aragot (u/aragot) - Readit News

aragot commented on Fired zachholman.com/posts/fire... · Posted by u/rdegges

hoverkraft · 11 years ago

I have a lot of family in France, and based on what I've heard from them, the flip-side of those kinds of employment protections is that employers become much more reluctant to hire people (especially young people and people considered higher risk based on background, skills, etc.)

Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.

aragot · 11 years ago

Spain has a 15-days notice for termination and Luxembourg 1-month, France 3 months for IT jobs (I'm French) and I guess employee protection laws are proportional to those figures. So I wonder whether it's essntially France which is considers the employment contract as a blood pact.

aragot commented on Stack Overflow: How we upgrade a live data center blog.serverfault.com/2015... · Posted by u/Nick-Craver

stinos · 11 years ago

Most companies depreciate hardware across 3 years

Can somebody explain why exactly? Was there ever some large scale research with the outcome this was somehow the cheapest? Or is it a mere byproduct of the consumption-based society? I'm asking because I'ved used lots of different types of hardware (both computing and non-computing) and >90% lasted well over 3 years. It seems a waste of time/money to get rid of ot after 3 years? Which matches with SE's findings: they choose 4 years. Still not that much, but already 'better'

aragot · 11 years ago

The default accountability rules say 3 years (or maybe "minimum 3 years"). Therefore older hardware is assumed to have no value, unless someone takes the time to think about it.

aragot commented on Google Contributor google.com/contributor/we... · Posted by u/sharjeel

IgorPartola · 11 years ago

This severely breaks down when you find a site you disagree with. Say you go on some anti-vaccines blog just to find after reading through a bunch of articles that they are a part of this program. Can you take your money back? Or what about a political campaign site for your rival? Or the Westboro Baptist clan?

aragot · 11 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. I'd like the choice to rebalance my donations at the end of the month. Stackoverflow (if it were a charity) is immensely useful to my business while BuzzFeed isn't. If donations are proportional to clicks and time spent, the we maintain an incentive for clickbait and low-value content.

aragot commented on Google Contributor google.com/contributor/we... · Posted by u/sharjeel

boozelclark · 11 years ago

I would love to see something like this for the actual software that runs the web. Things like OpenSSL, PGP, FessBSD and the other critical software that makes it all possible but almost all users will never visit there webpages. There would need to be some other way to allocate the funds, maybe by checking some form of header metadata to see what software websites are built on.

aragot · 11 years ago

Is 1-3$ enough? If we had to invoice "the internet" and OSS to users instead of financing it with ads, wouldn't it require something starting above 1. $40/month for the charity websites and 2. $600 per machine (the equivalent of the cost of Windows) for OSS software?

aragot commented on Google Contributor google.com/contributor/we... · Posted by u/sharjeel

foxylad · 11 years ago

Horses for courses - for high volume sites this would be awesome. My immediate thought was "Great - at last Wikipedia can get rid of the annual begging bowl". It could also be a great solution to the news site paywall debate. I'd love to seamlessly reward the sites I visit often, and if Google can automate this, more power to their elbow.

Also, interesting that it is Google is doing this. It risks reducing their advertising revenue if it takes off too well - I wonder what their cut of revenue is like compared to their advertising business? This model pays them (and the content producer) per impression rather than per click.

aragot · 11 years ago

In many countries, companies have a tax incentive to contribute to charities, up to 1% of their income. Billing this as a normal service to customers then transferring the money to charities after a tax-reduction scheme could be a way to fund the service cost-free. That said, it's extremely appreciable that companies help charities, whatever the scheme.

aragot commented on Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life esquire.co.uk/culture/boo... · Posted by u/Jem

Jem · 11 years ago

I remember when this incident happened. I can't remember what my reaction was at the time (probably a combination of "let's not alienate women in tech further" and "sexual jokes are OK in the right context, and a conf is propably not it") but reading this excerpt - particularly reading about Adria's continued anger(?) at Hank - really shocked me.

aragot · 11 years ago

There's only one way to reach peace: By not attacking the other party and by giving up past debts, altogether at a country level.

Example: The current way we deal with respect for women in IT is to raise those problems, get people fired, give women the promotion preference, and shame reluctant minds. If those actions leave scars in the sentiments of males, we won't be any closer to peace, confidence and safety between the two genders.

After WWII, the German people started to learn French and the French people started to learn German, among a lot of similar things. We need to find what will lead us to work together and acknowledge each other's qualities, more than attacking each other on legal grounds.

aragot commented on Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life esquire.co.uk/culture/boo... · Posted by u/Jem

MatekCopatek · 11 years ago

I remember when this story happened and after reading it all again, I still think that what makes it so terrible is the fact both sides were fired. One of them because he was behaving immaturely at a conference and another because her employer was getting ddosed.

Is it just me or are those both terrible overreactions from the companies' sides? The whole sexism discussion is perfectly valid and very important, we need to talk about what is wrong, but those layoffs were nothing but selfish pragmatic decisions. Hank's company didn't want the bad PR and Adria's didn't want the security trouble...

aragot · 11 years ago

It often happens in US to fire executives because of bad PR, undepending on their work. It doesn't have to be - How do they do on other continents? And this kind of be-perfect-or-be-banned rule doesn't have to extend to LTEs or even contractors.

aragot commented on Uber Database Breach Exposed Information of 50,000 Drivers, Company Confirms techcrunch.com/2015/02/27... · Posted by u/rockdiesel

skuhn · 11 years ago

Uber is already hamstrung by their inexperienced drivers's reliance on Google Maps for navigation. It is in no way equivalent to actually knowing your way around.

The difficulty of making an urban self-driving car aside, Google would have to achieve a quantum leap forward in the quality of their navigation platform. Otherwise every auto-taxi in San Francisco will proceed single file down Van Ness, with turns onto Market or Mission only. All other streets will be empty and filled with pigeons.

aragot · 11 years ago

> inexperienced driver's reliance on Google Maps for navigation

When I lived in Sydney, I used to take the taxi often. And the rule was pretty much: If your address doesn't exist on Google Maps, they don't know how to get there. Even "At the corner of Hyde Park and Oxford St", which is in the CBD, returned a 404 from the driver's vocal API. They were all officially registered drivers, I just think cab's over reliance on Google Maps makes them unaware of the street names.

aragot commented on Tree structure query with PostgreSQL truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tr... · Posted by u/dpeck

hobs · 11 years ago

I have never had great performance with recursive queries in SQL Server, does postgre perform better in this respect?

I have seen a few posts on HN regarding recursive CTEs recently and I shy away from them because it seems like an additional invocation for each different recursive lookup and a lot of the queries can be rewritten and potentially optimized using more traditional approaches.

aragot · 11 years ago

I've had positive experience with Postgresql, but I haven't personnaly witnessed how it behaves in production. In my opinion there aren't good alternatives to a recursive query:

- Send one request for each level of hierarchy? Worst of all.

- Stored procedure? I don't think it would be optimised compared to a recursive query.