nisse72

> so that the fortnightly pay run ends on an even hourly number

How isn't that already the case with 10 x 8 hour days? or 8.5 etc?

Your linked article mentions another interesting idea: that an additional 9 minutes a day is more than 5 days a year.

I used to work for a medium sized company (~500 staff) that made us all work 10 extra minutes each day "off the clock", but then gave it back in the form of a number of whole and half days throughout the year when the company would be closed for business. Usually that meant that we'd get an extra day off before a long weekend or bank holiday, an additional day before christmas, that sort of thing. This was on top of 33 days of paid annual leave, so a sweet deal.

> There's a reason newer buildings use lever handles over doorknobs

For the cats.

With the thumb of the same hand that's holding the phone? Welcome to RSI hell!

I want a 2-knob "mouse" like the one I had on my etch-a-sketch 30 years ago! One for X, one for Y...

[ 3 minutes of googling later... ]

Of course it's been done: https://mitxela.com/projects/etch_mouse

Oh I missed the part where it said what country he (she?) was leaving, or where he might want to go. Do you feel the same way about people leaving any country, wherever they might be?

In fact, no snakes at all.

Ah! Which brings to mind the quote from former NZ prime minister Rob Muldoon, commenting how the large numbers of Kiwis emigrating to Australia resulted in raising the average IQ of both countries.

It will help keep your head from bobbing outside the vehicle as it rolls, preventing your death from a crushed skull.

Edited to add:

"partial ejection" are the magic google words. Here's an example:

"It was found that, in standard impact tests on high containment barriers, partial ejection of the head through the side windows occurs systematically"

from: https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=750825

Swedish pleasantries 101:

Sure! Let's do lunch! Week 42? No my in-laws will be visiting that week. Week 43? Sorry, I have a dentist appointment that week. Week 44, no I can't then, but maybe week 45? Oh, we have a christmas thing that week. Week 46? I'm not sure, but I think I need to keep that week open. How about we get back in touch after the holidays? Absolutely. Rinse and repeat.

Haha, the senior colleague in the story is the CEO, and my manager is the CTO. The CTO is on our side but the CEO cares only about 1 person and it's not us. Hence: clueless and does not give a toss.

I would love to do that, but even though my opinion is shared by possibly 80% of the staff here I would also be the prime suspect since I've been quite outspoken about it. In fact there's a note on the back of the amplifier telling me specifically to keep my hands off the speaker cables! (They have been unplugged on a few occasions, but not by me).

My manager is sympathetic but powerless. However we're expecting some major changes soon so I am cautiously hopeful, but I'm also keeping my eyes open for other opportunities in my area. This will sort itself one way or another.

I am currently working in a very crowded open office. We have small desks where we sit almost elbow to elbow, the place is all hard surfaces (it's an old industrial building made into office space), and there is a fair amount of noise.

But none of this would bother me except for the fact that one senior person has decided to have speakers installed in the ceiling, and we have to listen to non-stop spotify playing top 40 or whatever, all day every day.

The constant music drives me insane, it just drones on and on. I wear noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds to drown it out but I don't like wearing headphones all day and it hinders collaborating with my neighbours. I can't tell if management is clueless or simply does not give a toss. Probably both.

Vancouver, since 1986

Why do you think you have nothing to learn from any society that is smaller than yours?

I don't know the details for Finland, but Sweden has a similar system that works out like this:

If a company has agreed to pay you $100k, that's after any payroll tax has been paid, so they pay ~ $120k, you get (gross) $100k.

Of the remaining $100k, you pay 0 on the first ~ $2600, 31% on the portion between $2600 and $62k, 51% between $62k and $88k, and 56% above $88k. Do the math, it comes out to about $38500 in income tax.

There is no wealth tax or inheritance tax. You get free university education, free universal health care, great public transport, 480 days of parental leave (that can be split among the parents mostly how you like, and used for up to 8 years), and you get a child allowance of ~ 120 euro each month for each child until that child is 16.

Too much? Yeah right.

Today I learned that people will spend the better part of a day looking at and presumably buying candles.

"People come here and they make a day out of it. They'll spend four, five hours in this store because it's fun!"

I can't think of any store where I'd happily spend anything approaching that amount of time. But candles? Really? Fun?

Before you do that, see this film:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0302674/

It happens automatically. There is no "cancel" button.

Watching a video on my mac, and listening over bluetooth, the audio lags the video by at least 0.5 second, it's unwatchable if there's any sort of dialogue.

> Maybe that lot on the slope of the volcano wasn't such a great idea after all?

Yeah, tell that to about half the population of New Zealand. Volcano or fault line, take your pick.

You mean like this one?

http://www.getroost.com/

A friend has one, and tells me that when his infant daughter screams, it sometimes notifies him that the house is on fire. I wonder if she's learned to game that system...

Well there was that cook who survived for 3 days in an air pocket inside a sunken fishing boat. At the time there was a lot of discussion what made that possible. I believe it was posted to HN as well but can't find it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/05/cook-survived-sunke...

I hear what you are saying, and really I don't mind that the formatting is required by the language, I'm not arguing against that.

But... we could have had both! Absolutely require the formatting, but also keep the magic symbols that help your tools help you!

If you move a block of code to a place just after e.g. a loop, it isn't clear whether it should be inside or outside the loop, your editor cannot guess this. You still need to tell it at what level the new code should be inserted. And if the end of the loop happens to be nested further, the ambiguity is exacerbated.

I switch between C and Python quite frequently. With C, I just type the code, and let my editor manage the indentation, which it can do perfectly without any help from me. With Python, I find that I spend a lot more time thinking about the formatting itself, especially at the end of block, because it's up to me to get it right.

I fail to see how the _lack_ of a closing brace _improves_ comprehensibility. What Python has done is removed a helpful indicator, and put more of the responsibility on the programmer.

I'm happy to type that extra character in C, because it helps lower my cognitive workload so I can focus more on the problem I'm trying to solve. The closing brace doesn't mean anarchy, or make the code harder to understand later.

Rearranging code, refactoring, moving blocks, inserting conditionals etc would be easier and could be auto-indented if there were braces. Instead you need to carefully ensure that everything aligns correctly with the intended meaning at the new location.

Also, a closing brace is a nice signal to the editor that it's time to "outdent".

Finally, people seem to forget that python already has an opening brace, except it's spelled ':'. So why no closing brace to match? This seems inconsistent to me.

Since when does a television become "obsolete" after a year? Or even after 5 years? Just because it doesn't have built-in support for Netflix or whatever the latest thing is? This is the sort of idea that lures people into overspending in the first place.

For the record, mine is close to 18 years old and continues to work just fine for watching broadcast television. Yes it's fatter than those newfangled flat things, but it doesn't watch me watching it, it doesn't record my conversations, and it doesn't report my viewing habits back to the mother ship. One day it will fail and I'll be forced to get a new one.

Copyright trap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry#Copyright_tra...

One word geek test: pronounce "coax" :)

I agree with the authors main point, however I did see a good counterexample a few years ago when Martin Fowler did a talk about his then recently published book on refactoring. He did the talking while an assistant did the live coding to keep up with the narration. "Now lets move this behaviour into the other class": magically the video followed his instructions, paused automatically at the right places etc.

> “It’s a treaty that structures everything forever – and we can’t get out of it.”

> he noted treaties like this one set rules that must be followed forever

But a few lines further down:

> A country can withdraw any time, on six months’ notice.

I'm confused; which is it?