NHL stunner: A 36-year-old accountant who has never played pro stars in win - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/30/nhl-stunner-a-36-year-old-accountant-whos-never-played-pro-stars-in-blackhawks-win/ <comment><USER2> They had to failover to a warm standby only minutes after their hot standby failed too.

I'm impressed that there is a process in place for this. I would not have been surprised if the story was that the equipment manager has put on whichever goalie's equipment fits him better, in order to get into the game to prevent a forfeit.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised its not just one of the players on the roster. Somebody who played goalie in high school or something. In soccer you occasionally see a hurt or red carded goalie replaced by a field player if the team has already used their allowed substitutions for the game. But I guess goalie is just that different in hockey.

<comment><USER2> This being HN, I should point out that getting goalies to play can be such a problem that there is even an "Uber for goalies" app in Canada:

[https://www.puckapp.ca/](https://www.puckapp.ca/)

<comment><USER4> Are goalies so rare / specialised / injury-prone in ice-hockey that they need a dedicated app? Wow.

I don't think anyone would need anything like that in football (soccer), but maybe there is a business opportunity I had never thought of...

<comment><USER5> Pretty much. If you're in a rec league and your goalie can't make the game you have to scramble to find one, or forfeit the game (or play without one, which trust me, sucks for both teams since the other team feels like they have to take it easy on you even though they really shouldn't.)

Usually the league you're in provides this service though, there's a sort of standby list of goalies that can get called on if you know enough in advance that yours can't make it.

Goalies also almost never pay the league fees (the team distributes the fees amongst the skating players and doesn't make the goalie pay). Not having a goalie is basically the death of a team.

<comment><USER6> In my beer hockey league (Charlotte), goalies have to pay the league fees too. And it's up to the player-coach to find a sub if the primary goalie can't make the game. Our league is relatively "formal" in that we all have to be registered with USA Hockey; our games have real refs, time keeper, etc. But I've been in other leagues, less formal, where goalies skate for free.

<comment><USER5> In my league the payment is per-team, not per person, so the league doesn't care who pays, they just need payment. But traditionally, a team will divide the cost among N-1 of them so that the goalie doesn't have to pay. It's quite a nice system IMO.

<comment><USER7> It also is worth pointing out that it's not just because of the "rarity" of goalies teammates do this - it's also a substantial cost burden for a goalie to play due to the expense of equipment. This helps distribute that burden a bit more fairly since as you stated early - the team doesn't exist unless you have a goalie.

A family member recently outfitted a junior high goalie and the total came to about $1,000.

I always imagined the goalie as the main tank of a raiding guild. They got special privileges just due to their importance and "upkeep" costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every team has an emergency backup. And sometimes they will let the other team use them if there is a situation that requires it, since they don't travel with the team.

Happened a few days ago in a game in Colorado. He was dressed and everything (no jersey though), but he didn't end up playing.

They just sign one day contracts with the teams if they have to suit up. And it's only a few hundred bucks if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER9> Yep, and it's often a team employee too.

I know the webmaster for the Washington Capitols is their backup.

<comment><USER10> So he's a _web_ master in more ways than one.

(I had to do it. It's Friday.)

<comment><USER11> You could say say he takes care of the team's _net_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands I actually play with a emergency goalie that plays for the Minnesota Wild. He does practice with them on a regular basis so its not like he goes in cold or goes from playing with ex-D1,D3 guys to NHL caliber players.

It's interesting to hear him talk about the the level of skill the players have. He said there is a small percentage of guys on every team who can put the puck into a hole that has little more space than the puck itself every time. He said then there's quite a drop off where you have roughly the other 80% of the team who are obviously NHL quality players, but make up the difference in skating skills, speed and power.

</comment><comment><USER12> His post-game interview is great, too: [https://twitter.com/BradyTrett/status/979563904387788800](https://twitter.com/BradyTrett/status/979563904387788800)

<comment><USER13> His composure in the game and in the interview is remarkable, he looked completely unfazed.

<comment><USER14> Truly an accountant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a very variable gap between novice, amateur and professional in different sports - and I think the closer to "natural human movement" the sport is the greater the gap.

for example, you could pick any one from the Olympic stadium, give them running shoes and there would be zero chance they would be anything but last over the finishing line.

For something like football (soccer) the gap is almost as large - you could take any enthusiastic amateur and put them in the premiership and the results would be obviously bad. Only as you go up the amateur skill rankins would you start to see a closing of the gap - and football / soccer has spent so long honing that gap that even professional players in the second division would usually be shown to be woefully inadequate (Leicester City being the exception proving the rule)

But NHL hockey has a huge amount of skill / equipment / training needs before even starting a game - and so the gap between amateur and top player is much smaller than we expect.

What I guess I am saying is that 99% of humanity could cross the finish line in an olympic spring (seconds off the time obviously but still finish). but probably 99% of humanity could not even stand up on the ice let alone skate and hit a puck.

As such i conjecture that professional hockey has a lot further it can stretch that gap between top professional and amateur - in other words the team that finds how to develop its skills so that a third string goalie would never stand a chance is a team that will lift a lot of trophies.

<comment><USER16> I think you are greatly understating the difference between amateurs and top players in the NHL. Watching the players coming from the feeder leagues to the NHL, you can tell that there can be a _huge_ difference in skill.

The Blackhawks this season are a good example to look at. If you just compare the goalies this year you will see a large difference. Corey Crawford has been their goaltender for 2 Stanley Cup championships, and was injured in the middle of this year. He has not played since then, and it has forced the team to try and find a replacement. I think looking at the statistics shows the difference even between the most elite goalies and those that are close to that level.

