ebrenes

The deal that you entered into had a set duration, and it was only binding for a set period of time for which you paid for. Once the money/time runs out, you'll need to renegotiate a deal, which Amazon has done.

From amazon's release: "Current customers will keep their existing unlimited storage plan through its expiration date."

Which means they are honoring the deal and not altering it and are abiding by the terms agreed to.

So, while the computer is not your property, the information as well as access to personal accounts or information might be protected. All of that is personal and depending on jurisdiction can be protected and accessing it would be a violation.

I'm not entirely certain what the legal status of this in the US, but I know of other jurisdictions (Costa Rica, for example), where employers are forbidden from scanning, logging or viewing personal email accounts or even personal email on work accounts/computers. Hell, they can't even make a back-up of your computer without your permission.

source: Constitutional Court Prohibits Employers from Accessing Computers Without Employee Permission: http://www.elmundo.cr/sala-iv-prohibe-accesar-computadoras-f...

> but I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over time.

Lack of time is a strong driver for some gamers opting towards simpler games, or at least games whose complexity does not translate into requiring additional time for mastery/understanding. In my circle of gaming friends, as our available time is under greater pressure we've purposely moved away from games that require significant investment of time to those that perhaps retain some complexity but reward a casual time investment.

Another factor I've seen that affects is the demand of contiguous blocks of time to game properly. Some games do not permit breaking up game sessions arbitrarily, so while one might have ample leisure time, there might be multiple interruptions in between which make playing certain games impossible or a burden.

> What exactly do they do that requires 60 hours of work and no less?

It's not so much the type of work, but other factors like volume, availability and perceived engagement. Even if you were capable of getting done in 20 hours what takes 60 hours for someone else you'd be expected to be available to help the team or respond to issues. Often times, in these types of environments you'll be expected to reply to issues quickly, respond to managers/leads if there's a question and these will arise at any moment within those 60 work hours, because even though you finished "your tasks" the team is still working to finish theirs and you're expected to be around "adding value".

As regards to the "checks emails", the task can literally be anything: a question regarding code, a response to an inquiry, a prompt for a decision on some topic, or a request for information that's needed ASAP. I've seen organizations that track the time taken to get a reply to these emails and they keep track in Excel sheets the average response time from individuals and their number of responses.

For example, I've also seen people get reported to management for taking a nap during their lunch break, even though they had finished their assigned task. The details of the tasks become irrelevant in those types of toxic environments.

I wasn't trying to say all factors apply equally to all people.

Some factors are completely negligible for some users. For example, individuals coming from a high income bracket rarely face significant legal costs due to their drug use. However, the story is much different for those from lower income brackets. None of the people I know that use drugs have faced any legal problems, but people are detained for carrying drugs. Just because I'm not witness to it, does not mean that cost does not exist for some non-negligible part of the population.

In another vein, for some people the legal repercussions are an issue due to their personalities or circumstances (drug testing at work).

I was merely saying that you could want the drugs, but there are still some strong forces (that pull on people differently) that make this decision far from frictionless.

YouTube completely censors material, here's a list of the actions they've undertaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube

And as it states there, they also have censorship based on their terms of service, where they prohibit the posting of videos which violate copyrights or depict pornography, illegal acts, gratuitous violence, or hate speech.

I don't believe the "anyone that wants to get high can" mantra. This misses a very important part of the equation which is that they must also be willing to face the consequences and repercussions of said decision including up to loss of freedom, financial costs and deal with the sketchy providers. In addition, it does not take into account the social stigma still associated with some drugs and/or usage in general. I know people who have used all manner of drugs who will talk pejoratively of individuals who still continue to consume, and have not 'straightened out'.

Even with drugs that are pretty available like alcohol, alcoholics have to curb their desire and usage based on many external constraints. And there is definitely no alcohol drought, but there's also no permissive free for all for consumption.

But isn't much of that self-inflicted?

