Digg was popular well before Reddit, and I was always given the impression that Reddit was established as an ultimately successful Digg competitor.
However, your statement prompted me to do a little research. Here is Alexis' (reddit) story:
"This is a good chance for me to dispel any rumors. We were living in a veil of ignorance for the first month or so at Reddit. We were working our asses off, my co-founder Steve Huffman and I, building a site that we got online, and then two weeks into the site being online we found out that there was this other site called Digg, that had venture funding and it had been out for quite some time."
In my experience, Airbnb's biggest competitor is HostelHero and I found this much more convenient than Airbnb while traveling (if only because hostels nearly always have space, unlike the many rooms we encountered on Airbnb advertised as free but suddenly not when you book them).
Arriving in a new city without internet it was great to have HH and be able to find 10 hostels and know they are going to be open. I guess McDonalds wifi etc. means Airbnb could have been a competitor, but the ease of finding accommodation reliably, of a reliable standard, and at more affordable prices meant we used HH far more than Airbnb.
Having said that, the times we could manage to find a room that was genuinely free, and appeared to be genuine people with a spare room, were some of the highlights of our travels. The people and the rooms were both fantastic, and it's this "home away from home" and social aspect I think Airbnb should be pushing. I think at the same time they should be working hard to remove the listings that I could best describe as dodgy guys trying to run a hotel out of an apartment building without adhering to local hotelier laws as we found these far too prevalent in some cities.
I agree they're great products, but I found Airbnb wasn't competing with hotels - it was competing with hostels, and on that point it was far cheaper to stay in hostels (10 euro a night in Barcelona for instance) than Airbnb rooms.
I didn't say it is a PR plant, I said it's barely much more than one. This is to say, I'm accusing the article of being low on content demonstrating its primary premise (IE9 is the most modern browser) and of being written in a tone comparable to marketing material for the IE browser.
No I read the second page. They looked like "half-criticisms" that won't affect the IE userbase - "geeks won't like it", "the 64 bit version sucks" etc.
The reviewer gives a hint at their definition of "modern" as "most recently released" when they state "It's arguably the most modern browser on the market—for a few weeks, at any rate."
I really don't know how this is on HN - this is barely much more than a PR plant espousing how fantastic IE9 is. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad IE9 is more standards compliant than past IE versions, but this is basically a promo piece. This made me chuckle though, in the tradition of "it's not a bug, it's a feature":
"In contrast to the other browser developers, Microsoft's approach to standards support has been conservative. The company doesn't want to ever have to remove or fundamentally modify a feature that it has implemented due to changes in specifications. As such, it has taken a policy of only implementing those specifications that are unlikely to undergo any further changes. As a result, Internet Explorer 9 will compare unfavorably on sites like HTML5 Test, but Microsoft views this as far preferable to making developers have to alter their real-world applications just because a specification has changed. "
It's not a personal attack and now you're using a strawman argument to deflect my response (I'm not saying you don't have a right to voice a personal opinion, simply that you aren't looking at this objectively). If you read the link I posted you'll see that what you think is a "large downside risk" only seems that way because of a perception fallacy - we believe incidents like nuclear explosions and airplane crashes are much riskier than everyday risks like lung cancer deaths and car accidents.
"Biggest (nuclear) emergency since Chernobyl" seems hyperbolic unless the situation has changed considerably since I last looked at it. Indeed in Japan alone the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant accident in 2004 caused more fatalities than Fukushima has so far.
Yeah I heard about that but thought it might be a bit far-fetched. Yeah I meant correlation with the earthquake (the articles I read strongly mentioned that the volcanoes are coincidental, not necessarily related causally).
Shinmoedake erupted recently (Feb 1), was quiet since March 1st and has now erupted again. Interestingly it has been showing increasing activity the last couple of years (eruptions in 1716, 1717, 1771, 1822, 1959, 1991, 2008, and 2009). One could perhaps draw some arbitrary links between these dates and significant earthquake activity, but that would probably be taking it too far.
An Indonesian volcano (Karangetang) also erupted following the recent earthquakes (Hawaii had smaller unrelated quakes as well which I wasn't aware of).
Russian volcanoes also erupted following the quakes (accompanied by smaller quakes).
