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hace 14 añosdiscuss

I disagree as an American heterosexual guy who has many female friends.

It works the same way any friendship works with the same sex for heterosexual men. I have positively no desire to sleep with my closest male friends, but they are my friends because we challenge each other, support each other or just otherwise get along and have similar interests (preach to the choir to each other).

Of my female friends, my emotional/sexual desire ranges. I opt for transparency. I don't do booty calls or casual sex because it doesn't work for me. But I have admitted my feelings to several of my female friends (both as "I'm not interested in anything other than a platonic relationship" to get it off the table and the opposite). In one case I dated a close friend for a short stint, and in almost all of the others my feelings were not reciprocated (I think American women where I live anyway don't see long term friends as sexual objects as I have no problems attracting good looking women that are otherwise strangers -- topic for another reply). In all cases, sharing my emotional/sexual feelings strengthened the friendship after a short period of awkwardness. It simply takes the issue off the table.

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hace 14 añosdiscuss

He seems to argue that it's very difficult to have platonic male/female friendships in a heterosexual context.

Speaking as anecdotally as that article did. My first roommate was a girl. Neither of us wanted to have sex with eachother. It was a shared rent/utilities arrangement and she got the second room because she was the only one of my friends who I would trust to not destroy the place. She was easy to get along with and our relationship was as platonic as it would have been with a guy (I'm straight, to clear that up). Despite [my parent's] faith not allowing such things (rather judgmental Catholic family), they thought it was a great idea because they knew "us" in context and even they saw it as no different than having a same gender roommate (believe me, I agonized explaining the situation to them and was shocked when they outright endorsed it).

Today, I'm just finishing off a divorce. Of my three closest friends, the top two are women that I had lost touch with years ago. Both are exceptionally attractive, single, women (I'm no Brad Pitt, but I've never had a problem attracting, either).

I think the simplest way to have a successful platonic relationship is to be transparent about sex. I think some of us are too insecure to even think of doing that, but it's really not difficult. If you really find your friend attractive, say so. If you previously had feelings for them but do not now, say so. If they're really a meaningful friend, the awkwardness won't last long as long as you're not so hung up on rejection that you can't take getting a "let's be friends". I've done this with both of my two friends, one I simply reassured that I'm not at all interested in a relationship, the other I admitted my attraction to years ago and was not reciprocated. I cherish the friendship of both and after a short time of grousing about the latter relationship, I realized she was right and we'd be a terrible fit.

Now as a divorced man, I'm looking for a roommate. I'm not interested in a relationship beyond friendship and I don't see that changing regardless of the person. I'd consider either one of them (and that is likely to happen at some point in very the near future), but not my best "guy" friend.

*Edit: Bracketed items for clarification.

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hace 14 añosdiscuss

When people are applying for a job you can be 99% sure they're motivated by the money

I would challenge the 99% rule (I know it wasn't derived scientifically so I'm not poking fun). Speaking purely from my own experience and my knowledge of two of my coworkers, money is always a factor, but once you get past enough to live comfortably, other factors start to come into play. I don't want a larger house (I'd like to pay it off, instead), I know I probably have a raise coming soon and I don't care how much it is for. About 5 years ago I cut my salary off at $60,000 before taxes. I get paid much more than that, but that's all I see in my main checking account and I'll probably drop that to $40,000 soon (a story for another post, perhaps). My closest coworkers (the ones who are the top performers IMO) feel the same way. The environment is good, the work is fun, the money is enough even though we could all do better elsewhere.

I've been given other offers, some that were very attractive and paid more. I've not accepted them because they tended to be too narrow in what I'd be doing. My job as a corporate drone writing software is fun and rewarding well beyond my salary, I have a great boss and great coworkers and I'd quit and head someplace else for $50,000 if that changed. Maybe I'm not a typical HN reader in that I have no desire to create a start-up (the business side of it is no fun) or work for one (there's no such thing as job security, but it's admittedly worse and while I'm no stranger to "crunch time", my desk will never have a sleeping bag under it).

