jtbigwoo

It's also true that the better less-selective (or non-selective) colleges provide more help than very selective colleges. I went to community college for a year and then went to a selective private college. The community college had far more help sessions, tutors, and study aids available. There was even a program at the community college that specifically sought out first-generation students to make sure they were getting extra support.

This doesn't sound like a great idea for the U.S. system. Students would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars and spend many precious months for an experience with a 90% failure rate. I have a hard time thinking that anyone with other options would accept that proposal. On top of that, even if you're in the select 10%, you're attending classes where almost all the other students are failing. I can't imagine that class discussions are going to be helpful for you.

If this school was free or very cheap, maybe it's an option for some, but with the way things work in the U.S., this seems more like a scam than a college.

When this happened at a company I worked at, the line from management was, "Stay for two months and train this person and your severance is 6 months' salary. Don't train them and you leave in five minutes with 6 weeks' severance."

>> Work in a non-software company. A company whose business doesn't take its software seriously invariably treats its software and IT resources as cost centers meant to get maximum cost savings for as little money as possible via opex reduction and will, ironically, likely fail to make bigger expenditures required to keep costs (and really, wasting time) lower.

To expand on this, there are some companies that seem like non-software companies, yet still treat software as a competitive advantage rather than a cost center. I worked for a big bank that did their best to stay six months to a year ahead of other banks on technology. The marketing folks were constantly coming to us and saying, "Give us cool features that we can sell." It was a fun place to work.

I also worked for an insurance company that viewed technology as a necessary evil that should be as cheap as possible. The marketing folks there were constantly complaining about how much time and money the company was wasting on technology. (Curiously, they also complained that the company's technology offerings were hopelessly far behind its competitors.) It was a miserable experience.

If you're looking for a job, ask questions about management support and budget priorities. If they're evasive or they say things like, "we're proud of how far we stretch our investment," it's not a good place to work. You can also ask how the company compares technically to its competitors. If they're evasive or talk about how they're trying to catch up, that's a bad sign, too.

I agree and disagree. On the one hand, General Mills, Wells Fargo, and Target are never going to be as cutting-edge as Google. On the other hand, most jobs at Google aren't cutting-edge, either. The two guys I know at Google are doing stuff that's not that much different than your average line-of-business programmer.

I'd say availability of tech jobs in the "sort of interesting" category is great in MSP, but the truly amazing jobs are still rare.

Lots of ad agencies employ programmers--Olson, Periscope, Mirum, etc.

There are several business-y software companies like Concur, Lawson Software, Code 42, Dell (their cloud manager software is developed here).

(We're hiring software engineers at Concur, by the way.)

Three things, I think:

It's much easier to build hype with pretty renderings of miniatures rather than just with pictures of cards and dice.

I think folks are more willing to lay out $50 or $100 for a game with miniatures because it seems like you're getting more stuff. Even if the game sucks you get all these cool toys you can play with.

These games inevitably have higher revenue per user which gives them a much better chance of making the leaderboard. The cheapest reward level for Zombiecide: Season 3 was $90 and they raised about $237 per customer. Compare this to Tiny Epic Galaxies which had a similar number of backers and only raised only $33 per customer.

The community and the meta-game quickly became the engrossing part of the game. If you like coordinating with other players and getting together to wander around and mash buttons on your phone, then it's great. You can still play by taking walks by yourself, but that's not as much fun.

I think this is pretty common evolution for games. Games from bridge to Magic:The Gathering to softball are as much about the social elements as they are about the actual gameplay.

120k is in the top 20% of wage earners in the U.S. That's quite a bit different than $35k which is in the bottom ~30% (in the U.S.)

My male Montana cousins always had cheaper car insurance than I did (also a male) so some companies must be using a different table. Everything else about us (age, grades, miles driven, etc.) was similar.

You'd enact redistributive tax and spending policies and high minimum wages. You'd reduce government spending for corporations. You'd make it difficult to fire workers.

You'd make the U.S. more like Europe, basically.

>> Note that the decoupling correlates closely with the computerization of society/business around the mid-1980s.

It also correlates closely with the decline of labor unions.

I had to go through FCPA training for my employer a while ago, so take all this with a grain of salt:

As I understand it, the FCPA covers U.S. companies and their foreign affiliates and companies/organizations that trade securities in the U.S. If any employee or agent of such an organization bribes a foreign official, the DOJ or the SEC can go after them. "Foreign official" is defined really broadly as well. It includes foreign government employees, but also employees of international agencies and employees of government-managed industries (like doctors working for a state university hospital.) Also, the payment has to be illegal and not just "grease" money to speed up an ordinary task.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but the DOJ might be able to draw a line from various U.S. individuals to various FIFA board members or from US Soccer to FIFA itself depending on how broad the definitions are. If they get that second one, everybody on FIFA's board is screwed.

