kjackson2012

I worked for Yahoo in the years surrounding the Microsoft debacle. Let me tell you in no uncertain terms that Yahoo was the worst company I worked for.

I had very little work to do. Period. End of statement. I spent most of my time doing practically nothing except playing ping pong and foosball and getting paid for it. A lot of my coworkers and a lot of Yahoos were in the same boat. Needless to say, that once the Microsoft acquisition failed and the layoffs started happening, most of us were out of there.

On top of that, there was very much a prima donna attitude around Yahoo, with a great deal of self-entitlement. I remember a couple of threads on devel-random complaining about the lack of ping pong balls, and how that insulted us as Yahoos since it meant that management didn't trust us. Oh the humanity of not providing everyone with $2 worth of ping pong balls!

Yahoo was filled with lazy workers, and an extremely fat layer of lazy management. I vaguely remember Rasmus running a script that calculated around 70 employees per VP. As well, the internal politics at Yahoo was astounding. One of my friends worked on an iPhone app on his own free time, and when he tried to get approval, it was held up for months because people were arguing over things like color schemes, and which group should own the app. It was pathetic.

I like what Marisa Mayer is doing. I think by getting rid of some privileges like remote working, it is enforcing a discipline that hasn't been at Yahoo, at least during the years that I was there. Showing up to work is a small price to pay for being paid a great wage and having the opportunity to work for what will hopefully become a first class company again. People need to show up and work and interact with their peers, instead of hiding at home and people not knowing wtf is going on with them. Sure, some people will quit, but quite bluntly, anyone worth their salt would have already left Yahoo by now. Anyone who is happy working in the environment that was Yahoo over the past 5 years is not an A player by any stretch, so it's safe to assume that you can afford to lose them.

In Canada they have a system where you input a PIN number every time you use a credit card at a POS.

I've heard from my Canadian friend who owns a Shoppers Drug Mart, that it has cut down chargebacks to almost 0.

Why they haven't implemented this in the US I'm not sure. The only problem is that if they figure out your PIN, it makes it very hard to fight chargebacks from the point of the consumer. But we all know that the CC companies don't care.

The one thing to note is that it's very hard for the CC companies to lose money with fraud. Usually the merchant or the consumer is on the hook. Then the issuing bank, etc. They're last in line, so their incentive to make drastic change is nil.

They can't claim the merchants' money as gross revenue, if they are using GAAP. It's the same issue that Groupon ran into and got slapped for.

No, because HN doesn't have a good way to manage comments the way Reddit can. In Reddit, it's easy to close an entire thread if you're not interested in it, but HN natively does not have this facility. I've seen some hacks that allow this, but if it were available natively on HN, it would make perusing the comments a lot easier.

It depends on what your goals are, and what foods you eat. I eat A LOT of spinach, it basically replaced bread, pasta and rice for me. As well I eat bell peppers, broccoli and other veggies. They may have some carbs in them, but not a whole lot.

I mentioned I kept track of all the food I ate in June 2012, and even after increasing my calories after going on low-carb, I still lost weight. What part of that did you not understand?

There are plenty of ways to lose weight. Cutting calories is a very effective way of losing weight.

This doesn't discount the fact that cutting carbs also works. In my case, it has been working spectacularly. I believe that I don't need to cut calories or cut the amount of food I eat, and still lose weight, by choosing food that is very low in carbs. I limit myself to 1 granola bar per day, plus whatever incidental amounts of carbs I eat through other means, and I've been able to lose a lot of weight in a short period of time. I don't overeat meat or fat, I eat the same diet, just a lot less carbs.

A basic text on biochemistry will educate you more than this "expert". You really should educate yourself properly instead of following random web sites that confirm your own biases.

Carbohydrates ARE converted to fat under normal dietary conditions, via insulin. If this metabolic process was "rare" as he states, then diabetics that require insulin injections wouldn't need them often.

I don't know where this "expert" is getting his information from, but it's a basic human biochemical reaction to form fat from blood glucose, via insulin.

"carbs are very rarely converted into body fat".

Yeah, you probably need to brush up on your biochemistry before you make statements like this.

