How is being tied to a clunky text editor different from being tied to a clunky GUI? No matter which alternative text editor you use, apparently it's still clunky (slow) according to that somewhat limited research.
My opinion is that people who are motivated to do things or make money work as much as they can to work towards what they want. Sitting around would be frustrating. That doesn't mean they need to work so much to survive, they just want to.
Personally I've never done that. I often worked 3 day weeks. Now I do programming at home whenever I feel like and have a low-hours day job. I make enough money to be comfortable and it's quite nice.
I think the predictions have come true - for anyone who wants it.
For anyone who wants it? Surely you mean for some people who want it. People with in-demand skill-sets can fashion these sorts of working situations, certainly; other people are grateful to have as many hours of work as they can get and would gladly take more if it helped them in their struggles to pay the bills. I'm sure most people would work less if they could afford to, but that isn't an option for an awful lot of people.
It was unskilled laboring work. Others in my situation had criminal records and drug habits but they could do it too. Now I do programming for my own business so no clients to worry about, just self-pressure to give customers what they want, but without any deadlines or obligations.
The employment market today might not be quite the same, but it's often surprisingly easy to find casual work if you lower your expectations. And it pays enough to live on while also giving you free time for your hobbies, which for me turned into money after some years.
This also depends on where you live, and your responsibilities. I lived for six months in western Australia working only 2-3 days a week as a bartender. Pay was about $160 per day, which works out to $1500-$2000 per month.
With no kids or dependents, this is more than enough to live on. I paid rent and food comfortably, had plenty of time to learn guitar, go outside and skateboard, meet girls and even had enough leftover to buy myself a new Macbook Pro. Plus it was a fun and social job.
You could live on even less if you were determined, for inspiration on frugal living read Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Priorities change though - right now I suppose I 'work' about 10 hours a day, six days a week. This is because I decided I was going to learn to code and got motivated and driven to become good at it. Building a skill takes a lot of hours of focus and concentration but it's not 'work' if you get excited about it.
Do you get paid for the programming that you do this way? I've always dreamed of a world where I can "take a contact when I feel like working" or "just work a few hours a day" but if someone hires me they want as much of my time as I can give them.
Telling a client that I only work three hours a day so their projects will take twice as long as they have estimated doesn't seem like a good pitch.
How do you handle this?
I have been in a situation where I had one main client and several smaller ones. The main client had endless work and the person I was contracting thorough at the time would only guarantee me for 20h per week to the main client but this was only so he could rent me out to others at the same time. If I had said I only want the 20h I wonder what he would have done. It was definitely enough billing to pay my salary but then he has to find another programmer to go my lost time, etc.
Now I work full time for a business. I definitely can't do anything less that 40h per week... It's full time position.
I have a chronic illness that involves fatigue and is likely to worsen over time so figuring out how I can get to 20h a week is a pretty real thing for me. Any advice would be welcome.
My programming is a hobby that turned into a business. It's just one application that I write and sell online. I think the reason it works (just about) is that my market is a niche of professionals. Usually their boss pays for it, so they're not afraid of spending money. Also, most of my competitors are either astronomically priced (get a site visit from their salesman to help decide what options you want) or barely usable (need to learn a huge command language) open source.
I do it, though I do 30 hours so it's three 10-hour days, and I get 75% of my "normal" salary. I started out full time, and after about a year or so I went to my manager and said "how about I work 30 hours?" and he said "sure".
It's a big company which HN would probably scoff at, and we work with super uncool things like Oracle. But it's just a job, and I get to spend Mondays and Fridays with my young kids.
When I was a young graduate, I didn't feel like working 5 days a week. I had many activities that I didn't want to sacrifice.
At job interviews, I asked about part-time and surprisingly, some companies were fine with that. At least, until I got hired, then I was quickly pressured to switch to full time (eventually, I moved to academics which suits me better).
Large institutions can be surprisingly good about this. Government jobs in the UK, for instance, tend to be pretty open to job-shares. Look for companies supportive of working mothers -- if they have systems in place for parents to work part-time, they may well be prepared to accommodate you on similar terms.
I am a developer as well but I struggle to put anything less than 5 days a week. I'd be really interested to know how you managed to find work that pays so well that you can afford to work only 3 days.