W is wins, L is losses, GAA is "goals against average" per game, SV% is save percentage

\- Corey Crawford: 16 W, 9 L, 2.27 GAA, .929 SV%

\- Anton Forsberg: 10 W, 16 L, 2.97 GAA, .908 SV%

\- Jeff Glass: 3 W, 6 L, 3.31 GAA, .898 SV%

\- J-F Berube: 2 W, 5 L, 3.93 GAA, .891 SV%

Statistics taken from ESPN [1]

[1]: [http://www.espn.com/nhl/team/stats/_/name/chi/chicago- blackh...](http://www.espn.com/nhl/team/stats/_/name/chi/chicago-blackhawks)

<comment><USER17> Which of these metrics would be most important in evaluating a goalie?

I know nothing about hockey, but my intuition would be that you can throw W/L out the window - if you have an amazing offensive team you could let in 5 goals a game and still win. GAA is a reflection of both the team's defensive ability and the goalie's performance. It seems like SV% is the "purest" metric to compare apples to apples here. Unless I'm only looking at first-order effects here and the team's entire strategy changes based on who is in goal...

<comment><USER18> SV% does have team and score effects, but it's the best single metric. It's often best to compare 1 - SV%, as that tells you roughly how many goals they're letting in.

So on 1000 shots, crawford allowed 71 goals, forsberg 92, Glass 102, Berube 109.

Goalie W-L is typically bullshit, but comparing goalies on the same team it can be useful. With crawford they were winning 64% of their games, without him around 35%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a huge fan of hockey but the sport seems to have so many interesting things like this that really sets it apart from other major sports. Could you ever see the NFL letting an amateur walk on the same day and play in a real game?

<comment><USER17> I don't know a ton about hockey either, but apparently goalie is more analogous to kicker or punter than "regular" positions in football.

Even so, in the case of a kicker/punter injury a NFL team wouldn't call someone out of the stands to fill in - they'd sign someone out of free agency to play the next week and would adjust their strategy accordingly during the current game.

It's really cool that pro hockey has a unique system in place for edge case situations like this.

<comment><USER20> That's a good point though - a lot of times the backup kicker or punter on an NFL roster is someone from a totally different skill position.

Ndamukong Suh is a 300 pound defensive tackle but he was the emergency placekicker for the Dolphins for 2017. There are a bunch of QBs who can punt as well.

<comment><USER21> It's not common for those backups to actually kick, but it does happen. Wes Welker was placekicker for the Dolphins for one game as a rookie in 2004, besides being the team's kick and punt returner. He successfully converted both kicks he attempted. He did not catch a pass in that game, despite being nominally a wide receiver (and a future Pro Bowler at that position). Six years later, at New England, he served as the backup placekicker again and made a single extra point, finishing his career perfect as a kicker.

The legendary quarterback Doug Flutie kicked the last successful "drop kick" in the NFL for an extra point in 2006. However, that was more of a novelty than out of necessity; New England's kicker was healthy, they were well ahead in the game, and the team knew Flutie would retire after the season.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> He's giving Sister Jean and the Loyola basketball team a run for their money as the most heartwarming Chicago sports story of 2018!

</comment><comment><USER22> He was put in because Chicago's third-string goalie injured himself in the pre-game warmups, and their fourth-string goalie who started the game was injured in the third period. It is REALLY unusual for an emergency goalie to actually play in a game.

</comment><comment><USER23> Game recap: [http://www.espn.com/nhl/playbyplay?gameId=400962799](http://www.espn.com/nhl/playbyplay?gameId=400962799)

See "5:59 Stoppage - Goalie Stopped - Player Injury" 5:59 into the 3rd period

</comment><comment><USER24> Now he can say he's a former professional hockey player!

Can't be sure if that's good a resume or not, but it's at least as good as being Big Bird in Ice Capades.

<comment><USER25> "really? What years and team?" "13 minutes of a single game when I was 35. For the Blackhawks."

This man would be given honorary Canadian citizenship if he wanted it. He made seven saves!

<comment><USER26> He is already Canadian. He said so during the interview but the accent is a dead give away.

<comment><USER25> I should have guessed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Now this is awesome to hear!!!

</comment><comment><USER28> This just made my day :).

</comment><comment><USER29> OT: The title could use a couple commas to improve readability

 _NHL stunner: A 36-year-old accountant, who has never played pro, stars in win_</comment>


Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-mail-addresses-compared/

<comment><USER2> all are fairly useless. once your e-mail address gets out (and it will) obfuscating it is pretty pointless and just makes it harder for legitimate people to contact you. if you post to mailing lists, your address is surely out there in plain sight anyway. use a plain mailto: link and block spam at the smtp/mua level.

i've been using the same email address for almost a decade which is now in many mailing list archives, surely a bunch of spammers lists, and on every page of my website as a regular mailto: link with no obfuscation. my mail is filtered with sufficient smtp-level protection and maybe 1 junk message a day actually gets to my inbox.

<comment><USER3> Second that. My email address is public and forwards to GMail, where the Google spam filter gives one false negative a week and I can't remember a false positive. Google has spam beat.

<comment><USER4> My Gmail inbox would disagree with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone else surprised by the effectiveness of ATs and DOTs?

<comment><USER6> Yes. Because if I were writing an email harvester I would handle those. Maybe they are lazy.

<comment><USER7> I believe it's a matter of complexity vs reward. There are already so many unobfuscated addresses available on the internet, that it's not really "worth it" to spend extra time parsing even simple obfuscation techniques. Something about low-hanging fruits?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I usually just put my email into an image and leave it at that. As previous people have said though, it is only a matter of time before your email gets on some lift. Ultimately it all comes down to the quality of your spam filter :-).

</comment><comment><USER9> Also see <http://jeaig.org/>

<comment><USER6> Images are annoying because you can't copy and paste the address. I would suggest <http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/obfuscator.php> it's not perfect, but it's the best you can do and still allow clicking the address, and not use javascript.

<comment><USER10> While this seems like a nice, little tool, I find (as already mentioned in this thread) obfuscating emails a pointless endeavour.

