rchowe

They also may not publish the DNA sequence they are using, or they may have more than one sequence and only publish one of them. Presumably it has to be in a highly conserved region of the bacterial genome (or present in a few highly conserved places).

Apparently this is why some of the McDonalds restaurants in the Oak Brook / Chicago area are very good (or at least perfectly to spec)... they are owned by corporate and used for executive training.

Since so many people travel to foreign countries by air, these electronic travel authorization programs are about stopping people before they board a plane (or train, since the UK has the channel tunnel).

There was a brief golden age when you could show a passport from a western country at the border of many other countries and they would let you in. No planning ahead required. I think we will see reciprocal waivers return at some point, once countries realize their citizens are affected by these policies as well.

It’s because Hayes held the patent on the modem having to pause for one second before it could receive commands.

Other modem manufacturers implemented the “time-independent escape sequence” to get around the patent[0]… the only issue being binaries that contained control codes and meddlesome kids.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequ...

You take the bet because it's not even your entire profit stream and iPhone is much more of your revenue.

Tim Cook's operational experience helped them increase their market cap dramatically once he took over, so I'm not sure you can discount the value of him as CEO.

A bad CEO can definitely drive a company into the ground, so in many cases I think the pay can make sense. Spending the money does not assure a good pick though...

Many of the private railcars in existence today are ex-Amtrak, because when Amtrak was formed on May 1, 1971, they assumed most of the passenger rolling stock of the railroads that discharged passenger service.

Supposedly the biggest cost associated with refurbishing a car is passing the Amtrak inspection of the bogies, axles, and wheels -- I believe they have to be completely replaced at 40 years of age. When a railroad retires a car, this equipment may be close to end-of-life.

Many freight railroads still have "office-car specials" -- passenger equipment for the executives to use. Those would probably be the easiest to get up to Amtrak specs.

Trivia: Amtrak will only run trains with private railcars at a maximum speed of 110 mph. On the Northeast Corridor, private railcars are only allowed to be added to the overnight Northeast Regional train which normally travels at 125 mph -- but there's enough padding in the schedule that they can slow it down to 110 without affecting the timetable.

Don't underestimate the ability of small companies to have 4D matrix pricing that nobody can comprehend!

It's pretty common in custom manufacturing (which makes sense) but also companies that purchase product/services from others and re-sell them as part of a larger whole. Some folks also don't understand that pricing doesn't have to exactly match your product.

I think there is also value for certain lines of business for having a customer meet the sales team and possibly an account manager before using the product, usually if the product has some kind of learning curve or domain specific knowledge where insiders can unlock value.

People were able to re-brand "charity" to "non-profit" in the US as well -- in part because if you have a $500k salary as CEO of a charity that looks like you're taking money, but if you have a $500k salary as the CEO of a non-profit...

I would actually argue that, although it is unfortunate for long term retirement security, eliminating pensions and allowing workers to switch jobs is a good thing. Otherwise, you might get folks who stay in a job where they are miserable just to get a pension.

If people do quiet quit… doesn’t it make sense? They can continue receiving a salary and fulfilling their job responsibilities during a transition period in their lives. Their employer gets their job responsibilities performed, perhaps to the letter, but it reduces churn / time-between-hires.

The one group of people that quiet quitting might not work for are executives, whose salary is justified by them being able to deliver outsized value, which it is hard to show up to work and do on autopilot.

I think the problem with the term is that it places the blame on the employee —- Sarah “quiet quit” 3 months ago, and that’s her fault for not going above and beyond, not her manager’s or the company’s.

We have a lot of founders that will work 16 hours a day on HN, but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people (in the US at least) prefer having a work-life balance.

... and a lot of those VPN companies are probably VC-funded.

Tom Scott made a good video on the uses and non-uses of VPNs [1]. VPN advertising has changed since that video to downplay "security", but what I think is odd is that they've replaced that with advertisement that basically is "violate the terms of service of Netflix".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

29, AARP member for the British Airways discount.

After Tom Scott made a video about VPNs[1], apparently a lot of VPN company executives got together to rethink how they market their product. He mentions that the reason there are so many VPN ads is probably because they are VC-funded, so perhaps the gravy train will run out for these companies some day.

It's odd to me that they have pivoted to marketing VPNs for out-of-region TV, because that's against the terms of service of pretty much every streaming provider. I guess if the ads don't mention a name, they can say "oh we expected you to find a streaming service where that's not illegal, not use Netflix."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

When I was in school, I wondered why my hand hurt from writing so much. I switched to gel pens and my hand fatigue went way down.

We put up with a lot in the name of cost. The thin blue Bic pens are much cheaper, but when I have to use one I really hate it.

President Biden made it a federal holiday last year.

I work in manufacturing and I haven’t met many companies that are taking it off. I had hoped it would immediately be a paid holiday for most folks, but I think it’s going to take a few years to get to that point.

I love the ITA Matrix style time bars; I wish every flight tool had them.

Since you're using a browser extension and scraping OTA websites, one of the things on my wish list is the ability to scrape Amex Travel -- they offer discounted rates if you have a Platinum card.

If there's a picture of the person on the ID, gender doesn't seem very helpful in verifying identity.

Isn’t this kind of email easy to classify (on a large scale)? Gmail has a similar inbox system in its web reader.

A physician probably learns the physiology of sweat glands, mechanisms for how the human body regulates sodium and potassium, and diseases caused by regulatory mechanisms not working. Unless they had an interest or read a study, I’m not sure I would expect a physician to know that, and in my experience a lot of physicians are reluctant to speculate.

