skookum

101 BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl.

This was a book published in the 70s by DEC. I vividly remember at either the very beginning or the very end of the book there was a section on how to send submissions for consideration in future editions, complete with instructions on how to properly pack oiled teletype tape for shipping. :)

I found a copy of one of the editions of this book in my parent's book stash in the 80s some time after I got a C128. Up until then the C128 had spent most of it's time in C64 emulation mode alternately running a BBS, downloading cracked games while taking some liberties with the telephone system, or playing those games. Starting on that book put me on the path of teaching myself to program.

If the OP is looking for something that changes philosophical outlook, or something that might be relevant today, then I probably disappoint. However in taking the question literally, I'd guess this book set me on the path to the life I live today more than any other single book.

An answer to your question was already in an immediate sibling subthread half an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162574

Protein sources that are not complete don't need to be mixed and matched in any specific fashion. Those depending solely on non-complete proteins just need to make sure they eat a variety and not try to get all their protein from one source. They don't need to eat specific esoteric combinations or even to ensure they cover all the essential amino acids in a single meal.

Eggs - and also milk - are both complete protein sources, so it can be as simple as eating them as part of a wider diet if they are not restricted.

Quoting a factoid about the distribution of actual medical _spending_ doesn't change the incorrectness of projecting CPI onto medical _costs_. There are indices - the BLS maintains one and a number of actuarial firms publish others - that track the costs of various medical services and they all outpace CPI.

The inflation of medical expenses in the US significantly outpaces the standard measures of inflation that you're quoting, generally by at least 3%. The OPs estimate of $500 is much closer to reality than yours.

Have you considered that the glorious day featured in the ad is for aesthetics and mental association, and not actually representative of when most people use their stationary bikes?

I try to get out on the trail when I can, but not all of us live in locations where regularly getting on a real bike is compatible with having a full-time job. Between sunrise/sunset times and weather, in the Seattle area you're going to have to be quite dedicated to get on a real bike 3-4 times a week year round.

Polish barszcz is not traditionally made with cabbage - it's at heart a beet soup. Some variants of the soup made in Ukraine or Russia may contain chopped vegetables and sour cream, but in Poland warm barszcz is a consommé-style soup. There is also a cold variant served in the summer called chłodnik (a literal translation of which would be something like "cooler") which has sour cream in it.

Cabbage soup is called kapuśniak (from "kapusta" which is cabbage). Żurek is a fermented rye soup often called "white borscht" on North American restaurant menus. Another Polish soup worth trying if you find it on the menu and like sour flavors is zupa ogórkowa, which is a dill pickle soup.

Wait, what? The second old people are no longer working their savings should immediately be devalued?

There is some rich irony in calling out the lazy old people sitting on fiat when easily 99.9% of "cryptocurrency people" are sitting around HODLing while they wait for their COINZ to MOON. If contribution is your value argument, at least make a modicum of effort to list some of the great open source work contributed by the cryptocurrency people. It seems that most of the "work" is either minimum effort ICO garbage meant to enrich the principals or is blockchain-for-the-sake-of-blockchain to get a marketing boost off the hype.

Your math ignored both maintenance and property tax on the home. Let's say maintenance costs 1% a year and property tax is 3.5% a year. I'm choosing both numbers lower than likely reality to give your position an advantage and let's say that advantage covers any income tax benefit of paying the property tax. After those 30 years you have a $1214 asset that you've put a bit over $1170 into - that's the original $100 plus about $238 in maintenance and about $833 in property taxes. So your $100 investment has grown by about $44 while the stock investment in your example, after deducting 20% in cap gains, has grown by about $114.

The house by itself is a bad investment, factoring in mortgage interest makes it even worse, then factoring in not paying rent makes it significantly better. How much worse or better it is in the final analysis depends on factors that are outside of many our controls - jobs, family, local market, etc. The decision is not quite as cut & dry as many on this thread make it out to be.

> In my experience it has a chilling effect on actual vacation taken.

This was exactly my experience in two very different environments with an unlimited vacation policy - one start-up, one large established company. The overwhelming majority of people took less vacation than what is typical at most tech companies and a handful took quite a bit more. The latter handful tended to be strongly correlated with people who were underperformers and the underperforming was, at least from my perspective, not due to less time but more down to a mix of general attitude and motivation. The former majority tended to be worried about perception and/or unsure of what was appropriate and thus tended to take less vacation than they otherwise would have.