I'm currently on a low-carb diet.

Since June 2012, I've been tracking my weight almost daily, the food I ate, and the amount of times I've worked out. I drastically increased my workouts from October to December, working out almost 4-5 times per week, and I gained 10 lbs. This was accompanied by a change in diet, since my company started offering free lunches.

In January, I went with low-carb (less than 30g of carbs per day), and besides cutting out most carbs like bread, pasta and rice, I increased the amount of meat and vegetables I ate. I actually eat more after being on this diet than before. As well, I cut my workouts down to 2-3x per day. Since then, I've lost 15 lbs. So, with less workouts, more food, and within 8 weeks, I've lost more weight than any period in the last 8 months. When you look at the graph of my weight over time, you can see that the only significant factor in weight reduction was my low-carb diet.

I used to buy from buy.com often, back during the dot com bubble. They were pretty big then, and they had pretty decent deals. Then mid-2000's Amazon stepped it up with their free shipping and lower prices, and basically buried buy.com.

It's a cool idea, but has Google actually guaranteed any certain level of support? What if someone ends up creating a site with a huge amount of bandwidth, and then Google pulls the plug?

I know that the offered amount of bandwidth is drool-worthy, but realistically how much of it can be used without drawing the ire of Google and getting shut down?

This was extremely well-written. It's a shame he had to sully his good name by taking the easy route and make up quotes, etc. Hopefully he can bounce back and revitalize his career.

Mainly speed, usability, etc. If you have a large spreadsheet with tens of thousands of rows, trying to scroll back and forth makes it unusable.

The only thing holding me back from going completely to Google Docs is the spreadsheet. For anything real, the Google Spreadsheet is simply not usable. It's a great proof of concept, and it works for small, unuseful spreadsheets, but for doing anything substantive, Excel is several orders of magnitude better.

I don't care if I need to install a separate, native executable/plugin in order to get better performance. If Google offers something that is usable, I would gladly switch to Google Docs.

No they do not need to attempt to contact the merchant. Especially companies like American Express, they will usually chargeback first and ask questions later. In fact, if customers call in to ask what a particular charge is, they will ding the merchant.

No, they don't serve the same purpose that market markers and specialists do. MM and Specialists serve to stabilize the markets and are obligated to create and maintain orderly markets.

HFT have no such obligation, so they can create liquidity and remove it whenever they want. They caused the Flash Crash in 2010 by removing a large amount of liquidity when the markets needed it the most.

If HFT were forced to maintain liquidity like real market makers and specialists, then I would have no qualms with them. But they want to have their cake and eat it too, they say they provide liquidity but only when it's convenient for them, and that is the part that is total BS.

This is why I strongly believe that regular people should not learn how to code, despite all the "you should learn how to code" articles.

Excel is a really good example of how easy it is to get up and running, and how easy it is to get yourself into a lot of trouble. You might not need to program per se, but you do need to know how to DEBUG and TEST your programs as well. This is something that most people are loathe to do. It requires a great deal of discipline, and even though in finance you're supposed to test spreadsheets during internal auditing, most auditors aren't trained in proper testing/coding, so it ends up being ad hoc. In fact, it's scary how much intermediate financial statements are rubber-stamped/robo-signed by people in the finance, usually because they are pressed for time.

Does anyone have any particular recommendations on which one is better? I don't mind paying for iExplorer, I'm just wondering if there is any issue with reliability/safety/security with either of these two.

I switched over from Windows to Mac hardcore for 3 months as well. I did all my development on Mac and used Mac tools for everything.

I simply didn't enjoy the change, so I switched back. It's just personal preference, but I didn't like switching keys, or having to do finger-Twister in order to get certain things to work. I found that most of the programs were at best equal to Windows-equivalents, and most were much poorer.

It's just personal preference, I'm not trying to incite a religious war. I can adequately still use the Mac, and my wife had no such problems switching to the Mac, but I personally prefer Windows. The one thing I really despise, though, is Finder. I believe Windows Explorer is clearly superior to Finder in that sense, but then again, I think Windows 7 Explorer is a downgrade from Windows XP Explorer, by an order of magnitude.

