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If anyone would like an invite, send me an email or reply here.
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I would like one, please.
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If anyone would like an invite, send me an email or reply here.
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I'd love an invite, ben [@] hutchins.co (no spaces).
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> In my mind, it’s a little preposterous that if I want to do so, however, I have to be ok with being felt up and indirectly insulted.
To the author: You're right, it's unacceptable but you know how to fix it? You say something at the point in which it occurs. Nip it in the bud. Running off to write yet another gender-division-in-the-tech-world blog which will be read, primarily, by the sort of folk who already agree with you isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference as taking care of issues promptly. After doing so, blog about what happened and the resulting reaction. That's the sort of story that'll spread like wildfire.
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This is a great point, but it's hard to be confrontational in a place where you're already worried about your social standing. I agree that things would change faster if people were more confrontational but it's kind of a lot to ask. Posting a blog post about it (and one that's well-written, with good examples and explanation) is also a great step forward, and requires substantial courage on its own.
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Thanks, it's been a lot of hard work for a lot of people making all of this happen ... I am glad to see you're happy, but am most curious what else you think can be improved. How can I help you get to the 100% happiness point? Please feel free to drop a comment in here or email with any feedback you have. For technical bugs, the established process is to indeed go via Connect, so this would NOT replace the correct/official feedback process ... But I promise to read up every comment left as a response to this one and try to follow up on as many of them as are actionable. I am obviously under NDA so cannot always discuss the internals/specifics of what we are doing, nor am I officially a spokesperson for Microsoft, so please keep those in mind when reading my responses :-)
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The features making a website go beyond standards and into microsoft specific areas (menus in pinned sites, changing color on the chrome depending on which site you're seeing) gives me a feeling of 'this is wrong'.
Care to shed some light on this topic?
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I don't understand what he's angry about. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, these are all enormously complicated programs that require resources to load. That doesn't make them bloatware and it doesn't make the programmers lazy.
His proposed solution sucks too. Show the UI while it's loading so the user can impotently click around waiting for the program to "turn on". Windows does this when it boots up and it drives me insane -- if the OS or program isn't in a usable state when you show it to me, don't show it to me
Loading speed is just one of a multitude of factors that come into play when making software. According to this Adobe employee it should be the chief most concern, even dominating other things like features, usability, UX, cost, technological debt, etc.
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It's the same for any complex program, smartphone or desktop. I have Picsel Smart Office on my phone and it has a boot time, because it's an office app and has to load resources to use the app.
And on his proposed solution, he asks developers to empower users, to not make users feel belittled, and at the same time he asks developers to trick users into thinking the full app has loaded. How can you avoid belittling someone and trick them at the same time?
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This might be a little off topic but I often read articles like this, and elsewhere, speculate on the "future" where so 'n so is able to see exactly what you purchased on your cards for some nefarious reason.
So here is my question: Do stores REALLY pass on an itemised list to the credit card processor? Because it was always my understanding that all they passed upstream was the amount and the name of the establishment.
This article claims: "Imagine getting a call from your doctor if you [...] make a habit of buying candy bars at the checkout counter"
I don't think that data exists outside of the specific convenience store where you purchased the candy. The CC company would know that you spend an extra $1 at that place, but how do you tie that into bad eating habits? Maybe they purchased an apple or a cup of coffee.
I'd really love some insight on this topic, and I will happily admit that maybe my information is either out of date or just flat out wrong.
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Potentially could make assumptions about establishment and value.. $2 at gas station probably isnt gas. etc. Hard to do though.
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"They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste."
No, no, no! This always frustrates me. This is not 'coding' (maybe it is, and we should be doing less of it, and more programming). This is gluing together pre-coded snippets and trying to make it work. Continuing to do this is an impediment to getting better. Thinking that somehow this is what 'coding' is, is missing the point.
I will read a stack overflow page perhaps in a search for some direction, look at all the 'solutions' like surveying a landscape of others approaches to the problem. Then I'll throw them all away and code my own. Possibly it will share a lot with one of the answers, what I would consider a good approach. But a literal copy and paste just doesn't happen. I would consider a copy and paste a recipe for inviting trouble, because you haven't really reasoned through the problem yourself, and thus don't really understand the solution intimately.
Programming is a process of mental reasoning around your problem with an eye on the form of reasoning computers use, so you can express that reasoning to the computer in the language you're using. Because computers don't reason like humans 'reason' (ie. humans don't really 'reason'...), knowing how a computer reasons and behaves is alien and takes time to understand and learn and it takes time to become quicker at comprehending this. This is the path of becoming a better programmer. Gaining that experience so the process is less alien and you more easily can fathom how a computer will respond and behave with a certain approach of laying out of the logic you are trying to express.
Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this. In some cases it may prevent you learning essential lessons and hinder your improvement.
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copy and paste helps to get the job done
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It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. There must be sources of data about salaries in the Bay Area. Has anyone tried looking to see if there is a depression in tech workers' salaries, relative to people in other fields, during the time this agreement was in force?
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I am not entirely sure that 'relative to other fields' is a useful metric in this case.
Maybe if we could restrict those fields to others in the middle of a boom or otherwise in a fierce competition for talent...petroleum and other engineers in the oil industry in the past few years, for example. (though I'd wonder if the big players in that industry have similar pacts in place).
I don't know. It would be difficult to hold enough variables constant to make any useful comparisons but there might be something in the broad strokes.
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I thought this was going to be a puff piece before I opened it but the most interesting thing--and perhaps this is posted elsewhere and I merely missed it--is it has basic Facebook financials.
$2 billion revenue for $400 million profit gives a P/E ratio of 125. That is simply nuts.
Now I fully realize that the stockmarket is driven on the expectation of future value rather than the simpler view of the ability to produce income, which is why "growth" companies trade much higher than their P/Es but 125? That's like the height of the dot.com era pricing.
Remember at 600 million users, if you exclude those who are illiterate, have no access to computers or the internet, are infirm or simply too young, there's only so much bigger Facebook can actually get (given ~6 billion people on Earth you'd exclude at least half of them).
The counterargument to that is that Facebook has only scratched the surface of monetizing those users and I guess that might be true but I'm also of the opinion that there isn't as much room to monetize as some seem to think.
The usual MO for a VC-backed company is to go all out to build scale. They'll burn through millions of dollars to do it without concern for how to generate money. Why? Because once you have scale many things become easier, even possible.
Facebook has scale and can only generate $400 million in profit a year and only a 20% profit margin? That's less than impressive.
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Salesforce has a hefty P/E of ~ 258. This pales in comparison. Both are absurd in my opinion.
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This is how I feel. I don't watch TV for hours like I did as a child. What I do now is worse; stay in doors programming, browsing the web aimlessly, or staring at the ceiling. I don't blame my internet lifestyle for this really, but I literally don't know what else to do and the internet is so accommodating to me being a shut-in. I know I'm wasting my life but I don't know how to stop.
San Francisco is a beautiful city but it is wasted on me and I feel like I should feel guilty for that. I don't deserve this nice city; it belongs to creative people.
Trying to leave the house to do anything interesting takes herculean efforts. I can't find joy or interest in anything beyond an intellectual level. Everyday sometimes feels like it's worse than the last.
I'm trapped in an un-ending present where I grow older but never grow as a person.
ps - anything you have to suggest is something i've heard already x10 and have or currently trying, such as therapy.
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Go on google flights and pick a city that sounds dangerous.
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Not specific to hacker culture, but I always felt there was a bit of a double standard when it comes to alpha male behavior. Women are attracted to aggressive men. Women like men who take charge. Women like men who are the initiators. Now obviously there is a line that crosses over into sexual harassment, but the fact is that men who behave aggressively are the ones who succeed in sexual pursuits most often. It's almost as if when the girl is attracted to the guy, it's flirting, but when she isn't, it's creepy/sexual harassment. I wish it weren't like this because I, personally, am not very aggressive.
I'm not trying to defend the behavior described in the article, I'm just saying that men act like that because it works.
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Ugh.. the last thing we need is to turn this into a general sexual attraction discussion about what (we think) works and what doesn't. It's a way more complex and controversial topic that we don't have to solve in order to address the "women in IT" problem when there is a much simpler solution:
DON'T TRY TO HIT ON WOMEN AT CONFERENCES OR OTHER BUSINESS/PROFESSIONAL ENVIRONMENTS AT ALL. PERIOD.
There is no shortage of more appropriate times and places we can test our theories about alpha male behavior, aggressiveness or what have you. Hell, some venues are specifically intended for such endeavors! Use them!
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Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is?
Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google. Is what I think of that.
Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else!
Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. I don't want to tab around a widget in the upper left. Plus you have toggle it open in the first place, and it's not very responsive, either.
Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing.
I could go on. How awful. What happened?
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The quality of their directions has gone downhill as well. I keep getting routes that take me needlessly onto a frontage road and back to the main road; that say there's a hard right when there's a slight jog in the road; that have me take take a right and three lefts instead of just going straight and turning left, when there is an abundantly clear left-turn lane; the list goes on and on. When it first started it wasn't so great at directions, and they improved it dramatically over the next few years. Now it's back to sucking pretty badly.
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From the fringes - how typical is a 8:45am - 4pm (3 days a week anyways) schedule for HN googlers?
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Virtually everything about your experience at Google will depend on your manager.
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Dolphins are exactly why I feel SETI is such a misguided (in a sweet way) effort.
Here we are, searching for extraterrestrial intelligence while we can't even communicate with the other intelligent species on our own planet.
Glad to see we're making progress though!
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SETI are one of the biggest supporters of research into dolphin vocalisations. Laurance Doyle, who is at SETI, is one of the pioneers of the field.
http://www.tusker.com/tusker-trips/eclipse-trips/archaeo/art...
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I had heard a while ago that Einstein was a womanizer. Looks like he was a demanding jerk as well.
