262 karma · joined February 16, 2018
Marijuana makes you feel good, without needing to do anything else. This can be great in some environments.. such as enjoying a serene natural scene. But if you've got deadlines to meet it can feel challenging to "get up off the couch".
Some people have no problem with that, but other people will sit around doing nothing all day.
Says your particular organizations policies, why is the line drawn at 90%, why not 95%? Is this restriction based on calculations or was it simply arbitrarily chosen?
If it's arbitrary, allow me to offer an alternative, focus support only on "modern generation" browsers which auto-update by default. All popular browsers adopted auto-updates as a collective effort to improve end-user security, and so as web developers we're able to encourage this by only supporting those platforms.
As you can see on caniuse, grid support on those modern browser platforms is 100%. The only ones lacking are IE which microsoft has abandoned, and Opera Mini (I can't speak good or bad about that, I haven't examined it).
The idea that you must support as many browsers as possible is a relic of the 1990s dot com bubble when it was unclear which browser was best and there were no agreed upon standards. It's now 2018 and you're either using Firefox or Chrome and to a much smaller extent, Edge or Safari. Any other browser that wants to be taken seriously is going to support the standards set by those platforms.
> I don't believe that it's exploitive
But it is. You aren't paying them based on their capabilities or merit, you're paying them based on what region of the world they were born into, which is completely out of their control. The message your "offer" sends is this, you aren't worth a real developer's salary, because you were born in India. So work for peanuts for me, your privileged first-world master, until you've earned enough to move out of the nation you were born in, and then maybe you can earn a salary equal to your peers.
That is exactly what you're doing, and that is exploitative. I know it's exploitative because it is exactly what American plantation owners did in the slave-owning south 250 years ago. "Work for me for some length of time and you can earn your freedom". It's the same scam. "But these developers are being paid" uh huh, they get $5-$20/hr for what I get $100/hr for. It is dishonest to call that fair.
If you don't believe in equal pay for equal merit then stand behind your opinion, but don't pretend that you're doing these poverty stricken people some kind of favor by paying them fast-food salaries to develop your million dollar applications. If someone spends their life becoming an expert developer they deserve to make expert-developer salaries regardless of what region of the world they call home.
The economic "tool" of outsourcing has always been about exploiting poverty and literally everyone actually knows that.
I guess I'm challenging you to justify this policy without naming greed as your justification. You are exploiting people for what amounts to slave labor. You're saying that because someone has the unfortunate luck of being born in a third world country that they deserve a smaller salary than you. Admitting that you are not ashamed of yourself for exploiting poor people for cheap labor I mean.. what else is there to say I guess.
The current system of hell-banning repeat offenders doesn't actually prevent the savvier users from seeing their content. Instead of that, what if comments could be split into two sections, threads about social ramifications and similar humanitarian concerns, and threads about intellectual curiosities and technology specific discussions?
Users could opt-in/out of each type of conversation, perhaps the social threads could be opt-out by default.
I understand what the site is trying to do. I also understand that there aren't really "other websites", because as I said this is where the real adult conversations are happening. HN is the only legitimate major source of news on the planet today in 2018, thanks in no small part to community participation. Everywhere else is garbage news and flame-wars as you've stated. I don't think "flame-wars" are a product of having grown up conversations about important topics, they're a product of having a lot of non-grown-ups participating in grown-up conversations. The up/down voting system does a great job already of filtering worthwhile content, it should not also be necessary to censor people.
_this_ conversation is, in my humble opinion, extremely interesting. What is the social responsibility of a website like HN which starts small but grows into something much larger? Look at what happened with Facebook when they ignored their social responsibilities in favor of their preferred direction. That's a conversation which should probably be had. And if we're being honest, and let's be honest, the best way to have it would be an Ask HN, and you and I both know that'd be flagged right away. My concern is: history has repeatedly taught us the severe consequences of that.
