martian

Also annoyed by this. One small thing to help: if you long press on the Stocks widget, you can edit to hide the "Stories".

Substack | SF, NYC, Remote US or Canada | https://substack.com

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture. Many of the world's leading thinkers, writers, and creators are using Substack to produce their work and connect directly with their audiences.

Substack is a startup funded by YC, a16z, and others. We raised our Series B two years ago and are growing quickly.

We are hiring for:

  - iOS engineer
  - software engineering manager

Substack | SF, NYC, Remote US or Canada | https://substack.com

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture. Many of the world's leading thinkers, writers, and creators are using Substack to produce their work and connect directly with their audiences.

Substack is a startup funded by YC, a16z, and others. We raised our Series B two years ago and are growing quickly.

We are hiring for:

  - full-stack engineer
  - iOS engineer
  - software engineering manager

Have you considered Substack?

Obligatory audio from Venus, Venera 14 lander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZDW53U8qQ&t=0s

With annotations: https://www.reddit.com/r/venus/comments/7vpr1w/sound_recordi...

That was my take as well. I'm not convinced that BTC is technically or ethically "worth" the energy usage either way, but this is a useful/nuanced perspective.

Energy usage is distributed across industries and sectors, and we frequently criticize oil/gas and automobiles. Other technologies, like batteries, seem to avoid the laser-focus of the eco-oriented press. Batteries are very energy-heavy/carbon-heavy to produce. For example, the total carbon impact of a Tesla may in fact be higher than a conventional automobile. [1]

Point is: understanding total environmental costs of any technology is a Hard Problem.

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/cleaner-cars-cradle-grave

This reminds me: One of the best books about a long walk is Patrick Leigh Fermor's "Time of Gifts" (and the subsequent books). Memoirs of his time before WW2 literally walking from one side of Europe to the other.

His cultural insights, historical perspective, and witty language are all exquisite.

Target has been doing this for a while now, via their acquisition of Shipt.

https://www.target.com/c/shipt/-/N-t4bob

Bummer. I own one and use it every day for listening to high quality audio on an old stereo setup. The sound quality is so great!

I routinely buy these for friends/family who want better digital audio setups and they tend to work great. I’ve never had any issues.

The best feature is “Ok, Google, play X.” When combined with Spotify’s amazing music index (really good for rare recordings/composers/etc), this is a super powerful mechanism to play any music at high quality. Best of all I can do it without needing to look at my phone and fend off the distractions there.

That's the UI that I remember from that time. Nothing in the auth dialog mentions access to Messages.

+1 I don’t use any new features in the new iOS releases just want the same speed and efficiency I’ve come to enjoy, and that I literally had minutes before the upgrade.

Do Not Disturb has a variety of options on iOS that can allow calls from your contacts and blocks all others.

Just use the Do Not Disturb feature on iOS

I don't disagree with the sentiment here, but want to add a few comments: If you have to walk once you get off of Bart (and let's be honest, the Bart stops are pretty well spaced out), your commute goes up. SF transit (the 38 Geary, the N) might seem slower, but you typically don't have to walk as far when you get off. Also, depending on time of day, Muni runs more frequently than the specific Bart lines. Compared with NY Metro (or most other major cities), Bart stops are spread thin.

And quick nit on the Presidio: it's a lovely place to live and if you live there, there is a free shuttle to downtown called the Presidigo that's easy and efficient.

If you're interested in play-based schooling, I recommend looking at the Reggio Emilia approach. Some very interesting and very practical approaches around early childhood education.

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

Curious why you specify the Cities and Knights expansion?

Yes, the Coway. I've had it for a few months now and just leave it on all the time on auto/eco mode.

I bought a top rated air purifier a couple months ago off of the recommendation from Wirecutter. I live in SF, not China, but it's dramatically improved quality of life in my apartment. It cleans out smokey air from cooking very quickly, and cuts down dust/particulates especially in the spring months when pollen is everywhere. Highly recommend.

OP here: really worth watching the embedded video on this topic. Viridis is born out of an awesome, intense deep-dive into research on human vision and perception.

I meant: the companies are giving numbers to the spammers so their calls show up as local numbers.

Do automated systems / robots have first amendment rights? (Honestly curious if this has been brought up in the courts)

Do Not Disturb mode is surprisingly great at this.

You can complain to the FTC. I haven't had much luck with it actually stopping the calls but it's better than nothing and gives the government something to work with.

https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/

Why aren't these kinds of calls straight up illegal in the first place? Telecom companies who hand out numbers to spammers should get fined like crazy, and the burden of proof goes on them for dealing with the people they give US phone numbers to.

But for now, I use the iPhone's Do Not Disturb option and allow calls only from contacts. I used to get harassed daily by shit companies selling me stuff, and I'd report them to the FTC, and it was a huge annoyance. Now I have to see the missed call from an unknown number, but at least my phone doesn't ring.

Prions are both beautiful and terrifying. One of my favorite science fiction stories is Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora". He makes great use of the prion concept, and its consequences for human life, in relation to space exploration. Fascinating read if you're interested in the topic.

True innovation happens in amazing places. I'm really excited to see the future of agriculture enhanced by robots and AI.

One Bay-area company doing awesome stuff, not mentioned in the article, is Blue River Technologies. They make lettuce crops (of all things, lettuce!) insanely efficient with AI and hyper-fast distributed systems computations. This stuff is so cool.

It's easy enough to disable all these emails in FB's notification preferences.

The number of companies that have bad unit economics is, I agree, substantially higher than it should be. But I'm not sure this explains the bubblegum expansion of valuations and rounds we're seeing today. There are many thoughtful comments on the perceived bubble from people all over the industry. I'm not qualified to say one way or the other, but I did enjoy Mark Cuban's recent post on the matter. [1]

My company, Thumbtack, got a lot of this right early on. Years ago we doubled down on getting the unit economics right. So right that we were (IIRC) profitable for a month or two before taking a big VC round. Not sure how many other companies can say that. But at the end of the day, if the bubble is a bubble and it pops, knowing that we would survive and be able to make a profit is hugely satisfying.

My advice to any young startup is figure out how to make money early on. It's the rare Google/Facebook that can blow up and use the platform to sell ads. Most startups will not do this, but many can still make good money doing important things that people will pay for.

[1] http://qz.com/356620/mark-cuban-is-absolutely-convinced-we-a...

Also: never underestimate laziness. Typing in a credit card takes work.

Re: Netflix/Spotify price differences. The relative size of the libraries (vs all content in the domain) is something to keep in mind. Netflix gives users access to some videos, but Spotify gives users access to almost all songs [1].

[1] Can't find precise estimates for sizes of libraries, so apologies for the argument from anecdotal evidence.

Our mission is to help people accomplish personal projects by matching their needs to the best service professionals in their area. From wedding photographers and DJs to home contractors or French tutors, Thumbtack can help.

We are backed by Sequoia and Google Capital. Offices in SoMa with daily home-cooked food and a friendly, ambitious team of 30 engineers. We're looking for expertise in Go, Python, data science (ML and NLP), mobile, and web.

Current projects:

  * Hadoop/Spark data research platform
  * Two-sided search and discovery system to connect the marketplace
  * Scaling of core systems on AWS
  * Building an Android app to empower service professionals to be more efficient

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

Also, feel free to email me (chris at) with any questions!