gwillen

I was also seeing a surprising cost of about twice what I expected, but since I rarely use AWS I was assuming I had just calculated it wrong somehow. It's maddeningly difficult to see your usage history of services -- I still can't figure out how to see what my EC2 usage was this month. There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's not even clear that it will include my historical activity when it's ready...

When I was a Google SRE, during one trip to Zurich I complained that I hated the lack of my standard vice, Diet Coke, in Europe (they have "Coke Light" instead). My boss didn't believe me that I could tell the difference... so he brought some back to the States and we ran a blind test. (I think we also added Pepsi and some other things.) My recollection is that I got every sample correct, but we definitely didn't have that many! I wonder what the probability of a false positive was in that case. (I no longer drink Diet Coke, but I still maintain that Coke Light -- and Coke Zero which I believe to be the same formula -- is gross.)

Indeed not, and I am EXTREMELY skeptical of the claim that birth times are reduced TWO HOURS (!!!) by the addition of art. That's the kind of effect you see in papers that get retracted for outright fraud, let alone dubious and irreproducible studies.

Oh, and don't post all over the internet about it. ;-) But I see you're using a throwaway, which is a smart move. As the reddit PF link will also tell you, don't go around telling everybody about it. In fact, for now don't tell anybody but your spouse (if applicable) and your tax advisor. You can always tell people later, but you can never un-tell someone. You'd be surprised (or not) at how people can get when huge sums of money are at stake. Even if people know you are getting an IPO windfall (or what have you), be vague and downplay the amount. Don't promise anybody anything. This goes 10x if they are asking you to.

There is some really good basic guidance on dealing with windfalls, available on Reddit's personalfinance board: https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/windfall

I recommend you read it all and take some time to digest it.

Don't do anything rash -- in fact, don't rush to do anything right away unless it's necessary. Necessary things include:

* Figuring out what your tax obligations are.

- You should get someone to recommend you a competent CPA who has dealt with this situation before. You want someone who will proactively help you sort out your tax situation starting NOW, not wait until tax time. But I would _not_ suggest a "wealth manager", or even a "financial advisor" at least to start with -- find someone who will just help you with the immediate tax consequences, and who will deal with you on a flat-fee basis with price given up front. A competent CPA should probably be able to handle this on a bare-bones basis for less than $1000, but _if_ you can get someone who comes highly-recommended and has significant experience with the specific issues you're facing, and can help you navigate the situation, paying a small multiple of that for more good advice won't kill you.

- Note that you are going to owe estimated taxes, which need to be paid quarter-by-quarter, not at tax time. At the federal level, you will not be subject to penalties, regardless of your income this year, as long as you prepay (in payroll withholding plus estimated tax payments) 110% of _last year's_ tax obligation. However, if you are in the state of California there is no such safe harbor for _state_ taxes if your income exceeds $1 million in a given year (which it will). (See https://www.bdcocpa.com/resources/articles/43 .) So make sure you pay California estimated taxes as promptly as you can manage. (But also, don't panic if you end up being charged penalties. For stuff like this (i.e. not fraud) they are generally quite small relative to the amount of taxes owed, especially if you aren't that late.)

* Figuring out your liquidity situation:

- Are you getting the money in cash, or liquid securities (i.e. that you will be able to sell easily), or illiquid securities (i.e. that you cannot reliably sell?) If your employer has been thoughtful towards you, you won't be in the third situation, which can be very messy come tax time. (If you are in that situation, there are people who can help advise you, but you'll want to start thinking _now_ about how you'll pay the taxes.)

- If you're getting securities (i.e. stock shares) that come to you in some sort of brokerage account, it's fine to _leave them there_ while you decide your next steps. Make sure you're able to sell enough to cover your tax bill, but you don't need to actually sell anything until you discuss it with your tax advisor.

- If you're getting cash, you will probably want to open a brokerage account to put it in (don't stick it in your checking account.) Charles Schwab and Fidelity are fine general-purpose brokers. Vanguard is good if your plan is to invest the money in low-fee index funds and then not touch it, which is generally a wise idea.

This only became illegal on January 1, 2019. Before that there was a grace period. So you're going to see a lot less of it.

Zarf also invented the game Capture the Flag With Stuff, played twice a year by hundreds of people at Carnegie Mellon University.

Current rules (2017 edition): http://www.cmukgb.org/ctfws/

Zarf's original rules (1995): https://eblong.com/zarf/capture-flag-rules.html

Harvard's spinoff: http://www.hrsfa.org/photos/lotze/ctfws/harvard-rules2.html

I find Urbit's significantly more pronouncable. I wonder if it was inspired by proquint.

I see this as a control group in the great Internet advertising experiment. It answers the question: "How often will someone click an ad, given that the advertised product is certain to be unwanted?" That is, how often will someone mistake an ad for a real result?

