HN user

DrewAllyn

74 karma
Posts2
Comments31
View on HN

If they can't do that, the mediator will quickly gain a reputation as being unreliable and to be avoided.

I'm not saying you are a libertarian, but this is an argument that libertarians use a lot. I don't buy it. Look at the companies, organizations, and people out there today who deserve bad reputations, but don't have them. Ask most random buyers what they think of PayPal, even, and they won't realize there is anything wrong with it. Hell, a surprising chunk of sellers don't even have a problem with PayPal.

I've found that the places that typically charge fees or have minimums in Canada are the tiny asian restaurants run by immigrants, and the small corner stores. Similar places in the US are the ones I find that take cash only a lot of the time.

Credit limits in Canada start out restrictive, yes, though I've generally found that if you ask for a higher limit, they will generally grant it. I've had good credit though. That probably makes a difference.

I've been lucky enough to never need to do a chargeback in Canada or the US. Maybe it's not easy in Canada.

I'm a Canadian who is temporarily in the US, and it seems so backwards to me. A signature? You mean writing on a piece of paper that probably never gets looks at allows someone to take money out of my bank account? Chip+Pin at least has a semblance of technical security.

And cash? Don't get me started. Cash can be physically lost. Cash can be stolen. When you pay with cash, you get given coins as well as the thing you are buying. Coins suck. To me, cash makes less and less sense these days. In Canada, I never carry any. In California there are enough cash only places (in 2014!) that I have some at most times.

I will probably not know it when I see it, but I look forward to the last day I touch cash.

People may want the occasional experience of being a cook, without being super dedicated. It's like getting the occasional riding lesson, but never buying a horse. Horse enthusiasts say that caring for the horse, raising it, selecting a saddle, etc. is an integral part of the experience, and they might be right, but that doesn't stop places from succeeding at offering riding lessons.

I also like to cook, but I buy all my vegetables online anyway. I find the online experience good enough, and the convenience totally worth it. I would probably be an infrequent user of this service.

Do you want to turn it into a product?

Probably, they don't want to turn it into a product. Probably, they just want to use it themselves. In this case it makes total sense to improve speed of development despite increasing unit cost.

For small transactions, it is safe to give the purchases after 0 confirmations. In order to pull off a double spend with 0 confirmations, you need to ensure that the store (or whoever processes payments for them) receives the "wrong" spend first, which requires a large enough fraction of the hash power of the network that just mining the usual way is more profitable.

But why not let the programmer opt in to manually ordering the field, and let the compiler do it the rest of the time? Similar to how the inline specifier works for functions, the compiler can inline things that it thinks will be faster if inlined, but if the programmer knows that can't be done, or must be done, they can say so.

False positives can have a ton of very negative effects. There is the monetary cost of further testing, which can be high depending on what is being tested for, and most importantly, telling a bunch of people that they have some particular disease when they don't is really bad. They may become more stressed, which can bring about a whole host of problems, people might start telling family members, and start getting their affairs in order, they might make different financial decisions based on these false results. And its actually very difficult to administer these tests in a way that doesn't results in way way more false positives than true positives.

It shouldn't because it doesn't? That seems like a circular argument. Home technology would evolve much faster if we invested more into it, and it we rebuilt homes every 30 years, we would be investing a lot more into building...

In theory that sounds great, but as we've seen with make, the end result is that the users of make just didn't upgrade. If that's not a desirable outcome for you, then it's on you to prevent that. No else is going to.

It might not be the best or most efficient way, and you might not be able to access all the features of your hardware but its certainly possible to write an OS kernal in pure C. We even did in our Operating Systems class. We did use exactly one GCC extension to C that made things a lot easier for us, but we could have used setjmp/longjmp instead if that extension hadn't been available. Since the machines that real Lisp OSes were made for were often designed as a Lisp target, I don't see any reason they couldn't be pure Lisp.

The people who complain about how things work are the people who make things better. If everyone was satisfied with jQuery and felt that JS development could stop after that then we wouldn't be where we are today, and if everybody thinks that where we are now is fine then tomorrow will look exactly the same as today. I, for one, want tomorow to look different (and better) regardless of how rosy it looks today, so I will continue complaining. When I can, I will also do something about my complaints, and I do submit patches when I can, but unfortunately thats not always feasible.

For QR codes generated on the fly on another screen, that is obviously impossible. For QR codes on posters, I think the effort required to actually go about making stickers far outweighs any potential gain from hijacking a QR code.

I'd imagine internationalized gamed would be a big one, although I'm not a games programmer or a lua user myself.

[dead] 13 years ago

There is a concept of 'normal' and if your sleep cycle is so far out of 'normal' that it interferes with your ability to do 'normal' things, then it is your responsibility to determine if that will be a problem before you accept the job, not the employers. Even in the case of trading that you brought up, if starting at 6:30 is normal in that field, then the employer shouldn't need to bring up in the offer that they expect you to start at 6:30. If the employee is moving to a new field or to a place that has a different corporate culture, it should be their responsibility to find out what 'normal' is.

[dead] 13 years ago

They agreed to attend meetings when they accepted the job offer. If you aren't capable of doing what is deemed necessary for your job (whether its actually necessary or not is a separate question) then maybe you are in the wrong job.