FastMonkey

I think Salesforce is fine for large companies with teams of sales reps and a well staffed IT department, but it's overkill for most small to medium sized companies with just a few sales reps. If you can run on a creaky set of excel sheets, access would have been a far better and much more flexible solution. With minimal training it could be set up and run by a competent excel user.

Salesforce admin is a pain in the ass. There's mandatory updates 3 times a year that require low level software development expertise in order for the admin to understand what will break, building new functionality essentially requires tens of thousands of dollars of consultant development, and god help you if you want to run a report that involves objects that don't have a direct parent-child relationship.

I'm an analyst, and because I know how a database works, Salesforce stuff gets dumped on my desk all the time. I actively seek out alternative systems for everything it does, and would dearly love to see us drop this eye-watering expense.

I don't think it's questioning anyone's competence to suggest that a single scientific result might have confounding factors. This is one study done by one team. If the result was repeated in several studies, all coming at it with different viewpoints then I'd start to believe the result. In this particular case though, there seems to be new research coming out every few months saying coffee is good or bad for you. If the results look like that then it's hard to put much weight on any single one of them.

It seems like he probably has enough saved to never have to work again. I don't think I'd keep plugging away either if I was in that position and the work wasn't my passion.

Maybe rocks in the scree cool down the air in the pores between them. Cool air is denser so it sinks and flows out at the bottom of the porous layer, and new warm air is pulled into the ground towards the top of the scree pile. People found the places that cool air was flowing out and built these grottos there. Not saying I knew anything about these before 10 minutes ago, but that seems plausible to me.

Invest in very boring things, like S&P500 and AGG ETFs. If you feel tempted, try investing a couple of percent in something more exiting. You'll find its easy to invest with hindsight but very hard to do it in reality. With your fingers safely burned you'll be happy to return to your boring ETFs.

Pay attention to transaction fees and taxes.

I don't think he's saying that the repair will teach you the first principles of phone design. It's that by taking the step of actually opening the device, you significantly lower the hurdle to any next steps.

In theory:

(real GDP)×(price level) = (money supply)×(money velocity)

In general terms its probably a decent model. But ya, there are situations where it's not completely internally consistent.

I'm not that keen on that. Odds are that when the plastic is broken down, it'd be broken down into CO2. we're much better off just locking all that carbon away underground. If anything, we'd be better off with some micro-organism that turned CO2 into some type of hydrocarbon.

With people falling over themselves to prove how well work from home works, it's more likely that the jobs just go abroad.

I don't know about that. I left civil engineering for finance a couple of years ago. Changing was actually a lot less painful than I thought it would be (I might even say it was fun), and I'm way happier now. There was a couple of years as I found my feet where the pay wasn't quite as good, but that reversed pretty quickly and I'm ahead now again.

Transferable skills are a real thing. Also, the amount of people who can do the everyday work in any industry is endless, so don't worry too much about that. It's the ability to come at things from a different perspective that's rare and it really sets you apart.

I don't know the details of this, but a guy I worked with once told me he did work detecting underground structures using gravity measurements. I guess there's lots of relatively affordable equipment to so something like this.

https://archive.epa.gov/esd/archive-geophysics/web/html/grav...

Ya, a good microphone makes a huge difference and it's just plug and play.

I was against going back to the office too (just 2 days a week, but still). Having gone back I can't argue against it, it's just more productive to be in the same space as your team.

The periodic back and forth movement of a pendulum can be modelled as a circular rotation with constant angular velocity. We "know" that it just goes over and back so we "know" that the circular motion is just a model. All the same, maybe in the future, they'll figure out that pendulums actually move in 4 dimensions. Then they'll look back at us and think "surely they should have known that pendulums really moved in 4 dimensional circles, because they knew about this model".

I'd imagine it's similar looking at the sky. If you "knew" the motion of the planets was related to some Gods moving around, you might expect that circular motion was just a model there too.

You could cut the paper along the X axis, and subtract the area below from the area above.

