Hacker News Reader

curtisholmeson Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

Not sure about the UK, but as someone who lives in Canada and works at a tech company, I've recently been getting a blitz of linkedin messages and facebook ads encouraging me to apply to facebook as a remote employee.

curtisholmeson Mt. Gox under DDoS attack as bitcoin price surges

to me, the surest sign of an impending crash is when people start to think something is infallible

curtisholmeson If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

No, "was" implies the past indicative, which means "If I was your cloud provider in the past", whereas "were" implies the subjunctive mood, which expresses "various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood)

curtisholmeson Population Pyramids of All Countries (1950-2100)

Higher fertility rates are more likely the cause

curtisholmeson People Hate Email That Names Them

I always assumed that this was a tactic to get around spam filters.

curtisholmeson Heavier people should pay more to fly

> Once they've raised the price for fatter people, why, as a business, would they lower the price for thinner people to balance it out? Why not just take more profit?

You can't assume that raising prices will cause your profit to go up. Higher prices (for heavier people) means that they are less likely to buy plane tickets, which could potentially mean less profit. So, you have to counteract this by incentivizing less heaver people to fly, by lowering the price for them, or by lowering the base ticket price slightly. Having heavier people pay more wouldn't necessarily get more money out of people, it would achieve having less weight on the plane so that fuel costs are lower.

curtisholmeson The 'Startup Boom' is a disguised jobs fair for big corporations

> A giant Internet company such as Amazon can leverage the output of a software engineer far more efficiently than a startup

Really? I doubt that. I would imagine software engineers could be much more efficient without the drag of a large company

curtisholmeson I quit my job to do a startup.

Why do you firmly believe that your first startup should be on your own dime? I have two issues with this. First, if you can't convince investors to give you money, it might be a sign that it will be hard to convince users to use your product. Also, it's a bad risk management strategy. You seem to be already investing over $10,000 of your time in this project, so if it fails, you will feel it regardless. An upside would be that you have more control and might worry less about dilution, but at this stage I would be more concerned about having the best resources to create a great product.