Nutella2

According to the article, one of the main advantages of Thiel's program is the contacts they make. So how different is it from the Ivy League?

And more important, a significant financial incentive to correct their own obviously inadequate procedures.

Amazon does this. If you look at a product and then come back later to buy it the price will be higher than it is if you bought it immediately after looking. If you want to get the best prices and look up things whenever you want, use one computer to do lookups and one to buy.

He's suing the charities along with Inman and IndiGoGo on his own behalf, not for FunnyJunk. He's acting as his own lawyer and demanding his legal fees be paid by the defendants. That's some amazing chutzpah.

We appreciate the uniformity of men's clothes sizes, too. One of the reasons women have to think about clothing and shop for clothing a lot more than men do is that we can't just look at the jeans in our closet, note the size, and walk out of any store with a pair of jeans labelled with that size and expect that they will be wearable. Women's sizes on labels have very little to do with the size of the clothes, even clothes from the same brand/store.

Fashions come and go more in women's clothing, too. My go-to dressup item is a navy blue blazer which is a standard that should be available all the time, right? No, some years standard blazers are out of style and cannot be found.

That's why all the work put in by the OP to find simple, classic styles is mysterious to many men. They can find simple, classic clothes that fit pretty much anywhere. That's a lifehack that's MUCH more difficult for a woman to achieve.

No, because Craigslist is not a broker. They're an advertiser. AirBnB is a broker because all the financial transactions go through them so their legal and tax responsibilities are different.

Most languages were proprietary and expensive through the 80s. When C took off it wiped out (or much reduced) the use of expensive proprietary languages. C was free so a lot of people learned it in university and wanted to use it on the job later because they were used to it. Since it was free it was easy to introduce to companies. It established a base and then when Java came out in 1995, also free but a higher level language than C, it took off like a rocket. Now the idea of expensive proprietary languages seems absurd.

Many tools have been developed that support C-family languages and most programmers depend on those tools. It's a huge job to move out of that and into an image-based language like Smalltalk because everything changes at once. That's a major reason why new frameworks like node.js or Rails can take off quickly now: They fit into most programmers' normal workflow so they are easy to adopt.

I worked in an image-based language in the 80s and it drove me crazy that I didn't have diff and grep. I was glad to leave that language when I moved on to a job that used a conventional text-file language. I'm sure I'm not the only one who found it awkward.

Agreed that tutorials on 'how to program' are and should be different from tutorials about a new language for experienced programmers, but one thing that both should do early on is a complete 'Hello World' example to show the minimum of code and compile/run steps required to run the simplest example. Too many tutorials skip that step and leave many of their readers unable to run the tutorial code at all because the authors haven't bothered to describe how to get a simple program to run. Those are obvious after you've done it once but completely unobvious to the people who read tutorials to learn a new language.

Affirmative action has and continues to be a problem, though. The vast majority of affirmative action has favored and continues to favor rich, connected white men. Famous example:

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'"

Quoted in http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/09/republicans-to-the-man...

I think I still have the box somewhere at home. I should donate it to the Computer History Museum.

Perhaps economics and game theory will in the long run but here and now the Department of Justice and the class-action plaintiffs are doing a good job taking down the cartel.

Whenever someone moans about not being able to hire when other companies can do it, the solution is obvious. Offer better jobs! Better working conditions, better projects, better benefits, better salaries. The fact that this did not occur to the author of the article is pretty sad.

What Stallman's for is free as in 'free speech'. Free as in 'free beer' is something completely different.

I keep thing separate by doing only Google things in Chrome and everything else in Firefox.

I will continue to shun Google+ because of the stories about people being shut out of it over the 'looks like a real name' rules because I have an Android phone and can't risk losing access to it.

In practice the two kinds of leave are treated differently even if they're from the same pool since vacation has to be requested in advance and sick time usually cannot be requested in advance. Unless you can schedule your accidents, injuries, and infections 4 weeks out.

It is extremely expensive in the US for small companies to provide health insurance for employees. Not as horribly expensive as individual insurance, but still outrageously high.

This is a great example of a launch page, not an MVP. It's not 'a version of a new product', it's marketing information about a proposed product.

One reason it's a good example of a launch page is that it tells you before you enter your address that the product isn't available yet. Many launch pages these days talk about the non-existent product, ask for your address, and only then tell you the product isn't available. They try to start a business by lying to their prospective customers. I'm glad to see that this one shows integrity by telling the truth about availability.

I just looked at the Amazon sale page and saw it had one review from the author saying that he is the copyright holder, then refreshed the page and the review was gone.

So it seems that Amazon is aware of the problem and is deliberately continuing to distribute his book while concealing any information about the copyright challenge.

"a business model threatening crisis that everyone should have seen coming"

Airbnb did see it coming and were careful to cover it in their TOS section 1.2 and 1.4. They have, however, been marketing their service very differently. They've now taken down the FAQ answer about security that had only a joke about grand pianos, but it shows that they were deliberately trying to obfuscate security issues in order to make more sales.

That makes it even more amazing that they had no PR or operational plan in place to deal with the inevitable criminal user.

No, it doesn't cover illegal transactions. In many places the Airbnb rentals are violations of local or state hotel laws. Even in places not covered by those kinds of laws, it's unlikely that insurance for owners and renters of a private home covers commercial services in the home. Of course everyone should check their own policy to be sure.

In many places the business facilitated by Airbnb is illegal. New York state, Chicago, and many other places have strict hotel laws that forbid these kinds of informal apartment rentals. It is extremely unlikely that any one can buy an insurance policy to cover an illegal transaction.

If you read the Airbnb TOS you'll see that they are well aware of this and are just hoping that naive customers don't read the whole thing.

I expect the original poster's losses will not be covered by home owner's insurance.

http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/illegal-hotels-bill-pa...

Yes, I got this e-mail today and was most impressed that it went on for so long without providing any information useful to me, the customer. None of the links in it go to anything that is useful to me, either. It's nice that they agonized over their business decision but now that they've made it surely the important thing is to tell us how exactly it is going to affect us and what we need to do. None of that is mentioned. Makes me feel like they really are not taking any customer concerns seriously.

Savvy businessmen know the difference between discounted nonrefundable tickets and full-fare refundable tickets.

I think he should leave this in his blog since it's very helpful information for prospective vendors and customers. They should know that he doesn't read contracts when he makes a purchase and simply assumes that the contract favors him. When the vendor does not honor the contract he imagined, he'll create a scene at the vendor's business demanding that their customer service agents honor the imaginary contract. When they don't do so he'll publish a screed in his company blog saying that it's all the vendors fault and their customer service reps are just so rude.

I'd say this is valuable information for anyone who's thinking of doing business with this guy.