davidroberts

Metrics used to evaluate fitness being detached from the actual purpose of a position is not only a characteristic of the military.

For example, since success in academics is usually the first requirement to even start in any position above the most menial, anyone who finds it difficult to toe the line and waste hours listening to someone drone on about a topic totally unrelated to their purpose in life, or enthusiastically embrace make-work homework assignments, will likely have a hard road, no matter how well qualified they might otherwise be.

I'm not disagreeing with the statement. It's just that it's rather shoddy journalism. Most influential is a matter of opinion and needs to be justified. Most generous is plausible, but the metric for generosity needs definition.

"Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist." Good thing this writer is unbiased.

Maybe because the same user who broke things on the computer is locked out on the phone/tablet so they can't break things. If it's broken it'll either be hardware issue or a firmware/os/app problem that has to be solved by the maker/developer.

In my experience supporting users of PCs, Macs, and Android and Apple phones/tablets, very few users have any desire for root access or any idea what to do with it when they have it. Their device is going to belong to others no matter what, maybe it's better for it to be Apple or Google or a somewhat vetted developer in a walled garden than the owner of a malicious bot-net.

Both of them did absolutely amazing things. They were both very complicated characters. They both made an enormous contribution to society. They both drove their employees to the limit, and sometimes over the edge. Bill is following the tradition trajectory of American tycoons. Questionable business practices amass a fortune, which is then spent improving the world. Jobs was an artist whose medium was technology. His art was his offering to the world. Just my two cents...

The Atlantic has definitely jumped the shark. It used to be one of my favorite magazines.

From Merriam-Webster Race: "a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits." Nationality: "a people having a common origin, tradition, and language and capable of forming or actually constituting a nation-state." Dutch: "of or relating to the Netherlands or its inhabitants."

Of course people interested in increasing government control over the population love security checks and any excuse to increase them.

Would it be considered anal to note that the Dutch aren't a race, therefore "Dutch courage" can't be a racist term? Nationalist maybe, but not racist.

Especially since the TSA actually accomplishes almost nothing in preventing deaths. All a terrorist about to be discovered at the airport security gate would have to do to complete his deadly mission would be to detonate his bomb right then and there. It would cause people to fear airports and security gates and mess up the whole system. Terrorism is all about sowing fear that the government can't protect you. The TSA just shifts some of the risk from the airplane to the airport. You can't security check everything in life. Better to figure out why people want to detonate bombs in the first place and solve that problem. But symbolic solutions are so much easier.

Actually, writers rarely choose the titles to their articles. That's what editors do. So it's the editors of publications that suck at choosing good titles, not the writers.

Very often the original article title assumes the reader is already familiar with a particular context, based on the fact he or she is already visiting the site it is hosted on. This of course does not apply to readers of Hacker News who see the article title totally out of context, surrounded by other articles.

I can see the value in editing titles that excessively call attention to themselves, include a comment by the poster, or inaccurately reflect the content, No one wants the front page of Hacker News to look like a page from Craigslist. The title should accurately describe the content of the article so readers can quickly decide whether to open it or move to the next one. The question asked by moderators should be whether the title fulfills this purpose, not whether it conforms to some bureaucratic guideline. Life is already too much distorted by slavish devotion to bureaucratic guidelines without bringing that mindset to Hacker News.

I'd be interested in hearing the rationale for changing the titles.

Essentially it's a form of terrorism. They are saying do things our way or we burn your house down. They don't believe in democracy and so what's left? A world where the best people at malicious hacking rule? The same skills they used to do this can shut down power plants, bring down air planes, and wreck general mayhem. They are saying the people in power are corrupt. Some how we have to trust they will never become corrupt.

Before I posted my original comment. I had a moment of fear. What if I pass them off and they decide to ruin my life. Maybe as an exercise size for one of their noobs.

Self-righteous idiots. Who made them judge and jury of the world? Do something positive.

