I believe it comes down to the difference between master‘s and bachelor’s as well as the size of the university.
After showing the article to one of my friends who‘s doing the thesis right now, he told me that his experience with his supervisor is very different from mine. In my case I might have gotten very lucky.
I think it’s worth a try. Being a bit older than the rest (almost thirties) when I started also gave me pause at first. But I felt that people were very welcoming regardless of your situation.
I wouldn’t let that discourage you. During my time there I did meet people well in their mid thirties juggling work, kids and the masters. Depending on your country, universities can do a lot of accommodations to parents if that’s in the picture.
The "Ministry of Truth" in this case is a bad analogy though, since in the story, its purpose was to redefine what is the truth according to state up to the point of forcing people ignore the proof that they see in front of their eyes through torture.
I think the idea would be to compete in different segments. Startups often focus on problems where hypergrowth is at least possible with massive investments. But the examples listed in the article advocate for ideas that might generate millions but not billions in revenue.
Some of the ideas the author is proposing are already happening in Germany. There are grants to develop games for instance which pay you a monthly salary for 1 year and a while back there was a similar one for open source projects.
I think it's more likely that while the punishment might be significant it will be more profitable to continue as long as possible violating the law or at least pushing the boundaries as much as possible instead of proactively being compliant.
After a court order they will know exactly where the limits are and tiptoe them as much as possible. If they proactively try to be "overcompliant" they might loose more money in the long run.
It's messed up to be honest. I would prefer harsher punishments, but on the other hand if companies are scared all the time it might have a chilling economic effect so there is a balance to strike as well.
I can't speak for the original poster but one thing that I noticed is that from time to time it happens to me that despite not having a tight deadline I tend to not go all the way in avoiding tech debt.
One example would be that I had a problem in one of the microservices with a version of a docker image that wouldn't run on an M1 mac. I fixed it in that repo but didn't do the same changes to other services with the same issue. Changing the other services would have taken me less than half an hour. This is the kind of laziness that the article and qup are referring to I believe.
The standards mentioned in the article seem to be required to deploy rust code as part of safety critical systems in cars and other industrial applications. This might be a big deal to get rust code into cars but I’m just guessing
From personal experience I can tell you that using a modern framework can be really worth the added complexity even in simple applications.
For one of my clients projects it started out in what seemed like a simple crud app and so I did the few reactive changes in pure java script. The thing is: requirements changed and now after a while I couldn't get around adding VueJS simply because the reactive changes kept piling up.
Even though the HN sentiment seems to be that all "modern" frameworks are just huge piles of code that you add to your project without understanding how any of this works, my personal opinion is that using something like nextjs with server side rendering is not all that different from using a server side php framework like laravel. You still generate the same html unless you need reactive changes and when you do, you are happy to have chosen that. And to play a bit the devil's advocate: Unless you write your own webserver and template rendering engine you are already using a bunch of code you don't really understand.
I feel like D has a lower barrier of entry than rust. It has the familiar patterns most developers a familiar with like garbage collection and inheritance while also giving you the tools to manually take care of the garbage in a safe manner.
As much as I love rust, I can see how as a language, D would be easier to teach devs who come from languages like java, javascript or php.
That would be a grammar checker though. And there are many solutions available today to do that. Even open source solutions. Grammarly would be one example, language tool another.
The ones I looked at work by encoding common spelling mistakes into a grammar (as in Chomsky grammar) and then running that over the text.
It depends on your project. As soon as you add too many dependencies to rust with lots of macros, compile times tend to increase a lot for rust projects because it creates a fat binary, whereas it works fine for a mountain of dependencies in Scala for me.
On the other hand if you just need compiler errors, cargo check runs almost instantly for incremental checks.
It depends. I, as a freelancer, am required to ask for a VAT tax but my clients can balance out the VAT tax for the services they buy from me with the VAT they ask from their clients.
Personal labour in the sense of employment is exempt from VAT tax if the person is employed but then other forms of taxes, like the income tax apply.
The amount of tax as well as the form in which they are collected vary from country to country.
My personal opinion is that the tax system is actually quite clear and progressive, at least for me as a freelancer. I can file my taxes online without any hitches and the amount to pay and deductibles are easy to get (at least in Germany and Spain).
Then again this whole thing varies from country to country and Spain requires you to give quarterly justifications on the VAT tax you owe which amounts to a lot of paperwork but not too much in my mind.
I think it should be obvious that unions are not the only factor contributing to salaries.
For instance: Average salary for tech in Germany is roughly twice as high as in Spain, even though they are working in the same market zone and have comparable workers protection. Though there are some differences in fiscal policy like for instance Vat tax (Spain 21% for service industry, Germany 19%).
I believe the main reason why the USA have such a high salary in comparison is because of a few factors:
Most importantly a huge zone speaking one single language that by now is spoken throughout the world, leading to a much bigger initial market, thus making it easier to create start ups and selling your goods. So you can easily invest in R&D.
Additionally, silicon valley is home to huge monopolies/duopolies like Google, Apple, Intel etc. And while these might hurt competition and the market as a whole, they also increase the demand for labour in the US.
Another contributing factor, though I don't have any numbers to back it up is that higher education is a privilege in the US whereas in Germany it is a commodity.
After showing the article to one of my friends who‘s doing the thesis right now, he told me that his experience with his supervisor is very different from mine. In my case I might have gotten very lucky.