I'm curious if any companies have required (minimum) amounts of vacation. Taking a break seems to be a general positive for productivity, but people with unlimited vacation seem to not take it. What if you were obligated to?
While I agree that most of the ads you see online today are not desired, I would argue that it does not have to be this way. When advertising is done right, it can open consumers up to products that they wouldn't know exist without ads. It actually creates value for both the buyer and the seller. A music news site [0] I tend to visit used to be a shining example of this--ads promoting new records by bands featured on the site could be seen in their banners and fit seemlessly with the rest of the page, now they've been replaced by McDonald's and Dr Pepper across large portions of the site. I've found out about new albums that I may not have otherwise listened to when ads were relevant; now that the site's admin realizes that fast food pays more than indie record labels I'll leave AdBlock enabled.
My university added some charging stations in public places in my senior year. There were countless times where these came in handy for both myself and fellow classmates, I can definitely see this catching on
Time received a good deal of criticism for their choice for their Person of the Year. I believe Edward Snowden was winning the online polling for a while (all of it?), but the POTY is ultimately an editorial decision not a poll.
There are also people who browse HN who are not programmers, like myself (a mechanical engineer). I may not read all of the same posts as programmers, but the "intellectually stimulating" guideline for news posts & the overall level of discussion here seem to make it worth my while
Owning a truck can be a blessing and a curse. I was never the driver when car pooling with my friends, but I had tons of requests to help move things--usually at the end/beginning of the academic years.
I wish this service was around when I owned a truck.
The whole point of this is that there isn't necessarily a single right answer. As another user pointed out, mathematicians define 0^0 to be 1, but you don't necessarily have to accept that as truth in the way that 1+1=2.
it's using log to mean log base e, also known as the natural log or ln. you can do that because they're inverse operations (I think that's the right term for it, it's been a while since a formal math class) so they undo each other
What's the reason for this? Is it part of Coinbase's payment integration? I don't recall any other websites doing this (although there's the possibility that I simply haven't used other sites that also do this)
They used to do a batch in Boston/Cambridge, but stopped when PG was expecting a child. I'm hoping that Sam Altman considers bringing this back, or continues expanding to other areas. I believe such a move could have a huge impact in places they'd expand to
I spent a semester doing this in college, living in the city where my school was located during the weekends and living in a student city a few hours away to work an internship during the work week. I would bus between the two every week. It definitely spread me thin (working full time, classes and papers at night, research on the weekends, plus somehow still trying to have a social life) but it was an incredible experience to live in an awesome new city. If you have a reason to go for it and don't mind spending the time on the road, why not give it a shot? You can always decide on one place to settle down, and you'll know what it's like to actually live in each of them
Does anyone know if its possible to hack GMail such that it only updates your inbox at certain times? I've fallen into a habit of checking it more often than I should (on a computer, both work and personal) and it would certainly help me if the inbox just didn't update with new mail continuously.
Imagine combining this with an Oculus Rift, so that you can make your house look however you want within the level, and you can move around through this new world. It would take virtual reality to an entirely new level
That's amazing. It can be easy to write off WhatsApp with an ethnocentric view, but to hear how other people are using it on the other side of the world certainly adds a new perspective
I'd steer clear of /r/bitcoin. It's been declining in quality consistently over the several months. bitcointalk or /r/bitcoinserious or even /r/bitcoinbeginners should give you better advice
it may be helpful to people who are trying to evaluate different bootcamps to attend for you to include some sort of ranking of the top-rated 'schools'
that being said, it's awesome that you made that. I'm not aware of anywhere that lets people evaluate their bootcamp experience and it'll be great if/when more people review what they went through
It would be very interesting to see what types of things people go on to do with the knowledge that they've gained from MOOC's. The value created based on knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be accessible would be a very interesting metric to try and measure
Because you can circumvent the centralized authority of DNS registrars. Look at the Pirate Bay, who keeps having its domain names revoked by central authorities. Namecoin's ledger allows people to agree on who has what domain name without using a standard registrar
While I agree that it is necessarily difficult to create a search engine ranking algorithm that isn't gamed, customer service isn't something that should be lumped in with the 'difficult problems'. Google has been notoriously terrible at customer service for years and it's amazing that they've been so successful despite this.
Even if it isn't "true" CS, they're likely to learn useful skills that can help them automate repetitive tasks and things like that, and give them enough exposure to decide if it's something they may want to do in the future. If they decide to study it more in depth, awesome. If not, the worst that happens is they got a few skills that may help them in the future
I talked to my cousin, a hedge fund partner, about this over thanksgiving. He said that he thinks that it has a chance, and it's something that people and governments have been looking for. If governments just keep printing money with no limits and no end in sight, why should people continue to keep solid faith in those currencies?
He did say that most of his co-workers don't necessarily agree, but some are hedging their bets