corwinstephen

Precisely. I'm not entirely sure how deep your site goes, but assuming it's like the actual stock market, one could potentially game the system by creating two separate accounts and making a series of investments with one, and by shorting those exact same investments on the other; One of the accounts is guaranteed to go up.

I'm jealous of all the people that can come up with ideas so incredibly trivial that they're awesome and everyone buys into them.

I consider myself to be a relatively experienced developer, and even still, reading this blog post really lifted my spirits.

I write code for a living, and even though no one has ever told me they weren't happy with my performance, the constant influx of new techniques, languages, algorithms, and systems in the programming world have always made me feel like an inferior developer. I constantly feel like there's so much to learn, that I can't possibly be good, as if the only worthy developers in the world are the top 500 geniuses that work for Google and Facebook and are somehow capable of magically knowing everything.

Knowing that this isn't the case, and that companies like Twilio are finding value in employees with skill sets much narrower than mine, is a good feeling. It's also really nice to know that they're open minded to the point that they respect this guy's talents as a developer just as much as they did as a customer service rep. #thehighroad

Because they have no control over the content on that site. The owner could easily throw up some raunchy content, which would make for a weird experience when it comes to discussions like this one.

I actually just recently saw that movie. To be honest, I couldn't help but wonder the entire time whether he really was the happiest person he could be while making sushi, or if he just couldn't bring himself to let it go. The scene where he visits his friends for example, is in my opinion, the happiest he appears throughout the entire film.

Obviously his lifestyle is one that I won't ever understand. I suppose some people's minds just work differently. But then again, studies show that the happiest people are those that have warm networks of friends and family that they speak to regularly, and I can't imagine that making money for your family (at least past a certain point) is better than simply spending more time with them.

I agree. Just because your definition of travel is apparently centered around outdoorsy activities that take you far away from civilization doesn't mean that there aren't other reasons to travel that are just as viable, but not nearly as desolate. I for example, prefer to spend my time in big cities. That just happens to be what I like. If I were to take a trip to Tokyo, I would want to spend a lot of my time eating at Japanese restaurants, meeting new people and hanging out at Japanese bars, and just experiencing what life is like for the average person who lives there. And honestly, for that sort of travel, this service could be really cool.

On another level, it's even useful for finding the parts of a city you've never seen before. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life, and have begun to find it very boring, but perhaps if I were to unlock parts of the city that I didn't realize I'd never been to before, I could make some interesting new discoveries and keep myself entertained without even having to travel!

I can't see how even the pay could justify living such a miserable life. I feel like the life of a miserably rich banker scales perfectly down to a simple conversation I had with a taylor in Hong Kong last month.

He mentioned to me that it had been a long day for him, so I asked him what long was. He told me he'd been working for 17 hour, and that he's used to working only 15. Aghast, I said wow! That's a lot of work, but at least it's Friday. He told me it didn't matter, because he worked 7 days a week. He also mentioned that the last day off he'd taken had been over a month prior, and that it was because he was sick.

I remember thinking, what's the point of living? This man works all day every day so that he can live, but he's only living to work. And honestly, that's exactly what I see in the bankers. Yeah, you make an enormous amount of money, but your job makes you so miserable that you don't even enjoy having it, so what's the point?

Koreans should only be allowed to use .azn archives.

True, but just because it's not very meaningful doesn't mean people won't use it. We don't live in an ideal world. If we did, nobody would buy prewritten greeting cards or flowers, which are essentially the same thing as a Facebook gift: Something that shows you care without requiring much thought.

Considering the near unbelievable user idiocy I deal with every day as a developer for a startup, I'm confident that the complaints are entirely false alarms by people who are unable to wrap their head around the idea that Facebook used to be very different than it is today, and that the way they used it years ago is likely to have reflected that difference.

In my own experience, even with things as simple as logging into our site, I've had users file angry complaints and bug reports INSISTING that I deleted their account, because they KNOW they're using the right email, and they've tried every single password they've ever used and can't seem to get on the site. Ten minutes later I'll get another email saying "Nevermind, I forgot logged in with Facebook."

Point is, users frequently don't know what they're talking about.

First off, a close friend of mine did this a few years back. He called it hoboreview.com. He ended up shutting it down to to lack of public interest.

Secondly, the title of this post is "shocked by San Francisco" and yet the article fails to explain what was so shocking. Was it the fact that the hobo gave you a weird look? Or that there were hobos at all? I can't imagine Miami being a whole lot different.

