nicpottier

Espresso is brewed under pressure, if you don't have a consistently fine grind then the water will pass straight through without extracting any of the flavor. If your grind is too fine, then it will block the machine and you'll get a bitter extraction.

Again, this isn't a subtle thing. If you've had a real espresso machine (one that has a pump that applies the proper pressure) then it immediately becomes obvious that you need a consistent grind that you can adjust.

The variable you track is generally the length of the extraction, ie, how long it takes to get an ounce or an ounce and a half of espresso for a given amount of time. (aiming for 16-22 seconds or so) Too fine a grind and you'll block it up and you'll never get the oz, too coarse and it will all come out too quickly. You often need to adjust the grind minute amounts every day based on local temperature, humidity and the age of the beans.

This isn't audiophile stuff, it is obvious to anybody who makes espresso and actually wants it to taste good. (ie, isn't drowning it in milk, sugar and syrups)

It isn't an ego thing, it is a consistency thing. People go mad about getting higher end grinders, machines, etc... because they are trying to control for all possible variables. Espresso is incredibly finicky about those variables, but you can control for them with the right equipment.

It is pretty easy to demonstrate that the higher end burr grinders have greater adjustability and consistency than the lower end ones. It is also totally obvious that they are needed on any higher end machine.

I used to think it was all bullshit too, then I got a Silvia, started with a blade grinder, then a low end burr grinder, then a rocky before I could finally get the grind both fine and consistent enough to pull a proper shot.

It isn't a subtle difference between a good shot or a bad one, anybody can tell the difference.

I have a PID'd Silvia (https://www.seattlecoffeegear.com/pid-retrofit-kit-for-ranci...) and it does make a difference. But man, the black hole that is making repeatable excellent espresso at home doesn't end there. You start wondering about your tamp pressure, need a $700 grinder to have consistent adjustable grinds and start roasting your own coffee.

It is an expensive hobby, but a tasty one at least.

If you pass through Seattle, make sure to drop by Vivace, they define what proper espresso is.

I thought we were all going to start standardizing on USB type-C?

I know that in general this is a trite topic and your quote about "no more development" is a valid one, but so is the opposite.

There's another funny quote, apparently from Yogi Berra, which is roughly: "Oh that restaurant, nobody goes there anymore, it is too crowded." And I think that kind of touches on the same thing.

Some people picked Seattle / Capitol Hill for the characteristics it had (apart from proximity to downtown), and it is only natural for us to bemoan that it isn't that anymore. Maybe that is just a fundamental truth, that with growth you will lose some "flavor", but perhaps it is also worth trying to see if city planning can help a city grow so that it doesn't.

That's the point. Of course things change, but maybe appropriate planning and policies can make it so that we don't lose what was so great about these neighborhoods in the first place.

Yes, tons of new development has happened in SLU, but that area wasn't much of an established neighborhood to live in before, so it doesn't bother me as much.

Seattle is quickly losing any remaining "grit" and that as someone who has always called it home that is seriously depressing. I'm in the Central District which to some degree feels more like a Capitol Hill (except with black people!) but I imagine it is only a matter of time before the condos invade here as well.

The way I would be in 100% support of this would be if I could go and "top up" my ad-support-budget. Say I add $50.. and from then on every Google served ad gets swallowed up and my balance gets deducted whatever the bid price was, with the same % going to the contributor site.

When my $50 is up, ads return. I can choose to refill as I want, or set it up to auto-refill with $20 when it runs out, sending me an email or whatnot.

I really really really like this concept, but man, they need to be really honest with their implementation.

If I'm paying the same as the bidding cost for advertisers, then I'm all in, this is super sweet. If I'm paying some vague hand-wavy fee that reduces my ads, but doesn't correspond 1-1 to what advertisers are paying then forget it.

I also find it a bit "armchair quarterbacky" to be calling out PayPal on security practices. They've been around the block a few times, and though I certainly don't love them, they aren't making rookie mistakes like not-hashing passwords or the like.

You are just spreading FUD for no discernable reason. 20 characters while not the epitome of greatness, isn't a sign of the end times.

For those of us who have been around a while, we might remember this as being PayPal's original purpose in life. I remember paying back friends for lunch using PayPal and feeling like we were living in the future.

Only later did PayPal move into the merchant space more seriously. Maybe my memory is poor and they launched with merchants at the same time but it took a few years for me to ever purchase anything with PayPal, it was all between consumers before.

So ya, welcome back PayPal?

It is easy to demonize the status quo, and it is certainly true that there are powerful industries and lobbies whose interests could be threatened by cannabis, but it is a cheap argument to use, because of course the cannabis industry also has its own interests in mind.

PS. I live in WA state, and I'm all for legalized marijuana, but I dislike this sort of lazy intellectual presentation that uses emotional appeals and anecdotes instead of diving down a bit deeper.

(don't mind the stale release, just use master)

It is a much, much better admin-like tool to use for building CRUD views, with strong conventions on permissions, URL structures and template names. It really simplifies things and we've been using it internally for four years on a dozen different projects.