In the end you will need a spam-filter anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


My humble arcade game - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id928939391 <comment><AUTHOR> I finally made it. To the last tiny little bit I complete RPG arcade FTL like game. Please, Enjoy.</comment>


Googlers Write to CEO Demanding Equal Treatment for Contractors - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-05/googlers-write-to-ceo-demanding-equal-treatment-for-contractors <comment><USER2> Ask Microsoft how it works out for a company when contractors are treated as employees[1]. What ticks me off is that before that lawsuit, I was really enjoying being a contractor then that happened and companies became really skittish and a bit hostile.

1) [https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us- findlaw-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont- treat-c-idUSTRE53063S20090401)

<comment><USER3> Microsoft losing that contractors case also had a lot of repercussions affecting legitimate contractors.

In the early 1990s before Microsoft lost, I easily got direct-1099 contracting jobs at various companies.

Afterwards, every company got scared and _overcorrected_ away from 1099s. It didn't matter if you incorporated as "Joe's Programming Solutions Inc". They insisted you had to go through one of their "approved vendors" which was basically just a middleman company set up to hire you as a W-2 employee. That intermediate company would then contract you to the 1099-averse client. Microsoft's defeat was when all the "W-2 bodyshops" popped up.

Instead of me earning $100 directly from a client, I had to find a W-2 shop to "hire" me as an employee and let them skim $30 from my hourly billing so I would only net $70/hour. It wasn't too happy about that but that's the closest I could get to being a freelancer. I really didn't want to be anyone's employee.

I believe most contractors share my opinion that the overall effect of the court judgement against Microsoft was a _net negative_ and it didn't improve work conditions for contractors. Instead, it just made it worse by enriching middlemen we never asked for. It's also a net negative for the client company because they pay a somewhat higher bill rate to the W-2 company because they provide the service of "legal cover" to protect against a Microsoft type of lawsuit or IRS reclassification. It's a textbook version of economic inefficiencies.

<comment><USER4> In exchange for the $30 an hour, you get a meaningless phone call from someone who works there every couple months and access to a terrible health plan.

My plan was literally "pay $100 per month to avoid the 2% Obamacare tax." It covered basically nothing, and the deductible was ridiculous.

The only value "talent agencies" add is that you can start earning money immediately, instead of jumping through whatever hoops vendors need to jump through to be approved nowadays.

<comment><USER2> You got hooked up with someone bad, which is a shame. I had a great health plan as a contractor (through my agency) and they were great about finding fun jobs. I do know a lot of agents didn't tell folks what rate they were being billed out at (I suspect that $30/hour would mean you are not getting good value), but my pay was a % of the bill rate.

<comment><USER4> I actually negotiated my pay with the hiring manager. I have no idea what the agency was paid.

I got the invitation directly from the large company I was consulting for. They explained to me that they didn't work directly with freelancers; they had processes in place to prevent TVCs from being retroactively deemed FTEs (and compensated for withheld benefits). Therefore, they put me in touch with an agency whose only function was to hire freelancers as W2 employees and rent them back out to the company. I don't recall exactly: I think the agency's only client was the firm I was consulting for. They might have had 1 or 2 more. The whole we-only-exist-because-bureaucracy was pretty transparent.

Funny story: one of the TVC restrictions was that you could only be one for a year. (At the end of the year, you had to either convert to full-time or take 6 months off.) Partway through the year, my client decided they wanted to switch agencies. Thousands of us got an email that basically said "As of next week, you legally work for Other Agency. Your day-to-day work will be the same."

<comment><USER2> Uhm.... that sounds really, really shady. If you do the negotiating then they've failed at 90% of their job, and I suspect you most certainly didn't get your full value.

<comment><USER4> They chose an inaccurate job title for me to justify my salary. Maybe I could have made more freelancing somewhere else, but I think I was at the top of what this role was willing to pay.

I was making $100 per hour with a guaranteed 40 billable hours per week.

<comment><USER2> Well, I'm glad you got something decent out of it. I have a bit of a visceral reaction to bad actors in agencies since their actions had consequences.

It was very informative at one place I worked where a ticked off employee released a spreadsheet with all of the hourly rates for all the consultants. I was rather amused to lean how many bad actor agencies there were (although gratified that I worked with the honest sort). It was a bit amazing to me that people were baffled that I didn't really want to look at the spreadsheet. I knew my rate, was pretty happy, and was a bit worried it would impact how I viewed others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work in pharma, and I was a contractor before I was hired on. It's a similar situation to what's described in the article, where contractors are full-time employees of a third-party company, and that company's rules are the ones that apply to their employees.

If I remember correctly, the contract company was mostly concerned with co- employment. As it was explained to me, Microsoft had a similar setup, but contractors were treated exactly the same as employees. Those contractors sued and won all of the additional compensation they had been denied as contractors.

For that reason, Google can't have too much control over things like hiring and firing decisions, healthcare offerings, compensation, etc, lest they be considered a co-employer. In the article, it sounds like the Google employees want Google to wield its power to enforce particular HR policies on their contractors, but I'm not entirely sure that's possible.

Disclaimer: I'm a biologist, not a lawyer.

<comment><USER6> These "contractors" exist solely to create the ability to exclude employees from benefits and rights. It's entirely possible for Google to resolve this: Google can hire it's own employees. From my recollection, Apple Store employees are, in fact, employees of Apple. Whereas if you go to any sort of Google popup retail location, you're going to be working with contractors.

The other way Google can control all of these aspects even for contractors is to refuse to work with contractors who do not uphold the standards they set. As these contracting companies exist solely to provide contract work to big tech cos, they will fall in line immediately.

<comment><USER7> > The other way Google can control all of these aspects even for contractors > is to refuse to work with contractors who do not uphold the standards they > set. As these contracting companies exist solely to provide contract work to > big tech cos, they will fall in line immediately.

Hmm. But if they try to match (or come close) to Google's standards then Google will likely have to pay more for a contractor than they do for an employee. At that point might as well just hire them.

