mynewwork

Ha, wow, the first time I've ever been genuinely taken aback by 'victim blaming' and of all possible places it comes from a story about a farmer and his tractor.

For starters, even the text of the article shows that he's reliant on the technician to replace the part, and it doesn't break down what of the 2 days is ordering the part vs scheduling the technician's time. It may be that even with the part in hand it's 2 days for an opening in the tech's schedule.

Further, while the article makes it sound as if there is one part repeatedly failing, the reality is that there are dozens of different sensors, and maybe only one fails per year. Your proposed solution might require the farmer to have thousands of dollars in spare parts sitting around at all times so he has replacements ready for all of them. Modern ag is already a capital intensive operation without forcing every family farm to double as a parts warehouse.

Flagging as a means of shutting down opinions people disagree with or to target groups they don't like is unfortunately very common. Sometimes even in organized fashion, where a group will urge its members to flag content from someone they oppose. There have also been instances where a group tried to invoke copyright infringement because someone said their name in a video.

It didn't have to go anywhere, and in many cases it didn't. Imagine you have a house (500k) and a car(20k) in 2007. Today you still have the same house (now valued at 400k) the same car (now valued at 10k). Your net worth has dropped substantially but the money didn't go anywhere, nobody else gained by the depreciation of your car or the market price correction of your house.

There is just no truth to what you're saying at all, and it's hard for me to even know how to respond. I've written out several responses that I've deleted because your worldview seems so far removed from reality that I'm not sure how to address it.

If the police show up during the day and knock on the front door with a warrant at the house of the NRA-supporting, libertarian, "statist" terminology using person you allude to, he's not going to respond violently. He'll call a lawyer while reading the warrant, then maybe call the media if he thinks it will help. Please stop "othering" people who hold different views than you. Taking it to such an absurd extreme as to suggest that if someone supports the full bill of rights then they need to be treated as dangerous and dealt with like terrorists is just ridiculous.

If someone plans to murder a police officer, they probably don't really care whether the gun they use to do it is legally owned or not.

Did you read the article? "As part of that, there was a new reservation system on certain nights of the week for a $27 permit...left the park open for drop-in play 96 percent of the time".

So 96% of the time, the park is open to everyone and 4% of the time the park can be reserved for a price which is equal to 2.5 hours of work at the local minimum wage.

One could easily argue that the people showing an unreasonable entitlement are the ones who think they should get to use the park in the tiny sliver of time where someone else has paid the city to reserve it for an organized game.

"We do the same for Facebook: Slotboom is able to intercept the login name and password I entered with relative ease."

Is Facebook not using encryption for login? That would surprise me. Or is the author either blatantly lying or intentionally being deceptive (ie, he clicked passed an invalid certificate warning or similar).

The SAT is in no way more "rigorous" than the ACT. The theoretical difference between ACT and SAT is a slight shift between "achievement" (ACT) vs "potential" (SAT) although the reality is that this is pretty minimal. That is to say, ACT was supposed to slightly more reflect what you had learned in HS, while SAT was slightly closer to something like an IQ test that changed less by HS education.

In practice, the only difference between ACT and SAT for decades has been geographic preference. East&West coast schools primarily use SAT and Midwest/Central schools primarily use ACT.

Something about that fact has always bothered me.

I can hire a team of lawyers and finance people to set up a complex system of subsidiaries so that my company only realizes profit in a specific way in a specific jurisdiction to avoid taxes, and as long as we've all followed the letter of the law, there doesn't seem to be any problem with the 'spirit of the law'. In fact, entire companies of accountants, lawyers and business consultants exist solely to help other companies follow the letter of the law while avoiding the spirit of it.

What makes it so that laws regarding anything "tech" get to be written and interpreted so vaguely and widely (from warrant canaries to copyright issues etc) when rules for everything from finance to oil spills are narrowly defined and interpreted?

I'm so tired of people who don't know what "free market" means making up their own definition and then saying it's a bad thing.

A "free market" is an economics term meaning a marketplace free from anti-competitive forces such as government subsidies, government price floors or ceilings, monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, non-compete agreements, etc.

If Google and Apple make an agreement about smartphone pricing, then we might not have a free market for cell phones. The government could then use regulations against such anti-competitive agreements to end the price fixing and restore a free market. In that scenario it was private enterprise causing a non-free market and regulation that made it a free market.

Regulations can help a free market (breaking up monopolies, preventing cartels and anti-competitive practices) or regulations can harm a free market (subsidizing production, preventing new entrants from entering the market). This notion of "free market vs regulations" is completely misunderstanding what a free market is and how the systems involved work.

