yalurker

As long as we're talking incentives, your plan gives a huge incentive to fire someone just before the end of their first year of employment. At the end of the year you're faced with paying a recruiter 2 years of salary, but if you fire them you just got a year of work for free.

The article mentions "arrested for a felony" not "convicted". Obviously these are very different things, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people have a problem with people found innocent still having their privacy invaded, not to mention the incentives it gives authorities to arrest more people. It almost encourages 'fishing' by arresting people with little to no evidence (or on unrelated charges) to get the DNA sample, and then releasing them without pressing charges. Groups that already feel targetted by the police might be wary of policies which give incentives for making questionable or spurious felony arrests in order to get data for investigations into future or previous crimes.

"weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school."

Wow. Since the rest of your post seems to equate "top-tier school" with the Ivy's (plus maybe MIT/stanford or whatever) this is just amazingly wrong to the point of being offensive.

There are tons of smart, driven and dedicated high school students in America who have no chance of getting into Ivy League schools. If you're lucky enough to be born into the right family so that you can go to the right private jewish prep school in one of a handful of posh suburbs, then being smart, driven and dedicated means you can probably get into one of the Ivy schools.

For every kid going to a public school in the midwest, who has to check the "will need financial assistance" checkbox (if the application fee alone didn't make them skip applying) and doesn't have any legacy or connections, then applying to Harvard is a lottery ticket even with perfect grades, stellar test scores and a long resume of extra-curriculars.

There are plenty of smart, driven and dedicated 18 year olds who won't be heading to Harvard or Yale next fall. Admittance to one of those schools correlates more with growing up privileged than it does about intelligence.

I'd be more excited if they gave me the option to disable the annoying "spin the map when you try to pinch-zoom" feature. I've never wanted my phone to give me a map where north is some arbitrary direction spun with my fingers and it's difficult to zoom without accidentally rotating the map.

// I know it's off topic, but it makes the map barely usable and I can dream that some google engineer will see my plea and consider it.

Account created 45 minutes ago, to post a wildly unlikely and almost certainly embellished if not entirely fictitious anecdote.

What is it about sexism on HN that brings out every troll, sock puppet, white knight, astroturfer, and any other internet message board cliche?

The most sexist thing I've ever heard in a decade of real world work and interactions in the software industry can't hold a candle to what anonymous internet posters apparently see on a daily basis.

How? Because parents, teachers and mass media said to 'do what you love and the money will follow' or some variant, so kids picked majors with no demand in the labor market.

Because affluent, well-connected kids got humanities degrees at Ivy league schools and then used their connections and the prestige of the school to secure high paying jobs, and kids from blue-collar backgrounds didn't realize they can't do the same thing with a humanities degree from the local college.

Because kids who should have gone to trade schools or entered the workforce after high school were convinced they had to go to some college, so they wasted a few years studying something they're not good at and don't care about, so they didn't learn anything to make themselves more employable than they were before they started.

To play devil's advocate, the moment the government gets involved, so do politics.

Contraception and sexually transmitted diseases - will the religious right / moral majority voters turn against a representative who supports medical research for these?

What about diseases associated with lifestyle - smoking, alcohol, obesity. Will a parent group ask why X million is going to emphysema research when it could have gone to childhood cancer research instead? What about the anti-vaccine groups? Vegan/Vegetarian groups? Whatever other special interest group or political viewpoint?

I really don't want to see Bill O'Reilly or Rosie O'Donnell on tv expressing their outrage at why funding is going to curing the wrong diseases/disorders.

Does anyone have experience with cost of living in the bay area vs Austin, TX? According to the cost of living calculator on CNN Money, $120,000 in San Francisco is equivalent to $70,000 in Austin.

Has anyone here moved from Austin to Silicon Valley or vice versa? How accurate are the online cost of living calculators to what you experienced in person?

Google says the group of major players colluding together in a joint bid for patents is anti-competitive. Google did not want to join this anti-competitive collusion. How is this inconsistent, shocking, or bad?

Couldn't the simple explanation be "If we join forces with Microsoft and Apple to jointly buy these patents, the DoJ is going to come down on all of us for illegal anti-competitive behavior"? Why are people acting like Google did something wrong by not wanting to join the cartel that they are now publicly saying is anti-competitive and that the DoJ should impose limits on?

There is 'general public' and there is 'tech-savvy android users'. The former you have probably characterized correctly, but I suspect you are underestimating the size of the latter. As the grandparent mentions, if people are posting on forums to help support the devs, then at least some people are being persuaded to use the service because they believe they're helping the developers.

Many people do go out of their way to support independent musicians or indie game makers. It's not unreasonable to believe that there are people who want to help support small mobile development shops.

