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Most people have no safety net and if the money stops rolling in their life is effectively ruined for several years

Most people in the world? Potentially, though I doubt the "life ruined for years" part holds for >50%.

Most people on HN? Definite no. Most people on HN who work in roles where they're exposed to such mass surveillance or other evil at scale (like Meta)? Absolutely not.


You'd be amazed at the number of people that live pay check to pay check. Even on here, I'd guess the number is higher than you'd expect. There are plenty of people in tech that do not live in SV or work for a FAANG. You're failing victim to the echo chamber if you think everyone here is a well paid bit banger

> You'd be amazed at the number of people that live pay check to pay check. Even on here, I'd guess the number is higher than you'd expect.

Well you don't have to live anywhere near paycheck to paycheck to be intimidated. If you're stonewalled from employment, you're in trouble unless you are so fabulously wealthy that you can afford to never work again.


- There are people with $1M+ salaries who live pay check to pay check. This is a choice. A lot of HNers fall under this category.

- A lot of people who are actually poor and live pay check to pay check aren't ruined for years if they lose their job. Because the nature of their work and lack of career usually means they're unstable and replaceable "commodity" jobs in the first place.

- Almost everyone who is in a position to be exposed to evil at scale as a tech worker, is among the top 5% earners in the world. I'm being very conservative there, it's likely top 1%.


Top 5% earnings only buffer you against job loss if you don't have top 5% expenditures. The hedonic treadmill is real.

That's the whole point. That treadmill is purely for selfish personal satisfaction. This thread was about the ability to quit jobs over ethics. Those people absolutely can get off it and cut their expenditures, without their life being ruined for several years for any reasonable definition of "ruined".

I've seen [alleged] homeless people post on here before. Do you really need more than an interest in tech (and an internet connection) to read/post here?

I've seen them too, and I see no reason to question them. I'm sure there's indeed homeless people on here. I also have very good reason to believe they're a small minority. Try sample 100 profiles, especially of frequent commenters (not in "Get hired" threads). It is by its nature and origin an incredibly SV-dominated group. You and me are outliers.

Exactly. I love reading on this site . Written while im on the public bus.

I took far too many ethics and philosophy electives to have a well-paying career in computing. I should've just taken the one required ethics course for the major and gone to work for the "kinetic delivery system" company that tried to recruit me.

I always keep coming back to the Nixon years when basic income was first approved in the senate by the republicans and stopped in the house by democrats.

What a different world we'd be living in, if the (back then, at least supposedly) greatest democracy would have shown the way to a universal safety net.

How fucking sad that we ended in a world where the finders of flaws or zerodays are being suppressed and prosecuted, instead of allowing them to make the world a better place.

A handful of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths now hold almost all power with these structures.

At least now the pretense of democracy is dropped.


I think you're massively misreading the tone of the comment you're relying to


> The medium is freer than Free Software

$$$$$ for supplies, you could probably take up oil painting for cheaper.


A simple hammer you'll sharpen, maybe a bog standard angle grinder. These are the cheap ones, and all you need.

Bigger panes of laminated glass is expensive, but you can start small, no? I'd go to the local glass shops and ask for their scraps, for example.

However, the point is not the cost of the supplies, but supporting the argument by putting out something better than the thing being criticized.


They said "shallow and uninspired" but that's separate from "requires immense skill and patience". The point is, whether or not the process is cool and impressive, is the end product really very interesting?

It can be valid to criticize something as uninspired even if you're not capable of doing it yourself. Movie critics would have a hard time otherwise.

In this case I wouldn't be quite as dismissive, personally. But if you've seen one, have you seen them all? Probably yes.


> Bigger panes of laminated glass is expensive, but you can start small, no? I'd go to the local glass shops and ask for their scraps, for example.

Go to a scrapyard and see if you can pull the windscreen out of a car. It's just a contaminant when it goes in the fraggie anyway.


Like when someone that clearly needs more exercise, is yelling at a sports star to “not be lazy,” or “practice more.”

It can easily be said that this makes no sense, because the yeller has no idea of the tremendous work that even the lowest-tier athletes put into their vocation.

On the other hand, they are a “customer” of the athlete, and have a “right” to criticize the “product.” They are probably out of line, suggesting root causes and solutions, but they aren’t out of line for complaining about their experience with the product.

I wrote a short piece about this mindset, some time ago: https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/


The athlete is in a no way a product a dude behind the tv bought. Tv watching guy is not a customer of the artist. Like, first of all, the dude behind the tv did not paid the athlete nor the athlete employer.

> but they aren’t out of line for complaining about their experience with the product.

They are just as asshole, as much valid as me mocking random people on the street.


