JunkDNA

I was flat out unable to use the family sharing feature of YouTubeTV. Support from gooogle was helpful but they didn’t have much to offer in the way of a workaround. They researched it and basically told me to get gmail accounts for everyone in my family or share my google account with my kids (!!!). Interestingly, I asked if I switched email providers if my account would revert to one that would allow family sharing. They couldn’t guarantee it.

I am on google’s grandfathered free tier for my domain. Recently it has gotten annoying with new google products since they have to be supported by g-suite for you to use them. So I recently was shopping around for a new host. Basically I’m a non-business user who is probably in your target market.

As others have said, your pricing is unpredictable and hard to compute. As I’m evaluating you with competitors, I’m not going to invest the time. In my experience, when a company makes it hard to know what you’re actually going to end up paying, you usually end up paying more than you want (see: Verizon).

From a business perspective, it seems to me your value proposition is that you are striving to be the cheapest email provider. I think you should consider the kind of customer this attracts. The sort of person who thinks a few dollars a month per email address is too expensive is going to be high maintenance. If you want this to be sustainable, I think you need a different angle. Consider that all these other email providers basically charge around the same amount. That isn’t an accident. I don’t know the email business, but I assume it needs a certain margin to actually be sustainable and these guys have landed in the right ballpark.

If you’re looking for business customers, then your pricing is basically rounding error compared to the other guys. It’s not materially different enough to matter for a business of any reasonable size to be worth having as a customer. In fact, the lack of predictability is a major deterrent. Businesses need to create budgets and every variable cost adds to the complexity of the forecast.

Yes! I loved that book. Many of these pictures are in there for sure. I actually recently got a copy of the book used and in excellent condition. My mother donated most of my books as I outgrew them over the years. My 8 year old daughter recently got interested in space so we read it cover to cover. While dated (and blatantly incorrect in places) it still managed to spark that same awe and wonder in her that it did in me. I’m so glad to have found this copy. Such a great book.

As a parent I have a strong desire to raise my children with the same values that I have. For people who practice organized religion, you can’t really have the “values” part without the religion part. It all fits together into a cohesive whole. Young children also have a strong desire to mimic their parents, while at the same time wanting to know “why?”. How does one explain to kids why you’re celebrating a religious holiday or headed off to church/synagogue/etc... without teaching them about God? Most organized religions also have imperatives for passing on the knowledge to children. It’s totally incompatible with a person’s own belief system to not raise their children in their faith.

Many people for thousands of years have devoted their lives to the search for Truth. It is a journey that takes a lifetime. I don’t believe there is some moment in time where one is able to discern fact from fiction when it comes to the big questions of the meaning of life.

This is exactly how the Autobahn works today and it is indeed fine.

I spent an enormous amount of time on my computer as a kid, and I credit that time with giving me the superpowers later in life that accelerated my career. I had a decade-long head start on many of my peers. So I am hugely biased that "hey, I turned out fine. No big deal".

However, seeing my own kids' behavior even when I heavily restrict their screen time makes me question that. When their time is up they wail and moan and yell in a way that goes well beyond the usual kind of complaining kids do. I tightly control the apps that my kids are allowed to use and limit their time (thanks to iOS screen time). In the times when I've taken away iPads as punishment for extended periods, my kids' moods have improved. The amount of arguing has gone down. Their behavior is better. It's inescapable that these things alter them in some way. This is without social media even!

I genuinely don't know what the right answer is. On one hand, they have this amazing machine that is a gateway to all sorts of learning. It's almost like we've stepped into the world of "Diamond Age". On the other hand, it makes them turn into borderline sociopaths, even when they use it for short periods of time. The addictive effect is real too, and that is also frightening. If given the choice between anything and iPad time, iPad time wins hands-down 100% of the time. The human race has entered a whole new unexplored territory.

I agree completely. This book was recommended to me as “life changing”. I was skeptical given that my experience is that 90% of self help books are a rehash of “How to win Friends and Influence People”.

As I have moved into professional roles with progressively more responsibility, the tools and techniques in this book are what have allowed me to scale myself out in a way that my prior ways of working would not have enabled. Many productivity tips (such as inbox zero) have their roots in this book.

As another commenter says, any semblance of the private student loan industry was wiped out shortly after the financial crisis. All the US student debt is now essentially backstopped by the US Federal government (in quasi-government run institutions like Sallie Mae).

What will happen when this bubble bursts is that we will bail out the bad loans using US taxpayer money. This is another reason why universities can continue to raise tuition rates: they know there is significant political support to having the government "help students pay for college". The government tipped their hand regarding being open to outright forgiveness of debt by including a rule that they do full debt forgiveness if you go work for a non-profit right after school. This turns out to be a fantastic deal if you go to medical school. You can rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in med school loans, go get a job at non-profit hospital for several years (and get paid market rates for your skills!), and then saddle the US taxpayer with your med school loans.

