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thebspatrol

Re:How does FreedomPop make money? on Friday August 25, 2017 @10:00AM (#15098443)
Not an easily answerable question, and no one is giving you the real answer:

look at the specific bands that your phone supports. there is no other way of knowing. a good amount of phones are CDMA and GSM. if your phone is carrier locked, you will also need to find a way of undoing that.

Re:Amazon Drive removing unlimited storage plan on Thursday June 08, 2017 @01:42AM (#14512157)
Ah, the old "give them a bunch of storage and then ask for more money to keep storing it" meme.
Re:Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @11:28PM (#14511692)
Is understanding views that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country" not enough?

The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE, to the extent that you will have american right wingers calling Hillary Clinton a communist, despite her being by all measures right leaning in any other western country. I don't feel like I'd be doing myself any value in reading extreme fringe politics, since I can read widely applicable politics that are so eclectic. And I do read green and libertarian rhetoric.

I think reading global rhetoric is really useful, especially if you live in a country that positions itself as the center of the universe, but I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.

Re:Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @11:23PM (#14511667)
I find that hard to believe. The American right wing and the general western left wing are MILES apart. I think the fact that there are people who unironically think that center-right Hillary Clinton is a "communist" is evidence enough of that.

I mean I still live within the constraints of reality, and generally only read politics which are widely accepted. I think I'm getting a fairly broad spread by reading opinions that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country".

Re:Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @02:03AM (#14495113)
I'd actually be really interested in knowing what percentage of people read opposing rhetoric.

I easily spend far more time listening to and reading right-leaning rhetoric, despite being left leaning. I already know "my side". Why would I want to live in an echo chamber?

Confirmation bias?

This is the same exact trap that people fall into who are successful without formal education. "All people should be expected to have an above average level of agency and intelligence!"

It is unreasonable to expect most people to be self-learners and/or entrepreneurs. It is also unreasonable to suggest that people, who have been brainwashed since elementary school that university is a turn-key solution, should spend so much money on tuition and still not be guaranteed with reasonable accuracy that they can be more than one paycheck away from poverty.

Everyone is supposed to know that there are 10-quick-tips that they need to apply in university to actually make use of learning what they have been told is highly specialized knowledge? Is this really reasonable?

I say this as a self learner with no formal education: it is incredibly unfair that people are trying to "do everything right" and are still in the shitter.

I don't think it's fair to fault people for being average. Higher education in the US is very predatory in many cases. If the economy is doing well and the average individual is still coming out of university in a pretty rough situation, you have a problem.

Re:Introducing Surface Laptop on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:14PM (#14252490)
>isn't sexy

But why not?

The singular issue with electron is how fucking huge the simplest of apps have to be. I see desktop HTML/JS as a RUNTIME being a very near-future standard.

I'm sure electron has thought about it. It couldn't possibly be any bigger of a hassle than the java runtime.

Re:Introducing Surface Laptop on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:10PM (#14252477)
What is the overall sentiment like for them?

I recently interacted with a high school kid that was given a school-provided chromebook that had the most inane website filters following him around, the USB ports literally disabled, and tons of hoops to jump through to accomplish simple tasks.

For such a locked down platform, you really would think they wouldn't have to pull this shit.

Re:Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video] on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @11:21AM (#13696649)
>Windows13 will be based 100% based on Great Linux

I want to believe. I'd go fucking apeshit if Windows dropped the NT kernel for Linux or BSD.

Re:Why Is Cancer More Common in Men? on Monday February 20, 2017 @03:16PM (#13690501)
Prostate cancer isn't as big of an issue fatality-wise.

Right now breast cancer has a disproportionate amount of money spent on it, but I don't think comparing it to prostate cancer is fair.

This is pretty cool. Multiplayer terminal sessions.
Re:Should gifted students go to a separate school? on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @05:37PM (#13486942)
>Gifted students can help raise up their less gifted classmates.

Gifted students can often also be held back by their less gifted classmates, and feel a sense of isolation from being different. Gifted students with a stimulation-seeking kick also do not work well at all with traditional education.

Industrial-revolution-era ideas about school are terrible as far as i'm concerned, and made education a very sour experience for me once the novelty of going to school wore off.

I'm all for the notion that segregation of education is a bad idea (taxes that benefit only one's immediate district are terrible), but I totally don't buy into the notion that smart kids have anything to gain by being taught the way average and dumb kids have to be.

