theoj

Wow, that post is appalling poor and demonstrates complete lack of understanding of their target audience, namely programmers.

Upfront, it tells you everything you are not getting as an employee... free time, good salary or nutritious food. Then it tells you absolutely nothing about what you are getting... like you know, things an engineer might be interested in... interesting work, spiffy new programming languages etc. Instead they ramble on about how great they are and focus mostly on business figures like revenue. Even with regards to business stuff things sound scary. Revenue slopes you would not ski down on? Makes me think of plummeting revenues.

Been trying to get on Google+ for a few days now, today it finally worked.

>> GLAAD's letter declared. "What our community wants in wireless phone and Internet service is exactly what Americans in general want: more access, faster service, and competitive pricing. On all three counts, we believe that the facts strongly favor the merger."

So let me guess this straight: a merger that reduces competition by reducing the number of market players will get you competitive pricing, more access and faster service. Don't make me laugh.

>> So, what should Citi do? Optimize for security and shut down that feature from their website, or optimize for being able to just wire some money in a rock solid fashion?

In practice what Citi does is neither of these absolute extremes; it just flags transactions over a certain amount (I believe it's generally $5K) and any transactions that the Citi systems deem suspicious. Anything in these categories yields a notification to the account holder, and the transfer has to be confirmed via phone before the funds are released. This is a variation of the "Are you sure you want to do this?" messagebox confirmation in programming.

Most economists will trumpet the increase in societal or collective well-being but will never give you a straight answer about who accrues the gains, who accrues the losses, and what amends -- if any -- should be made towards the economic losers to encourage them to support the proposed schemes. When asked about these matters, most economists claim that these are outside their science. Then they are surprised that people refuse to go along with their plans for maximizing societal well-being.

Ah, free trade. Pretty much all economists agree that the economic pie will get larger, but they are silent about how the pie will be split. Therein lies the problem.

Most economists will trumpet the increase in societal or collective well-being but will not give you a straight answer about who accrues the gains, who accrues the losses, and what amends -- if any -- should be made towards the economic losers to encourage them to support the proposed schemes. When asked about these matters, most economists claim that these are outside their science. They are then surprised that their science is less than relevant and that people refuse to go along with their plans.

EDIT: If you disagree with my assessment please explain your reasons instead of downvoting.

EDIT: Added the second paragraph for clarification.

Well then, why don't we just stick to your statement that privatization is theft. Bonus points if you can show me how your arguments do not fall in any existing ideology.

Is there an argument here? Care to expand?

"That, like most people on this site, you place every person whose thoughts you read into one of a small number of mental "boxes." I, for instance, am apparently a "Looter" from Ayn Rand's novels."

Notice how you placed all the people on HN in a single mental box.

In the interest of fairness, can you tell me more about your outlook and why you believe privatization is theft?

"this does not change the fact that privatization is theft. The former owners of Soviet facilities - the Soviet people - were not adequately compensated for their loss."

There's also the original theft that enabled the existence of the Soviet state -- the theft of land and wealth from the former land holding class starting in 1917. The collectives were created from their lands, and they received no compensation -- in fact in many cases they were persecuted and murdered. Some excuse this breach of property rights by saying that the aristocracy was corrupt, evil, etc., just like today's elites are. It's only the communes and collectives who were "good" and whose property rights should be respected.

Should everyone be equal economically regardless of merit? The guy who does nothing all day long, and the guy who works hard to build a successful dairy firm -- they all should receive the same salary? It is this type of economic thinking that ruined the USSR - when there's no reward for doing good work, then there's no reason to do good work. Why should I work hard when I can rest and get my guaranteed salary?

EDIT: Please attack the arguments not the messenger. I've edited my comment to do the same.

With the erosion in Windows' market share and the increased use of Macs, it was a matter of time before Macs became a target for malware. Based on what happened with Windows and its base of "gullible" users, can't say that one couldn't see this coming. Apple will have to take a close look at securing the desktop against threats that play on their users's lack of sophistication when it comes to computers. It will be interesting to see whether they choose to go the Windows way with more warning boxes and lower ease of use, or find a different way.

+1 Use the right tool for the right job is the proper approach. Right tool depends on your project requirements.

No conviction does not necessarily mean no guilt. And you may want to take a look at a counterpoint, because convictions may finally be on their way:

Matt Taibi - The People vs Goldman Sachs http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-gold...

What I find fascinating about the whole Facebook story is how many lawsuits are connected to it. Zuck vs Winklevii, Winklevii vs Chang, Zuck vs Aaron Greenspan, Zuck vs Paul Ceglia. The Facebook story is the gift that keep on giving... lawsuits, that is. Just when you think things have settled down, there's another interesting twist and another person who alleges he's been defrauded.

