pjlegato

Children don't actually NEED electronic entertainment of any kind. Kids lived that way for a very long time.

Networking is a continuous, ongoing process. You must pre-plan networking.

It must be executed well in advance of actually needing a favor from the network. It is the opposite of a "transactional" interaction, such as buying something from a store.

You must make an effort to continue having a social relationship with people you meet (former employers and colleagues, etc.) from the moment you meet them. What exact activities must be done depends on your local culture.

It is very possible that contracting -- which absolutely requires maintaining a social network of business contacts -- is not for you. That's fine, everyone is different and some people for various reasons don't want to or cannot do the social networking part. In that case, you might be happier as a well-paid employee.

OTOH, if you want to learn to do the networking part, it is possible. There are courses, books, even clubs that teach this sort of thing and create opportunities to practice it. If you see it as an interesting challenge that is outside your comfort zone but doable, that might work. Don't do it as a chore because you feel you must, though; if it is forced or reluctant, it won't work well.

Not so. Armed security guards are indeed legal and licensed to carry firearms in almost all US states[1], as well as in almost all European Union states[2], Japan[3], Australia[4], and Canada[5].

So, in nearly the entire 'developed world,' security guards can indeed carry guns.

[1] Time magazine even wrote about this a few months ago: https://time.com/6275440/insecure-private-security-replacing... -- it says that "about 30" states even allow guards to be licensed as "private police" with full arrest powers.

For an example, here is California's regulatory site: https://www.bsis.ca.gov/industries/guard.shtml -- California, one of the most notoriously anti-gun states -- allows properly licensed security guards to arrest people, as well as to carry tear gas, batons, and firearms.

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/use-firearms-private-security...

[3] https://dannychoo.com/archive/en/posts/firearms-in-japan

[4] https://multisectraining.edu.au/do-security-guards-carry-wea...

[5] https://novage.ms/canadian-laws-security-guards-need-to-know...

By far the best way to operate is via in-network connections you already have. This could be former employers who were happy with your work as an employee, former colleagues at those jobs, people you know from your local university or tech community, even niche Discords / Slacks / forums, and so on: places where you are a known quantity and not a commodity, places where you are not competing with a million anonymous consultants on the Internet.

If you are on Upwork or some similar site, you are in a brutal Hunger Games deathmatch with many, many highly experienced people around the world, all racing to the bottom to be commodity service providers at the lowest possible cost. Avoid that if at all possible.

Devote specific time towards keeping your old connections alive, revitalize that network periodically in accordance with your local business customs and norms (the exact things you have to do to do this vary significantly by region.) That network is highly valuable to you as a consultant. That is the one place in the world where you are not merely a commodity.

Take time too to expand your network: attend conferences and technical meetups. Participate in them as a presenter as much as you can. Ask people in your network for introductions to others.

You will find the networking aspect takes up a tremendous amount of time if done properly. Many don't like this, which is fine; these people tend to go back to being an employee.

Finally, make sure you don't spend all of your income as you get it -- that is, save a significant amount of money to cover the low points in your sales cycle. Your income as a consultant is highly "lumpy," meaning you will receive a lot of money at some points, then no money at all for a long time. Make sure you've budgeted appropriately, and you have enough money in reserve to pay for the "no income" parts of the cycle.

Hope this helps.

Licensed private security guards who are armed, trained, and legally able to deal with lethal force are common all over the world.

The features offered by commercial engines are lightyears ahead of FOSS engines, especially at the high end.

If you're running a commercial game studio in such a brutally competitive market as video games, how can you afford to use FOSS? Your choices are go without high-end features that your competitors do have; or divert resources from your game content to build them in-house. Both seem less attractive than "just buy a commercial engine" to many studios.

Indeed; this is the bulk of AWS / Azure / Google Cloud's business model, the so called "kill zone" adjacent to their infrastructure offerings. They let startups conduct the risky, expensive R&D to find product-market fit, then step in with massively more operational resources to clone whatever worked, only with massively more resources on developing better tooling.

Not quite. "Selling you something" and "satisfying a debt owed" are not the same thing. A sales transaction is not the same thing as a debt.

It is perfectly legal for a counterparty to decline to enter into a sales transaction with you because they don't like your proposed payment terms. They are not required to accept cash (or anything else that they don't like.) That is not satisfaction of a debt owed; no debt has been created, because they refuse to give you anything in the first place.

