There is no need for me to live in a city. I work from home and telecommute. I travel to a city that is 45 minutes away for pleasure. He was 100% on from my perspective.
Yet, you are still an outlier. I also work from home and telecommute, but I enjoy living in a city because of the diversity of choice available for nearly every endeavor, be it schooling, dining, or cultural.
If telecommuting does become the defacto mode of work, I expect people will live in a greater variety of places. For instance, I wouldn't mind living a few years in Europe and Asia.
But you never know when you're going to be in a city, go to bar, meet someone who says something that gives you an idea that makes you go, "Hey, we should try doing that." And when you do it, suddenly you have an opportunity you wouldn't have had if you lived in a distant exurb.
Cities open more of what Steven Berlin Johnson calls "the adjacent possible" in Where Good Ideas Come From. As I said above, if you're interested in knowledge spillover effects promoted by cities, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City.
It's an attempt to understand how you would solve problems of the class that the question is of, not an attempt to get a solution to a specific problem.
Not using a library when you should have is a problem solved by a 20 second code review.
Code reviews are normally done after the developer has spent some time on the code. That is fine that it takes 20 second to determine the code is totally worthless, but the developer has already wasted DAYS of effort.
I was surprised at how CS Theory oriented they are in hiring. My technical interview went like a CS final exam. I don't expect that I will apply to Google again. If I was interested in CS Theory I would have got a masters in CS. They have to weed people out somehow though.
I also was rejected after 'failing' a technical interview. What was annoying to me is that I told the recruiter that I am rusty on my CS theory. I wish he has just said; "We are only interested in people that could do very well on a senior CS final exam right now"
I doubt that college students are going to be upset by an open source project 'Destroying Wealth'. Why would anyone other than RIM share holders care if RIM is loosing market share to Android?
You care if you are a college kid who helped develop a competitor to Google's AdWords and you want to pitch it to RIM and MS. At least I think that's what is going on here.
You are confusing trust with the right to have an address book. if you give me your phone number I can save that number in my Verizon cell phone, then when I switch to ATT I can move the number to my ATT cell phone. That IS a black and white issue.
Because I demand the right to move phone numbers to my new phone, does not mean that I demand the right to sell your phone number to telemarketers or send your phone number to sex offenders. Doing things like that would make me a shitty friend. And being a shitty friend is totally unrelated to what websites/phones I store contact information on
> You are confusing trust with the right to have an address book.
And most of the people in this discussion are confusing the right to have an address book (which you control and to which only you have access) with giving someone else's personal data to Google (a global giant that would squish you like a bug if it meant a 0.001% increase in its data mining efficiency, with absolutely no loyalty to either you or the person whose data you are providing to it). Is that clear enough?
That's not the point. Your friend made a decision to share their private data with you using Facebook, knowing that it was Facebook that would be holding the sensitive data. You are talking about sharing that data with other organisations, which your friend has no control over. The point isn't whether or not you trust those organisations, it's whether it's abusing the privilege of having access to your friend's data to spread that data around where they don't control it any more. I think doing so is, at best, a betrayal of confidence.
(Edit: And in answer to your other question, about which organisations I personally can trust, we have fairly strict laws in my country about privacy and data protection, which limit what any of these companies may legally do and give me various rights with regard to any personally identifiable data anyone holds about me. I don't think those laws go far enough, but IMHO they're certainly better than the free-for-all you seem to want. So I can have some confidence in how my data will be handled by any company operating in our jurisdiction, which immediately makes me more likely to trust them than US-based companies like Facebook and Google whose business models fundamentally rely on undermining privacy in ways that are rarely going to be in the interests of the exposed.)
My friend has shared their contact information on Facebook, I decide to contact them using my iPhone, and save their contact information. That now gets sync'ed from my phone to my Mac, which is sync'ed with Google because I use gmail for my main email account and I like to have all of my contact information also available from within gmail and more importantly google voice so that I know when people send me text messages and when they call me.
