nknealk

An M6a on AWS has 128 GB of RAM and 32 cores and goes for around $0.60 on the spot market. If you need local SSD and you’re willing to go ARM, an m6gd has a similar spot price and nearly 2 TB of NVME local storage. I’m sure other cloud providers have similar offerings.

I agree with the root comment though that you may want to look at building in a cloud provider using spot instances. You’d have to invest in automation to spin up and tear down machines and manage build artifacts, but it might be more cost effective and operationally simpler than investing in your own hardware.

Not me but my wife started an Etsy store during COVID to sell the art she was making. She now does custom watercolor house portraits and has a variety of prints for sale as well.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/UrbEmSketches

The New York Times recently published this which I feel explains why a lot of my peers don’t want to have children.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-clim...

Does this work well for SQL?

There’s another consideration here. The entire buying operation was debt financed which created incentives for risky behavior and left very little margin for error. Not only does your sales price need to cover the cost of the house and any improvements, it must also cover the interest expense (123 million YTD according to their latest 10Q, vs 2.67B in sales of houses or about 4.6% yield relative to sales). And that interest expense is there regardless of how many houses you sell.

If Zillow predicted housing prices to go up and it merely stayed flat instead, they can’t just hold the inventory for longer in hopes that the market might go up a few months from now. They’ve got that interest expense to cover. The whole operation implodes the moment they made a bad prediction because of the debt financing. Yes, their models were wrong. But if they had a different capital structure maybe they’d be able to hold the inventory for longer to try to turn a profit and rebound instead of collapse.

Dr. Hardinger at UCLA teaches the intro organic chemistry courses for essentially anyone graduating in science. His lectures regularly exceeded enrollment of 1000 people per quarter when I was there in 2009.

Dr. Hardinger also wrote his own text books. He’d charge $35ish for them through the university publisher instead of making us buy much more expensive professionally published text books. I personally thought they were well written and his problem sets and worked explanations were clear and concise. All in all a great professor.

To be fair, some might call that good marketing. Largely speaking, it’s the affluent who will pay for a subscription workout product.

From the cash flow statement for the last 9 months:

10.8B spent on dividends

66.2B spent on repurchase of shares

For context, Apple spent 16.1B on R&D. It’s amazing they can self-fund this kind of growth while still returning so much capital to shareholders.

Charles Schwab. I’ve been a customer for decades.

The good: Similar to vanguard and fidelity on most dimensions which are also mentioned in this thread, but they’re also a bank so you can have a checking + savings account with them and all your finances are then in one place (IRA, brokerage, banking all in one). Their checking accounts offer free ATM withdrawals from any ATM world wide and when traveling they offer the actual exchange rate when withdrawing cash. Also, they have excellent customer service in my experience. Their research offering on equities is decent. Also $0 commissions on on trading equities, ETFs, most bonds and CDs.

Down sides in my opinion (YMMV): options trading is meh on Schwab, but most people shouldn’t be dabbling in options anyway. Their fully managed offerings have 0% fees, but the funds they pick internally are somewhat higher fee Schwab funds so watch out for that. You might be better off managing your own set of mutual funds/ETFs rather than going with their robo advisor if that’s what you’re after. Sometimes they do maintenance on their site on the weekends that spans beyond the midnight hours. Their mobile app is very functional but some features are slow even on an iPhone 12. Few physical branches if that’s important to you.

I recommend Bayesian Methods for hackers [1]. It doesn’t go too deep on theory but I feel like it’s well written and has really good coded up examples of theory being applied to problems. It has a relatively narrow scope, but I find myself reaching for methods I learned from the author frequently.

[1] https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programmin...

Some considerations on manufacturing — there’s a variety of product quality steps necessary to release batches of medicine. The FDA mandates this as part of GMP regulations. These steps help ensure things like:

* How do I know that every vial has the same concentration of insulin each time? That is to say 1 unit from a vial today and 1 unit from another vial is going to have the same dosing.

* How do I know the insulin is purified? If there’s any host cell protein in the vial, that could be immunogenic and cause bad side effects.

* How do I know that the formulation of insulin in the vial won’t degrade on me at whatever storage condition is stated?

I realize that these tests make up only a small fraction of the price, but there’s a lot of value to purchasing medicine from regulated sources. I’m not against upstart competition against big pharma, but I worry that you might literally kill someone if you don’t include these product quality steps in your process.

The endpoints for vaccines are “does the person end up in the hospital and does the person die of COVID” not “does the person get infected”. To that end, the vaccines are still effective.