I'd spend most of my days skiing

Are you sure about that? My dad's life plan was to retire at 35, and he did. His thing was golf, not skiing, and he did a lot of it for half a year before he took his family's retirement savings and purchased a quarter of a small business where he also took a job as the only salesperson. "You can only play so much golf" is the excuse he gave. I don't know his net worth, but he has two homes and one is on a lake that is exceptionally prime real estate. He's past his 60s and still working and I give him another 5 years before he tries to retire again.

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hace 14 añosdiscuss

Have you ever found a replacement that works suitably without having to use DosBox?

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

I've had been using the Costco Kirkland AAs for a long time, but I stopped last year due to a perceived shelf life issue.

In an attempt to reduce waste, I use a "battery rotation" in my house. They start in the kids toys. When they reach the "flake out" point (this is where the toy starts behaving like it's demon possessed, saying only one or two words of a song, playing it's "music" without anyone touching it, etc), they get tossed into a "drained" box where they are used in IR remote controls or LED flashlights (I have 15 LED flashlights, story in another thread). When the LED flashlights burn through them, I put them in my IR remotes. They last, literally, for months before the IR remotes kill them. Then they get recycled.

The problem I found with the Kirkland over the Energizer and Duracell (and I'll admit my sample size was two of their 48 packs) was that as I got to about the middle of the 48 pack, the unused remaining batteries wouldn't run the toys. They'd light the LED flashlights about as well as the batteries in the drained box. As this happened twice, my guess was that the Kirkland batteries don't have the shelf-life of the Energizers. I don't think it was environmental conditions--all batteries were stored in the same place and went through four seasons. Two 48 packs of Kirkland and I'm on my third 36 pack of Energizers, though I never hooked it up to a device to get an accurate measurement, so take it for what it's worth.

After getting frustrated with the Kirkland's I decided to bite the bullet and go to rechargable. I went with AA and AAA NiMh batteries. My kids have a lot of electronic toys, and they get rotated into and out of use as they get bored with them. I switched to all NiMh (expensive) batteries, last year (not sure if they had the "fix" that was mentioned about the Sanyo batteries but considering how quickly they stopped taking any charge after very few recharges, I'm guessing not). After the kids used the first set of toys (about 16 batteries worth), I stored them for about 2 weeks as usual (turned off, not removed, I know, I know). When I put them back in rotation, they were completely dead (I didn't measure, but I did put two in my Sony TV remote and no dice). This made the batteries worthless. Kids toys made in the last ten years require tools to replace the batteries and my battery charger only holds 4 batteries, so this is an all day ordeal of charging, watching, changing, charging and of course, figuring out how to get past the child-proof battery holder, putting the batteries in wrong or discovering the need to clean the terminals, unscrewing and screwing them back in.

I did find that if the batteries were fully charged prior to storage, they worked after rotation, but it seemed they didn't work very long.

I'd like to be a whole lot less wasteful (both money, time and materials). Does anyone have any experience with a specific brand of rechargable AA and AAA battery that retains most of its current charge when stored for up to 3 weeks not fully charged (I'll even go through the trouble of removing them from the toys if I have no choice), and from a cost perspective make sense for toys that require batteries to have a discharge rate similar to good Alkaline batteries?

Edit: Clarify storage conditions.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

My domain transfer completed today (interesting, since it said it would complete on Tuesday, but I'll chock it up to volume).

Immediately before the domain transfer, I received an e-mail indicating that GoDaddy was sorry to see my one sad domain go away. I replied asking if there is a way to completely eliminate my account with them.

As I don't expect a reply, does anyone know if GoDaddy provides a way to eliminate your account completely? I'm planning on removing saved Credit Card information and setting a random, max-length password. Far from bullet proof, but I expect I won't be doing business with them again and don't want some random hack to result in account disclosure and some troublemaker deciding to buy a bunch of services in my name. The probability is low, but the amount of anger resulting from this SOPA nonsense has to have made them a bigger target for such nefarious activities ... I'm thinking Sony from recent memory.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

While I'm sure this would probably violate all sorts of copyright, I'd love a site that could provide alternate dubbed languages (specifically Spanish, German and Portuguese) for movies.