This is a nonsense attitude. If you vote for a party, then you 're acknowledging that you want them in power. If you don't want them, stop voting for them. Sure, your action won't get a 3rd party elected, but neither will your incumbent vote be needed for the incumbent to stay in power. It's just a psychological illusion of "voting for the winner" and not "wasting" it that drives people to oppose their own interests. Within the past 20 years there have been several 3rd parties with some chance, but enough of their supporters decided not to "waste" their vote that none of them ever made it.
For the presidency, under which the power to enact or prosecute torture lies, there's been no chance for a third-party candidate in my lifetime (and I've seen one election, 2000, thrown in the wrong direction because too many people voted for Nader).
In any event, 3rd parties often look so honest and admirable because they've never had to hold power and make tough decisions. If any of them managed to hold power for a significant portion of time, we'd be clamoring to vote them out of office for their misdeeds all the same. Part of politics is about accepting the dirtiness of the game and doing the best with what you have. I'll throw my support behind the party that's good enough for me, and has a chance of actually bringing about some meaningful change.
This is actually a relatively new "feature" of web browsers. When I was a kid, if a page didn't load completely it would just make do with whatever assets it could grab. Images would be replaced with a stand-in icon and some descriptive text.
4realz are you serious? What is the actual downside of that? As a kid, it made perfect sense to me, and I often would right click the image and press reload or just refresh the whole page. Now whenever images don't load (which is often these days, since cloudfare blocks tor 90% of the time until you load the image in a separate window and fill out their captcha, and even without tor, wireless networks tend to be extremely unreliable), it's not easy to tell whether the page is broken, since it just collapses the spaces where the images would have been.
Further, if you directly view an image and it breaks half way, the browser will hide it and say it's corrupt (and have no "show anyway" button), unless the size wasn't provided, then the browser just thinks it's valid, despite that it could parse the JPEG file and find out that lines of pixels are missing. Calling either of these cases a feature seems very biased.
We aren't even talking about one of the worse problems, which is when a page fails to load, the browser doesn't try to reload it - you have to come back and press reload yourself. I've wasted literally hundreds of hours doing this.
It's the cost of it working at all, at least in terms of it being as accessible as it is:
Making it feasible for people to create websites quickly enough to be worthwhile entailed allowing the tag soup non-standard HTML we see in practice now, and the confluence of desire and technical limitations made plug-ins inevitable.
A "better-regulated" Internet wouldn't have had the Web at all. Remember that, according to the people using it circa 1988, file transfer and hypertext were both solved problems, with FTP and Gopher respectively already in existence. Unstructured hypertext, something Gopher was not really designed for, wasn't especially desired until some random at CERN released WorldWideWeb and httpd to the world.
It's good to see conservationists admit that their task is mostly killing. Too often people confuse conserving a species with being nice to animals. They're diametrically opposite ambitions. Conservationists sometimes try to tap into our "don't kill cute animals" feeling to support their cause, but have to do a 180 when it doesn't suit.
I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals.
> I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals.
Okay...
But I'm pretty sure a conservationists goal is not to make species go extinct.
There is a long run goal which is the survival of as many species and habitats as possible. Being nice animals is not diametrically opposed with being a conversationist, nor would a conversationist actually argue for killing all whales unless it had greater benefits for ocean ecosystems as a whole. You're ignoring the long-term consequences and only focusing on the actions themselves in calculating moral utility.
Wiping out the species you're trying to save is obviously ludicrous. The point of this article is that rats (which are dead common in practically all corners of the world) pose an enormous threat to lots of unique species and ecosystems, and controlling rats is necessary if you want to preserve those unique species and ecosystems.
Spreaking large amounts of poison to do that, certainly makes me quite uncomfortable. But I'm no conservationist, so I can't really judge whether that's ultimately a good or bad idea.
How is this bad for anything except Uber's public image? If prices remained the same, cars would be unavailable. If you want that outcome, then simply don't order a ride. There's absolutely nothing wrong with surge pricing when there's an actual spike in demand - the alternative would have been not getting a ride at all which you can still do with surge pricing. This problem is exactly what happens with traditional taxis - you simply can't get where you want to not matter how important it is. This was meant to be one of Uber's strengths - greater availability. Now that gave us a little, we expect charity from them too?
An attacker could advise your trusting church-mates to download and run an application that turns out to be a virus while they believe it's from you.
A real but milder story - a customer of mine once complained about the advertising on my website being slightly offensive. I didn't have any advertising. When I investigated, it turned out the advertising was being injected by malware on his own computer. Not that HTTPS would have solved that, but I've heard of ISPs doing similar things where it would be prevented.
