richardjordan

I don't get this. Is it a VC firm? They seem fuzzy on details. "We provide startups with funding" then a list of VC partners. Are they one of those 'we help you get funding' companies who actually do the opposite?

Does anyone know, as I've never heard of them.

Care to turn that into a coherent argument? These views are hardly unusual, and many Europeans share them.

Ah yes because Hacker News is the place for a thesis on modern history.

I was being polite: let me be clearer - you are wrong and your comment shows an ignorance of the facts and I suggest you actually read up on said conflicts before spouting nonsense. Better?

If you're referring to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict I was actually present for the start of interestingly, then that's a whole different issue and far more complicated.

Those examples are somewhat extreme and don't support the premise that the US is the least racist society anywhere. You also need to separate out complicated ethnic conflicts that are largely geopolitical in nature than racist in a conventional sense.

Also muslims in India isn't racism it's inter-religious conflict which is a fundamentally different thing.

I think there's an alternative explanation to your anecdotal suggestion black drivers don't pick up white hitch-hikers. Picking up hitch-hikers is inherently risky. Given that in any altercation or conflict the establishment and authorities will pretty much always view the black participant with suspicion and the white participant with favor, as experienced on a regular basis in day-to-day life by said driver, I think caution in not putting themselves in such a situation is warranted.

How can anyone possibly believe this? Not just attacking you but genuinely I find this incomprehensible.

America is a deeply racist society. It's built on the genocide of the Native Americans who are still largely kept in poverty in virtual prison camps we insultingly call reservations, by racist policies.

The legacy of racism against African Americans is still deep and real - have you any experience as a black person in the Southern states? If so then I'll respect your opinion on that topic, but as a White person who came to the US from a different country, and then lived in Texas for a few years, the levels of racism are disgraceful.

The entire hispanic ag-business-driven immigration problem hinges on institutionalized racism.

Then we don't even touch on disparities like over-concentration of poverty in minority communities, incarceration rates, under-representation in positions of power and seniority etc.

Having grown up in the UK, lived in many countries around the world, and now been in the US for 15 years I dispute that.

To fight anecdote with anecdote...

Moving from the UK to the US I was shocked by the pernicious levels of institutionalized racism and the undercurrent of subtle racism. It's everywhere.

There's certainly more of a veneer of tolerance here, which covers up a deep seated pathological racism, which is missing in parts of Europe, so when you experience racism in Europe it's more blatant and obvious.

What you do get a lot in Europe is a lot of discomfort with the muslim minorities - whether white, or of color - which is often falsely equated with racism (because racists are often also Islamophobic too). However it's a mistake to conflate the two. With the religious issues it's mostly a stance on the totalitarian nature of the religion and the cultural practices that adherents look to bring, which are often incompatible with accepted norms and values in those countries (particularly regarding the treatment of women).

I'm very careful with advice. Even more so in personal contexts. The challenge is that there's a four square matrix of outcomes: they follow vs they don't follow; the outcome is a success vs a failure.

If they follow and have success they're a genius for evaluating options and coming to proper conclusions. You don't get any credit for the advice.

If they ignore your advice and it works out well then they just remember you're an idiot who can't be trusted.

If they don't follow your advice and things work out well they can resent you for the imagined "I told you so".

But worst is if they act consistently with your advice (or at least believe they have) and have a negative outcome. Your advice can cause people to avoid accepting their own agency in the outcome, and fail to learn key lessons while passing the blame to you.

Giving advice offers little upside with a lot of downside particularly in relationships you value. I like the suggested approach of talking anecdotally about similar situations in my own life or career, and my thinking and choices, and as far as possible some objective accounting for outcomes.

Humility and support is better than overconfident prescriptions.

Why do people still design pages unreadable on mobile? This sounded interesting but it's unreadable.

Nobody had ever connected the dots?

That's nonsense. I studied Physics in the early 90s and the various possibilities for early habitability used to crop up in conversation - in the common room if nothing else.

Given how many countries and cultures allow women to be treated as property and owned with little recourse it's hard to say this is the last stronghold of slavery. We just prefer not to raise this too often, as it's often the result of religious rules.

Oh, no way. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a genius actor, every role he's played he's been riveting in. He's consistently been one of the very best actors of his generation. One I'd hoped to see for many years to come. I think we may have lost his best years too. Very sad at this news.

EDIT: syringe stil in the arm? Ugh. So sad.

sure... it can be more broadly stated "you have a design problem and/or you're testing the wrong things"

Shout out for Sandi Metz book POODR, and her Railsconf talk The Magic Tricks of Testing, if you're a rubyist (though the principles hold true for non-ruby OO programmers too).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSWYvyc42M

The comments section today looks like a support group for beginners/intermediates who struggled with TDD and gave up, and so want to explain why it's all bunk. I get this. I am not a great programmer. I'm self taught like a lot of you. I had tremendous difficulty grokking TDD and for the longest time I'd start, give up, build without it.

But, I'm here as a you-can-do-it-to. You might not think you want to but I'm so glad I DID manage to get there.

Feel free to ignore because I respect that everyone's experience differs. But the real problem is that there are few good step by step tutorials that teach you from start to competent with TDD. Couple that with the fact that it takes real time to learn good TDD practices and the vast majority of TDDers in their early stage write too many tests, bad tests, and tightly couple tests.

