Hacker News Reader

jfruhon Generation X Stymied by Baby Boomers Refusing to Give Up Jobs

Ha ha, those darn baby boomers, refusing to give up their jobs like their parents did! The fact that their parents' retirement was in defined-benefit pensions whereas the baby boomers' retirement is in 401ks that dropped hugely in value just as they were planning to retire has nothing to do with this, obviously.

jfruhon Generation X Stymied by Baby Boomers Refusing to Give Up Jobs

When the media first took note of Gen Xers during the early '90s recession, we were "lazy." Then during the dot-com boom we were ambitious. Funny how easy it is for a generation hitting a workforce when there aren't jobs available to look lazy, or for a generation hitting their late 20s/early 30s during a boom to look like sharp business types.

jfruhon Zagat got Googled

So is this Google's plan to compete with Yelp?

jfruhon How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

Despite the sensationalistic leded about ratting out your brother in law, if you read the details of the article, this is program really about getting accounting professionals to report large-scale tax evasion by businesses they work for or with. The IRS doesn't want your vague reports that someone you know brags about not paying his taxes; they want details and specifics, and they won't pursue it unless the numbers are very large.

jfruhon How Old Is Your Globe?

Well, usually globes tend not to put countries on the map until they're universally recognized. Kosovo's an interesting edge case though!

jfruhon How Old Is Your Globe?

It's also missing Palau (became independent from US trusteeship in 1994).

jfruhon How Old Is Your Globe?

Beat me to the punch! Needs updating.

jfruhon Users First, Brands Second

Exactly. "Brand" is a bit of biz-marketing speak that always makes my hair stand on end anyway, but I've sort of come to terms with it as it refers to your company or organization's public face/perception. But if you're just using it to refer to external corporate partners, it's confusing, to me anyway.

jfruhon Users First, Brands Second

Ugggh, can someone please explain to me why the word "brand" here couldn't be replaced by with "companies" or "partners" or something like that?

jfruhon Profit Profit Profit

A Kindle's main function is to read books, not sell them.

Not as far as Amazon is concerned.

jfruhon 4 Advantages of Self-Employment

If you want evidence of the complete worthlessness of this article, here it is: they list the self-employed tax deduction as a "tax advantage." This despite the fact that it only partially offsets the self-employment tax. You pay more taxes on self-employment income, not less.

(Technically, of course, the self-employment tax is the equivalent of the portion of your payroll taxes that your employer pays on your behalf, which don't appear on your paystub. In practice, of course, your employer factors these taxes into your total compensation, and they affect what kind of salary they offer you, so it's silly to argue that you're not the one paying them in the long run. But the reality is that you pay more taxes on $50,000 of freelance income than you pay on $50,000 of salary.)

jfruhon Do you really need a tablet?

I'm not sure why the author seems so focused on the need to be "productive" with a tablet. For me, the tablet form factor seems to be recognizing a truth that's still emerging, although it's inevitable: much of the time I used to spend reading books and magazines and newspapers for fun or personal edification I'm now spending reading those things or their equivalents on the Internet. And if that's all I'm doing, I'd rather be on the couch with a vaguely book/newspaper/magazine-shaped object than sitting in the same chair in front of the same monitor where I spend all my workdays. I can't tell you how much it's improved my life to have instapaper on my browser on my work computer, so I don't have to make the "this looks really interesting, do I waste work time reading it or lose it forever?" decision like I used to.

That said, I fully agree with nesbot above: if you made me give up one of my gadgets, it'd be the iPad, no question. But since nobody's making me give up any of my gadgets, I'm not too worried.

jfruhon It’s Official: HP Kills Off webOS Phones and the TouchPad

I'm guessing none? Probably his future is counting the money he made for himself and Palm shareholders 16 months ago in the buyout.

jfruhon My Users Say "No Thanks" to Free Money?

There are plenty of studies that show that people will do things for free that they'll never do for pay, and moreover it's pretty easy to come up with intuitive examples of this in real life. Lots of people would be more than willing to help their buddies move, doing many hours of manual labor for free because that's what friends do, with the only tangible reward being pizza and beer at the end of the day. But if your buddy went on Craigslist and offered the monetary equivalent of that pizza and beer to hire movers, nobody would take him on it, as it would be way below minimum wage; if he tried to offer you that money instead of the pizza, you'd be insulted.

jfruhon My Users Say "No Thanks" to Free Money?

Groupon doesn't ask you to put your personal reputation on the line to endorse a product. You're essentially asking people to be pitchmen (or -women) for a product -- which involves putting whatever reputation they've built up among their social circles on the line for you -- for a measly $2. This has an entirely different vibe to it than the Groupon model of "Hey, I love this restaurant, sign up for this Groupon with me and we'll get half price!" The "endorsement" here is less obviously for hire, not least because there's a third-party service in play.

