developer1's comments

Have you ever worked closely with upper management? I have personally worked with 3 CTO's at medium-to-large companies who have taken advantage of external relationships with partners to personally profit. I mean cash and benefits deposited in their individual hands, not the company's coffers. It's amazing how far executives in power will go to pad their pockets with extra dollars. Perhaps more incredible is how much you observe when you gain the trust of such people - I've never really understood why I find myself in a position to see these events taking place.

So yes, my personal observations over the years have made me extremely critical of any "business deal" wherein there is supposedly no "deal".

My only thought is that the airline is going to regret crumbling under the pressure from developers who wanted node.js. Allowing developers to choose whatever language they want for such a massive system is a mistake. node.js has not proven itself beyond being the latest fad. The developers wanted to use something cool and modern, while clearly ignoring concerns over the long-term viability of the system.

Oh well, that isn't a problem for anyone other than the airline. It's possible that in a matter of a few years (instead of decades), the entire system will have to be reimplemented at the airline's cost. You don't use the latest trendy language for systems which are expected to remain in operation for 20-30 years.

There's a reason nobody believe there is no money exchanging hands: if there is no profit for Mozilla in including Pocket, then there is no explanation as to why it is included. It's useless bloatware. I could "understand" if Mozilla was selling us out and being paid to do this. If they are not, nobody is benefiting, and it should be removed.

Even if there is no actual money being funnelled to Mozilla itself, that does not mean there isn't a financial kickback behind the scenes to upper executives that is not on the books, or other incentives not being handed over in cold cash.

Just because the Mozilla Foundation itself is a non-profit, does not mean that the people at the top of the food chain are not the same scummy types you find in any for-profit corporation.

No, it doesn't. Udemy would fall apart as a company without illegal content. Their entire business DEPENDS on pirated content. You really think they would be making any money with the very very few legitimate courses? The business knows the majority of courses are pirated, and they don't care. This is how they make their money.

That is normal here too, and it's more like 7-8 mph. So you can receive a ticket for impeding traffic even if the people you are supposedly obstructing would be exceeding the speed limit? Instead of ticketing the slow guy, set up a sting and ticket every person exceeding the limit by more than 6 mph. This whole thing sounds backwards.

It's absurd that 24 mph in a 35 zone is considered "too slow". This is nearly equivalent to driving 40 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, and there is not a single traffic court in any Canadian city that would uphold a ticket being served for that difference. How is this even a thing down there? In a 60 km/h zone here, you'd have to be going 25 km/h to even warrant being pulled over at all (ie: doing 15 mph in 37 mph zone).

If 24 mph is too slow for that particular road or neighbourhood, then the speed limit should be 45+ mph, not 35. Clearly the average citizen is already driving 45+, or the "slow" wouldn't even be noticeable.

Edit: wait, this is even more absurd. The traffic violation quoted is https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/vctop/vc/d11/c... which mentions "highway". 35 mph or 56 km/h is residential street speed, not highway speed. This whole thing makes no sense to me.

The new CEO wants to collect evidence? The new CEO is a puppet for the board of directors. The CEO doesn't care, he's just there as a public face to play pretend that the company cares.

This "study" isn't a study at all. One week provides factually meaningless data. You'd need a minimum of 3 months just to register a new baseline, and another 6-12 months to see if those participants who originally found a higher baseline at 3 months maintain it or fall back to previous levels as the novelty of the situation wears off.

You want to know why people reported feeling better? Because they changed a habit. When you change anything in your life for a single week, you will feel better because you have pulled yourself out of your everyday routine and are experiencing something NEW. This is the result of a change; what changed - Facebook in this case - does not matter.

The novelty of a change in habit for a single week does not even begin to offer evidence of anything. This isn't even a case of "not enough evidence", but rather "no evidence whatsoever". This novelty is similar to the kind of high you get from buying a new expensive toy/gadget. A temporary boost of "happiness" that quickly fades as the new item just becomes another object in your day-to-day life.

