Bitcoin is already sort of a Gold Standard. Because the release of new bitcoins that can algorithmically be mined is limited and the current valuation and pervasiveness of bitcoins in general, it's a better standard than any currency, where they could just manipulate the course by printing more money or buying more gold.
If you are a contractor or have a company you have very little fall-back. For students it really depends. If you are still under your parents roof you can't apply for anything, but if you go live alone, you could apply for a "living wage" as a student. Tuition is still currently rather cheap, and you get social rebate. You probably have access to a social scholarship as well.
One one hand you have unemployment, which depending on your situation is 1,000 - 1,600 euro per month.
If you don't qualify for unemployment, you can still get a "living wage", which is 870 euro if you're single (570 if single and living together) and 1,150 euro if you have kids.
newsflash: this is how facebook makes money. It's hardly a secret.
You want to target all females age 16 - 45 in your small city for your new trendy fashion store? That's 50$. Try to beat that coverage with the cost of printing flyers, posters and running ads on the local radio and TV station.
> I can open it up and tinker with it if I feel the need
Right, but the difference is that it's much more expensive for you to replicate that drill. If you buy a piece of software and get the source code so you can tinker with it, you can replicate and distribute that software at pretty much zero cost. They are not giving you the manufacturing design specifications and assembly line process with that drill either. Still, if there was one driving force the last 20+ years to get where we are today in computer and software technology it's definitely the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative. Okay, that's two forces:).
written from my linux laptop. No MS or Apple for me, thank you very much!
Clearly I'm not an Apple fan-boy.
Back in the mid 90s, we had MAC LC II's at university. We also had teaching assistants who were selling us the "it just works", "no tweaking" fad crap.
Except it didn't. Telnet windows would just crash out of nowhere without knowing what went wrong all the time. Same with other programs like the programming environment we were using or Netscape.
Those things would freeze on us all the time or your application window would just disappear without a clue of what went wrong. Floppies not ejecting also. Dos and Windows had CTRL-ALT-DEL, but I grew fond of CTRL-COMMAND-OPTION-whatever combination it took to reboot that piece of crap. And that's if it didn't require a hard reset.
I think the value really is in the high-end. The 27" 5k retina super-duper Mac is probably the best value for money. Monitors with those specs are already around 1500$ (you can go much cheaper with 4k though) plus you get kick-ass performance.
This. I think my contract actually states that everything made on the clock is their intellectual property. Also, there's a clause you can't work for other companies in the mean time, and if you are setting something up on your own time they can actually call first dibs on it (meaning they are first in line to buy it from you, but I don't know how that works if you're not agreeing with the offer).
I think the CC makes sense if, as a developer for example, you need resources that have to be set up by someone else. Databases, accounts, VMs etc...
Probably I could do those things myself, but hey, they are responsible for it so I have to go through them. If after a couple of days nothing seems to be moving, it's time for some cc's.
As for coworkers that you can't trust doing a good job, I'd rather do the job myself than delegating it. Yes, they should be let go, but if management ignores the issue there isn't much you can do about it. If you know it will take more time explaining it, fixing their bad implementation, and they won't learn anything from it and repeat the same mistakes the next time than doing it yourself, than yes I'm not going to e-mail them.
Talked to a guy who works with plenty of H1Bs and he said he didn't know anyone making under 125k. So, maybe there are a couple of big players really undercutting the H1B process, or we are just hearing about the abusive cases.
However if they have official H1B stats claiming 80% makes under the median for their skill/trade, that's an issue. Would want to know where these stats come from though.
This sounds all pretty standard if you have a software engineering background, but sometimes office politics takes over.
The codebase being dispersed over different teams, each team of course thinks their stuff is most important.
Those 50 small projects? You just created dependency hell! Sure, in theory you should strive for high cohesion and low coupling of projects, but suddenly team A needs this from team B, and they don't want to spend time asking, so they just implement that functionality at their level. Or the lower level team really wants to push through that change, suddenly the other team can adapt plenty of code (that should be low coupling).
I don't understand why attendance means anything. Of course, in a military school it makes sense, since you are enrolled in the military and you are getting paid. Basically, you're on the clock. Also, in Labs and practical courses obviously you need to be there to gain experience.
You could see it the other way around. If you get points just for showing up, you don't need to know the material as well. Whereas if your final grade for the course is the written exam and maybe the oral exam; than your mastery of the material is the only thing that counts in your grading .
