aluminussoma

Remdesivir was one of the earliest promising candidates to treat covid-19 since it had promising results - in the lab - against other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS. It did not have results in humans because those viruses went away before in vivo testing could be performed.

Will it work? If it was a runaway success, I would have expected any of the current clinical trials to be cut short as the difference between placebo and non-placebo patients would have been obvious. That hadn't happened. I'm still hoping it has some positive effect.

The drug also had to administered through an IV over several days. It is not a pill you take. If it works, this makes treatment a little bit more difficult. You can't just give patients a pill and send them home.

In California, unemployment benefits are a form of insurance that is paid by the employees of your previous employer (caveat at end). If the company went bankrupt, I'd assume that the costs are spread out among all the employees of all companies in that state. If your employer has more claims, it's employees are charged a higher amount per paycheck.

In the sense of insurance, not claiming unemployment benefits is like laying for insurance and not using it when you have a claim. A personal choice for you to make.

In most cases, you also have to prove you are actively looking for work to get benefits.

However, the recent CARES Act does supplement unemployment benefits from federal taxes.

What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA.

I fear that we will see revolutions in countries where this is not contained, from either a health or economic perspective. An old saying is that you should buy stocks when there is blood in the streets. I hope that doesn't become literal.

eBay has not added many new features in years. There are problems with the platform, like auction sniping, that they have not addressed.

PayPal as well to a similar extent. There are a litany of problems that its users have been complaining about for years that have not been addressed. I see PayPal rolling out certain new services but ignoring existing services. If PayPal was ahead of the curve, there would be no need for services like Venmo (now owned by PayPal!) Or even Stripe.

eBay is a fascinating story for their early impact to the commercial internet. It is also fascinating to see how they've fared: it is still around but now it is being eaten up by competitors like Facebook Marketplace in the US, MercadoLibre in Latin America and others.

PayPal is on a somewhat similar trajectory.

The lesson here is to keep your customers happy or someone else will.

Also found it interesting to read about the people and companies who thought eBay wouldn't work for various - good - reasons. You can always make something work!

This is the end of an era. I can only imagine what those board meetings are like. If anything like his product reviews, he asked incisive, aggressive questions.

I hope he left because he is satisfied with the job the rest of the board is doing. Yes, Microsoft caused a lot of damage during the monopoly days. The tech industry needs a healthy, competitive Microsoft - at the very least to keep a check on other companies.

Also worth reading again is former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's anecdotes on Apple, Microsoft and Kodak trying to shake down Sun using patents: https://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-arti...

My reaction: Great! Reproducing these keys costs hundreds of dollars and a trip to the dealer. Maybe it can finally be affordable again.

I'm less concerned about someone stealing my car. The local police department takes it seriously, no less because stolen cars are used to commit other crimes.

The education entrepreneur Adam Robinson did his own survey a few decades ago. He found that while children of two immigrants did better on standardized tests than children of two non-immigrant parents, the "best" combination came from having an immigrant father and a non-immigrant mother. ("Best" when focusing solely on standardized test results)

Old timers talked about IBM the way people used to talk about Microsoft in the 90s and Google in the 2000s. The new CEO being someone who's been there his entire working life does not sound like a recipe for success.

The danger with such unqualified sentiments is that there are many things that can make someone uncomfortable. Let me be more plain: David Drummond is (was) the most famous black male executive in tech. I have heard black men voicing frustrations at people being uncomfortable at them for no good reason.

I am not saying that the OP or anyone here is being racist. We need to provide more context to these statements if we are going to say these in public. Otherwise, some groups of people will be at the receiving end of these kind of statements more often than the rest of us.

I think it is a bad idea to say this about him without providing a concrete example on how he made you uncomfortable. I'm sure I have accidentally made someone uncomfortable before. Does that make me a bad person? I hope not.

