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blurryon The state of the freelance job market - Exquisitejobs survey results

Typo: "and the the overall average desired wage".

As a counter-practicality, a 30+ year old is more likely to be legally attached to someone with health insurance.

I know gender discussions make everyone blind with emotion but come on. How do you go from a few hundred casual drinking buddies over the years to blind-drunk nightly excursions? And from "not once do I remember anyone joking about men not being too smart" to "no women ever make any negative comments about men whatsoever"?

Of course "no women, never" argument is just as stupid as, "all women, always" argument. If I made the argument. You took my rather short counterpoint/anecdote and ran away with it. Far, far away.

blurryon Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes

I didn't say anything about your friends or family that you didn't say first. You told us that they constantly make fun of you for not being too smart, or did I misinterpret? I don't think it's bad to suggest that you don't need to subject yourself to verbal abuse from people around you, or, in the case of family, choose to take the abuse with at least a big grain of salt.

blurryon Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes

"Us" men vs. "them" women? Is HN officially a boys' club? I hope not.

blurryon Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes

Ah, the story was asking for it. Slut.

blurryon Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes

Are these your friends or your family? If it's the former, time to find new friends. If it's the latter, a dysfunctional family doesn't need to warp your sense of what the rest of the world is like.

blurryon Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes

Over the years, I've had about a dozen close girlfriends and hundreds of casual girls-night-out buddies. Not once do I remember anyone joking about men not being too smart. Where do you get your "all women, always" from?

blurryon Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters 2010 [pdf]

If you don't want to "quibble" about it the why do you keep posting? If you think this thread is immaterial, you are free to leave.

blurryon Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters 2010 [pdf]

The line break disappeared when I posted. With the line break, it was:

Average US salary in today's dollars:

1930 - $ 250,000

2010 - $ 50,000

So, no, it's not good. When adjusted for inflation, the average American has about 5 times less purchasing power.

blurryon Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters 2010 [pdf]

As overdue as it was, women and blacks being able to vote is not "6 times better".

60 years to 80 years life expectancy is not "6 times better".

26 to 7 infant mortality is not "6 times better".

8% to 30% college graduation rate is not "6 times better".

Estimated hourly wages have actually fallen drastically, when estimated apples to apples (i.e. adjusted for inflation).

Labor productivity is mostly based on advances in technology, and in any event, working harder is hardly the same as being "6 times better" off.

In other words, let's stay within the context of what is actually being argued. Plus, it's rude to open your argument with, You honestly have to ask this question? If you have something to say, you can say it without implying that @samtp is too dumb to see the obvious.

blurryon Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters 2010 [pdf]

Average US salary in today's dollars:

1930 - $ 250,000 2010 - $ 50,000

Add to that the declining purchasing power of the dollar, the growing income disparity and the thinning out of the middle and upper-middle class, etc, etc.

Average life expectancy in the US:

1930 - 60 yrs 2010 - 78 yrs

Clearly, Mr. Buffet's statement is PR rather than fact.

blurryon My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer

What say thee?

blurryon Recommended Reading

If scalability is relevant to your product, this is an accessible classic:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

blurryon The best investment advice you'll never get

The article answers that. Look around "We need active managers".

blurryon Digg v4's Problems are not Technical

And it's pretty ironic to have a writer criticize a rushed release by saying, Digg v4 was also suffering from a surprisingly amount of down time. Kettle, meet pot.

blurryon Forum scraping sites taking over my search results

You can permanently include and exclude sites with Google Custom Search (http://www.google.com/cse/). I added mine to my iGoogle page so I do all my searches from there instead of google.com.

Currently, I blacklist:

answers.yahoo.com

slideshare.net

scribd.com

bigresource.com

experts-exchange.com

blurryon Hacking Women and the Delusion of the Ethical Pickup Artist

http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Secrets-Success-Beautiful-Women/dp...

blurryon Amazon introduces new service: Simple Notification Service

Future enhancements to Amazon SNS – such as notification delivery over SMS – will provide more protocol options and additional flexibility to mobile application developers.

