GAAAHHHH!!! Enough with this credit cards are bad BS.

Cons with CCs: If you don't manage your funds well, you git hit with a 20%+ interest rate and will never likely climb out of that hole. Solution: learn to manage debt. Seriously, most CC companies now allow direct account transfers. If you are that scared, whenever you make a purchase, go home, log in to your bank's website (every major bank has one, if yours doesn't, open an account with one that does), and pay off the card immediately. Its not rocket science, just basic financial management.

Pros with CCs: Fraud protection. Easily one of the biggest plus points of CCs. Concerned that there is a charge on you statement that you didn't approve? Just call the company and tell them that it is a fraudulent charge and then its their problem. If nothing else, this easily makes credit cards worth the time it takes to manage them. After this, we have the easy record of all transactions, cash back, convenience, safety from the fact that you don't have a giant wad of cash with you, and last but not least, a credit history which can be used to reduce interest rates on long term loans.

Seriously, this anti-debt attitude is in general ridiculous. Is excessive and badly-managed debt bad? Absolutely, its one of the worst situations to be in but there is a simple way to avoid it: manage your finances. Swearing off all debt is foolish and inefficient.

I bank at a small Japanese bank in the middle of nowhere. One day, I visited a small hospital, also in the middle of nowhere. As it happened, I did not have cash on me to pay the fee. I told the nurse to please wait for a moment while I went next door to use the ATM.

Next door is a gambling establishment, with an ATM outside of it. I tried getting cash and the ATM refused my card.

So I ended up walking three blocks (small town, luckily) and found myself a bank branch, which took my card. I returned to the hospital, paid the bill, and went on with my day.

Some time later I mentioned to my bank manager "By the way, I think my card is bugged -- it got rejected by a reader the other day." And I told him the circumstances.

"Sir, do you remember when we gave you your credit card that you promised not to gamble with it?"

"Yes, of course. I don't gamble, ever."

"We appreciate that, sir. Neither does the bank. Nor will we permit our customers to hurt themselves by gambling. Accordingly, we do not site any of our ATMs by gambling establishments."

"Oh, I can respect that. Of course, your competitors do, and that makes them money."

"Our real competitors do not. We have an understanding with them on this issue: no honorable bank in $SMALL_TOWN_JAPAN will countenance our customers losing their livelihoods while our eyes are still white. [Japanese idiom, means "while we still draw breath"]"

"But there really is an ATM in front of it?"

"It is from a Tokyo bank, and a disreputable Tokyo bank at that. And let them put an ATM there. They have no branch in this town, nor will they ever."

"But they don't need a branch, do they?"

"No. Bank A, Bank B, Bank C, and ourselves have enough branches to have 98% share of deposit accounts in this town. A, B, and C share our understanding of the importance of protecting this community."

"Wait, so NOBODY can use that ATM?"

"Maybe they can soak some tourists. wry smile Its a free market, you know."

I've got to say, the capitalist in me thinks "Oh crikey, cartelization". The rest of me really, really likes my bank.

[Edit: I just looked in my dictionary and it says that the actual idiom is "While my eyes are still black". I guess that means my memory is faulty. Wouldn't be the first time. Take note, students of the language.]

Wanted:

DHTML Rapist to demoralize and abuse Internet Explorer's layout and javascript bugs...

This is the same company that caused all that fuss a few weeks back with their arrogance about who they would hire and for posting a cover letter to belittle a candidate. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360574)

No wonder they're finding hiring hard.

So by JWZ's maxim they are really poised to succeed.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

I've found that the people who are most successful are those that ascribe their success to good luck. And when things fail, they examine what they did wrong: externalize success, internalize failure.

Those that believe that luck has "nothing to do with it" are generally endowed with a huge ego and no way to see around it. Strangely, they're also the ones most likely to blame bad luck when things go wrong: internalize success, externalize failure.

The advantage to internalizing failure is that you can learn from it.

Living in NYC, Friday and Saturday nights tend to revolve around restaurants and bars. Although drinking is generally involved, this doesn't mean that it isn't a good time to get to know and engage in conversation with other entrepreneurs and hackers.

From my experience, the best way to quickly become friends with someone is to share a couple beers with them. Plenty of business, coding, and good general technical discussion can follow later.

Because you need to take a bus to go to work. Buses have machines that only accept coins. If you don't have coins, you can't go to work. This is mostly an issue with one-peso coins, as the bus costs 90c.

It's extremely stupid, and also self-fulfilling. Small businesses are afraid of running out of coins so they hoard them. It's really not that big of a deal if you don't take the bus (I either walk or drive depending on the distance). A couple of times in the past year I did have to stand in line at the bank to get change for laundry.

Here is one:

Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they're no longer getting the best people.

I believe this statement to be false. Sampling from my college class and my smart hometown friends, the most common careers are, in order: 1) Law School/Med School 2) Wall St. 3) Consulting 4) Government 5) Academia 6) non-profit 7) other large corporation 8) small business. Perhaps 1% are working for a startup.

This dominance by large organizations is historically weird. For most of American history, the goal of an ambitious person was to own his own business or farm. The really ambitious would aim to turn that small business into an empire. Statistically, the average firm size was far, far smaller in 1900, so most ambitious people would be working for small businesses. Anecdotally, my great-grand parents mostly ran a business or were self-employed. But my father and uncles were mostly "organization men", as are most of my peers.

I think relative to 1960, people today are more likely to work for small organizations. But the "organization man" economy of the 60's was a creation of the New Deal and World War II. We're still trying to unwind the consolidation of that era.

Intentionally infecting people with SSIDs is illegal. You have to notify your ad-hoc partner.

Sure, it's probably legal, but people need to make their own judgments on what should be kept private and what not. It's still a jerk thing to do.

i feel like use of the word 'hack' has become a little bit too liberal