It will be interesting to see what changes these streaming services bring to TV consumption and the Internet in the next decade. Comcast and other providers are losing subscribers to YouTube TV and Hulu. I suspect this will cause internet prices in the US to rise since these companies will want to make up the shortfall.

Yes, which is the whole point of my question: how is this data compiled?

Just because it requires effort does not mean it can't be done in an open source way.

I see that the underlying IP to Geo data is consolidated by MaxMind. Where does MaxMind get this data? I wish this data was open sourced.

I've heard, but can't confirm, that photos and videos stored on Google are used to train ML models at Google. So I'm surprised that Google would want to charge at all for this service if it's important.

Were any other company able to get you to store your photos and videos, I wonder if that could dent Google's ML capabilities a bit.

Is activism so pure? The activists I see have nice signs and people protesting during business hours when the rest of us are working. Printing good signs costs money. There is big money behind a lot of activists, just better hidden.

I would think that Google's first choice was Garmin. In my personal opinion, they have better watch products.

It was reported last month that Fitbit engaged Qatalyst for a sale. I wonder who leaked the news to Reuters, which did not mention a price: was it Qatalyst, hoping to start a bidding war?

This included water weight. My body's water weight during that time, if my scale is to be trusted, was between 52.0-53.0% during that week of interviews. It is consistent with levels before my interviews.

I was wearing a HRM tracker for two of the interviews, but I didn't turn it on any activities to track frequent metrics. Heart rate was elevated for the entire interview, like I was briskly walking. In my hardest Google interview, my heart rate was at its peak.

I guarantee you I was hydrated. Maybe over hydrated. I went through about 12 fl oz of water an hour, maybe more (I brought my own water bottle).

I track my vital metrics religiously. Last week, I interviewed at three companies who have intensive technical interviews (Dropbox, Google, Apple).

The morning after the second interview, at Google which was intensive, I was my lowest weight ever in several years (dropped three to four pounds from five days before)

I gained the weight back after a week. But it was interesting to observe the physiological effects from interviewing. I'm not surprised to read about such physiological effects from long, mentally intensive activities.

(I thought I did well enough in my interviews but I didn't make it past the hiring committee at Google, or Dropbox)

As for the more frequent vesting (as opposed to the 1 year cliff): I heard companies started doing that to reduce or eventually eliminate the signing bonus. The theory being that a more frequent vesting schedule will accomplish the same thing.

For example, one recent offer from a big tech company was for a 6 month vesting schedule with no cliff. Most are switching to quarterly vesting schedules with no cliffs.

Things have gotten crazy here but this information is useful even for experienced hires. A few years ago, I did not realize that new grads at companies were being paid more than I was! I switched companies to fix that.

Yes, most of my check still goes towards rent but at least I have a little bit more left over to plan for the future.

I think someone is trying to cover their ass. Think about how this story could have been written: the WSJ reaches out to current and former employees and writes what they say. Those cyber security employees are already feeling the heat and want to preserve their reputation, so they throw someone else under the bus.

This was an inside hack by a former AWS employee. It was difficult to protect against. I can't fault Capital One here as much as I can fault AWS.

There will always be tension between the Security team and the rest of the company.

The problem is that the vendor is incentivized to publicly use whatever metric shows the highest availability. Otherwise, the vendor will have to pay back credits. The vendor's nines are never my nines.

Is the Ugly Fruit problem a myth? The crop scientist Sarah Taber argues it is a myth: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

I'm too far removed from the situation to make an educated call but I am inclined to believe her.

Yes - the compliance teams needs to be on board with the goal. It's not an unsurmountable barrier unless they choose to make it one. In my current workplace, the compliance team spells out what the rules are and provides suggestions on how to achieve those rules.

Thanks for responding. That's really inspirational.

"State-sponsored attacker": A euphemism to deflect blame for your own inadequate security practices.

As long as he has no interactions with his former colleagues, I don't see the issue. You want to make sure your company is following all the rules: who can tell you that better than the person drafting those rules?