blue039

Would be a shame if it leaked though, wouldn't it? I could imagine healthcare companies would be very interested in the metadata surrounding prolific consumers of junk food, smokes, booze, etc. Wouldn't be too hard to use parallel construction to modify rates given the current "market".

Much like you will never understand why someone would go to these lengths I struggle to understand how someone _wouldn't_. I can't understand people whose threat model begins with "these places I'm okay with someone knowing things about me".

If I read your email and then selected "metadata" I found important, walked into a very busy public square, and started shouting your secrets you'd be right to be uncomfortable. If I, for example, made a reasonably accurate prediction that you are pregnant/on drugs/have ED/etc and then told 10,000 people about this you'd be right to be angry.

Yet...you're okay with a company doing any of this? Is it because you can't see it or feel it directly? The head in the sand approach doesn't work. With enough datapoints in one bin anyone can use "metadata" to make extremely accurate predictions about your private life. You need to defend yourself from the constant gathering of this metadata. Snowden warned us and apparently very few of us decided to listen. All it takes is one leak, one hack, one disgruntled employee, or one bad government to take all those secrets you're not thinking about and turn them into weapons to use against you. In a modern battlefield you are a target and the war has been going on for decades now.

Computer Science has become a "programming" farm degree rather than what it was originally back in my day (grumble, grumble). It used to be an off-shoot of mathematics and was so strongly tied at the hip many schools had CS and math in the same department.

Cynically programmers are paid better than any other so-called "knowledge worker" field. Naturally, schools paid by large organizations have a vested interest in finding interesting ways to drive down wages. One of the easiest ways is to just pollute the waters with sub-par talent. As much as this website, Google, and many other FAANGs would like you to believe, the average person lacking a formal education in CS or a related field (math, engineering, etc) tend to make for the programming equivalent of one trick ponies. The wages have stayed high as a result.

Personally, I am growing tired of seeing all of these "learn to program" focused CS degrees. Even the one you have linked lacks the rigor of an ABET accredited program. For the last several years now every time someone tells me they like computer science what they have meant is they like learning to code. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but CS is quickly going the way of the kleenex. I am not gatekeeping to be an asshole. There is so much beauty and richness of the field. It's like the people who read one pop-sci physics book and then put "physicist" in their linkedin.

The article author is saying "I sprained my ankle and it was extremely painful to the point I could not do anything". You can ice an ankle (take a little time off) and have it fixed.

The parent is saying "I broke my ankle - fractured in several places I was crippled and needed surgery you did not experience a broken ankle". You cannot fix this problem by icing it. You need a systemic reduction in everything.

The author is conflating a sprained ankle with a broken one. The parent is saying that is not true. A lot of people who have sprained their ankles have come into this topic to tell everyone "WELL ACKTHUALLY" in the most obnoxiously stereotypical HN way possible thereby diluting the actual meaning of the parent's statement. There are far too many HNers who have a permanent craniorectal issue.

You are being needlessly sensitive to the parent post.

The parent is making a distinct difference between what the industry typically refers to as "burnout" and what actual, physical, burnout is. As someone who has gone through phases of burnout and currently working through yet another one in my career I can attest the parent's definition IS the correct one.

You are not burned out when you are bored at work. You are burned out when you are so tired of doing something that you cannot bring yourself to not only do it, but anything else. When you need drugs to get through the day. It's a combination of depression/anxiety/fear of failure that manifests as what I can only describe as a feeling of wanting to disconnect from everything forever and sleep. The only solution is to disconnect for a long time. I, for example, have not programmed as a hobby in almost half a decade. It's the only way I can stave off repeated bouts of severe life crippling burnout.

Be far less sensitive. Also, perhaps you should try to experience burnout before a needlessly pedantic out-of-nowhere virtue signal.

It’s not about “making them feel better”. It’s about wage theft from workers.

If you pay me N extra hours, where N is less than the hours I worked on call then you stole from me. Plain and simple. This should be pursued by rabid labor lawyers and interest at the prevailing 30 year rate should accrue on those dollars hourly until they are paid back.

