_csoo

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

>...programmers are often thought of as "professionals," like doctors or lawyers, and not part of the "working class." But this is misleading. Most programmers are neither self-employed nor employed in an organization where they have a meaningful say, and most can't expect any kind of tenure or partnership status, no matter how long they work.

>...Programmers are typically hired at-will, and are not generally accepted to have any professional obligations that could supersede management's authority, nor the ability to do research or pro bono work on company time. Management styles range from the likes of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss to a hierarchy so flat that it's almost invisible--until it's time for somebody to get fired. Still, for most programmers, management authority is a constant.

Professionals without authority.

I like this highlight of collective bargaining:

>the right to contribute to open source projects or veto the release of insecure, privacy-violating or otherwise unprofessional code.

Sure would be nice if the red flags we raised would actually have an impact.

>Most important, however, might be the idea of solidarity.

This is something that Michael O Church mentioned in a blog post; how the managers always say nice things about one another whereas programmers always slag one another and always blame the last guy for crappy code instead of trying to build each other up. I once had two senior devs basically force me out of projects; where did they end up? at different companies 1 year after I was forced out. where did the executives end up? they merged the company and gained some $$ or completely cashed out. Solidarity would have been the better choice.

At another place, the devs weren't listened to and juniors/contractors were hired to develop a project. The devs had to deal with the mess that was created. What happens on the next project? They aren't listened to again and can't even flag down the fact that the previous project has generated like 0.001% ROI.

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.

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.

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

Unsurprising, most programmers are poor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is also the genius of the Smalltalk systems.

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

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