Just goes to show that there is usually a huge difference between what we think of historical figures and how they actually were.
It's interesting how much we want our heroes to be pure and spotless -- unlike any other humans we encounter.
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I agree that this isn't enough to judge Einsteins morality, but it is interesting the tendency to want our heroes to be noble people. James Thurber wrote a wonderful short story about this -- The Greatest Man in the World.
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Seeing comments like this “I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281319
This is partly what inspired me to write a wishlist for Satya in the first place.
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"And most importantly: Don’t be ashamed to build 100% JavaScript applications. You may get some incensed priests vituperating you in their blogs. But there will be an army of users (like me) who will fall in love with using your app."
This statement needs a huge, HUGE caveat that you should only be building 100% JavaScript apps in situations where doing so makes sense. For example, I find the new Blogger "web app" infuriating. I shouldn't have to stare at a loading screen to read a half-dozen paragraphs of text, that's just stupid. Just serve the HTML. No one is going to "fall in love" with your app if your app shouldn't exist in the first place because the old-school solution provided a superior experience.
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Also, spare a thought for those who have to use screen readers.
If your 'app' is just a web page — use a web page!
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I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus.
I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices.
I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work. I want to make awesome stuff, keep my skills sharp and make the company some money. Preferably lots of it.
I'd be fine with an office that's literally 5x5', a desk, a door, a wifi connection, and some shared working areas for when it's time to collaborate. Because yes, collaboration is crucial (and fun) but if I have to hunt all over the damn building for a bit of quiet space (that might not even be avaiable) when it's time to bear down and do some solo coding then this is not going to work.
Hell, I'll even bring my own damn desk, chair, and laptop. Supplied my own laptop to my last two jobs. No big deal. I'm an engineer; I get paid decently. But I need a freaking place to focus for at least half of any given working week - and sometimes, for close to the entire week.
I don't need: famous guest speakers, catered food, fancy architecture, anything. I wouldn't even care if the office was a poorly-insulated garage that gets cold in the winter. I'll bring my own $20 space heater that will heat a 5x5' office just fine.
What I can't have, if you want me to get any work done, is multiple simultaneous conversations taking place five feet away from my head all day long.
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Agreed. The most important thing about an office or workspace, for me, is that there are minimal interruptions. Quiet is best, maybe punctuated by music through my headphones or a bout of pair programming with a colleague.
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If you're getting your work done, on time, and to the quality specifications, who the hell cares how many hours in the week you work?
We're working on computers, doing work which does not benefit from typing for N hours straight; there is no meaningful correlation between quality/quantity and hours worked.
I wish more people realized this.
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It really depends from whose perspective you're looking at. If you are working for a startup this is exactly how you may think. If I am the owner I would probably think otherwise. There is always more work and more responsibilities that someone can take on, and I would expect my people to do just that. If you're doing something specific in half the time it normally takes, it doesn't mean you can't start doing something outside of your scope and expend your knowledge, maybe help others with their work.
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I've noticed a rather disturbing trend of thought in technology that's been showing up more and more recently with things like this: "Make it harder for users to know how things really work. Make it harder for users to explore, make mistakes, and learn. Make it harder for users to become developers. The less the users know, the easier it'll seem to them, and the easier it'll be for us to stay in control. Keep them ignorant and consuming. Lock them in a walled garden and tell them it's all 'for your security/safety'. Because knowledge is power, and we don't want that in the hands of the users."
Netflix doing this is one of the more obvious manifestations, but they are not alone - many other companies and even open-source, free-software projects are taking this approach, Google included.
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I don't have netflix. If everybody does the same, they'll go out of business. Or are you all addicted to TV?
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Don't throw stones on me, but... Why on HN?
(besides, I am as saddened as you are. I truly loved his as an actor and comedian - I just used his acronym scene from Good Morning Vietnam 4 days ago in a presentation I gave).
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I had the same thought, but...Robin Williams.
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Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.
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Use the same system that decays a post's weight on the front page to decay a comments weight on a thread.
This will balance out the uneven distribution of karma that is talked about above, as new comments will be seen and given a chance to voted on even well into a conversation.
Having done this, comments that stop being relevant to the conversation should drop to the bottom and naturally attract less attention. Ideally, this will leave trolling posts ignored. (This can be helped further by having user selected timeout apply. If comment / responses are mapped as a tree, hide all branches that have no new activity for the past x hours, allowing users to change x as they choose. Give visual feedback to a comments age by fading old comments)
This solves the 'income' end of the system, as karma should now be distributed a little more evenly over time.
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The problem with this article is that a lot of things that are cheap for one serving go stale before you eat the second.
For instance, on day one, he adds some mint which cost ~50p to buy, but he calls 1p because he only eats a little. He does not eat the rest of the mint that week, so it cost him ~50p, i.e. half the days budget.
I am poor and eat very cheap. I do that using dry bulk foods and frozen veg. This is important because there are opportunities for free meals (e.g. if customers at work do not eat all the sand witches and biscuits, that can be lunch for 2 days). Friends invite you for dinner too. If you buy food that spoils, opportunities like this come at a price.
How about this for a suggestion - mix lentils, buck wheat, brown rice, dried beans, quinoa. These come in 500g bags for about a pound. You need 6 spoons of this mix per meal, so 10 pounds of mix will last you several months. Put in a rice cooker for 40 min (some beans need soaking first), with a chicken stock cube. Cook for 20 mins then add mixed frozen veg. This will cost you about 30p per meal, and is pretty much complete [1].
I eat the above most of the time, and take free food whenever possible. At the end of the week, I treat myself to a ready meal. You can add curry spice or other herbs for variety. After a year of this I feel pretty healthy.
As an aside, supermarkets are machines for making you overbuy. Between BOGOF offers and big packs of meat (or small ones at a huge premium), it's very hard to shop there on a budget because they are designed to trick you into making 'bad' choices. Avoiding them by living on a non-spoiling diet saves tons.
[1] I think. The key to a healthy diet is variety, but if your basic meal is healthy and cheap, you can make sure to be eating other things from time to time.
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I know this is inappropriate but I got a kick out of imagining your customers dining on sand witches. Brilliant!
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The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases.
I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently.
The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions with quality answers get closed because they are slightly subjective, which completely obliterates the community feeling.
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Totally agree on the so called subjective questions. The idea should be "wide-open your minds" instead of everybody's "how can I cast it to list" questions.
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I'm currently mounting two rPi boards to two external hard drives. I'll leave one at home and one at work and run BitTorrent Sync on them to create my own little distributed / decentralized Dropbox. Would a blog post when I'm done be interesting?
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ya
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I created my account exactly 6 years ago, on February 20th, 2007. I guess I must have seen that announcement[1] posted on Reddit[2].
It's definitely lost that small town charm, but given how much it has grown it's still remarkably good.
To another 6 years!
1. http://www.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_ne...
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Nice. just checked mine -- I was here 3 days after it was created.
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Ten years ago? Not sure. I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. Literally nothing in this post is in any way amazing to anyone who actually remembers life ten years ago. We had smartphones. We had social media. We had web forums. Just because you've dumped money into some of them doesn't make them special or even interesting from a technology standpoint.
I, too, support SpaceX (as well as Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic, etc) but pretending that reddit is even anywhere near that list as far as being "unimaginably fantastic" is either depressingly credulous or else clumsy false optimism.
Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform.
More generally, in cars, computers, and most other sectors in technology, things are getting less and less accessible to casual interest or even moderately-dedicated hobbyists. Sometimes it's in the name of efficiency, sometimes it's in the name of corporate control, but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. It was just easier to learn the internals, then, when programs were programs, instead of HTTP APIs, and circuits were circuits, instead of closely-held intellectual properties. When was the last time anyone bought an appliance of any sort that had the wiring diagram pasted to the inside of the case?
Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun.
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One major innovation that has occurred over the past decade has been the distribution of technology that was only available to a lucky few.
Over the last decade tech has had a major impact on the daily lives of people like me. Today I can work from anywhere and communicate with everyone I know at any time of day, while 10 years ago I didn't have internet fast enough to watch a youtube video. iPhones weren't even sold in my state until 2008 (I might be off by a year in either direction).
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I worked at an Apple store for over a year as a "salesperson" (we called them Mac Specialists at the time). Let me input my two cents:
I was trained to do this. From day one of dedicated 8-hour training sessions, we're trained to find customers the right "solution" rather than get the most money. This requires using the APPLE technique (acronym, google it). The second P stands for "Present a solution for the customer to take home today." It was common knowledge at the time (4 years ago) that consumers were brainwashed to thinking faster/more is always better. But when we can save them hundreds of dollars, this isn't the case. There were many many times I talked someone out of a $2,000 MacBook Pro for a $1200 entry-level iMac with double the specs because after probing (the first "P") I learned they didn't need to be mobile. This was really, really common.
And note, this isn't about trying to convince people to spend less. Sometimes after probing, we learned they needed _more_. It is about the RIGHT solution.
To add to this: specialists don't earn commission. We weren't ranked based on financial sales numbers (there are other metrics, however). There is no incentive for specialists to sell more expensive or less expensive things. It is about the right thing.
So, this guy was just doing what he was trained to do. It is Apple store standard.
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I agree that Apple, as the case is at every brick-and-mortar store that I'm loyal to (B&H Photo has often talked me out of expensive purchases), has a great incentive to not oversell an unneeded product.
However, I think we need more data on recommendations before we can argue that the intent is entirely altruistic. As others have said, the low-end model is also the same model as the "Vanilla" build, i.e. the model that Apple has plenty of in stock...and a purchase in-store (with the possibility of upselling on other accessories) is more valuable than a purchase from the web. If it's the case that Apple sells a disproportionate amount of its Vanilla stock in-store, then is it coincidence that the Vanilla stock happens to be the perfect fit for so many customers? How many slightly-upgraded (but not in-stock) models are customers convinced to buy...because there has to be at least a few customers for whom the MBP is not ideal, but a slightly upgraded MBA is needed.
