Sorgam

How is being tied to a clunky text editor different from being tied to a clunky GUI? No matter which alternative text editor you use, apparently it's still clunky (slow) according to that somewhat limited research.

My programming is a hobby that turned into a business. It's just one application that I write and sell online. I think the reason it works (just about) is that my market is a niche of professionals. Usually their boss pays for it, so they're not afraid of spending money. Also, most of my competitors are either astronomically priced (get a site visit from their salesman to help decide what options you want) or barely usable (need to learn a huge command language) open source.

My day job is a school teacher in China. You sometimes have to find a country that suits your lifestyle to do the low hours thing.

I'd guess 90% of HNers could very easily walk into a job just like mine too.

It was unskilled laboring work. Others in my situation had criminal records and drug habits but they could do it too. Now I do programming for my own business so no clients to worry about, just self-pressure to give customers what they want, but without any deadlines or obligations.

The employment market today might not be quite the same, but it's often surprisingly easy to find casual work if you lower your expectations. And it pays enough to live on while also giving you free time for your hobbies, which for me turned into money after some years.

My opinion is that people who are motivated to do things or make money work as much as they can to work towards what they want. Sitting around would be frustrating. That doesn't mean they need to work so much to survive, they just want to.

Personally I've never done that. I often worked 3 day weeks. Now I do programming at home whenever I feel like and have a low-hours day job. I make enough money to be comfortable and it's quite nice.

I think the predictions have come true - for anyone who wants it.

This is a nonsense attitude. If you vote for a party, then you 're acknowledging that you want them in power. If you don't want them, stop voting for them. Sure, your action won't get a 3rd party elected, but neither will your incumbent vote be needed for the incumbent to stay in power. It's just a psychological illusion of "voting for the winner" and not "wasting" it that drives people to oppose their own interests. Within the past 20 years there have been several 3rd parties with some chance, but enough of their supporters decided not to "waste" their vote that none of them ever made it.

It's sad that after 20 years of the web, it still doesn't work properly. These kinds of bugs should have been solved years ago.

It's good to see conservationists admit that their task is mostly killing. Too often people confuse conserving a species with being nice to animals. They're diametrically opposite ambitions. Conservationists sometimes try to tap into our "don't kill cute animals" feeling to support their cause, but have to do a 180 when it doesn't suit.

I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals.

How is this bad for anything except Uber's public image? If prices remained the same, cars would be unavailable. If you want that outcome, then simply don't order a ride. There's absolutely nothing wrong with surge pricing when there's an actual spike in demand - the alternative would have been not getting a ride at all which you can still do with surge pricing. This problem is exactly what happens with traditional taxis - you simply can't get where you want to not matter how important it is. This was meant to be one of Uber's strengths - greater availability. Now that gave us a little, we expect charity from them too?

An attacker could advise your trusting church-mates to download and run an application that turns out to be a virus while they believe it's from you.

A real but milder story - a customer of mine once complained about the advertising on my website being slightly offensive. I didn't have any advertising. When I investigated, it turned out the advertising was being injected by malware on his own computer. Not that HTTPS would have solved that, but I've heard of ISPs doing similar things where it would be prevented.

If it's only systematic abuses, then the rogue police torturings in Brazil that the article described would count as "crime" and not be human rights violations. I think it's a grey area between the government allowing it to happen and actively doing it. Is a policeman breaking his rules really worse than a powerful gang? The latter may do more systematic harm and be more inescapable.

Indeed. Restrictions on women in Muslim countries sound bad, but western countries don't allow women to go topless in public and don't allow prisoners or children to work for money at their own discretion. They even have compulsory detention for children (school), which is a human right sacrificed in the name of economic development but doesn't get complaints because us westerners are used to it. If only everyone else was just like us we could forget those inconvenient human rights and just do things the normal proper way (sarcasm).

As well as being vague, human rights prioritize actions of the government over those of ordinary people - the high murder rate in America is not a human rights violation (what right could be more true than the right to not be killed?) but the relatively less severe execution rate of political prisoners in many other countries is a human rights violation. I live in a country with poor human rights but very good safety against violent crime. I'd much rather be here than in America where I won't be arrested for complaining about the government but I'm likely to be robbed or threatened with a gun if I walk down the wrong street at night. Different harm caused by different groups but one is a human rights violation and the other is not despite both being ultimately under the control of the government.

The effect of this is America can say "we have good human rights, we don't torture political prisoners" and an authoritarian country can say "We have good security, our people don't kill each other". The latter is usually more directly helpful to more people, but the former has somehow become seen as superior.

It's better for a soldier to die than a civilian. This is why they statistics are always separated.

Keep in mind that every alternative free library to do something adds cost to the task of selecting a library. Some open source projects (not suggesting any specifically) actually do make life worse for people because they spend time studying it only to find it's not useful.