The dubbing is never quite right or simply not included (for the media I'm looking at purchasing, I always ensure that at least Spanish is covered). I'm using television shows and movies that I have nearly memorized the script to help with "immersion" between more traditional study (I took many years of Spanish and gave up ... this hack wasn't mine, it was mentioned by a coworker and it turned out to be a very clever one). In the US, it's easy to find DVD/BD versions that include Spanish (to a lesser extent, French, which I'm not interested in), but rarely include anything else in the US (and most of the stuff I want to watch includes neither).

This service is intriguing to me. I don't routinely download movies, and I'm unfamiliar with .srt and .sub formats, but I'm wondering if this could help assist reading in another language the same way it has helped in listening/comprehension and it certainly seems like your site is solving a problem I've seen when transcoding DVDs ... it used to be audio mismatch (largely a problem of the past with modern container formats), now it sounds like the same pain point exists with subtitles.

Well done.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

I was seconds away from updating my status with a quote from that entry... then I saw it was from John Mayer and I realized how much grief and sarcasm I'd get for having posted and linked to the source.

The sad thing is, I like a lot of his music so the fact that I was truly intimidated by posting a link by him for fear of what my friends might think of me probably says more about me than it does him (and perhaps speaks to a bit to why Rdio and Spotify had to add privacy controls). Oh well! I'm intimidated by music snobs, I guess. I'll be intimidating another time.

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This is an interesting problem that I think some states in the US have at least partially solved.

The highways in Michigan, for example, are almost all set at 70 MPH (minus those around large cities like Detroit, a point I disagree with). The result has been a dramatic reduction in speeding. I'm not sure if road safety has improved or not since the change, but since I have taken the same way to/from work 5 days a week for 15 years, I can say I haven't seen any increase or decrease in accidents, personally. What I have noticed is a dramatic change in driving behavior. When the limit was 55 MPH, the majority of traffic was going at least 60 with a sizable minority of traffic working very hard to get around those doing 60.

From my personal perspective, 70 MPH feels fast enough. It probably feels that way because I'm not being tailgated at that speed, nor do I feel like I'd have to slow down to take a bend in the road at that speed (my understanding is that the highways in Michigan are designed to be driven safely at 75 MPH in reasonable weather conditions). By casual observation, most people are driving between 65 and 75 MPH outside of rush hour.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

The discussions on this post are awesome. So many are judging this is moral terms and from every perspective imaginable.

The two most prevalent are:

     "The fight was in public, the world has changed, I have no sympathy"
     "I would never live-tweet such a subject, that's an evil invasion of privacy"

We're given amazing tools to interact with others and culture has not advanced as quickly as technology has. Our interactions with other human beings are (and I apologise for the metaphor in advance), like services interacting with other services on a network. Sometimes one service breaks another by accident.

We're connected to everyone else in a different way today than we were 5 years ago (and 5 years ago I would have said 10 years ago). I could see myself over-sharing this sort of thing because it's unusual and because I have a twitter account and a device that sits in my hand and I don't know that my brain would have thought of much more than "this is unusual" (it helps that I have no twitter followers). I've also been in relationships where something like this could happen and wouldn't want someone to broadcast it.

I think the future is going to be a hard lesson in "give everyone the benefit of the doubt".

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

I've been tearing through this one and I have a very basic question:

Because it's in the IP stack, would a software firewall offer any sort of defense here?

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

I think you've answered your own question here.

I'd put Knuth on stage, because, he's Knuth. You know he'd have something interesting to say that would be relevant to your audience, assuming your audience was the typical reader of this site, of course.

My wife is an avid cook. If she attended a conference on cooking and the organizer put Knuth on stage because he wanted greater representation on cooking from the programming community, even if Knuth was secretly a brilliant cook, the audience would dismiss him.

This is, obviously, further complicated by the fact that putting a person on stage because of an attribute that no person has control over is an unacceptable bias. I'm not saying that's what happened (clearly it's not because the guy had been successful in the past), I'm just putting into context how a statement like that is perceived.

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I agree completely and as a result I generally don't trust any news source that pretends to be objective (whatever that means in an environment where personal bias meets advertising revenue and the end-product is at least partly entertainment).

A whole lot of people jumped all over Arrington when he was (and still is) covering tech startups that he is invested in. It never bothered me, he was up front with his disclosures and although he tried to remain objective and even took several companies he invested in to task, having a reasonably clear statement of bias was helpful.