I've seen students ace difficult maths exams while studying undergrad in Mathematics who never came to class. If you can master material on your own in a course where half the class flunks, you know your stuff, whether you've been going to class or not.
You are entitled, but that's not enough to pick up your kid from school each day at 3 pm, when most people still have hours to go at work.
Or to cover the 14+ weeks of holidays kids have in a year. When I look at my siblings and friends who have kids in kindergarten and elementary school, most are being picked up by their grandparents.
If you don't have that social support from family, and you are a single parent, you're pretty much forced to work half-time or find employment that matches perfectly with the schedule of your kids, hence being a school teacher usually works out.
The MiniMax algorithm (one of the simplest game algorithms) does exactly the same thing. It looks a couple of moves ahead, and picks the best to its knowledge (value function of that state). It can't brute force all Chess moves either. The art is how to calculate a correct value function of the state of the board.
The Deep Learning approach is probably more an exercise in finding features to correctly assess the state of the board at a given time rather than "brute forcing", although I'm sure it brute forces quite a lot. There's a reason why it takes years to train this system, because it requires a lot of "brute forcing".
There is a second type of Reinventer. And he sits at the opposite of your Reinventer. It's the guy who will call bullshit on every open source framework (or other) and will start implementing his own version from scratch. The claim will usually be that the framework doesn't completely matches the needs and creates too much overhead. Instead, he'd rather implement an application server, logging system, or a generic client-server framework, load-balancing from scratch, etc... Years later, after most bugs are solved, you have your completely custom and undocumented solution that only works with your particular use-case.
Yep, learned about it in college in '98 and how it was going to be the next big thing and rolled out quickly. Took its time though but it's here to stay.
says the article. How about googling "programmer" or "software developer". Oh, mainly well dressed people in a professional environment doing software development. Guess the image isn't too bad after all.
The Push Over / Overwhelmer is equally bad though. Because they will just add stuff to your plate, interrupting you constantly as well.
Say you're busy with a 2 day task. By noon, you will already need to pull a report for something else because he promised it up the hierarchy or other meeting where he didn't dare say no. He will promise two other high priority tasks that you also have to perform in the mean time and by the end of the 2 days, where you had basically 2 hours of work on the initial project, he will ask why the initial task is taking so long. They are basically setting you up for failure and make you look bad. Because you'll be the scapegoat and the guy who's bad at time-management when one of the tasks aren't handled properly or over time.
micro-managers are the worst though, because they suck every ounce of creativity out of you, and often take credit for your stuff.
Shouldn't it be pretty evenly distributed, given that you buy insurance your whole life, but chances of big health costs are much lower at an early age. So you're banking for later years. By the time you really need hospital visits, you may already have spend 6 figures on insurance without ever asking.
No it doesn't. Because you still have to pay taxes in Europe as well, and they are much higher than in the US.
So, not only are you only making half, you're also often losing half of that to taxes. So in the end, it's not a x2 but more a x3 win for the US.
I'm in Western Europe (Belgium) and wages for web (full stack) and software development are definitely higher than 35k. They are probably more in the 50k range. Except if you just came out of school.
In web development you would indeed be pretty useless if you knew one without the other, especially in smaller projects, unless you're a top notch designer.
In larger applications serving more users or more data, or where your client interface is not a webpage, it makes sense having people more specialized in certain areas. You may want to mitigate access by different types of users ( warehousing, analytics, real-time, transactions) to a huge relational database. You may need to design and maintain noSQL Cassandra clusters. Your customer uses your services through RPC procedures where you need to have a high-availability pipeline to consume their data and present the end-result back to them. All these use cases require zero lines of HTML, but a rather specialized skill-set. And that's where the money is.
Not a bad idea on the salary bump though:-) Let's all do that this year so next evaluation we can go "Well Mr Boss Man, seems industry standards for my job are +30%, but I'll take +20%";-)
Are they seeing this a currency or stock? Because what they could (and probably do) tax is Capital Gain. You bought some bitcoins at 50$, they are now 1050$ (looks like some people cashed in from the 1280$ peak:-)), so that's 20-30% capital gain tax on 1000$/btc please.
Since you did hold on to them more than a year that's long term capital gain tax which is a bit less, though
But it may indeed be hard to prove where these come from. Did you mine them, did you buy them as an investment, was this some kind of payment, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin is already sort of a Gold Standard. Because the release of new bitcoins that can algorithmically be mined is limited and the current valuation and pervasiveness of bitcoins in general, it's a better standard than any currency, where they could just manipulate the course by printing more money or buying more gold.