The problem is, of course, the law dictating “exempt workers” was written in a time where the only people that would be exempt were executives with actual million dollars golden parachutes. Now, white collar labor is almost universally exempt allowing the state sanctioned theft of millions of dollars a year by corporations who lobby to keep the laws the same, and promoted by “grind culture” immoral bottom-barrel blood-suckers like PagerDuty.

It’s bullshit. You’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome. You’ve somehow managed to say stealing from you is okay because they put some nominal amount of unrelated dollars in front of you.

So many words and none of them include “pay people overtime for working on call”.

Having seen this several times in family and close relatives it does not appear as painful as you'd think. Often times the people responsible for the care of the person dying will provide them small amounts of water, typically via a syringe, to keep their mouth wet in order to not provoke a thirst response. Food is easy enough to ignore and most people can indefinitely ignore hunger right up until they die.

It seems clear to me you have never seen this procedure done. It was rather traumatic for me having to be one of the people responsible for the final caregiving (it does not seem logical to provide such comforts as small water or medicine to someone committed to dying) but it was important for closure. I hope you dont have to witness it or make this choice yourself.

Personally, I find doctor assisted suicide to be both unethical and amoral. While people may disagree with me I see no difference between MAID and paying someone to hang you as instantaneous death is guaranteed in both ways and it is done by a sanctioned murderer. VSED is entirely in the dying person's control, and thus to me is not unethical nor amoral as the control of life is in the person who owns that life.

I dont know if the take is as hot as you think. Meditation is cool and good (I try to do it) but it's not the panacea that, like all new age things, the average hacker news reader thinks it is.

Optimizing sleep improves productivity. Not a hot take. I don't know anyone who enjoys blowing an entire day sleeping. Do you? Perhaps people who are ill (whether they know or not) need 12-14 hours of sleep a day but a normal healthy person can get by on 6-8 with 7 being the recommended median for most people.

Psychological health is the hardest problem we face. The entire field of mental health is rife with fraud. Psychology as a "science" suffers from one of the greatest reproducibility failures we have witnessed. We have legitimately no idea why "mental health" is a problem in 99% of cases and our medicines and treatments are only marginally better than electroconvulsive therapy and divination to drive bad spirits away. We have, for example, almost no idea how and why SSRIs work. Many anti-depressant studies fail to reproduce. We often overmedicate people who just have a little sadness resulting in even more difficult and sometimes fatal problems. The only other field with more problems is chiropractic which, by my estimation, is only marginally less scientific than psychology. In fact if I pulled a random psychology study and compared it's reproducibility to a study on cracking people's spines to fix slipped discs I'd imagine they'd be similarly impossible to reproduce.

Enjoy it while it lasts. It sounds pessimistic of me to say but once the company catches wind of you enjoying yourself it'll be taken away. They'll realize after some careful spreadsheet analysis that participation in this hackathon is an all time high. You know it's because you guys can do what you want. They don't. They just see the distilled numbers. So, the C-levels will order everyone to instead work on a work-related project with a mandatory demo (for "fun" time constraints!) and everyone will be miserable. Participation will drop, and then it will become a routine where they get all the engineers to do a song and dance once a year for them. That's all "demos" are, anyway. Of course that'll be sold as "giving the engineers an opportunity to improve their speaking skills for conferences" or some trite bullshit typical of sub-zero IQ C-levels.

I dont participate in any kind of hackathon or after work in-office "fun" event because they almost always turn into extra work hours. If you want to hang out you can find me at the bar.

Hackathons are generally an excuse to get more work for less pay. No different than pagerduty or any number of other scams the technocracy has devised to drive wages down. People would be happy to do them if they'd get paid.

However, there's another problem. No one wants to work on "regular everyday" stuff for even a 9-5 M-F hackathon. I and many other people just call this "doing our job".

Sometimes there are fringe benefits where a company may allow engineers to actually work on something they enjoy. Maybe it's a new language, or a prototype, or anything. The key is it doesn't have to be related to company work. Unfortunately, as it has been my experience several times now, this benefit is the first to go and replaced instead with tyrannical PMs and sales people cracking the whip over the engineers to get a "fun hackathon project" done.

