levthedev

I disagree. There is no such thing as a "lean" site that is as popular as Wikipedia (top 5-10 US depending on the day). I believe they are likely the leanest website in the Alexa top 30. The only site that I see that is leaner in the top rankings is Craigslist, currently at #38 in America, and Craigslist is a famously, fantastically, uniquely lean site (in some people's opinions, even to a fault).

Hosting costs for Wikipedia are "only" $2.3m, but imagine the legal expense they have, fighting likely millions of takedown requests, malicious lawsuits, complying with local laws and regulations in China, Russia, etc, paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime), a security threat model that includes nation-state actors, and the responsibility that if they fail (by being hacked, or sued, or DDOSd, or whatever), they will have let humanity's library be harmed.

I just can't understand how any casual bystander can complain about Wikipedia or their funding/organizational model. If you don't like it, just don't donate money.

I have to object to this. Wikimedia as of their audited 2019 financial statements (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...) already has ~$53m in short term investments, leaving ~$101m in "cash and cash equivalents", which notably often includes Treasury bonds, CDs, etc, anyways. So they are likely already investing all of their cash into safe, low-yield investments already.

Even if they weren't, the ~$154m they have free for investments, would only gross ~$1.2m in 10 year Treasuries, or at most $5-6m in relatively higher-yield investment grade corporate bonds.

Looking at their expenses in 2019, even if you cut donation processing expenses to $0, cut awards and grants to $0, cut travel and conferences to $0, strip out depreciation and amortization, and cut their $46m payroll in half to $23m (which at a fully loaded cost of $200k/employee, is only 115 employees for one of the most widely used websites in the world), you would still be looking at annual operating expenses of ~$45m.

There is absolutely no way that Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation could survive without any donations - they have $154m between cash and investments, and would need to support $45m in annual operating expenses, even with these fantastically high budget cuts. That means they'd need to net, after taxes, almost 30% return on their assets every year, just to tread water, and only after cutting their budget essentially in half.

Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?

WeWork, for the most part, does not own actual real-estate assets. They mostly have actual real-estate liabilities - leases.

They do own a relatively small amount of property, like their partial ownership of the Lord and Taylor building, which for reference is now considered a huge mistake (it's bleeding money).

This is technically true, but sort of misses the mark. Costco does not price goods such that their Cost of Goods Sold + Operating Expenses = their Membership Fees + Non Alcohol Gross Revenue, Alcohol Gross Revenue to be their main source of profit. They do price goods such that their COGS + OPEX = Gross Revenue, leaving their membership fees to be the main source of profit.

In other words, you can say that any given vertical worth $Xbn of their revenue was their profit, if you are convinced that Costco actually models their pricing around that vertical section of their revenue. But in reality, everyone knows that the section they model around is membership fees - everything else is break even and the fees are profit.

The interest rate on deposits was previously -0.6%, and now is -0.75%. Hope that clarifies if you were unsure.

What is the advantage to buying Tether with Krones instead of just converting them to USD? I think people jump to crypto as a solution when oftentimes the financial markets have already had the same solution for hundreds of years (in this case, foreign exchange).

Full email thread on the Wayback Machine (worth the read) https://web.archive.org/web/20080112204313/http://www.centos...

Boglehead investing is generally the safe and correct pick for the average investor, but large corporations, hedge funds, banks, and so on, all require hedging.

A simple example is a corporation that buys goods in China and sells them in the US. This corporation does not want to lose money due to a poor USD/Yuan exchange rate, so they hedge that risk by buying a financial instrument that guarantees them a certain USD/Yuan exchange rate.

Does the average Joe ever need to hedge currency risk? No. But large institutions do. And this is just a single risk; hedging is not just used for exchange rate risk, but also for credit risk, interest rate risk, asset price risk, liquidity risk, disaster risk, political risk, and so on. Any kind of risk can be priced (see for instance, health insurance and car insurance for consumers, a mechanism by which large corporations price the bulk of consumer risk), and there are many trillions of dollars that belong to groups that especially dislike certain risks, and therefore wish to hedge them.

I believe they are, by some fairly loose accounting definition (i.e., not counting back office expenses, capital expenses, etc), profitable on non-pool rides in core US cities.

Don't do this. See the other response as to why.

Sure, if you think that rates are going to drop next year, and would like to secure the 10 year rate instead of risking that.

Another way to express it: if today, you believe the average rate over the next 10 years will be lower than the current 10 year rate, you should buy the 10 year treasury.

This is a tiny bit simplistic as it ignore liquidity/volatility differences between buying a 10 year treasury and buying 20 6-month treasuries or 10 1 year treasuries.

There was a less extreme yield curve inversion a few months ago, which is likely what you're referring to. But it wasn't so far reaching as the current inversion, which puts the 1 year Treasury over the 10 year.

It's a sci-fi book with an impressive sense of scale. Every hundred pages or so the story zooms out; from one man's life, to a country's struggle, to a global calamity, to an interplanetary and then galactic crisis, and finally to even higher dimensions.

It does this while threading characters from each stage of "zoom" into future stages, creating for a lot of interesting cross-over plots and sub-plots.

As other commentator's have said, it also wove together Chinese culture with science fiction and history with drama very fluidly.

It was, for me personally, a very "fun" read. Kept me excited at each chapter, and I genuinely didn't know what to expect next. I highly recommend to any sci-fi fans out there, even those like me, who initially didn't think they could stomach around 1,000 pages of a translated-from-Chinese sci-fi novel.

That doesn't make any sense. Why would someone have interviewed at Google before doing a bootcamp like Lambda School, which is specifically meant to teach someone (with almost zero experience) programming? If you've made it to a Google onsite, you probably don't need to go to a bootcamp.

