Has anyone used hook.io as an alternative? I have only built toy projects with it, nothing substantial, so I can't speak to important things like error handling, but so far I really like it and find it substantially easier to use than Lambda.
I used hook.io in its early days. It once lost the data in its internal data store when they were doing a database migration, rendering my hooks useless until I manually intervened. Haven't really used it much longer after that, but due to not needing it anymore.
Creator of hook.io checking in. Sorry to hear you had an issue.
We haven't had any recorded incidents of lost data. We did have an issue after a security upgrade where older accounts did need to be migrated with new access tokens. If you lost any data drop me an email and I'd be glad to find it.
The internal datastore is mostly for development purposes. We generally recommend persisting data to an external database like DynamoDB.
Hey Marak, sorry, I think I came across as too snarky and I think it'd be a good rule to always imagine the author/creator will read/reply. So with that in mind, I think hook.io is really cool and thanks for your excitement.
In the chart of trends in how people meet, there is a suspicious uptick in "at a restaurant/bar" in the last few years... that is totally just a cover for people who met on Tinder and then got serious.
Oh? Can you point me to an instance of that usage, where "stigmata" is used as a plural of "stigma" (meaning: a socially-ostracizing feature or trait), in a contemporary, edited publication?
A will grant that it's sometimes used in the medical literature to mean "a clear, diagnostic sign of some illness", but the allusion there is to the stigmata of Christianity.
I've never, ever seen it used to mean the plural of stigma as the word is commonly used in English.
The "fundamental building blocks are too flawed" argument is so strange to me. Too flawed for what? To become, by far, the most popular platform in history for running applications? Because it's already done that.
This is a case of the evidence not fitting the theory well, so people complain about the evidence. If the browser/DOM/HTML/JS ecosystem "technically" is terrible, but in practice dominates the competition, then there is something about it that is better. This is not a fallacy, but a simple supply and demand argument.
Elementary education is mandatory, but the curriculum is only mandated for public schools. The rules vary from state to state, but here they are for California:
1. File an annual private school affidavit.
2. Maintain an attendance register.
3. Instruction must be in English.
4. Instructors must be capable of teaching.
5. Provide instruction in the courses commonly taught in the public schools (e.g., language arts, math, science, social studies, health, and driver training).
6. Maintain immunization records or personal beliefs exemption.
7. Maintain a list of courses of study.
8. Maintain a list of instructors with their addresses and qualifications.
This is MINIMALLY enforced. If the parent has a teaching credential, the rules are even more lax "The child must be taught for at least three hours a day, between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., for 175 days each school year in the several branches of study required to be taught by the public schools and in the English language."[1]
On a related side notes, private schools also do not have to follow the curriculum set for public schools. There are even some public schools that are exempted from parts of the mandatory curriculum (charters).
Wow - check out my summary of the UK home schooling process to the OP you responded to. Our approach is much more laissez faire than the US arrangement. Interesting.
Each state has their own requirements. In some states, it is very burdensome to meet the requiremsnts. In others, anything goes. In Cal, we had no problems doing as we liked.
Did you read the whole article? I was composing a similar comment in my head, but then got to "switching from conventional milk to organic milk would increase omega-3 intake by only very small margins... protein levels were lower in organic crops such as wheat... from a health perspective, what you eat matters more than whether you choose organic or conventional."
I agree that any science-for-the-public reporting tends to do a bad job of conveying the inherent uncertainty in current research, but I feel like this was not terrible.
So, after "[announcing] $7.67 million in fresh funding... TinyOwl was reportedly offering post-dated checks to [the laid off employees], which concerned them as previously laid-off employees had yet to receive their payment." And we're supposed to feel bad for the guy?
Indian employees have a long history of being abused and taken advantage of to the point of actual slave labour, a lot of the time by other Indian people. If they're based in another country they frequently hold on to their employee's passports so that they become virtual prisoners.
This guy should lose his funding, at the least for following this pattern of behaviour and choosing to exploit the local economy by paying his workers well below what would be considered a reasonable wage anywhere else.
You must consider a few things. India didnt have a lot of private organizations to work for before the 80s. And most of the youth are second generation college educated. At least the ones you're reading about.
Post Independence in 1947, govt jobs have been held in very high regard and no one gets fired from those jobs. They're mostly patronage.
Getting fired is a concept is still a new concept for most. People don't get fired, they're asked to resign. Even labour laws haven't been updated with the times. You can hire, but can't fire.
Also, people feel entitled to job security here and have not experienced a single recession in the last 30 years.
You must understand, Tiny Owl pays very well. Relatively. People with six months of managerial experience are getting paid $40,000. That's a lot here. It takes 8-10 years to get to that pay in regular large organizations.
But where they went wrong:
1. Hiring one bad apple who encouraged others to gang up on the founder. This is no way to resolve a professional dispute.