The "legal tender for all debts" part means that _if you already owe someone money_ for some reason, and you offer them cash, they cannot refuse the cash and then pursue legal action against you for not paying the debt. The court must rule that your offer of cash is sufficient to satisfy the debt.

Non sequitur fallacy; mismanaged and abusive hospitals are not an inevitable consequence of involuntary committment for people with severe mental illnesses who are unable to take care of themselves.

There are also many cases of mismanaged and abusive conventional hospitals for purely physical ailments. Should we shut down all ERs and stop putting casts on broken bones because of that?

If it's that important and you've left it until the night before, you have failed to do your own job properly through inadequate prior planning.

If it makes you feel any better, people also do the same sort of inaccurate cultural reductivism about the United States -- a vast geographical area containing many strongly differentiated local regional cultures -- on a daily basis.

This is correct. The core value-add of e.g. Slack is not actually "transmit messages between authenticated users." There were dozens of other applications, both commercial and open source, that already did exactly that when Slack came out and killed them all off.

The core value proposition of Slack is next-level beyond that: it adds a visually appealing, highly intuitive UI/UX that almost anyone can sit down and immediately use, without any studying or setup or manuals or training. No technical skills are required. You don't need to understand anything beyond "type username and password"; the rest is self-explanatory.

SSH has supported MFA for decades: https://www.google.com/search?q=ssh+mfa

Indeed, Germany, Ireland, and France (among others) exhibit both extremely high productivity[1] and extremely high per capita alcohol consumption[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...

As a direct result of Stallman's uncompromising disinterest in what values people in the broader world actually wanted to engage with -- instead attempting to dictate his own moral views as a petty tyrant -- GNU _as a project_ hasn't been relevant to computing for decades.

When was the last time you booted up the Hurd kernel? I would be surprised if more than 10% of HN readers even know what that is. (Stallman actually summarily dismissed Hurd's lead developer when he dared to criticize the GFDL in public. https://lwn.net/Articles/59147/)

Stallman's abrasive and confrontational posturing is related to but distinct from his ideological goals. His rude posturing actually _damaged_ the chances of ever reaching those goals.

Even the GNU "copyleft" license -- the project's greatest success in terms of "actually impacting the world" -- has fallen more and more into disuse in favor of less restrictive licenses such as BSD and MIT.

It's even older than that: Amazon began doing this in the 90s.

Their initial idea was to synchronize warehouse inventory with the online store in realtime, so that users would never buy anything out of stock. That proved logistically difficult and expensive, so they decided that the frontend would merely checkpoint inventory levels at intervals. When someone inevitably ordered something that was no longer in stock, they simply sent a robo-apology note and refunded the order.

Mitigating the hit to customer satisfaction was deemed cheaper than the very expensive proposition of synchronizing distributed warehouse inventory levels in realtime over unreliable networks.

"Products targeted to non-experts" bears emphasizing: prior to the early 2000s, "using computers" (for any purpose) was a very niche activity, not a mainstream thing that everyone did all the time every day.

Either you were a highly trained professional using a computer for serious work, or else you were a dedicated hobbyist. Either way, you expected to put in significant time to learn and understand how this magically complex machine worked before you could actually accomplish anything. "Normal people" without strong motivation to study the computer simply did not use computers much during that era.

Fast forward to the smartphone era, and "using computers" has become a casual everyday activity for normal people. Companies are now incentivized to produce software for a mass audience with UIs that require as close to zero thought, study, or technical skill as possible.

All the computer nerds were shocked when Google came out with just a single bare text input as its primary UI. Surely we needed the Baroque masterpiece that was AltaVista's UI to ever gain useful work from a search engine; there are so many parameters the user might wish to vary! But no; as it turns out, the new Eternal September mass computer user audience strongly prefers slightly less control in favor of less time spent thinking.

Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it easy for a user to figure out what's going on by making your application look, feel, and work the same as all others. Anyone familiar with the general HIGs can just sit down and start using it with minimal hassle.

Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it harder for a consumer to remember your brand. It's not sticky in their minds, visually speaking. Your application looks, feels, and works exactly the same as your competitors' applications. This has measurable impact on revenue, and it's bad for your bottom line.