From the original WSJ source [1]: “Analysis by England’s public-health agency suggests vaccines provide significant protection against Delta after two doses, reducing the risk of symptomatic illness by about 80% and the risk of hospitalization by around 96%. That is only slightly weaker than the protection vaccines confer against Alpha, also known as B.1.1.7.“

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-warns-of-new-versions-of-...

As others have said, PostGIS is a great option if supports everything in your use case. The GIN indexes in particular give you very fast bounding box lookups. You can also do shape intersection and other sophisticated things.

I recommend the Boundless Geo tutorial on PostGIS. It does a great job of teaching you about bounding box indexes and all the GIS functions and types.

Tome of identify only holds 20 charges

The alternative hypothesis is that the phylogenetic tree is wrong. Maybe those two fish actually share a recent common ancestor.

Turns out, AMD did the opposite: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-shows-new-3d-v-cache-r...

MySQL can handle many more connections per instance than postgres. Often when you have a high-transaction database in prod with postgres, you need something like pgbouncer to handle connection pooling or you'll have a bad time.

I agree though that postgres has some fantastic features.

edit: I think they may have addressed some of this in a recent version? I'm basing my knowledge on postgres 12

> I have continuously been near or around folks that have come down with Covid and have yet to encounter a second infection or positive test since my initial infection. I look forward to when greater fact-based realities start to take hold again.

People can get covid twice [1]. Especially older people who are at higher risk of death.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00502-w

If it weren’t for shareholders, the company wouldn’t even exist. Who do you think kicked in the initial capital for the company to get started?

Some would argue the standardized tests select for those who can afford test preparation services, regardless of what section of the test is in question.

Most money market funds are required to publish their holdings. For example, here's a Schwab money market fund's holdings: http://hosted.rightprospectus.com/SF/MMD/Fund.aspx?cu=808515...

You can see every counterparty for the fund clearly listed and the dollar amount/date of maturity. Surely an above board holdings vehicle like Tether would publish similar disclosures right?

Several considerations to what other commenters have already said:

* Rental properties, vending machines, etc have poor liquidity. What if you need to get your cash back out in an emergency? This poor liquidity is particularly correlated to poor economic conditions (ie. it takes longer to sell a condo in a bad economy which is also when you might really need cash).

* Many non-traditional investments are not actually passive. Even with a property manager, you still have to manage that person. Also, many investments can have quarters with negative cashflow. What might happen to your cashflows in a given period if a tree falls on your rental property breaking the roof and the tenants move out as a result? What if your property manager also quits on you because that situation isn't worth dealing with?

* There are a variety of ETFs focused on non-debt income (Eg. high dividend equity funds). Vanguard's trades under the ticker VYM. If you come from a background purchasing equities, these kinds of investments might be more comfortable for you.

There's a great Acquired podcast episode about Warren Buffet and his obsession with compounding returns. After listening to that episode, it totally makes sense why he'd be opposed to a stock split.

I highly recommend it for those curious about Buffet

I just finished filing my taxes in the USA. Let me tell you, the US government is my biggest annual subscription by cost.

Joking aside:

Jetbrains all product pack - $149/yr

Half decent home internet - $65/mo

Cell phone bill (with my wife's parents) - $140/mo

Consider a hybrid approach as a fallback? I'll come in all week every other week. Or I'll come in 2 days per week.

Your manager might be more open to that kind of an arrangement than fully remote.

I believe LevelDB automatically passes blocks through snappy compression, hence the smaller size. SQLite has an extension[1] that will do something similar. I’ve never used it so I can’t comment on how it might work for your use case.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/zipvfs/doc/trunk/www/readme.wiki

How firm are your "less than 1000ms" requirements. Could you identify a subset of your images/videos that are very unlikely to ever be accessed and move those to s3 glacier and price in that some fractional percentage will require expedited retrieval costs?

Here’s an interesting question — if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You know it’s stolen and you might worry someone else who you might pay in the future would be able to track down that it’s stolen, so do you ask for “clean” BTC that isn’t linked to known theft?

I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills

> the gold standard, for example, contributed in some ways to The Great Depression

Most people don’t realize this. A great book on the topic is Lords of Finance which outlines how the gold standard made the Great Depression truly great.

Even during covid, I don’t think people realize just how fundamentally important Fed actions were to basic things like keeping food on grocery store shelves.

Seconding render. I host a Hugo site with them. Their free tier is pretty feature-rich and I love the automated builds. My site is set up so that any push to the main branch on a private github repo gets automatically checked out, compiled to HTML, and updated on their CDN.