When did the parent post claim Gate's time is more valuable than others? I only saw that the parent comment claimed that to Gates himself his time is much more valuable than his money, but even so he spends all of his time pursuing good things. He was never compared to anyone else.
>In theory, fully homomorphic encryption could allow the best of both worlds above. I completely encrypt my data on my machine --- nobody else has the key --- then send it into the cloud where cloud companies can do operations for me like searching, sorting, filtering, etc, all without ever decrypting the data or learning what it is.
Can you explain this to me? I don't understand how you can search encrypted data.
>As a side note I love how 80% of the comments here are about the number of books available as a pissing contest versus any real discussion for the merits of the idea. For shame.
Real discussion for the merits? I think maybe all of our collective experiences so far might show that it was good in theory but bad in practice (although I really hope not).
Even today I'm disappointed with Nexflix's selection so I never bothered getting past the free trials.
I would hope that some day Amazon would require everyone that wants to sell a physical copy join in on the program but I can see how that might damage their profits. Maybe once a majority of books are on the program they can make it a requirement and everyone selling books will have to decide to suck it up and join or not make money through Amazon.
What I really don't understand is why anyone selling books wouldn't want to join the program. Is there any scenario at all where they would lose by being a part of it?
Considering the fact that in billions of years of evolution only a few meteors have caused mass extinctions I have always been confident that we will not just happen to live in a time when one of the big ones hit. Human civilization has only existed for a very short time and I think it really would be like winning the lottery to get hit by a civilization ending meteor even in the next 10,000 years (although I'm no expert in the topic, simply looking at Earth's past).
All that study seems to show is that schools with more students in the sports programs also produce better students. Isn't it possible that schools that strive for better athletes also tend to strive for better students and those two groups could be separate? I know out of the 20 engineers I went to college with, only one of them was in any sports and he did pretty poorly and barely graduated.
I want to agree with you because it sounds like a great story, the "American Dream", but there are so many kids who want so much and almost none achieve what this girl did. It's like praising a professional sports player for success but ignoring the fact that the other 99.9% of kids who played too many sports and didn't pay attention in school didn't get very far in life. It happened to work out in this situation but it is far from the normal case.
As he said in the post, what a customer asks for and what a customer actually wants can be very different (and by wants he means what they will actually act on). Apparently they didn't act on paying per ticket but they DID act on a single no hassle price.
I would agree its a bit unrealistic to be able to save half of what you make, unless you are in a relationship. I only make 52.4k a year in a very low cost of living area but once she starts making some money my living expenses will be so low I think it could easily happen.
I have had this problem once before, I was trying to buy a jewelry box for my girlfriend and the picture was way different from the actual item. I think this is mostly because Amazon is willing to put up anything any supplier wants to produce and those suppliers don't know what they are doing. In this situation at least it was easy enough to flag the images as wrong for that item and they were replaced with correct pictures in a few days.
Picking a department is always annoying especially when there are two or more it could easily be in, but overall I like the search options. For example I have wide feed so I always need 4E shoes and Amazon can filter out all of the shoes which don't have 4Es.
And I feel sorry for those people as I made sure to live within a 7 minute drive of work. I save thousands of dollars every year this way, as well as don't get nearly as much stress and have a lot more free time.
There definitely is something to getting a package to open all the time instead of going through a checkout line at the store, sometimes it feels like Christmas every week!
Same here. My girlfriend and I both buy basically all non food items from Amazon because we live in a small town and we are a 20 minute interstate drive away from any stores other than krogers. This has saved us a ton of money on gas and lots of time that easily makes up for the prime cost each year. The one time I have had to return a package was very easy as well. I can't imagine ever going back to spending gas money and my free time driving to a store because they might have what I want, usually at a higher price, without a rating system to see what others who bought the same thing have experienced.
I think it depends on the issue. When it comes to something like abortion or the death penalty I would rather see a politician hold their ground and never compromise on it. If it is about spending some money on health insurance then it should be compromised on.
How do I bring in code samples when all of the code I write has been for my previous employers and therefore is owned by them? Can't I be good at what I do without spending free time away from family and hobbies doing it even more?
