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nbanks

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I enjoy singing, playing the organ, unicycling, and programming. Currently I'm working on BotColony in a large Montréal start-up called NorthSide. Basically, I'm just another guy who grew up at a computer.

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They wanted a new CEO and didn't expect Sam to take 95% of the company with him when he left.

Sam also played his hand extremely well; he's likely learned from watching hundreds of founder blowups over the years. He never really seemed angry publicly as he gained support from all the staff including Ilya & Mira. I had little doubt Emmett Shear would also welcome Sam's return since they were both in the first YC batch together.

I think the most obvious redesign would be to switch to a stenography system instead of Querty/Dvorak/etc. By chording, we could type faster with less movements. Steno takes longer to learn, but it's easier to type over 200WPM.

On the other hand, I tried using Plover for a couple months and found it was much better for writing English than it was for programming in an IDE. I missed the function keys. Plover was also a pain to use...I've been meaning to program a Raspberry Pi to run Plover but act like a normal USB or Bluetooth keyboard. I bought the Pi and a small screen, but never got further with the project. The Pi is now the piano synthesizer for my 25 year old music keyboard.

Getting Re below 1 seems like the right approach, but I really hope that we can do this through extensive testing and travel restrictions. This way anyone who gets any illness and can be tested immediately, tell their friends to get tested, and isolate themselves. Meanwhile the rest of society can function more or less normally, even if they have to watch sports on TV instead of live, and after a sick individuals recover they can be retested and rejoin society again. This seems so much better to me having everyone spend 18 months in moderate isolation until a vaccine is approved.

At least summer is coming and it's substantially safer to be with people outside.

I've been using the Gemini PDA for the past year; it's recently been replaced by the Cosmo Communicator. It has a normal glass screen that folds like a mini laptop to reveal a keyboard. Mostly I like the keyboard (I'm typing on it now) because I find it hard to get over 60 WPM on a smartphone. However it's also nice to have the screen protected.

For very short distance flights, electric aircraft are already viable. For example, Harbour Air Seaplanes operates a 20 minutes flight between Vancouver, BC and Victoria, BC. They use float planes because both cities are on the coast. Their first electric aircraft should take off in a couple months.

One nice thing about electricity is that it's much cheaper than biofuels. This is because motors are much more efficient than engines, and because large generating stations are more efficient than small aircraft engines. BC is 95% hydroelectric which makes electricity even cheaper.

There is a compromise. I have a tendency to work odd hours because it's much easier to get actual work done if there's less distractions. On the other hand, I do feel it's important to have at least 1-2 hours overlap with other people's schedule to ensure that there's buy-in for any major changes in the code base.

Presuming you still can't borrow a new book if you have overdue books at home, and you still have to pay for lost books, this seems reasonable. It reminds me of the old-school netflix DVD rental system where you can keep a movie as long as you want, but can't get a new one until you return the previous one. It also reminds me of being able to take out books for 3-5 months at a time as a grad student--it was so much nicer than undergrad!

I wonder how countries like Norway and Switzerland implement their wealth taxes if this is absolutely impossible. It's true that more countries use an inheritance tax which has a similar effect to a wealth tax.

I'd be willing to try a fitbit if they had a daylight-readable smart watch. I haven't gotten around to getting a Garmin, but last I checked they were the only watch since pebble with a daylight-readable screen--and they support heart-rate. Google has a chance to do better with App integration.

I tried reading an issue of Dabiq once because I was curious about how they interpreted the Hadith. It was really hard to get, which probably shows that the cyber attack worked. If their servers were still up it should have been easy.

edit: I don't recommend reading Dabiq because a decapitation is really difficult to unsee.

That explains why the jquery based script I wrote to change the alpha channel of an image didn't work in Edge whereas it worked in all the other modern browsers I tested.

edit:clarity

I've always considered Amazon's search system as pretty bad, often ignoring keywords to get more search results. It does look like their sort by price mechanism has improved. eBay has my favourite search system because it's willing to admit if there are no results and allow me create an e-mail alert. It also allows negation and lets me use parentheses to define a logical "or" as part of the query.

With Hong Kong's population density, I could see this technology working fairly well. I'm not sure how well it would work inside buildings, but could be good enough for people walking on the streets. It would also theoretically possible for each phone to store hundreds of encrypted text messages if latency isn't important.

I know of a pastor who asked a woman in his congregation to go to a different church for a while so he could date her because he wasn't allowed to date parishioners. After they married, she came back to his church again. It's entirely possible to date a subordinate by asking him/her to transfer so they're not your subordinate any more.

I wonder how if this European study holds true in North America. The US and Canada have a regulation for maximum speed/power, but pedelec is optional.

In Canada it's pretty easy to build faster/more powerful e-bikes that break the laws without getting caught, though I'm sure off the shelf bicycles do adhere to the regulations. I ride a conventional racing bike myself, but I like e-bikes because having more cyclists and faster cyclists is a good incentive for making more bike paths.

I don't understand why this was done suddenly. Warning Iranians that there account will be blocked next month and offering read-only access in the meantime would be much more reasonable. I'd expect legal action to impose the ban would likely take at least this long. I'm glad git is a distributed system, and hope no one lost any information.

I have a Gemini PDA phone that I've used to recompile the Linux kernel. It takes 4-5 times as long as compiling on my laptop, but sometimes it's easier than cross-compiling.

I rarely use my phone as a development machine, but when I do, it feels more authentic than using a remote workstation. It heats up because the local CPU is really working. Occasionally I find myself shelling into the phone from my laptop....

[edit, typo]

When I was 10, I kept track of politics, and my political views haven't changed much since then. I certainly had better judgement at 10 than my grandfather the last time he voted a after living with Alzheimer's for a decade. The learning from voting would be worth a little noise around election results where parents or peers convince kids to vote the way they prefer.

The Joint European Torus had a 67% efficient reaction back in 1997. The torus wasn't designed for it, so they never tried again. It seams that ITER could achieve break-even quite realistically simply because tokamak reactors are more efficient when they're bigger. Yes, it has to be hotter than the sun and use a deuterium/tritium fuel, but it's all doable with known physics.

I'm not sure when or if a sustained reaction can be done economically.