Slight correction - it has access to your friends who have also used the facebook login for that site.

If you're the first person to login, the site will get an empty list. Only the set of your friends who have previously used the service, will show up if the service queries fb for your friends.

I recently talked at length with someone who had just finished one of these programs, and learned that they do an incredible amount of "teaching to the test". That is to say, they very specifically and intentionally designed the program to teach people the things that are typically discussed during interviews. The number one goal didn't seem to be teaching programming or software engineering so much as teaching you how to pass the interview to get a job as a developer.

That said, the person I spoke to had created a project similar in scope and quality to what I'd expect a CS undergrad to do as a class project, and clearly had the ability to get things done. I'd guess someone from such a program could be a good developer, but with big gaps in understanding beneath the surface ability to do Rails or Node.JS or whatever the bootcamp used. If you're only doing html/css/javascript then the coding school is probably a sufficient education to get a web dev/design job.

Funny, "labor law disaster tourism" could also explain how an American feels visiting Spain, France or Italy right now.

No system is perfect, but let's not pretend labor laws in the EU don't come with massive downsides (unemployment, difficulty to start or grow a business, purchasing power of discretionary income).

Here's a simple rule of thumb for understanding the situation in the US: if you have to be at work at a specific time and get scheduled breaks, you probably get paid overtime. If you're judged on your output and nobody notices when you go get coffee, eat lunch or start in the morning, you probably get paid a consistent salary regardless of exact hours you were in the office.

Ghostery blocks access to the content due to how they're doing a redirect.

I wonder if that's intentional, was one of the seven habits users who block trackers?

So were ICQ, AIM, MSN, Google Chat, texting, maybe FB messenger, WhatsApp.

I myself have migrated my primary messaging platform through half that list. Isn't there a tremendous risk snapchat users leave that platform the way users have moved from one messaging platform to another for years?

Adding to JasonCEC's comment, a semi-famous example of this phenomenon appeared in the blind taste-test challenge Pepsi marketed vs Coke.

Pepsi, being slightly sweeter, was preferred when participants took a single small sip for a taste test. However, when drinking an entire can, people were more likely to prefer the less-sweet Coke.

I recently talked at length with someone who had just finished one of these programs, and learned that they do an incredible amount of "teaching to the test". That is to say, they very specifically and intentionally designed the program to teach people the things that are typically discussed during interviews. The number one goal didn't seem to be teaching programming or software engineering so much as teaching you how to pass the interview to get a job as a developer.

That said, the person I spoke to had created a project on par with what I'd expect a CS undergrad to do, and clearly had the ability to get things done. I'd guess someone from such a program could be a good developer, but beware there will be big gaps in understanding beneath the surface ability to do Rails or Node.JS or whatever the bootcamp used.

This is fascinatingly baffling. I'd love to meet the author in person.

I don't know how much existing technology was used, but the feature set sounds quite expansive for 6 weeks of development. Seems like the guy must be a pretty good developer. Aside from the HN shilling, it sounds like the launch marketing was done well.

But then a few surprisingly bad bits: "we had a long heart to heart about 3 weeks after launch". 3 weeks? Just how quickly were they expecting success? Followed by "I assumed that the way I worked on projects (remotely over SSH or SFTP) was how everyone set up their projects" which suggests they did all this without even the slightest bit of market research.

I wish the team good luck in the future. It seems like some smart people made some strangely simple mistakes, but I bet they've got a great chance to be successful in the future.

There are multiple very large public companies in the US which boast that their CEO earns a salary of only $1. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary

Is there some difference between the type of corporation which makes it acceptable, or could the IRS potentially go after all of those individuals?

Which still sounds wrong to me. I'd expect "You're not allowed to breathe oxygen" or "You're not allowed to have oxygen".

So I guess it's "allowed" which is being used in a way I'm unfamiliar with.

I'm confused by the awkward grammar in the title. Is it intentional for humor (like xkcd's 'going to try science') or is that wording acceptable use in British dialects?

I'm parsing it as "You're not allowed <to use> science" or "You're not allowed <to know> science", but it's right on the line of believable that I could see that sentence being used genuinely in another dialect.

It absolutely can be both. The government-run solution could be poorly managed, unreliable and overly expensive while still scaring away the massive investment needed for someone else to compete. A private for-profit business could be completely undercut by the government service which can be incredibly unprofitable but continue to operate using tax dollars.

The current telecom oligopoly is bad, but a government-run monopoly is the one thing that could be worse. Now, public money going to build last-mile fiber which is then leased to competing ISPs to create a functioning marketplace (neither corporate oligopoly nor government monopoly, but a true economics-textbook 'free market') sounds like something that could be a good use of public money & power.