I do the same! There is never anything on TV worth watching when you have the internet and lots of books, so that saves me $50/month at least, and I have a cheap android with a $30/month unlimited text and data with 100 minutes and that is more than enough to get by. The savings for me is more like $1200 a year, not $2000 though. My girlfriend and I have also started cooking instead of going out which saves a TON of money and living nearby where we work saves a lot on gas (at least $1000/year).
>But for a lot of these things you live in one world or the other, and never the twain shall meet - and rightly or wrongly, my impression is that more interesting software gets written in the "HN stack" than in the "MS stack", which seems a lot more enterprise-oriented.
Oh I agree! Writing HMIs for machinery can be very boring work, but someone has to do it, and since we pick the PCs for the machine we can simply choose windows and then we have no issues being bound to the Microsoft stack. I figure once I get more experience I can go find one of those dream jobs where I can use lots of different languages on a regular basis.
So many on HN treat those that write C# code as a sort of lower class of programmers and I have never understood why. I have been writing HMIs for machinery for over two years now in C# and the .NET framework with intellisense is a great tool for getting the job done. I guess there are some programmers that blunder through their career using only the most mainstream languages but I make sure to work towards learning new languages all the time so maybe I'm just a special case.
I really hate the attitude in the first few sentences. The "your life is better than others so be grateful" idea never really applies, its like saying "your neighbor gets beaten three times a day, so don't complain when you only get beat once!". Just because someone else's life is worse than yours doesn't mean your own is so great. Also, the person breaking their back on a farm might be doing that because they made choices in life which lead them to have a poor future.
As for your job being what you make it, I totally agree. There are lots of ways I have made my work life better recently even when I hate my job (for example I got a keurig) and until you do everything you can in that aspect you can't be sure you won't be happy. When you do all of these and THEN still aren't happy, find a new job.
I always go directly to the companies website to give information like this. You can't fall for the dancing bunny if you never ever respond through email.
I have been stressing this to everyone I work with who have kids somewhat younger than myself for over a year now (I'm 24) when I realized how many of my friends ruined their lives playing video games. I have played a lot of video games since I was 3 years old and I still do every day, but I made a conscience effort to not let it affect me too much (although my grades in college could have been better). My brother, on the other hand, has been so obsessed with World of Warcraft that at the age of 22 he works part time at a department store without even a high school degree because he stopped caring about anything else in his life. Another of my friends spent 4 years coasting in college never choosing a major until he finally dropped out and now has $28k in debt with nothing to show for it but his own World of Warcraft characters.
Playing video games is good for you in moderation (it is what led me into a career in software), but I always try to stress to parents how easy it is for kids to get lost in the feeling of achievement. My brother is always talking about how he has "the most gold of anyone on the server" as though he is set for life but even now when my parents and I constantly try to remind him that his life isn't that great he is so far gone that there is no hope. Why be successful in real life when it is so easy to be "successful" in a fantasy world?
I also loved Diablo 1 and 2, but did not like the gameplay of Diablo 3 at all as it felt too simplistic. The thing I was worried about, however, was seeing the auction house being successful and this kind of nonsense becoming mainstream. It is bad enough we have day 1 DLC, special preorder offers which give overpowered items, and special currencies which buy the best items. But being able to simply throw money at a game to be good at it? What is the point in playing the game? Players should have to play the game and be good at it to earn/unlock items and achievements and this experiment shows that players don't want to be able to rush themselves through it because it is the experience that counts, not the end goal.
As someone who grew up in the low income bracket of America I totally agree with your first point, it is amazing how easy it is to simply work hard and get somewhere like I have, yet people throw that chance away all the time. Your second point, however, I think is not so much about students thinking they can be whatever they want and more about not succeeding in their first choices. Most of the people I went to college with tried to be engineers or physics majors or something similar but didn't put enough effort in and instead of simply dropping out decided to change their majors to something easier because "you have to get a degree" is such a strong idea by our parents generation that most kids will accept the debt knowing they will never find a good job simply to not look like a failure. I'm not saying this is any better, but this in my experience seems to be the more common reason for so many people getting those degrees.
I have played Minecraft since back when it was still a browser game and played Terraria a lot as well from day one and honestly Terraria has been much better simply because it had a lot more content. By the way, the 1.2 update is almost out, he has been working on it for a while and kept pushing the date back but apparently has finished it and is just left with bug fixes now (multiplayer is finally fixed too so you wont need something like hamachi to play).