I got my main interest only from seeing your comments on every thread related to Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, it was worth a try and I moved all my projects there, I hope nothing will change on long term to be like Github now, Great job.
I have started a 3 days book challenge where i finish a book every 3 days, it's going great so far, also I am refreshing my skills with online education (although I am still following MS degree in Robotics and AI), but still the world is broader than only this, and I programmed few robots and made few contributions to the OSS (talking about ROS here).
Raspberry still costs more than 100$ in my country, due the rarity of such tools sometimes we found ourselves obliged to buy it with that price and pay the difference, and even though this is such a great step, i really doubt it would have any effect on 3rd world countries where this is really needed.
Same, in Tunisia a B model (with no SD or anything) will go around 70$. This is mainly due to state imposed taxes on "luxury products".
I tried importing one, but customs ended up charging me almost double the unit price just to let it through.
The only cheap solution to get one in Tunisia is to have someone buy it for you in europe and then bring it back in his luggage.
Customs will check the package and if it contains any goods that they think should be taxed they'll call you and give you a quote. If you pay then you can get your package. If you don't it will sit on a shelf for-ever.
Markup + import tax (as another commenter remarked) would not really allow a competitive price range. Only way to get around that would be to assemble it in the country itself (assuming the components can be imported without those taxes)
I suspect it's due to the combination of low sales volumes and import taxes. Here in Chile, Pi B's are around $50–60.
Though to be fair, traditional PCs and laptops are more expensive than in the US (but not 2x as expensive).
> But books, magazines, etc. don't pay taxes. That's why this free Rpi with MagPi #40 is awesome: you don't have to pay taxes at all.
I assume you mean in Brazil? Books and very expensive in Chile, compared to other things. And I believe it's because they are heavily taxed. I don't know about magazines, though.
Tax is not just based on the price. If the fact that you were getting it for free were good enough to avoid import taxes, everyone would just have friends in other countries send them 'gifts'.
Well, in Brazil books are exempt and stuff that gets shipped gratis along with them doesn't get taxed. Usually, it's CDs and once I did see software shipped as Manual+free CD in order to evade taxes. I was quite surprised (and a tad disappointed) that it worked, but I don't think it would work with larger products.
> I know Brazil has prohibitive import duties on electronics, does this also apply to Chile?
To be honest, I'm not sure. VAT here is 19%, so if you are assessed duties on things you bring, you'll often pay that rate. However, I don't know what the rates are like for merchants importhing goods for sale.
If there is a user group, then purchasing together and dividing costs might make life a little easier. could be a fun base to work on for making more hardware available too.
This really has to stop , you are just wasting other candidates time , i know more of a dozen of people that did not get any response back not even automatic rejection , and also a lot of people here had the same problem , i find this as highly disrespectful for candidates , i hope this post stops posts like these.
It's true that I don't respond to every candidate, but I also never promised to. I DO read every single resume sent to me, guaranteed. Normally I just only reach out to people that I think are a good fit for us. I end up responding to at least a dozen candidates for each HN posting. Please keep in mind there is no automation here, and no recruiters - it's just me, and I have to balance running a company.
That said, you are 100% right that I should send at least some response to everyone, even people we aren't going to move forward with. I'm working on a process for this and will start doing it soon.
In the meantime, I want to personally apologize if you feel I wasted your time. If you want to send me a note via email I'm happy to give you some individual feedback on your application and why we didn't feel it was a good fit.
Just to chime in, the fact that this substantially-identical ad has been running here and on CL for years, while rejecting lots of people, says maybe the requirements can be massaged a bit to reflect what you're actually looking for in light of what you aren't finding in the many people who do attempt to get their foot in the door.
We should start a service, similar to downforeveryoneorjustme.com, that lets us aggregate info about which companies do not provide any type of response when rejecting a candidate.
It's such a rude thing to do; probably the companies themselves would be glad for it so they could see the poor perception it generates and then work to fix it with an easy solution like polite but automated rejection emails.
The fact that many companies already do this, companies of all sizes and facing all manner of different magnitudes of applicant pool size, really makes the effect stark too. You pretty much have to very actively choose a policy of utterly not replying; an excuse like "we get too many applications to reply to them all" or "we can't afford to build an application response system right now" just don't work given that some companies receiving huge amounts of applications, some early stage companies deep in the throes of building their first product, and even some companies facing both problems simultaneously, already do it.