I have dramatically reduced my caffeine dependence in the past by slowly adjusting my morning coffee on an increasing percentage of decaf: 10% first week, 20% second, 30% the third, 50% the fourth. It was completely painless.

Time for an old favorite:

http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

And here we get into perverse incentives in scientific research distorting what you see. Public health agencies generally care more if there is a threat to public health. So if you are a researcher looking for grant $$$ over the long term, repeatedly not finding a link between WiFi and health makes you uninteresting to funding agencies. Note that I’m not suggesting nefarious intent, it’s more bias than anything else.

For purely scientific pursuits the “other camp” on any given issue often has a voice. Unfortunately in this situation, the other camp is largely made up of industry folks. They are happy to fund your research that finds no link as many times as you want. The cost to you as a researcher is being labeled an industry shill. The problem here is sometimes people are industry shills. So separating the good from the bad is nontrivial. This problem is pervasive in scientific research and solutions are non-obvious. Never forget that humans are biased creatures and scientists are not magical. They carry all the same baggage the rest of us do. Many are self aware enough to know it. But doing something about it is quite hard.

This. I remember my biochemistry professor in college grinding up a bowl of cereal into a fine powder and then using a magnet to yank all the iron out. Fine iron powder like the kind present in cereals is nowhere near as bioavailable as iron complexed with proteins (e.g. from red meat). You basically just poop most of it out. Ask anyone who has had an iron deficiency. It is ferociously difficult to take enough supplements and change your diet enough to correct a severe form of it.

There’s a bigger issue than gene therapy. Precision therapies that work really well for a very small number of people are going to become increasingly common (whether gene based or otherwise). We are seeing this in cancer right now where there are finally true cures emerging. It’s clear current pricing models are not going to work in a world where you need lots of different therapies to treat small clusters of patients.

Outside of cancer (the only real place where there is a broad clinical application of precision medicine at scale) there’s an estimated 25-30 million people in the US with a rare disease (a disease that affects less than 200,000 people) [1]. There are an estimated 7,000 different rare diseases. That makes rare diseasss more common than cancer in the us which is at about 15 million people [2].

So what if we end up with cancer itself being subdivided into thousands of small diseases (something that is already well underway) in addition to all these “rare” diseases? The current model of developing therapies is just not going to cut it. We need new development methods that are not so cost-intensive and we need new payment models that create enough incentive that individuals and companies take enough risk to identify therapies. It’s a ferociously hard problem.

[1] https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/pages/31/faqs-abo...

[2] https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html

I’ve seen a ton of them in suburban Philadelphia (Main Line). I travel to SF frequently and have spent a lot of time in Palo Alto. Model 3’s are at least as common on the roads here in suburban Philly as the Model S was in downtown Palo Alto a year or so ago. I know Tesla’s strategy was to ship close to HQ first and then expand elsewhere. Seeing this many here makes me think they are hitting their stride in a big way.

Oh you just wait! If you haven't gotten one of these yet, the latest version of this is that they actually send a calendar invitation (through a 3rd party service) for a meeting out of the blue. Gmail will helpfully pencil that time in on your calendar automatically until you go in and delete the event. This prevents legit meetings from being scheduled since people are afraid you have some important sales call. If you're absent minded and click "No" to your RSVP, they know you saw it! Blech!

If you’ve never read this paper, you owe it to yourself to give it a thorough read. It truly gives you a sense for the problems relational databases were attempting to solve with the tech of the day. Also note the strong mathematical underpinnings of many of the core ideas. It’s no wonder these ideas have withstood the test of time.

Accurately simulating biological systems in the cloud to run a virtual clinical trial is like trying to predict the exact weather for Washington DC at a specific date and time hundreds of years from now using weather forecast models. It’s pretty much impossible with current biomedical knowledge.

To simulate humans well enough to eliminate a clinical trial, you would have to simulate every single cell, organ, and organ system as well as the substantial population of bacterial and fungal microorganisms that live on and inside humans (as well as all their unique biology too). Building such a simulation would require a level of knowledge of biology that the human race currently does not possess.

I would argue this is already underway. There is a concerted campaign against fast food and sugary drinks. There are all sorts of programs to encourage people to exercise. Big corporations have annual “health screenings” where they fat shame you if your BMI is a point over and you drink alcohol once a week.

The problem is that obesity is a complex problem. Not everyone who is overweight is a lazy person who eats Doritos on the couch wile watching daytime tv and wondering why they’re so overweight.

