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I don’t know much about Alex Karp. What’s the story?

A - The concept of present value isn't a problem, it's more like a fact, derived from the time value of money. It's like saying gravity is a problem.

B - Construction is resource intensive, no doubt about it. Without this technique the costs and resources would go up, double?, more? Many structures we take for granted, like freeway overpasses, would be impossibly expensive.

I don't know if it is really a problem, more like a tradeoff. Reinforced concrete costs less and enables shapes that are impossible without it, with the downside that the buildings last 50 years instead of 100+ years. The present value of a building that lasts 50 years is not that much different that the same one that lasts 100 years.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to make an office building out of reinforced concrete.

Agreed, and it's a very weird type of conspicuous consumption. You can't really hang the NFT on your wall, or drive up to a fancy dinner in an NFT. I guess you can brag about it?

I bought some proxies to use in different EDH decks. The quality of the fakes was actually better than the real ones (anyone who follows MTG will know what I’m talking about).

Using a microscope it was pretty easy to tell them apart, based on the different printing technologies making different and hard to replicate pixel patterns (I don’t know the printing equivelent of a pixel).

Each proxy was $2, and you get to pick what you want. At that rate it’s pretty close to the rate you’d get if you bought a standard booster pack.

As a side thread, regarding Jeanne Calment, here's a more in depth article about whether she was actually the oldest person in the world: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-cal...

I find it compelling, or at least plausible, that she wasn't actually the oldest person ever. Mainly just on the math of if, that if expected years remaining reduces exponentially as a function of current age, there would have to be many more people closer to the oldest age than there are.

Yeah, maybe the ISA asks for too much. It is reasonable to find ways to align the incentives between students, schools, and employees. So in that way the ISA as a concept is plausible.

That's too bad. I'm rooting for Lambda School, they are trying hard to innovate in the area of education. Maybe ISAs are the future, maybe not, but the traditional university track of spending out $100K+ is clearly not the future.

They should have been really excelling during the 2020 year of covid, I wonder where things went wrong. Anyone know?

What does it do, what user segment are you looking at?

Sounds more like you want to do Product Management than Product Owner, the latter of which I believe is more about running the agile process.

I don’t know the secret sauce for breaking in. I’m sure that once you are in your background will be super helpful. What I have noticed is that:

- applying for jobs as a PM has a very low response rate

- if a recruiter contacts you, then your chances are much improved

- most PMs I know somehow transitioned into it via some lateral type move

With the above in mind, I’d suggest:

- update your LinkedIn profile to say that you are interested in PM roles, maybe that would help with keyword matches

- contact recruiters directly

- see if you can switch to a PM role internally

Doesn’t that just shift to whom the burden falls? The people paying the mortgages have forbearance, but the people who would recieve the payments aren’t, and that should have some type of impact, right?

Judges get final authority to approve plea deals. Most of the time they do but it is not automatic.

yes, like you said, covid will never go away, and there is more awareness of the problem of airborne viruses in enclosed spaces like an office.

I'm much more interested in how the ventilation works. I'd pay for some device that measures air quality, e.g. something that shows whether covid-sized particles are floating around.

Fair enough, I didn't mean to imply that the entirety of waterfall was just that one line. The point was that scrum, with all of its flaws, was meant to correct a then existing perceived bad practice.

Agile Scrum was created as a response to Waterfall. Waterfall was, generate a giant spec, like 50-100 pages, then set the developers on it.

I did not do much law practice, so hard to say. I miss writing well thought out documents. In the tech / corporate world people have very short attention spans so I only write out a couple of bullet points, and I wish there were people who were OK with a longer and more thought out piece of writing that’s more commmon in law.

I sort of did it, trained as a lawyer, got into e discovery, then became a product manager (that’s now doing some data privacy related product management, so there is some crossover). Most of my law school friends have had a pretty rough go of it, tbh, and are not enjoying life as much as people in tech do. Billable hours, high stress, no autonomy, and practicing in fields that can be kind of a drag. Things are much much better in tech generally speaking.

How could you break up Twitter, what's your plan?

What a legend! Janitors are outsourced now, and I wonder if the outsource everything makes the work your way to the top journey a lot harder.

Hacker News is about the idea not the individual.

Bitcoin is complicated:

- buying and holding actual coins feels feels like investing in other nonperforming assets, like other currencies, or art, or gold

- the world does seem to need / want a decentralized store of value that bitcoin provides

- if you are worried about fiat currency, then just don’t hold most of your wealth in currency, just keep enough float to cover expected transactions

- bitcoin seems horrible for actual transactions, as others have stated, it can do very small number of transactions per day

- some other crypto currency will nail the online transactions part, when that happens, that will be super interesting

When is that going to happen?

Excess mortality seems like the best way to track the pandemic because determining whether someone died of covid can be debatable sometimes, but there can be no debate over whether someone died.

How about this:

- Change the way we commute: Tesla

- Change the way we work: Zoom and other remote work enablers

- Change the way we eat: Beyond / Impossibe and other meat substitutes

This is a frustrating article, because it does not say how dangerous alcohol is. Maybe alcohol raises the risk of certain types of cancers, but only by a very tiny amount. Relative to other risks, even other risks from alcohol, do we really need to care about that?

I did Chess 5334 problems, still working my way through that. As a total rookie, doing some puzzles and playing games really helped me. The main issue that I had was that at some point, I didn't know what to do, other than grind out a game. The book helped me learn mating patterns which makes for more interesting and less attrition based games.

The core of the book is just chess problems of the mate in 1, mate in 2, etc variety. You just drill on that. I put the puzzles into Anki, and review a couple a day.

I’m into to 3d printing. It seems to be in that post early adopters trough. I’m long on it it though - distributed customized manufacturing with revolutionize retail, supply chains, and more.

Soon a writer sitting in a coffeeshop with a laptop could make a full feature length film with no comprimises to their vision.

Under the hood (legally) there is no ban on cookies per se. It is rather on tracking of personally identifiable information. It is Ok to place a cookie without explicit permission if it tracks something that can be applied to a wide range of people, like a timezone or language perference, for example.