And finally, he needs our help with what? Seems to me he's so excited about starting some sort of online collaboration / movement that he forgot to take the time to figure out what the movement actually is.

Plus, the dude is in San Francisco for a week and decides to spend his time at an ING Coffee shop? That's in poor taste.

It's funny, as seemingly unrelated as it is, the one thing that comes to mind after reading about how GitHub sees value in flying people to San Francisco from around the globe despite the cost is that the essence of that practice is the same as what we Americans SHOULD be seeing in our education system: People willing to invest enormous sums of money up front with the intention of producing graduates who, in turn, will generate much larger sums of money for the economy. Too bad all American politicians are too short sighted to see it.

Interesting story, though I think the title of this post could have been a lot more appropriate if he had stricken the word "how" and gone simply with "An investor who turned me down ended up sleeping on my couch." There's not much how here. Though I do agree, being kind and building karma is never a bad thing.

I'm sure Mark Cuban understands value investing. That's not the issue here. He's not saying you can't still make bets on the future of a company. What he's saying is that because of the high frequency trading, it has become largely more DIFFICULT to be a value investor due to the fact that investing in a company no longer depends solely on said company's success.

When high frequency trading is allowed, the price of a stock becomes influenced by the simple act of trading itself, and while it is true (as @btilly mentioned) that this enables other methods of trading like benchmarking, it discourages investing purely for the sake of supporting the company's growth. THAT was Mark's point. Wall Street's purpose is to INVEST in companies, not to microtrade the crap out of their shares until the stock price is so volatile you'd think the CEO was schizophrenic.

True software sucks, but that doesn't necessarily imply that it used to be any better. I think software has always sucked. Yeah, there are more problems now, but we're also able to do quite a lot more with computers than we used to be able to as well. I would say that over time, the level of effort out in by developers has stayed the same.

I'm totally going to use this for way more bad than good.

Fair enough. I guess I just don't know much about Godaddy outside of their Internet services. Have any good reading material on the subject?

You essentially countered your own argument there. The fact that you've admitted you understand that the immense profits they made last quarter were a direct result of their closed policy is evidence that deep down, even you don't truly believe they should be more open.

I think a more correct title would be, "Wouldn't it be nice if Apple was more open?"

Agreed. I wholeheartedly agree with their fundamental idea, but going the VC route doesn't seem like a good way to do it. By the time you've built up all the connections and steam you need to develop a budding company that a VC would be interested in investing in, your roots are going to be too strong wherever you currently are to be able to move to Canada. I'll be surprised if they get anything more than a handful of companies to relocate.

Also, any time you involve money people, you set the stage for things to get crooked and shady. I can already hear the narrator from some "Inside Job" type documentary on corruption in Canada.

"However, the Canadians didn't account for one major loophole. In 2012, they passed a law allowing startups with venture capital to emigrate into the country, but what they didn't consider was: ___________"

What I find most interesting here is how so much in depth analysis is coming out of one, simple statement with a very obvious meaning. You know how people used to try to analyze the life out of Beatles songs looking for all kinds of hidden meaning, until one day Paul McCartney straight up said, "There is no meaning other than what's on the surface level."? I'm getting that same vibe here.

Mark said they bet too heavily on HTML 5. Did that mean the people who wrote the HTML 5 standards failed them? Or that Google and Apple failed them for writing code that couldn't sufficiently run HTML 5 apps? Or that they overestimated their engineers' abilities to write good HTML 5 apps? Or that they thought HTML 5 was going to be something that it isn't?

Honestly, I don't think he meant any of those things. There is no hidden meaning here: They used HTML 5. It didn't work they way they'd hoped. Now they're using something else. That's it. End of story.

Props to the guy for finding something that wasn't good and fixing it. That's what a CEO is for.

I'm all for anonymous activism, but come on. Do they even have a reason for this attack, or was it purely to be able to gloat in having taken down half the internet?

I think at least part of this phenomenon can be attributed to what I call the StackOverflow effect, that being point-based incentives. People on SO answer questions much of the time because they believe their answer will earn them karma (or whatever it's called on SO). In fact, I'd be lying if I said Hacker News karma didn't have at least a little influence on my decision to actually take the time to write this comment.

