SimonPStevens

The easiest way to achieve this is just don't watch live.

I honestly don't remember the last time I watched actual live TV. I just recorded it and watch it later, then fast forward through all the ads.

Even if I'm watching it the same night, I'll just sit down to watch it slightly late, so I've got enough of a buffer to skip the ads, and catch back up to live by the end of the show.

I think the intent of the parent's question was to say why can't a group of drivers get together and create a ride sharing app that is jointly shared by all the drivers and just gives all the money to the drivers, hence taking no profit (rather than the more formal term 'non-profit' which has the tax implications like you say.)

Besides, companies only pay taxes on profits, so loss making companies don't pay any tax either. (And usually have some kind of ability to carry forward losses to reduce future tax bills)

Why would anyone work voluntarily for what would essentially just be a company that gave all it's profits to the drivers but expected them to work for free. Volunteers tend to work for causes they believe in for some ethical or moral reason, and while I sympathize with the drivers like I'm sure many do I doubt many would work for free so someone else can earn more.

Uber is a non-profit version of Uber. They made a 10% loss last year. So a non-profit (assuming they intend to at least break even) would actually need to pay the drivers less.

I still can't really think of any kind of work where 2 wheels and that body shape would be any better than just having 3 wheels and more stability. It would be just as flexible. Using wheels means it's not like it's going to be doing anything particularly off road anyway, that's for the walking robots.

Literally the only thing I can think of is that this is a pure tech demo to show off how clever they are that will never make it into production at all. Which is fair enough I guess, it certainly achieves it's aim if that is the case.

Ah, yes, thank you. This is the part I didn't take in. You'll return to pass through the orbit, but the ship will most likely not be at the same point.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but does this mean that the sci-fi cliche of going for a spacewalk and accidentally being knocked off your ship and drifting away forever is wrong? Actually, given a short wait you'll just stop and drift right back to the ship again?

(Yes, in orbit only, I understand that freefall is different from zero gravity scenarios)

I think this shows the fixation on hourly rates. Why does there need to be a translation to hours.

A day is a day. When I was freelance I just billed a day rate. The point for me is that I simply don't count the hours. It just meant I would spend the day working on that clients project only. Typically I'd do something like around 9-17:30, with around an hour for lunch. So that works at 7h30. But sometimes I stopped earlier. Sometimes I worked later. I still billed the same.

I never pro-rated the invoices for partial days. My minimum billing increment was half a day on the odd occasion I needed to run an errand that was going to require less than a full day off.

There's something I don't understand, perhaps someone knows and can explain.

Why have the chosen to build it with only two wheels? It's clearly unstable and has to constantly adjust it's position and counterweight to stay balanced. Sure, it's super clever and I think it looks amazing. But surely it would have been far cheaper and easier to build it with three of four wheels so it naturally stable. It would have looked less cool, but I feel like that can't be the only reason.

Quote reformatted for mobile:

This devil would be a human being disguised to teach a moral lesson with a theatrical metaphor, so let's not take the metaphor too far. I think we would do well not to say that users are “selling their souls” if they install nonfree software—rather, part of their own freedom is what they forfeit. We don't need to exaggerate to teach the point...

They aren't standard working terms because of the unions. They are standard working terms because all teachers (who work in state schools at least) are employed by the local education authorities, who in turn set their working terms and salaries based on the government's department for education. So for teachers there is no individual salary negotiation, it's all decided centrally by the government and you either take it, or move to the private schools of which there are a lot less. (This is UK for me, but based on what op said, I think it's similar)

There is something I've always struggled to understand...

Forget tech for a second. In any job type, isn't it a pyramid. There are lots of junior roles, slightly fewer senior roles, fewer again manager roles, only a few senior manager roles etc. Isn't that just a natural part of any team's makeup. You only need one leader for a team of 5-10 people, etc. I've witnessed this team structure at every single company I've worked for (and as a contractor for 10 years, that is a lot), if you want to progress up to the next level there are always fewer jobs available.

Doesn't that mean that as you get older, competition for the job at a seniority that matches your age become increasingly difficult. The number of people doesn't change.

Not everyone can progress up the ladder when the ladder narrows as you go.

This isn't ageism is it? It's just the natural lower demand for more senior people.

And I guess what follows from this is the people who fail to move up, and try to stay at their current level are then also competing with the people below them who are trying to move up.

[Resubmitting this comment I made against a previous flagged article]

At first glance it Blue Oak seems like a decent license, and the points the author makes about MIT [0] seem valid.

My major issue with adopting a new license however is how well known it probably isn't, so there is not yet a clear legal consensus on it.

In all software companies I've worked in there is a clear list of licenses that have been pre-approved and I can just log the inclusion of any open source using those licenses and everything is fine.

However, if I want to use anything not already on the list it requires a manual approval process from the legal department, which is usually time consuming, and often just results in a 'no' because they are too risk averse to asses the licenses properly themselves, but are happy relying on the consensus that licenses like MIT and BSD are OK for commercial use.