"saying that service staff deserve to be replaced by iPads if they demand a fair wage"

Terrible editorializing. Nothing in the original billboard suggests anyone "deserves" any particular treatment. But I suppose "Billboard warns employees that minimum wage legislation can't completely subvert market realities" doesn't make for as good of a viral hook.

A $15 minimum wage has many possible outcomes - 1)businesses close 2)prices increase 3)employees are laid off or 4)the business stays afloat with lower profits. It seems like wishful thinking to believe that only the fourth option will happen.

It's also frustrating that the narrative is that this is a class struggle, that the poor will benefit from higher minimum wage at the expense of the rich. Many low-income people will be much worse off in a world where entry level or unskilled jobs are hard to find. Taken to an extreme - how many people would be unemployed and unemployable if the minimum wage was set to $100/hr? Likewise, some number of people will be priced out of the employment market at $15/hr.

I don't know what ideal minimum wage is for SF, but I know that cliche class struggle narratives aren't helping address any of the real problems or complexities of the issue.

Oh come on. Referring to unproductive jobs as dead wood is a perfectly fine idiom.

Nobody is implying the people who hold those jobs have any personal failings or aren't capable of doing productive work, but the jobs themselves are not helping the business.

Standard advice is that accepting a counter-offer is usually a poor career choice because the employer sees you as a risk to leave and starts planning for your replacement rather than advancement.

Does anyone have insight into how Google handled employees who took the counter-offers to stay at Google?

Do you have any sort of citation or reference to back up your claim that a newspaper would be liable for a murder due to printing an address in the US? Wouldn't everyone be liable for everything if "someone used a fact you published to commit a crime" was the standard?

In the US, libel and slander laws can't be used to prevent people from saying things which they can prove to be true or factual.

Why are you being intentionally obtuse on this issue? I can't tell if you're trolling, shilling or just using poor rhetoric to support a genuine opinion.

Ending net neutrality is an opportunity for the very few large Telco companies to profit from their monopolistic position in the market at the expense of all customers.

Aside from the direct and immediate impact of a degraded experience for internet users, in the long term it also kills innovation by making it harder or impossible for new services to compete with existing companies that can afford to pay AT&T, TimeWarner, etc their extortion.

No, it's not just about video. Yes, your latency playing Starcraft will be effected (either blizzard pays your ISP to let you access their servers on the fast lane or your traffic gets deprioritized and you get more lag). No, you can't circumvent this by using a VPN and most importantly, you shouldn't have to even think about using a VPN to route around your own ISP intentionally degrading your connection to force payments from the services you're trying to access.

Dumb question: what is the status of the un-owned (un-vested) portion of shares in the first years?

Suppose two people, A and B, are equal partners each vesting towards 50% ownership in 3 years. After the first year, they both have vested ownership of 16.6%, what is the status of the other 66% of the company? Does the corporation as an entity own 66% of itself? Do they both really own 50% of the company, with an agreement that new shares will be created in a year and distributed to them? It seems to me like this scenario would mean they both own 50% of shares outstanding, and each year new shares are created which dilute their original holding's equity, but the shares then go to them (so they initially hold ie 10,000 shares of 20,000, then later hold 20,000 of 40,000).

I wasn't familiar with MonkeyParking until now and a quick glance at the top results on google doesn't make it exactly clear to me what the problem with their service is.

How are people hoarding public parking spaces? Surely it can't be cost effective for people to be repeatedly parking, selling the spot, then driving until they find a new one, but that's the only real abuse I could see of the system.

Can you explain what the problem is with the service for those of us not in SF and not familiar with MonkeyParking?

The studies you're referencing are very misleading. Many countries have much lower variation in income than the US. Imagine two normal curves, but one (the US) is very flattened and one (northern Europe) with a sharp peak.

In the US moving from X to X+Y might only push you a few percent higher in rank, there are still a lot of people in the fat tails on both sides, while the same change in Scandinavia might represent a substantial rank change.

Perhaps the problem isn't that it's hard to move up in the US, the problem is that in northern Europe it's impossible to escape the rat race.

I'm curious where you're from. In the US, the government being separate from religion is a pretty big deal so having taxes going to churches at all would seem strange.

The system in the US, for instance, isn't that non-believers fund churches with their tax money, it's that no one funds churches with tax money at all, members of the church donate directly to the church.

(Before someone comments, yes churches are often tax-exempt like other charities and non-profits, but that is different from actually receiving money from the government)