Also, this is anecdotal and field-dependent, but after high school you really do kind of live in a vacuum. In software especially, it feels like everyone kind of fits the archetype.

Re:Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky on Monday January 23, 2017 @11:24AM (#13463268)
Yes, but what is "bad luck"? For most people "luck" really means "how wide have I spread my net" -- how many people are willing to give me opportunities? When we say "luck surface area" I don't think we mean legitimate zero-sum odds, because we're only talking about luck idiomatically. You don't have much to lose by putting yourself first in line for as many opportunities as possible.
Re:If I could amend PEP 8 on Monday January 23, 2017 @03:09AM (#13460652)
I love this. I've always followed this guideline without thinking about how to communicate it.

I'm fairly sure that single quotes are much more common in the UK in literature, though, so this only feels like it makes sense to NA and AU speakers.

Kind of scary that Google is so much of a gatekeeper to the entire internet that they can essentially decide which websites get visited and coerce them into submission.
Re:Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky on Thursday January 19, 2017 @06:26PM (#13440416)
Another commenter used the phrase "luck surface area", which I think plays well into the concept that everything is hinged on an element of luck, where harder workers and people with better birthright generally have larger "surface area".
Re:Opera Neon concept browser on Thursday January 12, 2017 @11:27AM (#13383520)
>This is why disrupters are so successful - they can do something crazy and people will try it out and think - this is amazing. Because the mindset/psychology is that this is something new. But the market leader implements exactly the same thing and people won't give it a chance because it's a change and they can't handle change.

To play the devil's advocate, couldn't you argue that the reason the take-rate seems high is because only the people that want change are going to use the disrupter's thing, whereas those people represent a very small minority of people using the existing, uninnovative product?

Re:Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do? on Friday January 06, 2017 @11:27AM (#13337566)
This reminds me of Matthias Wandel. He's really one of the most impressive woodworkers I've ever seen. It's so clear to me that he still thinks like a software engineer.
Re:Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @02:25PM (#13321243)
Yeah, explorer here too.

This kind of reminds me of enneagram in the sense that it seeks to uncover intrinsic motivations and drives. I'm 7w6.

Re:Why are developers switching from Mac OS X to Linux? on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @11:19AM (#13319497)
The build quality still usually is a narrow miss. Namely, non-apple manufacturers LOVE to cut corners by using plastic on the bottom or more fragmented case design. Touchpads are always iffy too.

Does anyone know of any non-apple machines that truly are at parity in build quality? The new Thinkpad X1 looks nice.

Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 on Friday December 16, 2016 @01:04AM (#13191397)
Claiming that our understanding of science 500 years ago is at all equitable to the way science works in 2016 is even more naive.
Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:55PM (#13189442)
The laws of physics aren't interchangeable with our understanding of them
Re:Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490) on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:03PM (#13188902)
> aside from the internet becoming largely one-way and unmodifiable by the masses

If anything, it's as easy as ever to share knowledge. Just because the barrier to entry is now creating value on other people's websites instead of figuring out how to set up and promote your own doesn't mean its not easier.

Re:Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490) on Thursday December 15, 2016 @04:59PM (#13188860)
I think theres a pretty obvious difference between da Vinci-esque broad-reaching intrigue and just having a certain set of hobbies.
Re:Waymo: Google's self-driving car company on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @04:14PM (#13171094)
They are a US company, after all, who generally aims to release their innovative products and services in the US first, and the US has comparatively predictable and routine driving compared to other major countries.

Why not walk before running? Especially when this is a technology that is heavily driven by machine learning?

Re:Waymo: Google's self-driving car company on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @04:06PM (#13171030)
In terms of communication, I think the end game is a Las Vegas/Audi style centralized system of traffic negotiation and communication.

But that's an obvious chicken or egg problem that has unrealistic solutions like making sure everyone starts driving a networked car at all once.

Re:Developers’ side projects on Friday December 09, 2016 @06:32PM (#13142831)
This topic is very interesting to me.

With that said, which employer wants their employee watching TV and not breathing software 24/7? I really struggle to imagine the risk here is greater than the reward.

Re:Show HN: Notes. Simple flexible unix-y note taking on Thursday December 01, 2016 @12:41PM (#13081469)
Very cool.

I always feel an itch for this type of notetaking. I've played with using gists and whatnot for notetaking and it works somewhat well, but this hits the mark.

CMD + { and CMD + }

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