196 karma · joined June 28, 2013
Though that's cool a book is coming out! I remember when these projects were just getting started.
EDIT: Looks like the repo is pretty abandoned actually, scratch that!
For anyone perusing comments to see if a link is worth their time, I'd say the writing is pretty opinionated, but the fact nuggets are worth the digging.
Applications of triple-entry accounting on voting is something I'd never thought of, and it's actually fascinating. I don't necessarily think that concept has to be tied to computing either. You still go to the voting booth, but you get some printed out ID in return for your vote that acts as the private key. You can check the blockchain for your voting ID. There are still obvious issues, but my only point is that it doesn't necessarily need to be tied to voting on your computer.
I'm curious what sort of unconsidered edge cases they'll find out in the real world. I'm sure test passengers are much more "disciplined" than real world ones.
Take even the smallest snippet:
while (Count <= 3) {
To you or me, this is pretty obvious. I've had kids ask me questions I'd never have thought of because I know this stuff already:
* What do the parentheses mean? * What is Count, is it a Javascript thing? * Is Count being set to 3? (<= looks like an arrow, not necessarily less than or equal to) * What is that squiggle? (meaning the '{') * Is this a program?
I'm with you, the Blockly stuff is hardly legible to me. But to kids learning this for the first time, I can tell you from first hand experience the color/shape/block aspect makes a huge difference.
Admittedly I work in a remote office and not in HQ, but I've noticed NO day-to-day changes. The work, the management, the atmosphere have all been remarkably consistent despite wild rumors and general craziness.
I can't speak to the financials, but this...
> Additional cuts, along with internal management turmoil, are likely to effect your day to day job there to some degree.
...is false (in my, and every employee I've spoken to about this, opinion).
I'm not saying you shouldn't consider these points, but if you turn down Twitter expressly because you imagine the madhouse inside, I'm here to report no such thing.
(Story covers lawsuit against Twitter for misleading shareholders on user growth numbers).
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-17/twitter-su...
So, if its growth has petered out and this is as much money as it can produce, it's understandable to me the line of thinking would then be to cut costs as much as possible so the profit margin can grow. 4k people makes sense when your company is adding value every day, but to these shareholders those aren't translating into results.
My $0.02 -- thoughts?
> Personally I dream of making a living establishing a patio11-type software business. Something where I can do a high quality job and own all of the decision-making.
I have that dream too, but when I have it I always wonder if given that situation I'd be able to stop myself from wanting my baby to keep growing, even if it meant giving up those decision-making abilities and taking on investors.
Issue with Disney from a customer side is censorship.
I think more than anything it's the amount children share in common. Adults are lame. The world is big. There's a lot to do and a lot of time to do it in. If you're a kid and you meet another kid odds are you live in the same town or at least region, go through the same school system, are roughly socioeconomically similar, and (thus) have a lot of things you can do together.
At work I really don't know much about my co-workers. I would go grab a beer and watch the game with someone if I knew they were interested, and from there we could hang out more -- but I don't. We spend all day near each other, at the EOD I just want to go home.
So my theory is that as adults most of us have fulltime jobs where we're always near people we don't spend much time with, and have no time to enter social circles afterwards.
$0.02
On another note, I'm a huge fan of small utilities like this. Sometimes cruising HN it's easy to get it in my head that a project isn't worth doing unless it's a scalable VC business ready to submit to YC, or a community-supported FOSS. It's nice to see a little web utility doing its thing online.
In any case, it seemed pretty phenomenally sneaky and well done.
A. I never test my code. When we go to ship the code, it breaks, and I have no idea where it's broken. So now I'm forced to take pieces out to see which piece is broken, then take functionality out of that piece until I find the piece that's broken. This is a process that actually takes longer than writing code, and it prevents me from working on new projects. If this is given to someone else, it will take them twice as long because they don't have the context of how the pieces work, and they'll wind up asking me about it anyways.
B. I never write tests for my code. After every piece I write, I test the project in entirety to see if that piece works and does what I want it to do. After the project is done, suppose we want to change that piece. Because there's nothing written that will test these pieces alone, someone now has to do work I've already done, which will keep them from working on something else.
C. I write tests before or as I write my code. I know when the pieces I write are done when they pass those tests. It takes around as long to write tests as to write code, so this process is faster. When we want to change a piece later on, we just change the tests to express the new desirable functionality, then rewrite the piece to pass those tests.
When I'm troubleshooting my code, I'm not adding value to the product or company. Therefore, the shortest amount of time spent troubleshooting is in turn the most profitable. C is clearly the shortest amount of time, because by writing tests I ideally spend no time troubleshooting. In reality, things will slip through the cracks, but those cracks are a lot smaller.
> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.
I want a citation on that, that's all. I want a statistic on how many people who live paycheck to paycheck live that way solely because they manage their income poorly.
Again, the notion that everyone could be rich if they only worked harder is asinine, and frankly pretty offensive. This comment supports that notion by equating living paycheck to paycheck with being bad at managing income. I want statistics, I'm tired of that opinion.
That's a good start. "There are a lot" may not mean most, but it doesn't absolve it of providing some proof.
Oops I was born in a small poor suburb outside of Pittsburgh and barely make enough each week to feed myself and pay rent, where am I getting money to move?
> Befriend those who are already wealthy. Emulate them.
> Befriend people who are on the fast track and believe in loyalty. Be very useful to them. Help them rise.
This entirely depends on living in an area "wealthy" people would live. In my hypothetical poor suburb the richest guy is the guy who owns the only bar within a drive.
> Invest at least 25% of your income.
I make $1200 a month post-tax. In any given month:
- $500 rent
- $50 car insurance
- $200 food
- $80 enjoyment ($20/week)
- $75 utilities
That leaves me with $295 for everything that's a non-essential in my life. This is a flat tire. This is a doctor's appointment. This is medication. This is Christmas gifts. This is a leaking roof. This is a broken stove. This is money that I need to be liquid every month, you suggest I invest all of it? I probably wind up spending this money just to get by, it's less than $75/wk for expenses outside of a pretty barren lifestyle.
> Get out more. Talk to more people. Increase your opportunities to get lucky.
Again, this is entirely dependent on there being people of value in my immediate vicinity.
> Eliminate toxic people in your life (you can help them later if you want).
> And, don't burn bridges.
Believe it or not, these are the only valid points you've made to apply to my hypothetical life... And this is for a single person who makes 15000
What I want a citation for is:
> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.
What I want is definitive proof that, as claimed, most poor people in this country are poor because they manage their money poorly.
What I want a citation for is:
> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.
What I want is definitive proof that, as claimed, most poor people in this country are poor because they manage their money poorly.
The 22-year old out of college who needs a place to sleep doesn't need to save up for a mattress that will last them 10 years... they need a place to sleep. Especially when (unlike the article) you stop to consider other factors besides money. With "disposable" furniture/goods, you almost never need to take it with you when you move, as a 22-year old does frequently. This is an extreme example, but if the difference between a couch you'd want to keep and a couch you'd leave is $200 and the cost of the move is $200... it's actually a wash.
The middle aged parent taking care of multiple children with a poorly paid job isn't saving up for a nice couch. They're watching their family couch slowly disintegrate and they're getting years beyond what the author of this article might consider "useful".
I love the tech community for all it has given me, but the political and socioeconomic views of so many of its inhabitants ([redacted] in particular) who were born on third and told they hit a triple give me the creeps. Poor people aren't poor because they're stupid. They're poor because they don't have a lot of money, and the root causes of that can be as varied as anyone's individual life. Articles like this suggest that 500 words and a subscription to Slate can stand in the way of each and every one of those root causes.
The only valuable thing from this article is to avoid debt, beyond that there's not much of substance here..
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-on-demand-economy-2014-7
I'm not sure there's much more to that statement than baseless opinion. If you're interested in what the BLM movement has accomlished, there are many resources at your disposal, but I'd start here [1].
[1] http://blacklivesmatter.com/11-major-misconceptions-about-th...
It's my belief that if you take 10 similar people and give them a problem to solve, they'll all solve it the same way. Whereas if you take 10 different people and give them a problem to solve, they'll each individually be challenged to think differently and question their assumptions. If I ran a company I'd prefer the latter, because intuition tells me it will lead to the best answers (people questioning their opinions means thinking through whether they're as well founded as they hope, and teases out the problems with those opinions).
I think this innovation goes hand in hand with profitability. I'm not saying I wouldn't pick the creative driven innovative Harvard grad every time -- I'm saying I'd pick the creative driven innovative community college grad every time over the Harvard grad with the same background as everyone else in the company.
> Being able to do things well on paper is pretty important in 21st century US.
Except when it comes time to actually do work, it's not. The overlap in relevant skills between convincing people you're a good engineer and being a good engineer is very small. One is mostly about leveraging your background and social engineering, the other is about how you solve problems. While one could argue that being good on paper is good indicator of drive, I'd counter that a candidate with drive but without skills is less preferable than a candidate with skills.
More to the point, the thing everyone in a top-10 school has in common is that they're really good at looking good on paper. It says near nothing about what they'll contribute on a team, how they'll function with other people, or base programming skill. My only point is that if a company seeks diversity, they should seek it in all avenues.