Indeed. Restrictions on women in Muslim countries sound bad, but western countries don't allow women to go topless in public and don't allow prisoners or children to work for money at their own discretion. They even have compulsory detention for children (school), which is a human right sacrificed in the name of economic development but doesn't get complaints because us westerners are used to it. If only everyone else was just like us we could forget those inconvenient human rights and just do things the normal proper way (sarcasm).
This is for sexual activities in the public and just being nude does (usually) not qualify for that. Somebody could try to go after you for molestation but that is pretty unlikely. Even being completely naked should usually not get you into real trouble besides the police asking you to get some cloths or leave the place. But nudists indeed prefer a bit of separation to avoid any possible conflict.
If the police asks you to put some clothes on then, well, you can't walk nude publicly. They won't let you go without doing that. That was my entire point.
If you meant, you can walk nude in public without fearing draconian punishment then, yes, Germany is luckily a country having a sense for proportionate punishments.
As well as being vague, human rights prioritize actions of the government over those of ordinary people - the high murder rate in America is not a human rights violation (what right could be more true than the right to not be killed?) but the relatively less severe execution rate of political prisoners in many other countries is a human rights violation. I live in a country with poor human rights but very good safety against violent crime. I'd much rather be here than in America where I won't be arrested for complaining about the government but I'm likely to be robbed or threatened with a gun if I walk down the wrong street at night. Different harm caused by different groups but one is a human rights violation and the other is not despite both being ultimately under the control of the government.
The effect of this is America can say "we have good human rights, we don't torture political prisoners" and an authoritarian country can say "We have good security, our people don't kill each other". The latter is usually more directly helpful to more people, but the former has somehow become seen as superior.
The reason government actions are often prioritized is that 1) governments have the power to violate human rights more deliberately, systematically, and effectively than most ordinary people, and 2) most people are utterly incapable of defending themselves against governments.
A random thug can violate your rights as much as a government can, but he's probably not doing it systematically, and it's usually much easier for you to protect yourself from his actions. A shotgun will keep random thugs away from your home, but it will do nothing to deter a SWAT team.
Human rights were designed to prevent systematic abuses that victims cannot possibly protect themselves from, such as Hitler's persecution of ethnic minorities. The UDHR of 1948 was a direct response to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The framework of human rights was never intended to protect ordinary people from one another: that's what the police is for.
If it's only systematic abuses, then the rogue police torturings in Brazil that the article described would count as "crime" and not be human rights violations. I think it's a grey area between the government allowing it to happen and actively doing it. Is a policeman breaking his rules really worse than a powerful gang? The latter may do more systematic harm and be more inescapable.
If you violate national law, it is a crime, otherwise it is a human rights violation. If you violate national law but the law is not enforced, you end up in the grey area. I this case I would say if the state actively looks away it is a human rights violation, if the state is just overwhelmed it remains a crime. This of course again leaves a smaller gray are around looking away because you are overwhelmed.
The police represent the government, and everything the government does is assumed to be systematic. So it's a human rights violation, unless you can prove that it really was the isolated behavior of a rogue police officer.
>"We have good security, our people don't kill each other". The latter is usually more directly helpful to more people, but the former has somehow become seen as superior.
Surely there is a level of authoritarianism which you wouldn't support? How far is too far in the name of safety? I suspect different cultures have different answers.
You also can't just look at the murder rate. Let's use China as an example, sure they have less murders than the U.S. (maybe partly because they are more authoritarian), but there are fewer labor protections. You may be less likely to be shot in China, but you are more likely to be killed on the job.
>I'd much rather be here than in America where I won't be arrested for complaining about the government but I'm likely to be robbed or threatened with a gun if I walk down the wrong street at night.
I'm not sure were you're from, but being threatened with a gun is not a common occurrence in America, it's certainly not likely--even if you are walking down the wrong street.
The US has a higher homicide rate than Western Europe, but if you remove gang members and drug related homicides, the numbers go way down.
The high murder rate is definitely a problem, but most of the Europeans I've talked to think it is something that middle class Americans deal with on a day to day basis. This is simply not true.
The United States are probably not the best country for comparisons when it comes to human rights.
The United States was a traditional leader in human rights and one of the few countries that has used its power to advance human rights in other nations.