And if you want to be totally cynical, you could argue that Apple is ensuring that the customer returns in the nearer future by selling them a less future-proof model. Yes, customers have loyalty based on the reliability of the brand...but if the compassionate-sales-job is so effective, then that alone may be good enough of a memory for the customer to overlook that he/she is replacing a new laptop a year earlier than expected.
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This is exciting and all -- and much as I would love to see a serious competitor to Facebook, I still don't know how I would convince any of my non-techie friends that they should switch to this.
Circles? Actually I think that many people like the idea of their posts are being read by as many people as possible and not just the ones with similar interests. Although it looks like a big discussion group, the news feed is really a giant personality-defining display for vain people. I saw a programmer friend post annoyance over some Android API today and I suspect that this was more than just a spontaneous exclamation -- he was communicating that he is smart (to non-techies) and that he is "cutting edge" (to fellow programmers).
Privacy? I have the feeling that most really don't care very much. But ironically, I think the privacy-thing could actually work in facebook's favor. Here is why: I use fb a lot even though I don't like their privacy policies. I trust google more than facebook. Still, it bothers me when it says "logged in" in the google bar at the top because google watches my searches. When I am on facebook I behave like I am in public. I don't hope for the best and write secret stuff anywhere. But with all the google searches I make through a day, I am giving google a lot of very personal information that I would not like anyone to see. I would hate to see something that I was searching for somehow show up in a stream for my friends to see because I accidentally clicked a +1 button or similar.
Finally, there is the fact that even if I can export my graph from fb to g+, it's worthless until my friends do the same. And I just don't see that happening before they come up with some truly ground breaking feature that will allow me to get laid with any friend I choose by clicking on their picture :-)
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on a side note, the mobile app is live in android market. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.app...
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"To me that’s far more interesting than a tech company that’s hiring a bunch of people, just got their fourth round of financing for 12 million dollars, and they’re still losing money. That’s what everyone talks about as being exciting, but I think that’s an absolutely disgusting scenario when it comes to business."
Hilarious given that Jason Fried was on the board of directors of Groupon (his comments on this "disgusting scenario" here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617160).
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If anything, that comment just confirms his consistency.
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by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options.
I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.
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They can play the game though, too. Offer good discounts for onloading users; First year or two free, etc.. Hell, first 5 years free. What do they care if they get you used to their products, and then stay a client for 15 years after the 5 year trial?
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I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that I think he's being rude and arrogant.
Yes, he's in a position of power, and could turn up to his meetings wearing only a cunningly positioned silk scarf, and it would have no effect on the banks' willingness to earn lots of money from overseeing the Facebook IPO.
But when you're in a position of power you also have a responsibility not to be a dick. I realize dress codes etc are a bit different over there in the US, but at work here I normally dress pretty casually.
However, if someone's coming in for interview, I will wear a suit. As I know the candidate's going to turn up in a suit, and it will make them feel uncomfortable if I'm interviewing them in shorts and a t-shirt.
The person in the position of power has a moral obligation not to make everyone else feel uncomfortable or stupid. A great example of this is Queen Victoria drinking from her finger-bowl after one of her guests did - in order to save them from any embarassment or discomfort (http://www.bobssermons.com/sermons/archive/030831.htm).
And yes, bankers have acted arrogantly, and swanned around like they own the place too long. But its hardly a great example to set to just start doing the same yourself as soon as the balance of power tilts.
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But when you're in a position of power you also have a responsibility not to be a dick.
In general, that's a great idea and I agree. But Wall Street types mostly don't believe in that responsibility. So it's nice to see someone turn the tables on them.
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I don't respect this. I acknowledge that as it is their playground they can make this kind of judgement call, however I have always believed that freedom of speech also protects the freedom to hate and be a terrible person. There are countless texts, movies, and other 'creative works' which both condone and encourage violence against women, mass murder, torture, and other things I find abhorrent, but I don't get to ban any of them, and that is a good thing.
If your mission is focused on art I would encourage the kickstarter group to go back and re-read the history of banned works of art, and pay attention to which groups were pushing for those bans. I suspect you won't like the company you now keep.
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Kickstarter is simply selecting with whom they choose to enter into a contractual agreement. So long as they do so in a way which is not illegally discriminatory, they are within their right.
Likewise, the potential counterparties to an agreement with Kickstarter are free to choose not to enter into a contract with Kickstarter.
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While I no longer visit 4chan regularly, I love its extensive influence on human society.
* lolcats
* rage comics
* anonymous
* a lot of the 1% movement
* getting random people in jail because they think animal cruelty is funny
* making Moot TIME's person of the year and getting him a TED talk -> http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...
While most of what goes on there hinges somewhere between vile and horrible. 4chan has a lot of good in it, plenty of times there can be surprisingly good and high quality debates.
And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's profound. What other startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?
PS: 4chan has also invented a clever sorting algorithm - http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154
PPS: sometimes they even manage to count to 10. I think the record was 100.
edit: when I say meme, I mean "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena." ... I don't mean, "funny picture".
A lot of responders misunderstood this, I think.
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> PS: 4chan has also invented a clever sorting algorithm
Isn't this just relying on the scheduler which is probably a minheap?
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Actually I think Apple won here. Google was refusing to release a turn by turn direction update to their apps. By developing an Apple Map App with turn by turn, they kind of forced GooG to provide it on iOS platform. Also, it is very difficult for google to ignore ios users.
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As I recall, the reason that Apple chose not to include turn by turn in the official maps app was because they early on had high-profile partnerships with GPS makers who had expensive apps on the app store.
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Can anyone identify a few example passive income apps that a single developer has managed to support? I know of bingo card creator, but what are some others?
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There is a good blog devoted to passive income: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/
They also have a podcast, which I have listened to. It's not bad at all.
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Doesn't matter for me. I hardly get much deep sleep due to anatomical issues essentially blocking my airways. I can't afford the surgery (even though I have insurance) nor will my government contribute to it (even though it would increase my productivity multiple times over, meanwhile they throw trillions at universities offering useless degrees).
But yes, we have a culture that doesn't value sleep. I know of people who schedule emails to be sent in the middle of the night just so they appear to be working all the time. Construction can begin at 7AM in NYC, waking up hundreds of people in surrounding buildings. Gas leaf blowers emit one of the most stressful drone sounds out in the suburbs, causing stress to dozens of neighbors, so one man can clear a pavement of dead leaves quicker.
And just this morning over Manhattan, a helicopter hovered at 6AM for at least an hour. An hour, sitting there, hovering, for God knows what reason, awaking possibly thousands of people early, causing possibly millions in lost productivity today.
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Properly installed double glazing will block almost all sound, why not install them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulated_glazing
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Look, I really like the idea of the Chromebook, but I feel like Google's kinda moving in the wrong direction here.
What power user lives completely in the cloud?
* Coders obviously can't use this machine.
* Designers need photoshop or other non-web apps.
* Writers are not gonna migrate from Word to something like this, because either they were already using Google Docs and are fine with their crappy old netbook, or they like Word and are gonna stay with it, because writing is still just plain better in MS land.
* Video editors obviously need real apps
* Social media experts will just continue to use their iPad3 or Nexus 7/10
* Gamers can't go without DirectX seriously
What power users are they talking about?
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You have multiple good points. But I don't think that writing really requires Windows, that is a pretty extravagant claim. You can write with a typewriter or a text editor, it's not DTP. And I don't see how someone whose job is to operate sites like Twitter has any serious reason why they would need Windows per se.
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The whole thing reeks of NIH and some poor saps trying to save their butts by trying to be forcefully relevant.
Apple and Google already solved the UI problem - you don't need to have the damned ugly in-car UI anymore. Just stick decent hardware with Android Auto and CarPlay support and be done with it. Make decent looking apps for each platform to provide functionality outside of platform supported features.
I just don't understand why on earth would Ford need to have their own system with QNX, WiFi updates and Maps that are not free. What problem does it solve that is worth solving at the expense of reinventing the wheel and making users deal with yet another system?
Edit: One way Ford to justify it is to think of the non-SmartPhone, non-Apple, non-Google users. Though in terms of numbers, at least in the US this bunch is a tiny minority. Ford could give them a Moto G free with every Car for not having to pay for QNX licensing fees, maps and updates etc.! OR they could limit the QNX based independent system to lower end cars and make the higher end ones compatible with Android Auto and CarPlay.
There's also the question of longevity - what if in 2017 Apple and Google stop being compatible with the older version of Carplay/Auto compatible implementation Ford shipped in their 2014 car? What if users switched to non-Apple, non-Android phones? In that case it would make the in-car system useless for the user. So given people use cars for way longer than SmartPhones - I guess it makes some sense for Ford to have an independent system.
Regardless they should still rid themselves of the NIH and stick with Android based UI and not have their own based on QNX. That part hardly makes sense.
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How long is any particular flavor of Android going to be supported, vs QNX or some other unix-like RTOS?
Yes, you could contract for longer support, but how much current energy will remain with whoever's engineers you contracted to for supporting that older and older version?
Also, QNX is an RTOS. Maybe they actually needed an RTOS. How well does Android do as an RTOS?
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Like others in this thread, I naively assumed this was how Spotify already worked, and wondered why the payouts tended to be so low. Now it makes sense, and puts the numbers here (http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/) in context.
Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally and a hard sell for major labels to give up what is effectively a subsidy of popular music by indie fans. Let’s take the author’s thought experiment to its logical extreme:
Imagine “Terry” listened to just one obscure band for the entire month of February. $7 of his $10 subscription fee is going to artists, but let’s say he’s also the only fan of that band on Spotify. So that band has effectively zero percent of Spotify’s plays for the month, meaning that the band gets effectively zero percent of Spotify’s monthly revenue.