That is to say, Walmart purposely aims to undercut the competition on price and to save people money. If they deviated a bit from that mantra they could surely increase their profit margins. Especially in areas where they are now the main purveyor of goods after they've driven out the competition.

God, I hated that game; Outpost was my No Man's Sky. It was an overhyped game that did not deliver on the promised features and was peddled by computer magazine shills as the greatest thing.

Just curious, how portable is that car seat, and would you mind providing a link?

Most car seats I've seen are difficult to transport, mainly because they are heavy, bulky, don’t fit onto a stroller, and they certainly don’t roll. Once I found out Uber had that feature in New York I didn't even bother doing additional research for that trip, but could benefit from the knowledge in future trips.

I was being a bit facetious with the first part. I was also curious about why only New York and was thinking they would institute it elsewhere.

For example, in Madrid we were often being told having toddlers in taxis was a big issue, as the law isn't very clear on the legality of it. You'd think that type of market would be ripe for providing a competitive edge.

That's only if you're expecting a candidate to provide a perfect solution; and don't make it clear that the time limit should inform their design and not just measure their speed of implementation.

Part of software development is tailoring a solution to the scope of the problem, and this includes taking into account the time and effort available to come up with a solution. Someone who looks at that problem statement and designs something that will take a week has missed a very important requirement.

You could reasonably scale up any problem to take an arbitrarily long amount of time, by adding onerous requirements (must have 7 9's of reliability). What I've found more rare and precious is the developer who can limit the scope so that items that are not up for negotiation like time (2 hours) & resources (1 developer) are respected.

I fully expect a developer to state their assumptions up front, so that I can judge their design based on the stated assumptions and not some unstated imaginary assumptions. It also lets me see how or if they prioritize.

I'd probably follow up on talking with your buddy. It's often invaluable to get an outsider's feedback on how others look at our code.

From what you typed, it seems like there wasn't a lot of communication prior to doing the coding exercise. I'm also not aware if you had channels to ask questions or discuss technical design options. If available, those are often "part of the test", to see if you make use of such resources.

When I'm reviewing code in such scenarios I'm often looking for other indicators aside from the code's correctness. Things like: naming conventions, structure of the code, patterns used, how over-engineered it is. Just as important is seeing if the candidate picked up on less explicit instructions or hints in the coding exercise. Finally, I look for code that follows the conventional patterns and standards for that programming language; I expect a candidate to discuss with me the deviation from those standards prior to handing in the code.

Anyways, I wouldn't completely give up. This might be an opportunity to grow and learn, but you'll never know unless you follow through on asking your buddy. Likewise, I've seen people here on HN volunteer to review code and provide feedback.

It's completely different in my opinion, the only similarity is that you have two people and one computer.

In pair programming you're both working together, complementing each other to tackle a particular problem or issue. In a good pair programming session we'll both work together to surpass an obstacle.

In an interview, one person is observing, testing and ultimately judging the other person, while actively ensuring they do not contribute to the solution of the problem so as not to skew results. Only one person is truly working towards the programming goal, and both participants know this.

You move to New York and limit yourself to one kid, of course!

New York is the only market that I'm aware where you can ask for a (one) car seat when you request an Uber. It worked fairly well when I went to visit, but most cars only have one seat, so if you have two kids you're still out of luck.

He pays lip service to the fact that Twitter is not legally required to do any of that, but then just says that Twitter should die anyway. Which is the part that's worrying about these discourses, where they just erode the freedoms and liberties afforded to society to fit within their narrow world-view of how the rest of the world should behave.

I much prefer the person who labels this type of behavior by Twitter as something unproductive or undesired, but to label it as "treason" lets me know all I need to know about the way this person is currently parsing the world.

