I guess this makes sense if you're visiting NY and you're only going to use the subway a few times. If you live in the city though you're probably just refilling the same card over and over. Then the logic of filling the card up doesn't hold up. you should go for the largest "bonus" you can get and try not to lose that card!
Putting money on the card barely makes sense at all if you use the subway frequently. My honeymoon was in Manhattan for a week, and we were out and about every day. For a $30/person flat rate, you can use the subway unlimited times for a week. Even if you only use it 2 times per day, that's $35 at $2.50 per ride. The $30 was a much better deal for us, as we used the subway many times every day to get to museums, food, etc. For a month, it's a $112 flat rate, which comes out to ~$25.85/week. That means if you use the subway more than 10 times a week, it's better to get the month flat rate.
This makes sense on the surface, but the confounding factor is that the NYC MTA cards are rather flimsy. Bend these cards just a little bit and they sometimes don't scan as smoothly. The trivial inconvenience of social pressure while attempting to swipe an inconsistent card with a bunch of other people behind you waiting to push through the turnstiles is enough to cause me to consider purchasing a new card.
Yes, most of the time we're just refilling the same card over and over, but these cards also have an expiry date of 1 year. This is still a good hack to keep in mind.
>This makes sense on the surface, but the confounding factor is that the NYC MTA cards are rather flimsy. Bend these cards just a little bit and they sometimes don't scan as smoothly.
I have plenty of criticisms about the Metrocard system, but I've had no problems keeping my cards operational until they expire. I keep the card in a regular card slot in my wallet, use it 2-4 times a day and refill it once a month. No issues in years.
Say what you will about the SF bay area's public transportation system (yeah, it's kinda bad), at least we have RFID cards that are actually sturdy (I've had my current card for over 3 years), there's an auto-refill system that you can set up online, and I don't even have to take it out of my wallet to use it.
When visiting NYC I found it insane that those flimsy cards are the normal monthly tickets. I'm comparing this with the Oyster card in London which is a normal RFID card – I've had one for 5 years and it still works perfectly.
If your card expired with balance still remaining, you can exchange it at the window for a new card, transferring the balance and not losing anything. Or you can do it by mail.
Provided the magnetic strip can be read. Usually the card is so beaten up from usage over the year that the magnetic stripe will become unreadable before the an unavailable balance is left to be transferred.
If you live in the city and use the subway often, it is easier to get a 30-day unlimited ride pass. Lots of employers will even provide monthly unlimited ride passes as a pre-tax benefit via TransitChek.
As a bay area tech worker I'm hurt twice by this. First I'm robbed of access to a beautiful beach and second my standing in the community is tarnished further. With leaders like Perkins and Khosla I can hardly blame bay area natives for thinking we're all entitled and out of touch. The worst part is we have to take the brunt of the rage while we get on the bus to make more money for these people.
Have you seen what happens when holiday food drive barrels are brought front-and-center to techie venues? Basically empty. Go to any Midwestern state whether an office or a supermarket, and these same barrels are most often overflowing. The generosity and consideration of the less fortunate should shame and humble more people than it does.
An overflowing food barrel represents very little in value, compared to the large cash donations made by wealthy techies. Cash donations are buying entire warehouses of food that you just aren't seeing.
My girlfriend volunteers full-time for the local food pantry. It was formerly an independent nonprofit, but a few years ago it was taken over by United Way.
Since then, any and all cash donations, given on site at the pantry itself, are funnelled to United Way. The pantry never sees a single cent of the money and United Way does not provide any food (UW employs two people and sends a truck periodically that delivers food from an unaffiliated food bank). No one who works there has any idea where the money goes or what happens to it. The employees there are not allowed to explain this to donors. The donors, of course, have no idea either.
The pantry is only allowed to keep tangible foodstuffs that are donated directly to them, which they can then give to people who need it. The pantry often runs out of certain types of food. When they do, there's nothing they can do but hope someone will donate more of that specific item, meanwhile watching as the cash donations that could be used to buy it get sent away.
I realize this sounds implausible and I can't cite any sources for it[1]. Just be careful about the assumptions you make regarding where the money goes. Food is food and people can eat it. Money can get funnelled or turned into other things, and unless you're there to watch it happen, you don't know what's going on.
[1]: Howevever, if you haven't already, read the Wikipedia page on United Way sometime and see if you can figure out what it is that they actually do, other than collect money, build bureaucracy and get involved in major scandals.
You could check http://www.charitynavigator.org/ to see what ratio of the money goes to programs vs. admin costs and funding costs. The navigator has many entries for United Way as it seems each region has its own organisation.
Understood and agreed with, but you know as well as I do that advertising matters. You said it yourself, people "just aren't seeing" the entire warehouses of food. Empty donation bin means a snap judgement to "heartless."
