production on smaller projects. Maybe we’re terrible at writing tests, but if so, then it’s still something we have to deal with.

So I think it’s hard to outline the correct amount of testing for every case.

I don’t think I would want to work on a major system with multiple contributors if there weren’t automatic tests, so it’s not like I’m against testing either, I just don’t think it’s always a holy grail.

The push for forced support of local tv production on the big streaming services is coming mainly from leave type right-wing parties though.

In my experience git is excellent at being offline. I’m not sure if we would have had problem if our team foundation setup had ever went off line, but we moved to git long ago because it’s what every single IT-based student learns in my country. With every potential hire knowing git and almost none of them knowing tfd/vsts, it seemed silly not to migrate since the platforms both work well for what we need and git was cheaper over all.

You can use git outside of GitHub and Microsoft though, I mean, you could always use bitbucket.

Great headline, terrible article. It mostly talks about German words and almost nothing of German work ethics. The only interesting bit is around the end where it quickly skirts over the fact that you need to make employees realize they are unproductive before you can work on their behavior.

All the other stuff is just meh. I mean, the language analysis isn’t even very good, or in depth, with terrible half-assed English translations.

Basically, don’t waste you time reading this.

I work for a Danish muniplacity and I can assure you that every side way button has a functional purpose. It’s just that it’s not always the same one, and it varies throughout the day.

Some of the buttons are there solely for the visually impaired. Some of these will always play a beeping sound and then play it louder when you press them, others will only play the beeping sound if you press them. These buttons are generally placed in cities or at busy cross roads wherethere is never no-traffic sounds.

Others tell the signals you want to cross. In some cases, the pedestrian lights will never turn green unless you press the button, this is typically in the suburbs or in the country on streeets that are busy in one direction. Others will shorten the traffic cycle of the lights.

Here’s the thing though, most traffic lights are guided by data science to make traffic flow optimal. So often the pedestrian button is turned off during rush hours, where the signal is operating to maximize flow. Then during off hours, one direction may get prioritized because it has more traffic, and then the pedestrian button in the other direction gets turned on to shorten the cycle. Sometimes that setup alters multiple times during a day.

Many of the buttons combine functionality.

Aside from that they sometime get turned off for maintenance, maybe the button broke, maybe the traffic light got updated and the button needs to get changed. Maybe we’re testing a new traffic flow. Since 90% of them aren’t high priority, they can be turned off for quite a while, waiting to get fixed/updated. Hell, even the ones that are required for green lights aren’t necessarily fixed the same day, because the other 3 directions still work (we do fix these within a week though).

Finally there are the decommissioned buttons. As you might imagine they can be there for quite some time. It’s ridiculously expensive to remove buttons from just one cross section, so we pool them together. Of course this means that they can sit there for years waiting to be removed.

So it’s confusing. I know how they work, and I’ll still press the ones that are only there to give off sound.

None of them are installed for the reasons stated in the article though. In sidewalks where people have trouble waiting, we install visible timers that tell you exactly when it’ll be green instead.

Well I’m Danish, and I can assure you that the only political push on this area is coming from the far left and feminists and it’s mainly focused on the fact that people are more body centric because they feel the need to be perfect.

It’s not uncommon for young Danes to spend most of their free time either doing homework or working out.

This is largely because we’ve collectively spent the past 17 years in what’s called “the competitive state”. Here we’ve been told we needed to work hard to survive the global competition. This has brought necessary reforms to our welfare state, but one side effect has been that young people getting stressed because they never feel like they are good enough.

You’ll see similar stories around much of northern Europe.

Sometimes you’ll see anti-immigration parties comment on how immigrants have affected personal freedom for women, like the article states, but then those same parties are pushing agendas to make public nudity illegal. So I wouldn’t say they were forerunners on the issue.

This may be different in other countries of course.