Also, while a lot of the authors crtisisms of MIT seem valid points about uncertainty I think there is a lot to be said for the long length of time it has stood and the general consensus on it's intentions. If I see an MIT license, I can basically know I can do whatever I want with it, provided I give attribution, and there is no warrenty. I'm not going to worry about being sued over someone's interpretation of "deal in the software" because AFAIK, that has never happened in the 40+ years the license has been in use. I think I'd actually feel more at risk using Blue Oak just because of the lack of commentary and consensus on it's terms. The only really substantial point he makes is about variants under the same name, but the lesson here is to just do a diff on licenses to check it's in the standard form. And anyway, doesn't the same problem apply to Blue Oak and in fact all licenses, if you don't do a diff on the license text someone could easily produce and use a variant without you noticing.

[0] - https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-b...

Yes, of course, but my point wasn't that if you cache all results your software will be faster. My point is just that it is possible to write code that consumes more memory, and runs faster under some circumstances, which refutes the ops claim that all software that uses more memory is slower.

At first glance it Blue Oak seems like a decent license, and the points he makes about MIT and BSD seem valid.

My major issue with adopting a new license however is how well known it probably isn't, so there is not yet a clear legal consensus on it.

In all software companies I've worked in there is a clear list of licenses that have been pre-approved and I can just log the inclusion of any open source using those licenses and everything is fine.

However, if I want to use anything not already on the list it requires a manual approval process from the legal department, which is usually time consuming, and often just results in a 'no' because they are too risk averse to asses the licenses properly themselves, but are happy relying on the consensus that licenses like MIT and BSD are OK for commercial use.

Edit to add: Also, while a lot of his crtisisms of MIT seem valid points about uncertainty I think there is a lot to be said for the long length of time it has stood and the general consensus on it's intentions. If I see an MIT license, I can basically know I can do whatever I want with it, provided I give attribution, and there is no warrenty. I'm not going to worry about being sued over someone's interpretation of "deal in the software" because AFAIK, that has never happened in the 40+ years the license has been in use. I think I'd actually feel more at risk using Blue Oak just because of the lack of commentary and consensus on it's terms. The only really substantial point he makes is about variants under the same name, but the lesson here is to just do a diff on licenses to check it's in the standard form. And anyway, doesn't the same problem apply to Blue Oak and in fact all licenses, if you don't do a diff on the license text someone could easily produce and use a variant without you noticing.

I just don't think this is true.

A very common tradeoff we make is to cache the results of time consuming calculations in memory, or even cache raw data in memory to avoid database calls. Both of these techniques increase memory usage, but improve performance.

Hey, sorry for the OT message.

I like to connect with other devs working in the same industry as me. I work for Contigo Software, we make ETRM software and various other things for the energy industry.

There's various ways to contact me in my profile if your interested in chatting.

Just worth noteing this looks specific to the US freelance/contract market.

I can only speak for the jurisdiction I know (and I am not a lawyer, just a former freelancer), but in the UK this contract would not be suitable for someone wishing to operate outside of IR35 (disguised employment rules) as it makes no mention of substitution, direction or control, which are the key factors when determining IR35 status.

Not necessarily a failing of the project, but perhaps it could mention more explicitly that it's for US jurisdiction

(For UK freelancers I recommend looking at IPSE membership which includes access to their contract templates which are good and commonly accepted as standard contracts)

Yes, this. So then those young brilliant individuals move into management because it's the only way to continue some semblance of career progression in your 30s.

Then a subset of the gifted technical individuals grow tired of management, step down and go back to the tech to do what they really loved all along.

I've met a fair amount of brilliant engineers in their 40s/50s who have been through management and decided it's not for them and are now shining as engineers again after a decade lost to leadership roles

I did. I was replying to the parents comment about not being able to retire early specifically because of bad luck. Not the article directly.

And even based on your comment, I still think that statement sounds wrong to me.

> a small but not insignificant percentage of them get rich.

It happening to a small percentage means it require good luck for it to happen to you, not just the absence of bad luck (which implies it happens to most people unless they have bad luck).

> Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions.

This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.

Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.

Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.

You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.

It's not that .Net Core itself is unstable or anything, it's just that the ecosystem of packages and libraries is fairly immature, and there is still a lot of mismatches in support and dependencies.

For example, if you use core, you can't use entity framework 6, you have to use EF core, which has most features and if you are building a new app you'll probably find a way to do most things you want, but if you are porting something you might struggle. And that means you can't use anything that is built on EF 6 either. The dependacy chains seem to be muddled. One library will seem to be fine on core, but one of it's dependencies will only work on the full .net fx.

Another problem I hit was with doing some dynamic code generation. Roslyn is supported, but code dom isn't. That would be fine if I was starting from scratch, but I had a bunch of useful existing that that all depended on code dom that would have been a lot of extra effort if I couldn't reuse.