That's sad to hear. I'm in UT's online data science masters and I think it's great. They have some teething problems (we're the first cohort taking a lot of these classes), but it's all pretty minor stuff like delays in getting invoiced etc. We seem to have more choice in lectures than you do each semester, and we definitely don't have to spend particular days doing coursework on long weekends. Things have been pretty flexible for us so far at least. The most important thing for me is that there's enough material in there and that its reasonably advanced, so I feel like it's worth doing this one for sure.

All undergrads from a single university also. Just based on the social development of people as they go through undergrad, I'd guess that the variance in behavioural change before and after treatment is fairly high whether they're treated or not.

Maybe they mean "OS"?

I've gone back and forth a bit between electronic and paper notes. For me, electronic just can't beat the physical location of paper. I know where in space a particular note is so it's easier for me to hone in on it. I sketch and do a lot of math and there's just no friction less way to do that in an app. I think I tend to remember concepts graphically too, so searching with text doesn't feel as natural.

Of all the note taking apps I've used though, obsidian is easily the best. The graph they have for connecting notes together is just great. And, I like that their storage system is just plain text files, so long after obsidian is gone, I'll still be able to look at them if I need to.

I also only ever heard of it as "Maslow's hierarchy of needs".

I wouldn't have any issue with this type of stuff if it was just for pure self understanding. It's interesting to have that kind of reflection. However, even if the science were sound, we wouldn't just fall into a single category, we would be a little bit in all of them. We also adapt to our surroundings and change a bit over time.

Unfortunately, the fact is that promotion and hiring decisions are made based on things like this. The people promoting it are usually business and HR people who don't have an understanding of how shakey their underpinning is. They just think "we want a reformer, and this fancy test says that Cam has the highest reformer points out of the applicants we've seen so let's hire them".

The B2B startups I've seen that grew into something real all had did some consulting in their area at the start. It gave them a broader experience in the problems they were trying to solve, and helped them build relationships with their first customers. I'm not in SF or anything though, so things might just be a little different here.

The power company where I live installs more ducts than they need when they dig a trench. So they'll install say 10 ducts in the trench when they only need one or two. They rent out the extras to telecoms.

I guess the Yorkshire countryside is probably depopulating like many rural areas are, so they probably have extra capacity in the water lines. In London, decommissioned gas lines used to be sold to broadband companies to avoid digging up the streets. The difference here though might be that every waterline repair will probably lead to an internet outtage and vice versa. Since this is countryside and they probably wouldn't get the service otherwise, that's probably a trade off their happy to make.

This comment is being downvoted but it's correct. The moon all moves at the same speed, which is the speed at its center of gravity. The face nearest us is moving slightly slower than it should at that distance so it is pulled towards earth. The far side is moving slightly faster, so it is pulled away from the earth.

The wiki link explains it pretty well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force

I was going to make a similar comment, but you phrased it better than I could have. It's easy to say in hindsight that X knew Y, but there's a big difference between knowing something and just suspecting it.

In fact, at the time the evidence for many models was equally strong. So, based on the limited available evidence of the day it actually would have been incorrect to believe too strongly in any model, even the one that we now know to be better than the others.

The last point is an underappreciated one I think. Having been an engineer and worked around engineers for a long time, I've seen a lot of people get very frustrated in the face of fuzziness in organizations, teams, politics. It's just a fact of nature that there isn't one optimal system that everything should fit into. The sooner you can come to terms with that the more effective you will be in life.

Looks great! There's a lot of small businesses that have been upsold on Salesforce who are now finding out that all they needed was a moderate step up from excel to a simple database. I'd love to see a bit more visible detail on integrations: what does the native slack and email integration allow you to do, what are the top 10 apps people are adding etc.

Step 1 if you've made a mistake is to tell your supervisor. Waiting to see if it'll go away on its own will make the problem grow, robbing your supervisor of the ability to fix it. Your failure to tell others makes you look like you either don't understand what's happening around you, or that you did it on purpose.

"Regulatory arb" makes it sound like they did some clever financial engineering to conjure money out of this air. It actually means they were able to skirt regulations meant to put a limit on the interest rates that borrowers pay.