<comment><USER5> Even when I was a contractor, I never quite understood this. The contractor costs Google whatever it costs the contractor to employ them _plus_ some amount of profit for the contract company. It would be cheaper to just employ people at a contractor's wage and internalize those processes, at least where the contractors are doing similar work to their own employees. It might still not make sense to start doing things like maintenance or cooking.

As best I can tell, it is a different pot of money. In my company, contractors are a budgetary decision, while employees require HR and other hurdles. Similarly, when you want to cut costs, you can fire contractors (shrink the contract and let the contract company do whatever they need to) without making the news with a headline like "Google lays off 10% of its workforce".

<comment><USER8> > The contractor costs Google whatever it costs the contractor to employ them > plus some amount of profit for the contract company.

Plus contracting overhead on both sides (the contractor-side overhead is neither an employment cost for the contracting firm nor profit.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have mixed feelings about this as someone who has worked as a contractor at a FAANG company.

On the one hand, many of the complaints are absolutely correct. Where I worked contractors were:

\- Second class citizens \- Often worked on teams with other engineers, and ended up being in charge of a major part of the project \- Have subpar working conditions but are still required to come to the office (ie crappy working spaces with fewer amenities, often the inability to sit with their actual team) \- In worst case scenarios can often end up with abusive manager who at times will explicitly let them know their place as a contractor \- Get the runaround when it comes to discussion 'conversion' to full time employment. I've seen this happen only a handful of times

From what I've seen the ones most beholden to this crappyness are contractors who are non US citizens (after all if you are a citizen what's stopping you from applying to literally almost any other job... even at a large tech company). Contractors from outside the US are pretty much stuck.

On the flipside the bar for contractors and full time employees is VASTLY different. For contractors (at least in engineering) the interview process can be mostly boiled down to about five recruiter style questions on your area of expertise, or something as simple as "build a class that does XYZ, ok you're great for this role". No full day onsite interview loops with multiple whiteboard / architecture questions etc.

I'm not saying with proper preparation contractors couldn't do the same roles and aren't qualified, but they are also held do a different standard (for better or for mostly worst).

I've also seen many contractors leverage the name-brand of the company they worked for to get interviews that may have been previously inaccessible (yes, even with putting "contracting for X company" on your resume, Google / Apple et all still stand out to recruiters).

</comment><comment><USER10> I hope this doesn't make things difficult for those of us who actually prefer being contractors. Becoming a contractor in tech (not at Google) is one of the best decisions I've ever made.

1\. I mostly get to choose how much I work, currently around 25 hours per week.

2\. Despite fewer hours, I still make more annually than I ever did working full-time.

3\. I don't have waste time going to all-hands meetings, mandatory trainings, offsites, etc.

4\. I can work on my own side projects without worrying about an employer trying to claim the IP.

Maybe you could argue there's less job security, but if you think you have much of that with at-will employment, you're fooling yourself.

<comment><USER11> Agree in a very similar situation and hope to continue this format of working.

But that said this equality effort isn't about folks like us, it's about helping out those that need healthcare, holiday pay, etc. I'm on the side of those in need getting the benefits over our privileged lives being mildly altered.

<comment><USER12> It amuses me, because a significant percentage of these consultants are foreign workers brought in for the explicit purpose of increasing supply and suppressing domestic wages. Now the domestic workers are fighting to improve the wages of the people brought there to hurt them.

I want to be clear I'm not intending to say anything negative about the domestic or foreign workers. It's just an amusing situation imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I was a contractor (in NZ), there were substantial tax benefits.

Not only was my pay higher (to compensate for no-notice termination), I paid less income tax because many expenses were deductible (car, power, house, phone, computers, etc).

It turned out to be something like double my typical salary, with health insurance taken care of by taxes.

Are the tax rules different in the US?

<comment><USER14> Somewhat similar, but there are a lot of downsides. Doing taxes as a contractor is basically like doing taxes as a business. Probably similar in your situation. However the rules for it are much much more convoluted, especially when you have healthcare insurance. In the US, the healthcare insurance easily has a tax break involved as an employee, but as a contractor, it would likely require crazy things like incorporating and setting up a CEO/board, etc... Total nightmare. You might get lucky and cheat by calling it an outside service (and expense), but technically you could get audited and bad things result. Things get even more complicated if you have or want an HSA as a contractor. This USED to be a good option, but now it seems like HSA plans are total shit. HSAs used to be cheaper but now they seem to be the same price as non-HSA plans so there really is no advantage to them. Basically, until that side of the tax code is fixed, contractors are fucked over health insurance wise in the US.

<comment><USER15> There's nothing convoluted about deducting health insurance and dental premiums if you are self employed.

Money you pay for health and dental insurance is counted as a reduction against your AGI — technically this is even better than a deduction, as long as you don't qualify for insurance through another employer, and cannot exceed your total employment earnings. So you can't decline employee sponsored health insurance and also claim the reduction, and you can't deduct premiums to the point where you have a net loss.

Qualified expenses go on Line 29 of Form 1040 where it says "Self-employed health insurance deduction".

You do not have to incorporate or setup an LLC to claim the deduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >When a shooting happened at YouTube's campus in San Bruno, California, in April, TVCs didn't get some communications updating workers on the situation, which left them feeling unsafe, the TVCs said.

Wow, that seems like something very hard to argue against. I hope that even if Google keeps them as contractors they improve communications.

<comment><USER17> That sounds like an oversight. IIRC there are "googlers-<site>" mailing lists that each full-time employee at a site is automatically added to. Whoever was doing comms that day probably assumed it went to everyone in the building, not realizing that it doesn't cover contractors or visiting employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> YMMV, but where I work (non-tech company) contractors are treated quite well. I think the general feeling from most of the company is that contractors are hired to do specific project work, so their domain knowledge is narrow and specialized and thus are better/more knowledgeable than the in-house developers. This leads to people within the company going straight to contractors for questions/discussions/planning/etc, leaving in-house devs out of the loop. In the end you're left with over-engineered solutions and scope creep among other dysfunctions. Really frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER19> Careful what you wish for. You might just get it and it may not be what you want.

