wolframarnold

Yes, it's far too expensive. You can get a rental car for $20/day. The pricing scheme mentioned in the article with $1/trip would be far more attractive, along with drop off flexibility.

What I find missing from this discussion is the safety aspect of wholesale ultrasound. Yes, we've been told they're perfectly safe. That was once said of x-rays as well and physicians were routinely x-raying fetuses in the uertus up until the 1970's. That was before the evidence of birth defects from exposure to x-rays became so overwhelming that the practice finally stopped.

See http://sarahbuckley.com/ultrasound-scans-cause-for-concern and references quoted therein for a good overview of the current discussions on side effects of routine ultrasound screening, including tissue damage due to cavitation and hearing loss in fetuses.

I'd be curious if the distribution of salary data from H1-B filings was more or less the same. Anecdotally for brand name companies, eg Netflix, the selection bias of Angel List data to the lower end seems to be confirmed. The database publicly searchable and I had seen a visualization once but can't find the link.

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=NETFLIX+INC&job=SENIOR+SOFT...

Your judgments aside, we have and are vaccinating our child.

While it's correct that bipedal locomotion and big heads make childbirth more challenging for humans, it still is not a medical emergency. You'd be surprised, if you did some reading beyond what medical school curricula teach, how many of the medical practices that are taken for granted in managed birth have never been rigorously tested with double blind studies, or have had long term empirical studies about effects much later in life. The routine administration of antibiotics is just one of them. An excellent reference on the matter is this book by an M.D. in Australia, and all the referenced cited therein, many by peer-reviewed journals:

http://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Birth-Mothering-Childbirth-Pare...

The entire mammalian animal kingdom is fully capable of giving birth, autonomously and unassisted (if necessary). Human females, too, can tap into that part of their brains, if you let them, and don't distract or scare them with bright lights, beeping machines, cramped rooms, force them to make complex decisions that require cognitive function. Birth is operating from the mammalian part of the brain, not the pre-frontal cortex. If this wasn't true, mammals wouldn't exist. Think about it. As a male, however, you'd have to have seen it to believe it. I'm a male, and I saw it. It blew my mind.

It's heart-wrenching stories like these that prompted my wife and me to have our daughter at home. It was a beautiful birth. Birth is not a medical emergency, but hospital economic incentives are such that they're always trying to make it one.

That depends on the service. If you can afford outages that may be fair game. But if you have a high traffic service that's running hundreds or thousands of hosts, you can't take them all offline at once. Deploys can take hours, so can rollbacks. In that situation with high SLA requirements you can't really "expect" bad deploys.

I wonder what they used as training data?

Unenforceability of noncompetes + hot tech job market == free career insurance

Interesting. What's the rationale for this?

This is actually BMW's second foray into ride sharing stateside. They ran their Drive Now service in San Francisco for a couple of years. It never took off, because there were too few places to pick up and drop off cars, and their all-electric fleet never solved the fleet management aspect, eg charging, etc. Their mobile app also was clunky at best. Coincidentally Drive Now works fantastically well, eg in Berlin, where you can find a car on pretty much every city block. You drive it where you want to go and can drop it off at any public meter. You only pay the distance traveled, in the neighborhood of 0.40€/km. Typical inner city rides work out to a few bucks. It's cheaper and faster than cabs or Uber. It didn't take off in San Francisco, I would speculate comma because they never cut a deal with the city to let them use any parking meter as drop off point.

You can't build a career on that behavior. Especially if you stick around a place for a decade or so, you'd be surprised whom you run into and whose help you might need down the road. Unless you're leaving town and the industry for good, don't burn bridges.

But you can. The Brazen Head in the Marina, Thai Noodle on Haight and a bunch of places in North Beach will happily serve till 1 AM or later and at a quality that doesn't even compare with fast food. In fact since I've moved to SF, going on ten years now, I've found pretty much most of the rest of the country (NYC and LA excepted) to be quiet a sad food desert.

This is why Google canned the whole idea of requiring a human to be alert and ready to take over. They want to get rid of the steering wheel and pedals, because they found in their extensive road testing that their own employees just didn't pay as much attention as they wanted them to.

This is still facing regulatory hurdles, obviously.

I think that's spot on.

Real Estate: The core Bay Area cities, the pinnacle of which is San Francisco, have not seen substantial real estate slumps in either recession in recent memory (the dot com bust and the mortgage bubble). For outlying areas, like Antioch, the picture was pretty ugly, however. Location matters.

Tech jobs: As someone who joined the Bay Area tech workforce in February 2000, just a few months before the market peaked, my observation has been exactly what you describe: * employed people won't see their salaries drop much, they might even see slight increases * some perks will be cut * income from equity packages will be much lower * there will be some layoffs at established companies * some startups will go bust, others will see their valuation drop and fundraising will be a lot harder * there will be fewer tech people employed overall * new arrivals in the job market (eg new grads) will have a harder time and see substantially lower starting salaries compared to their peers just a year prior. Timing matters.

Being a parent of a young child myself, I can very much empathize with this article, and the plight of child care workers. The conclusions are only logical that this is an area where government support and intervention can reap vast societal benefits. There is an increasing body of research indicating that the quality of the care a child receives from birth, as well as the safety of socio-cultural environment a child is born into (which can be controlled by high quality child care), are strongly correlated with how productive a member of society the child grows up to be. Why wouldn't the government want to maximize that? If we can pay for elder care via social security, how can we afford not to pay for child care? Some countries are ahead in this regard.