I'm 55 and currently barely scraping by on temp jobs and freelance gigs. As I look back at all the mistakes and missed opportunities, mainly caused by obvious glaring faults of my own, or in what in retrospect could be considered very dumb decisions, I certainly feel some regret. Lack of focus, maybe ADD long before people knew it existed, quitting great jobs to start a failed business or non-profit or to work overseas. Going to grad school, then skipping classes and homework to spend all night on personal projects that never really amounted to anything, getting mediocre grades, then eventually dropping out. Not able to make up my mind what I want to do for a living.

But then I see my loving wife of 30 years who has put up with me, two kids in college who call me up for advice (not necessarily taking it, but it's the thought that counts) and a high school kid who talks to me and laughs at my jokes, good health, a decent if small home, and many, many, many friends from all the places I lived, and not really even one real enemy.

Then I wonder. Would I have been as happy if I had gotten that fancy degree? Kept that job that would have had me away on 6 week business trips twice or three times a year? If I'd not followed my dreams, even though they didn't pan out?

When I die (and at 55 it starts looking a lot closer), although I never amounted to much, maybe I'll have friends and family saying goodbye as I slip away and it will seem more important at that moment than a big job and major accomplishment. At least I can feel that maybe the world is happier and nicer a little bit because I was here. I smiled at people and they smiled back and there were two more smiles added to the world happiness account. Maybe it turned out OK not focus on career and DOING BIG THINGS.

Maybe nothing has stuck for you so far, because you haven't found what would really make you happy. Please, keep looking. Be open. Cultivate positive relationships. Help other people who are suffering. Make the world cleaner, nicer, safer, brighter, more fun, even if just through a kind word to the person sitting next to you at Starbucks, or picking up a piece of litter and dropping it in a trash can.

And if you do want to turn things around, it's definitely not too late, if you want to try again. I've had at least two great chances since I was 40. The only reason I'm not doing them now is because I ended up moving on because they weren't really what I wanted. Maybe they'll be what you want.

Most of all, don't let the world's idea of what is worth doing define how you evaluate your life. They have no idea what constitutes true happiness for you. Only you can know that, and sometimes it takes a while to find out.

Lot of good ideas, but the implementation looks kind of cold and sterile to me. It wouldn't be very comfortable to live alone in.

This was right on the Eve of World War I. Sad to think that many of the young men in uniform probably died in the trenches at Marne or Verdun over the next several years.

I received my BA through a similar program that used to be offered by the State of New York through their fully accredited Regents College program (now called Excelsior College, and not offering this pathway to a degree anymore). When I started I already had about a semester's worth of credits from various colleges; I sent in those transcripts and took two CLEP tests (each worth about three units), and three GRE subject exams in Economics, History, and English Literature (each worth 30 units, or one full year). A balance of Humanities, Social Science, and Science/Math credits were required.

I started in Sept. 1987, I passed my last exam in December and started graduate school in January (didn't graduate). It was a wonderful program. I even wrote a book about it and sold maybe 25 copies.

That degree has helped me get several jobs that required a college degree, and now I'm getting ready to go back to grad school again.

For me, junior high was so much worse than high school. By high school, I'd pretty much figured out how to get along with people, and had made as many friends as I needed. But high school still seems a huge waste of time for most people. Maybe it would be better to go back to some kind of apprenticeship system.

Looks like I'm not the only UTS alumni who reads Hacker News...

Since, as he mentions in the letter, room and board were included in the wage he uses as a reference, there is no need to deduct them from the wages his former master owes.

Yes. Sad to say.

I've earned several hundred thousand dollars directly from customers by doing honest work. I guess that means I can say that taking advantage of a person's lack of computer expertise to crowd his computer with toolbars, hijacking his search efforts, and making his web browsing slow to a crawl just to make a buck is very sleazy behavior.

I worked for a few months recently as a remote support agent for a big ISP, and many of my customer's browsers looked almost as bad as screenshot you posted. As I was cleaning up, I would ask them for each toolbar (because I was required to) "do you want me to remove this?" They would invariably reply "I don't know what it is or how it got there." I think this pretty much kills the "informed choice" rationalization. About the only toolbar they understood or wanted was Google, and maybe the one that came as part of the isp's setup package (because they were used to it).