dathanb82

I’d be interested in better understanding why Trump didn’t owe more under AM, since most regular deductions don’t apply in that case.

If you make half the median national household income, you’re making about $30K, and your effective federal tax rate is barely over 14%. Your 20%-30% scenario doesn’t seem to add up.

It is unusual to pay your children as regular employees and also pay them as consultants, tho.

> Typically I’m as productive or more productive than my peers.

This seems like a case of assuming the conclusion, tho. Whether a text editor-based workflow is as productive as an IDE-based workflow when avoiding feature that advantage the IDE doesn’t impact on whether the IDE-favoring features are valuable enough to adopt and assume everyone has access to.

I don't think I agree with your definition of "robust" in this context. A bank that only writes loans and doesn't have deposits must be lending out its own assets. In that case, they don't have a reserve, because the assets they're using to back their loans aren't liabilities, and aren't subject to runs. The reserve ratio is there precisely because banks are loaning out deposits, and deposits are liabilities. If a crisis comes, there can be a run on the bank, and all of a sudden the bank is insolvent. So a bank that's only writing loans and not taking deposits (if you can call it a bank at all; it's really more of a hedge fund) is in some ways more "robust" than a traditional bank that's lending out its deposits.

I sometimes wish I hadn’t learned vim, because it limits the tools I’m happy using. Since I’ve built the vim muscle memory, every other text editing experience feels crippled, so I actively avoid products that don’t support at least basic vim key bindings. Luckily the list of products with vim bindings keeps growing.

I wonder how much of that is just the lack of really good IDE tooling for Rust? GoLand is pretty good, so I don’t know if similar question applies to Go.

That’s both awful and awesome.

This is what clinched my career path for me. When I was 12 I and three of my friends would code on our TI-82’s and share that with each other. Being able to get positive feedback from people I liked spurred me to spend even more time at it than I would otherwise have. I wrote apps for the TI-83 and TI-89 in high school (helpers for doing synthetic division of polynomials, a valence shell calculator for chemistry, a Mandelbrot generator, some interactive physics apps for solving common physics word problems), which also temporarily turned me from the nerdy kid to the most popular kid in the class, which was another big step toward cementing my future path. I’m not sure I’d be where I am today if not for all that positive feedback from my peers.

I was very surprised to click on the llama icon and end up in a web-based port of Winamp.

I jus discovered vim-wiki a week ago, so it’s on my todo list. I’m on pat leave right now, so not really doing any hard core knowledge management for another couple weeks.

How’s the vim emulation in VSCode? I always miss being able to use vim in these sorts of knowledge management systems. I’m using Obsidian right now, which has ok, very basic vi emulation, but would love something that lets me use more advanced vim-fu.

Identifying leaking well sites is getting a little more attention in the industry than the article suggests, at least for active wells. See, e.g., Kairos Aerospace’s work in the Permian Basin. You can get a peek at what they’re doing in Matt Gordon’s PyCon talk: https://youtu.be/WQkM3ppuhWo

It’s true, the professional backgrounds at my church are much more diverse than any other social group I belong to.

> stripping fees off transactions with ZERO value add to the consumer...

The explosion of online shops made possible by companies like Stripe enabling secure credit card processing without imposing PCI DSS compliance on small businesses would disagree with you on whether there’s value to the consumer. If nothing else, greater variety of shops available means greater choice, which is generally considered good for the consumer.

Or PayPal, which allows the unbanked population to load funds to a widely-accepted online wallet and actually participate in online marketplaces, which they might otherwise be unable to do.

Or Affirm, which provides on-demand credit to consumers and lets them amortize large one-time costs over a few months, enabling them to afford, e.g., tuition when they otherwise might not be able to. (Tuition is maybe a bad example since most universities already offer tuition financing options; but online education services frequently don’t)

Maybe so. I disagree with much of Stallman’s platform. But regardless of that, I was just observing that the arguments offered in the article in addition to the rest of the dialogue about free vs proprietary software are mostly based on the idea of a moral or ethical imperative behind free software, and relies on an existing body of work to make arguments about why that imperative might exist. Since the article doesn’t attempt to justify the existence of that imperative, it mostly serves as a statement of position, rather than an argument that’s likely to win anybody over who isn’t already on board with the idea.

Huh. I couldn’t find anything about it one way or the other.