I know a guy who rescued several people from slavery in Florida. Here's an article about it from the New Yorker from 2003:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/21/nobodies

Since then, they've helped the government rescue over 1,000 people from slavery in the southeast U.S.

In the upper midwest, the Y2K testing/fixing jobs disappeared in Jan/Feb of 2000 and the internet/e-commerce shops started closing in the fall of that year. 2001 was a tough year to look for a programming job and then it got much, much worse after 9/11. The job market didn't really recover until 2003.

I've been on projects where we used Rackspace cloud servers or Amazon EC2 for HIPAA-compliant insurance enrollment systems. There was extra paperwork and we did a bunch of security testing, but it wasn't too bad.

In both cases the projects were controlled by marketing departments who were much more concerned with cost per customer than with maintaining total control over every aspect of the system.

>>corporate taxes should be zeroed out for everyone

I'm probably stepping into a pre-existing argument, but forming a corporation allows me to gain benefits that would be difficult or impossible to obtain as an ordinary person. (e.g. limited liability, special tax treatment) It's not unreasonable that a corporation's owners pay additional taxes.

I'm getting off the topic, but my friends that referee high-level children's sports were talking about how taunting rules and trash talk have changed over the years. In the past decade or two, they're really tried to stamp out racial and sexual trash talk. Now they're encouraged to watch out for trash talk regarding economic class. The reasoning is two-fold. First, kids are getting smarter. If you call someone a racial slur you get kicked out of the league, but maybe you can tell them their mother's on welfare or their dad is an illegal immigrant. Second, children's sports are so much about money. High-level children's sports are pay-to-play. Top-tier club teams in many sports can cost $10k/year or more. The fact that there are any lower-income kids in the leagues at all is kind of surprising. Usually the less talented, richer kids are subsidizing a handful of more talented poorer kids. Some kids will do whatever it takes to get an edge or maybe even get the other teams best player to throw a punch and get kicked out.

It seemed to me that the problem is an out-of-touch professor rather than the material. Who discusses Persephone and glosses over the rape part? Especially in an introductory course? At least half the class was probably wondering what the hell was going on.

The author of the article seems to willfully miss the point. He pats himself on the back for reading Mein Kampf. What do you think would happen if a professor assigned Mein Kampf and then didn't talk about anti-Semitism? Would the author be telling the students to keep quiet?

The student in the example read the material. Despite being "triggered", the student came to class to discuss the material. She's probably thinking, "that was tough to get through; I hope we have a good discussion of the issues in the text." She gets to class and the professor spends most of the time talking about style rather than substance and then brushes her off after class. I'd be frustrated, too.

If the domain name is a common abbreviation, they might be able to generate royalties from domain name sales like Tuvalu (.tv) does. (Though, if I remember correctly, it hasn't been the windfall that Tuvalu hoped for.)

That's a good strategy. Anything you can do to reduce the willpower it takes to give is a good thing.

> We all almost do through taxes. He goes further and donates 50% more from the remaining money.

This is an odd argument. Are you saying that paying taxes is some form of altruism? The story is about a guy who donates money with no tangible benefit to himself. We all get benefits and services from the government. It debatable whether the value we receive is equal to the amount we pay in taxes, but the value is certainly not zero.

I talked about this on HN a few years ago, but my friends and I planned to be this guy. In college we talked about all the money we'd make and how much we'd be able to donate. We all had a job offers for $32 - 42k/year. That was amazing! We were living on less than $1k/month in college. We had plans to give away 20%, 30%, or 50% of our income. We would barely even notice. Some of us even managed to do it for a few years. The world got to us, though. You start to notice that the coworkers that dress nicer and go to happy hour get promotions. One guy married a social worker and had four kids. One guy got tired of living in a studio apartment in New Jersey. One guy became a junior high science teacher. Twenty years later, I suspect that our average charitable contribution is down to around 5% of our income.

It is really hard to be counter-cultural like Mr. Wage. Especially when your plan requires you to remain completely immersed in the culture. It feels like there's a constant friction to overcome--like every choice takes a bit more willpower than it should. I think this is part of the reason that truly counter-cultural people and movements tend to segregate themselves from the rest of the world.

I don't mean to degrade Mr. Wage and his project. I hope this works out for him, but it's a very difficult road.

> Also that there's almost no reason to want to make truly anonymous purchases. Because it implies legality to the activity in question (otherwise why are you paying for it?)

