I moved to Diigo when delicious died, it does alright even at the free tier (I've never had incentive to use anything but the basic/free bookmarking features). https://www.diigo.com
A number of US states do not require background checks when it's resident-to-resident (I live in one). It's common to trade a bill of sale between parties but the paperwork stops there, and this paperwork is technically optional.
It's especially bad on a site like HN - an account only gets a downvote capability if they've received what is it, 400 upvotes? - so you're assured that every downvote you receive is someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote (or are a serial link poster getting link karma upvotes).
There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.
I’ve been using HN for a few years now, mostly lurking but commenting every now and then, and I’m creeping up to the downvote privilege threshold. (I think it’s 500, not 400.) I wouldn’t describe myself as “someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote,” I think it’s more “someone who says little things over many years and some people have upvoted them here and there.” In other words, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that your description of HN matches everyone’s experience, and not everyone with downvote ability is the same type of person.
HN has a certain discussion parameters and moderation system on purpose. The goal on HN isn’t to allow open ended discussions on all topics. I for one appreciate that we can talk computers and technology here and that the moderators keep the average level of the discussion high. If I want politics and other garbage I’ll go somewhere else. I have never experienced any issues here. Been here a looong time. Don’t be edgy and contribute positively to discussions with curiosity and you will do fine.
There are many threads here about the politics of technology (big tech, open source vs closed source software, cryptocurrency and finance, the fabrication industry and China, etc) and there are also plenty of threads about politics unrelated or tangentially related to computers (off the top of my head, housing and homelessness, the schooling system, and climate change get discussed here not infrequently). HN isn't for just computers and technology, but rather for anything that sparks curiosity.
With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat high, so I agree with your central thesis.
Just for the record, the reply to this comment by bopbeepboop that was downvoted to "dead" status is a good example of the type of downvoting I disagree with.
I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.
A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were vouched.
Click on the time/age of the comment (currently "3 hours ago") and you will get a direct link to the comment with more options, like "vouch" and "flag".
I had to dig a little bit to get a better view of "will this make a mess of my email if I try/test it without commitment?"; the tl;dr is basically:
(a) there is a DeltaChat subfolder in your IMAP storing the messages;
(b) the app looks for a "Chat-Version" header on emails to know to move it to (a) folder (and you can set a server side rule to also do that);
(c) a number of popular email providers (IMAP is used) are listed with some notes to help you get started: https://providers.delta.chat/; and
(d) it's using the Autocrypt/PGP standards and you can apparently import your existing PGP key if you want
It's all in the FAQ or other docs, just highlighting the things which I wanted to know straightaway before making a mess by accident just to give it a try.
Not only is the new stable there, cketti has been posting all of the betas leading up to this on F-Droid for quite awhile. :) You have to manually look once in awhile in the F-Droid client for newer beta builds to opt into using.
F-Droid builds in batches, about 3 days per batch (see monitor.f-droid.org). All the APKs are signed at once and published together so it should show up soon. Per the dev, the last beta is essentially what became the stable release so you could start today and just upgrade in a bit.
You can enable the 'Unstable updates' option in F-Droid's settings to receive notifications for new beta versions to avoid having to check manually. The downside is that you'll receive these updates for all apps, so be sure to check if a new version is a beta version for apps that you want to keep on stable versions.
Ctrl+F shows nobody has mentioned searx yet, so let me - you can have your cake and eat it, too. searx uses modest resources (2G disk/2G RAM, cloud server friendly) and gives you all the results from all the search engines without being tracked in your end-user browser.
Here are some existing public instances to get started (visit Preferences! You can choose your own search engines!) and there are many, many more not listed on this page out there:
Give searx a try - what I like most is that it sees the same top result from 2 sources (say, Google and DDG) and places them as a single entry as first, but then offers a link that neither one of those had (say, Mojeek) as the second result. It actually helps you find more content by spreading out your searches to many engines at the same time and giving the best results grouped.
I have a whoogle and a searx instance running based on the official docker images. With my subjective tests Searx seems to be slower and buggy though. I am curious to know how can I optimize the speed as much as much possible.