If you are a contractor or have a company you have very little fall-back. For students it really depends. If you are still under your parents roof you can't apply for anything, but if you go live alone, you could apply for a "living wage" as a student. Tuition is still currently rather cheap, and you get social rebate. You probably have access to a social scholarship as well.
One one hand you have unemployment, which depending on your situation is 1,000 - 1,600 euro per month.
If you don't qualify for unemployment, you can still get a "living wage", which is 870 euro if you're single (570 if single and living together) and 1,150 euro if you have kids.
newsflash: this is how facebook makes money. It's hardly a secret.
You want to target all females age 16 - 45 in your small city for your new trendy fashion store? That's 50$. Try to beat that coverage with the cost of printing flyers, posters and running ads on the local radio and TV station.
Make that GNU/Linux. My apologies RMS and thanks for your relentless determination!
Great article btw!
> I can open it up and tinker with it if I feel the need
:).
Right, but the difference is that it's much more expensive for you to replicate that drill. If you buy a piece of software and get the source code so you can tinker with it, you can replicate and distribute that software at pretty much zero cost.
They are not giving you the manufacturing design specifications and assembly line process with that drill either.
Still, if there was one driving force the last 20+ years to get where we are today in computer and software technology it's definitely the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative. Okay, that's two forces
written from my linux laptop. No MS or Apple for me, thank you very much!
Clearly I'm not an Apple fan-boy.
Back in the mid 90s, we had MAC LC II's at university. We also had teaching assistants who were selling us the "it just works", "no tweaking" fad crap.
Except it didn't. Telnet windows would just crash out of nowhere without knowing what went wrong all the time. Same with other programs like the programming environment we were using or Netscape.
Those things would freeze on us all the time or your application window would just disappear without a clue of what went wrong. Floppies not ejecting also. Dos and Windows had CTRL-ALT-DEL, but I grew fond of CTRL-COMMAND-OPTION-whatever combination it took to reboot that piece of crap. And that's if it didn't require a hard reset.
I think the value really is in the high-end. The 27" 5k retina super-duper Mac is probably the best value for money. Monitors with those specs are already around 1500$ (you can go much cheaper with 4k though) plus you get kick-ass performance.
This. I think my contract actually states that everything made on the clock is their intellectual property. Also, there's a clause you can't work for other companies in the mean time, and if you are setting something up on your own time they can actually call first dibs on it (meaning they are first in line to buy it from you, but I don't know how that works if you're not agreeing with the offer).
I think the CC makes sense if, as a developer for example, you need resources that have to be set up by someone else. Databases, accounts, VMs etc...
Probably I could do those things myself, but hey, they are responsible for it so I have to go through them.
If after a couple of days nothing seems to be moving, it's time for some cc's.
As for coworkers that you can't trust doing a good job, I'd rather do the job myself than delegating it. Yes, they should be let go, but if management ignores the issue there isn't much you can do about it. If you know it will take more time explaining it, fixing their bad implementation, and they won't learn anything from it and repeat the same mistakes the next time than doing it yourself, than yes I'm not going to e-mail them.
If I can't trust a coworker to do the work, I don't e-mail them at all.
Talked to a guy who works with plenty of H1Bs and he said he didn't know anyone making under 125k. So, maybe there are a couple of big players really undercutting the H1B process, or we are just hearing about the abusive cases.
However if they have official H1B stats claiming 80% makes under the median for their skill/trade, that's an issue. Would want to know where these stats come from though.
This sounds all pretty standard if you have a software engineering background, but sometimes office politics takes over.
The codebase being dispersed over different teams, each team of course thinks their stuff is most important.
Those 50 small projects? You just created dependency hell! Sure, in theory you should strive for high cohesion and low coupling of projects, but suddenly team A needs this from team B, and they don't want to spend time asking, so they just implement that functionality at their level. Or the lower level team really wants to push through that change, suddenly the other team can adapt plenty of code (that should be low coupling).
I don't understand why attendance means anything. Of course, in a military school it makes sense, since you are enrolled in the military and you are getting paid. Basically, you're on the clock.
Also, in Labs and practical courses obviously you need to be there to gain experience.
You could see it the other way around. If you get points just for showing up, you don't need to know the material as well. Whereas if your final grade for the course is the written exam and maybe the oral exam; than your mastery of the material is the only thing that counts in your grading
. I've seen students ace difficult maths exams while studying undergrad in Mathematics who never came to class. If you can master material on your own in a course where half the class flunks, you know your stuff, whether you've been going to class or not.