This seems like one of those situations where everyone knows it's broken and everyone wants it to be better, but strict adherence to "regulations" prevents otherwise free-willed people from doing what they know should be done. And then after the inevitable tragedies that result, people look back in hindsight thinking "why were we such fools". Often in the form of hollywood dramatizations ;)
I appreciate you taking time to hear me out, anyway.
These three TLDs are half the price of this .app gTLD. In fact all gTLDs are stupidly over-priced.
Furthermore, a .com can satisfy 100% of the needs of your organization. a .app will only ever satisfy a tiny niche of your needs. So instead of an organization needing 1 .com for $10/yr, they suddenly need half a dozen gTLDs for all their various services, at a cost of $20-$50/yr each.
If this is starting to sound like a giant racket, then you're paying attention.
Do we not have an _obligation_ as participants in this world society to speak up about horrors? Inaction leads to more suffering. If the discussion is only happening on HN, how can we justify our inaction to ourselves in the name of adhering to some arbitrary guidelines? "First they came for the..."
I understand why the guidelines exist. I even agree with them, mostly. However, I don't see the harm in tolerating necessary discussions about social awareness. This is where the adult conversations are happening. They aren't happening anywhere else. I am genuinely afraid of the social consequences of this policy.
Also, there is some confusion regarding where the violation occurs. Was it my original comment? Because I don't see a violation in my original comment. The comment you replied to was simply trying to clarify my statements for someone who asked for a clarification. Is clarification a violation? If so, this looks like "thought-crime" right? I would be grateful if you can clarify this for me.
In other words, you think it's okay to exploit people?
If you're writing software for a global corporation on a global marketplace (The internet), why would it be acceptable to be paid based on regional politics, which is what local economies are reflective of.? Especially considering the politics of third world nations is manipulated and controlled by the governments of first world nations for profitable gains.
No, the only acceptable answer is to pay all developers equally regardless of region, based only on their capability, and perhaps their investment of time and effort into their own improvement.
The Pre-Internet Planet Earth and all the little tricks that our ancestors injected to make it easier to take advantage of less fortunate people needs to end. Their guilt isn't yours until you decide to ignore your morality so you can make a few easier bucks. You cannot be a willing and informed participant in this systemic evil and pretend that it's anything but.
This, you nailed it and honestly what else matters. 100% of "offshore labor" and "india labor" and whatever is about exploiting people for personal gain. It's short-sighted selfish greedy Americans mostly, and they honestly believe that brown people living in other countries exist to be their slave labor. These same people are the ones who are constantly trying to abuse the "intern" program.
If you hire someone in India for $20/hr to do a job you damn well know is worth $100/hr then you're a ....ing ....ole. Every time I see job postings looking to exploit third world labor markets, I hope those underpaid developers burn the employer's entire operation to the ground.
It's not enough to bear witness to evil. We should be taking action to stop it.
So "second world" countries are those which are not quite stone-age savage, but are still noticably behind.
So an example of a "Second world" nation would be the United Kingdom, which enjoys many of the modern luxuries of the first world, and much of the social freedoms and progress, and yet still suffers under a completely irrational monarchy and lacks essential freedoms such as the right to self defense. As citizens of the United Kingdom are completely forbidden from keeping arms for the sole purpose of defense of self, family, and property, they are essentially servants of the state. Such a nation cannot then be justly described as "first world", as real first world nations such as the United States have enjoyed these additional freedoms for many generations now.
If my definition is not "official" then I apologize, nobody ever really explained the meaning of the phrases to me and my understanding is simply based on 3 decades of contextual usage. The implication is that there is a single path of progress which all nations are basically following. The first world is setting the example, and the rest are following our lead.
('that we still have such a long way to go is one of the reasons it's so amazing we haven't nuked ourselves to extinction yet :)')
The culture of first world nations however, is completely fubar, has been since before all of us were born, and will probably continue to be long after we're all dead. (second and third world nations are also completely broken, but we expect that.)
It's the same kind of nonsense when people say "We've destroyed the planet!" No we haven't, we destroyed our own survivability in our own habitat, but the planet _is fine_, and will shake us all off some day without so much as a thought about it. The internet is equally indifferent and unaffected by our stupid capitalism problems.