<comment><USER20> That's very ominous. Would you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER21> I think he's implying that Google may resolve the issue by treating the full time employees the same way they treat the contractors.

<comment><USER22> I am quite welcome if that happens actually, that is what equality means isn't it.

<comment><USER20> Are you saying you want them all to endure "discrimination, racism, and sexual harassment"? I hope I'm reading you wrong.

<comment><USER22> Well, if Google is such a horrible place to work for, my advice will be quit and sue them

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure what your agenda is but I doubt anyone wants to take advice from you.

<comment><USER22> True, no one has to. Reality will figure itself out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > One contractor, who works 50 to 60 hours a week in Google's marketing > division, said TVCs are treated as "collateral damage" who can be hired and > fired on short notice to help the company achieve business goals quickly and > cheaply.

well yeah, that is the point of contractors ...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I recently watched "Requiem for the American Dream" (the documentary is included with Prime Video, and there is also a book of the same name) [0]. One of the points that Noam Chomsky made near the end was about _undermining solidarity_ (I don't remember the exact phrase, but it had solidarity its name). I found the why in which Chomsky portrayed the accomplishments of unions and how the political elite dealt with unions afterwards (e.g. McCarthyism) both enlightening and depressing. Workers regardless of profession were all united towards better conditions for all. The gradual exaltation of selfishness and self-interest has become a silent but effective tool in pitting people against each other.

I highly encourage others here to watch it should they have 72 minutes to spare.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWD8Wksx_zI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWD8Wksx_zI)

</comment><comment><USER24> Shouldn't this lie on the consulting firms placing them? Equally, are the consultants unaware that they work for the staffing firm doing project for Google?

Yes, security communication should go to all. But everything else?

</comment><comment><USER25> The genie is out of the bottle. No company can afford to hire it's contractors as fulltime. Their cost would double. There's 2 things that can happen 1\. Move to automate or offshore these jobs 2\. Bring parity to fulltime or contract employee pay and benefits so its indistinguishable whether you work fulltime or contract- its just a choice for both. Just like do you want PPO or HMS for healthcare.

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe I'm missing something, but why _should_ contractors have access to company-wide emails to staff, townhall staff meetings, or Google health care and benefits?

Some of those seem very much the _essence_ of the difference between working for Google as an employee vs not working for Google as an employee.

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't "Googlers Write..." misleading?

The letter linked in the article says it was written by TVCs (Temps, Vendors, and Contractors).

I guess "Contractors Write to CEO Demanding Equal Treatment for Contractors" is less exciting?

</comment><comment><USER28> It's great to see some Googlers stand up for this. Subcontracting is an all around poor practice and encourages exploitation of labour, and whenever this is pointed out the same old false arguments on the lines 'but some slaves had it good' or the 'alternative is starvation' are trotted out, completely defocusing the companies benefiting from this labour and their dependence for it. This subtly shifts and derails discussion.

But the bigger problem having this discussion in a tech context is the tech community is also made of up many who derive near religious identity from their jobs and conflate their jobs with success and identity, and logical arguments cannot appeal to emotion and this need for hierarchy.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is literally illegal in many European countries which demand that people working at FTE conditions be employed as full-time employees.

<comment><USER30> Is this literally illegal? From what I understand, the typical arrangement is that these people are full-time employees, but they are employees of a different company, and the contract is between companies.

To delve into hypotheticals, company X has a building and hires company Y to clean it. Company Y employs the janitors full time, and company Y decides the policies for hiring and firing janitors, and decides what their schedules are. The janitors are working at FTE conditions, and therefore they are full-time employees, but they're not employees of company X and don't get the same benefits.

<comment><USER31> Well obviously it depends on the country. I know that here (in Israel), the are laws around this that say that anyone working in what is effectively FTE in a company, even if they are contractors, had to be treated in various ways like a fte of the company. Eg in vacation days.

I'm not sure about any subtleties here- when exactly this kicks in, etc. But there are some real protections.

<comment><USER30> To be clear, these people are FTE in a company, it's "just" a different company. There are various laws here in the US about whether someone is an employee and a contractor and the courts generally seem interested in enforcing them such as they are.

The test here comes down to how much control the company has. If the company controls schedules, pays ordinary wages, provides equipment and training, etc. then it's an employee. If the person can set their own schedule, gets paid for work completed, buys their own equipment, and is free to work for other companies then it's likely a contractor.

I know that Google has an office in Tel Aviv so it should be easy enough to check if they have the same kind of staffing they do elsewhere. The company I work at mostly uses contractors and vendors for things like janitorial service, catering, etc. At least, as far as I can tell, I'm more of a code monkey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why wouldn't Googlers make a union? I think Microsoft had one back in days, but it was microscopic.

<comment><USER33> At least in the US, unions tend to cover jobs where there is a lot of manual labor and etc. They tend to heavily emphasize seniority over most anything, and in doing so straight up discourage merit based pay. Many have strict rules about what position is offered to who and when (seniority wins again).

They're not very effective / desirable for higher skill jobs IMO where merit and skills change rapidly.

Granted that's all very general and I'm sure there are exceptions but unions (I hear they're different elsewhere) in the US are kinda wonky, not very agile, and can become an negative entity in many ways as they serve their own interests.

<comment><USER34> This isn't strictly true. Professional athletes in major leagues are unionized, and their jobs are highly specialized and well paid. The Writers Guild of America is another union that represents a non-manual labor profession. You could also consider the American Medical Association as a pseudounion guild that restricts entry into the medical field and keeps wages high.

<comment><USER33> Like I said it was a general statement, but professional athletes are kinda a different animal considering their "laobr" is in high demand and very rare at their skill level. That's a pretty distant comparison. Same goes for doctors where they're not readily replaceable considering training / licensing requirements.