Can't imagine using Django without it.

Have you been to Rwanda? It is a land-locked country surrounded by countries with terrible road infrastructure and corrupt border crossings. It costs more to get a container from Dar to Kigali than it does to get a container from China to Dar.

Rwanda is unlikely to ever become a place where physical goods are manufactured at scale: it costs too much to import raw materials and too much to export finished products even if you can get all the raw materials locally. You can sell into the local market, but it is a very small one.

It is an interesting place to be if you want to work on some kind of knowledge product, ie, software or services, micro-work etc, but even then it comes with its own set of challenges, it is no slam dunk.

Source: I lived there for over four years and cofounded a small software company there (http://nyaruka.com), which eventually built TextIt. (https://textit.in)

Even limited to 256k/3G, that is still insane. Coverage list here: https://fi.google.com/about/rates/

That's enough of a perk that I'm considering moving to a Nexus 6.

Basically Facebook goes into local carriers and makes an agreement to the effect that users can reach 0.facebook.com for free on their network. They've now started adding other sites as well to that 'free tier'.

I imagine Facebook is paying something to the carriers for this, though at the very start it may just be seen as a competitive advantage by the carrier so perhaps not.

I actually find this practice super disturbing and find the naming of it as 'internet.org' even more so. The Internet is great because of the very opposite of this type system.

Say in an alternate reality Friendster did this a decade ago, would Facebook even exist if people had to pay to access it? Is that a state of the world we are comfortable with?

I very much understand the arguments towards the utility of the internet (even Facebook) to the poor and marginalized, but this isn't the right way to do it.

I've had a lot of conversations about Facebook, because I think the phenomenon there is really interesting. A few things for me:

- I find it makes me think poorly of some of my best friends. The "humble brag" is kind of non-stop and in so many cases I know it isn't a real reflection of how those people feel. Yet sharing your amazing life is the "Facebook way" and is hard to escape.

- Crazy enough, because I am lucky enough to live a pretty great life, I would often get feelings of envy or dissatisfaction from browsing it. This may be a personal failing of mine, but when comparing the best moments of my "closest" 500 friends, sometimes I come up short and for whatever reason I find it hard to separate that.

I do really enjoy the ability to connect with old friends on Facebook and for that I love it, but ya, for me at least, I'm happier using it only when I need to reach out to those friends.

[1] I do still have an account and perhaps browse a few minutes once a week, but that's coming from usually looking at it several times a day.

Not sure what you mean by "sanctioned" here. Technically possible? Yes. But also abusing and perverting the most important medium of our age.

The internet largely works BECAUSE of trust and cooperation and BECAUSE actors chose to not fuck with each other. If China truly is behind this I have half a mind to just cut them entirely out, except in a way that is exactly what they want and figuring out how to maintain the positive effects of said internet on democracy and free speech is worth the trouble.

It really seems like it was the blueprint of what Android became.

Yes, though true trolling is actually pretty rare. But yes, trolls try to completely disrupt an otherwise functioning forum by keeping a fake "discussion" going.

The most obvious one I know of is Mike Vandeman who has been trolling mountain bikers online since the 90s: http://www.bicycling.com/blogs/thehub/anti-mountain-bike-vig...

Do I copy/paste swaths of code that I don't understand and put them in my programs? No, absolutely not, because each line is one I can reason about and want to understand.

But do I copy/paste swaths of configuration files / init scripts / etc, without understanding the implications of every single configuration? Yes, absolutely, because the depth behind each of those options is often irrelevant to me. (until I discover otherwise late at night when an alarm goes off (!!))

I think it is important to distinguish these. I don't think any dev that's done ops work would claim they aren't guilty of the latter, but at the same time I think very few good devs ever, and I mean ever, do the first.

Yes, quite often that came without a perfect knowledge of every single option, certainly usually without referring to the manual for every one of them.

Perhaps this is semantics. But the definition of superstition is:

a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief

Which ya, isn't quite the right thing. Anyways, agree with the sentiment of this 100%, just not the title. :)

But ya, that sure seems like that should be fair enough and profitable enough for the artists I listen to, so if Spotify isn't doing a good job of making sure that is the case then I hope someone else arrives on the scene who does. After all, switching costs are now incredibly low for us as consumers and that is where I want my money going.

And do total stream divisions take into account only premium accounts? Or do they also include free ones? Because ya, as a premium user, I really do want (and perhaps naively expected) my $9/mo split between the artists I listen to, which certainly seems the fairest.

The iWatch will be obsolete in 24 months at most (less if you are the type who values status and want a "$20,000" watch as the next model will probably come out 12-18 months later)

Maybe there are enough uber-rich people that are ok buying $20,000 watches every year, but that seems like a really, really small market.

Then again, maybe the bands will remain the same, so if the primary investment is in the band, then that could last a bit longer. Even then I'd expect that every 2-3 years they will have a form factor switch that will make all previous bands obsolete.

We'll see.