icey

Wow, they got an eye-popping performance improvement from this change.

I live near a fire station in SF, and see them practicing raising a huge 20+ foot ladder monthly out front of the station. They're pretty impressive ladders, and it looks like it takes quite a lot of coordination to raise them up.

For me it's either been emacs with a lisp (SBCL or Clojure), or C# with Visual Studio. In both cases the reasons were similar -- deep editor integration with the language. Having an editor that understands how the language works and is structured makes refactoring and navigation much simpler, and makes it faster for me to author code.

That being said, most of the major editors are pretty great today. There's great support for all the top 10 languages in multiple editors, so if you want to write Go in VS Code, or Elixir in Atom, or Python in vim, you're probably going to have a good time (or at least the editor will do quite a lot for you). It's a great time to be a software developer!

I'm not sure, but it's been a little surprising to me as well. For the past month any time I've had a conversation with someone who had an opinion about politics and policies in SF, I've asked them if they have voted yet, or if they're going to vote; and while nearly everyone has had an opinion, only two people in tech out of probably two dozen have said yes. Of the remaining lot, a bunch have said they never registered to vote for a variety of reasons ("I forgot to", "Oh, I need to do that sometime", "I don't want my information getting sold", "I still don't have a California driver's license", etc).

On the other hand, friends not in tech (much more varied population by job; artists, food-service & bar industry, construction, medical) were much more motivated to tell me not only what their opinions were, but how they were voting (or had already voted) and why.

It's possible that this will change nearer to the mid-term, but it doesn't seem like primary elections get people that excited.

It's a great question though, and I'll start asking more deeply about it because I'm curious now as well!

> The Economist is ignoring the fact that the city administration in San Francisco is now extremely busy, and I mean 24/7 busy, cracking down on electric scooters that - unlike needles, human excrements, tents and substance abuse - are a real problem that needs a resolution ASAP.

Don't discount the virtue signaling that's going on here. It's an election year, and tech is still a reasonably good whipping boy for voters. Of all my friends, the non-tech ones seem much more likely to vote than the tech ones. Many of my tech friends in SF aren't even registered to vote here.

I've been doing a similar thing for year with the gmail feature that lets you add "+anything" to the end of your email address. If someone starts spamming myrealemail+thethingIusedforthatsite@gmail.com, it's easy to create a filter to trash it automatically.

I've tried the catchall method on a domain I control, but got way too much spam people trying random addresses.

To add some information about the technical sales roles here -- these are ideal for anyone who is currently in an engineering role but wants to transition to something more customer-facing (especially if you're interested in going into sales). Of course, people already doing this job somewhere else are also very welcome to apply!

These are our first SA/SE hires, so you would have the opportunity to help shape how we do our technical sales. We can help teach you how to negotiate and close deals, navigate enterprises, and generally go through the sales process.

We're especially interested with people with a DevOps background and experience with Docker and Kubernetes, but are also interested in talking to developers who want to move into sales. As `fortysixpercent mentioned, our product is very technical and our buyers are as well; so you'd spend most of your time talking with very smart engineers working on cool projects. Feel free to ping me directly if you have any questions; I'd be glad to chat with anyone thinking about applying beforehand. My contact info is in my profile!

Largely dependent on what you mean by "business man", but going from dev to sales can be as easy as transitioning to a sales engineering / solutions architect role and getting exposure to closing deals that way. The next leap you'd make is figuring out how to get into a closing role; which will take a little patience in order to find a good fit (namely: a company willing to put someone with engineering experience in a closing role -- they're out there!).

If you mean other parts of the business (operations, finance, BD, etc), the pattern is probably similar -- find a technical role that's in that org and start there, with the intention of moving into the business side more and more.

If you mean "I'm a software developer and want to understand the business side of running a company better", there is a ton of reading you can do to learn how businesses work. Some books that were helpful to me:

  * The 4 Steps to Epiphany by Steve Blank
  * How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie 
  * The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
  * The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
  * Venture Deals by Brad Feld

Ultimately business skills are gained the same way you'd learn software skills -- self-study combined with exposure to the problems you're interested in solving.

My guess is that equity in Circle was part of the purchase price -- hard to know for sure since the terms weren't announced, but this probably wasn't an all-cash deal.

I wouldn't trust it for write concurrency but it's been great for my use case (reads are multiple orders of magnitude more frequent than writes; and the writes can be queued), I'm using s3sqlite for this from the Zappa project: https://github.com/Miserlou/zappa-django-utils/blob/master/z....

I do this with a side project, except it's SQLite databases on s3 buckets -- that's about as easy as it gets and doesn't require nearly as much of the configuration overhead that Aurora does.

There is progress being made on the _scientific_ effort to cryopreserve organic materials (ex: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401...). The argument is not that you will live forever, it's that what we consider "dead" today may not be the same as what's considered dead a hundred years from now. A hundred years ago if you had a heart attack and went unconscious, you were considered dead. We know now that there's a lot of things that can be done to revive someone who has just collapsed from a heart attack, but the awareness wasn't there yet.

I'm not interested in cryopreservation personally, but it's quite a stretch to lump the efforts in that space along with astrology or psychic healing.

It's probably more common for data scientists in the .NET world to use F#. FsLab (https://fslab.org/) seems cool from some limited experimentation (disclaimer: I'm not a data scientist, but am data curious).

I built and launched two projects:

https://docsift.com, which was a tool for journalists and legal teams to help smooth fact discovery from large document dumps. I ultimately benched it because I'm not a lawyer or a journalist and couldn't find a motivated group of users to provide good feedback.

