kore

You're right, I stand corrected

The article is misrepresenting the situation.

Jack Dorsey isn't attempting to sell anything here. The site allows anybody to make an offer, unsolicited, on a tweet of their choosing. Jack can choose to accept the offer if he wishes, but he's not the one who initiated this.

It's all in their FAQ.

I've been playing around with a Nest Hub Max, and with that you can pause/play a video by holding your hand like a stop sign in front of it. Kind of gimmicky, but occasionally useful.

Was also curious about your use cases on the phone (aside from ad skip), and they actually worked for me. I'm using a pixel 4, though wouldn't think that'd make a difference.

If we're talking about 1980s Japan, all of the talk about trade war could be a greater risk to Chinese stability. As with Japan back then, China's growth has been breathtaking, but it's also awash with bad debt from a banking environment where social relationships are more important than economic discipline. The weak links in their economy just haven't been culled.

If growth slows, reduced cash flow could put some immense pressure on their banking system as loans fail. Their bad debt rate was already thought to exceed Japan's at its worst years ago.

Then again, people have been predicting Chinese growth can't continue for years.

Correct, but that was just the cost to develop the core booster of the Falcon Heavy.

That doesn't include the original costs to develop the Falcon 9 and all of its subsequent variants, nor the cost to develop the original Falcon 1.

Worth pointing out however that the Saturn V cost roughly $1.2B per launch, compared to $90M for the Falcon Heavy. So it was roughly 6x more expensive per kg to LEO.

Not to mention it required a nation state to fund its roughly $40-80B development cost. Can only guess, but would expect the development costs of the Falcon 1/9/Heavy were maybe $3-5B?

That said, Space X has benefited from all of the R&D done in the past. They weren't building it in a vacuum.

The Chinese government's R&D initiatives are what's making the difference here. They've further laid out specific goals for particular technologies such as automated vehicles, drones, medical diagnosis, and machine translation, and their rate of R&D spend is on pace to overtake the US in the coming years.

For all its faults, their leadership has their eyes properly set on science and technology as a means to challenge the US economically and militarily. They're incentivizing the proper areas where they want industry to operate, and are better poised to take advantage of it. The US government is hampered by dysfunction in comparison.

Would hope the US sees what's at risk here, and moves from underestimating the threat, to overestimating it and taking massive action as they often do.

Better summary here: https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/coming-tech-war-china

Since that article, Kadowaki's actually now listed as a 2-star Michelin restaurant.

Don't know what's happened since then, but I remember the name because it's the only Michelin restaurant I've ever dined in. Small world coming across it on HN!

For what it's worth, the staff was pleasant and welcomed us as foreigners, asking where we were visiting from. Kadowaki came by at the end of the meal to put the finishing touches on his signature dish, and was just as welcoming. Pricey though!

China undoubtedly faces many challenges, as you fairly point out.

However, there's a long history in China that determines the thinking of both the government and its people. That view is that a strong centre leads to a peaceful and prosperous China, while a weak centre leads to confusion and chaos. An Arab Spring-like event isn't as likely, there just isn't the same desire to be liberated.

No one would challenge the centre unless they were prepared to go all the way. And there's a very powerful state security apparatus ready to come down hard if they do.

Stuxnet

This has also been making the rounds, Deep Photo Style Transfer: https://github.com/luanfujun/deep-photo-styletransfer

Sounds like you've already tried plenty of productivity apps, but in case you haven't tried it, I've found Todoist quite good.

The "Apple-ification" as you put it is done pretty well. In place of drag + drop to set a time of day, tasks can be created with inline date parsing. So tasks can be created with something like: "Meeting with Tim at Tues 3pm", and it'd pick that up. It's missing direct support for habits aside from having recurring todos.

If you'd like, I've got a 3-month premium code left over I can send your way. Not affiliated with them, just a happy user.

Not sure why there was such a knee-jerk reaction, but it's actually fairly straight forward and not scammy at all. You're performing two trades, using a money market ETF that trades at the currency exchange rate, and paying standard brokerage fees + spread instead of currency conversion fees.

