249 karma · joined June 7, 2012
I read this book in high-school and learned about as much as I did in 4 undergrad physics courses about quantum mechanics. There's no mathematics in this book, so it doesn't teach you how to calculate anything (for this, a physics degree helps), but the principles are presented very nicely.
There's a lot of hype around certain technologies, and I suspect it does not reflect reality. I've used hadoop+pig a few years ago and it was absolutely terrible.
Besides, couch surfers typically stay in the same house as the current resident, and he/she has to maintain good relations with the neighbours.
The apartment adjacent to mine recently got turned into a short-term rental place. Most of the time there's no problem, but every couple of weeks an extremely loud group of tourists comes over and treats it like a party house, making tons of noise, blasting soccer games on the TV with associated loud cheering, etc.
By the way, in japan there is a highly developed market for fish with many levels of quality, so the expensive restaurants get the best parts of the best fish and the leftovers end up in cheaper places.
Choosing just one product for color/material customization is a good idea, but I'm not sure that radio is the right choice. I venture a guess that the founders were simply stuck on the concept of making customizable electronics.
Maybe a fashion accessory (e.g. headphones, skateboards) or home decor/furniture of some sort could have been a better choice. People will pay a lot of money to show off.
Also, he dropped out of his Ph.D. on the first week. So it appears that he didn't learn too much physics in academia. Rocketry and electric cars don't involve too much advanced physics and he has top notch experts working for him in all the relevant fields.
My mom was a victim of some adware and she had no idea. She thought she was seeing google ads or something and only asked me for help because a bunch of stuff stopped working.
Just because something is profitable does not mean it adds value to the world.
In my opinion these hacks will always be specialty tools. What the world really needs is more languages that are both expressive and run pretty fast. e.g. Julia.
There's a startup (sensibo.com) that's building a full HW/SW solution for controlling and monitoring IR-operated air conditioners.
(full disclosure: I'm friends with the founders and backed their indiegogo campaign)
The only part which sounds odd is the "human factor" claim near the end. AFAIK the system is fully autonomous once deployed and does not require a human to decide whether or not to launch an interceptor missile.
Beer OTOH has been completely revolutionised in recent years.
Asia: I have traveled for months in China, India and Japan and don't recall seeing any thermostats, aside from hotels and commercial spaces.
Europe: no A/C in most countries (aside from commercial projects). They make extensive use of residential heating using liquid pipes that pass through the building. In southern europe split ductless A/C systems are common.
South america: I believe they have both central air and split systems.
USA: central air everywhere!
Africa: no money for A/C. ;-)
The split systems are much more energy efficient, so they should be gaining ground.
Hopefully they can help the rest of the world become more energy efficient. Thermostats are not common outside the US.
The biggest reminder of this was Python 3, which for me was a complete disappointment. They could have limited python's super-dynamic behavior (e.g. changing builtin functions, patching classes on the fly, etc.) or made them optional. They could've added optional typing annotations a la Cython. Or even changing the builtins and language syntax to allow more inplace operations and preallocations, so that temporary results wouldn't have to be allocated on the heap over and over again. All of these changes would have made python faster and more JIT-able. None of these things happened. Performance-wise, python 3 is no step forward.
Python+Cython is still a powerful combination, but eventually Julia or similar languages will eat python's lunch with respect to scientific computing.
Even if the Raspberry Pi foundation were to just take the old model A and drop the analog I/O ports and LED lights - with their economies of scale and the natural decrease in chip prices, I'm guessing they could ship a ~20$ board.
I recently spent 2 months in the US (conference + work + road trip). It was relatively sedentary, but probably no more than my day-to-day life. I was careful not to consume any soft drinks - just water, tea (the coffee is unbearable) and the occasional beer. I ate very few snacks and sweets and usually swapped fatty side dishes with salads or cooked vegetables.
I did eat out a lot, but I also eat out a lot at home. I don't think my portion sizes were any bigger. The result? Gained nearly 8 pounds! I was really surprised by this.
In contrast, during a 2-month long trip to china that included more physical activity, but also tons of very oily noodles, I lost around 4 pounds.
Btw, my typical diet is roughly mediterranean+beer (Tel-Aviv). In particular it includes lots of salads with olive oil, lots of hummus, chicken, fish, pasta, pizza, and various forms of junk food.
Even their ice creams don't contain much protein. A large McFlurry with Oreo's is 381g but has only 15g of protein (and 85g of sugar).
source: http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.p...
1) Housing tends to be the biggest expense. So try to share an apartment with flat mates until you're sick of it, or even stay at your parents place for a few years (if that's possible).
2) If you need a car, buy a used one in good condition and keep it that way for many years. Make sure you change the oil and filters at recommended intervals.
3) If you like to travel, learn to do it cheaply! Long and wonderful trips in south-america or asia can easily be had for 1000$-2000$ a month - sleep in hostels, eat what the locals eat, don't drive/fly around to much, travel slowly. :-)
4) Learn to cook.
5) Learn to make and fix basic things around the house: installing fixtures, plumbing, wall painting, furniture (fixing and making), etc. Doing things yourself is more satisfying and saves money.
If you are not crushed by debt, just try to make your spendings increase much slower than your pay.