Terry thinks $7 went to his favorite band, but it actually got divided up among February’s top 40, with only a fraction of a fraction of a cent going to the band!
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Grooveshark supports Flattr which does exactly what this article proposes, if the user opts in.
http://help.grooveshark.com/customer/portal/articles/669416-...
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To get an idea of the raw power of the Oculus, check out this guy playing a horror game with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OrANjgeYe0#t=3m55s
(Kind of loud. But be sure not to miss his awesome reaction at 4m20s.)
I have the original devkit, and it's amazing. You can even interface it with Google Street View. There's nothing like typing in "Eiffel Tower," tilting your head back, and staring up in awe.
In fact, I'd say no one here has experienced Street View until you've seen it with an Occulus. It simply cannot be described how incredible it is to look around with your head instead of dragging your mouse!
EDIT: Okay, if you're unhappy with that particular video, then this one might be more to your liking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7fz__6B-4#t=15m30s
EDIT2: Wow, that Dreadhalls game is terrifying. You actually don't even need an Oculus to get the full effect, just headphones. https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=3... (Windows / Mac)
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I found this much more amusing, and it shows just how "real" Oculus VR can be to people, to the point where it physically affects their movements:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9po7_2hYaU
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I think the biggest problem with RSS is that you divorce the content from the context. Both from the publisher's standpoint, when their ads aren't being served or they decide to truncate their RSS feed so they can get ad revenue back from click-through, and from the reader's standpoint, where a common lamentation in moving to RSS is that you no longer get to read the original site regularly.
I solved the "Original site" problem by building the original site into NewsBlur -- http://www.newsblur.com.
The other big issue with RSS is that there are too many stories with a low signal-to-noise ratio. I built in filtering and highlighting into NewsBlur to address that concern. And it's a completely separate backend from Google Reader.
And now the common refrain is that people use social channels (Twitter/FB/Tumblr) to find links and news. So I just built that into NewsBlur with shared stories. You can sign up to be a part of the private beta at http://dev.newsblur.com. I'll send out invites to anybody who signs up.
Consuming the web through RSS can be problematic for both publishers and readers. I'm addressing the big three issues - context, relevancy, and surfacing - with a strong commitment to both readers and publishers. Let me know what else you would expect to see in your ideal reading setup, and chances are, RSS offers the foundation to build it.
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This is the first I'm hearing of Newsblur. I've contemplated building something similar to try and tackle some of the issues I raised in my comment in this thread. Looks like you're well on your way.
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I have a theory. I think that self-help books and articles actually make people miserable. I'm quite happy, and I manage to be happy without having a list of the 6 essential things I must do every day to stay happy.
In my personal life, the people most into self-help books and the like are the least happy. Correlation doesn't prove causation, so I can't blame the books and blogs -- but they certainly don't seem to be helpful either.
edit: I meant this as a light-hearted observation, not as a put-down to anyone who finds self-help helpful. :) I do think however that it's possible to become less happy by trying to over-optimize every moment of your life.
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What you do is as bad as standing next to a doctor's office and telling the people coming in, that you personally don't need to see the doctor to be healthy, so they must be doing something wrong, especially since they seem to come in more than once.
You're being a jerk, whether you meant to or not.
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I think we should stop using the word "poach" when describing these job changes. Use of this word suggests that we (technology workers) are the property of our employer, and that other employers are "stealing" that property away. I don't consider myself akin to a cow owned by my previous employer, stolen by my current one. I hope you don't either. My relationship with my employer is one of equals, freely and mutually entered into, and does not imply any ownership of my person.
Hate to be the PC police, but I personally feel offended by the use of this word, and I'm surprised that more people aren't. I'd like to propose using a more neutral phrase, like "hire away" to describe this practice, instead of "poach". I hope, upon reflection about their own role in the employer-employee relationship, others might come to this conclusion and stop using this word as well.
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I think the word is apt in the context of employer-employee or employer-employer relationships involving ownership claims.
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Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval.
In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you want a specific kind of cat lover, you’d probably want to target even more specifically (like people in a zip code near you).
We're continually working on making it easier for advertisers to target the right people. Earlier this year I worked on a piece of UI called "Audience Definition" (in our ad create flow), which helps give advertisers guidance on how to target ads more specifically. If you set your advertising too broadly (or too narrowly) -- you get a warning.
Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone. We don’t want advertisers to get fans that aren’t good for their business -- we want to help them drive real results, and we can’t do that with bad likes. We invest a lot in improving the systems to monitor and remove fake likes from the system, and also in helping advertisers set smart targeting to help them reach the people they care most about.
And to be honest, a lot of people like cats, and the picture on the page is pretty adorable. Lots of real people like lots of things. And LOTS of people like cats. :P
-Peter
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You just completely ignored the point he was trying to make with the fake likes. You're going to have to come up with a better bullshit defense.
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How prevalent is Tcl usage in the real world? You don't hear much about it, are there any new startups adopting it? Or is it only used in legacy projects at large companies?
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It's definitely not the 'in' thing these days, but it's a very solid, robust bit of code that still makes for a nice language for creating certain kinds of systems.
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As usual, the government is trying to meddle with companies. Read the letter, but make no mistake - the "kind" tone, especially when reminding how they did they best to get in touch, have meetings, help insuring compliance etc. is just a decoy. The truth is with "must immediately discontinue marketing the PGS".
The gov wants to decide what's best for the people. Should the people decide differently, using their wallets for example, this anomaly will be quashed.
This trend is especially strong in the medical field - gov approval required everywhere, then people wonder why medical things are so damn expansive.
I use 23andme and I'm happy with the information provided. I know it's not reliable - it's not a lab test anyone will use to base important decisions on, since it is not a full sequence of genes.
Yet, by being commercially available and easy to use, it is paving the way for commercial offers of full genome sequencing, which I damn well intend to use when they reach the $500 threshold.
However, gov actions like this one may very well make that impossible, making sure the only full genome sequencing offers there will be will be "FDA cleared" at a huge markup.
Suggestions to "medical" like companies - get out the gov eye. Move your business to Asia, the caribbean or wherever the gov will not get in your way like this. I want to keep using (and recommending) your products!
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I agree for the most part (I tend towards libertarian ideals if you've read any of my comments), but it's a difficult balance to maintain between allowing for medical innovation and preventing an objectivist distopia a la Bioshock. The government has a legitimate responsibility to ensure that medical technology is used and marketed responsibly, while at the same time giving companies some wiggle room to innovate.
Look how smallpox vaccine was discovered. Edward Jenner inoculated a young boy with cow pox, then attempted to infect him with smallpox a dozen times. Obviously we can't go around convincing young children to take infectious doses of deadly viruses. But we also cant send FDA thugs after every Silicon Valley startup pushing the boundaries of genomics research. So where do we draw the line?
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From the article comments:
"This is the bottom line. Whether or not the business model is out-dated or not has absolutely no effect on whether what Kim was doing was either immoral or illegal.
In the Governments eyes, what Kim was doing illegal. I can't just steal something from an Amish person's business because "their business model is out-dated." It doesn't matter.
Unless Kim can prove that MegaUpload was actively taking down downloads as requested my DMCA takedown requests, then he doesn't have much hope.
I'm a long time Torrent-Freak reader, and it hurts me to say this. Torrentfreak has become a breeding ground extremists dedicated to the theft of music and movies under the guise of a "moral" obligation/right to do them. File-Sharing, such as giving my friend a CD I burned, is not file sharing in the same sense as Torrenting something which is also being torrented by 400 other people. Think about if they DID buy that CD. That's $2,000 to the artist.
"
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But those 400 wouldn't buy a CD. Maybe 40 of them would. People consume a lot more content when it's free/unlimited. Proof of that is the average content consumption on Spotify vs iTunes, and why some artists complain that they make a lot less "per play" from Spotify than they would on iTunes, but they are looking at this in a very wrong way.
When people have access to a lot more content for the same price or lower, they will consume a lot more content. That doesn't mean they would be willing to pay for each piece of content as much as they would with the old model.
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"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth."
Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?
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Read "lights in the tunnel" by Martin Ford.
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Problem: Django has features. These features, horrors, reuse each other's capabilities.
Solution: Use something that has no features.
I'm not sure myself how sarcastic I'm being, to be honest. There's some truth in there too (or I wouldn't have posted this). But of course your microframework doesn't have any dependency issues. Rip all those things out of Django and it wouldn't have any dependencies either. Put them all into Flask and it will inevitably have to choose between either having the same problem, or leaving vast swathes of functionality on the table because of the refusal to let the components work together so they stay separate.
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You just posted what I had intended to say, only you said it better.
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> The main reason for Python 2 users to not switch to Python 3 is the lack of motivation/killer features. We need to therefore be more proactive in encouraging people to switch to Python 3 by (a) making sure that any new users are always directed to the latest Python 3 version, and (b) releasing, in the near future, new major versions of packages for Python 3 only, while maintaining long term bugfix support for Python 2 versions.
That's the evil right there. Read carefully what's written.
"The main reason for Python 2 users to not switch to Python 3 is the lack of motivation/killer features". Which says that users are familiar with what Python 3 has to offer but consider it not good enough. Why would you then jump to a conclusion that you have to be more proactive in directing people to switch to Python 3. Or even better, to stop adding features to what 81% of people use.
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just include it for default in ubuntu repositories and distributions
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I think you're right about society's role, but I see a much more pernicious tendency that I think damages boys and, eventually, men. Society teaches boys to bottle up their feelings. "Be a man" means be strong, and don't show emotion. Crying is a sign of weakness. And god forbid you talk about your emotions...that's a female thing.
But the thing is, those activities are what allow us to be vulnerable and what allow us to bond with others. The more you suppress those urges, the more you end up feeling alone. And loneliness is perhaps the most understandable cause of suicide I can think of.