<comment><USER35> >Like I said it was a general statement, but professional athletes are kinda a different animal considering their "laobr" is in high demand and very rare at their skill level.

Er, what? That was the point.

You: Unions are mainly effective for low-skill, manual jobs.

ForHackernews: But they have them for professional athletes and actors too.

You: Irrelevant, they're a whole different animal.

Yes, the point all along was that the union model applies to different animals/worker-types.

<comment><USER36> Also, they failed to address screenwriters, who have a creative specialist occupation that is vaguely more similar to software engineers.

<comment><USER35> Interesting, never thought about that one. And it's also similar in terms of tons of unqualified people trying to get in, and a low barrier to entry (in terms of producing recognizable work)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> how does google have that many contractors?

<comment><USER38> Google pays competitively enough such that contractors agree to do work for the company. They just don't get the benefits that a FTE get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> These CEO demand letters are always perplexing. Do the authors think this is a representative government? The CEO represents the shareholders, not you. A letter from an employee is like a letter from a RAM stick in a data center.

<comment><USER40> While I agree the CEO works for the shareholders he also has to keep his ship running. So sometimes the CEO will care about what employees say.

But I think at this point the CEO failed correct the problem of at hand and now will have to deal with every injustice a few googlers see fit to scream about.

From here on out all I can see is it getting worse, and then the shareholders firing the CEO and replacing him with one who will deal with sort of issues appropriately.

We can talk all day about what is appropriate, but I think many will agree you can't have your employees hold a company hostage over political beliefs. But then again, Google set themselves up with this problem with their silly hiring practices.</comment></comment>


The BitTorrent token's flagging price is making it unusable - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/8128/the-bittorrent-tokens-flagging-price-is-making-it-unusable <comment><USER2> UX is everything, people!</comment>


Back from United States or how I learned to copy something else ... - <AUTHOR> http://www.nofeed.org/2008/12/07/back-from-united-states-or-how-i-learned-to-copy-something-else-than-having-a-friggin-bar-inside-my-company/

<comment><USER2> just a guess... but did you only work for small companies in the US and large ones in Italy? 'cause my experience (within the US) has been that large companies are very much like you describe Italian companies, and small companies are much more like the US companies you describe.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a point I should definitely think about. I worked for big companies in Italy, that's true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just read your post, and I think that your grudge is probably more with the Italian way of doing things than the European way. I'm from Denmark, which of course is at the other end of EU, but here things are very different. Not all that much politics, and you get credit for being smart and getting things done. And meetings are primarily for making decisions.

If you ever come to Copenhagen I'll buy you a coffee, there are some pretty decent places here :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, comparison is just with italians, not Europe. I can't talk for other countries, can merely talk about mine :)</comment></comment>


Why I moved to CentOS 7 (on the desktop) - <AUTHOR> http://the.mightywomble.com/post/93691621517/why-i-moved-to-centos-7

<comment><USER2> Eh, I thought this article would discuss reasons for migrating from Centos 6 to Centos 7 in an enterprise-y environment. I don't relish the thought of porting configurations to work with modern Linux.

It's been a struggle in our small business (100 employees, ~40 Redhat PCs?) to get my boss to cope with SystemD and all the changes to his beloved Linux kernel he started using in the late 90s. He's been so frustrated with Fedora 20 that he's considered moving his development box to Centos 6 (what our secretaries use) to regain familiarity with everything instead of learning how the new components work.

We have one Fedora 15 box running Gnome 3.0. The guy blessed with that machine hates its guts. He's fairly proficient with technology, but struggles with the Gnome group's vision for how humans should "properly" interact with their desktop computers. Hotspots are particularly frustrating for him. Unleashing Gnome 3, even with the refinements and concessions they've begrudgingly made to the community, on our secretaries en masse is a terrifies me enough to give me the shakes. Bleh.</comment>


Zune 2.0: is Microsoft making the same mistakes with Surface RT? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/19/4537944/surface-rt-mistakes-look-like-zune-2

<comment><USER2> For Surface to be successful, it needs to become its own brand. Judging by Surface General Manager Brian Hall's comments in this article, that's going to be hard to do.

He says MSFT has to compare Surface to iPad in order for people to pay attention (1), but that MSFT is in a "tough position" (aka not going to be successful) if everyone looks at the market through the lens of an iPad (2).

Quite a problem when your solution (comparing to iPad) is part of the problem (all everyone thinks about is iPad).

\---

Quotes:

(1) "Because iPad has such a strong awareness and understanding in the tablet market, it's important for us to start to compare more with iPad"

(2) "If everybody just looks at the market through the lens of an iPad, that obviously is a tougher position for us," explains Hall. "For us we need more people using Surfaces, so that they can explain the benefits."</comment>


Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/nyregion/students-inventing-programs-to-streamline-their-colleges-data.html <comment><USER3> This is nothing new. Since course registration has had a web interface, there have been those who find the system clunky, inefficient, and useless for a wide array of situations, the least of which is registering for classes. I know at least 3 people in my grade level who have done the same thing. I've done the same thing. People before me have told me how they did the same thing. This is all at one university. The NYTimes is making these guys out to be heroes of programming and ingenuity, when this is almost a first step for a college/university programmer.

<comment><USER4> Did they share the program with other people? Why did 6+ people all rewrite the same program? Or did they have different specific uses?

From the first example of the article, it says that within the time span of one semester there were 8000 students who had used the software. In another example, the site used to compare courses at Berkeley now has over 50,000 registered users. Berkeley even paid them for the website afterwards because of the value they saw in it. They all produced something that lots of students use to solve problems/increase efficiency in academic life. That's not a trivial thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's always encouraging to hear about schools like Stanford and Berkeley that are actually supportive of student-run initiatives like these. I just graduated from McGill University, and throughout most of my undergrad I was one of the admins of a website (wikinotes.ca) for sharing notes and other student-created course materials. We got little to no support from the administration, despite attempts at reaching out, and the only reason we knew that they heard about us was a mass email - filled with misinformation - <USER2> out to profs warning them about us.