Nutritionists and fitness coaches are much more willing to speculate in my experience, with the caveat that they may not have the same education as a scientist as a physician does.

Most Bitcoin transactions have a quite high transaction cost, and I would argue that chargebacks are an important consumer protection.

The Model S was a significantly higher volume and lower cost car than the Roadster that came before it.

The Model 3 was a significantly higher volume and lower cost car than the Model S that came before it.

Eventually they hit a wall in terms of the cost of the raw materials and labor to build the battery and drive train, but I'm not convinced they are there yet.

Also, TSLA could very well find a Tim Cook to Elon Musk's Steve Jobs: someone familiar with logistics to take over the vision and mass produce it.

The wait fees are imposed by the app, not the driver.

It makes sense that disability accommodations should be part of Uber's normal service standard and supported by their technology.

I'd argue ITA Matrix serves folks that know airports and aircraft well enough to figure the human factors in their heads (e.g. if you can fly Delta and connect in either AMS or CDG, choose AMS), and just want to find a valid solution set at the lowest price for a query. The lack of split ticketing means you will be protected in the case of a misconnect.

I'd say this is a good case for a declarative language like SQL or Prolog: "just give me X that satisfies Y and Z, I don't care how you get it." Existing search engines either have a painful number of dropdown menus or are free-text only with limited power user features.

ITA Matrix is a great tool for a power user to search for flights, and the time bar view is brilliant. Google's done a pretty good job with Google Flights, but there are still crazy things you can build in ITA Matrix that it's tough to find anywhere else (unless you are/know a travel agent and/or have a GDS). I've said for a while that if Google ever kills off matrix.itasoftware.com I would build a replica.

Having the browser vendors write documentation might be an issue because they will all write it for their own browser.

I ended up doing most of these things as a business development manager (in addition to some engineering work) at a small manufacturing company. Often I felt like an executive assistant. My first project was to take a drawer full of invoices and bills, sort them, and put them into accounting software. Sometimes I made copies for people. Other times I cleaned the bathrooms before important meetings with customers when they seemed too dirty.

When a company gets to a certain size (and it's probably smaller than you might think), I think you eventually want a smart person to keep the "knucklehead stuff" off of everyone else's desk. It has to be the kind of person that has an intuitive understanding of the technical side of how the company runs internally, how the external sales process works, and a willingness to do things that other people don't want to do.

Shameless plug: If you are looking for someone to do this in the New England area, drop me a note. I'm not available immediately though.

Correct. If the drivers are treated as independent contractors and account for vehicle costs and paying themselves at least minimum wage for all working time, the profit margin on rides is quite slim, potentially to the point where the additional time to clean the car means a driver makes less than minimum wage. Were it an actual company, that would be illegal. Under Uber's model, it's "they are an independent contractor, we just match them with rides and handle billing."

Uber does provide training that says drivers must accept service dogs. However, if there are issues, they are uncommon enough and the likelihood of a driver getting sued is low enough that a driver may just drive away.

My gut tells me that drivers should be employees, or limits should be placed on using single-person independent contractors to provide a service like this. It's not going to solve every problem and the traditional "taxi" mentality is going to remain, but I remember the early days of Uber when drivers could not reject too many rides and stay on the platform, and it did seem to solve some of the management problems with drivers. Heck, maybe the answer is to contract the work out to car management companies with real HR departments like the airlines do with regional jet flying, so that Uber can insist on their high quality product and performance metrics and drivers can be employees.

Unsplash has a great product, however for Getty this seems to be a good deal more because they eliminate a competitor than because they acquire a good product/team.

I read that Unsplash's plan to monetize was to sell banner ads and branded image placement, but that's gotta make less money than Getty slapping their normal business model onto Unsplash, right?

I wish MicroCenter would work on their customer experience. I go to one in Cambridge, MA to buy IoT supplies and it's never organized (despite signs saying "this area stocked by XYZ"), popular products are behind the service counter and not even in the main area (so you have to ask) and associates rush to stick their associate ID barcode on your merchandise and usually at check out another associate takes it off and puts theirs on. Perverse incentives for sales staff and poor customer experience.

But they often do loss-leaders on popular things to get folks in the store, so...

I think one of the nice things about Python is that most people write it in a similar way (with the exception of classes vs not and annotations). "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." There are already "accents" on how people write code, and the beginner dialect sounds a bit too close to Visual Basic to me.

There are some chances to smooth out some warts. I like typed languages like TypeScript, though I find Python's type system not very natural comparatively.

My biggest gripe though is that it's not possible to write functional code where you can read the operations in order. For a contrived example, if you wanted to know the total length of all strings in a list that start with the letter 'a', you would do the following in C#:

    strings
        .Where(s => s.StartsWith('a'))
        .Select(s => s.Length)
        .Sum()

Each step follows the last: first you filter the list, then you get the lengths, then you add the lengths together.

The equivalent in Python is this (I broke it out into multiple lines for a better 1:1 comparison):

    sum(
        len(s)
        for s in strings
        if s.startswith("a"))

Okay, maybe in this example the only difference is the location of the if, but in more complex example I really lose the flow by using list comprehensions.

And before anyone says I can use `map` and `filter` assign each step to a variable and write it in an "imperative-ish" style, I find it difficult to come up with descriptive names for each intermediary variable, and don't want to call them `l1`, `l2`, etc.

Gripe over, hopefully I conveyed my message.