2. Not anticipating redundancy in positions well in advance, and communicating and disclosing the risks. Perhaps those jobs could have had a built in expiry and conditional renewal clause in their contracts.
But had they been growing as they did earlier this year, there would not have been any redundancy. The problem was credit dried up and competition became too fierce.
There's a lot of inconsistencies here in your comment and a lot of deliberate omissions.
> India didnt have a lot of private organizations to work for before the 80s.
A good chunk of our planet didn't have that prior to 80s, not just India.
> Post Independence in 1947, govt jobs have been held in very high regard and no one gets fired from those jobs. They're mostly patronage.
Nothing changed in this regard.
And, no
> People with six months of managerial experience are getting paid $40,000
is an exception and not a norm. Your comment makes it look like, it's the norm here. I work in one of the blue eyes Indian startups (which translates to yes, it's burning money like most of the Indian startups but has more hope riding on it than the others) and I see these salary figures from up close.
What TinyOwl's founder(s) did is very simple - fraud! That's why they were held hostage knowing that being moneybags they would be untouchable once they are out and they (the employees) would probably never get their wages. You didn't even mention this issue in your comment. Or are you deliberately trying to spin the story? Is it a PR attempt, considering the age of your account? Anyway, that's another debate.
Also, the people holding the founder hostage were not at all those "management graduates" with that kind of salaries. They were the people who were kind of making ends meet, of course relatively speaking. They saw they were being cheated and took matters in their own hands, which, IMHO, even though illegal was/is the most effective way here.
What I have noticed in Indian startups (where I work included and maybe this is how it is worldwide), the founders wants quick numbers - by the hook, or by the crook. Well, the difference is in the west (US/EU) there's the law and the watchdogs who bring the crooks to the book, in India everything has a price and you can buy it if you can pay including the law and the courts. So that's there.
Haha. I agree, my previous answer doesn't come across as consistent. But I was typing from an app I recently started using and I didn't know where the edit button was. It might explain the age of my account too. I just discovered this site.
The central point I was trying to make in my reply was that getting fired (or being a college dropout or bankrupt) is a huge social stigma. It's a relic, in my opinion, of the pre-liberalization times.
"A good chunk of our planet didn't have that prior to 80s, not just India." This is plain wrong. It was hard to open new business because of lack of cheap credit and license permit system. Most of the developed world had systems in place for half a century before we had them. We didn't have banks, we relied on funds from friends and family, or the shadow banking system that is so prominent in Gujarati and Marwari communities. We didn't have the economic freedom to start large organizations, and those who could, were the elite families who had access, and stranglehold over the govt. They had the power and connections to use their levers in govt to acquire licenses and contracts. Which might explain why we have most number of inherited billionaires in the richest Indians list.
Ok, so why is this history relevant? Getting laid off as a concept hasn't seeped in the public psyche yet. Because it a huge social stigma and because for many working for corporate is recent experience. There weren't many to speak of. Add to that, there hasn't been a single recession.
".. they (the employees) would probably never get their wages." Do you really think the founders would not pay? In this age where the smallest stories can get wide attention, I don't think they can ever get away with something like this.
So what is the dispute about?
1. On the surface, about timing of payment. For which they can work out a resolution, but ganging up on anyone is not a good way to resolve issues. Employees aren't that powerless, that they have to resort to physical means - it is not the most effective means. Internet and sites like Twitter has leveled the field a little for everyone. If ganging up is the most effective means to deal with this, then it is mostly a lack of imagination on the part of those employees.
2. At the core, about getting fired. Their anger is about getting fired. Founders have handled it ineptly. If their jobs became redundant because of automation of orders, the firm should have set the expectations right from the start. They certainly shouldn't have laid them off in a sudden move.
Also, what I think, from a plain econ 101 pov, is that harder we make firing, slower hiring becomes - because vacancies won't open easily, and more difficult is it to get hired into good jobs. Hiring and firing should be easy - determined solely by economic rationalie. The more efficient labour market is, the better off everyone is.
My only point is that ganging up is no solution - which they did because of the emotive issue. In the long run, it clips the wings of the individual.
"My only point is that ganging up is no solution - which they did because of the emotive issue. In the long run, it clips the wings of the individual."
While "ganging up is no solution" might make sense if there were alternatives, in this case, it seems likely that "ganging up" was their only chance of getting paid. It seems like the police in this case, saw the unfairness of it and sided with the workers.
Given the media attention startups are now getting in India, the contigency of not getting paid highly unlikely. If the company was insolvent, then perhaps. But in this case they secured $8mm. If the company defaults on their dues, the story of startups being mythical and not value creating entities would blow in the media.
As far as the police is concerned, they are highly inept, dysfunctional, and enjoy discretionary powers. Most people don't trust them or their judgment, and wish they never have to deal with the police.