I prefer to read and consume opinion pieces over hard news because hard news reads more like opinion pieces without the author's bias being disclosed or at least well known (neither Limbaugh nor Olberman include disclosures, but neither have to go out of their way to make their political bias known).

Outside of politics and race, there's a lot of tech writers who see Apple as the company that can do no wrong and Microsoft as the company that can do no good. Earlier this year I was looking for an objective, terse, comparison on Relational Databases vs NoSQL in the tech press (yes, I know, not the best source for such things). I found it more useful to read from the diehards. They both knew the strengths of their design and the inherent weaknesses in their perceived competition. Take out the spitting and grumbling and you generally get a good picture when sent through the known bias filter of the author.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

Based on what I've seen from this blog post, my initial impression is that I don't think I'm going to like the new Gmail UI (I haven't been able to use it, so this is based on the preview). But I'll be perfectly happy when they arrive.

One of the many reasons I switched to GMail was the fact that they didn't charge to access mail from a POP3 (and now IMAP). Neither protocol is perfect (or perhaps it's the implementation in the variety of mail apps that support it), but the bottom line is that there are limitless numbers of clients that support those protocols, which allows me to abandon the web platform if I choose to.

When my bride complains about the next Facebook UI overhaul, I always think of this. To clarify, I'm always stuck thinking of Facebook in terms of old-school online service like AOL with features that fit better in the 21st century...I get that it's not e-mail+ or e-mail-. And I appreciate that it has a powerful API, the usage of which allows me to avoid the UI overhauls for the limited feature-set that I enjoy. But for e-mail, I still prefer the provider with the most options.

Count me in as perfectly fine with the new UI changes because I don't have to care if I don't like them.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

I'm happy with the reduction in Experts Exchange content in my search (I won't get into that at the moment, just to say that I usually find better quality content on other sites).

Unfortunately, I still run into a myriad of copy/paste sites, which when compared against Exerpts Exchange, are far worse, and Google's UI has made it less simple to ban the sites. I've had to manually block "unifiedpeople.ru", "mvp.itcommunity.ru", "boardreader.com" and "efreedom.com" in order to clean up search results related to topics I'm regularly seeking answers. They generally copy/paste from a variety of forums (and maybe even legally so), but they present a less up-to-date version than the site they're copying and often the code highlighting and other formatting is completely stripped rendering a very difficult to read result. Yet they often rank higher than that from which they copied.

The sites are marginally useful and were a problem before and after Panda. Google, being in a very powerful position, does have a lot of control over things like this, however, they also are going to be the most targetted. I've found, in some cases, their closest competitor (the one that used to be very blue) occasionally provides cleaner results, especially if the query involves their own products--a circumstance that was not always the case.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

I hope I'm not the only one here upvote your comment simply because you decompressed IR into Intermediate Representation.

I like to read about LLVM and some of the things that are a bit (ok, in a lot of cases, way) above what I do day-to-day, except that it's sometimes taken for granted that the readers know the acronym/reference. I read the whole article and I understood what it was referring to, but for the life of me I couldn't land on the two words because IR in my world is always infrared.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

As a former SQL guy myself, this issue wasn't a surprise the first time I saw it.

In MSSQL (and I believe this is somewhat, though not always universal since Structured Query Language is somewhat, though rarely completely compatible between RDBMSs), NULL does not equal NULL (or anything else). In SQL terms, the idea is that it's different from "empty", it's a value with no definition---an unknown.

NaN seemed like it should work the same way. "Zed" is NaN, "Bob" is NaN, "Zed" / "Bob" is NaN. None of those are equal, they simply make no sense, so they're undefinable. (quick disclaimer: It's been a few years since I've had to actually deal with NaN in JavaScript, so if it's now possible to divide "Zed" by "Bob" in newer specs or strange implementations of JS, and not end up with NaN, feel free to correct me, I won't take it personally. I'm not writing from a position of authority on the subject).

In the land of "sort-of standard SQL", this is remedied by Field IS NULL. I can see the a similar utility in JavaScript's IsNaN. It's important to know when two things return values that the equivalent of "unknown", and not allow the unknown to equal the other unknown.