Thank you for enlightening me as to why female public washrooms are disgusting places. I wonder how many women are honestly so germaphobic as to never touch their rear to the toilet seat. Which results in them trying and failing to perform these kinds of feats, which in turn makes the toilet and floor disgusting, which in turn makes other women not want to go near. Perpetual cycle.

I haven't had to clean public washrooms in over 10 years now, but I will never forget the incredibly disgusting sights I had to endure in the stalls of women's washrooms. While men's stalls aren't always spic 'n span either (if any man reading this has ever taken a piss without even lifting the seat, or have poured half your liquid onto the floor - fuck you), the number of occasions on which this is encountered is a tiny fraction compared to what women routinely do.

Yuck.

This is exactly it. Twitter should not have gone public, or at least nowhere near the valuation it received. You don't take in a lot of investor money without having a fully fleshed-out plan on how exactly you intend to put it to good use. Twitter's IPO was not based on logic and proven methods for growth. It was a bunch of people jumping on a bandwagon hoping that Twitter was going to be the next major player in the social media bubble.

Small and medium-sized businesses should be raking in investments to accomplish a single specific and realistically obtainable goal at a time. Large businesses who haven't yet found a way to be profitable aren't going to magically find a solution to all their problems by experimenting with dozens or hundreds of new ideas at high cost, with the desperate hope that one of the ideas will randomly catch and save the business. That approach is pure gambling, and so far the gamble does not appear to be paying off.

I honestly can't imagine what people who invested in Twitter expected to see happen. I figure that with Twitter being the next most recognized name in social media after Facebook, people simply imagined that nothing could go wrong. "Everyone knows about Twitter" does not translate as "everyone uses or will want to use Twitter".

I was bouncing between firefox and chrome, using them both more-or-less equally. The day the "hello" thing appeared, I uninstalled firefox. Too many useless and annoying things being added to firefox as core components where they do not belong. The fact that anybody can pay Mozilla to have their crappy addon forced onto all users is a problem.

Every technology company I have worked for claims and receives the SRED. None of them have deserved it - not even remotely close. Each of my companies have made millions in profit each year. We have never done anything innovative that required actual research or risking anything by developing new technologies. My teams have used linux, mysql, memcached, redis, and a couple of programming languages. 100% of the work is just writing normal code for web applications. How much of that $4 billion dollars being handed out is for fraudulent claims of R&D? I would bet more than $3 billion. There are supposed requirements to meet to be eligible for the benefit, but everyday programming work is being rephrased to sound innovative and difficult.

This benefit needs to be abolished, as the number of tax dollars being sunk into it is ridiculous. For the few percent of businesses that might actual merit such a benefit, oh well. Compete in the market like everyone else without assistance. The difference between a deserving business and a business that will lie and twist words to save 15-35% on salaries is impossible to determine accurately. Too many liars and fraudsters have destroyed the system, so kill the program and nobody benefits.

This is what citizens' tax dollars pay for. How nice that public funds can so easily be used to pay people to do nothing.

The pricing page for Glacier is horrifically misleading. That "learn more" link digs deep into their FAQ to the real costs. Retrieving a small amount of data in a rush can cost hundreds of dollars. Glacier is not a backup product, it's an archival product. There is an enormous difference between the terms "backup" and "archival", and anyone who thinks of using an archival solution for consumer backup needs is not understanding the differences and the related costs in the event of the need to retrieve data. Glacier is meant for corporations with deep pockets for disaster recovery, not for consumers.

A young audio engineer might know every possible fact about how Bluray, DVD, and CD formats work. Probably even cassette tapes and Long Play records (aka LPs). But I'm sure it's completely respectable for you to roll your eyes when an audio engineer gives you a blank stare when you bring up wow and flutter caused by a flattened pinch roller in an 8-track tape.

What would be the software equivalent? Insulting someone who starting developing on PHP 5 not knowing about the short_tags() global function which only existed in PHP 3? Someone proficient in Visual Basic .NET but doesn't know anything about VB 1-6? There is no reason to know how to develop in an ancient version of a language if every job you have had thus far has used exclusively modern versions.