Somehow this is punishment for the iphone. You can't just casually cause hundreds or thousands of suicides or whatever it was, for your stupid first world luxury toys, and not expect to suffer some kind of karma backlash.
Or even a github page with just a list.
[UPDATE] I took the liberty to get the ball rolling.
https://github.com/killed-by-gdpr/killed-by-gdpr.github.io and
https://killed-by-gdpr.github.io/
Contributions welcome.
That is literally a disaster. I wonder if this kind of thing is why the EU is crumbling.
Now you have! :) Unless you don't count online interaction.
That reasoning drove the majority of computer technology progress during the 1980s and 1990s. It wasn't until AFTER the birth of the World Wide Web did mainstream businesses start to really look at monetizing this new market, and in a symbiotic way hackers and nerds and geeks started crowing about altruistic philosophies like decentralization and how information "wants" to be free.
In other words, GDPR has no teeth outside of Europe.
I disagree, I think it's a political move and won't have the kind of positive impact that we want it to.
GDPR, as it is written, should put Facebook and Google out of business. Invading people's privacy is a huge part of their revenue stream. I'm all in favor of protecting privacy of individuals but I'm cynical that we'll see any real progress as a result of this and the negative consequences are real, and possibly more significant than any positive effects. Time will tell.
GDPR (EU Law) requires companies to delete private data upon request.
SOX (US Law) requires companies do not delete private data, in case the government wants to investigate those companies later on.
SOX has existed since 2002. Did the EU lawmakers even consider this when crafting GDPR? I'm betting not, considering the damage they've done to the WHOIS system as well.
This kind of fallout is the result of poor planning and pushing incomplete legislation for political purposes and I think all of us realize that, so let's not pretend otherwise.
uh... this post is about a guy losing his business because of the GDPR. What part of that isn't a disaster?
>If you are a bank and a client asks you to delete their data. The bank will still keep it for the tax agencies.
> If a tribunal gets asked to delete the personal data of the accused, they will keep the data.
> There is a principle of public interest and public obligations to keep data.
In other words, GDPR has no teeth outside of Europe.
GDPR is a great example of the kinds of disasters that happen when nations try to force the entire planet to follow their unilateral actions.
Where'd you get that from?
I think the Internet's original intent was to do it "because we can". Everything else came afterward.
That is, of course, precisely why they spoke up. Their lawyers and accountants determined that would be the least costly approach.
As an aside, why do we continue to tolerate this kind of behavior from corporations? They aren't _really_ people and they don't deserve and should not be afforded the freedom to experiment with their impact on our society and our lives that real people are privileged to enjoy. Regulations and massive punitive consequences are _good_ things to ensure corporate behavior serves the public interest. And yet this has been going on for almost a century and nothing ever happens to change it?
It's nothing but an evolution of the robber barons.
I know that some services have a public-facing "username" and a behind the scenes unique identifier (which is a great UX model), I'm just focusing on the unique identifier. Which I would think should always be it's own column, whether it's also used for the public "username" or not.
> Because if you change that, all your relations between tables will break.
Okay, that is not a response to my question, which is why would you ever use the row ID for anything in your program. If you never use it, then it cannot ever be changed. Also SQL allows relationships based on more than one field, so it seems such a disaster could be easily avoided.
That's a pretty passionate response, can you explain your logic? What are you doing with your usernames that you can't afford to let users change them?
My understanding of numerical types is that they exist to perform math. User IDs are not used for math, they're a completely arbitrary vanity system to assist with identification, so they should be strings, equally arbitrary.
Personally, I think E-mail addresses are the best user identifiers these days. Back in the day when there were like 5 websites everyone used, having your username was a cool thing. These days there's a billion websites and nobody uses the same ones and there's zero inter-user interaction on most sites. From the perspective of user friendliness, E-mail addresses are the easiest because you kill two birds with one stone (contact method + username + password recovery).
If you want a numerical ID, what about using a hash of the E-mail address? Or perhaps a combination of things, email, full name, sign-up date.