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BrianEatWorld

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Former gov economist with an MS in Econ. Spent a great deal of my undergrad as a EE and have since swapped jobs to software eng. Currently navigating my way through the Valley start-up scene working with data, both big and small. In my spare time I like to work on papers exploring econ topics in cyberspace, surf and work on my motorcycle.

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What did you end up finding?

I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.

I think part of that resistance is that by giving in to urbanization, they are subsidizing SF's resistance to the same thing. If SF relaxed their laws and allowed for more density, San Jose could go back to being a suburb. As your post alludes, most of the jobs for people in SJ are further up the peninsula and I imagine most would want to live closer if they could.

I find it odd that the baseline used is after the holiday sales period, in the doldrums of retail.Couldn't the lower price after the holiday season be explained by excess stocks due to insufficient demand relative to forecasts during the holiday season?

I think the fact that toys, a product highly prone to fads and trends, are the main culprit would reinforce such an explanation. It would be nice if they had a baseline both before and after or an even average of multiple non-shopping holiday points, rather than one day.

In your example, aren't you implying that landlords and other wealthy individuals aren't simply not spending, but actually hoarding cash?

Most wealthy individuals aren't holding cash, they put the money in a savings account or investment that has a return. This money appears to be held to most people, but even money in a savings account makes its way back into the economy by affecting the reserve requirements of banks. Its a proportional effect, because reserve requirements are greater than 0% but lower than 100%, but it still contributes.

If they actually are hoarding, the question is why and in the past that is usually because savings returns and investment returns are expected to be negative. In which case, thats the problem to solve.

Oakland is almost just as bad.

I managed to make do with 50K a year, but I lived in San Jose and didn't have the expenses of car ownership.

Living in SJ required a 20 minute walk to CalTrain and then a 45 minute ride to the city by CalTrain (if I caught the express) and then another 15 minute walk to work.

I wonder if a solution would be a payment to extend copyright.

I think the strongest argument in the article is about the disappearance of works, but, as pointed out, this doesn't really apply to Mickey Mouse. Instead of having a universal expiration, which is causing some works to die, have a shorter expiration but then allow those who are still monetizing their works to pay a portion to extend it. This would provide a less grey market alternative to lobbying and perhaps the revenue generated could be put back into the arts.

I used it for a solid year when it first came out and have recently switched to Android, so that I can use Project Fi.

I found the systems to be pretty comparable. Google Now still creeps me out a bit because it assumes I want it to do many things without asking. This may be a product of me not customizing the options, but the fact that it has pinged me while I was sleeping to tell me I was late for a flight in a different country that a family member was taking was irritating. I didn't have that kind of issue with Cortana because it seemed to only do what I directly requested of it.

The voice recognition and speed seemed a little better than Google and Siri at the time too. During lunch, we frequently had faceoffs between digital assistants and Cortana won more than its share. It also seemed to be better at not just showing search results for a question, but actually answering it like a human would. I've even found that it's song recognition works faster than Shazaam, although it has a higher rate of returning no results.

From my experience, unless you are in the MS ecosystem, there is probably little reason to switch from your native assistant. The one exception being, if you find the data policies or certain features to be too intrusive in your current assistant.

On Radical Candor 11 years ago

I think Scott addresses that critique in the article:

HHIPP: “Radical candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.” That last P makes a key distinction: “My boss didn’t say, ‘You're stupid.’ She said, ‘You sounded stupid when you said um.’ There's a big difference between the two.”

I don't think they're going for that market directly.

The housing market is connected though, so interest in these, which may be limited to singles or couples without children, will remove some of the demand on larger units, such as yours, which can house children and families.

Watch out when shopping for this model. This specific model is tough to find reasonably priced and the current iteration doesn't have a built in USB cord. Instead, it connects via a USB mini-5 that is pretty weak mechanically. I was using mine as a keyboard for my media pc and it broke after two months of fairly normal use.

'Hackers' at 20 11 years ago

If you are in downtown Austin, this is actually playing at Alamo Drafthouse tonight(9/15).

I think some college campuses try to walk the line with under age drinking. A quick search shows Purdue has a policy that grants students amnesty in the event of alcohol poisonings [1]. I don't know if anyone has run numbers to see the net effects of such a policy.