Merely having been alive during the decade in which an obsolete technology was first introduced or was still popular means nothing. It may even have some relevance today when discussing the then-and-now similarities or differences, but frankly someone born decades after its obsolescence just will not care. There is already more knowledge than is possible to absorb about current technology. There is simply not enough time in a single lifetime to care about what came 20-40 years before. Perhaps if we ever push life expectancy to 1000 years, we'll spend the first 100 years of our lives reviewing every relevant detail of the past.

Damn you, giving me an additional boost to my already large ego. I'm one of those programmers who considers my skills to be more developed than most of my co-workers - I've met 4 people throughout my career whom I consider to be as good as or better than me. I never thought to compare my experience against that which a doctor goes through.

Ironic considering my language of choice is laughed at by "true developers". It's true that I consider my skill set to be above the people I've worked with, but I know there are millions of developers out there who outshine me in what one might call real development. I am both proud and jealous, but I like the comparison of a seasoned developer being similar to a doctor. It's true that it takes 10-20 years to have a solid understanding of what one is doing. Interesting analogy.

I clicked through the the article, verified that the title was the same as HN, read the early line "Couple days ago some R.D. from United States contacted me. She wanted to do website scrape.". I stopped reading. Clickbait, ignorant of real freelance work, thinks being contacted about a pathetic scraping job means freelance is worthless? Give me a break. Become a real developer who can find real clients worth the effort, and freelance is 100% viable. How the hell is this getting any traction? Puh-please.

I try not to use offensive language on HN, but are you fucking kidding me? You actually expect a single company out there to not keep your personal information? The type of system you are looking for will never exist. Ever. The only reason a company wants your DNA to begin with is either to profit from its data, or to perform crowd-sourced research that requires keeping your information indefinitely. Your comment goes far and beyond a fantasy. There will never be anything positive to gain from having your DNA analyzed. Corporate, hospital, "non-profit"... there is no such thing as a secure outlet from whom to obtain your DNA profile. There will always be a record, even if it's "erased" but still recoverable from the raw disk. Either you don't understand how corporations and modern government work, or you are insanely naive about the possible benefits from DNA analysis compared to the politicians and corporate psychopaths who will find a way to benefit from it.

If you're willing to hand over your biological fingerprints to anybody, you may as well walk into your local police station and admit to a murder you haven't committed. Even if 99.99% of people submitting their DNA for analysis never see any negative consequences, the other 0.01% are going to have their lives ruined because of some supposed family association to a criminal. These days, suspicion is equal to guilt beyond a doubt. If one out a million people are falsely chased down based on something like DNA, that is one person too many.

The possibility that you have some horrible abnormality that can be detected via DNA testing is so astronomically low. Stop thinking about the interesting science behind what you can learn about your body. Instead, be very concerned about the fact that there are people out there interested in nothing other than having power over others. Nobody should be submitting themselves to this horrendous risk.

I cannot imagine how someone would even consider submitting themselves to such a process. I took a season pass to my local amusement park; they strongly suggest you provide your thumbprint instead of taking a photo for your ID. It's insane. Obviously the police or state government can force this park with hundreds of thousands of fingerprints to submit to database searches. Who the hell offers to provide their fingerprints to an amusement park, in order to save the 5 minutes of inconvenience required to go have your photo taken? "Stupid sheep" is the only phrase that comes to mind.

For the employees affected, the "generous exit packages" is all that matters. Do you know what I consider to be generous? 6 months of pay, no less. What did they probably get? 4 weeks. It's disgusting to see this kind of language in an email, when the employees are obviously being screwed beyond belief.

This. It's the thing that stands apart from the rest of the email. "Up to 336". Huh? That is far too specific. Either that was an exact percentage of staff, or they have the list of 336 people, and may reverse on up to a couple of dozen if they fight for their positions with good explanations as to why they deserve to stay.

"Up to 336". The fact that phrase made it into the email is unbelievable. Who, being at the head of a company so large, writes with that kind of language?