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reduce··on Couple 'fined' £100 for leaving a bad review
Thanks. I flagged yours too. I want the mods to pay attention and find a way to reduce the hostility of Hacker News.

Several people I know in real life have told me that they perceive Hacker News comments as very hostile, so I know it's not just me. Nothing significant has been done to try to correct it.

reduce··on Couple 'fined' £100 for leaving a bad review
Then you're saying maybe all three of us aren't so smart? No argument here :)

I'm not claiming to be smart, but I'm not going to hesitate for a second to call out people who start putting others down, no matter what.

reduce··on Couple 'fined' £100 for leaving a bad review
EU doesn't exactly make law. They make more of suggestions. Some of the countries do the drastic opposite of the EU "laws", even if on paper they're saying they don't.

For example, many types of racial discrimination are technically illegal in many EU countries. But look at what actually gets enforced, it's unfortunately made to look like a huge joke.

reduce··on Couple 'fined' £100 for leaving a bad review
He's probably thinking of some similar situations in the US where certain types of clauses are automatically void. No court appearance needed, no waiting, no nothing. It's as if the clause never existed in the contract, no matter what people sign.

For an example of this, see non-compete clauses, for most types of employees in California.

reduce··on Couple 'fined' £100 for leaving a bad review
In many parts of Europe (among the countries I've worked) the written word of contracts is worshiped as the ultimate authority. What's "the right thing to do" means nothing by comparison. You sign, you're bound by it, unless you put up a massive legal fight. Not only that, but signed contracts are expected to be used vastly more than in the US.

It's a bit of a culture shock when you see the sharp difference in this respect from how the US treats contracts, at least it was for me.

On both sides you have people saying that the business world will collapse if you treat contracts the way that the other side is treating them. I'll refrain from saying which side I think is right, but I guarantee you that these differences are strong and real.

reduce··on Show HN: Simply Wall St – Pinterest for Stocks in the US, UK and Aus
Doing interesting things here.
reduce··on Tornado Without a GIL on PyPy STM
Am I reading this correctly? Looking at the benchmark code, Why not do a comparison versus the default Tornado setup, which is to fork one process per core? So STM Tornado is allowed to use multiple cores in this benchmark, but vanilla Tornado is not allowed to?

        http_server = HTTPServer(Application(),
                                 xheaders=True,
                                 )
        http_server.bind(port)
        http_server.start(0) # Forks one sub-process per core

[1] https://bitbucket.org/kostialopuhin/tornado-stm-bench/src/65...
reduce··on MetricsGraphics.js – D3-based library optimized for visualizing time-series data
I really wish that there were canvas (non-svg) alternatives to flot, with many graphing features. Flot's performance for frequently updating graphs is awesome.
reduce··on MetricsGraphics.js – D3-based library optimized for visualizing time-series data
Some nice stuff here. My feature request: this badly needs a vertical crosshair for the multi-line charts, to see what are all the values at that point on the x-axis at once.
reduce··on A new team at Reddit
Reddit is a magnet for people who have an unhealthy appetite for over dramatic "justice porn." That's all I'm going to say about your feelings.
reduce··on A new team at Reddit
Wow, didn't expect this. The original founding team of Reddit were awesome.

1) Personally responded to feedback emails.

2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!

3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare.

Hoping for great things!

reduce··on That Time Buffett Smashed the Efficient Market Hypothesis
In the long term, all stocks become worthless and the heat death of the universe occurs.

If you can't state a particular time period over which a finance model's prediction should be valid, then you haven't actually made any prediction at all.

reduce··on German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
Very interesting. I bet that will be a big selling point for people considering this hosting service. Seems that it will be harder to put pressure on hundreds of individual residents, than it is to do so to a big centralized datacenter provider company.
reduce··on German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
So now what happens when law enforcement shows up to the hosting company and tells them they're raiding some servers?

Will this be seen as a way to impede and slow down large scale raids?

reduce··on Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US
In the US it's considered low status because it's considered to have questionable long-term value, due to potential future outsourcing.

He's absolutely right. In the US, software development has always, until perhaps very recently, been considered a very low status career and with low long-term potential. That is, versus one of the classic engineering or medical jobs. By the way, in the US, IT generally means support desk job, which is seen as the lowest of the low. Only very recently has the median software development job approached anywhere near a medical specialist or the classic engineering job, and it's still far below the wage of many US doctors.

I'd say that the US general public is still expecting the imminent outsourcing of all software development, to foreigners making $2/hour somewhere far away, to occur soon. People in the field don't expect this, but that's how outsiders perceive it.