I imagine that it removes some of the teeth, but if the negative aspects associated with drinking decline, then it seems like a good basis for arguing that similar policies should be applied to harder drugs, even if they remain illegal.

[1] http://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_2c255e7c-a2a4-5...

I noticed the same thing. According to Wikipedia:

On May 30, Stimson asked Groves to remove Kyoto from the target list, but Groves pointed to its military and industrial significance.[73] Stimson then approached President Harry S. Truman about the matter. Truman agreed with Stimson, and Kyoto was temporarily removed from the target list.[74] Groves attempted to restore Kyoto to the target list in July, but Stimson remained adamant.[75][76] On July 25, Nagasaki was put on the target list in place of Kyoto.[76] Orders for the attack were issued to General Carl Spaatz on July 25 under the signature of General Thomas T. Handy, the acting Chief of Staff, since Marshall was at the Potsdam Conference with Truman.[77] That day, Truman noted in his diary that:

"This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.[78]"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...

This is why I switched to Wealthfront.

I inherited an actively managed Morgan Stanley portfolio which has fees around 2-3% annually. I initially looked at managing everything myself, but didn't want to have to worry about all the finer points of managing one's own account. I may be losing the additional half of a percent, but in my mind, I am gaining far more.

Could you go more in-depth on your experiences here? Your opinion seems to differ with the review, which refers to it as seamless. It is the main feature I am interested in as I get anywhere from two to zero bars in my apartment complex but have a fairly strong router and would love to have it transition without dropping as I am walking home.

I agree with the point about the benefits of physicals notes, but I still don't understand what is so special about Moleskines. Maybe it was just because I was an early hire and not a founder, but I actually preferred Mead's line of Five-Star notebooks. Since I had to wear a variety of hats, from eng to hr to content creation, the subject dividers were great for keeping everything straight. They also seem to last forever.

My only wish was that they intermingled some engineering style quadrille sheets with their college rule.

You can still get access to the QR feature/Bing Vision, you just have to look under Lenses.

I was also bummed about this change, but used it infrequently enough that I don't mind it being located under Lenses.

If you check the Store, you can even pick up an app called QR for Cortana that can be pinned as a shortcut to get quick access to the Lenses menu.

I initially read this as returning to work for Microsoft.

I actually never left their tech realm. Even though both my work and home machine run flavours of Linux, I fell in love with Windows Phone back on WP7 and haven't been able to go back to Android of iOS since. If the integration between phone and desktop are really as tight as they look to be in Windows 10, I may consider converting my home machine to Windows, but at work running the same OS on my box as I do in prod is way too valuable.

Local H has always been a duo and so Scott Lucas has had some really cool setups in the past. At one point, he had replaced the two strings on his guitar with two strings of a bass and then ran different sets of pickups to different amps so that he could effectively play both traditional bass style parts and guitar parts at the same time.

Heres a video of him demoing his older setup: http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/video-local-hs-scott-...

I saw them a few weeks ago and he no longer uses the same setup, but I've always thought it was inventive.

I don't know if its the same in all cities, but in Austin I have actually had taxi services refuse to pick me up if I give an address that is a bar, regardless of my level of inebriation.

Uber may not be a model corporate citizen, but I have trouble as seeing this as anything but a good move. Particularly, given that my current city has a pretty big issue with drunk drivers.

Almonds originally came out of countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. All of which are members of the EU, which in most cases has stricter environmental policies than just about anywhere else in the world.

The problem with your statement is that, in this case, we are that country lacking suitable environmental policy. If almonds weren't brought to California, they would potentially be more expensive, but they would also be grown in regions where they naturally occur and under laws that are more strict than our own.

My first experience with an open source project was just a small github repo for a library I wanted to use. I noticed some TODOs in the code and fleshed them out. Even now, the repo only has four contributors, but the others were quite helpful when I had questions.

I have yet to move onto a big project, but it was a nice introduction to that kind of distributed coordination needed for open source repos.

OCaml: Objects 11 years ago

Thanks for the reference. I will check out that and SICP[1] as mentioned by one of your replies.

It was the Austin Meetup. The name of the presenter escapes me, but it was great overview. The topic wasn't meant to be CLOS, it was just mentioned in passing, which was why I was hoping that it was the topic of this article.

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/