Hacker News Reader

omouseon We should kill the 40-hour work week

There's a difference; if you own your own business or are freelancing, any extra work you do is for your benefit. If you're in someone else's company, completely different story.

omouseon Why Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor?

Owning shares is not the same as ownership. Profit sharing on the other hand...

omouseon Mozilla Acquires Pocket

My only problem with Pocket was that it was proprietary and it was integrated with Firefox. If it's released under and open source license, then I'll be glad to have it integrated.

Pocket makes Mozilla competitive on mobile because Firefox's market share on mobile is very low.

omouseon Mozilla Acquires Pocket

You can see that just by looking at their job postings. The experimental ads team was hiring and then stopped and then the team was absorbed into other teams. Now they have more postings for project managers. They're basically introducing more hierarchy and traditional corp. stuff from the sounds of it.

omouseon Using Neutrino to jump-start modern JavaScript development

What complexities of build processes?!

Building Javascript files with modules and deps is a solved problem. We've built all sorts of other file types and compiled them and linked them before with tools like Make, SCons and other tools. It's ridiculous to think that JavaScript is a unique language that needs its own build tools. It does not.

We went down the wrong path years ago when we decided that whenever we use a language we also need to use tools written in that language. Grunt, gulp, webpack and the rest should go away.

omouseon Using Neutrino to jump-start modern JavaScript development

It's just you. No one actually likes fighting against webpack so that they can concatenate JavaScript files in the correct order.

omouseon From lunch to acquisition: How Atlassian bought Trello

Atlassian found their niche: enterprise sales. Because the buyer is not the user usually so it's way easier to sell shitty products.

omouseon They Write the Right Stuff (1996)

Those code reviews are more commonly called inspections or code walkthroughs and are very very uncommon. Everyone wants to cheap out on testing and quality :/

omouseon They Write the Right Stuff (1996)

Hah, the only thing that most people end up doing is code reviews and much of those are very relaxed and bare-bones.

omouseon I started a one-man biz that's beating VC-backed startups

What's interesting to me is how he focused on doing small things and building up on them.

omouseon Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

The company's been around since 2009 apparently, I'm pretty sure they are no longer a startup, just a regular business that has to survive in the real world and all funding rounds are temporary loans.

omouseon Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

That makes it sound like a ticket-shop; you're treated like a bricklayer rather than a software engineer?

omouseon Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

The market is definitely strange in Toronto.

Did the #2 type companies offer any equity at all?

omouseon Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

What was on the 16pg exam? that sounds ridiculous!

omouseon Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

Read through their GlassDoor reviews, it suggests they're an awful company on both the dev and sales side. And that means thatm at this point, their product probably isn't very good because devs keep leaving. Which means it'll be a mountain of technical debt to deal with and of course the inevitable, "omg we must have new features X, Y, and Z".

They're no longer a startup, yet they act like it. If they didn't raise more cash I would suspect that they would be out of business in a few short years.

omouseon The Document Foundation on City of Munich’s discussion on returning to Microsoft

So you're suggesting that a city government should continue to support and basically aid and abet the monopoly that Microsoft has in wordprocessing and spreadsheets? That sounds like you don't like the free market.

omouseon The Document Foundation on City of Munich’s discussion on returning to Microsoft

Free market doesn't mean you have to go with the cheapest solution. It means you have choice. Preferring local firms is ok because they're competing in a free market; they aren't being given contracts because they're local, it's just local firms will be opening up to supply the demand.

omouseon Encrypted email is still a pain

ProtonMail and TutaNota are pretty good.

omouseon H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

A significant proportion of IT and STEM graduate are unable to get work in their chosen industry, and proceed to waste years of education by going into other areas out of necessity.

Therefore all the talk about a tech talent shortage is complete and utter bullshit and coding bootcamps and H1B visas are another strategy to keep wages low and make it so companies don't have to pay for training, don't have to have signing bonuses.

omouseon H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

BAM, there is no fucking tech labour shortage! They're just hiring outsourcing firms instead of training. Fucking knew it.

omouseon Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”

Yep, that's what I just noticed too. Interesting how a story about unionization gets pushed down.

It will be interesting to see if any tech news sites pick up on this story at all. It seems like anything to do with labour/unions gets ignored.

omouseon Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”

very interesting that this story is very popular but doesn't seem to appear on the frontpage of hacker news? can any of the mods address how that works and on which page this story appears?

omouseon Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”

will ultimately help alleviate these workers complaints, but perhaps at the expense of their jobs

definitely at the expense of their jobs. capital/owners get to keep all the earnings, the workers get nothing. this is why it's important for workers to be part of co-operatives or to have profit-sharing or more equity or shares.

omouseon Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”

WOW. I'm impressed! :D

omouseon What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days?

it kind of feels like skipping homework at school, things are always building up

There's always more work to do! No surprise! This is why we automate so that the amount becomes smaller and that's why we cut things we don't need.

omouseon Ask HN: Why do companies outside the US pay so much less?

They aren't wrong but salaries are too low; you can't really bootstrap unless you're doing a side business and then you're effectively working two jobs. There's no YC in Canada or at least it's harder to get some funding.

omouseon Our long term plan to make GitLab as fast as possible with Vue and Webpack

Webpack is a mistake imo. Accidental complexity everywhere.

omouseon Sandstorm is returning to its community roots

The reason I mentioned it is because it has worked for Wordpress, Drupal and Magento in general. There's countless shops that build plugins and themes for those and are hired for things ranging from small changes to full-scale development.

I would love to see that happen with Sandstorm or other projects because maybe the consulting model doesn't work for the parent company but I'm sure there's hundreds of smaller consulting firms that would love to support it.

omouseon Ask HN: Why do companies outside the US pay so much less?

That's also possible. They know how to herd the cats and get them to move in the right direction. In Canada for example, there are few companies that do this correctly and the best ones are influenced by the way US companies (especially Silicon Valley companies) work and manage their employees.

omouseon Ask HN: Why do companies outside the US pay so much less?

Because devs get to keep more of what they earn? That should also be true for other workers but it isn't. It's really difficult to hide how much wealth is created through software.

I always like to point out that even the most junior developer can automate a task and save a company hundreds of thousands of dollars.