I agree with that last part but the people watching the athlete are definitely the customer. The athlete gets paid because people watch them on tv (and in person). If no one watched them on tv, then they quite literally would not get paid. Their employer is selling their talent and abilities (the product) to the watchers (the customers). The watchers are literally paying the athlete and the athletes employer, if not through subscriptions or tickets, then just by watching the ads on tv.


1.) It is not even true that all athletes you watch on TV would be professionals. A lot of them are supposed amateurs, not getting actual salary at all.

2.) Like common, it is even fairly common for people to pay literally nothing to anyone and watch professional sports for free.

3.) Those who are paid are NOT paid by the watchers at all. Not even by the TV itself. Their actual employers are multiple steps away from broadcaster.

> if not through subscriptions or tickets, then just by watching the ads on tv.

That makes them products themselves. They are not paying by watching ads, their time is sold to the real customer who is whoever paid for ads.


It "only" doubles performance so the overheads aren't that heavy


windows update just doing a normal write causing the active chunk of flash memory being used to hold something in the boot loader to a different failed/failing section


PSU (Oregon) uses C++ as just "c with classes" and ignores the rest of C++ for intro to programming courses. It frustrates people who already use C++ but otherwise works pretty well.


We should distinguish "First language" classes (for Computer Scientists who will likely learn many other languages and are expected to graduate knowing enough to just pick up another language with self study in reasonable time) from "Only language" classes for subjects where you might find it useful to write some software. These have different goals, it wouldn't make sense to teach say, OCaml as the only language but it's entirely reasonable as a first language.


This was how we learned it in an intro class in highschool ages ago, worked pretty well there too.


C++, The Good Parts


What issues on Linux would this actually solve?


simplify gssapi, for one. single authentication and authorization: submit on slurm? ask kerberos + ldap. can i upload to this service? as kerberos + ldap. Policies applied on this computer? ask kerberos + ldap

i may be naive a bit, i'll accept that, but I really like how AD works (which is essentially kerberos + ldap)


I tried to set up network file sharing with NFS the other day and it was like pulling teeth. You need Kerberos if you want to map user names instead of user ids and still have some security.

Ultimately I gave up and used samba instead, but it does seem like there's a big gap in linux offerings for "home/small business network file sharing" with shared auth


sshfs doesn't work for you?


It's for a drive holding primarily media files, my experiences with sshfs have been that it is slow. My goal here was to have a network drive mounted on login for two different accounts on my linux desktop, and the same users (my partner and I) on different accounts (because apple) on two different macbooks. It's a typical home network, with a firewall, so the extra security of ssh would be nice but isn't really critical for us - any malware on the computers we use would already have network access and our ssh keys.

I also want to share the home printer/scanner, which I believe samba can do, but obviously sshfs won't. Side note - I would love to see a standard protocol and server for a 3d printer. We have a Bambu and the software is... alright... but doesn't play nice sharing an account between computers.

Ultimately I set up samba on the server, with mapped users, and a line in fstab on the desktop. Plain old NFS might have worked for the desktop but the users don't have the same UIDs between the desktop and the server and... reconciling that seemed painful.

I did try to make kerberos work with NFS for a few days but the experience was akin to staring into the sun.


It's a great option to have, but ultimately it's at-best pretty slow.


If you bought something from a physical store and lose it doesn't entitle you to go get another one for free...


But we're not discussing an item from a physical store? We're discussing software sold online.


Why do you think there is any difference? Did servers and backups and data centers and electricity and cooling and ups batteries and generators and facility operators and banwidth all become free while I wasn't looking?


They're going to need "servers and backups and data centers and electricity and cooling and ups batteries and generators and facility operators and banwidth" regardless, because they're still selling licenses. The cost of providing downloads to existing owners is marginal.


So... they are free or they are not free?


That's the difference between a license and a product my friend


Exactly. OP bought a lifetime license but expects a lifetime product.


If you bought a license from a physical store - depending on the language of that license - yes, it would entitle you.


I bought a Windows license from a university book store. I can download copies of Windows all day if I want.


So what? So MS happens to feel like providing distribution servers. That has no bearing on anyone else.


I wonder if we'll ever get truly round objects in my lifetime though


My old ray tracer could do arbitrary quadric surfaces, toroids with 2 minor radii, and CSG of all those. Triangles too (no CSG). It was getting kind of fast 20 years ago - 10fps at 1024x768. Never had good shading though.

I should dig that up and add NURBS and see how it performs today.


dreams on playstation and unbound on pc both use sdfs to allow users to make truly round objects for games


The (a?) problem is that only the largest / most profitable players can afford to implement these systems. So while well intentioned they just shut out any company/service without loads of extra cash


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