pswilson14

Not OP, but UC San Diego taught both Vim and Emacs when I was there 5 years ago

Apple doesn't have much incentive to build new Mac minis and new Mac Pros.

Significant cultural difference makes for really interesting design differences in apps and websites! Americans (maybe Westerners more broadly) tend to prefer simple designs with plenty of white space, where Chinese users find a simple design to be annoying and difficult to use. They want the content all in one place - whitespace is wasted space.

I've read once that this might have something to do with slow internet in China, which leads to users wanting to reach content in as few clicks/page loads as possible, but I'm not sure how accurate that is.

I'd agree it's common knowledge, but I love reading detailed accounts of that kind of thing. Cheers anyway!

The idea of factions in Microsoft fighting for control is interesting to me from a historical perspective - do you have any books or sources I can read to get the full story?

You aren't including the time it takes to find your phone, pull it out, maybe unlock it, and THEN do the steps you describe.

That's friction, and that's where these frictionless interfaces step in.

He did, but the audience doesn't. Every show and movie that deals with this kind of stuff does it.

I see that Acre (a home construction company) is on there. Kind of odd for a gift giving site.

"Merry Christmas! I bought you a house!"

Most people only use 4-6 apps a day, or less. Users are spending more and more time in fewer apps. I reckon a good bit of that is the friction of installing new apps.

As a pale person who burns easily, I can assure you that the sun is much more dangerous than my cell phone.

Not OP, and I don't have an opinion on Go, but I think that's why he used the words "threatens to".

You can actually turn off retweets for individual users if you want to. I do that a lot.

"Massive" JS frameworks aren't the issue, not by themselves. AngularJS, for instance, is only 39.5kb. Bloat sneaks into web applications in other ways, but merely bringing in a framework isn't enough to add a noticeable load on a web page.

I hold the door open for everybody, and I've never been accused of sexism. I usually just get smiles from everyone. If a woman were to call me a sexist for holding the door open for her, I'd shrug it off. I'm not so fragile that I avoid speaking to anyone of the opposite gender just because I'm too thin-skinned to deal with the hypothetical situation where someone, somewhere, might think me a sexist.

Part of professional life is understanding how to communicate with others and how to know before you say something how it will be taken. Some people aren't good at this, and those people should work on it until they get better at it. I wouldn't blame anyone who makes an honest effort. But many more people in my experience simply aren't interested in learning how to communicate with people that are different from them. In these cases, this mentality of blaming "PC culture" is just allowing people to remain lazy and ignorant.

"...not navigating the PC minefield"

I see variations on this phrase all over the place, and I don't understand it. It really isn't that hard to avoid saying offensive and distasteful things to women (or anyone else, actually). It's almost always obvious that some statements are pretty offensive or at the very least make people uncomfortable, and it only takes the smallest modicum of common sense and tact to avoid saying those things. "You're too hot to be an engineer" is an awkward thing to say to a woman in an elevator, and if you're a woman in tech, you're bombarded with those statements weekly. It's not about being brittle. It's about letting people know when what they're saying is garbage. If anything, the men complaining about how they don't like having to think before speaking are brittle.

Speaking as a man that manages to "navigate the PC minefield" every day, it really isn't difficult. I promise.

I guess I was looking at some very out-of-date or possibly incorrect figures. My mistake. Updated my comment accordingly.

95% of YC-backed startups fail. A few go on to have decent success, and maybe 2 or 3 YC ventures actually went on to billion-dollar valuations (Dropbox and Airbnb). And that's considered a really good success rate.

Since we're talking here about what you call 'unicorns' (I hate that word), then we're talking about the odds of building a billion-dollar company. YC is made up of hundreds of incredibly talented entrepreneurs, and even then, it's pretty evident that building a billion dollar company is as much about luck and circumstance as it is about talent and determination.

EDIT: Correction - I was very wrong about YC stats, as it turns out [1]. My mistake. I stand by the original point, though. 8 billion-dollar companies out of ~940 YC companies demonstrate clearly that building a billion dollar company isn't easy, and takes a whole lot of luck.

[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats

I think you may be missing the point here.

And let's not get into the whole privacy thing. A 1 TB drive is, what, fifty bucks today -- and people would rather store their files in a datacenter across the ocean?

Yep. Fact is, HNers are much more concerned with privacy than your average consumer is. Most people care much more about convenience than privacy. I don't really know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it's a truth.

Well, of course they do. But they also have extremely strict rules about when you can access what user data and why. Employees can and do get fired for minor infractions of those rules.

Clickbait article?

Right, because no talented engineer has ever spoken anything less than perfect english.

My company's solution - small teams of 4 to 6 people, each cluster separated from everyone else by 5 foot walls with whiteboards on them. Our development style is pretty collaborative, so we benefit from having teammates nearby to bounce ideas off of, but it isn't as siloed off as an individual office. Helps with sound, too.

I also really dislike being alone in an office, though.

JavaScript is only unpredictable if written by a poor developer. It's just a language, and it is as powerful as you are. Weakly typed languages are not hacky - merely different.

Angular and jQuery ARE JavaScript.

For anyone interested, this strategy is called the [1]Martingale betting system. It works great if a gambler has infinite money, but no gamblers do. It can deplete your bankroll very quickly, due to the exponential nature of the betting system. Your expected profit from this game style is still slightly below zero, due to the relatively unlikely event of running out of bankroll before winning and losing a catastrophic amount of money.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

EDIT: Everyone seems to have beaten me to this answer... :p

I'm not certain about the exact color scheme, but my terminal looks pretty similar. I use a ZSH shell, and I use Oh My ZSH to manage my configuration. The ZSH theme I use is called "amuse", and it looks pretty similar to this one. Hope that helps!

For fans of This American Life, there was a really good show on a similar topic a couple weeks ago called Tarred and Feathered (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/522/t...).

As a brief summary, the story discusses a man who lives in a small town in the US. Like many small towns, residents frequent a website called Topics where gossip is shared anonymously in much the same way that it is on Yik Yak. One man, whose wife was killed by an ex-husband, ended up on the receiving end of a stream of particularly vicious rumors and lies spread through the site. This gossip, posted anonymously by a single person under multiple pseudonyms, ended up tarnishing his reputation and costing him his job. Keep in mind, this is a community of grown adults we're talking about.

A high school is similar in many ways to a small town in that everyone knows everyone else, which facilitates the spread of gossip. Add to that the lower maturity levels of children and teenagers, and it is easy to see how anonymous gossip can do some serious damage to a community.

Anyway, I can't recommend that episode of TAL enough, it's very relevant to this whole topic of anonymous online forums.

The company he works at is supposed to be a satire of Google, I believe.

Surely, you see a difference between a data company collecting data from users who willingly hand it to them, and a government that forces those companies to hand over private data against their will?