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nickbpon Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997

Not at all. "Charity is not for the sake of others."

nickbpon Twitter Reacts to the #Dickbar Uproar

AT&T might not be the best choice as an example of a non-hamfisted company.

nickbpon Gnome removes maximize and minimize buttons from program windows.

You might want to try out one of the other WMs, whether thats KDE or something less well known like xfce or openbox. I've myself been using gnome just about continuously since early 2.x and I may end up switching to something else as well. A nice thing with Linux is there's always a million alternatives, giving you a good chance of finding a close approximation to what you're looking for.

Also, something I've found extremely useful at both work and home is the compiz "Grid" plugin, which allows you to set up easy keyboard shortcuts for window placement. I think it can be found in "compiz-fusion-plugins-extra" on bunters. A video of it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHMKhiZmlV0

nickbpon How many developers over 40 do you know?

At my last workplace around half the people I worked with were in their 50's and still going strong, working on things they love. A couple were just a year or two from retirement.

You may be glad to know that HN ⊂ 'the' developer community.

(For the record, I'm 'only' 26)

nickbpon [dead]

I remember seeing a bit of this mindset shortly after the bailouts.

GM pension obligations? Just drop em. But AIG bonuses? Those contracts are sacred!

nickbpon Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997

If you witness a car accident, do you ignore it because you didn't cause the crash? Do you walk up to the shattered window to yell "I'm not responsible!"?

Or do you help them out of their current situation so that they can better help themselves in the future?

nickbpon Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997

Given his $1 salary, his effective income is all capital gains, which is taxed at 15%.

In any case, taxes are (in theory at least) paid in return for services provided to you and your country, whereas charity is paid in return only for the feeling you've contributed to a greater good. It's best to not confuse the two.

nickbpon Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997

I totally agree with this. A lot of people don't realize how much they are helped by their society because they've never seen how bad it can truly be. Here's an example of I mean (and a worthwhile read to boot): http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50799

You aren't going to be able to develop your skills if there is no society or infrastructure to support that development, if transit is difficult and dangerous, if all money and energy is being siphoned to a few corrupt people at the top. Of course charity isn't the only solution to breaking this cycle, but it certainly helps more than a $1500 laptop.

nickbpon Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997

Those who would be benefited by a charity are unlikely to be impacted by Jobs' computers. What Haitian can afford or would be helped by a MacBook?

nickbpon Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997

Yes, all those fashionable computers they sell for what would be years of income in many countries are really helping the non-rich world.

nickbpon Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997

Only to those who can afford it.

nickbpon Intel's New 6Gps 510 series SATA SSD, Tested and It's Fast

On the flip side, they apparently optimized for large sequential accesses, so this can be good drive if you do a lot of image/video editing.

nickbpon Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

Hey, welcome to SF. Take the good with the bad.

nickbpon Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

Another possible contributing factor: If I were homeless, I'd try to go somewhere with mild weather.

nickbpon You won't find FSF on Facebook

Adsense and Indexing are separate services. One tracks you, the other tracks published sites.

nickbpon You won't find FSF on Facebook

I don't get that impression from them at all.

They maintain a very comprehensive and useful listing[1] of 3rd party licenses which goes over their histories, tradeoffs, and whether they're compatible with the GPL.

And that compatibility is treated independently of whether they consider those licenses to be 'Free'.

Of course they'd prefer use of their own licenses, but this self-interest takes a back seat to helping the overall ecosystem.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

nickbpon Sold my dipshit company for $5m, where to invest?

From the article, it sounds like 'fiscal 2009' must've encompassed late 2008/early 2009, in which case 30% losses would not be abnormal. Otherwise this line sounds a bit odd:

At the end of fiscal 2008, Yale continued to turn in the best 10-year performance with an average annualized gain of 16.3 percent, which was followed by Harvard with 13.8 percent.

nickbpon Sold my dipshit company for $5m, where to invest?

The best thing you can do right now is taking a good 3-6 months to figure out what you want to do with this money, framed in terms of what you want to do in your life. Just park the money in a safe place (eg money market fund, treasury bills) and work things out. There's no need to rush into things, the money will still be there when you know what you want to accomplish with it.

After you've done that, you should have some idea of when/whether you plan to use the money, and how comfortable you are with losing some of it. To be honest, you're probably best off just choosing a reasonable mix of stocks/bonds/cash which reflects your goals/needs, then going on with your life. 5mil sounds like a lot, but in investment-land it's not an unusual amount for a family to have saved for retirement. You would be well off to check out the Bogleheads wiki and forum at http://bogleheads.org. The forum would be an excellent place to post any questions you may have.

With regard to specific allocations, here are some example mixes between stocks and bonds, and how those behaved over 40 years. It's not the best chart, but it should give you some idea. Note that the author is subtracting out an annual 1% management fee from those returns, which is completely bogus. Go with good index funds and you'll be paying 1/15th of that. http://www.fundadvice.com/images/stories/fundadvice_images/f...

Also, if you ultimately decide that you really want to get into real estate, you might want to consider REIT mutual funds/ETFs, rather than buying individual real estate properties and the risk/maintenance that comes with them.

nickbpon Linus Torvalds: Pearls before swine

SLASH LINUX. SLASH. -rms

nickbpon check out my (very silly) web app: tweetmix.me (for Twitter users)

Looks like its just doing markov chaining against previous messages.

nickbpon OM: "My web without Facebook Connect"

I have. It's creepy, and about as useful as any line that begins with "SUP DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE..."

nickbpon An Update is available for your computer

That's because Snow Leopard was Apple's equivalent to a Service Pack.

nickbpon [dead]

Big company with all its bets on downloadable purchases makes product available for download alongside physical media.

Vapid tech journalist follows along, declares all physical media to be dead in hopes of harvesting pageviews.

nickbpon OM: "My web without Facebook Connect"

From the user perspective, I don't use Facebook Connect because I don't think a third party site should be given access to any of my Facebook information, nor should Facebook know what other sites I visit.

I'd much rather they all stay ignorant of one another.

nickbpon My Message To Google: Stop Cheating

I don't disagree with the overall point, but the McDonalds analogy doesn't quite work.

By specifically going to McDonalds you are indeed showing them that you're shopping for a McDonalds Happy Meal, because that's all they've got to sell. But when you're searching for a given term on a site that indexes the entire internet, you're just looking for whatever's most relevant, regardless of where it's hosted.

If you'd wanted the search to only apply to YouTube, well, that's what direct youtube.com and the "site:" keyword are for.

nickbpon Does Committing Code to an Open Source Project Mean Committing Career Suicide?

The rules of ownership vary by country, and even by US state! That section might be intended to accommodate a diverse audience.

nickbpon Does Committing Code to an Open Source Project Mean Committing Career Suicide?

Big company? Small company?

nickbpon Google Forecloses on Content Farms with "Farmer" Algorithm Update

If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them

I wonder what those domains are.