brfox

Your comment reminded me of this Asimov short story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

That's from Indeed. And, Indeed has fewer job postings overall [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUS]. Should we normalize the software jobs with the total number of Indeed postings? Is Indeed getting less popular or more popular over this time period? Data is complicated

Manhattenhenge:

https://shademap.app/@40.75481,-73.98696,14.82042z,171702794...

https://www.amnh.org/research/hayden-planetarium/manhattanhe...

I've seen articles saying that it would be hard to find any large enough investors to buy it who also don't cause a monopoly. Can ByteDance spin off TikTok to a separate company which would have an IPO and go public and in the process no longer have Chinese owners?

Anthropic's Claude summarized this, too (the article was too long for ChatGPT):

    In April 1993, Don Calhoun made a miraculous full-court shot during a Chicago Bulls game to win $1 million. He was an average office supply salesman but felt calm and destined to make the nearly impossible shot.
    The shot went viral and sparked a boom in in-game contests at sporting events. Companies like SCA Promotions started insuring these big-money contests, which remained popular crowd pleasers.
    Calhoun initially feared he wouldn't get the money because he had played some college basketball recently. This violated a common rule that contestants couldn't have played the sport recently.
    The Bulls held a press conference saying they would pay Calhoun the $1 million regardless of the insurance outcome. Later, Michael Jordan privately told Calhoun that the Bulls players had pressured the insurance company to pay him.
    Calhoun got Jordan to sign the winning ball years later after persistence. He kept the autographed ball not as a collectible but for his kids to play with, symbolizing how the shot changed their family's trajectory.
    The $1 million was paid out as $50k checks over 20 years. It provided a nice supplement to Calhoun's middle-class lifestyle but did not make him wealthy. The experience and memories were priceless.

I have a deck of these cards from the 80s in very good condition (except the box is not in good shape). Let me know if you want it and if you live in Seattle I'll give it to you (or I can mail it if you want to pay shipping).

Woops, I guess I was thinking more about ordering online and picking up the food myself. I usually just call the restaurants to place my take out order, but tend to prefer places where I can order on their own app or website, pull up and re-order the last thing I got, and then hit submit. Like someone else mentioned, there is a lot of friction with calling and placing an order, explaining the modifications, paying in the store, etc, etc.

I thought this was such a fabulous idea, I bought a domain name for it: https://inmytown.org/ As usual, I just haven't done all the other hard work. But, in the old days last year, I thought it would be cool for local shops to have an online presence so that online shoppers could see where to buy stuff and place orders and then pick it up. So, have an e-commerce platform for shops, restaurants, delivery would be great. Try and keep money local instead of shaving 10-20% off of all transactions and sending them to big tech. Does anyone want to help me build this? Totally committed to non-profit and great apps for local companies.

It seems like this area is ripe for a non-profit, open source platform to help out. What options are out there along these lines?

See here: http://www.counsyl.com/

But, about 30 genomic mutations are spontaneous every generation. I have one that causes brittle bone disease. So, just knowing the parents' genomic profile and screening out with IVF will not be sufficient.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322360/

That paper is a mini review of this paper which actually has the data in it: http://emboj.embopress.org/content/37/14/e98597

In there, they did work on A549 cell lines and showed that removing nutrients from the media decreased their growth rate. They also showed that putting these human cell lines into immune deficient mice and doing a couple 24hr fasts per week had a small (p=0.03) effect on the tumor growth rate (Fig 2). But in the in vivo study, it appears they didn't directly compare A549 vs cisplatin resistant A549 - they seemed to have run 2 studies both vs control.

There are literally thousands of papers showing drugs or treatments which can cure lab mice of "cancer" and many more which can kill cell lines in vivo, but only a tiny percentage of those work in patients. There is a reason this is not in a higher profile journal.

If I am European and I ask Facebook to remove my data, will they also remove pictures of me which are owned by my family? I doubt it, and that's also the problem with providing consent on these DNA databases - they don't require the consent of all of your relatives.

From their blog: "In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident."

Notice it says one fatality per "320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware." But, how many of those miles (or what percent of the time) does a Tesla driver use Autopilot? Also, maybe those good stats are due to the structural safety features and not the autopilot. It may be more fair to compare to other cars with excellent crash protection but no autopilot.