Quantum tunneling effects are generally (maybe always?) exponentially unlikely, in the sense that the probability of tunneling will decay exponentially with the discrepancy between energy-available and energy-required.

No, they only need to be able to contact you.

However, as far as I know, even if you change your listed address, your _past_ addresses are still published, unfortunately. There was some movement towards ending that, but I don't think it was successful.

I have a home internet connection that is a resold AT&T U-Verse connection. I doubt any of these fixes are available to me -- the extremely user-hostile equipment provides essentially no user-configurable options, and I have been told it has no switched mode, not even a secret one. So there's no way I can introduce my own router hardware unless I want to be double-NATted.

(Also, it has a broken caching DNS server, and forces that broken server into its DHCP responses; the server it returns is not user-configurable.)

So what's an ordinary consumer to do?

Fortunately: https://sci-hub.tw/

Yes, technically it's copyright violation, but if you ask any of the actual authors, or any human being with any _legitimate_ interest in the papers therein, they will encourage you to go for it.

Channel takeovers aren't really a thing on modern networks with good services.

The Freenode decloak trick still works, though.

The photo of Shockley's lab in Mountain View is at least two teardowns out of date now. The small plaque visible in the picture is gone in the latest construction, but in its place there is a larger plaque, and several huge, towering sculptures of electronic components. It's a pretty neat display.

BEWARE. This app is severely insecure. Nothing against the creators but they clearly don't have much familiarity with web security. I can list things that are obviously wrong with it that they haven't spotted, but even if they fix those, they still are not qualified to store sensitive data, and you should not put sensitive data into this app.

Now, most obviously: go to https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/activities and go ahead and view every activity that is active, by any user of the site. It appears you can also delete or edit them without authentication, though I didn't try.

Again, to the creators of the site: It's a cool idea, I have nothing against you, but you're clearly not qualified to work with other people's data, and I recommend that you stop at once.

The "bag in the back" slogan makes sense, but I wonder if it wouldn't also make sense to encourage childcare facilities to treat an unexpected missed dropoff as a potential dangerous situation until the parent is reached to confirm their intentions.

I don't know who's downvoting this, but this is exactly what my high-paid CPAs told me. I'm hoping the IRS gives guidance, and I'm extra-hoping that they give sane guidance, but the law simply doesn't appear to allow for treating coin splits like stock splits.

I assume that having gone through academic hell, at least as a grad student so as to get your PhD, is basically a hard requirement to do the sort of thing you do now in industry, though?

As a person without a PhD, my sense is that "research" as a field is Not For Me, even in industry, because the PhD is the critical factor that determines whether one is "researcher material".

Funny you should talk about shared spatial computing environments. Have you seen what Alan Kay's research group is doing lately? :-)

https://dynamicland.org/

This is a UI/UX felony. Anybody who writes an interface that does this should go to UI jail.

I had forgotten about that, but I've totally had this experience too. A sufficiently low-latency response feels like it has negative latency.

If you're regularly selling amounts more than 25k USD worth, don't use an exchange. Try these guys, for example: https://genesistrading.com

What you're describing is a payment channel. The Lightning Network is that _plus_ protocols for negotiating the routing and chaining of payments across multiple channels.

I'm not involved in this project but I'll bet you're seeing these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen

In addition to the comment below about CrashPlan requiring you to use their client software, which limits abusabiliy -- I am also seeing signs of strain from CrashPlan. They have always had a policy that claimed they would delete data from machines that hadn't touched the service in a long time, but they had never implemented this in practice before; just last year they finally started sending out threatening letters to people saying they're going to delete data on short notice. (And they didn't really back down when people got angry.) This tells me the storage expense is starting to hurt them.

Having hung out with Tom 7: Grad school didn't make him like this, he just has an absolutely insane level of drive to create cool things. I don't think he could stop if he tried. And like most things, the way you get good at "making cool and hilarious hacks / techno-art" is to do a lot of it. So start hacking! :-)

God, I loved that game. I should see if I can find a copy.

I had memory/sound trouble with that, X-Wing, and World of Xeen.

In the US it feels to me like it's gone the opposite way. The textbook publishers are increasingly able to block people from using pirated books, or even buying used books, by including one-use online codes in the books. Then they can raise the prices because there's no other market.

Don't ask me what I think the punishment should be, for devising this system, or for a professor requiring the use of such a thing in a course.

I can think of a slightly more general solution to the problem of not being sure if A and B are different views on the same file or not, especially if you plan to hardlink one to the other: Hardlink A to a tempfile, hardlink the tempfile in place of both A and B, then remove the tempfile. This will give the right outcome regardless of whether A and B are secretly the same underlying file (assuming that they are on the same filesystem).