While I was building Docsift, I'd built a Slack integration to get nice-looking cryptocurrency quotes, and it was growing on its own after sharing it in a single team; I decided to switch gears and work on that. It turned into https://www.CoinAlerts.io, which is a quoting tool and alerting service for cryptocurrency hobbyists, investors, and speculators. It's been growing pretty strongly on its own, and I'm having a great time hacking away at it. I'm building another thing in that space right now, splitting some of my time off from CoinAlerts to work on it; ultimately they'll go together. No comment on whether or not I think BTC or crypto in general are a bubble, but I'm really enamored with the space.

I'm getting ready to do this but haven't figured out a way to open a bank account there without visiting the country. How did you do that? I saw there's a service that will do it for you but it seems like an expensive monthly fee.

A scenario I'm not sure has been talked about much is the notion of some kind of "Automation tax", in which industries that adopt automation that remove significant amounts of human labor pay an additional tax to offset lost jobs in order to pay for a basic income.

Ostensibly automation has the side-effect of reducing the cost of production, which should help stabilize prices against an influx of spendable currency (assuming the initial focus of basic income is needs-based versus a universal basic income).

It's possible that either decision attracted a different class of buyer. Altcoins have been dumping recently as people sold their holdings to buy Bitcoin in case there was a fork in order to get more of the forked coin (like what happened with Bitcoin Cash). Canceling Segwit2x may have caused traditional investors (e.g. those with less risk appetite) to feel that there are fewer questions about which chain survives a fork; they could have been waiting to put money into the market until there was a clear sense of which Bitcoin fork would be the successful one.

Altcoins are surging at the moment, so I believe that lends some credence to the first group being people trying to move into BTC to get more free coin.

So crazy to see this video shot in the neighborhood I lived in the summers as a kid. Chandler's got a lot of good things going for it as eggpy mentioned -- well marked roads, wide, very little rain. On the downside, the entire Phoenix area has some terrible drivers, which I suppose is good training for the Waymo cars. It will be interesting to see if they park the cars during monsoon season; conditions can get pretty treacherous on the first rainy days of the season -- roads get very slick, drainage isn't always the best so you can end up with large puddles of water on the road that cause hydroplaning, etc.

Most nurseries have expert gardeners on-hand who will happily talk to you for free.

Same experience here -- got back into dev earlier this year and decided to go with Python 3 everywhere. The only libraries I've needed that were Python 2 only were ones that weren't being maintained anyways. It's been a pretty good recency filter for me. I know that wasn't the case when Python 3 was younger, but the ecosystem is pretty dang good today.

There are some coins (NEO/AntShares for example) that are opting for DBFT-style governance -- https://themerkle.com/what-is-delegated-byzantine-fault-tole...

I've been working on https://docsift.com for a couple of months but have been having a hard time finding users to offer any feedback.

It's meant to make it easier for journalists and citizen activists to review bills, document dumps, etc (and on the pay side, help law firms read through and review discovery materials). A challenge has been that I'm neither a journalist or a lawyer, just someone who is motivated to help out where I can when I see something that seems screwed up; and wanted to build a tool that would make it easy for people to take 5 minutes and help read / review a bill, etc when they were on the bus or when they had some downtime. The failure mode is obvious in retrospect: I started building it without knowing people directly impacted by the problem I was trying to solve -- it was a good problem to solve in theory; but without a concrete problem to solve it's very hard to land on the right set of solutions.

I still tinker with it (uploading docs that seem interesting, messing with features), but I've mostly moved on to other projects until I find the set of people who are presently feeling the pain.

GitHub is _mostly_ Ruby -- there's Go, Python, C, and I think some Haskell in production on the website (there used to be some Erlang in there too, but iirc that's gone now). The Visual Studio and Unity extensions are written in C#. The new GitHub Desktop is written entirely in Typescript.

Before anything else, this is a great project; always excited with Smalltalk -> JS projects. I noticed some blurriness as well, I wonder if it's an issue with Retina displays? I uploaded a screenshot here if it's helpful: http://imgur.com/a/NxhQp

Well... it's open source and Electron works on Linux. Give it some time, perhaps some enterprising soul will submit a tested patch to get it running on Linux. Not sure if it's widely known or not, but there are only a handful of people at GitHub who use Linux as their primary OS. Better to ship a tested version than to guess that it works for people.

I've been working on a tool to help people team up and discover important facts from documents like this. It's still very early going, but I've uploaded the document here: https://docsift.com/docs/restoring-internet-freedom-notice-o...

At the very least, it will provide an easy way to share links to specific pages of the documents (of course, you can add notes and annotations to the pages, and there's been some rudimentary fact extraction done already).

I just loaded the document a moment ago, so I haven't had a chance to scan through and make sure all the details are correct, but wanted to share it so folks can scan through it now.

Feedback is definitely welcome, and I'll hold off on doing non-critical deploys today so it stays up while people read it. I've only been working on it for a few weeks so there's still quite a lot to do :)

Meditations, originally written by Marcus Aurelius, but translated many times over. More as an introduction to stoicism; choosing the translation that works best for you is ideal. Hays and Hicks translations are most often recommended but if you can peek inside the book to see what language resonates the best with you.

Stoicism helped me build the ability to care about the things in my power to change, and not stress about things that aren't. Very useful in any job or personal situation that includes a lot of ambient stress.

Related, I carry a Synapse 19 daily and freaking love it. Best backpack I've ever bought, and will probably carry it for the next long while.

I'd love to chat with you about this; my contact info is in my profile if you're interested.

Nick Bostrom also did an interview on EconTalk that covers quite a lot of the topics in the book from a high-level, if you want a shorter introduction to AI safety and the control problem: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/12/nick_bostrom_on.htm...