Smoking was easy: with extremely rare exception, smokers get lung cancer. Period. Smoking is one of the very few personal behaviors that basically guarantees you will get cancer. It also has the side benefit of annoying the living daylights out of people who don’t smoke which creates social pressure against it. It was pretty much a slam dunk.

I’m of two minds on this. I loved the original Falcon on the Amiga (it actually talked! “Pull Up! Pull Up!”). I thought I wanted more and more realism. But at the same time I feel like all the sims lost their way trying to be too realistic. I was a huge avaiation buff as a kid. I loved flight sims. But it all stopped being fun when I had to learn so much just to play. It turns out ramming the afterburners and chasing down bad guys is a lot more fun when you don’t have to worry about scraping the engine on the runway on takeoff.

I did this with my almost 3 year old. Except I use whole beans and a drip coffee maker. He tares the scale, weighs the beans, dumps them in the grinder, grinds them, and puts them in the coffee maker. The only part he doesn’t do is get the water because he’s not strong enough to push the button for filtered water in the fridge.

I made the mistake with my first two kids of not involving them early enough. Now they think work around the house is something only mom and dad do.

The content of the data is not the issue. The point is that society has decided to pass a law stating that certain data needs to be treated a certain way or there are serious penalties because of past abuses. We in the US take for granted that this law exists, but there was much complaining in the medical establishment about how burdensome it is to them conducting their work because of all the extra protections it required. This was especially true in biomedical research where patient data was pretty carelessly treated in many cases. Not because the people involved were bad people, but because society as a whole had not thought through the consequences of walking around with an unencrypted list of cancer patients on a floppy disk.

As someone who works in a startup in the healthcare space, I will point out that nobody lets health startups off the hook for HIPAA. You don’t get to be sloppy with people’s protected health information just because it makes your life easier.

Taking your point a step further, I often wonder if mathematics is a local minimum for humans. It has been so damn effective in so many ways that we can’t imagine that there might be some other mechanism for solving hard problems. In cases where the mathematics gets really complex, I wonder if this is a hint that there’s some other way to represent the situation.

Would love to know about FDW push down. That could be really good for specialized applications where you want to use a relational db and wrap a specialized data store outside postgres with a FDW.

My big issue with this argument is that usernames and passwords are a means to an end. That end is (in many cases) establishing identity. One can establish identity in other ways. For example: every morning when I open the door to my house after my early morning run, my wife greets me in the kitchen and asks me how my run was. She (thankfully) does not hit me on the head with a frying pan and call the cops about an intruder. My biometrics work awesome for establishing that I'm "me" in the real world. I don't think it's too big a stretch to imagine a world where my computer is as good at looking at me and identifying that I'm "me" as my wife.

I think the best take on this whole thing by far is from Ben Thompson:

https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-new-customer/

(Incidentally, his podcast is fantastic)

If your life needs more randomness, I highly recommend having or adopting children. Having three of them 7 and under, I can attest that the entropy in my life is off the charts. I have no need for an app.

The reality I've learned from hiring a lot of people over the years is that recruiting is just not an objective process, no matter how much candidates and employers want it to be. I've often thought it's a bit analogous to dating. If you've ever had a close friend try to set you up with someone, you've definitely experienced it. Your friend will tell you how this other person meets all your criteria and you will be perfect for each other! You get all excited and then you meet the person and it's just a big letdown. Objectively you should be ready to tie the knot next week. But subjectively it's just not right for reasons you can't even always explain.

I've learned that if I'm not excited about getting a candidate an offer letter ASAP, it's likely they're not a good fit. If I have to talk myself into someone and make a list of pro's and con's, they're usually a bad fit.

My wife is a doctor and doesn't carry her phone around during the day when seeing patients. It sits on her desk back in her office which she rarely enters except at lunch and at the end of the day. After seeing my watch and talking to patients who have them, she decided she wanted one. Having the watch means she can get text messages throughout the day and if needed, quickly respond in the few minutes between patients. It's a total game-changer because if there's something going on with our kids or I just have a quick question for her (e.g. "Do I still need to stop by the store on the way home?") she gets the message right away and is able to respond.

Notifications and fitness tracking are the primary use cases form me. Those alone are enough but I also use mine for Apple Pay. It's a way better user experience paying with the watch than the phone.

It's also a great alarm clock if you wear it to bed since it vibrates silently. No more waking my wife up at 3:00AM when I need to catch an early morning flight.

I used a Fitbit for years and was reasonably happy with it. But the reality is that the Fitbit was cheaply made and not especially attractive. If you're already spending $100+ on a fitness tracker that is going to likely break in a year, it isn't that much of a stretch to spend a little more to get a really nice Apple Watch that lasts longer and looks nice when you're dressed up.