Irregardless

After reading the first paragraph, I thought he was about to announce a new startup that helps individual travelers find each other to plan group excursions around the world.

I left disappointed :/

My reaction while reading most of this was "Why didn't any of you try harder to let someone know? Why didn't you email everyone? Why didn't you call all the people you emailed? Wasn't there ANYONE important who would listen!?"

After reading the whole thing, I was a little shocked to realize the answer is "No, there was no one important who would listen." The accountant who essentially documented the impending collapse of Citigroup in less than 2 pages was interviewed by the SEC and then never heard from them again. Then there's this guy:

> The congressional responses were, “Thank you for your letter, and thank you for your interest.” And, “We’ll look into this,” basically.

> I also wrote letters to just about every television journalist, and network journalist that I could get my hands on. Sent as e-mail with attachments and never received any response. [I wrote to] CNN and Fox News. ABC News, NBC News, CBS. My daughter was working at that time with one of the network affiliates in Phoenix, and she knew how upset I was about this whole thing. So she put me in contact with their consumer reporter, who does the consumer complaints and that sort of thing. He came out to my house and interviewed me for about 45 minutes. And I gave him documentation, and tried to as best I could to explain the situation to someone that was basically ignorant of the mortgage industry. Never heard another word. …

> During the mortgage meltdown, [Fox News host] Bill O’Reilly was having a temper tantrum on his show where he was going off about, “Why didn’t I hear about this? Why didn’t somebody tell me about all this that was going on?” And I almost threw my shoe through the television set. Ask my wife — I was screaming and yelling, “I did try to let you know.” ‘Cause he had been one of the ones that I had sent e-mails and attachments with all of this stuff. …

What the hell are these people supposed to do? Start posting their warnings all over the internet and hope it goes viral? What are the chances that would work vs. the chances they'd all be dismissed as conspiracy theorist crackpots?

It's easy to think "If I were in any of their positions, I would've gotten the entire country's attention", but it seems people at every level are determined to be ignorant as long as it's profitable.

  What would I recommend learning? 
      - C
      - Prolog
      - Erlang (I'm biased)
      - Smalltalk
      - Javascript
      - Hakell / ML /OCaml
      - LISP/Scheme/Clojure 
  A couple of years should be enough (PER LANGUAGE).

A 'beginner' should start by spending 14 years (minimum) learning 7 languages? I was starting to agree with him when he mentioned the paradox of choice that programming beginners face today, but that recommendation is beyond ignorant.

Becoming a veteran polyglot is not the only way to break into the programming field. This is exactly the type of elitist BS that we don't need -- scaring beginners away by giving the impression that they face an insurmountable cliff from the start.

Should we also mention that they need a minimum of 3 master's and 2 doctorate degrees? I don't think I've heard of a single successful programmer with anything less. Surely no one has ever dropped out of college and acquired vast amounts of wealth at an early age by programming.

His felony wouldn't be a big deal for employers who would potentially be sending him into people's homes on a regular basis?

I have to strongly disagree with that one.

If I remember correctly, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T have all settled class-action lawsuits regarding their locked down handsets after consumers claimed it was anti-competitive.

1 step forward, 10 steps backwards. How is this happening?

> Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on June 1, 1929, Dr. Billington was. . .

Oh, the guy who just decided unlocking smartphones should be illegal was born in 1929? Cool. That's how rotary phones used to work, right?

Good point, I'd only glanced at the chart.

Looks like the trees along the right have a half-life range of <10,000 to >1,000,000, even with nearly identical individual mass.

The title is pure linkbait, which is surprising for NPR. I guess that's the only way to get more clicks when the entire article boils down to "Large plants/animals live longer, on average (except humans)". Thanks, we hadn't already noticed.

A formula that "tells us when it's time to die" would imply some sort of prediction about individuals, which they admit is not the case at all. That would actually be interesting.

My point was that PACER documents are not inherently useful to the public -- edited to make that more clear.

Several people have already pointed out that there are also malicious uses for this data that could negatively impact normal people. Do you want all your neighbors and potential employers to know you've filed for bankruptcy? And would you want to give them completely open access to all court filings in your name?