This happens in middle east countries a lot, and applies to many white collar workers too. Unless you are in a really good company/position the employer will keep your passport.
There is no such history in India. Please show evidence. India is a super poor country which means far too many people fighting for any minor job which does not amount to slavery.
Indian laws are outright crazy and favor labor and not the employer in all cases. One of the so called "reform" that current government is doing is to provide an exit option for failed businesses.
I don't think there is anything wrong here. Generally if you resign or leave you do not get the immediately salary in India. You receive it with what they call final settlement. It might be 30 to 90 days later.
But in either case the point here is that India does not have a working judiciary that can enforce contracts and hence people take law into their hand which is wrong even if the co-founder was at err.
Imagine these employees had to go to court to get their due. My uncle is fighting a similar case for last 32 years.
Check what happened to this mailman who was fired by postal department accusing him of stealing Rs 50 (80 cents). The case took 30 years and eventually reached Supreme Court.
If India could fix its court system half the problems are over. You need to have someone to complain to and get it remedied and that someone takes 10+ years for even routine matters like land(partition) disputes. It is not a good sign. No one will even bother questioning people flouting rules, and when no one is there to question them the rule flouters continue to subvert the law.
Like other Indian institutions, judiciary too is corrupt (but I don't see it represented as such in the media) at the lower levels.
Court system is incompetent because of constitution. Indian constitution is ridiculously complex lengthy and takes a very "law to fix everything" stand compared to something like American constitution which places liberty of individuals at core.
Courts waste a lot of time on technicality and morality rather than pure pragmatism and sense of justice. For example a murder in India is not just a murder. Depending on the gender, age, reasons, motives there are at least 45 different laws that can be applied. Murder out of religious superstition would warrant a totally different legal approach than say murder in domestic abuse because at core the court is not looking at it as violation of person's right to life.
As a trained, but non-practicing, physicist, I would like you to elaborate about your first paragraph. I am used to using units where c=1, I think that is what you are referencing: a "meter" of time is the time it takes light to go a meter (which is to say, a very small amount of time) and so a second is 3x10^8 m. I don't see how this changes the pattern we would make in spacetime. If we assume no one ever moves (a nice physics-y approximation), but the particles that make them up do, so I don't see why we wouldn't look like the middle pattern while alive. Then after death, the disintegration is exaggerated, but again, it seems more-or-less right to me. What am I missing?
Because the timescales that you're "moving" on are very long from a relativistic perspective. If we localize you in spacetime you're maybe a meter long in one direction, two meters in another, half a meter in a third, and... 30,000 km in the fourth. If we look at you on the nanosecond timescale that you need to see time as "meters" we find that except for, say, electrons' worldlines about the nuclei, your worldlines are very much all parallel to each other.
Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling. In ordinary homeschooling, the parents set a curriculum, and direct the learning. In unschooling, the student decides what to learn, and the parent provides resources to support that.
If the kid gets into dinosaurs, a regular homeschooling parent might add a dinosaur module to the science/biology part of the curriculum. The unschooling parent might ask, "How would you like it if we took a trip to Utah, to visit an actual dig site?"
If the kid gets into robots, a regular homeschooling parent might add mechanical engineering and electronics to the curriculum. An unschooling parent might bring home a LEGO Mindstorms set and sign the kid up for the robot soccer league run by an adjunct from the local community college.
As I understand it, successful unschoolers rely rather heavily on a whole-family lifestyle commitment, to subtly discourage the kid from choosing to become the world's foremost expert on Minecraft, and learn nothing else. I would, at the least, be compelled to suggest that perhaps my kid should play all the computer games in my personal collection, in chronological order, starting with the Infocom library, progressing through the Sierra/Dynamix era, running through Black Isle and LucasArts titles, and ending with access to my Steam and GOG accounts. I could also hook up my old console systems.
Then I might, ever so subtly, suggest that an encyclopedic knowledge of video gaming, past and present, might be useful to a heavily-followed and well-monetized text or video blogger. Because I am certainly not going to unschool if it won't eventually get the kid out of my basement (and pantry).
No, Unschooling is a subset of Home Education. So is Home Schooling. The distinction is important, since while both count as education, only one is school-at-home.
The rest of the post is rather accurate though, although I would say that with the robotics, the unschooling parent would probably take the kids to a local Radioshack (Or Maplin's, if you're in the UK!) and buy a book on electronics, along with a few bits and bobs (motors, etc), encourage the kid to experiment, and encourage them to join a local engineering group :D
Homeschooling may encompass a lot of different methodologies but as I said Homeschooling back when I did it which was a long time ago it had a lot of similarities to unschooling as it's defined now.
The point here though is that whether you call it Homeschooling or Unschooling it is still a labor intensive process that will likely require sacrifice on the part of the parents. Sacrifices that many times a lower income family can not afford to make.