Whoogle is a Google anonymizer and stripper-of-chaff, searx is a content aggregator on top of that same concept. While similar in the first context, searx provides a secondary layer of interacting with many search engines for well rounded content. Nothing wrong with whoogle, just not an exact 1-to-1 comparison. (cannot speak to your issues with speed and bugs, I suggest opening an issue on their Github and explaining your problems or a dedicated user forum maybe reddit?)
Thanks a lot for this. Will definitely give this a go as I'm using Google for my programming related searches and DDG for normal searches. Will see if this satisfies my needs or not.
I run my own searx instance and it's amazing. One issue I am facing is with images not loading in the Images section sometimes, but other than it's perfect and I recommend it.
Just to share for readers, what are your personal RAM/CPU/disk usage measurements? The instance I use is shared with a small group so my numbers above may be skewed.
Any sufficiently large thread about text editors contains a pitch for an ad hoc, bug-ridden, unnecessary plugin that's overkill for achieving some effect which is already possible just using a build of Vim mainline.
Not only simple browser plugins per the other reply (and a plethora of non-crashing mobile apps, whereas mobile PDF reading apps crash on me all the time) - the ePub format is just a zip file in disguise with plain text (HTML) inside and maybe some images/etc.
In a manner of speaking, ePub as a design has an inherent built-in fallback mechanism to manually obtain the internal content in case of failure - including ability to try and repair a broken zip format (zip -F/-FF) and grep it in place (zipgrep).
These articles never seem to touch on the point which matters to me: I don't want the workplace social peer pressure of who makes more, or less, etc. and the drama which comes with it. The belief that every employee wants there to be open sharing of salary data is not universal.
I don’t want to know what bob or jill make but i do want to know the company pay bands. It’s really silly when im looking for other jobs that i pass everything then get to the offer to counter it and ooops looks like your 5k over the band for what we wanted to hire you for. Great would have been nice to know up front that unless I interview at whatever your requirement is for staff level on the day of the interview this wasn’t going to work. Its draining and a waste of everyones time.
Why don't you want to know what Bob or Jill makes? If they make more than you and are better than you, you can see where you will be after you improve. If they get paid more than you and are worse than you, then you can use that knowledge to get a raise. If they make less than you and are better than you, you know they're going to start getting paid more which will make everyone better off. And if they get paid less than you and are worse than you, they'll be more receptive to mentoring.
And the someone who made that decision can explain why one of you is paid more. And instead of one of you spending your career thinking you're so great, you find out that X skills are lacking or Y skills are not valued where you are. So you improve your skills or find a job with a better fit. That sounds great.
The employees at tech firms I’ve worked at solved this by “anonymizing”. Basically a few folks maintained a big publicly readable spreadsheet with columns like Title, Level, YOE, YOE at Company, Office Location, Gender, Base Comp, Total Comp. Technically the fields were sufficiently granular that some rows could in principle be de-anonymized, but that wasn’t really the point.
N.b. This was just random employees collecting volunteered information, nothing HR-sanctioned.
The fact remains that this seems likely to increase the perception of unfairness, lower the level of individual happiness, and increase the time spent complaining and analyzing salary discrepancies.
Things will never be exactly equal. Why focus time emphasizing the differences?
If you accept a job, wait a year, then start interviewing at least one interview every 6 months. You'll improve your interviewing skills and learn your market value.
What your coworkers make at your current job is not a strong indicator of your market value. What actual employers are willing to pay you is much better data.
Don't forget, a huge component in salaries is social skills.
If you want to optimize for everybody getting paid perfectly fairly, sure. If you believe there are diminishing returns to that and our time as people is better spent growing the pie, then that isn't information, it's noise.
As an individual, why would I care about growing the pie and not my own salary? It's not about optimizing everyone getting paid fairly. It's about optimizing your own pay.
"Growing the pie" means making the company more successful, and if you have any equity in it, then it's likely to make you more money long term than arguing for more cash. Also, if you happen to be at a good company with honest and responsible management, then your compensation will be accurately adjusted based on your business value. So, doing good useful work will optimize your own pay as well as benefit everyone else.
