Where do you get that information? This Harvard review - http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and... suggests a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide, both nationally and internationally
Great work guys. Lob's a great service and I wish you all the best.
Certainly rings a lot of bells here at Pwinty as we both launched about the same time.
Our first ever order arrived sooner than expected and was fulfilled by me running down to the local photo store with a memory stick and them over to the post office. Then spent a few months with a commercial photo printer living in our dining room. We'd drape a blanket over it when guests came over for dinner, but it had a habit of whirring to life at the most inopportune times.
My wife tolerated this wonderfully for a good few months until we had a better alternative!
We're using GoCardless at Pwinty to bill our UK based merchants- works really smoothly, and much cheaper than collecting via debit card or PayPal as we have to do in the rest of the world.
Best of luck to them- especially after hearing they're rolling out to Europe as well- exciting times!
Unfortunately the working time directive for doctors in the UK is also averaged over a longer time period. So my wife has just come off an 80+ hour week of night shifts
How about 'press' ?
Maybe I'm missing something- but I can't see the valuations the companies are raising at anywhere (e.g. I can see that Company X wants to raise $490,000 - but how much of the business this is for)
Surely this is question number 1 when you want to invest in a company?
EDIT- Found it once I clicked the "Apply to invest" button". Maybe it should be a bit more up front though
Although TDD does give you more confidence to make changes to your code in future, I think you're overlooking a major benefit, which is allowing swifter code/test/debug cycles.
So rather than having to make a change, run up the app in my browser, and manually test that the latest bit of code is working, I can test individual functions just by running my unit tests.
Of course this doesn't obviate the need for browser based testing too - but it can reduce the amount of it you need.
TDD allows me to produce working code faster by helping me notice and fix my errors sooner. If you're an excellent coder, maybe you don't need this- but I certainly do!
interesting- in the UK, Volvo drivers tend to be thought of as left-wing, cautious, careful, slow. The brand is also associated with the left-leaning newspaper 'The Guardian' as well as museli and wearing socks with sandals!
But a DNS based failover is still going to take an hour or so to propagate right (given that a lot of browsers/proxies/DNS servers don't respect TTL very well at all)? And then you end up with a system with stale data, and the mess of trying to reconcile it when your other system comes back up.
I'd take an hour long Appengine outage once a year over that anytime!
I think the best place would be in an 'Ask HN' thread. I think the community felt your post was off topic- and that's why it was downvoted
Surely hosting yourself exposes you to just as much, if not more risk? Problem in the datacentre where you're co-lo'd, or one of your servers blows up?
I think people not trusting the cloud is similar to how people feel safer driving their cars then taking a plane. The stats say the plane's safer, but people prefer being in control. People like the idea of being in control of their servers, even if that means there's hundreds of extra things that can go wrong compared to a cloud provider.
We also get a lot more publicity when a cloud provider has an outage as LOTS of sites go down at once. Hardly anyone notices when service X who self-host go down for a few hours...
I think it is incredibly important for tech companies to not only give adequate amount of leave, but also to make sure it is taken. I know that after 6-9 months without any holiday my productivity drops, my motivation too, I can start to get bored etc. After a week's (or preferably two's) holiday, I'm raring to go again, and my output sky rockets.
I think the mandatory minimum in the UK is 20 days plus public holidays. However, less than 25 is too little in my opinion.
I'd take issue with psychology not being a science. Ok, 'pop-psychology' as evidenced in this article is not, but psychology itself definitely is (speaking as someone who did a very rigorous course in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge).
Just to name a few things that psychology covers (off the top of my head):
Speech and language development Child development (e.g. work of Piaget and many since) Models of mental illness (depression, autism, schizophrenia etc) Animal psychology- operant conditioning (Skinner and forward), language in other animals etc
There's too much to mention really, and its an extremely important and relevant field.
What other greenhouse gases does burning biofuel create?
For the same reason burning wood is green- as long as you are regrowing it.
So - if you're burning timber from a forest which is sustainably managed (so you're renewing wood at the same rate you're using it), then there is no net carbon released.
I'm not sure I agree. I'd say my name is private, I'd say my date of birth is more private, I'd say my medical conditions are more private still. There are clearly degrees of privacy.
Does it really make sense to hold my bank to the same standard as a real estate website? Sure they should all reach some minimum requirement (salted and hashed passwords), but I expect my bank to have far higher standards (e.g. two factor auth) than a a random site.
But I want to be able to make that decision. There's nothing stopping me from re-electing Zuck as CEO every year and letting him do his thing.
However, if he starts doing crazy things, or I think there's a better candidate for the job, I want to be able to vote to chuck him out. 1 share 1 vote!