None of this would happen but software engineers do not identify themselves as laborers being exploited. Software engineers are, honestly, some of the smartest and absolute braindead people I've ever met. I can think of no other industry where someone could be convinced to do literally 5-figure level free work in exchange for 3 pizzas and a 6 pack.

Aren't you forgetting something? The "believe the science" shills that just so happen to be the same people that write "study says" type articles?

People are right to be suspect of medicine. Especially when things like vaccinations are shrouded in FAITH and not SCIENCE. You wouldn't trust a faith healer, yet here we are accosting people for criticizing medicine literally promoted as "believe the science or you're an anti-vax idiot". I'd take a lay-on-hands over injecting myself with any substance promoted by such people. Especially when people like Pfizer stand to profit from it. You're welcome to your 5-8 helpings of covid vaccine boosters (more boosters than any disease requires on the planet, btw). If you're still hungry (and alive) after that, you can take mine for me too.

For-profit medicine whether for an alleged "global good" (covid) or not is sinister and should be suspect. When the people writing the studies are on the payroll, or produced through the revolving door, of the creators of said thing you should probably begin running the other direction. It wasn't more than 60 years ago smoking was proven by SCIENCE to be optimal for weight loss. Phillip-Morris even funded the studies. You wouldn't doubt that science, would you, shill?

> like a 4800 piece Lego star destroyer,

This, funny enough, is all you needed to say to completely delineate your entire political view.

> So was I punished when my previous right to buy a semi-auto centre-fire was removed? Or was my society made somewhat safer because it's now very hard to obtain guns that were designed as weapons for use against other humans first and foremost?

Fallacy, making guns harder to acquire does not stop crime. Turns out, criminals don't follow laws. Shucks. Want evidence? Everything south of the border. The entire state of Illinois. Los Angeles. Italy. The list goes on. Oh, are you going to cite Australia? They collected a laughably small amount of guns from the population during their gun ban. So small in fact the number is never quoted because it is actually evidence gun bans don't and will never work (< 20%). The only reason they were even that successful (that is to say, not at all) is because they are literally surrounded on all sides by water and their only natural enemies are themselves.

Let me introduce a counter argument:

Why is it that when we talk about hard drugs, abortion, etc "banning it doesn't work" but when we talk about guns the only solution is to ban them with prejudice? Is it because "those things don't kill people"? Because, current there's a literal war going on in Mexico. You know, the place where all the fentanyl murdering US citizens comes from. Leave my rights alone.

> At the intersection between the right to bear arms, and the right to not be shot at school or the mosque or the gay nightclub, which right should win?

The right to bear arms, which when properly executed protects the mosque and the night club. But yeah, use a false dichotomy to further dig yourself deeper into a hole you'll never surface from.

When you are young you think you can become anything. You dream big and have tremendous reserves of creativity, and importantly, time to draw from. As you get older you begin to realize that you aren't special, you'll never get to be what you want, and more-or-less from birth you've be pre-ordained into a set of paths in your life and you can only choose one. Some people manage to break this in small ways, for example being the first to go to university and get a STEM degree. Though, it just opens a few more paths. You're still a cog. By the time you're 35 over half your useful life is gone, and the most important formative periods are long in the past. You're now a derelict ship flying through space solely on inertia waiting to slam into whatever is your final resting place.

Once I realized this I lost almost all of my passion for anything. I don't program outside work, I am by-and-large a luddite when viewed externally. I absolutely hate new technology and learning about it. It took over a decade of industry work grinding me to the bone and destroying my passion to do this. I wouldn't be so cynical, except that because I work 8-10 hours a day I don't even have much time pursue a replacement passion. I exist to serve. In this light "depression" is really a survival mechanism. If you start having hope of becoming something better after you leave school you'll just watch it be dashed right in front of you by some tech-moron you're working for. Or worse, the non-technical person turned "programmer".

> Unfortunately for you that would remove the vast majority of people who could be tricked via Fox News to vote for the viewpoints this and your other (vile) comments espouse.