We need to stop sending this message to young boys. It's okay to express your feelings. It's okay to be vulnerable. You don't have to simply grit your teeth and toughen up to endure whatever is bothering you.
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The problem is that it quite often isn't actually safe for men to be vulnerable, or share painful feelings yet.
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Or better, more solid relational options like Postgres...
Honestly, is there any reason to use MySQL over Postgres at this point? Or is it sort of six of one half a dozen of the other as long as the data model is decent?
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One minor reason I noticed recently is that you can't change Postgres' listen(2) backlog. This can have a significant impact on responsiveness.
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Notably, Play services is totally closed. So Google has abandoned the open source part of Android and is now developing the operating system as a completely closed product.
Edit: downvotes don't change the truth of the observation. Android is no longer meaningfully open, other than a years old core of basic functions. Just like OSX and Darwin.
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It is amazing how big of an ass you are. Make an assertion --> people provide counter-arguments and downvote you. You --> provide no explanation to your initial assertion and ass-ily mention that downvotes are meaningless.
Be a man and get into the argument if you really believe what you are saying. Otherwise keep blowing yourself to fool yourself into thinking that it is the same thing.
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Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance.
A more realistic view of C:
- C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The social necessity of implementing a decent C compiler may have stifled our architecture development (go look at the Burroughs systems, or the Connection Machine, and tell me how well C's virtual machine maps to them).
- C's standard library is a joke. Its shortcomings, particularly around string handling, have been responsible for an appalling fraction of the security holes of the past forty years.
- C's tooling is hardly something to brag about, especially compared to its contemporaries like Smalltalk and Lisp. Most of the debuggers people use with C are command line monstrosities. Compare them to the standard debuggers of, say, Squeak or Allegro Common Lisp.
- Claiming a fast build/debug/run cycle for C is sad. It seems fast because of the failure in this area of C++. Go look at Turbo Pascal if you want to know how to make the build/debug/run cycle fast.
- Claiming that C is callable from anywhere via its standard ABI equates all the world with Unix. Sadly, that's almost true today, though, but maybe it's because of the ubiquity of C rather than the other way around.
So, before writing about the glories of C, please go familiarize yourself with modern FORTRAN, ALGOL 60 and 68, Turbo Pascal's compiler and environment, a good Smalltalk like Squeak or Pharo, and the state of modern pipelines processor architectures.
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> The social necessity of implementing a decent C compiler may have stifled our architecture development
the idea that specific requirements of c had started driving architecture development blew my mind the first time i came across it. it is still a point that does not get discussed nearly enough at a popular level.
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I am personally not a fan of businesses giving money to charity. If they have spare cash, they should give it to their employees (who in a normal business are mainly responsible for the cash surplus) as a bonus - those employees can themselves donate their earning to a charity of their choice, rather than having the company inflict a charity on them.
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tptacek made the only refutation of your criticism that needs making later in the thread, so I'll copy it here as a direct response:
It is not a valid criticism to complain that money that the owners of the company are entitled to anyways is instead going to charity.
The pledge is the founders pledging equity. It is not "the company" giving money to charities, it's the founders themselves. Thus your point about corporate philanthropy (with which I disagree) is off-topic. The company isn't giving any money, anyway. This is individual donation, of the kind you claim to promote.
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Are there any common languages that allow you to do compile time metaprogramming in the language itself? I'd like to write little miniprograms which output source code and get evaluated at compile time. For example:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#COMPILETIME
int fib(int n) {
if(n < 2) return n;
return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);
}
int main() {
printf("int fib(int n) {\n");
printf(" switch(n) {\n");
for(int i=0; i < 30; i++) {
printf("case %d: return %d\n", i, fib(i));
}
printf("default: return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);\n");
printf("}\n}");
}
#ENDCOMPILETIME
and then at compile time that would get run and the source could generated would be:
int fib(int n) {
switch(n) {
case 0: return 0;
case 1: return 1;
case 2: return 1;
case 3: return 2;
case 4: return 3;
case 5: return 5;
case 6: return 8;
... etc up to i=29...
default: return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);
}
}
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Others have said LISP; if you're willing to manipulate ASTs then anything with macros will do (I love scala). If you want it to be more string-oriented then perhaps TCL (not that there's always a compile time per se)
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I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly. I completely disagree with him on essentially everything he writes about these topics.
Granted, he's an incredible programmer who contributed immensely to the development of our modern operating systems and the tools we use, and people here love to bring that up ("what - you DON'T KNOW WHO STALLMAN IS? SHAME? HOW DARE YOU CRITICISE HIM?")
Does this make his opinion on Facebook or privacy or freedom any more correct or valid? No.
Just like I wouldn't listen to Usain Bolt if he were trying to teach me the biological mechanisms behind doping, I can't see why Stallman's opinion is considered so correct in these matters.
IMO his ramblings about personal liberties and freedom being infringed by everything under the sun from Amazon to Google to Facebook are oversimplified and childish. The world isn't black and white and he obviously fails to understand the entire point behind many of these companies. When Facebook makes you use a real name it's not because theres some "Mr. Evil" at the top level plotting to steal your freedom, it's because it leads to a better working social network.
Just his description of AirBnB is ridiculous: "Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel)."
That's an immensely stupid argument, because any _viable_ company that wants to provide a service that a consumer other than Stallman himself will use will "infringe" on those two idiotic requirements.
TL;DR. Just because he did something amazing in one field/area, doesn't mean he is not spewing complete BS. For a similar example, see: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-jam...
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sorry, but your comment is trolling! You just claim RS isn't "right" and name others who aren't "right" either - in your unfounded oppionion.
RS lists examples of FB malpractice, abuse of power and in contrast to your trash talk he is linking proof to each claim.
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My good old trick to mitigate that is:
touch /-@
I also always do it in my home directory:
touch ~/-@
That's the first thing I do on a new host.
When accidentally running rm -f *, the command expands to -@ first, which is not a valid option and makes the command fail before doing any harm
rm: illegal option -- @
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
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alias rm='trash-put'
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Does everyone think this is good news?
I'm all for making the web faster/safer/better and all that. But I am worried about losing the web's "open by design" nature.
Much of what I've learned and am learning comes from me going to websites, opening the inspector and stepping through their code. It's educational. You learn things you may never read about in tutorials or books. And it's great because the author may have never intended for their code to be studied. But whether they like it or not, other people will learn from their code, and perhaps come up with [occasionally] better versions of it on their own.
This has helped the web development to evolve faster, and it's obvious how democratizing this "open-by-design" property is, and I think we should be concerned that it's being traded away for another (also essential) property.
Human beings cannot read asm.js code. And a bytecode format will be more or less the same. So, no matter how much faster and more flexible this format/standard is, it will still turn web apps into black boxes that no one can look into and learn from.
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As others have already stated the web today can be quite hard to read. WebAssembly doesn't make that situtation worse. WebAssembly, however, is and will continue to be well defined and openly documented. I am confident tooling will come that will help humans understand this format.
It might be time for a WebDwarf debug format, though, to help us. Source maps aren't quite robust enough.
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I think the bigger news here is the Chromebit. A $100 device that turns any monitor into a computer? Fascinating.
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One of those running XBMC would be awesome.
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No, of course I know that :( The problem was that the papers mentioned were either 1) not about the subject in question or 2) not cited enough to count. Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability?
None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. I didn't nominate them for deletion because of hard drive space. I nominated them because there was nothing to say about them barring a superficial overview of syntax.
I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page. I also never thought my 15 minutes of fame would be for nominating Nemerle for deletion :) Maybe I should have a Wikipedia article...?
But seriously. Anyone could have commented on the AfD. Anyone could have provided reliable sources. The only thing anyone did was bitch and moan. I didn't delete the articles -- the Wikipedia administrators did. Thumbs down, internet.
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Let's put them back on there and add a chapter titled 'controversy over Wikipedia deletion' - plenty of sources there :-)
(I am only half kidding in fact, I remember something like this happening a while ago but don't remember what the precise article was about)
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As someone who does JavaScript and HTML5 UIs for a living, I'm interested to understand more about the market of customers who pay for UI components or libraries.
Can anyone comment point me to an successful MVP in this area or tell me about customers who buy this stuff?
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My untested opinion is quality JavaScript libraries are something everyone needs, but few are willing to pay for because Open Source has taught the majority of web developers to demand everything be free all the time, and include free support, otherwise they won't touch it.
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OFF-TOPIC FOR ENGLISH-AS-SECOND-LANGUAGE:
For HN'ers who are still learning the finer points of English this title shows one of the many weird inconsistencies of the language.
Normally, when trying to say 'a thing' where the thing starts with a vowel we change the 'a' into 'an' so 'a axe' becomes 'an axe', 'a umbrella' becomes 'an umbrella'.
However this is a notable exception: when pronouncing 'user' there is an unwritten 'y' e.g. it is said 'yoozer', thus we wouldn't normally add another consonant here so it should be 'a user' not 'an user'. If you say it out loud you can hear it (and hopefully feel the extra tongue work that, traditionally, we try to avoid).
Another common exception is 'Hotel'. It takes 'an' rather than the expected 'a' as for some reason we drop the 'H'. For me it rolls better off the tongue with 'an' but this may purely be due to conditioning.
'Herb' is a difficult one as in the US it's pronounced 'erb' while in the UK it has a hard 'H'. Thus in the UK we use 'A herb' — I assume the US says 'an Herb' — correct me if I'm wrong.
It's nonsense like this that makes me pity you brave fellows who attempt to master our pidgin of a language!
Edit: change 'pigeon' to 'pidgin' :)
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This off-topic digression was made possible by the submitter's rewritten title: "PowerDNS on losing Cloudflare as an user".