This argument seems to rely heavily on the idea that non-free software is unethical. If you’re already bought into that idea, then clearly schools ought to only use free software. If you’ve not bought into it already, there’s nothing here that’s likely to change your mind.

Vim can be compiled to webasm and run in the browser now, so at least on the text editing front, there’s no reason the web text editor has to run a significant feature deficit compared to desktop.

I predict that at some point in the next five years we’ll start to see more apps that are written with webasm cross-compilation in mind, so that “browser” is just another target architecture, just like MacOS, Linux, and Windows.

How do hydroelectric plants unnaturally cool water going through them?

The article isn’t arguing against requirements existing, it’s arguing against being bound to de facto requirements because you allowed a client you don’t own to depend on behavior you didn’t specify. (See Hyrum’s Law: https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#hyrums-law-the-law-of...). By limiting the scope of unspecified behaviors, you also limit the scope of what makes for a de facto breaking change.

This is probably solvable with Hypothesis and a custom browser extension.

More generally, third-party annotation of web (especially hypertext) resources is an underexplored opportunity. I suspect it’s at least partly because integration isn’t a first-class concern for these sorts of apps (if it were, they’d build it themselves and own the feature and the data), so the experience isn’t that great and the marketing is significantly diluted.

Ditto Ulysses S Grant (though he wasn’t born with that name).

This doesn't seem like it actually solves the capture problem, though. The most egregious cases I can think of of third-party capture involve taking a project, bundling it with infrastructure, and offering it via a SaaS model (obviously thinking of Kafka, Elastichsearch, Postgres, MySQL, etc. via AWS). Only direct modifications to the project source are covered by the license, right? So the infrastructure code that make it easy to create instances of the product (but don't involve changes to the product code directly) aren't affected.

You get maximum performance improvement by distributing equal amount of work to each worker. You’ve used the first-order approximation that equal world means equal-sized slice of numbers. But with your approach, the amount of work to determine primality of a number is actually proportional to the sqrt of the number. That means that the higher-index workers are doing a lot more work than the lower-index workers. You can verify this by adding log statements and comparing when the lower-index workers terminate with when the higher-index workers terminate - you’ll see there’s a big difference.

So try instead giving each worker slices where the sum of the sqrt of numbers in the slice are equal instead of the width of the slices being equal. You’ll find that your solution ends up running faster, and your workers terminate closer to the same time.

Frequently acquihires are about opportunity, not cost. I’ve seen acquihires at salaries above what the company would offer to organically recruited employees, because the company is just desperate to recruit. Paying higher salaries can be less costly (once you factor in recruiter salaries, cost of interviews, and opportunity cost of all the time those open positions sit unfilled) than hiring through normal channels.

I guess it’s still fundamentally about cost, but not necessarily first-order costs as you describe.

When asking for help solving a problem, I start writing a question to ask someone, and then as I start explaining what I've tried (to try to be respectful of their time and them not have to repeat anything I've done) more and more things to try occur to me. By the time I've tried all the things that occur to me while describing the problem, I've solved the problem. That's the way it works out more often than not.

> There was a player from Utah whose name eludes me now that had a, I think, ~$2B exit but that might be the only one.

Are you thinking of Instructure? They're based in Salt Lake City, and Marketwatch gives their current market cap as $1.86B

When's the last time you checked out IntelliJ? It does incremental compilation these days, plus auto-save-and-compile whenever you switch tabs (not just when you save the current tab, which bit me many times in Eclipse; though I haven't used Eclipse in at least four years now), so code completion is immediately updated. I'm pretty sure this has been the case for a few years now.

A huge sample size does not necessarily mean a good sample. While it's difficult to say what the impact of sampling only from a group of people who self-select into a given population, it's clearly a bias. If a quarter of the population self-selects into Facebook, I'd prefer a sample that includes three times as many people who didn't.

If nothing else, it's worth considering the demographics: within the USA, women use Facebook at a higher rate than men; people with some college education use Facebook at a higher rate than either college graduates or adults who've never been to college; Facebook use rate is roughly negatively correlated with income level; use of Facebook is negatively correlated with age (http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-20...). So the leftover US population skews male and slightly higher-income than the Facebook population. And globally, Facebook use is correlated with national wealth (minus some outliers). So there's clearly a sampling bias, and that's worth understanding.

That said, whether the results would be any different is hard (impossible?) to say without actually trying a different sampling methodology, and I suspect the results from this study are valid, sampling bias notwithstanding.