Because it's a way to make money while you're between jobs while still using the skills you're good at. Not everyone is great at networking, nor are they necessarily in a place where they could pull good clients even if they were.
It's a shit sandwich, but in tough times, that's all you can find to eat.
You're not making money if they're refunding the client. This article and people in this thread suggest it's a terrible way to make money and to AVOID at all costs.
Or, you can use this company and I look forward to reading more of these articles.
Yes, it's worked out terribly for some people, but everyone I know who have done upwork jobs on the side have had next to zero problems.
I don't use them anymore, as I've gotten out of the tech industry and became a professional baker instead, but I get the feeling that we on HN tend to hear a few horror stories, and ignore the thousands of success stories.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be changes made, but anecdotal evidence does not instantly justify a witchhunt and boycott.
Edit: For a slightly less sardonic answer, I prep an innumerable number of different items every day, and they all have to look near perfect. I decided that while programming was a passion of mine, I wanted to do it on my own terms. I wanted to create projects that I found interesting.
Baking though? If I want to make something at work that I find interesting, I can experiment and do that, and my boss encourages me.
So I still code, but I stopped doing it for money and started doing it to contribute to society. Baking I do for fun and money. It was a later in life career change, but I'm much happier for it.
I made a fortune on Ripple this year. I wasn't doing amazingly financially, but I invested about 50k of my savings into it over 3 months because it sounded like an amazing idea. I did that in May, and just recently sold. It's been a hell of a ride, and I plan to continue to invest in other cryptos that sound interesting to me.
RaiBlocks is next on my list, but I'm still trying to find a good point to get in.
Edit: To make it clear, I had never invested in crypto before last year.
I'd say Heartbleed was worse. This one requires local code execution, whereas Heartbleed was "connect to any OpenSSL-using server, send a magic packet, and read the private keys from its memory."
… and nowadays almost everyone permits remote sites to execute code in their browsers. I don't know if JavaScript can be used to implement Meltdown though.
This research has implications for products and services that execute externally supplied code, including Chrome and other browsers with support for JavaScript and WebAssembly.
The difference is scale. OpenSSL was on a lot of servers, but this affects literally every device manufactured in the last 9 years or so. A well-crafted virus could infect nearly any computer and exploit it reliably. We're talking billions and billions of devices, as opposed to millions by Heartbleed.
From my understanding, the VM can exploit it too via executing a crazy amount of syscalls. I may be misunderstanding, but if that were not the case I doubt that AWS would be forcing quick reboots of a ton of its VMs.
Edit: Wait, sorry, I misread. Read is all you really need, write would just be a cherry. If you can read the memory of the host kernel, then you can gain access to any other VMs on the system. This one is bottom-up, you need access to one system and in theory you can gain access to thousands.
True, though the fix for Meltdown requiring a performance hit might exacerbate bad incentives (people not wanting to upgrade) or bad publicity for major corporations (server hosts whose clients now have degraded performance). Whereas Heartbleed had a security cost, this has a possible financial cost.
Also the unpatched devices. Millions of phones don't receive patches anymore, whereas most servers do get patches. They're not really comparable in scale.
Here is the original documentary I watched. There is more information on the individual sites on more recent news and magazine sites, often referenced on wikipedia:
There was a good NBC dateline documentary about it years ago. The biggest stockpiles were being dismantled slowly, but they were indeed leaking, and it was a gargantuan project to neutralize the weapons and containers full of VX. I'm not sure where we're at now. I'll look it up later when I'm home.
I think you're spot on. I manage an online game, and we don't have rules. We have somewhat vague guidelines, and moderators we trust to enforce them.
Rules are open to arguments, and with dozens of bans/appeals a day, it'd be ridiculous to do that. We tried strict rules, and they are both too restrictive and ineffective.
Humans need to make judgements, and guidelines give you the latitude to do that.
90 percent? Probably close to 99. While a significant portion of crypto is probably owned by rich people, the vast majority of actual owners of crypto is owned by people who make far less than that.
For every millionaire out there who is investing in crypto, there are a few hundred people who just want to buy things off the dark web.
No, definitely not. It would reach the temperature of the other side of the heatsink, and since that's 30 billion years, the Earth will be long, long, LONG gone by then.
Even if the sun doesn't engulf the earth, the lowest it could get would be the temperature of the CMB, which is about 3K. Granted, over a couple trillion years, that number would lower.
Reaching absolute zero is pretty much one of the only few things that physicists consider impossible, along with exceeding light speed.
If (s)he isn't a Continuum player, I would be astounded. The default ship is pretty much the Warbird without a bullet. It handles like... identically.
To the developer, if you want another, I develop another popular online game (TagPro) and I desperately want to help you make this a bigger game. This has incredible potential, and it mirrors a game I've been developing for like a year. I haven't had this much fun with a webgame in a long time.
I'm glad you like it! I've taken a leave of absence because my IRL situation has become intense, but I'll definitely be going back. If you like the particle effects, that's my doing. If you don't, well, blame LuckySpammer.
I'm with you. I read the complaint twice, and the RFC twice, and I don't quite think it's a bug. It's a weird thing to reason out, but I don't think Amazon's behavior here is wrong, though it might be unexpected...
This might seem prophetic or cocky, but I've used a random b64 TLD for years that I expand with a macro. After we expanded past countries on the TLDs, I just figured that any short (or even sensible) TLD would eventually be taken, and I didn't want that to break any of my tests that had hardcoded domains (as rare as those are.)
It's a shit sandwich, but in tough times, that's all you can find to eat.