> Everyone can, all toddlers do it.

That's faulty logic. Toddlers' bones and cartilage aren't fully developed and as a result their skeletal system is more pliable. They have more bones than an adult (270 vs. 206 per wikipedia) with areas of cartilage in between that allow for flexibility which diminishes when the maturing bones fuse in place.

If you know enough to hate bitcoin then you've likely already heard all the standard pro-Bitcoin arguments. By now you'd expect a "this will change your mind" article on the topic to bring up some new angle. Not this one. It's just the usual suspects ("No fees! No government meddling! Financial power to the poor!") complete with the standard sprinkling of opinions stated as facts.

How does the author justify wasting bits on this in 2018? The righting of wrongs: "the result of all this low-quality Bitcoin journalism is that most newcomers never get to learn about all the new and exciting things made possible by Bitcoin’s core technology."

I made no such claim about the author's beliefs. I posited that the author was pandering to an audience with such beliefs, an audience who loves these "tulip mania didn't happen" stories because in their logic they somehow serve as rebuttal to the possibility that crypto-currencies are experiencing a speculative mania of their own.

Even a small amount of time spent perusing Bitcoin fora reveals an endemic belief that if one doesn't sell, one has incurred no loss. Any conversations discussing a realized loss will quickly surface the "weak hands" meme wherein the loser simply didn't have sufficient will or presence of mind to keep HODLing and selling their Bitcoins served to benefit the better investors who were able to buy them at a discount.

Perhaps the author is simply playing to the zeitgeist?

> I'd argue this has an impact on the "savings rate" per employee, but not on the average payout length.

Your argument is only correct if we define the average payout length to only factor in those employees who receive at least one check. However the original quote that you claimed was wrong is referring how much the pension has to pay out on average, which is not limited to those who live long enough to collect a payout. Their average payout length of 3 years factors in a whole bunch of $0 payouts, whereas your average ignores all of the zeros.

All the people dying before 65 absolutely do have a bearing on pension payment length: If an employer promises someone a pension at 35 and they don't live long enough to collect then the employer doesn't have to fund that commitment. Using life expectancy at 65 would only be valid if the pensions were being promised only to those who had already lived to 65 and at the time they were 65.

> I don't see a downside to getting the money as soon as possible.

There are transaction fees, which for the minimum wage shift workers targeted by this scheme, can add up to 2-4% of a day's take-home pay.

This is not true. However there is a target total compensation range for your [level X review ratings] and if the stock price growth results in your future total compensation projecting above your target compensation range you won't get refresh RSU grants.

It's not illegal, but it is against Visa and Mastercard's rules, to levy a fee or surcharge to use a credit card. What IS illegal is to prohibit merchants from offering a discount to induce customers to pay by cash or check, which is why merchants that do so don't end up having their Visa and Mastercard contracts cancelled.

No, this is not why you heard such stories. If you use the commonly accepted definition of 'underwater' as applied to financial dealings which is that you owe more for something than it is worth, then....

... you will never go underwater from holding onto a vested stock grant. (This is the situation the OP was asking about.)

... you will never go underwater from holding onto a vested & exercised stock option if you paid taxes out of pocket.

... you may go underwater if you take on debt to finance the tax liability incurred when exercising stock options and the value of the retained stock subsequently drops below the unpaid portion of the debt you undertook to exercise it. (This is the scenario that led to the stories you refer to.)

What I care about most in a tech job post is not having to see it in the first place. I haven't looked at a job posting since my internships in college and I sincerely hope to never look at one again. I learn far more about a potential next gig by talking to ex-coworkers and acquaintances who are already there than I ever could from looking at a posting.

There is plenty of literature. None of it necessarily agrees with the rest, but Agile proponents over the past 15+ years have produced a copious body of literature. If you disown all of that literature, then all you are left with is some pseudo-religious principles, tenets and values, which is not useful for someone trying to improve a development org. It also make evaluation of its effectiveness impossible as there's no agreement on what's being evaluated.

Living and breathing values and principles entails putting something in to practice which means you need to put a stake in the ground as to "how", instead of just repeating platitudes. If you can't find three people who all agree on what "living and breathing the Agile values" means, then you can't practice Agile at team scale.

> Transparency, accountability

These are concepts, not practices. And 'introspection', while arguably being a practice, is really, really not basic stuff. Introspection with actionable outcome is about as basic a practice as "finding inner peace" is.