I think it would be a great service to the world to improve driving safety, but maybe we need to really start looking at the stats and get some more hubris as we transition to full autopilot. For example, require that drivers keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. When more cars have autopilot, then mesh behavior between vehicles, and e-road features, then maybe we'll be more ready for driver-less cars.

Last paragraph:

The University of California, Los Angeles, owns a U.S. patent (6,274,119) entitled “Methods for Labeling ß-Amyloid Plaques and Neurofibrillary Tangles”, which has been licensed to TauMark, LLC. Drs. Small, Satyamurthy, Huang, and Barrio are among the inventors and have financial interest in TauMark, LLC. Dr. Small also reports having served as an advisor to and/or having received lecture fees from Allergan, Argentum, Axovant, Cogniciti, Forum Pharmaceuticals, Herbalife, Janssen, Lundbeck, Lilly, Novartis, Otsuka, and Pfizer. Dr. Heber reports receiving consulting fees from Herbalife, and the McCormick Science Institute. The manufacturer of Theracurmin, Theravalues Corporation, provided the Theracurmin and placebo for the trial, funds for laboratory testing of blood curcumin levels, and funds for Dr. Small's travel to the 2017 Alzheimer's Association International Conference for presentation of the findings.

And real tumors are quite heterogeneous, so maybe experiments done with contaminated cell lines are more realistic than those done with pure cell lines.

I totally agree. I just wonder if there is some way to take that open space, visual programming which so many people do with Excel and make it more robust. Well, actually, lots of people are working on making a better spreadsheet or putting the table data into a database and making interactive plots, so maybe that's not the angle here. Maybe we can figure out how to make our IDEs more Excel-like in some ways. Not for us regular programmers, but for people who'd like to do serious programming in their subject/domain of expertise but don't want to just do it in Excel with VB.

The article didn't mention it, but I think that Excel is a great example of where "the masses" have learned to do programming. It is visual and the effects of changes are immediate.

A few points not yet mentioned: - Increasing the diversity of the Amazon culture by having an HQ in a new city will help Amazon understand the customer better... the last election has shown how little we all understand each other. - Could Amazon be planning to eventually split the consumer and cloud divisions into two companies? - Is this an opportunity to flip a red state to a blue state by getting a lot of tech workers to be employed in a red state? Which cities/states are closest to flipping? Atlanta, Pittsburg/Phil, Detroit, Cleveland, Phoenix, Austin/Houston?

If you are skeptical of the company's future, and the CEO is not to be trusted (and it is clear he is trying to take advantage of you), then ask yourself if you had 100k, would you invest it in this company? If the answer is no, then maybe you should take the buyout. On the other hand, how well do you live with regrets - if for example you were wrong and the CEO does not run the company into the round? If you really think the company will fail, then 100k is better than nothing.

How will the investors feel if they know that you would sell 5% of the company for $100k? Maybe this is your leverage: the investors will know the price of the buyout and since the investors know that you are very familiar with the company, then they will invest less. Therefore, the CEO should offer you a fair price for your shares.

I really like this idea! No one else mentioned it on the comments (and I saw this post too late for too many others to notice), but if we got more companies to do this, then it could have an impact on bringing more tech jobs to red states to "share the wealth" and change the electoral map, as well! It could help red state folks and blue state folks spend more time together and understand each other a little better. I would be very pleased if you could mention this aspect in your blog post and also try to convince other companies to do the same. This is so awesome!

This is a very important question - many employers get mad when you have side projects. Tread carefully or at least work on something clearly unrelated to the business of your employer.

What about enormous sunspots or some type of variable star - why is there no mention of this as a possibility?

ditto that, I just read the whole thing! I knew some of those tricks and others were new. Thanks!

Australian journalist does not agree with this story: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2015/02/24/was-mh370...

That seems like an important fact which should have been in the main story! Thanks for pulling it out.

It would be interesting to read how these handicaps are calculated. Seems like a game-able system.

Or maybe they overspent and built something too good. They could have had a much smaller budget if they really wanted a 90 day mission.

Its better (for the environment) than mining for diamonds or gold.

My daughters have this game. They played it twice over the past 6 months ... they much prefer Legos.

what a relief, thank you!

Do you have a good read for this? I'm always telling people around me that we're running out of helium.