radcon

I worked for a company that was always handing out cheap tokens of their "appreciation" (we all knew they didn't appreciate the employees but I guess they figured pretending might reduce turnover). Sometimes it was a free pretzel or water ice, other times it was a Thank You email that sounded like it was written by some cheap marketing AI. You could also get a "Shout Out" in the monthly newsletter that nobody read, but only if you twisted your coworkers' arms enough to submit one. In the end, all their efforts only served as constant reminders of how little the executives actually appreciated everyone, which decreased morale and increased turnover.

There's something extra depressing about working for a company where the millionaire executives think workers can be placated with 25-cent junk food. I think that company is still limping along somehow, which is great because the new Glassdoor reviews are usually pretty amusing.

Also, if you want to see an example of morale boosting gone wrong the Healthineers song is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5LiUrezV6k

> However, it turns out that there are a lot of developers that really love Elixir!

Turns out it has nothing to do with being non-typical and everything to do with Elixir.

This is more of an ad for their company than an article on hiring for unconventional tech stacks.

HN is no different from every other internet forum: Heavily moderated with very little transparency -- the perfect recipe for filter bubbles and groupthink.

The moderators can even apply permanent penalties to individual users (your comments will sink to the bottom where few will see them) without notice or justification. It's sort of like a shadow-ban but your comments are still visible.

> I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer

You're choosing to ignore the fact that computers still make mistakes.

My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident.

This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives.

Not too long ago, we (America) were bragging about our ability to influence foreign elections[1]. Everyone seems to conveniently forget that whenever Russian "meddling" comes up these days.

http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

> the third most common reason given was an “unfavorable atmosphere” in the workplace. The top reason was staff shortages and the second most common reason was that their company did not offer it.

If the company doesn't offer it, then they don't have a choice.

If they're short-staffed, that's (most likely) an atmosphere the company has created to keep labor costs low.

So the #2 reason shouldn't even be on the list, and #1 is essentially the same as #3. In other words, "unfavorable atmosphere" is the #1 reason for choosing not to take available paternity leave. This is no different from American companies that offer "unlimited" vacation time but create a toxic work culture where everyone feels guilty for using it.

Weren't plastic bags created because they have a significantly smaller environmental impact than paper? You need to re-use a paper bag at least 3 times before it's better than using a plastic bag[1]. And let's face it, no one re-uses those flimsy paper bags from grocery stores, but they're becoming the standard wherever plastic is banned.

Those "environmentally friendly" re-usable grocery bags aren't much better either. Depending on the material, they need to be used anywhere from 30 to 300+ times before they're less harmful than plastic bags[2].

Am I missing something or are regulators overreacting here? Clearly some countries have serious litter issues (sounds like the vast majority comes from Asia and Africa), but does that justify the rest of the world trading one type of pollution for another? Are we even fixing the problem or just making ourselves feel better?

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/life-cycle-assess...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/to-to...

> Residential customers are not allowed to . . . consume more bandwidth than required to support typical residential Internet activities. PhillyWisper may disconnect or limit the bandwidth for residential customers who use residential service for activities deemed atypical at PhillyWisper’s discretion.

This worries me much more than any privacy issues (which could easily be alleviated with a $5/mo. VPN).

Are we supposed to read their minds to determine what "typical" behavior we're allowed to engage in? Or should we just live in constant fear of our internet being arbitrarily disconnected?

> I don't have to wear that kind of outfit very often and the temperatures here rarely reach that high luckily.

I usually grin and bear it but I know plenty of older people who don't tolerate heat well. Men especially seem to suffer since they run hotter and they're not allowed to wear skirts and sleeveless shirts to work (or, if they are allowed, it's still not quite culturally acceptable enough yet...). A lot of "professional" workplaces don't even allow men to wear short sleeves, and they definitely don't allow shorts.

> I said "thank you, but I'm Norwegian, we walk". The man looked at me for a few seconds then barked "Well I'm American!", then drove off and we both laughed.

What a clever, considerate American, making use of energy-efficient transportation and stopping to offer rides to strangers along the way!

> The feet are superior everywhere except highways

Try walking to work in business attire on a few 100 degree (38C) days and then tell me how you feel about that...

> Who are these managers cand how can I get a job working for them.

Work in the IT department of any small or medium-sized enterprise. They seem to be the norm there.

I know there are better examples, but the one that always comes to mind for me is Asbestos. Everyone thought that was safe, now it kills 100,000+ people a year.

And to make matters worse, companies were able to suppress evidence of its danger for decades. We never know what evidence is being withheld from us, so I feel like a little irrational paranoia is actually rational.

Edit: Oh, and how about Exxon withholding all that information about climate change for 40 years? That's another good one.

Yup, devs.

> a lot of people think that just by being in the office they are 'working' regardless of whether they are in fact getting anything done.

This is the part that annoys me the most. Managers pretend that Seat Time = Productivity when we all know that's not the case. I've watched people sit and talk for hours, then sit and browse the internet or play games for hours. We just had a group of people who were told to stop playing online Chess all day.

Forcing people to come into the office full-time is just management's way of making their jobs easier and making themselves feel better. In my experience, it's a substitute for doing other things that they should be doing, like reviewing code that their team has committed that week, talking to their team about what they're working on, what they're planning to work on, what challenges they're facing, etc.