And why not just make it clear that valid_data depends on valid_user?

    valid_user = loggedIn() && hasRole(ROLE_ADMIN)
    valid_data = valid_user && data != null && validate(data)

    if (valid_user && valid_data) …

I think this makes it clear that valid_data has a dependency on valid_user that was being hidden in the previous version, which we're now making clear. It will look a bit weird, but I think that's a positive because it draws attention to the fact that the short-circuiting is required and that double-look coupled with a short comment will make everything much more readable. The previous version does not convey as much meaning, in my opinion.

    if (loggedIn() && hasRole(ROLE_ADMIN) &&
        data != null && validate(data)) …

Reminds me of this case where airlines routinely skipped a step during maintenance because it took too much time. Skipping that step in the manufacturer's process ended up costing 273 people their lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191#E...

It would seem reasonable if that could be applied consistently to all payment methods.

If I decide to use digital currency could I opt out of all the associated costs related to cash? Including printing it, shipping it, storing it, transporting it, counting it and other aspects that a digitized monetary transaction automatically handles?

I would concede that yes, the process of creating wealth does increase the overall size of the pie, but it does not increase the size of this pie proportionally for all involved.

That increase in pie, is the aggregate effect on the outstanding wealth. So, it could follow any such distribution that in the ends provides a net win. For example, automating some job will not increase the level of wealth of those who have now become jobless. It will undoubtedly increase the wealth of those who are now benefited by this automation, and in the end it will be a net win for the economy. However, those who were negatively affected see no benefit from this increase in the pie.

I believe that wealth is sometimes increased through tactics and strategies that negatively affect the wealth of other through mechanisms such as slavery, indentured servitude, extremely low wages and other situations that take advantage of the less advantaged (usually in 3rd world countries).

So yeah, the size of the pie increases, but those bigger slices are not appearing on everyone's plates, and often times people are ending up without any pie on their plate.

So, this article talks about the retraction of the 2006 paper, which the authors admitted had some failings.

However, I fail to see much discussion about the subsequent paper [1] that addressed these failings and featured improved experiments that seem to still uphold the hypothesis.

[1] http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...

In Costa Rica, which follows a similar system, you can also buyout your notice period, which I think is fair for all sides.

Basically, if your notice period is 1 month, you can opt to pay the company 1 month's salary instead of having to work that time. If a company wants you gone, they pay you the equivalent wages for the notice period you were required to provide.

I think it's fair because both sides have agreed that $X amount is a fair exchange for the employees services. If those services cannot be replaced with $X then that's really the company's problem for taking advantage of the worker.

This buyout is in addition to any other severance package the worker might be receiving.

Anyways, I think it's pretty nifty as it allows the flexibility of leaving immediately, but also puts in some structure into the situation.

One of the most stereotypical cases of bullying is to be openly mocked and made fun of in front of your peers for a perceived difference. There's no violence involved in that.

Have a look at what constitutes bullying [0]

Violence is but a subset of it.

Unless we were to water down the definition of violence to include any manner of ridicule. At which, you're diluting the definition of violence under the guise of staying steadfast on the definition of bullying necessarily including violence.

[0] http://www2.gov.bc.ca/myhr/article.page?ContentID=44eaf3f0-f...

Case in point, self-driving cars. No one's offering that right now, because they all believe it sucks (at this point). But that doesn't mean that when they do offer it that it will be a bad idea.

While you can theoretically leave the U.S. whenever you want, you cannot stop paying taxes whenever you want.

You have to renounce citizenship, pay a fine for renouncing said citizenship to avoid paying taxes and possibly be audited. And you might argue that's fine, because they should be able to collect back taxes but you'll generally have to pay taxes for the next 10 years.

So, putting aside the immigration issues, and assuming you could move to wherever you wanted it's still not possible.

You're really sweeping under the rug a lot of people who would be impacted by having $10 taken away.