Guess which one most businesses choose: easier to use, or better revenue?

This is an inaccurate and highly reductive stereotype of what the supposed "Anglophone" cultural world believes about friendship.

In reality, there are vast cultural differences between different English speaking regions, which foreigners often overlook due to the shared language. California, New York, Miami, Johannesburg, New Zealand, and rural Yorkshire are all technically "Anglophone" in some broad reductive sense, yet are as culturally distinct (or even moreso) as, say, Sweden and Greece.

Let's not overly stereotype here. America is a huge place with many radically distinct cultural regions.

Certain regions have this "forced positivity culture," notably the west coast. Others, such as the northeast, are famous for the opposite.

American regional cultural differences are obscured -- especially to foreigners -- by the use of a common language. California is as culturally different from Maine as Portugual is from Norway.

The retail price of renting the GPU includes, among other things, the cost of the power bill that the cloud service pays (or else they'd lose money.) The more efficient GPU will, all else the same, be cheaper to lease.

Writing "produced on equipment that also processes peanuts" on a food label is hardly inconveniencing others.

It's still very much on the parents to prevent harm to their peanut-allergic children.

As an aside, the sharp rise in nut allergies is itself an unintended consequence of another well-meaning attempt at social engineering: about 30 years ago, manufacturers began printing "CHOKING HAZARD: DO NOT FEED NUTS TO CHILDREN UNDER TWO YEARS OLD" on nut labels. Many parents complied, and that lack of any early exposure to nut proteins resulted in a massive increase in life-threatening nut allergies among children.

That statement is not true of Western music in general, only of most (not all) classical and poular music since roughly the 18th century, when "equal temperament," tunings designed to make all keys sound the same, became popular.[1]

Much Western music, such as that written during the the Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval eras, as well as certain modern genres like barbershop quartets, modern classical, electronica, microtonal and atonal music, etc. use a variety of other systems such as some form of just intonation[2], where different keys sound very different as they exhibit differently sized versions of the same interval.

Conversely, much non-Western music also uses some kind of equal temperament (where keys all sound the same), such as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Native American music.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation

_With_ publicly funded education, however, everything boils down to what some small group of unelected bureaucrats decide. That is arguably much worse.

It's also worth noting that most countries with totally free higher education emphatically do NOT allow just anyone to go study any major they like at taxpayer expense. Subjects that have few jobs waiting at the other end are strictly gated by intensely difficult entrance exams designed to weed out all but a small number of students, so that nobody wastes their time getting a degree in a topic where it is unlikely they can ever find employment.

Those warnings and replacement schedules are calibrated for heavy use in a mission-critical office environment, where people are printing dozens to hundreds of pages an hour (depending on the specific model) all day, every day; and where any printer failure costs many thousands of dollars in direct and opportunity costs.

In a residential office with orders of magnitude less use, and very low costs for an unexpected failure, it'll probably work fine for many years.

tl;dr Used office-grade laser printers are often a great bargain for home use.

Start smaller. Set a timer for one minute, and get them to "do nothing for one minute." Build up from there.

Mathematica is a comprehensive symbolic manipulation engine and functional programming language written by a physicist starting in the late 70s. It has been used to solve various real world physics problems since the early 80s. It has been commercially available since 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram

It should be noted that, empirically, all other economic systems that have been tried are even worse than capitalism as far as people's perceptions of their existence.

Capitalist countries have border guards to keep foreigners from coming in illegally. Socialist countries have border guards to keep their own people from escaping.

Capitalism does not enforce behavior patterns. You are free to opt out and be poor and not compete with others, if you want. You can be homeless, or subsist on minimum wage, or go on welfare benefits, and many do.

Compare this to socialist economic systems, where opting out is illegal and classifies you as a social parasite. "Being unemployed" is a felony that gets you ten years in a forced labor camp. "Complaining about how it is unfair that you are not allowed opt out" is also illegal, and also gets you a stint in the labor camp. That's "enforced behavior patterns."

"The government" has no money of its own. Everything "the government" does is paid for by private citizens in the form of taxes, without exception.

These taxes are harvested from capitalist economic activity.

Are the big commercial options such as Unreal and Unity significantly better when one attempts to do this sort of "off the beaten path" type stuff?