I've noticed a similar thing happening with prepared food. If there are Wawa stores in an area, there usually aren't as many sandwich or salad places nearby as you'd expect. Where I work, your options are basically Wawa or bottom-tier fast-food chains (McDonald's, Taco Bell, etc.). I really wish there were more health-oriented quick-service options (even a Chipotle would be nice), but I don't think they can compete against a place like Wawa since it's good enough for the vast majority of people.

For people scratching their heads wondering what the heck Wawa is, I have no idea what the West Coast equivalent would be. Sheetz is another similar chain on the East Coast, if that rings any bells...

> In order to produce them cost effectively, I'd need molds that cost several times what this entire system cost.

Was that price from China or the U.S. (or somewhere else)?

> I passed on that at the time and considered producing them myself but this machine didn't exist at the time. If it had, I might be making them now!

Does this mean you stopped making your product after fulfilling the Kickstarter orders?

Hopefully we go back to forums, where the format is more conducive to conversation rather than snarky one-liners and memes.

This whole nested comment format becomes completely unreadable once you have more than two people involved in a comment thread, and the fact that submissions can't survive more than 36 hours guarantees that no deeper conversations would ever happen even if the comment format could support them.

On forums, there are discussion threads that last for years and the format makes them much easier to read from start to finish.

I'm so glad I grew up during a time when you didn't have to worry about every single second of your life potentially being captured on video and used for some nefarious purpose.

I can't imagine being a kid in this type of environment. Then again, many of the kids who will be unwillingly subjected to this probably aren't informed enough to understand the potential long-term consequences of pervasive surveillance, which makes it all the more evil.

It's appalling that they spent $1.4 million (so far) on this rather than putting the money towards more useful things like teacher salaries or after-school programs. Maybe if they improved the overall school experience they wouldn't need to monitor the kids like prisoners?

Mesothelioma victims would beg to differ.

> There is no reliable evidence. . .

The premise of the entire article seems to rely on this one fallacy.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in a case like this where the effects are extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to measure AND there were extraordinary efforts made to suppress all the evidence.

This is different, the comments are simply pushed to the bottom of the page instead of hidden.

Usually, when you post a new comment it's boosted to the top for a short period of time. Now, the opposite is happening.

I had already switched on PC because of Chrome's voracious appetite for RAM.

On mobile I made the switch to avoid AMP pages.

The list of reasons keeps growing...

And then...?

You got a high-paying job? You started a successful company? You finally sold more than 300 copies of your eBook?

If you want to prove the article wrong, you're going to have to demonstrate more than just the fact that you got a piece of paper. If you can't do that, then you're actually proving the article's point.

> What's the other option? Not get a education and then be further disadvantaged?

I thought the other option was obvious: Colleges should prepare people for jobs rather than hiding behind excuses like "We're creating well-rounded citizens!"

Unfortunately, that would mean they'd need to replace all the TAs and adjunct professors with people who are actually qualified and have real world experience in their field, so it will probably never happen.

Employers: "You have to go to college to prepare for the workforce."

Colleges: "It's not our job to prepare you for the workforce."

Recent grads with $50k+ in debt and no useful job skills: "..."

Looks like it was flagged/removed with no explanation. It's currently ranked 107, even though it's vote:time ratio should easily put it on the front page.

Kind of ironic given the subject of their post. If I didn't know any better, I might think there are some FB people attempting to bury this story...

Edit: And this submission already appears to be suffering the same fate, ranked far below other stores with nearly equal vote:time ratios.

I don't think it's just overwork that has this effect. Work, in general, along with the constant pressure to remain "employable" forces us to structure our lives in a way that leaves very little time and/or energy for other meaningful endeavors:

> I begin with a simple-sounding question: at what point does a day’s work truly end? Whilst our jobs might contractually oblige us to work a certain amount of hours per day, it is clear that we do not simply step out of our workplaces and into a world of freedom. This was brought to light by Theodor Adorno in a short but poignant essay from the 1970s called ‘Free Time’. Adorno questioned the extent to which workers are truly autonomous in their time outside work, arguing that the covert aim of non-work time is simply to prepare people for the recommencement of work: free-time is not free at all, but a mere ‘continuation of the forms of profit-oriented social life’. This is because it involves activities which often have a similar quality to work (looking at screens, doing chores), but also because more alienating or exhausting forms of work produce a powerful need for recuperation. By draining people’s physical and mental energies, work that is alienating ensures that much of the worker’s non-work time is spent winding down, retreating to escapist forms of entertainment, or consuming treats which compensate for the day’s travails.

https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/free-time-pressures-empl...

Is anyone else extremely reluctant to fly on a Boeing plane after this?

A lot of people say "It's no big deal, they just need to update the MCAS software", but I see this entire situation as a sign of much deeper issues at Boeing, issues that can't be fixed with a simple software update and could affect every plane they make.

I agree, those are good signs.

If these fingerprint protection tools are effective, my main fear is that websites will simply say "Disable your fingerprint protection if you want to proceed", much like many sites currently do with ad blockers. Or if they don't spell it out in plain English, they'll make you jump through so many hoops that you'll switch it off just to end the suffering.

Trying to interact with any major website using the TOR browser has been a complete nightmare. If you aren't blocked outright, you face CAPTCHAs at every turn.

I can't find much info on the fingerprint protection. Has anyone tested it thoroughly? Do we know if it's effective against current fingerprinting methods? Can we actually rely on it, or will it simply be a matter of days/weeks before websites adapt to defeat this protection?