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blue11

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I'm very glad to hear that your son had a happy outcome!

"Ear infection" is often not even a heuristic. Pediatricians sometimes say that when it's not obvious what's wrong with a small child that has a little a bit of fever and is crying. Parents need to hear a reason and "ear infection" sounds more convincing than "probably nothing", and sometimes parents can be, well, difficult. I've even heard a pediatrician admit as much once. On another occasion, a nurse practitioner diagnosed our child with an ear infection without even bothering to check the ears.

Emergency physicians, on the other hand, are always thinking about the worst case scenarios and trying to rule them out.

It's not about traveling. It's about staying as long as he wants to and whenever he wants to. American citizens are limited to staying 90 days (in any 180 day period) in the EU as tourists. An EU passport would allow him for example to take a 6-month vacation in France.

EDIT: The 90/180 rule is for the Schengen area, not the whole EU, and, yes, that includes Switzerland, which is not in the EU. Not sure what the rules are for the rest of the EU, but he probably cares about Schengen anyway.

At Harvard and MIT "need-blind" means that all admitted students receive a financial aid package, adjusted for the student's financial means, to make it work somehow. It's a combination of grants, loans, and presumed income from on-campus part-time jobs. At some other places "need-blind" may simply mean that admissions are granted regardless of financial needs, but financial aid is not guaranteed. Yes, federal grant and loan programs are not available to international students, but the universities have other resources (endowments, private loans, etc.)

As for sources... I am a former international student at a top US university and I know many others too. Almost no one I've met came from a rich foreign family.

Yes, most "top" schools do not have Harvard's endowment, so they have to work with a limited budget. Still, their motivation is quite different from GP's suggestion that they are admitting international students to boost they finances. Anyway, we were talking about Harvard and MIT. I'll add one more thing, some universities do care about the well being of their students.

International students usually pay a much higher effective tuition rate.

That might be true for other universities but not for Harvard and MIT, whose admissions are aid-blind and most international students there receive huge financial aid packages.

There are lower-ranked universities that have programs (usually Masters's ones) that are targeted towards foreign students who can pay a lot of money.

The whole thing is optimized for maximum cruelty, but the suggestion that students should transfer to another school that has in-person classes is just mockery.

In normal times transferring to another college is a process that takes 9-10 months. The admission rate for transfer applications is really low. And that's just for domestic transfer students. It is not even theoretically possible to transfer to another school in a couple of months. Not to mention that the F-1 student visa and the I-20 form needed to obtain such a visa are for a specific school only, so international students would also have to go back to their home countries and obtain new visas.

Lots of negativity in this thread and comments from people that either have not had children or have had them so long ago that they don't remember what is age-appropriate for a 3-year-old.

I'll just second some of the common recommendation:

- Magnatiles. There are a lot of manufacturers out there, some brand name, some not. The good thing is that at this point they have all standardized on the tile sizes, so they are usually compatible.

- LEGO Duplo. The standard LEGO sizes are too small for most toddlers. Duplos are perfect. Kids (and parents) quickly tire of the set themes, but the good news is that you can mix and match pieces and let the kids build whatever crooked houses they want to build.

- Trains and other vehicles that go on rails.

- Picture books that you can read to them while they can follow by looking at the pictures. This is tricky, because in my experience most children books are not great. The biggest problem is usually the lack of a story. Many books are supposedly educational or teach kids good values, but they are poor at story telling. If there is no good story, kids are not interested. Many books also don't have a good balance between text and pictures. Too little text and there's not much for you to read, they'll flip through the book in seconds. Or pictures that do not have enough detail to match the text. Anyway, the only solution is trial and error.

Admittedly, none of these are exactly "STEM", but I think that's OK. What's more important to stimulate creativity and make learning fun.

It's called adverse selection. You don't want to be on the other side of an order from an informed trader, because the market is moving against you in the short run. In the longer run, if the big fund is more often correct than not, then you are also more likely to have made a losing trade. HFTs care mostly about the effect on the market today, so they probably don't care whether the information is correct or not, they just want to get out of the way of big moves.

Making a reservation or ordering food from Bloomberg Chat actually sounds like a feature that would be used by a lot of traders. I doubt that there are many restaurants that have a Bloomberg account though (there is no need for a physical terminal, Bloomberg Anywhere can run in a browser).

As a tourist, crossing from the German-speaking to the French-speaking part, the differences were quite noticeable. I was told that something like 30% of the population never cross the language line. "Never" is probably a hyperbole, but the point is that even within such a small territory there are significant cultural differences.