Is it not possible to limit your algorithm's maximum time change for each school? Say, capping the change at 1 hour, and finding the best result of that set of times. Even if it is not as good as the 100% optimized solution, it seems like more palatable while also being an improvement.

Presumably, you are already doing that, by limiting the start/end times from 7am-10am, or something similar. In this case, instead of a global time restraint, there would be a local time change restraint +-1 hour for each school.

Two great books.

California Sunday is my favorite.

https://californiasunday.com

I think you're being too harsh. Sure, there are a number of poorly run soup kitchens. There are also some excellent ones! And even the poorly run soup kitchens ostensibly do good - they certainly use the money that funds them more efficiently than most other enterprises, and they of course provide food to the hungry.

Maybe your choice is to be hungry rather than go back to a soup kitchen. That's fine, you're entitled to that opinion. But I don't feel that your experience should deprive others of the choice - I know some people who rely on soup kitchens so as not to starve, and they certainly would prefer to have soup kitchens than not.

Many people rebind caps lock (or another easy to reach key) with escape. This way they can quickly change modes.

Also, most beginners use insert mode too much. If you find yourself going into insert mode just to change a letter or word, try learning shortcuts instead (r for replace, ciw for replace word, diw for delete word, and other neat command combinations).

See my above comment - please don't pay them $1000 to learn this technique.

Copy and pasting my earlier comment about TM - TLDR for it is that the org is terrible but the technique is not bad (it's pretty generic: sit comfortably, repeat your given mantra, allow other outside thoughts to rise up and pass through you. Don't fight them, just think them and then go back to your mantra. Repeat for 15-20 minutes twice a day).

TM is a pretty terrible organization.

They used to officially believe all sorts of crazy things, like that their meditation could make you fly, or make you invisible, or that if the square root of 1% of a city meditated, then it would dramatically lower violent crime.

They charge huge amounts of money for very little value - a course to learn TM is something like $500, even though the whole technique could be described in 30 seconds.

They claim that you get a unique mantra based on your personality, and that the mantra is a powerful magical vibration energy word (or some such junk). In actuality, the mantra is chosen based on only your age (and sometimes gender).

The TM centers also sell snake oil - they have tons of teas, powders, supplements, etc, for cleansing your toxic energy.

Of course they have studies done by practitioners of TM that claim it is amazing, but there aren't really any unbiased studies about it.

The current leader of the movement, a former physicist, received the Ignobel Prize (like the Nobel prize but for stupidity) for his beliefs in the crazy parts of TM.

All of that being said, as a technique, it's not bad for meditation. It's just run by a shady organization that believes in magic and will charge you tons of money.

TM is a pretty terrible organization.

They used to officially believe all sorts of crazy things, like that their meditation could make you fly, or make you invisible, or that if the square root of 1% of a city meditated, then it would dramatically lower violent crime.

They charge huge amounts of money for very little value - a course to learn TM is something like $500, even though the whole technique could be described in 30 seconds.

They claim that you get a unique mantra based on your personality, and that the mantra is a powerful magical vibration energy word (or some such junk). In actuality, the mantra is chosen based on only your age (and sometimes gender).

The TM centers also sell snake oil - they have tons of teas, powders, supplements, etc, for cleansing your toxic energy.

Of course they have studies done by practitioners of TM that claim it is amazing, but there aren't really any unbiased studies about it.

The current leader of the movement, a former physicist, received the Ignobel Prize (like the Nobel prize but for stupidity) for his beliefs in the crazy parts of TM.

All of that being said, as a technique, it's not bad for meditation. It's just run by a shady organization that believes in magic and will charge you tons of money.

You should definitely check out !!con. They have really fascinating and weird talks about all sorts of interesting CS and design topics. Plus, it's pay what you can and is located in New York, so there's lots of interesting stuff to do nearby.

My favorite talk from this year was about implementing an algorithm for HDR photography purely in Microsoft Excel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8

Right now I am freelancing 20 hours a week. I've found it to be incredibly rewarding, as I have enough energy to sit down and code for 4 hours a day and then go home and read, go to the gym/library, watch a movie, or hang out with friends.

Plus, working part time in software still means that I make good money.

If I could work for a "regular" software company but only work 20 hours a week (and be paid 50%), I would definitely do it.

For what it's worth, I also know someone who for a while worked 6 weeks on 6 weeks off - he was kind of one of those fabled 10x developers and so had negotiated something special with his employer. Another commenter mentioned something similar; working 40 hours a week but for only a few months a year.

All you need are the (excellent) docs! You can read the whole thing in like an hour or so.

Onve you've read the docs, just start building.

They just started doing half batches recently, which are only 6 weeks. Some employers are actually OK with this, given the assumption that you come back as a stronger (and maybe even nicer) programmer.

I spend $650, splitting a 700 sqft 1 bedroom in center city Philadelphia. I spent exactly twice that for a similar setup in NYC, and I spent $2500 for a 200 sqft studio in SF (basically a walk-in closet).

What about you?

What do you mean you miss it? It still is around. I use it all the time.

This appears to be the wrong link - it asks me for a WordPress login.

Here are some of my favorite non-programming ones:

* https://californiasunday.com - super interesting articles, beautiful design and photography

* https://inside.com/readthisthing - 1 interesting piece of journalism per day

* https://tedium.co - weird deep dives on random topics. This week was on adhesive licking stamps

* https://stratechery.com - high quality essays on tech

* https://nytimes.com/newsletters/morning-briefing - daily summary of news. NYT has it's biases but the daily briefing is useful for picking up on stories quickly and deciding what's worth reading more about.

Lastly, I have a small newsletter of my own where I send out a weekly-ish plaintext email with interesting articles, essays, and links that I've found. You can check it out at https://tinyletter.com/levthedev. I'd love feedback on the format/content.