I am certain >0 people would have checks bounce, payments declined, fees imposed on them. For many people $10 can be the difference between being able to afford rent, payment of utilities or other items that could cascade into affecting their life significantly. The poor are really susceptible to these type of accidents

Also, about 60 million of the US population are below the age of 14 (which given you got 3 bln dollars from $10, I'm assuming you're taking the whole ~318 million population), that means many minors just lost $10 that to them would likely be more money than they ever had or be a significant amount of money.

And that doesn't even go into other aspects of the theft, like the effects nationwide on everyone having money taken away from them. The erosion of confidence in the safety of their money.

I posit to you a likely scenario of what you described. Imagine if everyone citizen in the US were issued a government mandated ID with an associated federally insured bank account. Now, the whole scenario becomes viable, where a hacker could steal $10 from every citizen in the U.S.

Now, that would first create a huge debacle. It would most likely cause an immediate loss of trust in the online marketplace, cost probably billions of dollars in getting it fixed. It would end many people's careers, most likely lead to companies getting fined, economic stagnation depending on a cascade effect from a loss of confidence in markets. It's hardly a victimless crime.

Sure, we could keep diminishing the amount to something ridiculous till we're maybe talking about stealing 1 cent. Which would still be a fairly juicy pay off of 3 million, and that would erase away many of my points or at least reduce their incidence significantly. I'm sure some people would miss payments or have other inconveniences affect them. Likewise, the theft would have repercussions on many people's lives.

Even if I were to take the magical scenario of someone who magically made 1 cent disappear from everyone's wallet/bank account. That would still cause great impact and damage. "Are there more people like him with such magical powers?"

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you have to look at the final magnitude not just the token value of the damage done per capita. And also look at the damage done by having affected so many people simultaneously.

At work we don't use Sococo but instead rely on Skype, Google Hangouts or Lync (depending on the project/client), but our experiences have matched what JoeAltmaier has said so far.

Whenever possible we prefer everyone be connected individually as opposed to sitting together in a conference room. The conference room becomes a distraction, impedes proper communication between all members and the attention spans increased when everyone connects from their workstation. The conference room creates two areas with two distinct conversations so if we're really aiming for an integrated environment we enforce people connecting from their workstations as opposed to using a conference room.

Culturally it also spreads that idea that those sitting together are better than the remote workers, which given our line of work is an unproductive idea to keep propagating. And while there might be differences, they pale in comparison to the negative impact that ignoring or discriminating remote workers has in our projects.

Yeah, the Costa Rica case was a real bummer for me.

Just had my first child and I only managed to get 5 days from the company, they were nice enough to throw in 2 additional days to my 3 days. To at least make it a week.

There's a bit of a caveat to the women's 4 months, those 4 months start by law 1 month before the child is scheduled to be born and continue for 3 months. We would have preferred more time after the birth and less time before.

In contrast this was one of the things I most liked about Everquest (in its early releases).

First, most loot had a reason to be there and some logic to it. You need bone chips? You'd go whack a skeleton. You needed some beetle eyes? Go whack a beetle. Bear meat or skin? Go hunt for bears. It gave the world a cohesiveness and logic that you didn't even have to think about.

Also in the early days you could give mobs items and they would equip them. If you traded a sword and shield with a skeleton and it would drop those back to you when you killed it. This was also pretty cool, because you could tell what damage to expect from the mobs based on what the mob looked like. If it was a skeleton wielding a staff you knew you'd found a catch because those would sell for a pretty penny.

Later on, in subsequent zones that all started to break down a bit more. But overall, I think it kinda retained this in essence. Had the game had a stronger crafting mechanic behind it (instead of being broken from the get go), it would have been quite interesting.

I agree whole heartedly on the just blindly gathering 100's of rat tails or wolf pelts being boring beyond redemption. But there's some charm to being able to hunt for what you need.

Don't forget vehicles, diseases, sudden deceleration, falls, drops and darwin award winning behaviour.

It's important that people be aware of the risks they face, and seeking to silence that conversation is not helpful. If anything, it will create an environment where any perpetators might go unpunished because it's just implausible they did what they did.