erichurkman

Yeah, we did look at Factset. Ultimately we found repeated gaps in their symbology, since we needed a full set, including less commonly used symbols.

For my current job, we wanted to get a mapping of stock tickers and exchanges to CUSIPs. Every provider we looked at — and this is fundamental trade data — was full of errors and missing values. Couple that with the extortion that is CUSIP (you can't use CUSIP values without a license from them, and licenses start at $xx,xxx+). It's criminally inept. And when you do fix it up, you don't want to publish it, because you spent all your time and resources fixing it… and it becomes a trade secret.

Rent vs. Own comes down to controlling your own harvest: renting means you may miss out, sometimes by weeks, of optimal harvest. You may have had to book a harvest weeks or months in advance. You may have to fork over cash months in advance. You may have to pay even if a field's yield is ruined due to summer floods.

If you own, you can select even segments of fields to harvest at more optimal times (a down grade, or wetter, portion of a field may harvest differently than an uphill, drier portion).

It sucks either way.

Equipment is an insane cost. That's why there are so few new farmers. The start up cost is astronomical. A combine, for example, can run to $400-500k — a piece of equipment that taking up barn space for 48 weeks out of the year. Add in your tractors, planters, spreaders, sprayers … add on top of that your land costs. Many farmers don't own all of their land outright, they hold medium/long term leases. Miss a single year lease costs and you lose the land, which forever drops your future earnings, lowering your margins, and bringing you closer to bankruptcy. There's a minimum amount of land you need to farm to even break even. You add more acres in good years to maybe save up enough for equipment replacement, or a new truck.

When you lose the land, lease, or go bankrupt, your land gets snapped up by huge corporate farms that can run at a higher margin, driving down food prices over the long term, making smaller farms less and less viable.

Not for watches, but there is a platform for collector cars, Rally Rd [0]. Each car gets its own defined company, you buy/sell company shares through Rally Rd. It's not fully liquid, as there's only one trading window per car per month.

[0] https://www.rallyrd.com/

* Respond 'no' to all upcoming calendar events

* Post your last password reset link from your email to Twitter

* Text your reddit username to whatever contact you text the most (likely your significant other)

* Silently remove the most popular, by email count, person from your VIP email list (likely your boss)

* Add entries to the auto correct list: :) -> ;) hey -> heyyyy

* Change any daily alarm from AM to PM, but leave the alarm enabled

Or, if you do get fired, you just move to the police department in the town next door, or from city to county, or county to state. It's the standard practice for communities with no incentive to prosecute (like the Vatican shuffling around rapist priests and bishops instead of bringing them to judgment).

That cost is actually spot on: Facebook, for US users, makes about $26 per user per year IIRC.

Agreed: government employment is not the same as government consulting.

There are generations of future government employees that haven't even graduated high school yet. Amazon is not dumb. Bezos has never played the short game.

Or: Amazon is going to heavily recruit former-DoD and government workers, luring them from low pay rates to high paying jobs. Reduce hiring friction: you don't need to convince them to uproot their families to move. They already live in the area, hell, their commute doesn't even change.

Are you more likely to award contracts to AWS if you work at the DoD knowing that in two years you can move over and suddenly quintuple your salary?

That's because in the West, marketers at best tried to replicate CueCat [0] with QR codes. QR codes are infinitely more useful if tied with an action from the real world -> digital world: scan this QR code to pay for this item; scan this name tag to get my full contact card; etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Alternate theory: it's important for a young company to practice things like finding office space, figuring out coffee machines, building independent team culture, learning how to recruit, filing state taxes, etc when they are early and mistakes are easier to fix.

Good companies are not just the product they ship.

Is there a limitation to what counts as a "diplomatic pouch"? According to the Wikipedia article, even shipping containers have been used before [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_bag#Noteworthy_ship...

Want to see something scary? https://www.businessinsider.com/powerball-mega-millions-how-...

Per capita lottery spend by state: Massachusetts @ $761/year. West Virginia @ $594/year. Georgia @ $391/year.

Ah, I always have fond memories of office buckets. At eShares, we had one in our first office. It dripped when it rained, but inexplicably so: we were on the ground floor.

One difference: large swaths of Python developers grew up using the system-provided version of Python.

Most Node developers grew up with

    curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.11/install.sh | bash

or

    brew install node

or using one of the dozen other ways to install node. Distinct versions and per-project packages were the norm from day one. That was not true with Python.

Re: top-level domain, there's a good number of universities on the list. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

It's about $200k.

Finder is the bug, unfortunately.

User impersonation code always terrifies the bajeebus out of me.