I down-modded this comment, but since the user probably made it in good-faith I'm going to explain why.

This would be a good comment on reddit - short, opinionated and easy for people who share the sentiment to upvote to show their agreement.

However, it doesn't add anything to the discussion. It's not insightful or relevant, it just adds noise to the discussion. The community here generally tends to try to keep the discussion more thoughtful with less short, funny quips, and following that ideal this comment does not belong.

I'll reply here though it's more of a general response to all the people who replied. First, I'm not sure why I got so many downvotes, I believe my response was quite civil and appropriate, my intention was to be helpful.

Clearly many people here do not view "USAian" as an offensive or derogatory term. I'll try to explain why I believe it to be inappropriate and hope I can do so in a polite and effective enough manner to avoid more downvotes.

"USAian" reads to me as someone who, under the guise of disambiguation, is intentionally being diminutive. Very rarely does a situation occur in which "American" as a term for the people from the US actually result in confusion versus the entire continent. It seems most likely that the speaker is using it to intentionally point out the unimportance of the USA to counter an implied American self-importance.

You're using a term for a group of people that they would never use for themselves, which is a strong indicator it may not be a desirable label. Further, given common themes in current global culture, it is very easy for the term to be taken as an intentional insult, as if the speaker is "putting them in their place".

Whenever I see something like "USAian" I assume the speaker views Americans as self-centered, imperialistic, unworldly or similar and is using the term to intentionally remind the reader of the significance of the rest of the Americas, with the implication they need this reminding.

But, based on the responses, maybe I'm an outlier. Hopefully the above clarified my original response.

As an aside, using "USAians" in your writing is probably not what you want here. Intentionally mangling the name of a group/nationality because you don't like the standard naming convention or because you want to get a little jab in to show your distaste for the group just undermines your credibility.

If I were to write a valid political commentary but use "Dumbocrats" for Democrats or "Republitards" for Republicans it would be hard to take me seriously, right? When someone online writes "USAians" it's very difficult to regard the rest of their writing as legitimate and not trolling or intentionally smug/antagonistic.

The opportunity is that they could have more customers. Many people are canceling their cable subscriptions because the price is too high for the value it offers. If cable companies allowed customers to have only a few channels that they cared about for a lower fee, many of these people would keep some level of cable subscription.

This comment is so absurdly wrong and offensive I had to read it several times fearing I was missing some sarcasm or satire. I'm sure you didn't mean it as such, so here is some information from someone who went to school in the midwest.

Schools in the midwest do not focus on "skills associated with living on a farm". Even in agriculture-centric Iowa farm labor is about 8% of the population, the other 92% of people are employed in offices/stores/factories/etc. For comparison, 5% of workers in California are employed as farm laborers for some part of the year.

The schools entire focus is on university preparation (often to a fault, many students would probably be better suited by a more vocational focus). No public school is teaching anyone to read the bible, and to my knowledge private Catholic or other religious schools are no more common in the midwest than in New York or California.

Ignorant stereotypes based on state/region are just as foolish as any other ignorant stereotype.

As a counter anecdote, there is a CS lecturer at my alma mater who actually did get a job directly due to taking code (a physics simulator I believe) from some company's server.

He was careful to end the story by reminding students that things have changed a bit since his youth, and what he did would be multiple felonies now.

Unless I'm missing something, I don't see how your twitter influence is important to any job except for paid endorsements.

If I'm hiring an engineer, a project manager, or a designer, I care about their ability to do the job, not about how much they influence their twitter followers.

Income for Fight Club fans is interesting, apparently correlating with both very low (<25k) and very high (>200k) incomes. I suppose a couple themes make sense with that data, the low income group presumably agrees with the anti-materialism message and rejection of following cultural norms of corporate careers. On the other end, the high-salary group is possibly the intelligent non-conformists who took risks which were rewarding (entrepreneurial or otherwise) which resulted in high incomes.

That, or being a fan of Fight Club means you're more likely to mess with online surveys...

I think something must have changed since that post. As displayed to me, I'm at 495 karma as of the writing of this post, but I don't currently have the ability to down-vote comments.

Actually, they don't specify who gets quoted a higher price initially, they just say it was different.

Based on the dealer's quote, it seems he starts higher if he expects more negotiation from the other party... are men or women more likely to try to negotiate more?

Also, they only talk about the initial offer, not the final price the car sold for.

Overall, a pretty weak article. They need to provide much more information. Just knowing that some group got a different initial price than some other group is kind of meaningless.