I hate to rock the bandwagon, but this will accomplish nothing and it's pretty tactless. As rayiner has already pointed out, PACER is a source of court documents, not case law. 99% of the public would have no use for PACER documents even if they had completely free, open access. The people who truly have a legitimate need to access PACER documents are able to afford the fees, although that still doesn't mean the current fee structure is justified or fair.

Many lawyers who use PACER also rely heavily on the fact that it's updated almost immediately -- a project like this could never accomplish that, and could lead to malpractice if used in its place. For example, you can't sue people for certain things if they've declared bankruptcy, so you need a reliable, up-to-date way to verify they haven't (a common strategy is to wait until the last minute to file bankruptcy just to delay legal proceedings).

What's worse is that this project seems to be encouraging some kind of witch hunt:

> Now he wants to make "every U.S. Attorney and AUSA's full career as a prosecutor available to the public to examine in its entirety." So those are the links queued up in Project Asymptote.

That's how you want to honor Aaron? By using PACER and an army of volunteers to pursue someone's personal vendetta? I can't even begin to describe how tasteless that is; to take one of Aaron's projects and turn it into some kind of misguided inquisition, then call it a "poetic tribute to Aaron Swartz's memory".

If you really want to make court documents available to everyone for free, then do that. Don't use Aaron as an excuse to target US prosecutors.

For any other Americans who were wondering what bicycle stunts might have to do with this research:

> Noun. trick cyclist (plural trick cyclists) 1. (UK, slang) A psychiatrist

My ability to detect British humor through text must be pretty poor, because it took several re-reads and a Googling of "trick cyclist" to finally notice the sarcasm/satire.

> cant replicate it

That's how the co-founder of a customer service oriented company responds to a bug complaint? Three whole words? And then he has the nerve to "go nuclear" on the customer? Wow, talk about being rude and arrogant. Not only is your response unprofessional because of its poor grammar, you also didn't even give the cusomter the impression that their complaint matters to you.

How about something like, "Still haven't been able to replicate it yet, but we're trying"?

I wouldn't respond how the customer did, but I think you deserved it.

Well, at least he proved himself wrong by posting this link: "Yes, Money Does Buy Happines: 6 Lessons from the Newest Research on Income and Well-Being"

http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/yes-money-...

Step 1: Get the tools you need

Step 2: Buy a subscription to our tutorials

Got it.

True, but it's just one example of a bigger point. I.e. stop pinching pennies and aim for larger savings or gains instead.

Swizec posted the name of the guy who wrote the article I was thinking of, Ramit Sethi. Here's one where he talks a little about the issues with frugality: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/save-on-coffee/

Reminds me of a great article I saw posted on HN a few months ago. I wish I could remember where it was, but it basically said "You'll never get anywhere by skipping coffee and bringing lunch to work, focus on the big gains like increasing your salary by 30% instead".

The frugal lifestyle BS most likely does more harm than good for the average person. People shouldn't be sacrificing quality of life because they're worried about nickels and dimes, especially not in retirement.

> Shouldn't salary correspond to productivity in a free market, though?

Ideally, yes. In reality, that's rarely the case, which is why wealth distribution has become such an issue and incomes continue to rise for top earners while falling for those in the middle and bottom tiers.

Another typical story of hard work and persistence with the word "hack" thrown into the title for linkbait.

Congrats on making it to CES, but this is not news, nor is it relevant or interesting.

Sure, if you assume everyone just sits around twiddling their thumbs and going on vacations once they're retired. A large number of people end up continuing to be productive during retirement, but they choose "jobs" based on enjoyment rather than salary. With a free market and a global economy, I fail to see the potential dilemma large numbers of early retirees could cause.

Retirement != not working.

You can't control your friends' privacy settings. If they tag you in something and have their own privacy settings wide open, anyone will be able to see it.

> This is huge. Huge!

Quite the opposite, in my opinion. People don't like being bothered by strangers on Facebook. It's weird and creepy, especially so when it's a guy contacting a girl. This could be seen as a disincentive to share if you don't want your face popping up on search results for people outside your immediate network.

