alexssung

You're gonna get downvoted, but there is truth in your comment. I wouldn't have made money with Bitcoin if I had paid attention to all the negative comments on HN.

I know I know, just because I profited on Bitcoin doesn't rule it out as a Ponzi scheme or whatever HN calls Bitcoin nowadays. I and many others genuinely believe that Bitcoin provides great value through its underlying technology and also has the potential to become something greater.

> First, because some random idiot on a blog post does not know whether the person "performed poorly at their job" in general. He just has a specific gripe. The other person might have done miracles in other parts of Cortana. There are such things as shipping priorities, and they're not determined by random blog posts or comments.

I'd say the _Product Manager_ of Cortana has performed poorly at their job if the released product (Cortana) is bad. And yes, Cortana is bad.

> Second, because people deserve chances for improving. Anybody at any current position has "performed poorly" at this or another project earlier on. Terminating or transferring them only makes sense if they don't get to improve, which a random blog post can't determine.

Cortana was first released over 3 years ago. That is plenty of time for a chance at improvement.

> That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.

Companies should base their decisions on customer feedback, and so far all the feedback I've seen on Cortana is that it's downright terrible.

Ad blockers are extensions to browsers.

And I would actually argue that blocking before closing the tab should be a decision up to the developer, not the browser.

The difference between autocomplete=off and the rest of your examples is that there are actually positive UX use cases for disabling autocomplete on certain inputs (e.g. when you are an admin editing existing users)

Yes, the pain is only there before your nerves get burnt out, but even just a minute of being burned alive is enough to make any normal human being, including you and me, react involuntarily to the pain.

And yes, I have been in high pain incidents. I recall the pain happening during and after.

And I think I could fly, but I'm not going to try. See how that works?

It at the very least shows that mindfulness gives you more control of your reaction to your thoughts. A normal human being gets constantly bombarded by random thoughts, a lot of them negative, and it tends to affect his or her behavior. Mindfulness teaches you to be more aware of your thoughts and gives you the choice of allowing them to affect how you behave or not.

No, you wouldn't be able to do that. They burn themselves to death.

Videos of monks performing self-immolation are enough proof to me.

These monks practice mindfulness meditation for decades, and as a result, they have such control over their minds that they are literally able to "ignore" the pain of being on fire and sit still through the entire duration.

Meditation (at least mindfulness meditation) is meant to rid you of inner monologue though. It can be immensely helpful considering depression is often caused by constant negative thoughts.

"Since not caring enough to do the basic gruntwork associated with a decent relationship is almost always a male problem in our society,"

That's some hilarious hypocrisy.

I'm disappointed to see RiotJS not getting much attention lately. I've been using it for a B2B SaaS application and it has been intuitive and elegant to use, and easy to pick up for any Javascript developers.

I tried learning Angular but found it to be too monolithic, and I'm currently using React Native to develop the mobile apps. If React Native is any indicator of how React web works, I don't think it compares to RiotJS in terms of developer happiness.. i.e. React has a tougher learning curve, the code is less readable and not as concise, a lot of things feel unnecessary, whereas RiotJS is significantly more lightweight, more intuitive, and faster to get things working (from my experience)

I've never heard of death by a thousand control variables.

What's exactly wrong with data controlled by relevant variables such as education, hours worked, and experience? If you find a combination of variables that reject the hypothesis, maybe you should look further into it, no? Dismissing it because you think it's not objective for some absurd reason is rather unscientific. "Trying all possible combinations of variables" does not disqualify an analysis from being objective--not sure where you got that idea from.

This has to be the worst post I've read on HN so far.

Comparing dynamic and static programming to creationism and evolution is passive-aggressively condescending and only weakens your credibility

Have you seen recently released software synths? They are much different from traditional analog synths and are capable of way more possibilities of sound. Definitely modern.

I don't get why "traditional" musicians tend to dismiss electronic music. Electronic music is not just dubstep or Eurodance. There are modern genres such as future bass that incorporate more advanced musical composition and implement it with new technologies that many people enjoy.

That wasn't the point of my post.

My point was that, no matter how you fudge the numbers, it's impossible to chalk up bad divorces as outliers. Outliers are defined as 3 standard deviations from the mean in a normal distribution, so the parent was implying that bad divorces occur at a rate of 0.1% or less--which is off by at least one order of magnitude.

Uhh considering how divorce rates are near 50%, your assumption of divorces occurring amicably as a second-most common case would heavily depend on what portion of that 40-50% _does_ actually end in a friendly manner.

Let's be extremely optimistic and say 80% of divorces occur amicably.. that would give us ~10% odds of a nasty divorce--which I would not chalk up to "outliers"

This.

I'd like to emphasize the QA part and their using the public as beta testers (absolutely true and totally unacceptable). Microsoft's quality control on everything has been terrible lately, which is saying a lot because their quality control has always been crap.

Good thing they have a great marketing team. They will keep producing cool looking ads and presentations that imitate Apple and hope that their customers will forget every buggy and disastrous launch

Agreed.

I grew up in China for ~5 years and I felt that the cultural mindset in China does not breed creativity nor greatness. The social culture there conditions people to be conformist and one-dimensional. The censorship is absurd. People there generally lack a higher overall perspective. Everyone tries to screw each other over for a dollar, not understanding the concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma and how it affects society as a whole.

There's a lot more to it, but basically in my opinion China is still far behind America and will not catch up any time soon. China needs some sort of cultural revolution before that happens.

This is all coming from a Chinese-American who wants to see China succeed. But reality is reality.