The Japanese are famous for leaving their elderly on mountains historically. Many societies see no purpose to invalids.

> they serve no economic value, are a burden to the economy and so forth.

Agree. Though I don't watch fox news I'm not as confused about my political beliefs as you are about your gender. I'd recommend therapy. My beliefs are only vile because your frame of references is clouded by living in a bohemian mega city.

1/4 of the defense budget used to protect the entire world. If we didn't have to do that, I'd agree.

I'm gonna take a long shot and say your education did not cover that part of world history.

Full employment never works. Famous example is the soviets. Neither can UBI be penciled into an actual economy. UBI would bankrupt the nation, so would a large scale job guarantee program as described.

I am never surprised. When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense. It's hard to take any of these academic exercises seriously. Especially when they spawn from fields as fraudulent as economics and social science.

History has shown full employment does not work. The most famous example being communist countries such as the USSR. They achieved full employment, except that it was mostly useless labor. Sure, you have a job. But your job is to count buckets of nails by hand all day. When you're done with that you go back to the beginning and count them again. You'll get paid a pittance for your trouble. However, I would not call this "valuable work". Or, work that the article supposes would provide someone some meaning.

> So far, a hundred and twelve people have used the Job Guarantee, as the program is known, to find work; at least fifty more are expected to do so before 2024, when the program is scheduled to end. Participants complete an eight-week training course, then receive a job offer; they’re free to decline it without losing their unemployment benefits, but so far everyone who’s been offered a job has chosen to work.

This is insane on principle when scaled up to a society. You can get trained, be offered a job (under the assumption of livable pay), and then can refuse it and stay on the government tit? NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. This will never work. It's the BS machinations of an overeducated academic trying to prove a point. If you accept tax payer funded job training you should be obligated to take the first job, in that field, that pays you the minimum liveable wage. Otherwise it's anarchy.

> Sven Hergovich, the regional director of the Public Employment Service of Lower Austria, essentially agrees with this analysis. He thinks that rising demands for productivity and efficiency mean that, now and in the future, not everyone will be able to find a job without support. “There are not sufficient jobs available for all of the long-term unemployed,” he told me. “In fact, we have only two options. Either we finance long-term unemployment, or we create a job guarantee.”

Some people are useless. This is not any different than any other time in history. There are people who, if it wasn't for menial work, would actually be fundamentally useless by the definition of the term. The internet calls these people NEETS. They are generally burdens on society and IMO we should just let nature run it's course. They will either starve or skill up. Either way, society wins.

So they can struggle, go back to their old ways, and end up back in the system for 15 more years. This isn't just the case for these more vile crimes its also the case for even minor felonies. Generally people let out on probation, for example, are more-or-less permanently "imprisoned" and on a very short leash. It is remarkably easy to end up back in prison and it's not even as complicated as failing a drug test or missing counseling.

The entire system from the bottom up is rigged against a former con. If we are to believe justice systems should be rehabilitative than when the con is released they should be made whole and all record expunged. Otherwise, we may as well kill them. They are dead to society anyway. Supposing you aren't a young offender that gets out while you still have some strength the jobs that will hire you (mostly the more dangerous labor jobs) won't have any use for you.

It's a shame. This recruiter is a perfect example of perpetuating the system by giving two extreme examples. I'm sure they won't hire anyone with a felony. Mostly because in their upper middle class upbringing they never had the threat of prison held over them. Must be nice.

> To be fair, when you learn that South Korea has prosecuted and convicted most of it's ex-presidents (also one assassination and one suicide)... I'm not sure it makes South Korea look uncorrupt.

Or, alternatively, they realize it's impossible to run a country and not be corrupt. Then, all "presidents" are actually defacto dictators. Not too far off the reality of the matter...perhaps the US should get on this train.

The only way a representative democracy can work, and moreover a justice system, is the assumption that the people in charge have extraordinary moral and ethical character.

Since time imemmorial this hasn't been true. It's worse now than it's ever been. You can't even vote the corruption out at this point. So, we will never have that mythical democracy nor justice system.