Since the article's title is neither linkbait nor misleading, we reverted to it, or rather to a shortened version of it that fits the 80 char limit.
I'm also demoting this subthread as obviously off-topic. It makes little sense for a bikeshed discussion like this to occupy the top slot of the top discussion on HN, but these things get reliably upvoted.
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I was considering getting a Lenovo X1 Carbon to run linux on. I'd be installing a clean image, so no Superfish, but I still don't want to give money to Lenovo right now.
What alternative linux laptops are there? (aside from macs)
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I have an hp elitebook, works great with ubuntu
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If Moores law ends with 14nm, I wonder what we'll be doing 10 years from now.
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look back and laugh at how long we were able to just shrink transistors within the 1 plane, totally ignoring all depth? Remember, moore's law is about transistor count per square inch. I'm kind of shocked we don't use 3D chips, though I understand heat is an issue.
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I think science articles should be banned from HN. The userbase is clearly not educated well enough to deal with the issues. It only produces comments from armchair scientists conjuring up whatever pet theory they can explain away the results with. Comments like the classic freshman stats quote "correlation does not equal causation", or the standard response starting with "Judging from the abstract", or the always informative "I didn't read the paper, but what if they forgot to control for X?"
The only topic that gets worse comments than science on HN is gender issues.
Edit: and killed by mods. From +25 at the top to the bottom
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The only topic that gets worse comments than science on HN is gender issues.
I think you're unfair there. If you want to see a diversity of opinions, that's exactly what we have--the fact that you disagree with one side or the other is quite your own problem.
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For the most part, I think that Google's crackdown on pseudonyms and anonymity is actually a good thing. In most cases, anonymity online brings out the worst of us—just look at 4chan, littered with mobs of minions proliferating senseless hacking and child pornography[1]. You need but look at the news lately to see the damages of unchecked anonymity: "LulzSec this," "Anonymous that" and so on.
Enforcing real names is a good thing. It means people finally start to take responsibility for their actions, and there is accountability. People behave much better when the threat of embarrassment is in the balance.
I only see one legitimate reason for someone to be allowed a pseudonym: if they are more widely known by that name than their real name. This applies to authors, artists as well as web community members. The solution is easy: allow a nickname field in addition to your real name: [First] "[Nickname]" [Last]. Some already do it. Day9, for example, goes by Sean "day9" Plott online.
Lastly, I realize the hypocrisy of posting to Hacker News without my name visibly attached, so for the record, I am Kenneth Ballenegger from kswizz.com.
[1]: I have browsed thru /b/ many times, and the behavior of people there truly is the worst I've seen ever. I was in the middle of the SF Giants riots last year, and the people setting fire to cars and breaking windows seemed more civil by comparaison.
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Anonymity is not related to lack of forum moderation or escape from consequences. It just means a username is not recorded or displayed. BTW, posting underage obscenity, inflammatory statements, neo nazism etc gets the poster ip banned.
[1] /b/ is an isolated case which is often quoted. It is only one of 40-something forums on 4chan. Please, go back and browse /adv/ instead. Same anonymous people, supporting and helping each other with advice. Anonymity is not the issue, it is the community which people create through their actions and expectations of finding other like-minded individuals in the same virtual space.
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Edit: Boston police reporting at least 2 dead, 22 injured and 10 people losing limbs.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/15/explosion-reported-near...
Looks like there were two explosions.
Picture: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BH6fCgFCQAERWMB.jpg:large
More details http://www.wcvb.com/news/local/metro/Explosions-reported-nea...
"Witnesses said several victims lost limbs, and the area was being evacuated.
Many of the injured appeared to be spectators who gathered for the 117th running of the race."
Many more pictures(warning NSFW Gore):
http://deadspin.com/explosions-reported-at-the-boston-marath...
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The explosions is so timely it gives more reasons to oppose any US immigration reforms next week.
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I'll have to think of something extra for them too. Any ideas? Bear in mind that about half the users under 10 are also over 90, so whatever it is can't conflict with extra large fonts.
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<blink> and <marquee>.
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The kids knew sign language?
The kids went and bought stuff (incl laptops) at multiple stores?
And wasn't there a long line at Apple? How'd they make it to so many other stores?
The kids physically go to the store to buy school computers?
The kids are such good actors that they fooled the author & all other salespeople?
A teacher would actually allow kids to pretend that they're disabled?
No bulk discount or pre-arranged deal?
All other employees in the mall were mean to deaf kids?
Author doesn't remember which Apple product was debuting?
I hate to be "that guy" -- but this story is most likely fiction.
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I had the exact same reaction. This story has all the telltale signs of typical internet fiction trying to pass as a real story. Lack of details (no names of the school, teacher, etc., no date) combined with an implausible "this doesn't happen to anyone" story line is the biggest giveaway.
It's unfortunate that people are so eager to believe a happy story that they will suppress their bullshit detectors. The truth is important even when the lie is pleasant.
Glad to see this comment is at the top, disappointed to see the story voted so highly in the first place, though.
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I just bought a home, and just started a considerable renovation. I'm putting in new water pipes, new electrical wiring, etc. I thought of putting "smart" devices (i.e. switches, alarms, thermostats, etc.) given the "advantages" these promise.
After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money. Let's put aside the fact that these are considerable more expensive, and won't breakeven in years (some devices smart devices simply don't breakeven).
The main reason I decided not to have any of these installed was due to how cumbersome they are to operate. Each appliance/brand has their own app/portal, which does not connect to other brands, making it impossible to have an overview of your "smart home". Even more scary, some of these devices are operated by startups, god knows, if they will be alive next year. Good luck getting that app to work with iOS 10! It's a true headache, it's even a headache for contractors, who have no clue how these work. It's going to take some time (and education) to have an OS that makes a smart home smart...
and don't get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today.
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That's why you make sure they use one of the standards based protocols, then buy something like a smartthings hub which is open enough that you can write your own apps if the vendor decides to abandon theirs. You don't need the vendor to update their app, you just need them to operate with the hub, and then talk to the hub directly to control the device.
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When I had a lot more time, I would go into Yahoo chat and basically phish for pedophiles usernames/passwords. I can tell you that a "hehe" after anything will set the hook.
I could on average phish about an account a minute and I was never figured out. I only fell out of character once to warn an 18 year old kid, that talking to 14 year old girls sexually online wasn't the best use of his time. He freaked out and thought I was a cop!
It's relatively trivial to do this, most people will ignore minor slip ups provided you have the right context. I would set context by doing the following:
1. I would set my profile to the geolocation of the room I intended to work. I would then find a school and neighborhood to say I was from.
2. I would suggest I was home sick (and thus alone).
3. I would use an innocent, although, sexual name in my username like "booty"
4. I would use emoticons and "hehe" on probably 75% of all messages sent.
5. I would let them contact me first. If you contact them they get scared. If they contact you, they feel like they are in control.
For example, I could tell them the wrong name and many wouldn't notice, or if they did simply saying, "Oh, that's my middle name" is usually sufficient.
With all that said, anyone know of a way I could use my experiences and ability at social engineering online in a legit manner?
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Previous comment here related to multiple down votes I received. I jumped the gun and lesson learned.
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I'm the counterexample - I like letting capable people as loose as possible, and more often than I'd like this backfires. I'd appreciate some effective pointers on how to deal with this issue.
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This is correct, from my understanding cultivated sternness happens not by being that way by default but by being so lenient at several different moments in your past that you were strictly taken advantage of until you could accept it no longer and you had to be strict or mean.
Then the first time you decide to do so all every one ever sees is "Oh this guy is really harsh, what a jerk".
Such is life. I'd LOVE for pointers on this.
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I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment. I am featured in the latest Hacker Monthly ( print version of HN). So they asked me for a bio. I wrote something about how I learnt everything in college...am not a hacker...and that you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS. So they edited out all of the pro-college stuff and just said this guy is data scientist.
You don't figure out Dirichlet allocation and principal components and matrix regularization hacking away in your garage. This stuff isn't going to occur in your mind out of the blue. Its fairly complicated and even those of us who were systematically taught these things at school take years to internalise it. Don't downplay education. You are missing out on a treasure trove of knowledge humanity has collated over centuries, just to hack away and reinvent the wheel by yourself...well, good luck with that.
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You could spend years in college or you could just start trying to solve problems collaboratively that lend themselves to principal components analysis. You'll learn PCA much faster via the later approach.
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Caveat: this is an anecdote, and your mileage may vary, but I think it illustrates a point of contention in the "two cultures".
As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately, the philosophy course seemed deeply rooted in classical theories like dualism (which I think of as a rationalization for religious dogma), ignoring any and all modern advances in neuroscience. The final straw was the lecture unit on "artificial minds". There was a lot of uninformed speculation about AI, which really disappointed me. The professor (and textbooks) completely ignored beautiful advances like Godel's theorem, which would make a great foundation for philosophizing about axiomatic "minds". I tried to speak up about what AI really is, even tried bringing Russell/Norvig into class, but I don't know if it was the professor or the students who were more resistant to facts clogging up the debate.
Anyway, I have nothing against philosophers, and I believe that they are an important part of the intellectual framework of academia. However, in inter-disciplinary cases like this, I really hope that they get people that can successfully straddle both sides of the divide. Stephen Hawking's quote in his new book comes to mind. I don't remember the exact words, but it was along the lines that a lot (not all, naturally) of philosophers have closed themselves off to science and thus denied themselves access to the greatest intellectual developments of the 20th century.
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Paul Graham wrote an essay a few years ago about his very frustration with this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
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Happiness-wise South Korea ranks 41. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report).
Here in Switzerland (3rd in happiness) it is not unusual that people are employed only 3-4 days / week and still make enough money to live well. I don't know of any other country where this is commonplace.
(Full disclosure: If you're from the EU and looking for a tech-job over here, I'd be happy to help out).
