This would infuriate me to no end. It's not enough that I'm forced to leave my home because of corruption and other problems? You dare come after me and ask for money? I would give up my citizenship the fastest I could.
Volunteering is a common concept in many communities. We have volunteer fire fighters, volunteer paramedics, volunteer librarians, volunteer social worker, volunteer ...
Some of these in fields, and sometimes even in close alignment to payed people.
In the context of SO there is a community producing Creative Commons (while there was recently a license change making the company less trustworthy) contents to help people and some people love helping others and the assumption is that the value this brings to all is bigger than the value for the company. Until recently the combination seemed to work. The company runs the platform to advertise their job boards and enterprise versions of SO and the community manages the content. But recently changes seem to be frustrating.
For comparison see also Wikipedia volunteers vs. Wikipedia foundation, Mozilla foundation&corp vs. Contributors, and even people happily submitting pull requests to Microsoft products on GitHub.
SE does not profit from its community websites (eg the ones we all read) aside from a vague "getting traffic to its enterprise product" which is probably not worth what they spend on hosting.
I don’t see how it’s my problem that their business model isn’t profitable. The board & C-suite still draw a salary, and the company value is built on unpaid labour.
And now we are contributing for free to Y Combinator!
(True - there's not much direct revenue from this comment I'm typing here, but this is Hacker News, the place where the imorotantninfirmationnos and YC is in the center of it, don't you see how cool they are?)
look, I get that you're not used to being called out on being hopelessly wrong. rephrasing the statement to be an empty tautology so you can be right is a waste of both of our times and only serves to protect your ego
Wikipedia and Mozilla were at one time mainly Non-Profits that people volunteered at for the same reason people volunteer at other non-profits, to benefit wider society
Both are turning more and more to be more profit-seeking, (Mozilla more than Wikipedia ) and it is tarnishing their reputations
SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".
Generally speaking, I do not believe For-Profit business should be allowed to seek Volunteers for their labor, this includes SE, Reddit, etc
If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business
> SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".
> If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business
Considering executive compensation at many non-profits, I don't think non-profit status alone is a good indicator of anything.
As for SO / SE, I didn't volunteer time and effort in light of their non-profit status, I volunteered in light of their mission. It was about putting in some amount of effort to make the world a better place. I couldn't care less if they made money off of it, just like I don't care if someone takes my open-source work and manages to make a business of it.
Or, people need to stop volunteering their time for free to commercial enterprises and then thinking that time investment gives them rights regarding the management of the enterprise.
Of course it doesn't grant them explicit rights, but it for sure grants implicit leverage if said commercial enterprise depends on these voluntary contributions. "Alienate your contributors, lose the basis of your business" doesn't sound very sustainable.
If you pay people for their labor then you can set terms in exchange for pay. It validates and reinforces the agreement. I’m being attached here for saying people should be paid for work.
Not having to accept terms is the point, or one of the major points, though. As an employee, you're beholden to the company, whereas as a volunteer, you don't owe them anything.
That doesn't mean exploitation isn't real and shouldn't be combated, but I think there's also a grey area that should be acknowledged.
By the way, what do you think of open source, and companies which use it?
My intent was not to attack you but rather the idea that contributing to internet forums somehow gives you any ownership rights to the forum.
For example, I don't know if HN makes money off this forum, but all of us commenters are contributing content that furthers the site's goals (hopefully). Yes, dang and sctb are paid to moderate this forum, but if there were no comments, there would be nothing to moderate.
Does that mean that by virtue of participating here for seven years I somehow have some right to tell them how to run their business? No, because there's no employment agreement. And even if there were any agreement, I doubt we would have the ability to do anything about some sudden change in direction from the C suite.
The realization that mere comments or the moderation of them on an internet forum create uncompensated content that someone else may profit from is apparently not as plain as I thought it was.
In my country, working as an Uber driver gets you a good salary. I think it's around 1000€ (minimum wage being less than 500€). Is it different in USA? Do they get less than minimum wage for 8 hours?
According to one analysis [1], working for Uber pays $8.80-$11 per hour (after subtracting car related expenses).
The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. But certain cities are much higher, for example New York City is $15.00. In San Francisco, it’s $15.59.
Also worth mentioning that most of these averages are not taken from drivers working full-time (40 hours per week). So while they may be able to make near minimum wage on an hourly basis, they may not be able to achieve that hourly rate for a full 40 hours per week due to fluctuating demand for rides.
