The key difference is they traded privacy for personal trust and rapport. When you live in the same foxhole with your entire family and are always interacting with the same small community, trust is built up over time. You knew everybody in a personal way, not just as an abstract notion of a person on the other side of the world.
The way we're heading, we'll have neither personal trust nor privacy. It's not JUST the lack of privacy that's a problem, it's the fact that any stranger can know everything there is to know about you. In a small community, everybody has to have good working relationships with everybody else or the community dies. On the internet, not everybody has your best interests in mind.
I've been doing the same and the lag isn't the issue. The real problem is high CPU usage. I can only use the usb monitor for looking at text, anything more (like opening a webpage or watching a video in youtube) and the computer slows to a crawl (I'm using the first unibody macbook pro, pre-thunderbolt).
From a legal standpoint, there absolutely is a need to know your full name and birth date. It's called the FTC Coppa rule, where it's illegal to collect and disclosing personal information of children under age 13 without their parents’ prior consent. Acclaim got dinged by that last year and as a result, some games no longer allow underage players at all.
So by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the practice.
by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the experience for the end user, but not the practice of creating the sushi. People may reserve a stool a year in advance, but for him it's the same - people come to eat, he makes sushi.
I've had similar problems with people who think everything and anything is possible in just 4 weeks. People with positive attitudes who over-commit a whole team is bad enough, but when I try to say 'what you're talking about isn't possible, let's scale back the requirements' I'm told I'm a pessimistic person. The most frustrating part of the experience in when you prove time and time again, that the goals they are so optimistic about are more complex than they think, they do not alter their outlook on future goals! It's as if their only comfort is in predicting success and then passively ensuring failure and burnout.
The government isn't discerning between "not for profit" piracy and "for profit" piracy. In fact, they're not even focused on "piracy" at all. If this is allowed to stand without any kind of recourse or punishment, there would then be a precedent that allowed the government to shut down any company at any time for any reason without the due process of law anywhere in the world. It's naive to think that wouldn't get abused.
The first startup I worked for called a company meeting and pretty much said everybody was laid off except those who were told beforehand that they weren't. The kicker is, I was a contractor (at that point) and wasn't allowed in the company meetings. I came in the following monday and worked half a day in an empty office before one of the HR people asked me what I was doing.
Did overall Groupers scheduled also go down once people realized they couldn't cancel without having to do it themselves? also, is the no-show rate still 0.2% after implementing this policy? I find it hard to believe these other metrics didn't move at least a little bit.
And they couldn't say no because...? Does being homeless automatically mean they have no free will? Granted, I've never been homeless, but I've read first hand accounts of people who fall into that life, then rehabilitate themselves and get jobs, only to willingly fall into homelessness again. As others have said in this thread, homelessness and the causes of it are a complex issue and there is no one answer that is going to apply for every homeless person. But does that mean we should assume no homeless person is capable of recognizing exploitation and politely decline such an opportunity?
BTW: you should look up forniphilia. Some people do willingly become furniture and like it.
> The idea that "If my work had become too popular I'd probably think I'd have to change" is terribly cynical.
Not really. For some people, the goal is to do useful work that only you can do. When your work becomes mainstream, that means there are people willing to take it and run with it. At that point, you've made a great contribution. Leave it to the next generation and move onto the next project. It keeps you from being complacent, keeps you moving forward and creating new things.
Case in point - how many new things has Steve Jobs created since he re-joined Apple? How many new things has Linus made since he started Linux? Two very different approaches to projects and work, yet I wouldn't call either of them cynical.
Am I the only one who can't use Solarized because it gives me a headache? I'm not trolling, I'm being serious. The contrast between the text and the background is lower than in a black background/white foreground setup. It strains my eyes, giving me a headache after about 10 minutes or so.
did you bother to read the article? we're not talking about hiring for startups. We're talking about hiring for police/emergency services. Having a selection bias against hiring honest cops sounds like a problem to me.
Personally, I liked the humor. It shows you're an actual human and not a program yourself.
I'm always amazed at the commentators on HN who advocate that you should never offend anyone in the slightest way, ever. <sarcasm>After all, it's clearly not a strategy that works for anybody. Just look at Zed Shaw or Giles Bowkett.</sarcasm>
I had one of those. If anything, it made me MORE paranoid. Before, I only responded to noise. Easy enough to fix, put on the headphones. But with the mirror, I can now see constant movement out of the corner of my eye. all. day. long.
I don't understand how you can think this is a valid argument against piracy. Community is available on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, netflix, hulu and NBC.com. Plenty of perfectly legal places to watch it not on broadcast TV. Some of which are even free. In this day and age, that's very similar to asking college students how many of them bought Community Season 1 on VHS.
I've been told by IDE users that a large part of why they use IDEs is just how much work it can do for you without you having to think about it. Need to change a class name that gets referenced hundreds of places throughout a project? Project-wide search and replace! Can't figure out what the string of 4 integer parameters to a function are? Just hover over it with a mouse and the IDE will tell you! Some IDEs even go so far as to create code for you using templates. And then there's always interactive debugging.
But, all this wonder comes with a price. For me, the key reasons I prefer vim to any ide out there is:
1) speed. compared to vim + bash, every ide is slow.
2) code portability. I work with lots of different languages on a daily basis and having to switch from Eclipse (java) to Monodevelop (C#) to whatever the http/css/php du jour is these days.
3) IDE maintenance. No matter what you use, ides have a ton of setup overhead just for the specifics of the project you're working on, let alone if you want to customize the environment.
4) fragility. Vim + bash rarely breaks or leaves me unable to work on a project. I have been left high and dry by IDEs multiple times. All it takes is a coworker checking in personal changes to a team-wide project file. Then you're left in a broken state, figuring out what went wrong.
so, there are some pros and cons. Everybody's style is different and there are real advantages to both approaches.
It's well understood in the social gaming industry that if you want a hit game, you have to do one of two things: get an underground viral hit (very hard and impossible to predict) or you buy users through ads. According to a recent story, Zynga may be spending as much as $300 per user to be on top [1]. The actual number is irrelevent. The important part is they're paying more in marketing and ads than their competitors and see better conversion rates because of it.
Operations does play a huge part in keeping the customers playing (user retention), it's true. The game has to look slick and not crash. Their ops teams must be wizards. Their design teams, not so much.
The way we're heading, we'll have neither personal trust nor privacy. It's not JUST the lack of privacy that's a problem, it's the fact that any stranger can know everything there is to know about you. In a small community, everybody has to have good working relationships with everybody else or the community dies. On the internet, not everybody has your best interests in mind.