pyoung

You seem to be conveniently ignoring the 5 other apple sellers in you hypothetical town, all who will gladly undercut your business. Or the fact that everyone in town now has a basic income, so starting a competing apple selling business is much less riskier, as they have the BI to fall back on if their venture fails.

More demand can raise prices, that is fair. But implementing a BI does not necessarily mean that we are getting rid of capitalism, a system that tends to keep the costs of goods close to the cost of production. Also, it's worth noting that BI would most likely replace current welfare systems, so the 'net' amount of money that is put back into the system would be smaller than you are probably expecting.

An alternative implementation, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, would be a negative income tax (NIT). This would work by establishing a 'baseline' wage, and if someone is below that baseline, they are subject to a negative tax (i.e. they receive money from the government). This would probably be a much cheaper method of establishing a BI, as only those with low or no wages would receive the benefit, but would also allow for massive reductions in welfare programs. Something to consider.

This is something that has been worrying me for some time. More and more, the IPO is being used as a method for cashing out, rather than as a source of funding. I am an advocate for low cost index funds, as historically, it is one of the best returns an ordinary investor can expect to achieve. But this recent trend in private/public markets has me second guessing that position.

Ha, that's funny. Just ran into this issue a few days ago. Spent an hour or two trying to figure what was going on, thought I was going crazy. Finally caved and asked an experienced python programmer, and they immediately pointed out that lists are mutable. Goes to show the value of working with experienced programmers.

The point is that employers are classifying employees as contractors because they can get away with offering the same 'salary', but avoid paying payroll taxes and benefits. We can get pedantic about 'who is really paying what', but in the end, companies are using this tactic to screw over their employees. There are many cases where taking work as a contractor makes sense (mainly, short-term/part-time work), but people need to be aware of the costs, and take them into consideration when comparing job offers.

I am pretty sure contractors have to pay payroll taxes. It is one of the reasons that companies are increasingly classifying employees as contractors, the burden of the payroll tax falls on the contractor entirely (normally it is split 50/50 between employee/employer).

It sounds like they were not aware of the wedding until late in the game. If you follow the arc of culpability throughout the post, Parker assumed that the Hotel was adequately permitted for such activities. When it turned out that they were not, the Hotel forced Parker into a indemnification agreement (presumably by threatening to cancel the wedding), which means he can't sue the Hotel. Then the Hotel refused to pay the CCC fine, preferring to cancel the wedding instead. So his only option at the point was to pay for the fines himself.

My take away from this is that the hotel is to blame. They did not have the required permits (despite an assumption on Parker's part that they did), and they refused to rectify the situation when it was discovered that there were issues. Parker seems to go easy on them, my guess is because he has some connections to the owners (in my opinion, his best defense would be to turn around and point fingers at the Hotel owners).

At some point, when you become famous enough (or infamous, in Parker's case), things like extravagant weddings are going to get attention from the media, whether you like it or not. I would not be entirely surprised if Zuckerberg took this into consideration when he planned his surprise, low-key backyard wedding. In the wake of the great recession, which most of America is still slowly recovering from, fancy cars and nice suits aren't going to win you sympathy from the American public. If you care about the public's perception of you, then adopting a low-key lifestyle would be a prudent effort in managing that. If you don't care, then feel free to live extravagantly, and be prepared to either tune out the blogs and trolls, or have some thick skin and learn to deal with them.

I wouldn't dismiss the smart phone so easily. Yeah, a lot of people use them to play games and do other trivial tasks, but the popularity of the iphone pushed telecom companies to radically upgrade their infrastructure, and while we are not there yet, hopefully the end result is fast, ubiquitous, and cheap connections to the internet around the globe. We are already seeing some of the possibilities, and I can't even begin to imagine what the future will look like (if I could, I would be feverishly working to make it happen), but wireless internet is certainly going to be a key component, and we have the iphone (or more precisely, the popularity of the iphone) to thank for getting it started.