This low-status is a huge contributor to what keeps most US women from pursuing software development as a career, according to women I've talked to. It really is that simple and obvious.

This is also why there's a trend of US software developers prominently adding "scientist" or "engineer" to their job titles. Pure software development still has a low status stigma.

reduce··on Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US
Working for free is completely different, because you're never in a trap where you owe the employer any repayment. I don't really see how you could claim these scenarios are the same at all.

These type of debt bond contracts are the foundation that has been used to legally justify modern slavery for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It's still the legal foundation of slavery in the many places where it's practiced today. Add to that, do you realize the extend to which it's still legally possible to enforce debt repayment in many countries? "Debt" is an extremely bad condition to be in, that can legally allow all kinds of terrible things to happen to you, if you're in certain countries.

Employees should absolutely never be put into the situation where they owe monetary repayment to an employer, in any conditions, except for if the employees break some kind of universal criminal law.

reduce··on Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US
Bonded labor, as some call it, is still quite alive in many/most countries. Sad that every single employee and manager doesn't refuse to continue the practice. I can see what's making it difficult to fight it in unison in some places.
reduce··on Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US
"For fresh grad though, if they quit earlier than 18 months, they have to pay almost a year of their salary, which seems reasonable when there are trainings when they joined the company."

No, that is not ever reasonable anywhere in any situation. May be typical, but not reasonable.

reduce··on We Just Thought, 'This Is How You Start a Company in America'
Yup, pure ego. Competing to be the guy who can show off that he got away with doing the least. It's the adult version of trying to be the too cool for school guy.
reduce··on We Just Thought, 'This Is How You Start a Company in America'
Nice story. I'm so tired of hearing all the "get rich without stressing yourself - by using this one simple trick" folks. Not that I encourage going to extremes for no purpose, I just don't see these as extreme at all. Just determined.

Sharing a room with a few people for a little while to save the last bit of money? I just call that camping and adventure, which some people actually seem to like. Have the commenters here never been camping? Travelled on a small boat? Been in competitive sports? Hiked a mountain? And they cry about sharing a room for a little while? What a bunch of wimps!

reduce··on MIT computer scientists can predict the price of Bitcoin
About 35 million USD in trades on the public bitcoin-paired markets today. About 40 million USD today in total volume for all pairs on these exchanges.

http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/coins/info

reduce··on Amazon.com redesign
Works if I open Amazon in a new Chrome incognito window.
reduce··on Building a Forex Trading Platform Using Kafka, Storm and Cassandra
Simple... versus the tools inside the top investment banks. I'd estimate that the publicly available tools are at least 10 to 15 years behind.
reduce··on Ello Raises $5.5M, Legally Files as Public Benefit Corp.
"which Ello says makes it legally impossible under US law for investors to require Ello to show ads, sell data, or sell the company to any buyer who would violate those conditions"

Quite possibly the silliest thing I've ever seen written in Techcrunch.

reduce··on Magic Leap Secures $542M Led by Google
> It’s rare that a company can stay relatively secretive while raising a huge amount of funding, but Florida’s Magic Leap has managed that.

Only rare because journalists are extremely lazy by default, and need their stories pre-drafted and handed to them on a silver platter, which companies tend to do. Avoiding press is very easy, just don't do the journalists' job for them. :)

reduce··on Why Does Spain Have the World's Highest Concentration of Elevators?
"Homeownership Rates in Select European Countries" -- That graph left out some of the countries mentioned in previous graphs that actually have higher home ownership rates :)
reduce··on Why I Love Startup School
"cheap, no-frills, and amazing content and people. And, of course, little to no introductory remarks."

Love that. Seeing EU events headed in the opposite direction... increasing fees, more showmanship, speakers all trying to literally sell you something, not very genuine or down to earth.

reduce··on Startup School Silicon Valley 2014 Live Stream
Makes me wonder why those bittorrent-for-streaming-video startups never were able to take off.

By the way, it's working now. Just have to keep refreshing.

reduce··on The Toughest Adversity I've Ever Faced
Get out of Montana. Seems you already feel you should. Top people in top cities will laugh at the idea of a degree being everything as much as you do, probably more.

I can't believe this has been up for 4 hours and I'm the first person to suggest this.

reduce··on How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)
The system has not performed "a lock on the target", at least not in the way that the language leads you to believe. The tool is making a prediction, that within a certain level of confidence, and given the present parameters, that firing the missile will result in the neutralization of the target.

There's growing number of ways, both active and passive, that targets can be tracked or future positions predicted. One of the answers on that page hints at this, the other answer is misleading and often not how it's done in many modern systems.

Source: engineered parts of these systems before.

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