If you're at a crappy company with crappy managers, then yeah maybe you just need to play politics until you're paid enough to justify not quitting. If you have the means to move on from a job you don't like, though, you should probably work toward fixing that regardless of the compensation.
> if you have any equity in it, then it's likely to make you more money long term than arguing for more cash.
It depends on how much equity. If you have a greater percentage of ownership than you do of total salary, that makes sense. (Unless it's publicly traded, because then you can buy more stock with the more money.) But that seems unlikely most of the time. So, yes, it's better for founders or major shareholders.
I don't follow that asking for more money is "playing politics"
Equity is a long term investment which ideally compounds exponentially over time (even if it only matches inflation) in a way that you, as an active participant, can positively or negatively influence. Salary is steady income that linearly accumulates (and loses value over time unless invested), so it's kind of apples to oranges. Undervaluing a modest amount of equity when you're young can lead to a large missed opportunity cost decades later. It's certainly hard work with an element of luck to get equity in a company that takes off like a rocket, but that's why high-risk high-reward is a saying.
If your compensation doesn't accurately reflect your merit to the company, then it instead reflects arbitrary social power dynamics. If you stick around somewhere that you believe is taking advantage of you, and try to up your pay through leverage or non-merit based arguments, then that definitely seems like politics to me.
Just asking for money if you think you deserve it isn't inherently politics, though. If you're genuinely being underpaid and think the company is dropping the ball but acting in good faith, then having an honest conversation with your manager is healthy, and should result in the situation being resolved favorably.
sgtnoodle said it well. I'll only add that if everybody thinks only of their own salary and not the company, you enter into a tragedy of the commons that kills the company (taken to the extreme).
Yes, they are, and they always will be. I don't disagree that we shouldn't make things fairer, but i believe there's a limit at which of becomes a meaningless exercise.
Yes, I agree. I'm providing another perspective that I think is missing, not arguing that we should always think this way. It's healthiest to consider multiple viewpoints.
I think it has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with negotiating your salary. The more you know about the market, the bigger your leverage is.
And if it so happens that you earn less as a result of gaps in your skills, you should own it and work on yourself.
Maybe the reason for the lower level of happiness, more time spent complaining... is different (unfair) pay for essentially the same job. How about treating the cause instead of blaming the messenger.
Finding out that your loving wife cheated on you early in your relationship after 40 years of marriage. Learning that people don't care about you as much you think they do. Knowing exactly how you will die.
These are things you may personally emotionally prefer to be ignorant of, but in all cases you are more capable and armed with the knowledge than without.
> Recent years have also brought more clarity around best practice on transparency: many workers favour a non-specific kind of salary disclosure where firms reveal ranges, averages and information about wage gaps rather than individual data.
nod I think these are two branches of the tree and this problem is more in line with role disclosure (I'm not saying this well - for example, the need on job postings to list the actual salary range up front, like I know some non-US countries and I think recently Colorado? implemented into law).
The branch of this problem tree I speak of intersects more like "OK the band for level 3 is 50k-60k USD. Mark makes 60k and I make 50k but I feel my work is better than his and I've been here longer." This article is mostly about individual sharing, I think that quoted part is a nod in context to the other branch of the problem root which is just as important in it's own way. Not the best at making up examples, sorry.
Bands still seem helpful to the discussion. If Mark is making 60k then its clear the company is valuing him more and that might open the door to a beneficial discussion.
Seems like it at least gives you some metrics to compare to rather than just favoritism.
While I loathe the seniority system that Union folks use, at the very least their pay is all out in the open and everyone knows what everyone makes and it still works. The biggest issue is just overcoming the cultural hurdle of acknowledging that your pay is not your identity, it's just a number that you can negotiate and if you're undervalued, instead of pissing and moaning to other employees, you go find a new job that pays what you're worth.
> The belief that every employee wants there to be open sharing of salary data is not universal.
I would have thought that the desire to know if you're being treated fairly is universal. You really wouldn't mind making a fraction of what your coworkers make?
What if you had a pool of anonymous employee-contributed data about title + pay + benefits that showed you where you were on the distribution? Would you contribute to, and view, that.