Because of the StackOverflow Effect, people will choose to answer even the worst questions as if they're fair play, simply because they have an answer they believe will earn them a couple points. If points were not involved, I'm willing to bet a lot more people would get told off for their poor quality questions, and a lot less people would continue to post them.

I can see why this guy got the job: he has the "I don't think the way you do" mentality that is so typical of silicone valley employees, I'm sure they probably loved him for it in his interview. That said, I think this guy is a misfiring canon. He's getting mad at all the wrong people for what seems to be his own dissatisfaction with not being in charge, ad he's getting mad at them for doing most of the things that have caused such dysfunction in traditional companies. Is like this guy's ideal work environment is an Innitech next to Michael Bolton and Samir.

In my experience, companies that fight to boost their stock prices in the short term end up making them plummet further in the long run. It's the companies that have the restraint to accept a loss in order to build toward a bigger reward that end up changing the world.

Look at Apple. They used to spend so much money on R and D that their stock prices were miserable. But shit, they got the iPod out of it, and look where it took them. If they had instead tried for short term profit, they probably would have ended up putting out another garbage iMac. Or a Zune.

And finally, you can't be so shortsighted as to overlook the impact of encouraging creativity an freedom. If you force beaurocracy on your employees you might end up getting more done at first, but as they start to lose the excitement that comes with being enabled and excited by a company that believes in their ability to be autonomous, the quality of their work will start to decline.

Short point: don't play devils advocate just because all your peers are stoked to work for Facebook. And especially don't do it to get hits on your blog.

I majored in electrical engineering. This image was a core part of my curriculum. lol

Sure, some people disagree, but you'd be farfetched to find anybody in history who proposed a new way of thinking who didn't have people arguing against him.

Furthermore, something being "unproven" (which is what his Wiki says about his propositions) is very different from it being "disproven." Even the most brilliant scientific breakthroughs of our time were, at the time of their inception, unproven.

Whether or not you agree, I still highly recommend watching the whole video. It's rife with good material for discussion.

I think it was Einstein who once said, "knowledge is not about what you've learned, it's about what you've managed to unlearn.". The old "calories in, calories out" adage is one of those things you have to unlearn, because as much as it seems to make sense, modern science has shown us that it's simply not true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5X0i92OZQ&feature=youtu...

I have never understood diets like this. They don't make evolutionary sense. There's only one diet logically that is ideal in my opinion, and I'd like to call it the food diet. Eat food. Eat natural, unmodified food. If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it. It's worth making more frequent trips to the grocery store to buy food that's real than to eat the non-food additives that make other things stay longer.

Guaranteed, if everyone were to cut all non-food / modified food items from their diets, the only people that would be unhealthy would be those who have medical conditions. And we'd probably have way less of those too.

Oh, and none of this should negate the fact that eatthismuch.com is totally awesome. Keep it up!

Hacker news guidelines:

"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Let's be honest with ourselves here. True, it's not the aluminum case they're after. But it also isn't the ease of use; The ease of use paradigm is yet another clever Apple marketing tactic to give people something to talk about when trying to explain to their friends why they made the decision to buy. The real reasons people buy Macintosh (and I'm talking about the general public here, because admittedly, the personal preferences on this board are likely to be skewed) are subconscious: People's brains notice that Apple products don't make the typical creaking/squeaking sound typical of tightly screwed together plastic parts when you touch them / pick them up. People notice things like magnetic power cords on laptops and cases and accessories designed to flawlessly fit their products without a centimeter to spare. People are influenced by what they see around them. People want to fit in, and do what's relevant. But most of all--and this is the one that a lot of us have trouble accepting--people care about style EVEN MORE than they do about function. Don't believe me? Take a look at how people dress. If people cared most about function, every single person on this planet would be walking around in New Balance trainers (or maybe Crocs), basketball shorts/track pants, and a Wallmart t-shirt. But instead, people pay hundreds of dollars for jeans that are far from functional. And sure, you might argue that not everyone does that, but a lot of the people who are buying Apple's products do.

My theory on why they don't care about the Mac Pro? They're phasing it out because Apple as a company is sustained by sexy, identifiable gadgets that are fun to flash and look at, and no matter what you do to the Mac Pro, it's still a computer tower. You're never going to bring it on vacation. You're never going to see it at a party. You can't even take it out into your living room to show your friends when they come over. The Mac Pro is a purely functional product, and Apple is about as much a functional company as C is a functional language.

The Internet is Y-Combinator for sarcastic satire.