Say | Director of Engineering | New York, NY | ONSITE | https://say.com/institutions

What we do: we're upgrading the shareholder franchise. Those stupid packets of paper you get mailed to you for proxy votes? We're modernizing that entire industry. We want all shareholders to vote. We want to make it easier for shareholders to propose changes to the companies they own.

Who we are: a well-funded seed company ($8mm+) in SoHo NYC. CEO Jeff Cruttenden (founder/former CEO of Acorns), CTO Eric Hurkman (former CTO @ Carta).

What we need: a great director or VP of engineering. Great initial team, but you can help us make it better.

What we need, 2: great engineers, front-end, back-end, or any combination thereof. Engineers that want to own meaningful pieces of a project from start to finish.

What we use: Kubernetes, AWS, Python, Django, Go (soon, join and make it come sooner), React, Typescript, PostgreSQL, ... tech-agnostic. Good people will learn things quickly enough. We don't grill you on inane algorithmic trivia in your interview.

We're also looking for:

- Senior technical product manager - Product designers (enterprise type products and/or mobile) - Android engineers - Senior/Staff software engineers - Chief of Staff - In house technical recruiter - More info on all jobs and others: https://jobs.lever.co/say

Process: We can move as fast or as slow as you want us to. Start with a quick phone call (evenings are fine if we need to work around your schedule). Come visit us, meet the team, wrap up the process quickly.

Contact: hn@say.com (we respond to 100% of candidates)

Yes, but a tiny percentage. A lot of spam. (_A lot of spam._) Tons of recruiting services. 80% of people obviously didn't read the post.

That said, I have hired a few amazing people, including some great technical leaders, that would have cost 15-20% salary to use a recruiter to find & snipe (this was before I had internal recruiters to help).

I use a separate email alias for it, and have a few canned responses (1/ you didn't read the job post 2/ I said we cannot do visas or major relocations, but you're in Greenland 3/ too junior, but please keep an eye on future posts) to keep things efficient.

It at least remembers the 'mute' icon on auto play videos now. That was broken for a while. Still, it's infuriating.

It opens with a huge header image with a brief sentence or two about the thing it's showing you. You're three words in reading and the intro text disappears into a minute-long preview that spoils the show. What the hell?

Or worse, you've loaded your dashboard and are about to click into starting the show you left off on, only for the hero image/preview to load and shove the page down three inches. Your click now opens a new, unrelated show. You frantically click 'back', only to end up on the page prior to netflix.com. When you re-load Netflix, the show you accidentally clicked is now in the 'continue watching' section — right where your desired show is. !@#^*!)#

Related, there's also Binging with Babish, a chef that recreates foods found in movies, tv shows, books, etc [0]. Including gems like Eggs Woodhouse (including the Iberico ham), Homer Simpson's Moon Waffles, and the English Trifle disaster from Friends.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJHA_jMfCvEnv-3kRjTCQXw

My biggest complaint is the nonsensical UI. I never know when I click a ticket if I'm going to get a) a split screen view, b) a modal pop up, c) a full screen view, or d) sirens in the distance.

When I click the 'back' button, I never know if I'm a) closing the ticket I have in a split screen, b) going back to the search results, or c) going back to Confluence and losing my search results and wondering how I was in Confluence to begin with.

In my home state, Family Video [0] is still very much alive, and growing. It's one of the traditions when I visit home: we go as a family to pick up a movie or two and some takeout pizza. They're pretty busy, too.

The lackluster and non-competitive broadband access helps keep them alive. "High speed" internet for most of my family back home supports low resolution Netflix, but other streaming is terrible at best (Hulu is unwatchable, for example). HD anything requires DVDs or Bluray.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Video

Chrome on macOS hides scroll bars, too.

Do not assume everyone knows acronyms or initialisms that you use, particularly if the audience is unknown. Saying "test driven development" is more accessible to a wider audience than "TDD".

GetHuman has most companies' information online on how to get a human the fastest and alternate ways to contact them.

I learned the other day that the CA Franchise Tax Board has a live chat via GetHuman [0] which saved an insane amount of time on hold. I was originally just trying to find alternate dial in numbers to actually talk to a person, not a robot.

[0] https://gethuman.com/phone-number/California-Franchise-Tax-B...

For me it's that the things I install are deliberate. I have to opt into installing every extra package, so I am more thoughtful in expanding the base image.

I liken it more to my fond days with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. A narrowly scoped base image and userland, but easy access to a vast array of packages/ports, but each explicitly listed and installed.

It's "batteries included" but "pick your batteries" vs "here's a kitchen sink full of batteries."

Even Mexico relies on hand pollination. The bees are not reliable enough for mass crops.