You are entitled, but that's not enough to pick up your kid from school each day at 3 pm, when most people still have hours to go at work.
Or to cover the 14+ weeks of holidays kids have in a year. When I look at my siblings and friends who have kids in kindergarten and elementary school, most are being picked up by their grandparents.
If you don't have that social support from family, and you are a single parent, you're pretty much forced to work half-time or find employment that matches perfectly with the schedule of your kids, hence being a school teacher usually works out.
The MiniMax algorithm (one of the simplest game algorithms) does exactly the same thing. It looks a couple of moves ahead, and picks the best to its knowledge (value function of that state). It can't brute force all Chess moves either. The art is how to calculate a correct value function of the state of the board.
The Deep Learning approach is probably more an exercise in finding features to correctly assess the state of the board at a given time rather than "brute forcing", although I'm sure it brute forces quite a lot. There's a reason why it takes years to train this system, because it requires a lot of "brute forcing".
There is a second type of Reinventer. And he sits at the opposite of your Reinventer. It's the guy who will call bullshit on every open source framework (or other) and will start implementing his own version from scratch. The claim will usually be that the framework doesn't completely matches the needs and creates too much overhead. Instead, he'd rather implement an application server, logging system, or a generic client-server framework, load-balancing from scratch, etc... Years later, after most bugs are solved, you have your completely custom and undocumented solution that only works with your particular use-case.
Yep, learned about it in college in '98 and how it was going to be the next big thing and rolled out quickly. Took its time though but it's here to stay.
but how many fps does it get running the new Mass Effect? Oh it can't?
says the article. How about googling "programmer" or "software developer". Oh, mainly well dressed people in a professional environment doing software development. Guess the image isn't too bad after all.
The Push Over / Overwhelmer is equally bad though. Because they will just add stuff to your plate, interrupting you constantly as well.
Say you're busy with a 2 day task. By noon, you will already need to pull a report for something else because he promised it up the hierarchy or other meeting where he didn't dare say no. He will promise two other high priority tasks that you also have to perform in the mean time and by the end of the 2 days, where you had basically 2 hours of work on the initial project, he will ask why the initial task is taking so long. They are basically setting you up for failure and make you look bad. Because you'll be the scapegoat and the guy who's bad at time-management when one of the tasks aren't handled properly or over time.
micro-managers are the worst though, because they suck every ounce of creativity out of you, and often take credit for your stuff.
Shouldn't it be pretty evenly distributed, given that you buy insurance your whole life, but chances of big health costs are much lower at an early age. So you're banking for later years. By the time you really need hospital visits, you may already have spend 6 figures on insurance without ever asking.
No it doesn't. Because you still have to pay taxes in Europe as well, and they are much higher than in the US.
So, not only are you only making half, you're also often losing half of that to taxes. So in the end, it's not a x2 but more a x3 win for the US.
I'm in Western Europe (Belgium) and wages for web (full stack) and software development are definitely higher than 35k. They are probably more in the 50k range. Except if you just came out of school.
In web development you would indeed be pretty useless if you knew one without the other, especially in smaller projects, unless you're a top notch designer. :-) Let's all do that this year so next evaluation we can go "Well Mr Boss Man, seems industry standards for my job are +30%, but I'll take +20%" ;-)
In larger applications serving more users or more data, or where your client interface is not a webpage, it makes sense having people more specialized in certain areas. You may want to mitigate access by different types of users ( warehousing, analytics, real-time, transactions) to a huge relational database. You may need to design and maintain noSQL Cassandra clusters. Your customer uses your services through RPC procedures where you need to have a high-availability pipeline to consume their data and present the end-result back to them. All these use cases require zero lines of HTML, but a rather specialized skill-set. And that's where the money is.
Not a bad idea on the salary bump though
Are they seeing this a currency or stock? Because what they could (and probably do) tax is Capital Gain. You bought some bitcoins at 50$, they are now 1050$ (looks like some people cashed in from the 1280$ peak :-)), so that's 20-30% capital gain tax on 1000$/btc please.
Since you did hold on to them more than a year that's long term capital gain tax which is a bit less, though
But it may indeed be hard to prove where these come from. Did you mine them, did you buy them as an investment, was this some kind of payment, etc...
Is it a Theoretical or Experimental Physicist?