They may say buy on bad news, but following that philosophy might have lead you to buy Enron and any number of companies where the bad news wasn't just temporary but a sign of real underlying problems.
You're also falling prey to anchoring bias. Because Facebook stock has previously been twice as much as it is now, it seems 'cheap', and a good deal.
What you really need to consider is the net value of Facebook as a company (by assessing its long term money making potential), and deciding whether its currently under or over valued.
I personally would never consider buying shares in FB because of the weird voting structure/rights. When I buy a piece of the company I want the corresponding votes to have my say in making sure that company is run in my best long term interests.
Couldn't you say the same about any company though? "Sure XYZ are doing badly, but they've got some really smart guys there, all they need to do is come up with a fresh idea for how to make money"
We can only really judge Facebook on what they are doing now, not a revolutionary new way of making money which no-one has yet thought up.
Hi- there isn't at the moment, so we'd love someone to come up with one (and I'm sure we can offer you some free credit on the service to say thanks for your effort!)
We haven't had anyone ask for it- but we're open to all sorts of ideas- feel free to drop me an email (info@pwinty.com) and we can discuss.
If anyone's looking for a photo printing API that's cheaper, ships photos internationally for a flat fee, and has already launched, check out Pwinty ( http://www.pwinty.com ).
We've very much a white label service, so you can add all your own branding etc, and we just do the boring stuff.
So- if you want to build the next PicPlum - think about using Pwinty to do it!
Oh- and we're completely bootstrapped!
Exactly the same with strawberries- chilled they lose a lot of the taste.
A lot of this can be worked around by going to farmer's markets/growing your own and picking traditional varieties which have been selected for taste over appearance.
Some more information about the tech behind the failings here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/rbs_natwest_what_wen...
TLDR: Looks like a failure in their CA-7 batch processing systems, which compounded so they weren't able to back out. Lots of the experts in RBS's implementation of CA-7 have been made redundant, and been replaced with offshore-expertise
I'm not going to question the proficiency of the offshore talent, however, I'm sure most on HN would agree that there's great value with legacy systems in not getting rid of the people who have been working on them for the last 20 years, and know all the idiosyncrasies and foibles.
Lots of the UK banks still use highly complex decades old main-frame based systems which interact with hundreds of other systems. It feels to me like the systems have got so complex, that its hard to see a way of replacing or rewriting and simplifying them.
So someone who's got ADHD and depression should effectively be stopped from using the internet in case they get bullied?
Asking you to fill out a survey is not harassment, neither is trying to tell you stuff. This person was the victim of a vicious and malicious campaign against her, and you really have the guts to compare it to someone trying to sell you stuff on the street?
Online bullying is real bullying. Would you say that if someone sends you a text message you should ignore it because it 'could be a bot'.
Yes- people should be educated that people online may not be who they say there are, or may not exist. But I think this is orthogonal to the proposal, which is that if someone harasses and bullies you online, you should be able to find out who they are and stop them. Just the same way you'd expect the police to help you out if someone started making abusive phone calls to your house.
You may be thick-skinned enough to cope with online harassment and bullying but not everyone is.
Here's an example of a 13 year old girl who commited suicide after being bullied online .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1569949/Girl-13-co...
Do you really think that is OK, and that the issue was in herself? I really hope you just haven't thought through what you said.
Just in the same way you can't harass someone in the street, there shouldn't be carte blanche for bullying just because it happens to be online.
Without seeming flippant, your number one priority should be to make sure it doesn't. The only reliable approach to this (at least with an immature product) is a 100% scripted demo that you have run through multiple times both in your office, and ideally where you are going to do the demo.
Ideally you also want to avoid using any sort of live/ad-hoc data if you can (you can trust that this is when an edge case is going to turn up!).
Script it, run through it multiple times and this will minimize the chances of anything unforseen going wrong. If you are not technical make sure you check off your demo with your technical guys so there's nothing they're uncomfortable with on there.
Make sure you're not demoing on either a dev or a live system if possible. You should have an environment just for demos which no-one else touches. Last thing you want is someone doing a release in the middle of it. Make sure the dev team know there's a demo planned in any case.
That said- inevitably things still go wrong, and most people accept this. Smile, and move on.
I think the key point is that no-one is in a better position to know your business than you are. You'll get lots of conflicting advice which you should listen to carefully. Ultimately you are responsible for the decisions you make.
And for those that are successful- when you are giving advice, remember that everyone's situation is different, and you are just one datapoint.
StackOverflow makes money off their jobs board: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/
whether it is enough to support the rest of the company- I'm not sure.
I think there's a big opportunity here on the gift front too- everyone gets socks from a relative at some point!
Let relatives buy subscriptions (the socky gift that keeps giving).