I couldn't agree more. Realistically, I don't think we will ever reach a political consensus in the US that would allow for a basic income bill to pass through congress. More likely is that technology will eventually make most menial labor and jobs obsolete, resulting in a spike of unemployment which essentially forces the issue. Time will tell.

Ugghhh, I signed up for this, my only complaint with coursera is there are way too many classes I want to take. Am already taking two classes that are about to wrap up and am probably spending 15-20 hrs/wk on them (lectures included). Hopefully I can manage the load for the next two weeks.

I think he was referring to the beer drinking/rock throwing/etc...

A few calls to the cops to report unruly behavior, and a letter or two to the homeowner may have been enough to get the homeowner to be more vigilant in controlling the tenants, or would encourage a return to longer term tenants.

I agree about your point on abstraction, but I also think there are different methods to deal with it, and that those methods often get overlooked.

My experience with SAS and R suggests it is possible to somewhat re-create the typical excel workflow. The SAS IDE allows you to open the data sets created in your code, which means you can write code one line (well, more accurately, one data step or procedure, as it is called in SAS) at a time and inspect the intermediate results at each point. Similarly, RStudio allows you to inspect the values of data frames and variables, once again allowing the user to step through the code writing process and get relatively immediate feedback.

Regardless, there are going to be a large portion of excel users that won't or can't switch, and there are also a number of use cases where excel makes perfect sense (smaller data, simpler summaries), but I have personally 'converted' a few analysts, and think that, with more exposure, a not insignificant portion of excel users could be convinced to make the leap.

I have used VBA here and there, and try not to bag on it too much. There are some cases where using it can make sense, but in general, it seems to be a compromise.

I get a little confused about the programmer/non-programmer dichotomy. If you are capable of implementing a complex model in excel, you are probably more than capable of learning a programming language. If you are just tallying up a few numbers to throw into a report or presentation, then yeah, no need to switch. As I mentioned in another post, it probably has to do with exposure and motivation.

I don't think scripting languages, of themselves, are the real barrier, after all, excel formulas are not too far off from what one would use in a language like R. I think the barrier is the data import/manipulation phase. Scripting languages loose out to the ease of copy/paste and data inspection that spreadsheets offer. It's not that using scripting languages for these tasks is very difficult, it's just that spreadsheets are, comparatively, much easier to use.

I worked in a place that used both, and the programmers were successful in preaching the benefits and converting some of the excel users, where it made sense. However, I imagine a large majority of analysts using excel in the corporate world do not have that exposure and don't realize there are other alternatives out there, or if they do know about the alternatives, they get quickly turned off from them when they try to import/manipulate the data. I don't think any tool, by itself, is going to push individuals to change. People need to be exposed to the benefits of approaching data analysis as a small software/programming project over the long term. It is short term thinking that pushes people to use excel in the first place.

Except it isn't that simple. Your definition of an outlier may be completely different from some one else's (95th percentile, median/regression method, or simple max/min, some of these are already possible in excel). Then, how is the information displayed? Highlighting cells? Well if you have +10k rows of data, than that won't be too useful. Creating a summary in another column/sheet will add to the already cluttered 'results' spreadsheet, etc...

This is why I recommend using programming based tools for data analysis. Any non-programming tool has to find a balance between the number of features offered and the complexity/ease-of-use of the tool. With programming tools, you merely have to find the right package (or build your own) which essentially results in getting the exact set of features that you need to solve your problem.

I was under the same impression. I tried digging up some old news on the subject, to see where I got the impression from, but Google is only returning results from this latest news cycle.

Wasn't there a number of news stories in the past about the NSA collecting data from telecom companies and such. How is this time different?

EDIT: Found this, from May 2006: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...

Assuming your car has to be towed away (for whatever reason), financially, your best bet is to probably sell it to a junk yard. They will tow it for you, and throw you a couple hundred bucks.

Seems like Google and Amazon may not be interested in capturing the entire cloud market? I get the feeling that they offer these services to offset the cost of their data centers/operations.

You could use google groups (it's basically a mailing list). Pretty straight forward.