Companies are not required to offer health insurance to part-time employees. Employers with more than 50 employees are required to offer health insurance to full time employees.
The crux of the interpretation is what constitutes an hour of work.
Once the ride starts with a paying client in the car, the hourly earnings are easily above minimum wage.
But what about the time spent logged into the app waiting for a ride? If you take a standpoint that's friendly to Uber, that is not billable time - the driver could potentially be working in other capacity (including doing gigs for direct and indirect competitors, like Lyft, Postmates, TaskRabbit, etc.) If you take a standpoint that's employee-friendly, this is similar to a store register clerk being by the register with no customers in the store - they're still present to perform their duties when necessary and therefore must be compensated.
How are you measuring the hours exactly? Just time when a passenger is in the car? Time on the way to pick up the passenger until you drop them off? All the time logged in and looking for a rides?
How do you factor in the car related expenses? And what about depreciation and other expenses beyond the direct out of pocket costs?
It is certainly possible to spend more than 8 hours trying to get rides, and end up with less than 8 hours worth of minimum wage pay after subtracting vehicle costs.
As a 20-year Linux user, I must say that many points are valid, but yes, there appear to be at least as many FUD items on that list.
My pain points, when trying to build a HTPC:
- Proper video support (like GPU offloading or vblank syncing) is haphazard at best.
- Font management is a pain. Not just the antialiasing, but adding a custom font and making sure all apps can find it.
- Audio support is a mess; pulseaudio creates as much problems as it solves (for example last I checked, it did not support IEC958 passthrough over spdif).
- Bluetooth connectivity appears to be a desktop-environment thing, so good luck logging in with your BT keyboard.
- Zeroconf service configuration is archaic (for example, advertising a Samba print share so that local machines can find it, or advertising a DLNA media source). It requires hand-editing xml configuration files.
Still, for all its flaws, it still beats other commercial offerings in terms of productivity.
> It's picking up every issue on Linux and paints it as a disaster.
Every time I tried to use Linux on desktop, I stopped due to a dozen of issues from that list.
> There's no concept of drivers in Linux
In Windows ecosystem, you buy hardware, plug it in, install drivers, and it works. On modern Windows, often they downloaded automatically by Windows, and start without reboots.
I think the OP meant that Linux can't offer comparable UX. The drivers are compiled into the kernel.
On the source level, this is due to the lack of the ABI.
There is plenty of great Desktop Environments nowadays that can easily compete with the UX you are used to from Windows (KDE Plasma, Gnome 3, Deepin,...).
Most things just work out of the box even without installing drivers. Yes there is still some problems (e.g. Laptop WiFi / old or exotic hardware) but I stumbled upon them in Windows and OSX as well.
Every OS has issues but I prefer Linux for everything besides graphics and working on PDF because most of the times I find a solution I can implement myself without much hassle.
OSX on the other side is very closed in comparison but I don't bother because Photoshop and Acrobat run just fine and I don't need much more.
Windows is just spyware, a security threat to people with free minds. I totally welcome China to switch to Linux and probably this will bring our world to a path towards more free software (very ironically because the US always tries to appear as the "Sheriff of the free world").
The average user is not the average HN user; the latter can solve the minor issues they stumble upon, but not the former.
Would you buy a car where "most things work", if you had no mechanical skills?
I'm a hardcore Linux user, but even with that, I don't advocate it unless I know exactly the platform a given user is going to work on.
There are surely issues on any system, but in Windows/Mac there is the expectation of everything working out of the box, since there is more of a "package" ("box") culture.
In this sense, projects like the Dell XPS are certainly big steps forward (and even the XPS has at least one significant issue out of the box).
You are basically right but for me this is a bit different.
My family and friends like to come to me with their IT problems and it's easier for me to solve them if they use Linux.
The big problems with Mac/Windows can in many cases also not be solved by me, easily (e.g. Driver for XYZ doesn't work - on Windows this means searching another EXE that could work but if it doesn't you can exchange the device in question because my Latin is exhausted at that point).
Sure there is problems with every system - it just depends on what you do and how you use computers what problems are the most concerning ones I think.
> Every time I tried to use Linux on desktop, I stopped due to a dozen of issues from that list.
At this point in time, given how technical a site HN is, and how many people have success with linux, it looks very much like the problem might be you. I don't mean this to be nasty, but installing and customising linux now is a pretty trivial exercise.
