In the UK, this is less of a problem, though it depends a lot on the contract between the company and the developer. Assuming nothing exotic, that the statement on the site is true (and not a malicious falsehood) and that if the hosting belongs to the end customer they did not revoke the developer's access (i.e. no unauthorised access occurred), then the developer is in a reasonable position legally. IANAL, of course.
No unauthorized access but they would argue unauthorized vandalism by the developer, which blocks the entire site.
Airing dirty laundry is in some jurisdictions a legal offence. Which is exactly why there needs to be agreement spelled out in contracts upfront, that this could happen, and the client would just sign it.
And I am a fan of smart contracts and cryptocurrencies, see my suggestion below:
Airing dirty laundry is in some jurisdictions a legal offence.
In the UK, the place where the site in the original link is, it's okay to state facts about a business transaction in public if it's not a malicious falsehood, a violation of contract, or a violation of privacy laws (e.g. sharing emails or recorded calls). But yes, I agree, the issues leading up to this should all be tackled by the contract up front.
You wouldn't own the land. It's quite common with small business web design for the developer to also control the hosting. The actual point in the web site case is that you are revoking the copyright license to the content until you receive payment, a well tested and accepted concept in UK law.
That said, there have certainly been situations where builders have gone back to properties and taken back their property (like tiles from walls, joinery, etc.) but I have no idea how that pans out legally as it's outside my wheelhouse.
Cute trick! I pointlessly wondered if I could make it work with Ruby and you kinda can, if you can tolerate a single error message before the script runs (sadly # comments don't work as shells consider them comments too):
=begin
ruby $0; exit
=end
puts "Hello from Ruby"
Not immediately useful, but no doubt this trick will pop up at some random moment in the future and actually be useful. Very basic C99 too, though I'm not sure I'd want to script with it(!):
Your point also touches on the idea that new things are being created that might well never have. Like your virtual pet. You might have been commissioned to illustrate such a thing but most likely not, and it wouldn’t have been “yours.” It reminds me of when desktop publishing, MIDI sequencers, or PowerPoint took off and people produced all sorts of things that were largely not of high artisanal quality but it was new stuff, people got personal value from it (as it was harder to spread stuff around pre-Internet) and the tools eventually matured into what all the pros now use anyway.
That said, I concede the critics have many valid points and concerns and it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate this flood of “stuff” at a scale never seen before. (I suspect it’ll end up like YouTube and video. Ultra long tail. Most stuff never seeing more than a few eyeballs and a smaller group getting the lion’s share of attention, as with most things. Did YouTube change TV and video production more generally? Yes! But it also didn’t destroy it..)
Your tireless experimenting (and especially documenting) is valuable and I love to see all of it. The avant garde nature of your recent work will draw the occasional flurry of disdain from more jaded types, but I doubt many HN regulars would think you had anything but good intentions! Guess I am basically just saying.. keep it up.
Great list, thank you. The only thing to note is that whenever I imported a large list like this in the past, I always stopped checking my RSS reader after a while because the content wasn't interesting. I think finding RSS/adding it to a reader should happen organically over time.
This may be because most feed readers don't have a proper way to triage items. Adding a feed doesn't mean you want to read everything from said feed. Usually only a subset of articles are interesting.
I built a feed reader with that concept in mind, having a separate triage stage where you only decide if it's worth reading or not. This will make it easier to handle large feed lists and find the best articles from them.
It's interesting to see the "stool" being transliterated as "p" because in Cyrillic and Greek "p" / pi is written as something that looks like a little stool: П / π! I wonder.. does that come all the way from ancient Egyptian or was it chosen to fit later?
Even if not, it serves a nice aide-memoire. A bit like how the "r" here is a mouth, and "r" in Cyrillic is Р which looks like an emoticon mouth. "s" looks like a folded cloth, ф (f) looks kinda like a snake, and Ы arguably looks like double reeds. I may be overthinking this, though ;-)
Somehow we've not had the problem (yet). They get bored quickly and self-limit themselves, though we reserve the right to look at what they're up to whenever we see fit. Having lots of extracurricular activities might be helping, but my introverted, nerdy self spent way more time glued to a CRT as a teen. Hmm, maybe that's the secret.. having a nerd for a dad makes tech look uncool! :-D
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