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My ancestors are Swiss, and I have seriously considered moving back. :)
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Not at all! Today is the ten-year anniversary of my first real post, so I've been planning to have my last real post on 3/18 for a long time.
Thanks for all your attention over the years. I'll still be around, just not doing these essays any more.
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I have to say that this is kind of sad. I've just discovered your blog and the podcast and I feel like I'm going to miss your essays.
I'm not an engineer, but a designer who likes to program and your thoughts on software are useful even for me. Now that you are venturing into the realm of VCs and being a media company I would've love reading (or hearing in the SO podcast) your insights over that.
Anyway, good luck. And I guess I have ten years of essays to dive into.
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My experiences with Groupon mirror your own. Whenever my friends and I would show up to a business with a Groupon, we would be treated with bad attitudes, worse service and just general reluctance when the exact opposite should have been true. I mean, that is the entire point of Groupon right? To promote a business -to spread the word on the street about how great your restaurant/bowling alley/pub is.
Sadly, it has been my experience that a lot of the businesses that sign up for Groupon don't know what they are getting themselves into and as a result, take out their frustrations on customers when they can't break even for the month... which is, I think, a fatal flaw in the human psychology aspect of the business model. I'd rather just pay the sticker price and enjoy better service than have to deal with all that.
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This mirrors somewhat my experience many years ago with bartering. The places that were bartering were doing so because it was some low hanging fruit way to increase business and it was easy to to. And they were places that weren't particularly popular on their own (restaurants let's say) so they would do bartering to bring in customers on Monday nights but not allow it for obvious reasons on Saturday or Friday night. There is always a feeling on the part of small business owners that barter dollars are not real dollars (even though there is value in many cases) and barter business is not real business. A place that isn't doing that well to begin with (and once again I realize this is a generalization that is not true in many cases) is not going to have the best employees or the best attitudes because they are running short on cash and can't pay the best wages or have the best working conditions. So it's an entire ecosystem of mediocrity that you (in your case or me in my case) might end up experiencing.
So I guess in theory someone taking groupon (or barter dollars) should just be a regular business that is doing well wanting to increase business. But in actual cases it might more often (from my experience at least) be a marginal business that is trying to fix a situation with marketing that isn't exactly going to work as planned by bringing in groupon dollars or barter dollars (that will end up being used by the owner to go out to dinner with his wife (and yes that is what happened)). Valuable things (in the case of barter dollars) that a business needs are not typically available with barter dollars. What you get is a bunch of things like dining, travel or accountants or attorneys (and how many of those do you need).
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Every time his story comes up, there are people who respond with answers along the lines of "what can we do for him? can we find him assisted employment? can we raise money for him?" etc. While these comments are surely well intentioned, they end up being mostly condescending and out of place, as if talking about a completely helpless being.
He is openly racist. He can't find a job on his own, unless it's among other extreme racists. I'm extrapolating based on his online behavior. If his real-life behavior is completely different, then that's one thing, but that seems unlikely. And his online behavior is so racist that there's just no chance of him fitting into any average social situation.
His racism probably isn't his fault. It's probably a factor of his condition. But isn't that the definition of "needs help"? So shouldn't we try to ask whether he wants our help, and if so, find an open-minded employer who might listen to the situation and be willing to give Terry a shot?
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Racism is not a disease that requires or even invites our help. Sure, we're open to engage in civil discussion with racist people -- even try to gently persuade them of the error of their ways. But that's about it.
We live in a society where we're supposed to cherish and celebrate the fact that we're all unique (and broken) to a great degree. Not increasingly intervene to make us all the same.
So bring on the eccentric, racist, barely-functioning people. Bring on the people with poor and lavish backgrounds. Bring on the mean-spirited, the generous, the completely strange. The more true diversity -- diversity in outlook, worldview, and experience -- the better we all are. Rough edges and outliers are fine. We need 'em.
As far as finding a job, that's another discussion. As long as he is able to feed and house himself, through whatever means? Why do I care whether he has a job or not?
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>> Backpack is a company that arbitrages the cost of goods in different countries by using international travelers as a distribution network
I don't understand this one - with a world focused on security and import taxes, how does this work out?
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If backpack's team is crazy, many more are crazy as you check out our non exhaustive list http://blog.piggybee.com/2014/08/delivery-by-travelers.html
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I might just ditch Firefox because of this webpage. A fresh session of Ffx15 goes up to 1.5 GB memory usage, pushes everything into swap and brings my whole OS to a grinding halt until I kill it. In other words this link is basically a very effective DoS. In Chromium it works fine. Am I the only one having this problem?
(Edit: I have several Ffx addons running and no Chromium addons, so the comparison was unfair. Maybe I'll just ditch some of those addons...)
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Using the current Nightly, I go up to 1.1Gb of memory usage, and the system (an old mbp with 8gb ram) is now noticeably slowing.
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"Meteor 0.5.0, available today, allows you to write secure realtime client-server applications in pure JavaScript. It's the only system of its kind in the world."
That's an outright lie.
cf. http://opalang.org
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i think when they say "only system of it's kind" they mean they are solving all of these problems in different ways than all other systems... everything from rails to django to opa to derby to whatever.
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Isn't C-w kill-region in emacs? I recently came up against this problem too, but what else to change it to .. ?
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I'd suggest changing it to vim.
But no, seriously, screen is one of the more useful programs I've ever used. I have a screen session running on a server somewhere, and just log into it from whatever terminal I happen to be using at the time. It's pretty much the best.
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I don't like REST. Making a call to a server should be like calling a function anywhere else - you have your parameters and return value. In REST the parameters are spread over 3 places, the action, the url and the post parameters themselves. It's a much better design to combine all your parameters in one place and keep things simple, for example -
REST version: UPDATE /course/324234 { description: "This is a level 1 course" }
Improved version: POST /course/UpdateDescription { courseId: 324234, description: "This is a level 2 course" }
In this case POST is always used for api calls. Course is the namespace, UpdateDesciption is the method name, and parameters are kept all together as JSON.
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IMO the biggest benefit of REST vs RPC is reduced coupling between the client and the server. With RPC client needs to be explicitly aware of all methods and parameters that the server supports. With well designed REST interface this is not the case, you can have a generic client that does not need to be explicitly coded to support the specific service. REST interfaces are more difficult to design than RPC interfaces, but they are also more elegant and simpler. Roy Fielding (REST father) argues that elegant and simpler != easier.
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> 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck
A typical thermal power station has an efficiency below 50% for electricity generation, so the plant dissipates at least as much heat as it generates electrical power.
I wonder how you could get rid of 100MW of waste heat from a volume small enough to fit on a truck. That's a heat flux of more than a megawatt per square meter of surface area.
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Sounds like it could make a heck of a launch rocket.
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Dropping Mozilla because Eich is anti-gay-marriage made sense to me because Mozilla is the beacon of open source. Mozilla belongs to us in a very personal way, many of us have contributed code to Firefox personally.
But Condi Rice joining a completely private Dropbox as a board member - this is a non-issue. I'm as strongly anti-Bush administration and anti-war in general (especially the Iraq War - good grief) as anyone you could hope to meet, but this is ridiculously naive and short sighted to think that Condi being involved with Dropbox is something to get excited about. There are SO many people involved with private companies that are so much more partisan and support with no hesitation so many terrible things that if you want to go down this rabbit hole, you're going to be down there for a while my friends.
Edit: that Condi Rice is a "privacy" concern - ok. Fine. I think that's ridiculous but you know what - nothing is particularly ridiculous when it comes to privacy anymore. So I will accept that argument.
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Why do you think that it is "ridiculous" for people to be upset that a strong supporter of warrant-less wiretapping and PRISM is now a board member at the place they store their data?
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Damn... I thought it was another remote DoS (like the semi-recent hashmap degenerating that could be triggered by using parameters in URL like aa=xx, ab=yy, ac=zz, etc. or the floating-point 12-years old bug that people noticed could be remotely triggered on any Tomcat server) and that, once again, I'd have to apply a workaround on my Java servers.
Thankfully this one is only concerning Java applets.
Java applets where probably the stupidest thing ever. They surely did sck and did bring terribly bad reputation to Java : (
Don't know who's still using them.
Can Google Chrome even be made to run Java applets?
I know latest OS X don't even ship* with Java anymore...
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Java applets were great for graphics demos and teaching apps.
Flash and Unity, etc have taken over, but who's to say that they are more secure?
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I think it's a very strong point that moving script code off the main thread can help achieve smooth UIs. No more GC pauses, no more slowdowns if the JS engine hits a snag, etc.
I think this is actually possible on the web as well. Someone could write a UI framework which runs JS in a Worker, and sends messages to the main thread, on which there is HTML and minimal JS to receive the messages and handle them.
I'm surprised this hasn't been done, or has it and I just haven't heard about it?
If you're worried about the overhead of transferring lots of messages from the Worker to the main thread, I think it can be pretty fast actually. I did an experiment with proxying WebGL that way, which is a fairly high-traffic API, with nice results,
https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/07/22/webgl-in-web-wo...
For something rendering a UI, message passing overhead should be reasonable, especially if the framework is smart enough to only send over what changes (like React Native does).
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> I'm surprised this hasn't been done, or has it and I just haven't heard about it?
N2O framework might do that.
https://github.com/5HT/n2o
Book:
https://synrc.com/apps/n2o/doc/book.pdf
One pattern you can do is send events to the server, server renders data asynchronously (maintains state for each client in a lightweight process), then ships result back to client via websocket binary frames.
You also decide how much rendering happens where. Can even do whole HTML elements on the server if you want.
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I'd rather not. It introduces a pretty big conflict of interest (for example, Gruber would probably think twice before writing something negative about a former sponsor when he's on the record endorsing them) and blurs the line between advertising and editorial content. As mentioned in the article:
> the cost today ranges between $8,000 – $10,000 dollars per placement and you get to write your own post, essentially
Maybe this isn't a big deal for DF, but I can imagine this would lead to a total lack of trust for other independent journalists.