Agreed that they seem an after thought, but with the talent they are acquiring and the resources at their disposal, I can't see anyone beating Facebook on a features basis. They might on a privacy basis, but I'm not sure Google has a lot more confidence in that respect than Facebook.
Sounds a lot like an idea I was considering, until I saw BrainTrust.io had already attacked it and The Fridge (YC S10) had followed up. The problem for someone like Google, as I see it, is "competitive advantage" boils down to "it's like Facebook except you can share stuff just with certain groups". Except, Facebook already has groups.
An unwillingness to accept and identify the causes of problems instead of dismissing all causes as facades for laziness indicates poor project management ability. A good project manager works with the team to identify why goals weren't met and to include these new risks in future estimates. If he spent half as much time identifying and mitigating risks as writing up his book of excuses he might not have had so many people giving them to him.
There is a difference between a reason and an excuse. An excuse is an attempt to remove blame ("it's not my fault, the traffic was bad") whereas a reason is an explanation of the cause ("the traffic was bad"). The latter, isn't an attempt to remove blame, but to a) identify risk factors that can potentially be mitigated in future and b) to remove misunderstandings ("I bet he was late because he didn't care" or as in the article "If the work would have mattered to you, you would have found a solution.") by explaining the true factors that caused the issue.
Assuming people are maliciously trying to ruin your day, and flat out don't care, is a sign of poor thinking patterns and a precursor for mental illness.
Okay, so my argument is that the minimum wage shouldn't increase unemployment at all, because it is so low that any reasonable task is worth more than the low rate the wage is set at. What you say makes sense - if a minimum wage is so high that employers can't afford employees anymore then the poor areas will be hit worst, because the poor areas are the most unskilled.
Actually the success of ideologies is more closely linked to the success of its implementations than its merit. For instance, the success of monarchies for such a long period in history was based on their stability. Likewise, it could be argued that the resurgence of democracy was based on instability in the existing regimes, more than any greater merit in the ideology. If the Soviets had been more successful, I can guarantee we'd be saying how the merit of equality of income is why the Soviets were successful, but we'd be wrong, just as saying the merit of democracy is why the US was successful.
I'm not sure what you mean here exactly, but I think you are implying that rich white suburbs don't abide by the minimum wage when hiring? Alternatively you might be saying that everyone in a rich white suburb manages to make more than the minimum wage. Either way it reeks of ad hominem by playing on the accepted racism of white people as heartless and trouble-free.
Regardless, saying people work below the minimum wage is irrelevant to my point that the minimum wage is sufficiently low that it does not deter people from hiring unskilled workers.
Minimum wage law may be debatable, but Milton's arguments here are poor. The minimum wage is a trivial amount, and noone holds skills below this rate - I severely doubt that the minimum wage stops unskilled people getting work on the basis of being too high a cost for businesses. Furthermore, increasing unemployment among the youth is based on increased education participation and a richer middle-class, not on the minimum wage being so high that businesses can't afford to employ teenagers.
Yet people perform worse mentally without sleep - why would that be if sleep was not vital to mental performance? Have you never needed a nap or coffee to refresh your mind? Do you deny a physical influence on mental faculties?
If it affects peak physical performance, it seems reasonable to suspect it affects peak mental performance (as studies seem to suggest). High functioning executives might get by on little sleep, but would they perform better on more sleep? Are hours clocked more important than output at the executive level?
"So how much sleep do you need? When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours."
In any case, you put me in a room with no clock or windows (and presumably no serious stimuli as it's likely to influence the results) and I can bet you I'll sleep twice as much - out of pure boredom.
I agree for the most part. However, try going for a regular run (say 5km) once per week, same day, and track your times. Let's say you hit about 30 minutes first time, and get it down to around 20 mins over a couple of weeks. Now try greater sleep deprivation than normal one week and watch your time plummet.
The only PC I've ever hated was a HP. Overpriced for poor parts, slow as hell for its advertised purposes and using their provided software, and when parts broke I had to pay for special HP parts because they used custom sizing and screws.
It's a fine and the venue faces temporary suspension of their liquor licence here in Australia. But gaol terms!? (or at least career ruining probation terms, presumably judgement is meant to factor in the impact of the decision?).