Does anyone have an educated guess as to when the SMS transport option will be available? How long does it usually take Amazon to add a promised feature?

blurryon Help Repeal NY State's Antiquated LLC Publication Requirement

The problem in NY State is not the publication requirement per se, it is that you must publish in 2 newspapers for 6 consecutive weeks, and one of those 2 papers must be this one specific law journal that exists for the sole purpose of taking your $1,500.

The 6 weeks requirement is arbitrary and onerous - if the public was not sufficiently informed after 2 weeks or 4 weeks, is it going to be informed after 6 weeks? Likewise, the law journal requirement is arbitrary and onerous - the journal has no public readership whatsoever so it cannot claim to achieve the purpose of informing the public about your new LLC, nor can it justify the exorbitant advertising fee.

Over the years, there have been multiple lawsuits to repeal the requirement but nothing has changed. It's a money issue, as usual - the media lobby is strong and wants to hang on to these bogus fees. By the way, it takes exactly two minutes to find any LLC on the official NYS website, and it's free.

blurryon The fruits of the feminist revolution: eight hours a day in a cubicle.

I beg to differ. Feminism is described as a poorly defined term only by people who wish it were so, probably out of the irrational fear that equal rights for men and women will somehow lead to the end of the world as we know it. Let's look at facts here:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Feminism: The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes

Encarta Dictionary:

Feminism: Belief in the need to secure rights and opportunities for women equal to those of men

Encyclopedia Britannica:

Feminism: Social movement that seeks equal rights for women.

Wikipedia:

Feminism: A political discourse aimed at equal rights and legal protection for women.

Likewise, when people talk about equal rights, they usually mean equal rights under the law. What's the point of discussing silly made-up rights such as "the right to be as dedicated to work as a childless 21-year-old whose primary goal in life is to climb a corporate ladder"?

blurryon The fruits of the feminist revolution: eight hours a day in a cubicle.

Feminism: a paradigm that advocates equal rights for men and women.

How exactly does having children contradict the above? Which rights should I have lost last month when I gave birth to my baby?

blurryon Bezos, are you listening?

The ratio of books on my wish list to books available for Kindle is about 10:1. If this is typical, perhaps Bezos simply doesn't want to offer a feature that could only serve to get people frustrated.

blurryon Ask HN: How to find startup jobs?

hotstartupjobs.com

twitter.com/startuplyjobs

authenticjobs.com

jobs.mashable.com

crunchboard.com/jobs/

punctuative.com/vcdb/

blurryon [dead]

This doesn't carry even a hint of believability or humor. 8 upvotes for a story that's neither true nor funny?

blurryon Is this Official Google merchandise site?

Registered to Merchandise Mania Ltd, Borehamwood, UK.

blurryon It's Cold Cash, Not Cold Feet, Motivating Runaway Brides in China

Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world.

That makes no sense whatsoever. The population-planning policy aimed at reducing total population, not the number of girls. The male-to-female ratio is skewed because of female infanticide, not "customary preference for boys".

The sad truth is, millions of chinese families killed their newborn girls in order to ensure that their one alloted child would be male because they believed in male superiority. They are now confronted with a self-perpetuated demographic disaster, and the western journalists, as usual, white-wash it in culturally relativistic terms.

blurryon Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

If you have gmail, you can add Google Labs Tasks. Nesting, one-click add from email, etc.

blurryon Beautiful photos of insides of old libraries

Cute kitten photos next. Ugh.

blurryon Ok HN, You Were Right. Unpaid Internships Are Wrong

As wrong as unpaid internships are, you'd agreed to work for the company for a set amount of time on an unpaid basis. Changing your mind after the fact is unfair both to the company and the next-in-line would-be intern whose place you took.

Or, think about it this way - if you are a kid who's been taken advantage of, maybe you deserve to be paid as such. If on the other hand you are an adult capable of making informed decisions and sticking to your commitments, then a couple months at a company whose awesome product you clearly admire shouldn't be that hard.

Take some responsibility and finish what you started. Or at least bow out gracefully by giving them sufficient notice and finding a replacement.