If my friends have trusted me with their information they also trust me to make sure to keep it safe. What service I use to store my data should not be of any consequence for them. That is the same way with this Facebook exporter (BTW, the iPhone app allows one to sync contacts from Facebook to the iPhone address book, which can then get sync'ed to .Mac, Me, or the new iCloud, from there back to a Mac and then back up to Google), it allows the user to get the data from Facebook and store it in their address book. Instead of having to go through each entry one by one this plugin automates the process.
I don't see how my friends that clearly have made this data available to me (so I could contact them) should now have a say as to how and where I store said data. Just because I decide to store it in my address book on Google doesn't make much if a difference, if they didn't want me to have that data in the first place they should have A. never have given it to me, or B. ask me to please remove their information.
I'm giving up on this thread now. The endless downvotes instead of replies and people missing the point are just disheartening.
One more time, for the record: Your friend trusted you with their personal data, not Google. You may not personally have a problem with sharing your own personal data with Google, but not everyone is like you, and some people do. That doesn't mean they have a problem with sharing the data with you in the first place or that it was somehow unreasonable of them to give it to you.
I really can't understand why so few people in this discussion seem to understand the distinction. We have multiple Acts of Parliament on the subject here in the UK and an entire government department whose primary responsibility is enforcing the rules, so I'm clearly not the only one who gets it or thinks it's important. Maybe it's a cultural/generational thing, and the average person on HN just sees the world differently or something. Then again, the average person on HN today downvotes rather than replying if they disagree, based on my experience in this discussion and what's happened to several other people in other discussions I've been following, so things have obviously gone way downhill.
You really expect every one of your contacts to let you know before the buy an Android cell phone, or sign up for gmail or call you on google voice? What if one of your contacts doesn't trust ANY company other than Google? Using your logic, you shouldn't contact them on anything other than Google services.
Your phone number and email address were never meant to be secret. That only provides security by obscurity and leads to exactly this problem - you, a user, being upset when the security you were led to expect doesn't align with reality.
If you wish to not receive certain communications the way to do this is by screening incoming connections/contents. This works, unlike secrets.
Now, understanding that what you wanted to do (keep an email address secret) is a bad idea - it won't do what you want, you can see why those who understand don't care about this "privacy" - it isn't.
Claiming to authorize your email address being shared with CompanyX but not CompanyY is like saying "Here's my phone number, I'm only lettingVerizon subscribers know it, to keep AT&T from snooping on which of their users calls me." It's just nonsensical.
They live in a world where Mark was just an employee that stole their idea and started another company. If only he stayed on as their employee they would own facebook. They don't understand that you can't have it both ways. You can't have a badass employee that understands your business and gets a lot done, and at the same time expect that employee to happily do most of the work while you supervise and make the profits. If Mark was the kind of person who just wanted to code and get a paycheck he wouldn't have even been doing a side project. He would have got decent grades at harvard and then easily got a 100k+ coding job at a big company working 30 hours a week
No, what happened was they hired a tech person to implement their idea and that person betrayed them. It's not that he just copied their idea for his own project. Personally I'm not a believer in non-compete clauses. What he actually did was to slow down their own works so his would release first. Now that is dirty and immoral. I can't believe all the startup hopefuls on this site would root for someone who behaves like that. Zuckerberg is the anti-role model for what we should all aspire to.
Mark is NOT a role model. Millions of people get duped into sharing information they think will remain private every day. He has screwed over a lot of people in the process.
'Idea people' that hire 'tech people' don't get it. Lots of people have ideas for companies. The twins were not the first people to think of creating a friendster for colleges. They don't get to own 50% of another company because their company was delayed by a few months.
>They don't get to own 50% of another company because their company was delayed by a few months.
I think they should get Mark's shares. It's not that their company was delayed a few months, it's that the founder of another company came in and sabotaged their company long enough to gain critical mass. In fact, I'm surprised what Mark's did isn't illegal.
