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nickcoury

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This reminds me of 3.5 inch floppy drives. They were last manufactured in 2011. You can still buy "new" ones where they pull internal drives from old corporate machines and then wrap them in a new plastic enclosure with USB converter board to make them an external drive.

I visited the Tarahumara and ran the race in his book 4 times. I know Chris personally and he's certainly a storyteller and not a scientist to put it simply. I was similarly bothered by these kind of claims and he wasn't the first to make them. I did some research papers in college on this years ago.

Surprisingly, these claims are more true than false, though in no way completely true. There are some fascinating cultural mechanisms that enable each one. But they were also largely dependent on their society being extremely small and living in remote hillsides and only coming together for certain social events. Not very applicable to modern society.

Yes, most of the studies show there is a very large individual variation. The original 4% figure and similar studies were an average of something like 1-7% across runners.

Also interestingly, the shoe in this record uses much less carbon than past shoes, both saving weight and allowing even more super foam where much of the energy return comes from. Though there so much variance in shoe design and materials there are only theories on how much comes from the plate vs foam vs stack height vs weight vs other factors.

I reference Jakob's Law at least once a week, which says users use not your site most of the time. So if it works like most other sites then users will intuitively understand it. And if you do something different users will struggle to learn it.

A lot of watches now have Bluetooth music playback, both smart watches and sport watches.

I can also still manage to fit an iPhone 12 Mini comfortably in many running shorts in the small rear key pockets or back zipper pockets. Some running waistbands also work well. But it's hit and miss vs old mp3 players that weighed next to nothing.

When Web Sockets were still not finalized, I was writing a C# program using them but there wasn't a functional library available. There was however a nice open-source Java implementation. I copied it into Visual Studio, changed all the file extensions, and spent half an hour hitting build then fixing syntax and import red squigglies. It eventually built successfully and happily sent data to a NodeJS front end for years.

My favorite front end interview did this exact thing. The interview started with an issue taken straight from the Preact GitHub codebase. The interviewer provided the issue text and the commit right before it was fixed to pull down onto my machine. I had an hour to figure out how to build and reproduce the issue, Take in the high level structure of the code base, figure out how to drill down in a debugger to find where the issue itself was occurring, then propose a fix for it. Took the whole hour but was both extremely satisfying for me, and I imagine very insightful for the interviewer.

I've worked at two different FAANG companies, and have a different view than some of the other commenters here. It sounds like you want to grow, learn, and advance, and I don't think you'll be happy kicking back and coasting.

The first piece is that mobility is high between teams at almost every FAANG company. At my first one, I moved 3 months later because the initial team wasn't a great fit for me maintaining a lot of slow moving legacy systems. I moved to a team working on much more greenfield projects with more attention on the products themselves, and I thrived for several years. See what your options are to talk to other teams and move to one that aligns better with what you want to work on.

The other related piece to this is that because mobility is so high, there do tend to be certain teams or areas with higher turnover and lower quality hires in some cases. No one wants to work on hard to maintain and neglected products, most good engineers that start there move on, and so it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

There are likely some extremely brilliant people to learn from at the company (even if not in your team), so try to seek out and find them in teams with openings. I agree it's easier to move after a year, but if the fit is really not right you can likely get an exception going to a team with an understanding manager (who you would enjoy working for anyways). Set up some non-formal meetings based on the internal job board and be open with all these experiences and concerns.

Finally, the internal toolset is a real challenge, but I've come to take a slightly less pessimistic view on it. First off, the internal tooling tends to be worse on an individual workflow level, but accepting it has largely been better for me than fighting it (in most but not all cases). It's slower than a modern toolset, but still usually productive once you embrace what it's good at. The flip side is there are usually good reasons it's evolved to where it is today. Some of these reasons have to do with the scale of how many teams are working together, and understanding that will help explain why it is what it is. The other reasons are just that some of these companies have now been around a long time, and shifting to something better would be quite painful organizationally, meaning it's not ideal but the alternative would also be painful for the organization at a whole. You're new to it, so are at the opposite end of that.

This is in line with the point of the original comment, which wasn’t just about investing money. That comment mentions self-development but it’s the general principle of reinvesting gains in something that is increasing in value.

In your case you are reinvesting gains from your music career back into your music career which is currently increasing in value. The principle is that this will let your career grow at increasing rates.

I’ve always thought (or have been unaware of) a formal economic way of talking about this. Years ago I came up with my own definitions. “Altruism” can be defined as the part of your utility that increases because someone else’s utility increases. If you get no personal satisfaction out of something intrinsically but get satisfaction because someone else is happier, that is 100% altruistic. If you get some satisfaction but also some from the external benefit, you could tease out where it lies between 0 and 100%.

This also leads to another concept of “Malice” which would be the positive utility you get from others losing utility.

The crux to me is that often utility is talked about as only what you intrinsically get. Doing selfless things isn’t without benefit, it’s just without direct benefit and I have seen little ability to quantify it in economic terms.