EDIT: changed "not rarely" to "rarely" in second paragraph.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

Thanks for the fantastic summary. I got a chuckle from one thing: besides the nearest RV park being 43 miles away (I believe I know exactly the one you're referring to), it's also about 12 miles of country road driving, and it's no picnic in rush hour.

I hadn't thought at all about back taxes. That's an interesting point and one that I think could be overcome, but I'm not a lawyer.

why have none of the people selling these properties gone to the trouble to get the rates fixed and adjusted for past taxes

I believe I can take a stab at this. The SEV is not able to be corrected until after the home is purchased and the state assessment is done. When I bought my first home, my father referred to it as the "surprise envelope" (as in, "You may already have won the Publisher's Clearing House!"). The back taxes situation is something you can research and can insure against (though, I'm willing to bet it's far more costly in the city limits). But I think you summed it up the best. Who would want to go through this trouble? You did the research and drew the conclusion that it wasn't worth it. Once you have to bring a lawyer in, unless they're doing so for charitable reasons (and I know a few that do just this), it's not worth the money. Even free, it's not worth the time fighting the assessment/treasury.

Detroit has its charms but nothing to make up for the brokenness of the city

Yes. And I'm sad to say that I completely agree with you.

EDIT: The RV park is 43 miles away was a quote from the original and I forgot to add emphasis to that point so it seemed like I was quoting much more than I was.

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hace 15 añosdiscuss

Thanks for the correction. I was too lazy to look it up :).

Being from the suburban area and not much of a "Michigan tourist", we always hear of the income tax being the "big detractor" to investment in the city. There are so many other problems in the neighborhoods that pinning the issue of investment to income tax is to convenient.

As for the Detroit Schools issue, you're also dead on. It's a big deal. The folks that I know who have relocated (whether Boston Edison or Brightmoor) of Detroit have done so because they want to help the city for charitable reasons. The biggest problem was DPS.

The enabler for all but one of the families is two-fold: Michigan is a very homeschool friendly state. And even in the good neighborhoods of Detroit, all of the families were able to buy their homes without a mortgage (5,000 square feet in the Boston Edison neighborhood for $120,000, though requiring a lot of TLC). As you put it *no sane couple will put their children in the Detroit schools". Out of six families that I know of who have relocated, five homeschool, the sixth sends his two children to Detroit Country Day School (a good private school in Southfield).

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Also note that those $6000 houses (and even less) will have property tax of several thousand per year. Detroit is still valuing houses at the rates of 10+ years ago

I'm curious about this statement. From what I recall of state law, the houses State Equalized Value would fall to 50% of the purchase price of the home assuming it is not a foreclosure. In the case of foreclosure, fighting a over-valued home (an experience I only have outside of the city) is pretty easy. In addition, in Michigan, a homeowner's SEV increase is capped per year until the property changes hands (known in these parts as Proposal "A", the third rail of Michigan politics). I'm not calling you out or anything. If you could explain that in greater detail or have a reference, I'd be interested to understand since I know some great, honest, giving people who also happen to be lawyers who would love to use their skills to help the city.

It's cool that Detroit is improving.

When Mayor Archer was in charge, the city underwent some pretty serious improvement, especially in overall "image". This is important. Mayoral candidates tend to run on the platform of pitting the folks who live in the city against the folks who've left the city (a technique honed and mastered by Mayor Young that resulted in near life-time tenure as mayor). It was the first time that I've ever noticed a trend of suburban folks actually wanting to explore some of the rare and interesting restaurants in Detroit. Under Mayor Kilpatrick, the city declined dramatically (this was not all his fault, it happened to coincide with a general economic decline, but he certainly didn't help the city's image). Under the new mayor, the image of the city of Detroit has improved. Again, an important thing.

However, the scene on the ground is not yet improved, and I'd subjectively assert that it's not as good as it was during the worst days under Archer. The poorest neighborhoods are getting much worse. I have a friend who moved her whole family to the Brightmoor area to help prostitutes and drug addicts. That area has gotten significantly worse and more dangerous in the last two years as have most of the poorest areas of Detroit.

It's terribly sad, and I can't say that I'm, personally, doing anything to make it better.

EDIT: Fix a cut/paste sentence error.

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