I know McGill's infamous for being especially bureaucratic, but it can't be impossible to get their support. Those who got their school's administration to support their project, what did you build and how did you do it?

<comment><USER6> Did that mass email get published anywhere?

<comment><USER5> It did, in one of the main campus newspapers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has always happened, because it doesn't take a genius to create a class registration application better than the monstrosities that some horrible overpaid vendor managed to cobble together for a couple million dollars. If there's any change indicated by this article, it's that these schools aren't threatening legal action or expulsion to have them shut down.

<comment><USER8> I find comments like this funny. If this is the case why not go out and make those millions?

True, you do just say anyone can make something better, so perhaps it's a labour cost but then your comment doesn't make sense since the vendor is not overpaid.

The reality is these systems are huge, often not re-usable between institutions and you are vastly under estimating their complexity.

These students are usually just improving a very small part of very large system.

Which is cool, API everything and let students make better parts of systems where it counts. That would be my lesson.

<comment><USER7> > I find comments like this funny. If this is the case why not go out and make > those millions?

Because marketing and sales don't simply boil down to having a superior product? You're making a strong market quality efficiency argument here that I'm pretty sure that you don't even agree with.

Also, I'm happy and well compensated in my own industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article links to a guidebook[0] of suggestions and best practices that was produced by student devs involved in such projects and who were brought together at a Campus Data Summit organized by GitHub.

[0]: [http://campusdata.org/guidebook/](http://campusdata.org/guidebook/)

<comment><USER10> [campusdata.org member here] - if you're working on something similar at your school and want to join forces, join the mailing list is at campusdata.org.

<comment><USER11> Love that my school (BYU) is used for the photo but we are not a member org yet. Joined the mailing list thanks for pointing that out, didn't know there was one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wrote a book in large part about how Harvard reacted to my student portal in 2003. (Not particularly well.)

[http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> I actually had a lot of luck creating such a timetable website[0] for NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Initial version did hacky scraping, eventually I found a database, after the site site gained traction the IME Faculty (IT, Maths, Electrical engineering) got in touch about the site.

At this point they actually paid me to opensource the code and hired me to setup a copy for them. We never got their version to take off, as mine was to well established. So eventually we shut their instance down, and mine lives happily on despite the fact that I've long since left the university.

IME also did some great follow up putting quite a bit of effort in creating an API for "me". The problem was that the central IT services could only provide payed access to their WSDL based XML service. So IME basically payed them for access and then reexported it with their own API[1] + caching.

On a side note, most of the code[2], except for the importers should be generic enough to use at other schools :-)

[0]: [http://ntnu.1024.no/](http://ntnu.1024.no/) or [http://ntnu.1024.no/2014/fall/adamcik/35/](http://ntnu.1024.no/2014/fall/adamcik/35/) for a sample timetable

[1]: [http://www.ime.ntnu.no/api/](http://www.ime.ntnu.no/api/)

[2]: [http://github.com/adamcik/plan](http://github.com/adamcik/plan)

</comment><comment><USER14> I actually really enjoyed the article, and can relate: about a month ago, I started building openYorkU, a RESTful API for York University, because their data was not in any accessible format, and was just listed (in a .pdf). I thought student-made apps would work much better, and I should work on something all students can use.

Some examples of why it's useful; when looking for courses - there wasn't any way of searching. I couldn't just look for all first year courses, that are 3 credits, and in courses A, B, and C. I also couldn't find all the restaurants, still open beside me that serve coffee (all the data York provided was on a .pdf). With an API, this stuff is simple.

It's still a work in progress, and I haven't had much time to work on it lately, but if you're interested in checking it out: [https://github.com/mlisbit/openYorkU- API](https://github.com/mlisbit/openYorkU-API) . This article definitely encouraged me to continue on with the project. More Universities should have open data like University of Waterloo.

<comment><USER15> Waterloo has open data now?

<comment><USER14> [https://github.com/uWaterloo/api- documentation](https://github.com/uWaterloo/api-documentation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I go to the University of Michigan, and there is a huge amount of fragmentation in IT services. APIs are out there, but it's tough to know where to go. A group I'm a part of is going to approach the right people to hopefully fix this.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've done something similar, although not directly interactive to course registration and classes _yet_.

My university, West Virginia University, was granted a few hundred million dollars by the US DOT and President Nixon back in the early 1970s to create a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) [0] system that would transport handfuls of students to and from the various campuses and other locations in the city. Built by Boeing and NASA JPL in the 70s, the overall system hasn't seen a large system overhaul since then. Because of that, it tends to go down often during the middle of the day, leaving students stranded at the various stations with no way to get to and from the various campuses for classes.

I, relying heavily on the PRT, built an app that monitors the PRT uptime status and alerts users [1]. This comes in handy all the time as it notifies students that the PRT is down typically before any announcements are ever made at the stations, allowing students to plan transportation ahead of time and catch the correct bus to the campus.

The app made it to my university's news [2], the city's student run newspaper [3], and I've gotten a few hundred users within the first week of operation.

The app is completely free and open source, written in Go [4] for the server logic and Java for the Android client [5]. And it also supports Android wearables and Google Glass. Please feel free to submit pull requests and issues as you see fit, I'm trying to improve the Go component's error handling, http.Client connections, and MongoDB database sessions/connections.