It also makes friends who are ignorant or careless about privacy more of a liability. If they tag you in something that's set to 'public', that thing could now be seen by far more strangers far more frequently. There's no good solution to this: You can harrass your friends about their tagging habits, waste countless hours un-tagging yourself every month, or delete your profile altogether.

I could see it being useful if you could give it commands. Something like: "Invite all friends who like Game of Thrones to my Game of Thrones Event on Sunday at 8PM". Then again, that could just increase the amount of noise on Facebook and drive people away even faster.

Great, now I have even more reason to stop tagging friends, like fewer things, tighten my privacy restrictions, and tell friends to stop tagging me or checking me in to places.

I have no interest in my personal info being used for their search engine, nor do I want friends of friends (i.e. strangers) to contact me just because I like the same TV show or went to their favorite restaurant.

You need a Google+ account to access it.

Then I suppose someone should tell Google their bullshit detector is broken.

And yet people from around the world fly here every day to have critical surgeries performed by the world's top doctors in state of the art facilities.

News Flash: The U.S. isn't a welfare state. To benefit from everything this country has to offer, you need to pay for it. Yes, it would be better if that didn't apply to healthcare, but there needs to be some method of exclusion when demand is high and supply is low. Would you rather wait 2 months just to see a specialist and another 2 months for treatment like patients in nationalized healthcare systems frequently do? (I'm looking at you, Canada and Europe)

> Iron, Calcium and Zinc are easy to obtain

When you're trying to grow plants in artificial environments on an inhospitable planet 40 million miles from earth? Oh, okay...

> Getting calories from meat is inefficient

You're taking the model of an industrialized first-world nation with 300 million+ people and applying it to a tiny space colony. Calling that apples vs. oranges would be an understatement.

If you disagree, tell me this: How many 30,000 lb. John Deere combines do you think will be sent with the first settlers?

Energy isn't the only consideration, you also have to think about nutrients. Animal proteins have all the amino acids we need, but the same can't be said of any plant. Essential nutrients like Iron, Calcium and Zinc are also difficult to come by for vegetarians. Vitamin B12 can't even be found naturally in non-meat foods, and it's necessary for our bodies to create red blood cells.

Getting the energey and nutrients and having a variety of foods to choose from (so you're not eating the same thing every meal of every day) is not an easy task for vegetarians. Hopefully we'll have supplements that can compensate for that in 15 years, but it's not exactly something you can rely on when planning something of this scale.

I doubt Musk would use his space colony as a means of enforcing his personal moral code, but I also suspect the diversity of plants required for a healthy vegetarian diet may be just as difficult to maintain on mars as livestock, so it would be very interesting to hear the full story.

In any case, there's no explanation of his motivation, and the statement is false according to this article that links to a (now deleted) tweet from Musk: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/10/good-news-elon-musk...

> all new platforms and technologies are first used by geeks

Including social networks? I highly doubt that.

> Also, I believe the past tense of +1 is +1'd

Which just proves my point, because "I plus oned that" is even more difficult to say and type. The word 'one' has no fluid way of being written or spoken as a verb. Plus one'd? +1-ed? Plus 1'd?

And yes, telling someone to 'like' something is far less awkard. Like is already a verb.

The cognitive dissonance is startling:

> Yes, of course Google could force most of us to use Google Plus begrudgingly tomorrow if it wanted to, but that’s playing with big, big, brand fire. And that’s not really who Google is at its core anyway.

> Want your business to appear on Google Maps, Google Local, et al., so that you can tell your prospective customers where you are, what you sell, and when you are open? Yup, you guessed it--you need a Google Plus Local Business page now.

The title "Plus-One This" is just another reminder of why G+ is such a failure: it's embarrassing to even talk about it. The name is clunky and awkward, as is trying to tell someone you +1'd something. Do you see what I just had to type? What the hell is that? And how do you say that out loud to someone? "Yeah, I plussed that article he posted". Wow, gross...

It's also got that whole "made for geeks" stygma because it's most frequently seen in use as blogging platform for techies. So not only are you labeling yourself a geek by talking about it, you're also forced to use awkward phrases like "I plussed that", or "Why didn't you plus my post?". No thanks.