If you pay $20 in fees + spread for 2 trades, that'll be the cost of the conversion. For a $10k conversion, that's 0.2%. Unless you're suggesting that a money market ETF is prone to manipulation, your brokerage is going to scam you, or you don't like to deal with taxes on your stock purchases/sales, there isn't much drawback other than time. The larger the amount though, the more it'll potentially be worthwhile.

More info about this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/norberts-smart... http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2013/12/03/norberts-gambit-th... http://www.finiki.org/wiki/Norbert's_gambit

If you have a need to transfer large amounts of USD-to-CAD or vice versa, have a look into Norbert's Gambit. It'll effectively let you perform the transfer for 0.2%. Probably not worthwhile for small amounts, but if you're converting ~$10k, might be worth the effort.

This site seems to break it down: https://norbertsgambit.com/

With multiple stations between SF and LA, this could be mitigated with an emergency system that pulls the train off at the next stop. Similar to how some buses or trains have emergency stop systems, except instead of stopping, the capsule would divert to the next station.

The mentions of his security concerns reminded me of this: http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/06/14/you-cant-get-there-fr...

"As a thought experiment, imagine that Osama bin Laden was still alive and that he used the Tor network to do a Reddit AMA once a month. How long do you imagine it would take for the US to find and neutralize him? I posted this question on Twitter and, while responses varied, ex-NSA Global Network Exploitation Analyst Charlie Miller guessed one to two months. I would be very surprised if it took more than three."

As others have noted, this capability was intentionally removed. From http://redis.io/topics/virtual-memory

"Redis VM is now deprecated. Redis 2.4 will be the latest Redis version featuring Virtual Memory (but it also warns you that Virtual Memory usage is discouraged). We found that using VM has several disadvantages and problems. In the future of Redis we want to simply provide the best in-memory database (but persistent on disk as usual) ever, without considering at least for now the support for databases bigger than RAM. Our future efforts are focused into providing scripting, cluster, and better persistence."

I'm inspired by this man's dreams and the way he's striving for it, even though the end goal is decades off.

Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California—maybe to around half a million dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move to Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there’ll be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still eight thousand people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.”

While I agree with some of your sentiments about the author, it feels like you're doing a bit of the same by claiming that everybody who wants to change the world are doing so only because they're projecting.

I say so with some defensiveness because one of my greatest goals in life is to do just that, to make a difference, as cliche as it is. And yes, I've quit my old job so I could pursue it. We all look around this world and see things that aren't quite right, that we'd like to see changed, and I'm no different. I'd like to be able to do something about it though, big things, not just sit idly by.

All too often in life I've been happy just coasting along, taking the easy road in front of me, pursuing good grades in earnest, working hard, and making a good living at interesting jobs. That brings me no closer to my goals in life though, that's not my dream. Some of us have dreams that can be achieved while working 9-5, that's great, but if you have a dream that's important to you, that requires you to quit, do give it some thought. You only have one life.

As someone planning to build some iOS games as a side project, I really appreciate this info.

Some questions for you:

Have you considered offering your game for free for a limited time to get your game out there, so it can hopefully find some more coverage? If so, what made you decide to keep it a paid app?

Did you consider any other game dev tools, such as Unity?

Did you reach out at all to any mobile gaming sites or blogs to try to get coverage for your game? If so, did you have any luck?

Based on monetary losses alone, the Yukos incident of some years back overshadows this by orders of magnitude, with claims that $98 billion was lost in the liquidation of company assets according to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos

The CEO, once the richest person in Russia, is now rotting in prison - many believing this was due to his public complaints of corruption and his funding of opposition parties.

Checked out the video, and it seems like a well designed app serving a niche audience.

If you find some success with it, might I suggest skinning the app to serve other niches that share similar needs? I can think of a couple just off the top of my head. You might need to make a few tweaks, but the majority of the feature set could be reused, and with the feedback you get from this app you might find ways to refine the design even further.

For those that want a free service and don't mind ads, there's also http://hotspotshield.com and http://expatshield.com which will let you access US and UK services respectively.

The UK one doesn't support OSX, so I run them both from within a separate Windows VM if there's some restricted service I want to access. That way their VPN software doesn't get in the way of my other activities, and I only get ads injected within the VM.