This is pretty interesting. Aside from the security questions already asked, and assuming they can be addressed satisfactorily, I have this question/suggestion:

Financial institutions all differ in their online offerings and most live in the stone age (i.e. no useful API's), such that accessing transaction data relies largely on screen scraping. One of the biggest make or break moments for services like yours is getting critical mass in coverage of financial institutions. I use two services, Mvelopes and FileThis and have connected dozens of accounts to either, everything from large credit card providers like Chase to obscure credit unions and mortgage lenders. Neither service covers all my institutions. I've offered my help to build scrapers but have not been taken up on that.

I think what could really revolutionize this is creating an open source marketplace for these scrapers that anyone can contribute to. The scrapers would implement a standard API to return data in some common format and would call a number of standard methods to access login credentials, etc. You'd have to develop the framework that these scrapers get plugged in to (also open source) and a test framework. The calling/consuming code of your service can be closed source.

In the long term hopefully this would inspire banks to implement the required API's natively such that scraping is no longer necessary.

Agreed. In fact markets can from time to time exhibit systemic inefficiencies. What this means is that the very fabric of the market itself can give rise to bubbles or crashes. A brilliant book that I found an eye-opening read is by Didier Sornette, a physicist by training, "Why stock markets crash," circa 2003.

I've seen this phenomenon too, and have seen entire engineering teams descend into mediocrity because the companies and their leaders tolerated such behavior and/or had no effective tools against it. I'm curious, too, what tips the HN community has to get such people exposed, mentored or fired, as the case may be.

Some people report that they can get in a state of flow while pair programming. I've experienced this on occasion but I'm unclear on what the exact ingredients are to produce flow while pairing. A big bonus with pairing, however, is automatic and real time code review, architecture review and perhaps even product review. Two people together are a lot less likely to run into the wrong direction _together_ than a single coder.

Switch to Sonic Fusion DSL if you're in their service area (Bay Area, perhaps elsewhere?).

http://sonic.net/solutions/home/internet/fusion/

Far cheaper than Comcast and no gimmicks. The service runs about $50/month with all the little FCC charges, taxes, etc tacked on and comes with an unlimited nationwide phone line too. The speed is dependent on your distance from the central switching station of the phone company. I've had it in two locations with speeds ranging from 8 to 16MBit/s, on par with Comcast. Perfect for streaming any TV show you want to watch.

I was wondering about the HOA restrictions too. Our condo in San Francisco that we live in came with CC&R's that limit how we can rent the unit out. It's permissible only for periods over 30 days and you're not allowed to offer typical hotel services like changing sheets, towels, etc.

I'm curious if the author looked into this.

Before I came to the U.S. in the mid 1990's I geeked out on two grocery bags' worth of VHS tapes of StarTrek Next Generation. Nothing like learning English from the forever affable Captain Picard or the eternally proper Data. I found it very helpful then.

The other piece of advice I have which I didn't see mentioned is to date a local, or several. They care about you and will help you learn. They'll also teach you idiomatic and colloquial language and correct you if you get it wrong.

Lastly: talk to young children ages four through eight or so. Unless they grow up multi-lingually, they don't have a concept of people speaking different languages and will just assume you'll understand and will be able to reply intelligently. They also don't have much experience with accents. For them it's more of a binary thing either they'll get you or they won't, they have no judgment nor enough experience to adapt to you. When learning French that was always my own personal test of how intelligible my speaking was in the foreign language.

You guys are asking some interesting questions in particular about whether people feel they charge too much or not enough. The best expose on that I've seen is in Gerald Weinberg's "Secrets of Consulting" http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0932633013/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...

It's a question that's both externally determined, e.g. "What does the market bear?" and also based on someone's own perception of their worth. It's hard to disentangle the two but very important in order to maximize revenue. What's more the objective question of what the market will bear is often colored by my own perception, which is a recipe to leaving money on the table.

Weinberg's advice is to set your rate such that you'd feel emotionally neutral whether or not you get the gig. If you over price (by your own feeling, not by what the market says) and you get the gig, you'll be stressed to deliver at what you think that price level should be worth in labor. If you under price (by your own standard, perhaps because you think the market will not accept more) then you'll be resentful for working below what you're worth. Having been a consultant myself, I can only advise everybody to challenge the own perception of what the market will bear.

Rails already raises an exception for you if the secret is blank.

In: `actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal/http_authentication.rb`:

    raise "You must set config.secret_token in your app's config" if secret.blank?

The way, we've solved this is to default to a hard-coded secret if the environment doesn't have it.

    App::Application.config.secret_token = ENV['COOKIE_SECRET'] || '<default secret>'

Secured environments like production get their own secret. Developer machines can use the default w/o additional overhead.

The way I understood the article is that this relies on harvesting data from users on your site. As you cannot control which browser your users have, the point here is that this exploit relies on a vulnerability in a mass-adopted browser.

There was a book in the late 1990's, "First Break All the Rules: What the world's greatest managers do differently" which was the write-up of a Gallup study about manager effectiveness. One of its conclusions is the point made in this article almost verbatim, that people leave their managers not their jobs or companies. One of the most powerful sections for the book for me was the opening chapter where they explain their assessment methodology. They compiled it down to a catalog of 12 questions and they found that if these questions were answered positively it correlated with high employee performance, good financial results, good retention, etc. The rest of the book dives into more detail on the reasons for this, one being that each employee's talent is different and managers should try to align talents with business need, focusing on employee strengths rather than weaknesses.

Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0...

Yes, that's correct. I've tried the official Sprint Wi-Fi tethering on an HTC Evo 4G for a couple of days and I was only charged for those days. The device supports up to eight wireless connections. Setup was over the phone and was effective immediately. The last time I did this was in early 2010 and the experience was flawless. It's overall not worth the money to me, though, to leave it enabled permanently. There are some USB tethering apps that require a little client-side setup but they've worked for me as a casual single client solution.

I've yet to see a startup or any company for that matter that signs over ownership of assets bought with company funds to rank and file employees.