Hacker News: aragot

New comment by aragot in "Fired"

aragot — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 23:28:55 +0000

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

New comment by aragot in "Stack Overflow: How we upgrade a live data center"

aragot — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 08:51:17 +0000

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

New comment by aragot in "Google Contributor"

aragot — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 07:44:51 +0000

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

New comment by aragot in "Google Contributor"

aragot — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 07:32:33 +0000

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

New comment by aragot in "Google Contributor"

aragot — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 07:25:15 +0000

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

New comment by aragot in "Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life"

aragot — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 13:02:15 +0000

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

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

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

New comment by aragot in "Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life"

aragot — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 12:39:39 +0000

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

New comment by aragot in "Uber Database Breach Exposed Information of 50,000 Drivers, Company Confirms"

aragot — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 15:37:59 +0000

> inexperienced driver's reliance on Google Maps for navigation

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

New comment by aragot in "Tree structure query with PostgreSQL"

aragot — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 08:00:03 +0000

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

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

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

New comment by aragot in "Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe – John Naughton"

aragot — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 14:18:33 +0000

Whether you like it or not, redistribution is the basis for most of the laws of my country (and certainly yours). It's not up to you or me, it's how the People think. In fact, that's what the OP is about.

It is besides the point to know which side I am. In fact, I've just said tax complexity squashes new enterprises. I've written an article about how an entrepreneur in France loses 70% of his income in tax-and-administrative-burden [1]. So guess whether I enjoy redistribution or not?

[1] http://adrien-ragot.me/why-i-say-70-percent-tax-in-france/

New comment by aragot in "Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe – John Naughton"

aragot — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 13:10:18 +0000

I'm worried about the form of the redistribution. In France, we have small taxes in many places. Just one example: We dealt with copyright issues by creating a tax on storage mediums, from a few cents to 20-40€ depending on the container, the size and the volatility - more than 40 different tax levels (see tables here [1]). Obviously they included the bureaucracy feature, where if you're a company you can send back a form and be reimbursed. I'm confident the same kind of insane level of tax compexity exists in pretty much any country and it implements revenue equality by squashing entrepreneurship at its root. Less innovation, less inequality ;)

So let's go ahead: Which forms of redistribution would do you see? Your comment made me notice that taxes proportional to the number of ads already exist (the VAT) and doesn't help redistributing. We need to take into account the change of scale. Would it be a tax per number of available cars for car-sharing services, then a tax per node in the friend graph for social networks? Sounds insane, but is it what we're bound to implement?

[1] http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Politiques-ministeri...

New comment by aragot in "Windows SSL Interception Gone Wild"

aragot — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 10:34:43 +0000

... or they could develop badware for Ubuntu.

New comment by aragot in "Dell XPS 13 Review"

aragot — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 02:50:55 +0000

If I pay 1900-2200$ for a deluxe laptop, I would be keen to pay about 300$ more and have a deluxe Linux. Please Canonical, charge me but give me the deluxe experience ;)

New comment by aragot in "Moving Forward with Firefox"

aragot — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 08:08:07 +0000

And drop the services we like a lot.

New comment by aragot in "The Worst Way to Fire Someone: I Was There"

aragot — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:27:39 +0000

How is it legal to talk about it?

Surely they've brickwalled them in the employment contracts saying "The employee agrees not to publicize events happening inside the company, with no limit of time, or the employee agrees to compensate the company for the loss of image"? How come the OP doesn't mind talking negatively in public about his former company?

I've already signed a simple software EULA which specified: "You (the Customer) will not comment about the performance of the product in public".

New comment by aragot in "The Worst Way to Fire Someone: I Was There"

aragot — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:08:38 +0000

Yes it explains a full range of behaviors in life. It seems we can go over such "facts" in non-challenging situations and dismiss them as non-relevant, but there's a point where we're emotionnaly overwhelmed and take those "facts" as a reference.

New comment by aragot in "How to die at Los Alamos"

aragot — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 08:49:27 +0000

A relative worked for an alcohol post-rehab center (Patients would get the severage in the hospital first for a fortnight, then go to rehab for several months). She says former drinkers almost never come here on their own choice. They're brought in rehab by a judge requirement, generally after car accidents involving death. Their average of wine drinking could be 5 to 12 liters... a day. The center was in a forest so they couldn't procure alcohol, but they're so much addicts than anything will do, and the center had to ban alcoholic liquid window cleansers because patients would drink them. And there were cases where patients drank them anyway, just in case...

So yes, anti-freeze isn't a surprising drink if better alcohol wasn't available.

New comment by aragot in "Bug Report 949446: “i can see all source code of all projects”"

aragot — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 08:59:44 +0000

Atlassian shows the source code to their customers, even without being open-source. They don't give redistribution rights obviously, but this has proven very useful in developing the ecosystem of plugin developers. Many people to date even believe Atlassian's products are open source.

New comment by aragot in "Google Is Shutting Down Google Helpouts, Its Expert Video Chat Service"

aragot — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 12:30:46 +0000

Technically, this is impossible because their build system and shared libraries [0]

Commercially, this is exactly the right thing to do! Then you can only blame customers for not buying shares of the spin-off!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899467

New comment by aragot in "Sergey Aleynikov Sues FBI Agents Who Arrested Him"

aragot — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 12:24:11 +0000

In a previous video posted on HN, a police officer explains how they would use a concession made by a honest humble person during an interview to boost their conviction rate: "Sure, I never like the guy. But I would never do anything malicious against anyone or even animals, especially not theft or murder which is totally against my conscience." would become big uppercase red letters on a videoprojector: "I NEVER LIKE THE GUY". Be sure you nail every emotional aspect to convince a jury.