> If they're violating the definition of the process, they're not implementing the process.

As seen even in just the comments on this submission, if someone follows the definition of the process as laid out in the literature, they are dismissed as being too process-focused and not truly Agile. If someone doesn't exactly follow the definition of the process as laid out in the literature, they are dismissed as not following the rules of Agile.

Your response, as do most such Agile defenses, suffers from the No True Scotsman fallacy.

The problem is that if, when faced with example after example of something labelled 'Agile' not working, one discounts each as not 'truly Agile', then once one subtracts all those examples of Agile not working from the Agile literature there's nothing concrete left to prescribe other than "keep trying stuff until you find something that works for you."

We bought a Purple and gave up on it after three nights. The foam portion of the mattress compresses a lot and the purple grid on top has this weird property where it holds weight up to a point and then collapses completely after that point - there's no progressive compression property in that grid. Those two aspects of the foam + grid amplify one another to result in something that has deep valleys where you have your most weighted points of contact (for example hips and shoulders for a side sleeper) and peaks where you don't. For me this meant that my legs would be coming at an uncomfortable angle out of the hip valley placing weird stress on my knees and my core/torso would similarly be forced into a weird curve over the peak between hips and shoulders. I woke up every day feeling like I'd been mildly beaten up and my wife compared it to a torture device - she has never experienced back or neck pain in her whole life but three nights on the Purple were close to debilitating for her.

The telling aspect of their marketing/FAQ is they actually tell you to expect this: they claim that years of sleeping on poor mattresses has conditioned your body to the wrong position and so it will be painful for 1-2 weeks while it corrects to their one true mattress. This seems like a load of bs. I've slept on hundreds of mattresses across the spectrum, from quarter inch closed-cell foam pads on top of rocks/roots to various hotel luxury mattresses and everything in between - and never experienced this level of painful need to "get used to a good mattress".

Lenders in the US are just trying to maximize their risk-adjusted profit - there's no conspiracy here. If income alone was just as good as income + debt servicing history for making the statistical decisions required to maximize credit industry profits (decisions like whether or not to lend, at what rate, at what ratio to income/assets, etc), do you think the lenders would pay the overhead of the additional useless tracking? Are you suggesting that Equifax & Co. are pulling a fast one on the US lenders and their armies of actuaries and after all these years the lenders haven't noticed the uselessness of the product?

> other factors (like current wealth and income) are far more important in practice - and this leads to paradoxical and absurd situations

From the perspective of the finance industry, these "absurd situations" are so far below the level of noise that they are effectively theoretical. If you want to discuss "in practice": in practice the users of the US credit system have no "current wealth" worth speaking of (look up the median net worth of US households), and their ability to maintain their existing debt is the defining feature of their financial status.

It's not the pile of debt that increases the score. It's the history of repaying that debt per its agreed terms that does.

While I'm not a fan of the credit bureau system, I understand the reasoning behind it. It's an efficient way for creditors to get access to the needed information. Lacking that, to allow the bank to evaluate your creditworthiness among other things you'd likely have to provide a list of references of past creditors and then your new potential creditor would have to validate those references individually: verify you had credit with them, verify you adhered to the payment terms, etc.

For better or for worse today instead of an on-demand complete graph we've got a centralized cache. This serves the needs of the financial players better (read: cheaper) while putting the PII of consumers at more risk.

I agree fully. It may look like there's fierce competition to someone who has failed repeatedly, but here's what it looks like from the inside: In my experience at three of the big tech companies, we extend offers to everyone who meets the bar. It's never a case of "we have 3 strong candidates, so which one do we choose?". If we have 3 strong candidates at the same time, we attempt to hire all 3 - attempt meaning in competition with other potential employers. If we have 3 weak candidates, we don't settle for the best of the current options - we hire 0 and we wait for more candidates. If you're not getting hired at AmaMicroGoogBook it's not because there's a surplus of great SDEs and some other candidates edged you out for a limited number of seats - it's because you simply didn't make the hiring bar.

There is no clarification to be made. There is no way to reduce taxes on RSUs by holding onto them longer. When $100 of RSUs vest, you get taxed on $100 of income. You can either keep the stock or immediately sell it with no further tax event related to that initial $100 whichever of the two options you choose. If you keep the stock, it is equivalent to having bought $100 of stock at that instant. Psychology aside, the hold versus sell-on-vest decision should be predicated entirely on whether you would have bought that amount of stock with your own cash at its vest price.