According to the weekly Kroger ad for their store in north Fort Worth (Texas), a can of Simply Organic beans (very tasty beans, I should add) is $1 with a Kroger card; the same goes for a can of Hormel chili (no beans in chili, please). My back-of-the-mousepad calculations say that approximately 37 regular cans will fit in a 55-gallon drum, the kind usually used for these food drives. That means that, in a regular 8-story office building with two deposit locations per floor, filling all of them to the brim will cost $592. If you go the other way and just put three cans in the areas visible to the public, that's $111 to make a small but visible impact.
Yep, it's advertising and showmanship, but that food also does go to people who will actually use it, so it has the benefit of doing a little bit of good, unlike most advertising.
I understand your argument but frankly I don't buy it. I don't think filling up inefficient bins of food on closed tech campus is visible to anyone outside the company; I don't see the potential for impact.
I'll be completely honest: I think much of this anti-tech sentiment (such as: tech people don't give) is wishful thinking and willfully divorced from reality. Most large tech companies have public giving foundations and publicize their donation programs. Here are a few examples:
These kinds of programs are strongly promoted at most tech companies. A large amount of giving happens outside these programs as well, but they do help establish a baseline well in excess of any food drive.
While trying to dig up the data for some of the bigger tech companies in the area I also stumbled across this report, which claims that area workers not only donate above the average but spend significantly more of their time actually going out into the community http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/bay-area-companies-giving... The article throws around the term "average" a lot which tends to raise my eyebrows, but it does mesh with my anecdotal experience that tech workers on the whole care a lot more about their community in the bay area than workers in general in other regions of the USA.
Companies do a fair amount of giving, but on an individual level, the Bay Area isn't particularly generous. San Mateo county is in the bottom 1/3 for '% of income given', Santa Clara in the bottom 1/4, SF is a bit better and is in the 42nd percentile for counties.
No, it's not dumb. It's merely suboptimal along the one metric you've chosen to measure. I'm including "show of good will" as a secondary metric, hence why it's perfectly sensible to donate in both forms.
It also creates expectations of help, which can also be very harmful in the long term. Helping others should be voluntary, not done because of expectations.
Pardon, but it's very clear. Take a look at the charitable donation foundations at various tech companies, many of whom publish their donation levels. Or get out and talk to some charities in the area and ask them where their money comes from.
I think the youth has a lot to do with it, more so than the industry. I live in DC, and there is a stark contrast between buildings with 20 somethings and buildings with older residents (the 20 something are split between a 5% that give tons and a 95% that do fuck all, while the older residents on general give far more on the aggregate.)
Just living in a building with 20 somethings shows that they are much more self-involved, no matter what industry you are in. The typical giving 30 something was probably the same way in their 20's.
As a bay area tech worker I'm hurt twice by this. I'm robbed of access to a beautiful beach and second my standing in the community is tarnished further. With leaders like Perkins and Khosla I can hardly blame bay area natives for thinking we're all entitled and out of touch. The worst part is we have to take the brunt of the rage while we get on the bus to make more money for these people.
I agree that the bus rage is completely misplaced. Google peons are more accessible targets, while the people who are actually destroying everything remain out of reach to the angry masses.
You guys have to overthrow your "leaders". Hit them hard and decisively, and free technology from them. The world will support you if you do.
Who are these people "destroying everything", and how are they related to the SF housing crisis? IMHO this crisis is caused by a large increase in housing demand, correlated with a mostly fixed housing supply (more people want to live in SF than there are apartments). This could either be solved by building more in SF, or building more in Silicon Valley (but without the high density of SF).
The comments on the Washington Post site are really a sight to behold.. I don't know who's worse, all the conservative/liberal commenters or the apple/android commenters.
The problem with python's website was never that it wasnt "Sexy" enough to attract newcomers. Its that the documentation was never as well written or well organized as other languages/libraries like ruby and jQuery.
All the information is there, but it isn't organized very well. There's a tutorial, overview of Decimal and its methods (with tutorials mixed within), and various "notes" sections. It's all mixed together, and confusing for a new user.
Personally, I'm more of a fan of this type of structure:
1. API documentation. No how-to's.
2. "Guides" and How-To's
API documentation is like a dictionary. Succinct, to the point, not littered with "Here's how you write a sentence with this word" examples.
Guides/How-To's including examples, introductions to use an object, spell out caveats, etc... This should get wordy when needed.
Both could have links to one another. For experienced coders, you'll mostly just use #1 (which fits great in a navigable list). For newbies, #2 will teach you how to do things.
Agrees on this. Sometimes you don't want the tutorial or book, you just want the reference guide of one liners saying what the thing is, at least for the proficient programmer. If I come back to Python from a few months on some C++ project and have to spend 15 minutes looking up how to use their JSON api because I have to dig 90% of the time to find callables the docs fail.
The lack of a Javadoc / Qt ref / cppreference (I love that wiki) module / function list makes just searching for something you know exists and just need the method name a pain in the butt.
The documentation is beautifully written and perfect for learning, but it doesn't support the quick-fire referencing I, and I presume the other detractors, have grown to expect.