> On modern Windows, often they downloaded automatically by Windows, and start without reboots.
On modern linux, they are usually already present on the system and it just works. You don't need the download stage for the vast majority of things. Nvidia Graphics cards are an obvious exception, but for the most part, this complaint is spurious.
This includes me. I successfully develop commercial-quality stuff for Linux servers, also embedded for ARM devices (using Debian kernel so far). But the desktop is different.
> usually already present on the system
The hardware is just too diverse. I have following USB devices plugged into my desktop right now. USB 3.0 DisplayLink monitor: proprietary protocol, still experimental support on Linux, chip vendor only supports Ubuntu, monitor vendor doesn’t support any. Logitech C920 web camera: microphone, auto focus, on-board h264 codec. Logitech G700s: a mouse with 7 extra buttons and horizontal scrolling. Microsoft LifeChat LX6000: 2 way USB audio, OS volume controls, a couple extra buttons. Also wireless adapter for xbox gamepad: 6 analog axes, many buttons, two vibration motors, two way audio.
I'd argue that the same is true today. No big org is using pure OSS. They have big contracts with Redhat and the likes and they like to pretend that they're covered.
You always pay for all software in time. Someone needs to install the software in your company. Someone needs to answer support calls. If you pay RedHat when your people can't figure it out they can turn to someone else - a specialist (You hope: Redhat has a good reputation but there is always risk it is just someone else who knows less than you and will take more of your time understanding the problem than to just figure it out yourself.)
My CEO could do my job. He would need an additional degree in programming, and even more time in a day. He hires me because telling my bosses bosses (skip several levels) boss to get something done will go down the chain into figuring it out how to go from we need to grow market share in the area I'm working to actual code that will grow that market share. This across thousands of employees - the CEO could learn to do any one but he can't do all of them.
"Apps" like Slack are on my hate list even above desktop Java apps. Seriously, I can't understand how come it's acceptable to use >1GB of RAM to display 10 lines of text.
It's easy. The text is marked up, mixed in with images, video and other miscellaneous rich content, and includes remote resources and third party embeds.
There is no native UI toolkit that can do this properly, nor is there a cross platform way for 3rd parties to integrate even if there was. So web it is, with a runtime designed for being able to rapidly page in/out the entire UI from one screen to the next, even if that is entirely unnecessary for a single app.
Grouches have been shitting on the web, not entirely for bad reasons, but it's made them miss the fact that web has been stealing their lunch for a reason. If you live inside a terminal, your needs have diverged from the majority, and you're likely relying on crutches that are considered impossibly clunky by most.
The only ray of hope here is what FB has done with React and React Native, but I imagine it will take another 10 years before the unix geeks will want to admit there is something in that "webshit" worth looking at.
macOS Messages (aka iMessage) has been rendering text chat using HTML views for years, and it doesn't use gobs of memory.
The problem isn't that the text part is rendered using HTML. That actually makes sense - multiple desktop applications that compose/render user generated rich content rely on HTML (or something converted to HTML) and a web view of some description to render that content: mail, chat, etc.
The problem is rendering the entire application's chrome using Web technologies, and then running all of that inside a web view from a browser that is known to have the resource usage of a porcine creature with an eating disorder.
> The only ray of hope here is what FB has done with React and React Native
No. The ray of hope is that people realise web technologies are not the best choice, and the way they're used in Electron is fucking atrocious.
> macOS Messages (aka iMessage) has been rendering text chat using HTML views for years, and it doesn't use gobs of memory.
Keep in mind that the OS and the hardware it runs on comes from the same company that does iMessages. You shouldn't discount the amount of control that brings.
Contrast that to people who have to work with different OS platforms and hardware specifications.
Adium did exactly the same thing - rendering chat contents using HTML. It also didn’t use gobs of memory.
The hard work of optimisation has been done by apple, any app can embed a web view for content and take advantage of the optimisations in the system html renderer.
I refuse to use Electron apps - they clearly work in JS so the web version will work fine, and I get to keep the sandbox protections, content blocking etc of Safari.
And I use IDEA Ultimate almost daily. Yes, it uses a ton of RAM - but it uses a ton of RAM and is powerful.
I've not yet seen another IDE with the same capabilities (i.e. built in static analysis of dynamic languages like PHP, with refactoring support, etc).
I have oodles of memory (64GB) so I could of course run Slack and not "run out". But the key thing here is that Slack doesn't just use memory, it wastes it.