Guys, he's a troll. Stop feeding the troll. His profile claims he's 13 years old, whether that's true or just part of the trolling I don't know or care, just beware you're getting pulled into someone who is trying to have an argument for the sake of having an argument.

"I don't see why being too sensitive is seen as somehow worse in the startup/developer community than being too insensitive."

I'll venture a guess: because many of us find it incredibly tiring and annoying to have to constantly stop and think "is there any possible way the following sentence could be interpreted as prejudiced against any group?" when communicating.

If person A says something non-sexual and person B finds a way to make it so (ie "that's what she said") we think person B is the dirty minded one, not A. However if person A says something non-racial and person B finds a way to make it so, we act like A has committed a grave offense and needs to apologize.

Too many people in America can't look at an ink-blot without seeing sexism or racism or discrimination of some stripe. Being "too sensitive" is often just causing controversy or problems where none needed to exist. It also makes it so that legitimate discrimination is harder to notice because it gets lost in a sea of false accusations.

The tl;dr is: save the outrage for legitimate discrimination, don't waste time & energy trying to manufacture it everywhere

There was a time when people thought the primary purpose of an mp3 player was to play pirated music, would you claim that an article about a new mp3 player was "advocating piracy"?

Stating that a piece of software exists is hardly "advocating" using it for illegal purposes. Most of the usage of torrents probably is copyright-infringing downloads, but that's not its only purpose and that doesn't mean a journalist can't talk about it.

What if you are moving from a low cost area to a high cost area?

I just checked out an online cost-of-living calculator and my salary in Austin would have to increase by 2.6x to have the same quality of life in Palo Alto.

How many HR types are going to realize that 50 in Austin is 100 in San Fran or Manhattan?

Wow, reading this didn't give me any sympathy for her at all. I'm reminded of the episode of South Park where Cartman feels bad only about getting punished, no actual guilt or remorse for his crime, and fails to understand how the other kids can feel bad in any way other than because of punishment.

She steals someone else's work, gets caught and sends an arrogant, rude email with absurd claims (web is public domain) and then when she is hit with the internet backlash, she writes a post that it's not her fault because she was overworked and throws in an insincere apology where she still clearly doesn't believe she did anything wrong ("I think I did a nice job for you").

The original article didn't irk me nearly as much as her rebuttal. Quite frankly, if this really does put them out of business, they deserve it.

While you are correct that almost everyone believes themselves to be "above average", the HN demographic likely is mostly above average individuals.

Also, not everyone claiming high intelligence is just arrogant or deluded. I'd estimate myself at high intelligence for fairly simple reasons - scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized tests, graduating summa cum laude, etc. I suspect a good number of HN posters have the same (or better) educational achievements I have to base our self-assessments on.

The whole gender wage gap issue tends to set me off, as it is filled with "lies, damned lies and statistics" and half the arguments seem to exist in a fairy tale world, so this may get a little ranty, but I'll try to keep it on the level:

OF COURSE THEY DO! As someone born in the 1980s, the gender norms of the previous generations had already been blown away. Schools are filled with female teachers, administrators and policy makers. The bias inherent in the system is already in favor of females, and yet we pile on extra focus and opportunities for girls at every level from kindergarten through college. We celebrate every female accomplishment while any sign of male over-achievement is viewed as being a manifestation of discrimination.

Today, women are more likely to graduate high school, get a phD, go to law school, go to medical school. Less likely to go to jail. How is anyone surprised when women therefore end up making more money? The horribly flawed, over used statistic about women making less than men has been shown many times to be due to hours worked, aggressiveness in pursuing promotions and raises, and other similar factors.

To compensate for women born before the 1970s getting the short end of the stick, our culture has given girls born in the '80s and later every possible advantage. This news article isn't shocking, surprising, or novel - it was inevitable.

/end rant, goodbye karma

I don't think eating out is really "conspicuous consumption" (unless maybe you're dealing with very-high end, trendy "see and be seen" destinations).

What you've presented seems like a perfectly rational choice: by moving to a lower-rent apartment they have more money to allocate towards their food budget. If a $5 burrito saves me 30 minutes of cooking, that's a great trade for my time/cash budgeting.

If it's in a roth account, isn't your investment horizon decades away (assuming you're not already in your 50's)? Why is "a 5 year investment to see a decent return" a negative?

Interesting read, a couple things come to mind though: how does "the people who have ok cupid profiles" vary against "the general population". Several things I suspect are skewed because of the population bias.

Also, they say most of their users are urban, but I'm curious if people aren't prone to list themselves as the nearest big city rather than where they really live. For instance, I suspect everyone within 45 minutes of Des Moines is listing themselves as living there, rather than the tiny farm town / suburb they really live in.