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PBS and NPR have to deal with this issue every year and their solution is pretty simple. They report it as they would want to, mention that X Co sponsored them in the past/present, and don't take their advertising dollars for that piece.
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It's great to read that Gabe has had such a positive experience with a Microsoft product team - but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's because he's a somebody. His posts on penny-arcade reach an enormous audience, and so of course they're going to do their damn best to make sure he sings the product's praises.
My experience is very different. I've been working for an enormous organisation for the last 4 years, and we're a tier 1 client of Microsoft's. I've had numerous occasions where I've tried to get anyone on the product team for my specialisation at Microsoft, that my company literally drops millions of pounds on to pay any attention to our requirements. And every time I've had that conversation, with the same requirements, it's like this is the first time they've heard it. They make great promises that they'll go away and think about it, and then nothing happens. And that's because I'm a nobody. I don't have a blog with a massive audience, and so they really don't give a sh!t.
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> They make great promises that they'll go away and think about it, and then nothing happens.
but this is EXACTLY how they treated Gabe. They didnt fix ANYTHING, they just showed up some prototypes and talked about fixing some stuff.
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Dear TV manufacturers,
No one want's your shitty software, it's not a competitive edge. No one has ever been impressed by the software their TV comes with, and for every person that found your software easy to use, there is a thousand who are still trying to figure out what that one button does on their remote. You wanna know what people are care about? Picture quality. That's it. That's always been the key. I don't know why you constantly fail to understand that.
Why can't you just make a dumb screen? You know desktop monitors? Like that. No sound, minimal software, but if you really want to get fancy, maybe a nice small remote to turn it on and off. Everything else, from sound to color profiles can, and have already for years now, be handled by external devices smarter than you.
If you make this, and you focus on picture quality instead of figuring out ways to confuse and exploit the customer, I promise you, I absolutely promise you, every AV nerd I know will buy one. And they will love it. And they will recommend it, and share it, and buy them for their loved ones. And blog about it. Tweet about it. Podcast, vlog and sing about it.
And you'll disrupt the old model. You will be the company that brings about the next revolution in television. You've been looking to do that for so long haven't you? And while you always secretly knew it wasn't IPTV or 3D that was going to start the next revolution, what you didn't know is how easy it would be to disrupt the current incumbents.
The customer is waiting, cash in hand.
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Dear LG,
I just returned a Nexus 5 because it had poor reception compared to other phones using the same SIM card.
I was going to buy a LG G2 but having just seen how you treat your TV customers as cattle, I won't touch anything from LG for the forseeable future.
In a nutshell, LG, you lose my money.
Regards,
Ex-Customer
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I don't think it's that strange. Let's compare the cost of the same MacBook Air in the US and France.
1. MacBook Air 11-inch : 64GB in US is $999.
2. MacBook Air 11-inch : 64GB in France is €1,049
3. $1 = €0.80 at the current time.
So you might think the MacBook Air should be €800 (999 * 0.80). So why it is €249 more? France levies 19.6% TVA (sales tax) on goods and the tax is included in the display price; the US levies sales taxes by state and these are not shown in the displayed prices (sales tax calculated based on destination).
So, what you need to compare is the pre-tax price on both machine. The pre-tax price of the MacBook Air in France is €877. Thus Apple is charging €77 more for the MacBook Air in France than in the US.
The issue is tax rates not Apple.
If you look at the UK you'll find that
4. MacBook Air 11-inch : 64GB is £849
5. $1 = £0.65
So, the £ equivalent of the $999 machine is £650. UK VAT (sales tax) is 20% and thus the pre-tax price of the machine is £707. So Apple is charging £57 more in the UK than in the US.
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Apple garnered £6 billion in sales in the UK in 2010, and paid only £10 million in tax.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...
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It's actually still possible to perform a specific type of legal insider trading.
Example: you are an executive at E Corp and the company will announce its acquisition in two months. You had previously set up planned trades to sell x number of shares each month before then. Because the acquisition is at a premium on the current price, you will make much less money if you go forward with your trades before the announcement. So, what do you do? You cancel the trades.
Was this insider trading according to the SEC? Surprisingly, no! Even though you're profiting from insider information, the SEC rules are such that for insider trading to occur, you actually need a trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loo...
Martha Stewart did exactly this before her company was acquired earlier this year:
http://i.imgur.com/ZikHCpP.jpg
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what about making 1000s of trades and cancelling the risky ones via insider info.
then the good trades weren't insider trades?
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Ubuntu runs hot on the MBP and will chew through your battery power even if you aren't running it in a VM. So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say? Too bad the default libraries are a pain to upgrade, trivial applications like "locate" and "wget" are missing and you'll have to manually configure stuff like page up/page down if you want the terminal to be useful.
I've had repeated issues compiling different "cross platform" applications on MacOS that compile painlessly under various Linux distributions and even Windows! So you end up being heavily reliant on "port" to install software instead of "./configure / make / make install". The last thing that drove me up the wall was a bizarre failure in statically-linking SQLite into a QT application. Every other platform worked. MacOS failed spectacularly.
If you want a Linux laptop, get a Linux laptop. I'm only on a Macbook for video editing and iPhone/iPad development. It is excellent for that and it is a beautiful machine in many ways (love the chassis), but it is not nearly as good a platform for developers as Ubuntu by any means.
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This is ultimately what led me to switch from OS X to Ubuntu. Been using Ubuntu full-time since May and its great! All those headaches are gone!
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Realize, of course, that "Free" usually means, "We'll let you use a lot for free, until you use too much, at which point we'll either (A) Rate Limit you, (B) Have a conversation about why you are abusing the Free Incoming ALlocation, (C) Charge you for your excessive incoming data (D) Suggest you take your business elsewhere.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it's inaccurate of Linode to suggest they can provide unlimited free inbound data.
The statement "This means you can upload an unlimited amount of data to your Linode without having to pay for any of the incoming data transfer." will not stand for all of their customers - the vast majority, yes, but don't create a business on the belief that you can do unlimited uploads into your linode VPS at full speed. You won't be able to in the long run.
I would have preferred they provide wildly generous inbound allocations (First 5 Terabytes inbound is free, or something like that) than make a claim they can't stand behind.
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How big is the pipe comming in to the server?
Because unless it is very large, chances are that it will not be able to banckrupt Linode.
On the other hand, they pretty much sealed the deal about where I will host my next project.
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When I see heavy web pages like this it makes me worry about the state of front-end web design.
According to YSlow, the site came to 3.5MB, which is quite large when compared to the average home page. The site took at least five seconds to load on my fast dev machine, which is far too long.
The nail in the coffin for me, however, is that this site does not work in older browser, namely IE7. I've worked with large clients and we've made sure that everything works in IE6 and above because they make the cost back from sales within hours. A large company like airbnb simply cannot afford to not support older browsers and I firmly believe that they'll lose a ton on money on their lack of support.
All in all, I'm disappointed.
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It crashed my browser (Opera) right after it loaded.
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i am worried about the popularity of git to be honest. i'm convinced it is popular rather than good.
"I've really tried to 'get into' mercurial's mindset several times now, but never could, whereas, IMO, git's model is simple and powerful. "
I find it hard to understand what this means, but this is typical of the arguments i see for using git. really the core concepts of DVCS are the same no matter what tool you use, and actually i consider the things that git does differently to hg to be demonstrably and measurably counter-intuitive and in some cases dangerous.
the biggest problem by far is that git is dangerous out of the box - it can destroy your work very easily or leave you in an unrecoverable state.
why can't i roll back a merge in one step if i didn't configure things to be able to do that? why does my branch disappear when i merge? how do the jenkins guys break their repo so casually and find themselves struggling to recover it?
i believe this is the robustness mentioned here: "The changeset graph is in some sense more "robust" in that it's just there and doesn't change on its own initiative"
mercurial seems loathe to alter history - which is pretty sane and common sensical seeming to me, git does it as part of how it is 'supposed to be used' which frankly sounds as mad as travelling back in time to shoot your grandfather. for these reasons - to me - using git is asking for trouble (it has caused me trouble and i switched to hg for precisely this reason).
i cant reasonably recommend git to anyone... which is a shame. other than that flaw it is really quite rich and powerful and has other advantages over mercurial - including (perhaps foremost) its enormous popularity.
EDIT: watch as this gets downvoted from hipster gut responses instead of thought :D
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> "I've really tried to 'get into' mercurial's mindset several times now, but never could, whereas, IMO, git's model is simple and powerful. "
>
> I find it hard to understand what this means
The git model can be, to a sufficient degree of completeness, be demonstrated with child toys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ffBJ4sVUb4
I can't even imagine how a similar demonstration would look like with Mercurial. It would probably involve having a bunch of such trees on the table, and super-glue instead of sticking things together.
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So, a thin client connecting to a virtual machine under some other company's control? No, thanks.
The fact is, computers are plenty fast now, and can handle 90% of peoples' usage patterns (browsing reddit, watching cat videos) with ease. The last thing I want is to have a remote desktop that lags out whenever there's a network hiccup.
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yo dawg I heard you need a computer to use your computer. Jokes aside, tablets/phones are carried with us everywhere and for on the go can accomplish most of what one may do when they are away from a dedicated pc. I can ssh into any one of my computers and do whatever is needed from my phone for the most part.
I'm really curious as to what the main use case would be ? I think this would make big strides in saving licensing costs if it were possible for certain cases where a shared computer may make sense.
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Looks spectacular, but why does it have to be a shooter?
I still hope that someone will eventually make a large scale world exploration game. Journey on steroids, basically.
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Sounds like a great idea, especially now that the idea of doing this for real is becoming a reality :)
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