Viewing profile — spacelizard

Because it's free as in freedom, not free as in price. Most popular free software is written by employed developers working for companies.

This is exactly what I mean though. The term "open source" has become so incredibly politicized that it doesn't mean anything any more. I used to use the term in business contexts …

You can tell a lot about a company by their attitude on this. The fact that "you should let your users have freedom" is still a controversial statement in those type of companies s…

If we believe prisons are to act as a sort of operant conditioning for the inmates, then the punishment IS supposed the rehabilitation. However, as you probably know, many folks do…

There is no malice, this is just what happens at big companies. When you have 10 layers of management, everyone is expected to fall in line because this is the only way it can work…

On the contrary, this was an obvious power play by the recruiter to get the candidate to agree and submit to whatever arbitrary KPI has been passed down by the HR manager, regardle…

I disagree, a good office culture extends beyond meatspace. I've worked at plenty of companies where the general atmosphere was... not good. These are places where the "hallway con…

Why is Electron still such a memory hog? Wasn't the Chromium Content module supposed to dramatically reduce footprint by only providing the bare minimum to render a web page?

The real privilege that derives from this is being able to live without being bombarded with advertising. To be able to have a meaningful conversation with a business that isn't pr…

Scratch is intended for older children who already have a certain level of literacy. There is another product, ScratchJr, for younger children that uses an icon-based UI: http://sc…

It does, but it has a lot of the same problems as MS Office, some worse. The scripting/macro system is arcane, proprietary, and only works in the cloud. The files aren't in an easi…

The problem with Soundcloud is that grew too big and as a result aren't building a site for their core customer: indie artists. Take a look at the front page, all it shows is track…

Look at the incentives of the people who made Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor. That kind of crud and malware will continue to exist as long as spying and advertising are the prevalent…

They also face considerable risk for sticking around when an employer has expressed interest in underpaying and overworking them or just outright firing them. If you're hiring peop…

It's difficult when you don't have a lot of free time to spend doing random mundane interview questions. It's doubly frustrating when this is because you're spending a lot of time …

The goal of a capitalistic government is still unfortunately to have a wholly predictable economy. There is competition, but only until a winner is declared, i.e. a monopoly is gra…

I do. There are all kinds of things wrong with requiring 20 years of study just to be able to have a chance to do a job properly. If done properly, we can reduce that time signific…

I've noticed Facebook seems to be really good at spamming me with useless notifications, it even somehow manages to do it after I've unfriended 90% of the people that I am not clos…

I agree, and it would be nice to have those things done. Free software has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem now where there is a lot of demand for certain things like you mention…

>The GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers. I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for developers to comply with it, especially those who …

Don't be fooled by the showboating, behind every attempt at executing these aggressive strategies is a crumbling organization rife with disharmony and malcontent. They would not be…

This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned b…

https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/artic...

This article also leaves out: - waiting for compiles - waiting for the CI server to finish running tests - waiting for network transfers - waiting for VMs to spin up - waiting for …