Supa has western European etymology, and chorba was the word brought by the Ottomans. Not sure about Romania, but throughout the Balkans the difference in meaning is mostly in the connotation of a degree of sophistication (supa:chorba is as city:village).

I was disappointed to find out that the ex-WOW developer in the title was Mark Kern. Sometimes the messenger can undermine the message. Reading his Twitter thread seemed like he is rewriting history. He took The9's money after spending the VC money (Benchmark, Sierra) he had raised originally and not being even close to releasing the game. I'm not sure who he refused a bribe from later (or maybe he meant that he refused to give a bribe to someone?), but he brought The9 to begin with.

I'm wandering what services and price structures you are referring to. Examples? While there are vast differences between what's available to low income vs., say, upper middle-class people, the differences on the other side of the distribution curve are not that dramatic.

For example, wire transfers in the US are fixed price regardless of the amount, ACH transfers are practically free, mortgage rates cannot go lower than treasury notes, etc. Or maybe I am misinterpreting who you consider as "normal people".

Streeteasy started employing the same dark pattern a few months ago. It seems like companies who have an effective monopoly just cannot resist the temptation.

They replaced the listing agent's number with a number that takes you to one of their agents. (After a while they added back the option to contact the actual listing agent, but you have to first click on a link to get to another page.) Also, as soon as I contact an agent about a listing their agents start spamming me with texts and emails written in a way that try to obscure that they are not the ones who have the listing. At this point I never contact an agent through the Streeteasy platform. I just google the agent's name to find their contact info.

The ports of LA and LB handle something like 40% of the US-China trade.

There are "clean trucks" requirements, but that can be enforced only in the immediate vicinity of the port. I don't have a source but there have been reports that the clean trucks shuttle back and forth between the port and nearby places where the cargo can be transferred to other trucks.

The benefit is decoupling the timing of setting funds aside for charity and the timing of donating to organizations. For example, let's say that your income this year was unusually high (you sold your company, you received a bonus, or some other one-time event) and you plan to donate $100,000 to charity. If you put the money in a donor-advised fund you get the tax deduction immediately, but you can decide what exactly to do with the money later. For example, you can choose to donate $10,000 per year over the next ten years. Yes, there are fees, but on the plus side the money can be invested in a mutual fund while it's sitting in the donor-advised fund. Eventually the money will be donated, there is no way to get it back.

Fall of Voodoo 8 years ago

Frankly, I don't remember with certainty. But Wikipedia seems to agree with what my memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

" The term GPU was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as "the world's first GPU", or Graphics Processing Unit,[2] although the term had been in use since at least the 1980s.[3] It was presented as a "single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines".[4] Rival ATI Technologies coined the term "visual processing unit" or VPU with the release of the Radeon 9700 in 2002.[5] "

I had forgotten that ATI initially tried to push the term VPU instead of accepting NVIDIA's terminology. The goal of both companies's marketing teams was the same--to convince the market that GPUs were as indispensable as CPUs and not just optional accelerators.

Fall of Voodoo 8 years ago

From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.

Babynests seem to be a Nordic thing, I guess? Personally, I had never heard of them until I read your comment. For what it's worth, the US market seems to be quite unexplored, something you might want to consider. They look really cool, although there might be some safety concerns. I think that US pediatricians are currently unanimously recommending flat empty cribs / bassinets (no side padding or loose blankets) for newborns.

"Could have gone for citizenship, but didn't. I was never seen as an American."

Perhaps you were not seen as an American because you yourself didn't feel that way? I would think that someone who feels American would apply for citizenship given the opportunity. American citizenship does not bring many additional advantages compared to the green card, in fact, there are some downsides (jury duty, potentially having to pay US taxes even if you leave the country). So, most immigrants apply for US citizenship only if they feel that they belong.

I agree that people asking where your accent is from is really annoying, however, that question doesn't have the same implications as in, say, Germany.

As a former participant in these types of competitions, I can confirm.

The teams that win are the teams that practice extensively. Universities like St.Petersburg care a lot and have official programs for preparing for the ACM competition. The students care a lot too as the competition is a way for them to distinguish themselves.

US universities, at least the top ones, don't care that much. American students have better things to do, as you said. If you look at a typical US university team, you'd see a lot of Chinese and Eastern European students that have done IOI in high school. Their advisor would be a professor who typically just signs the paperwork.

GCC 6.1 Released 10 years ago

I've worked at places where we maintained a dual build, VisualC++ and Linux gcc, because we wanted to be able to develop and run in multiple environments. That forces you to write clean standard-compliant code, although in some cases it could be a pain.