Days ago Financial Times published a nice article by Gillian Tett about how the hand-to-mouth living is harming the 'recovery' of the US economy. In general, hand-to-mouth living implies that you fully spend your income to keep your current 'status quo'. It also means that the economy would work in cycles that cannot be detected by medium-term censuses.
Read MoreNot everyone likes to build things, some people prefer to do things. Because I come from a family of aviators and aviation-related workers. I became a pilot soon as I could. I love to fly and I was sure that being an airline pilot was the only career I would ever want. I was wrong.
Read MoreI started to blog again a few weeks ago. I try to write some useful info like How to land an airplane if you are not a pilot or This is why you should never use Oracle DB those are not very interesting topics but, anyway, I always submit my post to Hacker News hoping at least 10 individuals would read it. Surprise: even thought I do never get one single upvote, I always end up with 100+ readers. This is really awesome. So, next time you write something, make sure you submit to Hacker News, even if you don't get upvotes, people will still read it. (The last three peaks on the graph below are submitted links)
I've been using and maintaining large oracle databases for more than 12 years. I'm a fan of oracle databases. Oracle:
But there is something about oracle you should know before choosing it as your database server...
Read MoreAt the flight school people always ask me:
"Can I land a plane? I have X years of flight simulator experience."
Short answer is: history shows you will probably die. Probably not because it is difficult but because you don't know what you don't know. Flight simulators distort important aspects of landing airplanes: your awesome 200 degrees/3D vision, the muscle mechanics of flying and the notion of distance. In fact, flight simulators are harder than the real thing. Yet, many in the flight school I teach landed without the need for intervention in their first flight. I landed an airplane for the first time when I was 11 years old. With a bit of luck you can do this by yourself. So, in case of an emergency, this is what you could do...
Read MoreMost people have misconceptions about what money is and that leads to a lot of confusion. People seem to think that payment and money are the same thing when talking about eletronic money, specially bitcoins. Let's fix this...
Read MoreI just sent this email:
Read MoreDear Apple,
I give up making software for you app store. Your DUNS number requirement was the last straw. I’ve been waiting 2 months for this number and was told I need to wait another month (60 working days total) unless I pay a substancial amount of money. So, please, GO ** ****. (edited)
I built a small credit card company, we have around 500k users and 2k merchants. We focus primarily on the low-income families, our service is free to users, just merchants have to pay (and our price is 60% lower than visa's) that's how we could outmaneuver pretty much all the big guys in the employee-benefits market. We are a company of just 12 employees now, we live in the cloud, our costs are just a very tiny fraction of the cost our competition faces, they could never compete with us on a level playing field. They were all screwed and they know it, and we received some buyout offers, which we refused...
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