Overall, what everyone is telling you (here and in the comments on your blog post) is that putting links and/or endorsements on a social networking service is much more than just a fee-for-service proposition; there are other intangible qualities that are important, primary among them what your friends on these social networking services think of you. You want to believe that your friends post links to things because they're good, not because they're getting a discount. In fact I'd argue that one of the main reasons people like social media in the first place is that it's a person-to-person interaction that's not commerical in nature.

jfruhon Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

The Xoom ads I've seen are fairly baffling, full of robots and weird spaceship thingies. In contrast, the iPad ads almost seem like anti-marketing. Look, here's what the product looks like! Look, here's what the apps do! Of course they're actually very cunningly designed (it's difficult to get simple things done that well) but they at least let you visualize what the iPad is and what it's for, which is more than I can say for the Xoom.

jfruhon Google to acquire Motorola

One thing I find interesting is that nowhere in the post itself does Larry Page (or whatever flack wrote this for him) say "Motorola Mobility". The only place that construction appears is in the title of the blog post.

jfruhon Google Buys Motorola For $12.5 Billion

How would this fit in with a Nokia-WP7 Special Relationship though? Would MS kill off old and new BlackBerry OSes and just use RIM's old sales contacts to sell more WP7 phones or what?

jfruhon 5000% Increase in the sale of baseball bats on Amazon.co.uk

Pish, the only people who love cricket more than the Brits are the people in the ex-colonies. It's huge in the Caribbean and South Asia.

jfruhon 5000% Increase in the sale of baseball bats on Amazon.co.uk

These loathsome people have no respect for Britain's glorious history or traditions. Real British patriots use cricket bats on their looting spree.

jfruhon Internet-Based Political Movement Aims To Put Presidential Ticket On Ballots

The idea that Americans are crying out for some kind of radical centrist is much cherished by technocrats, but is completely false. People decry partisanship in Washington while continuing to reward the most extreme members of their party, because "partisanship" is generally code for "the other side won't do what I want."

jfruhon Facebook: people outside America don't understand the "interested in" phrase

It's not a translation issue in terms of translating to another language -- many Africans are fluent in English (some speak in natively). It's an issue of cultural translation, which is a lot subtler.

jfruhon The Mysterious Case Of The Craigslist Writing Gig Scam

Can't tell if the numbers were the most commonly advertised ones, but he does note that "Aaron" told him this:

"...all you are doing is calling a company that we provide the number for, pressing the correct (1) or (2) – which we specify..."

If I'm interpreting that right, they're using inside information to get him up the phone tree to the right person (whatever their definition of "right" is).

jfruhon Did Newt Gingrich Buy Most of His Twitter Followers?

Why not link to the Gawker story since (for once) they're the actual original reporters of it:

http://gawker.com/5826645/

jfruhon MTV News covers "The Internet", video from 1995

HEY EVERYONE 1995 NEWT GINGRICH SAYS INTERNET PORN IS CONSTITUTIONAL

jfruhon Fox challenges cord-cutters by sticking TV shows behind paywall

<i>However, broadcast channels do make money through re-transmission rights that they sell to cable and satellite carriers.</i>

Hmm, but I think it's the local stations that make money on retransmission fees, not the networks. Though this is complicated by the fact that local stations are in some markets (though by no means all of them) owned by the networks.

jfruhon Most people have no idea what the word hacker means

Since we're talking about language use, this quote from Kevin Mitnik:

"What News Corp. did, guess pin codes, spoofing voicemails, that is amateur script kiddie stuff."

Is itself kind of interesting, as there's no use of computer scripting languages at all here. He's using "script kiddie" to mean not "someone who uses pre-written scripts to break into computer systems and then boasts of their skills" but rather "someone whose skills I don't respect."

jfruhon Automatically fixing bugs in C programs with Genetic Algorithms

Yeah, I remember hearing about this! Wasn't there also a creepy case where an evolved circuit involved FPGA that weren't attached to anything else in the circuit, and yet were still needed for the thing to work properly? I seem to recall it similarly involved electromagnetic interference.

jfruhon Automatically fixing bugs in C programs with Genetic Algorithms

I've often thought about evolutionary engineering like this, comparing it to biological systems. The human body (and really all biological life) is a remarkable machine -- it runs for decades, much longer than just about anything people build, and under most circumstances can repair itself quite impressively. But if it needs repair beyond what it can do itself, you run into a harrowing mess, with difficulty swapping in new parts, some parts doing double duty, difficulty separating various systems, etc.

It's also not extensible at all, which is a big problem for software engineering. An evolutionarily derived codebase might do really well at the problem that provided the parameters for its initial evolution, but trying to get it to do something else might be difficult or impossible. I suppose you could use more evolutionary iterations to get it to do something else, but maybe it'd be easier to start from scratch at that point?

jfruhon Social safety net harmful to economic growth?

"Economic growth" for who, is the question. Would you rather live in a country that has a better performing economy in the aggregate even if it means the median (not the mean) citizen is worse off?