Unrelated to the PRT Status app, I'm planning on making a web app that allows students to register for courses in the view of a calendar. Currently, our registration system kinda sucks in that you have to write out course times and do somewhat intensive planning to make sure your proposed classes don't interfere with other class times. So my idea is to let the students choose the courses they need, and then the service will automatically generate multiple possible schedules in a week calendar view that shows block times and course registration numbers should they choose that schedule configuration.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Trans...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit)

[1]: [https://austindizzy.me/prt/](https://austindizzy.me/prt/)

[2]: [http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2014/08/15/student-employee- develo...](http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2014/08/15/student-employee-develops-wvu- prt-status-app-to-alert-riders-about-service)

[3]: [http://www.thedaonline.com/news/article_c3405ca8-281b-11e4-8...](http://www.thedaonline.com/news/article_c3405ca8-281b-11e4-8f1d-001a4bcf6878.html)

[4]: [https://github.com/AustinDizzy/prtstatus- go](https://github.com/AustinDizzy/prtstatus-go)

[5]: [https://github.com/AustinDizzy/prtstatus- android](https://github.com/AustinDizzy/prtstatus-android)

<comment><USER18> You might be able to save some time by having Scheedule [0] add your school. It was created at UIUC, and I've found that it works very well. I know it provides some other functionality beyond class scheduling (via FB integration), but most people I know just use it to plan their schedule.

Edit: It looks like schools are added based on a voting/popularity system, which wasn't what I was expecting.

Edit 2: Classwhole [1] is another UIUC creation that's been open sourced [2] and might work for you.

[0] [http://www.scheedule.com](http://www.scheedule.com)

[1] [http://www.classwhole.com](http://www.classwhole.com)

[2] [https://github.com/kryali/classwhole](https://github.com/kryali/classwhole)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ha, glad to see I'm not the only one that just constantly waited for somebody to drop the class I want to register in before getting alerted.

The problem with my University (Notre Dame) is that we have everything hooked up to the Banner system . . . which is terrible. Course Search is terribly designed and not user-friendly, along with the Course Registration system not being the best either, it's quite frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ha, that's interesting. I wrote a very similar "sniping" app (for myself not for others) back in 1999. Back then I had a Motorola pager (one of the large- screen fancy ones) and I could receive short messages via email. I wrote a (horribly constructed) Visual Basic app to check the course enrollments and report to me, in near real-time, when a class opened up.

</comment><comment><USER21> I made a python script to do the similar thing(it actually register the course for user when there is spot) against University of Manitoba's Aurora student system. With modern browser automation tool this can be done easily :)

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if any of these systems are accessible to the disabled. If your awesome mobile app to grab classes means that blind or motor-impaired students lose access, is that really an improvement?

<comment><USER23> To be fair, the original systems often are not very accessible for the disabled. My university uses peoplesoft and it's a steaming piece of shit. The blind/impaired are better off contacting the undergraduate office/registrar, which they often do (it is so much easier).

So I guess that in a sense, everyone is wrong.

<comment><USER22> Interesting. I work at the University of California, and accessibility is a required element of any new campus-wide system. Many legacy systems lack accessibility, but that doesn't mean we don't improve them when new stuff comes out.

We do have a Disabled Students program, which provides a lot of help, but which is also expensive for the university.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My university threw up captchas the semester after something like this was made.

Luckily, they implemented their own auto-zen rolling wait list and notification system too.</comment>


Dell to Begin Shipping Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on Their Latest XPS Developer Edition - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-XPS-Ubuntu-20.04-Shipping <comment><USER2> 18.04 I had a lot of trouble with on my XPS.

20.04 has worked like a dream! It even can update the bios now, so you don't need to keep a windows partition or usb around.

I really have no reason to go back to any other OS

<comment><USER3> What sort of trouble? I don't see that, though the only reason this system has Ubuntu and not Debian is that seemed necessary for hardware support initially, and I should move to that rather than Ubuntu 20. (In my experience it's brave to run a new Ubuntu within a few months of it coming out...)

<comment><USER2> Move to 20. The GUI is way faster, and I've had zero odd quirks with anything. Everything just works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I replaced my older XPS with an Ubuntu 20.04 laptop from Star Lab systems. Mostly because I wanted firmware updates via apt-get. They have a new model coming out: better CPU, more RAM, more disk for the same price point as the XPS.

[https://starlabs.systems/pages/labtop-mk- iv](https://starlabs.systems/pages/labtop-mk-iv)

The top-end XPS will be a more powerful system, but if you're gonna budget - worth considering. Build quality is excellent, have had no issues.

<comment><USER5> Compared to a MacBook Air how thin and lightweight this laptop is?

<comment><USER4> I have the older Stab Lab model (Mk III) and have never owned a MacBook Air, but Googling the newest versions of both:

Star LabTop Mk IV [1]:

Thickness: 0.58 inches (1.48 cm)

Weight: 2.2 pounds (1 kg)

MacBook Air [2]:

Thickness: 0.63 inch (1.61 cm)

Weight: 2.8 pounds (1.29 kg)

[1] [https://starlabs.systems/pages/labtop-mk-iv- specification](https://starlabs.systems/pages/labtop-mk-iv-specification)

[2] [https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/](https://www.apple.com/macbook- air/specs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any distro with hardware video acceleration working in a web browser out of the box?

I tried installing Linux on my laptop but since watching videos is a major part of my laptop use case I can't really justify the switch.

</comment><comment><USER7> Too bad XPS laptops seem capped at 32GB. Can get 64GB on Thinkpads.

</comment><comment><USER8> Lots of people hate snaps though.</comment>


Potentially catastrophic Category 5 Hurricane Willa nearing Mexico's coast - <AUTHOR> https://lite.cnn.io/en/article/h_9f7af5bdc1443dbed0e336355e5816d2 <comment><USER2> Land mass to the south: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFM1X0o2pnc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFM1X0o2pnc)</comment>


ZFS on Linux Landing Workaround for Linux 5.0 Kernel Support - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-Linux-5.0-Workaround <comment><USER2> Perhaps is was a mistake to switch over to the ZoL as the reference implementation. At least FreeBsd does not have the FSF jihadies willing to blow themselves up just to make a point...</comment>


Cuil confesses 'serious file corruption' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/cuil_apology/

<comment><USER2> i searched "shyla stylez" on cuil.com and all the results point to "Reported Attack Site!" by mozilla firefox, whats wrong with guys at cuil? they want us to go to possibly dangerous sites? even though safe search was ON!</comment>