It seems ridiculous that an "intelligence" organization would upload files to a server that identified themselves so blatantly like that. Could it be that it is some ruse of some sort? I don't doubt that someone broke in, but would it really be CSIS?

I would agree that before, the risks from injuries like concussions were not known.

In this era, however, most people playing these contact sports like football and hockey know about them. And if they play at a high-enough level such that they can play in college, then the level of care and attention they get is even higher. If they don't play at a high enough level, their career effectively ends at high school.

And it's in the best interest of colleges to pay heed and educate the students on the risks as well. It's not just the NFL that is at risk to litigation, it's also the entire college system. Given the amount of litigation that colleges face, they also probably pay as much attention to things like concussions and career-ending injuries as the NFL does.

So I disagree that these days most people don't understand the risks. I believe the risks are well ingrained throughout the entire system. And people are willing to take those risks, which is their right.

I don't dispute any of that. My point is that it's a risk that everyone, to a great extent, knows about and are willing to take. Most of the NFL players don't care about the health effects until it gets extremely drastic, they are willing to risk their health to get the chance to make a life-changing amount of money. Some people, like Peyton Manning who suffered a grave neck injury, already have the money, but want to do it for the sheer competitive thrill.

To put it into context, it's similar to a couple of college grads spending all their time trying to make a startup. Their chance of success is extremely small, and yet they are still willing to go for it. And if they work 100 hrs a week, they could suffer health problems too, including physical and mental health issues, like depression. There are several stories of startup founders committing suicide because of their lack of success.

How would you feel if a bunch of non-practitioners were sitting around, and added regulations that limited your ability to form a startup because they feared the risks that you were willing to undertake for the chance to "make it rich"?

Where did I say that the majority of players have million dollar contracts?

I hate when people complain about football injuries. It's the risk and conscious choice that athletes take in order to make an enormous amount of money. If I were able to make millions of dollars for 8-10 years and risk having concussions and other physical problems later on in life, I would probably take it, especially if I came from an underprivileged background.

The real tragedy is that 80% of pro athletes go bankrupt because they don't know how to handle their own money. They made a life-changing amount of money, and they waste it all because they don't have proper guidance in terms of how to retain most of it. THIS is something the NFL needs to concentrate on, that these young kids don't blow all their money away because of immaturity and arrogance.

At least in his particular situation, committing suicide was not rational because they hadn't even gone to trial yet, and there was still a very reasonable chance that he could have escaped the charges.

If presented with several viable options, and a person chooses to end his life instead of pursuing those perfectly viable options, doesn't that mean he had some sort of mental issue? Whether it is depression or something else at that point is just splitting hairs, in my opinion. If he could have had access to some sort of mental health professional, maybe he could have gotten the treatment he deserved so that he remained alive.

As usual, ChuckMcM steps in as the voice of complete reason.

I have no doubts that we are undergoing climate change, however, since when have we NOT undergone climate change?

We have had catastrophic ice ages and the Medieval Warming Period, when the Earth was warmer than it is now. All without the help of man-made "greenhouse gases". We know that extreme climate changes have occurred in the PAST, and we know that extreme climate changes will occur in the FUTURE. What makes THIS particular climate change so different and more significant from the previous ones? Just because we happen to be alive for this one? A theory that only answers one particular observation but can't explain other observations doesn't feel particularly valuable to me.

Submitted a resume as a junior IOS programmer and got hired as a "solutions architect" and "R&D head"? That doesn't even make sense.

Sorry but I smell troll-bait here. I'm flagging this post.

If the report is accessed via HTTP, I wouldn't be surprised if the clocks on the government server are off by a few ms, so all the HFTs that are pounding the URL are trying to get access to the data. The first one who got it made their trades before everyone else.

Sometimes you hear things that instantly change your views on the world.

I have to say that this above post, in about 10 seconds of reading it, has completely changed my views on assessing risk.

The idea of quantifying risk by counting the number of mistakes you are away from catastrophic failure is an excellent way to visualize risk. It's a simple way to calculate risk, and an even easier way to teach my kids. Thank you.