They feed on each other. The corrupt crypto people corrupt the establishment, which looks the other way, and the feedback loop continues. One does not negate the other and especially in the case of finance it's entirely possible to have exactly 0 good guys. The media has no interest in the telling the truth. There's no financial incentive. Hence every "fact checker" is a consummate liar, and every "journalist" is just an opinion pundit with (perhaps) a bachelor degree. We are literally living in the Truman Show. All it takes is a little money to change the public's perception of a person.

Wow it's incredible how deeply embedded in everything these criminals are. This is some Epstein level cover being run by the media basically 24x7.

Really makes you wonder about those "fact checkers" we were supposed to "trust" 2 years ago...huh...

In the past being an "internet person" brought you into interesting sub-cultures. You had shibboleths (like quoting bash.org) that would identify you. Since the internet was small you would meet genuine often interesting people. I still have friends from the "wild west" days of the internet. The time period, I think, was the absolute best time to be alive and on the internet (though terminally online lamers and cry bullies demanding censorship may disagree).

Now, the apt term for people who are "too online" is "terminally online". The terminally online are more like a cancer than an interesting sub-culture. Since social media has allowed them to gain some semblance of following in a hyper-niche subgroup they think they can take their absurd opinions, styles, ideas, etc into the real world and expect it to work. These people are easily identified. When placed in an uncomfortable situation they become cry bullies. You might know many of them as your current HR department.

There is nothing objectively beautiful about modern architecture. Brutalism, for example, is talentless nonsense.

Before the advent of "everyone gets sued", the ADA, nuclear war, etc there was actual creative freedom. Now, everything is just one size fits all. Just in case you happen to attract the wrong attention.

Architecture really is a reflection on how mind numbingly dull modern life actually is.

> that they have a right to ask for a good faith estimate.

Yet another magical misdirection by the bought and paid for law writers.

You shouldn't have to ask. It should be no different than any other service. "Here Mr. Jones, your estimate." at which point you scoff and find somewhere else. Instead it's "oh btw you can ask for a good faith estimate" but the default is "bill the patient for everything at 9x rate and negotiate it down to 3x rate".

Entire system is a racket. Most doctors are rich not because they work hard but rather they are rich because their practices are highly effective fraud rings. Locally, many doctors won't even take medicaid because they can't defraud the government. It's fraud all the way down.

If you haven't felt it already the management consultants and CEOs are doing everything they can to damage remote work. I even heard the other day from one of these types that "studies show in-office work is more productive".

Its just a reminder that no matter what your pay and benefits "we are family" is always bullshit. Their goal is to simply extract maximum life from you at any cost. Despite increasing employee safety (no need to drive), reducing overall employee costs, and increasing employee health and welfare overall they will take all of this away. You can even find shills and company men here in this very forum touting the "astounding benefits" of office work.

At my current gig all of our remote benefits were taken away to encourage us to come into the office but the company would not say, officially, remote work is over.

Fuck these people.

> - Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.

Ah yes, Argumentum ad Pearl Clutchum. It never fails.

I have worked with the big 4, and also been on the receiving end of their "work". I can vouch for this comment personally. I've never seen less effort put into something worth so much money. Reams and reams of documents, jargon, and other bullshit and some cheap, obviously outsourced, incredibly shitty, "wireframe" sold as an MVP of a product.

I would be impressed by them if I wasn't so disgusted.

Every game that had a LAN mode could generally be played either via a software VPN, or other methods. More often than not games (especially FPSes) would ship with dedicated server software. You still needed to buy the game, but then you could run the dedicated server on your favorite hosting platform and play.

I think it was the xbox-ification of shooters that changed everything. 2009 or so, if I had to guess. MW2 was the first game that I remember really pushed company owned servers hard. Coincidentally this was also used to sell overpriced, often useless, DLC. At least back then the DLC was maps though.

It might be my age but I find it easier to remember games that DID have dedicated servers, rather than those that don't.

> specifically to prevent privacy.

I appreciate this typo on a spiritual level.