We had one for our 'post-college' social circle. It was a good way to spread the word about happy hours and parties, without spamming everyone on facebook.

I would assume that he is referring to the possibility of a confidence crash in tech companies that would affect public markets. Personally, I don't think Zynga is widely held enough for it to have much of an impact, and as you mentioned, the dirty laundry has already been aired.

Well, considering he is now a published author, with a second book on the way, maybe there was some monetary value form that degree after all?

Of course this isn't the case for the vast majority of liberal arts graduates.

I imagine that they would also have a connection to the grid, so that in the case that the solar capacity is insufficient to charge the cars, they could just switch over.

Also, with net metering becoming more wide spread, they could sell back any excess electricity produced from their solar installation back to the grid, which could possibly offset some of the costs of purchasing electricity during periods of high demand.

I'm pretty sure self-driving cars will make traffic better, because it has been shown that most traffic jams are caused by and exacerbated by poor driving habits.

Seems like you may be over thinking this. When I was in consulting, I didn't waste my time trying to track every 5-minute increment, the amount of effort and distraction that would cause would do more harm to the client (due to productivity loss from tracking) than anything else. Taking a 5-minute coffee break, or chatting with a co-worker for 15 minutes all gets lost in the noise if you are working on a project for multiple hours a day. Your level of focus (which is nearly impossible to quantify) is going to have a bigger impact on your productivity, and hence the value to the client, than almost anything else. So it makes sense that you should look to optimize for focus/productivity, rather than 'time spent sitting in front of computer'.

On a side note, there has been a lot of talk on HN about billing clients in half-day and full-day increments. You should probably look into that. At the consulting job, I basically took the total number of hours a day that I was working, and roughly divided it by the percent of time I spent on each project, which also worked for me (we were required to bill hourly). In the long run, it all tends to even out, and as long as your client is happy with the work, and the costs are in line with their expectations, they will not complain.

Series 3. Admittedly, there are a few applications that I use that won't run on ARM, but there are also plenty of alternatives that do. I would imagine that will change pretty soon though.

I think there is going to be a big departure in what developers want, and what consumers want. For the most part, over the last 10 years, those two groups were largely using the same computers and OS's, but that has already changed, and will continue to do so. If Google can get their platform in front a ton of people, the developers will most likely follow (although they maybe using different machines than the consumers).

On a random side note, just picked up a Samsung Chromebook. Loaded up crouton and Ubuntu. This thing definitely puts my 5 year old craptop to shame. If you already have a Macbook, you might not be as impressed, but for the price, this thing can't be beat. So to answer the question " What does your desktop look like a year from now?" Assuming the Chromebook holds up that long (although even if it doesn't, I can easily afford a new one), Ubuntu/Linux for dev(ish) work, and Chrome OS for browsing and non-work stuff (switching between the two is instant, and you can even stream music in Chrome OS and listen to it while in Ubuntu).

Looks like the cells are randomly populated, so my first attempt, I only had three '7's. I had a ton of '9's so I used the 10-10-9-9-9-9.... strategy to safely get me to a higher score, and then did a little math from there to hit each multiple of 7 on the way up.

Definitely a fun little distraction, I should be working though.

I think he did a good job at making the distinction. Not sure if you got the jist of it, but he clearly states that despite the heavy libertarian leaning culture, SV overwhelmingly voted for Democrats the last few elections, indicating they were not on board with the Republican platform.

My take on it is that SV is 'liberaltarian', in that they prefer small, efficient, decentralized organizational structures, but that they also recognize the need for social welfare as a stabilizing force. Additionally, I would guess most of them are turned off by the conservatism side of the Republican party (pro-religion, pro-drug controls, etc), and as such tend to vote for democrats based on the 'lesser of two evils' decision making process. This pretty much describes my views, and I would imagine a lot of others in SV.

This is crazy, are there any comprehensive lists of devices that were affected by this? I am a little curious to see what devices, of many that have failed, may have been affected by this. Not that it would really change anything at this point.