It's a low return high risk move. Low return because Social Circles is not a major player or a significant threat. Large risk because it's very likely you will be outted and it's a very large, public failure.

Why would anyone want to do this?

In some ways nothing new here. For example, right now you can type in pi into Google, and Google will provide its value above the search results.

I doubt that the page of links will go away anytime soon. For restaurant addresses and other highly focused searches that rely on public information, that works. However, content creators will fight you mightily if you as a search engine want to use their copyrighted content to generate your own content. What's in it for them, if you provide the answer to the customer and take them out of the loop?

And this now implies that you become more than a traditional search company, you become a content company. That's no easy feat either.

Let me see if I have this right:

You complain about the US not allowing high skilled immigrants in the first paragraph, but then you say you want to hire low skill mechanical turks at below minimum wage in your last paragraph.

You are upset that workers in the US will not work for Indian wages when they have US expenses. Furthermore, you imply that your wages are so low that people prefer the small unemployment benefits instead of working for you.

The fundamental question is this: is lunch work time or is it free time?

I actually subscribe to the view that lunch is free time, and because of this I agree with the parent comment and disagree with Joel dictating my lunch choices. At the end of the day, everyone wants to get something different out of their free time, including their free time at lunch.

- Some people want to relax, so then getting out of the office is the natural choice for them.

- Some people want to socialize and get to know their co-workers better, so going to lunch with the team is the natural choice.

- Some people want to have interesting conversations, so they seek people with similar interests to talk about the topics that are close to their hearts (it's the evil cliques, I tell you!).

- Some people want to use lunch for business and get outside their department to interact with internal clients and figure out their pain points.

It's all about what you want to get from your free time at lunch, and different people want different things.

The job has nothing to do with it, it's about the co-workers. You're not doing your job at lunch, you are interacting with your co-workers.

Do they have another option? If no site had survived the outage, then they may have been on to something. But with some sites surviving the outage, they just have no excuse.

Sure you can blame AWS because they said multiple availability zones in the same region would work. But at the same time there is an expectation that a site like Heroku is knowledgeable enough and sophisticated enough to intelligently process what AWS says and determine what's appropriate for them.

Sounds good on the face of it, except that the evidence points in a completely different direction.

Have you ever seen any of these wealthy people you mention go to Washington to champion a strong dollar policy? I haven't. Have you ever seen Hu Jintao go to Washington to call for a stronger dollar? I have. We all have.

Perhaps the truth is closer to this: The US is in a huge amount of dollar debt, and those dollars will become weaker. It's the countries who are owed money (China) who are generally the inflation fighters.

Not sure if over-emphasizing the site title and the navigational layout at the expense of the content is the right way to go. As a HN reader I came to the site for the content, but in your screenshot the content is small and hard to read.

That said, +1 for applying what you learned, even if it may still need some tweaking...

Somewhat related... Derek Sivers attempted to port CD Baby to Ruby on Rails, but ended up abandoning the port effort after 2 years and switched back to PHP. See his post on why he came back to PHP and what he learned from Rails (from 2007): http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...

In face to face selling you already know who you're dealing with and have prepared to address that person's (persona's) needs. With a website you never know what person (persona) will see it, so you need to cover more angles.

It's more than just about queries. Ruby on Rails is an absolute pig in terms of memory used. That's something you find out pretty quickly if you build your own VPS setup.

Once you increase the scale sufficiently, it's more cost effective to hire a team that makes the code run faster rather than add large expensive servers. This is what's happening now at Twitter.

It's not that Java is now absolutely 100% better than Ruby on Rails, it's just that Java is better for a site of that scale.

People might initially be excited about your idea, but after 3-6 months of you building it and not hearing from you, that excitement might die down or be tempered.

I'd say you need to do a couple of things. First, provide progress updates while building. Once you're done building and you decide to approach them again, re-iterate the pain points and benefits and try to build back that initial excitement. Also, read up on the principle of consistency in sales (for example pick up the book Influence by Cialdini). The idea is this: if you initially got a written and public commitment from the prospects, then those prospects will keep their word. They may also be less willing to flatter you given that kind of a commitment.

One problem with this approach is that if you get lost, there is no way to get back on track... you are off-the-grid and into unmapped territory (literally!) quite quickly. Your map becomes useless and you really can't go back to your computer to print a new map with the missing details. In this case, ink savings gained pale in comparison to convenience lost.

>> Veil-piercing isn't about "transacting business on behalf of the company in a role that doesn't legally exist."

That's what I thought, because it doesn't make sense. But I wanted to give him a chance to defend his statement.

Can you post some cases or background regarding piercing the corporate veil for an LLC based on "transacting business on behalf of the company in a role that does not legally exist"? Who is to say what does or doesn't exit? Based on this logic, a large LLC or LLP would be required to have its whole hierarchy listed in the operating agreement.