Just as it's taken you time to learn programming - I don't mean hello world, but getting to the competent level with coding you're at today, it'll take a long time to get good with TDD. My case (ruby ymmv) involved googling every time I struggled; lots of Stack Overflow; plenty of Confreaks talks; Sandi Metz' POODR...

Like the OP says - at different stages in the learning cycles you take different approaches because you're better, it's more instinctive to you. I thought I understood the purpose of mocks/doubles, until I actually understood the purpose of mocks/doubles. When used right they're fantastic.

The key insight that everyone attempting TDD has to grok, before all else, is that it's about design not regression testing. If you're struggling to write tests, and they're hard to write, messy, take a lot of setup, are slow to run, too tightly coupled etc. you have a design problem. It's exposed. Think through your abstractions. Refactor. Always refactor. Don't do RED-GREEN-GOOD ENOUGH ... I did for a long time. It was frustrating.

This is a good post. Don't dismiss TDD because you're struggling. Try to find better learning tools and practice lots and listen to others who are successful with it.

It's true that sometimes fads take hold and we can dismiss them as everyone doing something for no reason. But cynicism can take hold too and we can think that of everything and miss good tools and techniques. TDD will help you be a better coder - at least it has me. If your first response to this post was TDD is bullshit, give it another try.

As a long time fan of the BBC (well all my life really) their web written content often disappoints. When it's on a topic I know it's too often wrong or misleading. They need to bring their written web content up to the level of the rest of their media product.

so i need to think about that - i was asked by one of the incubator runners - and a friend of startups everywhere who doesn't need naming here - to do a write up of my experience and i balked mainly because it's hard to do without specifically naming names, and because investors all talk to each other and are always better friends with each other than with entrepreneurs - meaning i'm weak, they're strong, and if i embarrass them i probably end up suffering...

that being said it's been a few years and i should probably get over myself and relate the story - it's just that i know for a fact the investor in question is a litigious pain in the ass and has sued others over criticism of their behavior before

This is true of all investors not just VCs. There is often a misalignment of interest between investors and startups without the founders ever realizing it. I've experienced the situation of raising money where one of the investors had incentives so strongly misaligned that they undermined the investments of the other investors and forced the company down a very destructive path - and though for founders and the other investors all was lost, they were a small investor and actually most likely would consider that they had a net positive outcome when their underlying interests were taken into consideration.

Be very, very careful from whom you take money. There really is such a thing as bad money. No founder thinks they're naive - but we all start out if not naive certainly inexperienced in this regard. Always try to build your company so that you can say no to money if you cannot get the best investors you want in your company, because you aren't so desperate for money you'll take it from any source.

Just my hard earned 2c.

The North Korean stakeholders both inside and outside the regime understand how tailored it is to needing a member of the Kim family at the top. The destabilization is something they fear tremendously. There's a lot of inertia here and many structural problems to changing.

There are groups though that do what you're suggesting with balloons. News does get into North Korea in small doses - but nothing like to the degree it used to get into the Eastern block. It's much more locked down.

I have two kids. One with special needs. I see no joy in a world of increasing instability, rising violence and significant economic shocks.

where did i confuse apathy for lack of sympathy?

The world increasingly DOESN'T send its best and brightest to America to be educated. Wealthy elites often send family members to establish themselves here for the economic benefits of a system controlling most of the worlds resources supported by the world's largest military.

There's nothing particularly controversial in this. Most of these facts have been long reported - just in isolated dribs and drabs over the course of the last decade and mostly people are disinterested in hearing it.

There's nothing particularly extraordinary in these claims.

Is this titled so that we have sympathy with the Bitcoin startups?

and this is why the politicians and the media elites are able to brush off these uncomfortable facts

sadly this is exactly right - the American people don't care - they pretend they do but in reality they will just do what they're told to by the media and the politicians from whichever side of the one party with two faces they pretend they're aligned with

It's already taken hold in countries spanning a very large number of people. It matters in Pakistan for example. Pakistan has nukes. There's a threat there to everyone.

To the contrary I am indeed afraid of the increase in Islamic fundamentalism across the world because of the destabilizing influence. Also because of the detrimental effects it has on global development, scientific progress and human rights (particularly women's rights). With the latter I fear that the more entrenched it becomes the harder it is to roll back. Sharia is a terrible thing for global progress and its implementation anywhere is something I fear, so phobia seems pretty apt and not irrational. Talking with women living in societies where Islamic fundamentalist power is on the rise you will find a very real fear as to what it means for them.

Don't talk to me about that - I'm buying a ranch with farmable defensible land in a remote underpopulated location with good water access, large enough to support friends and family indefinitely. Ya, know. Just for vacations and things of course.

On a serious note (though I really am getting the ranch) I would recommend reading John Robb's resilient communities blog - though his former defense-related work on Global Guerillas is brilliant too (he used to be a military strategist before realizing all these problems boil down to what I refer to above).

It's about resiliency. When things fail, and given our lack of investment in infrastructure, and coming challenges they will, it's important to be resilient and make sure those around you are too. After that it depends on how big you think the bottle neck is we all have to squeeze through to whatever is coming next. I worry it's quite narrow personally, but ymmv.

Finally... that edit to lifestyle is coming. It's just whether it's managed by you or you're managed by it.

Happy holidays.