> While the VM backend helped, we found that it still wouldn't stay within the bounds we set, and would continually grow no matter what we set. We did report the issue but never came to a good solution in time. For example, we could give Redis an entire 12GB server and set the VM to 4GB, and given enough time (under high load, mind you) it would climb well above 12GB and start to swap, more or less killing our site.

We came across this same issue while implementing a Redis-based solution to improve the scalability of our own systems. Someone filed an issue reporting this: http://code.google.com/p/redis/issues/detail?id=248.

Basically, antirez confirms that Redis does a poor job estimating the amount of memory used, so you'll need to adjust your redis.conf VM settings to take this into account. For anybody relying on Redis's VM, I'd recommend writing a script to load your server with realistic data structures with sizes you expect in production. You can then profile Redis's configured memory usage vs. the actual memory usage point at which swapping starts occurring, and set your redis.conf according to the limitations of your box. For example, we run Redis 2.0.2, and using list structures with ~50 items of moderate size, we found configuring Redis to use 400MB actually resulted in it using up to 1.4GB before swapping. We configure our settings to take this into account. Mind you, this may all change with diskstore, and later versions of Redis which are supposed to be more memory efficient.

For those curious, our Redis-based solution is helping us scale some write-heavy activities quite nicely, and has been running stably.

When you said that they decided to hire you, was that something they told you right after the interview? If so, I think it would've been prudent to follow up with both the CTO and the recruiter after a week or two had passed. Worst case you'll just look enthusiastic about your new job, and there's little harm in that. It's always possible for these sorts of little mishaps to happen, even if it weren't through a recruiter. A short email could've saved much confusion.

Actually, as far as airlines go, as long as you let them know within 24 hours you'll usually get a full refund no strings attached. Different airlines have slightly different policies. For some, you need to request the refund strictly within 24 hrs. For others, you can get the refund anytime before the next day ends. This is the case for all of the airlines I've had to get a refund with in both Canada and the USA.

Beyond that grace period they'll usually charge a fee of some sort, and the refund might be in the form of a voucher or credit.

> $3M Series A (mid 2008) Assuming a $2M pre-money

> $10M Series B (2010) Assuming a $5M pre-money

I know this was just a thought exercise, but shouldn't their valuation have increased between 2008 and 2010?

Googling "everest base camp trek" will dig up all sorts of information. There are several adventure travel companies that offer treks of this sort - typically you'll go in a group of around 10 other travelers plus your local guides. If you're on a tight budget, flying into Kathmandu and booking the trip yourself with a local company can be much cheaper, it'll just require a bit more effort. Depending on the time of year you go, it can either be busy with many other trekking/mountaineering groups, or it could just be yourselves. You don't need to be superhuman to finish the trek, but you do need determination and a relatively good level of fitness.

One drawback with booking a set itinerary is that if your body doesn't take to the altitude well and you need more time to acclimatize, it could jeopardize your trip. Within a group of 10, a couple people likely will not make it all of the way to base camp and will need to stop. If that worries you, finding a more flexible itinerary will let you travel at a slower pace if need be.

This is the sort of scenery you can expect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6ZPYwlj4bc

> You are never warm, the food sucks, camping for long periods at high altitude sucks rather a lot, you are never clean, altitude sickness sucks, pooping in an 8" hole in the ground sucks, not eating much protein sucks, but… the views are spectacular, the people you meet are amazing, the place itself is awe-inspiring, the wildlife is interesting and diverse, the peace of the place is fantastic, and the mountains… well, the mountains are something special.

Great post. For those interested in experiencing the splendors of the Himalayas with less of the grittiness, I'd suggest booking a trek. Everest base camp treks can be done in 2 weeks or less for a modest price, along with many other scenic and adventurous treks in the area - no mountaineering needed. Tea houses provide an alternative to camping, no need to "poop in holes," and I found the food available great. You can't escape the lack of bathing, nor the possibility of altitude sickness - but I had an amazing time, and hope to go back some day. My one suggestion: go during low season.

I'm getting great value out of this list.

Can anybody recommend a book that has helped them become a more productive and efficient developer?