I think most people would welcome a shift to more anonymous transactions, but they're not willing to give up the advantages they get from tracking. When my purchase is tracked by a the seller, I get volume and loyalty discounts and easy returns. When my purchase is tracked by a credit card company, I get the ability to dispute payments and better manage cash flow. Most people and businesses aren't willing to give up those conveniences for anonymity.

I delivered papers once a week as a kid. I got paid 3 cents per copy by the company. I worked approximately 2 hours per week. I was officially an employee. It didn't break the company to classify me as an employee. It wouldn't break Postmates to have you classified as an employee either.

You're probably right, but the articles I've read suggests that Ford and Edison continued tinkering and working right up to the end. Edison was in his 30's when he invented the light bulb and the phonograph. He was in his 40's when he invented the motion picture camera and made a bunch of improvements to battery technology. I've read stories that Ford was still tinkering with engine technology when he was in his 60's and 70's.

>> You absolutely can brute force with management. You can always pay people more, or give up some of your equity to someone who will work harder.

Offering more money/equity will allow you to pick from a bigger pool of possible employees. If you know what you're doing, you can use that to hire better performing people. It's really hard to keep good people, though, because they can generally find another high-paying job when they get fed up with you.

I can think of three situations where a company can survive bad management:

-Companies that are growing ridiculously fast can keep great employees, at least as long as the growth keeps going. If everything else is going great, employees can overlook a manager who doesn't know what he's doing. That means everything is great--pay and benefits, opportunities for advancement, ability to have an impact, enjoyable coworkers, great location, etc. Happily for startups, this can give you breathing room to figure out how to be a good manager. The growth can't last forever, though. When it slows, the best performers tend to leave first since they're the most confident in their ability to find a similar position elsewhere.

-Companies that are the only game in town can keep great employees. This is sort of the inverse of the last one. If there are no other good opportunities, either because of geographic, economic, or political issues, employees will stay rather than being unemployed. If the economy gets better or the employee decides to move, the company is out of luck. Plus, the limited pool tends to work both ways--fewer good people look for jobs in these situations.

-Companies that can offer lottery-level payouts and craps-level odds. When I was in college in the mid-90's, Microsoft seemed to have their choice of any college grad in the western U.S. The reason was simple: there was a pretty good chance you could work there for three years and come out a millionaire. This obviously isn't a model that very many companies can follow, but lot of startups will try to make similar promises. (I'm not saying that Microsoft was poorly managed in the 90's, it's just an example.)

>> Being present longer and taking fewer breaks is superficially working harder. More abstractly, you can work harder until you make redundant people who complain about coffee breaks, if you so choose.

It appeared to me that they were heading off site to work out issues between founders, not because they were taking breaks. Whenever the bosses disappear together, I think smart employees will assume that something is up.

When I was in my 20s, I would have said the same thing. :) I agree that there are mature 18-year-olds and immature 40-year-olds. I think you're discounting the role of practice, though. Someone with 20 years of experience has spent almost 40,000 hours at work. It's very hard for a 25-year-old to compensate for that no matter how smart they are or how many experiences they've had.

Story time: My grandfather was a soft-spoken old cowboy, but you should have seen him charm and intimidate cattle buyers. At 70 years old, he could hold his own with the slick-talking young buyers because he had gone through that same negotiation 100 times and there was no trick they could pull that he hadn't seen.

Disclaimer: I'm 39.

High-achievers (and most people) are trained to simply put in more hours to get past problems. If I'm not doing well in a class, I study more or do extra credit work. If I'm not selling, I can make a hundred more calls. If I make a short-sighted technical decision, I can stay up all night and refactor my way out of it.

Part of the reason why management is so tough is that you can't always solve problems by simply working more. When it comes to team dynamics, a lot depends on catching problems in the moment and communicating clearly the first time. You can't just brute-force your way through problems like you can in most other areas. It takes intuition and understanding that is innate to a few folks and earned through experience by everybody else.

Think about this situation from the article: "We did, however, realize (a bit later than we should have) that disappearing from a tiny office too frequently during the day was a bad idea and hurt morale for the rest of the company." There was no way for them to fix this by working harder, they had to find an intuitive sense for how much time away from the office was too much.

Managing people is a fundamental skill for founders and one of the areas where intense effort often doesn't make a difference at all.

>> 1. Everyone has the right to deny being treated without stigmatization or punishment.

This is one of our biggest problems these days. You do have the right to self-determination. Others have the right to stigmatize you, especially if your choices impact others! If my house is a dangerous mess, should I be surprised when my friends and neighbors avoid me?

Freedom is a two-way street.