Contrast the first Google result for "python dictionary" [1] and "java hashmap" [2]. The Python result tells you about every data structure and does so in a story, the Java one gives you what you want and little more.
The first result is the tutorial - the second result is the comparable API documentation, although unfortunately you need to find the right section of the page after clicking through. Like the Java doc, it has a prose introduction followed by a list of methods.
Overall, I think you're right that the Python docs aren't optimal for quick fire referencing. I think we tend to use some form of introspection to examine methods, function signatures and docstrings. For instance, I keep IPython open and use tab completion and the 'foo?' syntax to find the details I need.
I also think the docs are pretty good. However, the one thing I would absolutely LOVE is if they added a table at the top of every page that has functionName and return Type (like so many other languages do).
The thing that irks me about the docs now it that they're almost too in depth. Sometimes, when I just need to get a quick refresher of what function X does, it takes me nearly 45 seconds to just find the thing. Ctrl + F doesn't help because the docs are so verbose that searching for one thing usually results in 20+ hits or references on the page.
Just a little table like the Java docs, and I'd be pleased as punch!
I'm a Rubyist but I find that curious because the more common public complaint seems to be that Ruby's documentation isn't as good as Python's. (And its official site is rather tired, to say the least.)
I really liked Python's documentation. I read the tutorial and it got me up and running really quickly, and whenever I had a problem or needed details of the arguments it was an invaluable reference.
Clearly, not everyone thought so. What did you not like about the docs?
It's nice to learn from, but if you already know what you're doing and you just forgot the arguments to that one god damn method, it's pretty irritating to actually find the arguments to that one god damn method.
I find Python's online documentation to be fantastic. It's probably the best online documentation I use. I'm really curious what about it you find lacking.
If Python's documentation is a "problem", then IMO the devs should continue doing problematic things. What in particular do you find lacking about the documentation? I've never heard this complaint before.
Personally I don't see why this resonates so much with the HN community.
Really? This is like a nerd mantra, it hits so many stereotypes in so few words. Orson talked about it at BayCon once when it came up.
I don't have a clear memory of exactly what he said but I took away from it that smart, introverted, people have a terrible time seeing anything outside their pool of influence, like looking at your shoes in a crowd and saying "everyone is crowding around me because I'm the coolest" when if you looked up you would see a pack of wolves circling the crowd. So all of their evaluation in their environment is about them and how people around them are responding.
An artifact of that inward looking view is to construct an internally consistent explanation for why things suck now but didn't before. That always targets people who are not like them (the introvert) and for whom the introvert cannot understand their motivations or values. (and more often than not in a software company that is "suits", aka business people or managers)
You combine that with a changing market place, and the thing that made the software successful before isn't valid any more, but if the programmers don't know why the software was successful in the first place they can't understand what changed or how to fix it. Imagine an artist who paints with charcoal, gets discovered, people buy their works, and then fashion moves on, and the artist goes broke. To an external viewer, fashion simply moved on, the artist was there (and fashionable for a time) and then they weren't. But internally the artist may have no concept of how briefly they were fashionable and now they weren't. Instead they construct an externalization of "discovery" where suddenly people begin to understand what it is they are doing with their art, and when they move on it is always some external force which has corrupted the minds of people seeing it or modified their vision. To accept the alternative, that their success was luck and fashion, rather than some deeper meaning, may be too harsh to think.
People cling to sense of destiny and purpose rather than consider themselves the random connection of ova and zygote and circumstance. Where is the meaning in that?
Orson captured this tension wonderfully in his essay, it resonates both with the bees who desperately want to be special and with the bee keepers who want productive bees without understanding that the bee's production is a byproduct of flowers and normal bee activity, it's a side effect of where the hive is and where the flowers are. Many software companies are fashion objects, successful ones are constantly producing new concepts and new ideas to stay in the limelight. Unsuccessful ones take a single success and assume they are done, nothing left to do but iterate. But fashion doesn't work like that.
Because it's kind of realistic. It is embellished a bit, of course, but it's true that programmers do not respond well to traditional management techniques, most especially when someone with no business whatsoever making technical calls presumes to do so (i.e. every business major who wants to feel important).
Programmers and businessmen have a difficult time understanding each other, is basically the crux of it. As a programmer and a businessman, I have to say I still have difficulty understanding most businessmen, and do not respect MBA degrees (not necessarily their holders).
This resonates because it is a perennial problem that anyone that works in a technical or hacker role is going to face. It is not an "attitude", it is a business reality rooted in economics. There is a direct conflict between people who want to innovate and people who want to simply streamline existing money making enterprises. Streamlining wins because it is lower risk. Innovation dies and then no more streamlining can be done. The innovators leave, one way or another. The business either becomes a cash cow or new innovative competitors kill it off.
The site looks great and I'm curious how your indexing all those docs to be searched so quickly. However I also feel obliged to tell you to stop encouraging people to use PHP =p