I would say if you are starting a new project and it's a fairly standard website you'll almost certainly be fine. But be ready for a lot of pain if you have any code to port.

Power Query - Used for querying data in excel and Power BI, and also for a custom connector for Power BI.

OData - A standard for rest APIs.

Did some playing with .Net Core, but still not really satisfied that it's ready for serious prime time.

I'm the first person to hate on Facebook, but for once I think this is hugely overblown. They didn't sell peoples data, that made it possible to voluntarily connect accounts.

It's the equivalent of complaining that hotmail sold your private email data to Thunderbird when you used Thunderbird as your desktop email client. No. They didn't, you gave them access to it because that is what connecting the accounts does.

If should be fairly clear to anyone that if you connect accounts you are exposing data between the accounts. The debate about the granularity of permissions is neither here nor there, everyone should have a clear expectation that connecting accounts = sharing lots of data. Unless it is explicitly stated what is excluded the assumption should be that everything is shared.

But where is the line? Can I import hundreds of people to manually have them dig coal out of the ground with their bare hands because I can't afford the machinery yet and claim I'm bootstrapping a mining business. We would typically call this exploitation.

Many types of business can't be bootstrapped. That is not unusual. Bootstrapping is primarily a popular approach now due to easy computer automation that makes a small subset of companies viable with the very small staff and no expensive hardware. It certainly isn't a default across all industries.

The labour pool is a market. You are not entitled to cheap labour just because you want it. If you can't find someone willing to do your work at the rate you want to pay it's because someone else is paying more for the same work, so you need to pay more to attract the labour.

Importing people from abroad is something that only exists as a solution because of the imbalance of development levels around the world right now. I expect that this is an anomaly that we are going to see correct itself in time once all countries reach a similer level of development. Where will you import your cheap labour from then?

In the UK we used to employ children to work in the mines and the mills. This was eventually realised to be exploitative and made illegal. I'd bet that all the business owners at the time complained how would they ever be profitable without the cheap child labour. But they either adjust or die, and I'm happy with that tradeoff. If a business is only viable with child labour I would prefer it didn't exist at all.

In this case I think the primary reason is to protect the company.

Aardman is probably a fairly hot company right now. Probably prime for a purchase by one of the big studios. But then it would most likely just get broken up and turned into a mill for churning out look-a-like content. Or possibly even just a logo stamped on contracted out content. I believe the founders have been fairly clear in the past about not being interested in selling.

While the founders still own it they can just turn down these offers and stay independent, but soon they are going to retire and will have to give up ownership to someone. And that someone might just decide to take the big payout and sell. So this is their way of ensuring that the company continues to run as it is for the good of the employees. It can now only be sold if the majority of employees vote to accept the sale, and if they do at least they'll also be the ones to get any associated payout not just some profit driven owner.

I want to like .Net Core, I really do. But in my opinion its just not yet ready for serious use.

An example. If you want to use .Net Core you can't use entity framework, you have to use EF Core, which doesn't yet support mapping to views or stored procs, only tables.

Now you might think that's fine, maybe you only want to map to tables. But it's the same story all over the ecosystem. Many major projects have a separate netfx and core package, and many times the core package has restricted functionality. You will almost certainly find a whole host of things you need are missing.

And then you get the fact that ASP.Net Core is dropping support for .Netfx in the next release, so if you want to use ASP.net Core you are now limited to EF core too, which means you are making a full jump and can't just go halfway first. And .netfx is now not going to support .net standard 2.1.

The list of incompatibilities and restrictions just goes on and on. I certainly can't keep the full list in my head. So right now I'm not really willing to commit to a new project of any significance on .net core because I know there will be dozens of missing dependencies or features.

You could argue this is just want it's like at the cutting edge, and the gaps will be filled in time. But .netfx is clearly already going into maintenance mode, so the push to move to .net core has already started.

Ah, my mistake, I didn't know that. Kind of actually enforces my point of the ecosystem being a mess though and the only realistic thing to do is compile for multiple targets.

Everytime I start to think Microsoft is heading in the right direction they go and blow it all away again.

This week we've already had a new asp.net core which drops support for .net standard and only supports .net core.

And now, a new version of .net standard that .net fx isn't going to support.

We are right back at the mess of portable class libraries with all their different supported profiles.

It means app devs are constantly dealing with problems like "is this library I want to use, supported by all the targets my app needs to run on", and library devs have a mess of different frameworks and combinations to support, so inevitability drop a few of them unless they are a big project with lots of manpower.

I'm always shocked by the difference in pay in the tech industry between US and UK.

For similar career path, my pay has consistently been significantly behind this based on a pure currency conversion.

And also I'm sure our living expenses are higher. Most hardware I buy seems to be priced the same or very similar in $ and £ so effectively charging a premium to UK buyers.

Am I comparing wrong, or are US tech works really so well played?

Good security isn't based on keeping source code secret. There is plenty of the most secure encryption software that is open source. I don't really see any ethical issue in handing over the source code.