Yes, I could have been more clear about meaning “current generation”. The implication being the phones that will have a long life of support and relevance. When the SE came out it was using Apple’s latest iPhone processor. You can still buy a new SE but it will be deprecated by Apple and run newer software for a lot fewer years than the current-gen X phones. Likewise a couple years from now when the 7 and 8 are out of software support the only options will be large phones if Apple doesn’t reintroduce a smaller phone.

I'll cross my fingers your speculation is correct.

There will now be an "apparent absence of good alternatives" in the iPhone camp too. The SE will be nearly EOL hardware soon, and the smallest iPhone is now a 5.8 inch screen. The minimum price point is also now $750 for current hardware. The SE was partially a low cost option for emerging markets as I understood it, so either they're planning on previous year hardware as the affordable option, or they'll need to release something that doesn't cost so much soon.

My reading of it was the opposite: > Pedestrians must yield the right-of-way to vehicles when crossing outside of a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection.

If a pedestrian is inside a crosswalk they almost always have the right of way. Outside a crosswalk it is not the case.

Agreed, the subsidized corn is also used as cheap feed for low quality meat. On the flip side fruits and vegetables receive the lowest subsidies. Plus the lower cost of unhealthy foods decreases demand for relatively more expensive healthy foods, lowering demand which drives prices up even higher. Tough to keep perishable foods when people don’t buy them as quickly. It’s a self reinforcing cycle to the bottom.

I had an Acer Aspire 751 with Atom Z520 and the GMA500 GPU you mentioned. It always had terrible driver support in Windows 7. When I updated to the Windows 10 insider preview before it was released, it was unusable. Huge graphics glitches all over the place, text would disappear entirely in some programs, random scrambled blocks of the screen that changed as you navigated. By the time Windows 10 was officially released it had been improved, but still wasn't great. Not surprising that this piece of hardware isn't a good candidate for support in the future.

Sick but Not Sick 9 years ago

It's a real thing. Freakonomics talked about it in one of their recent podcasts. Basically, clinical trials often exclude or under sample women for a number of reasons including the confounding factors of menstrual cycles, pregnancy complications, etc. This has received increasing attention lately and is getting better, but a ton of the current scientific wisdom is based on underrepresentative samples.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bad-medicine-part-2-drug-tri...

Sick but Not Sick 9 years ago

If you think it may be along the lines of the article and don't have a resource, I'd recommend Dr. Sarno's A Divided Mind. I had two bouts of knife-jabbing back pain (couldn't walk down a hall without holding the wall) twice, a year apart. While I think the way Dr. Sarno approaches the subject has too much hand waiving, approaching it through the psychosomatic lens gave me better results than anything else I tried, and I haven't had a recurrence for the last few years.

Had another friend with similar back issues who was told it was his disks from some 'top' doctors and he had similar results as me.

I think it's unfortunate when people ignore the possibility of psychosomatic symptoms, but even more dangerous when they attribute every issue to it. It should be a tool in the toolbox, a possible explanation/approach to ailments that are sometimes simple and singular but often times complex and multi-faceted.

My N=1:

I have chronic back issues. At best it's general tightness and fatigue, but can also be sore and painful. In particular I had two incidents in 2011 (in a matter of seconds) and 2012 (over a couple days) where my back spasmed and left me crippled, unable to move without knife-stabbing pains and unable walk down hallways without holding onto a wall. Both lasted almost a month, and were followed by months of heightened soreness.

I was 23/24 at the time, with no preexisting health issues. I'm a regular runner and in great health otherwise. I tried to fix this with deep tissue massage and core/strengthening regimens, and largely those helped keep the pain levels down but really only halved the symptoms at best. A friend had been recommending Sarno's 'A Divided Mind' which is all about the psychosomatic diagnosis since the first incident, but I had dismissed it. Finally in 2013, as I felt a new round of the spasms coming, I gave it a shot. Lo and behold, it became the single most effective tool I've found to manage my back issues. I identified that each spasm came with a major emotionally loaded event. In 2011 it was unrealistic pressure to compete at a big running race I had been training for. In 2012 it was participating in the search and rescue for a dear friend who was lost (and died) in the wilderness. In 2013 it was a nasty falling out with my best friend (and brother) at the time.

I don't believe the mechanisms are fully understood, and I think Sarno in particular does too much hand waving. But using his approach was the first time in years that I had no discernible back issues. I liken it to getting butterflies in your stomach. Your mind and emotions can trigger physiological changes to blood vessels, nerves, muscles, etc. that in turn can cause real issues. I also don't believe it's the only factor. I started an office job in 2015, and back issues have come back that I attribute 100% to the office lifestyle. I've found no relief with the psychosomatic approach, but do better with a sit/stand desk, breaks, and daily exercise.

Overall, I think a ton of people could benefit from approaching health issues from a psychosomatic perspective as one of many possible diagnoses. I also agree there are so many other possibilities that assuming it is always in your head is ignorant, neglectful, and downright dangerous.