rchowe

Buying Annapurna Labs also means they don't have to contend with the chipmaker's margin on the Graviton chips -- Intel's margin on server chips seems to be quite high.

I believe Uber used to have a web app.

That's really interesting!

They only support disbursements in six currencies (AUD, EUR, GBP, NZD, PLN, and USD), but they can accept eighteen currencies; presumably because they already have a large balance of those and they are relatively stable -- the one question mark for me would be PLN, but I would guess that it might be an important remote work market.

It seems the main difference is the lack of a requirement for an intermediate bank or banks; even a large international bank like HSBC might have to go through a third party for currency conversion in certain circumstances. It seems a lot easier if you are only making increases / decreases to your own balance sheet (cut out the middle man, no settlement requirements, etc).

Presumably you issue bonds to get the to do this with, which is relatively safe because it stays as cash and you know your churn rate. Does TransferWise have any levers they can pull besides halting disbursements in a given currency if there is a sudden devaluation, e.g. Poland goes bankrupt and PLN goes to zero?

What is the secret sauce to TransferWise? Are banks greedy, or do they have access to an exchange market that nobody else does? I've avoided them because whenever I look up wire transfer fees I get their SEO'd blog posts, but it seems from this thread that they have a legitimately good product.

I use a local bank account for incoming wires so that, if there is a problem, I can go down to the bank and talk to someone in person instead of being subject to the customer service whims of a tech startup. For me, that's worth the $10/transfer fee (though I bill in USD so I don't see forex or origination fees).

I think point-to-point is supposed to be the most efficient provided you accurately match airplanes to the routes people want to fly.

Hub flying is useful for folks that want to go from one small city to another; on a given day there might be two people who want to fly from Providence, RI to San Antonio, TX so it's not viable to fly a plane between them, but if you route them via Philadelphia, PVD-PHL-SAT, you can accommodate them with limited extra distance or extra time and also accommodate people wanting to travel PVD-PHL and PVD-PHL-SYR, etc.

Once you start working in units of "planeloads" instead of "people", point-to-point flying is likely going to be more efficient in terms of time, distance, cost, etc...

I used the Free Fillable Forms to file my taxes this year. However, it seems that the backend for the free fillable forms is provided by Intuit. It seems you really can't escape them unless you file on paper and mail in the forms.

ASP.NET Core in a (Linux-based) Docker container and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk works pretty well.

Bombardier is not a part of Airbus now, they just sold 50.01% of the C-series program to Airbus so that they could manufacture them in Alabama and dodge the 300% tariff imposed on them by the US government. It is unclear where the C-series airplanes for non-US markets will be made, but it's suspected to still be by Bombardier in Canada.

The real trick with an aggregator would be to say what you want (e.g. I want a carry-on bag, but I don't care where I sit or about in-flight food) and it spits out a list of total-cost airfares with those features. It would probably still skew towards the low-cost carriers where everything is a la carte, but at least people wouldn't be surprised by the total cost.

Airlines (in the US, mostly) are incentivized to add these fees for two major reasons:

1. Fees are exempt from the 7.5% federal excise tax on airfare. 2. It makes the initial fare lower on airfare sites like Kayak, for people who choose the cheapest route, then they up-sell customers once they've decided.

This really makes me miss the Stripe CTFs. I'm guessing Google's are aimed more at top security people working together as a team, not to teach ordinary programmers how a buffer overflow acts. I usually got about 80% of the way to a T-shirt in Stripe's.

They seem to imply that humans may see your Style Check photos (ostensibly "our team of experienced fashion specialists" for machine learning purposes). I'm wondering a bit if that team of fashion specialists is Mechanical Turk?

Probably because he paid the lowest fare for that segment and had no frequent flyer status. When involuntarily denying boarding to a passenger, an airline in the US has to provide 4x the fare paid for that segment, up to a maximum of $1350. Some articles incorrectly reported this as "the computer randomly picked" vs "the computer picked".

The insidious part of it is that on more complex itineraries, the regional jet segments are priced rather low. I've flown from Montreal to Dallas-Fort Worth to Tokyo multiple times on American Airlines, and each time the ticket shows the cost of the business class YUL-DFW segment to be $232. If I was IDB'd from that segment (which also wouldn't happen to business class passengers without some major extenuating circumstances), all I would be legally required to be paid would be $232 * 4 = $928. I've seen economy fares on regional jet flights on complex itineraries of about $50, so the legal requirement to deny boarding to that passenger would be $200 cash.

I've had more luck (i.e. more usable performance) with the NoMachine remote desktop product (basically X11 forwarding).

For a while I was also using GNU Screen over SSH too.

I found that using the LaTeXiT app that comes with the MacTex distribution is pretty easy; it offers drag-and-drop of an image into Keynote / Pages.

Their long-term plan seems to be that Azure is going to be the best / easiest platform to host the projects they contribute to on. Therefore, their open source projects like TypeScript and .NET Core act as a funnel to drive people to Azure.

I also think that they are trying to position .NET Core as a viable competitor to Java, for which they need decent cross-platform tooling.

My thoughts too. And in this case, phrasing it as a question is more honest than saying "there may have been a nuclear incident in the Arctic", since the statement would still likely cause some panic.

Amtrak is the contracted operator for a number of commuter rail services, such as MARC. Not sure if that counts as "by or for Amtrak".

The real issue is that often operationally, a passenger train has to stop for a freight train. If you have a 1000' siding that you have to have a 6 car passenger train pass a 30 car freight train at, the passenger train is going to have to stop for the freight train. That doesn't even take into consideration other factors like how freight dispatchers don't like to stop hazmat/"hot" trains for safety reasons.

Compared to other manufacturers (Bombardier, Embraer) that tend to make regional jets which max out at 2x2 seating, this is a large jet for a non-Airbus/Boeing(/Tupolev) manufacturer.

Only the longest stretched fuselages on the newest 737/A320s can carry more than 200 passengers, and there are a lot of 737-800s still flying that carry 160 or so people. China could very well build a stretched fuselage C919 if the project ends up being a success.

This is actually a common myth. Cable initially was a service where the feed for certain terrestrial broadcast stations was transmitted over a cable for users who could not receive a clear signal. Since the same feed was used, it had the ads the broadcast affiliate put into it.

MathJax by default doesn't use $ as a delimiter for inline equations, but instead uses \( and \) to avoid confusion with monetary quantities. Perhaps a similar thing could be done.

I believe that Netflix mainly uses AWS because their needs tend to surge dramatically at certain times, so that if they built their own worldwide server network, it would have to be vastly over-provisioned for when people get home at 7 PM and start streaming.

Plus they were a pretty early-adopter of AWS, and they have a ton of infrastructure running on it already.

Yeah, I guessed on that one. They may be able to use the third freight track that already passes through the station for that. The reason I said four is because there actually are just as many southbound commuter trains as northbound commuter trains at rush hour [1], since most of the trains stay overnight in Boston. The Amtrak trains are mostly southbound in the morning and northbound in the evening though.

It depends on what Amtrak's mathematicians decide, including whether electrifying the track is worth it.

[1] http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/Documents/Schedules_and_Ma...

There are a few issues with getting these train stations built though:

A. The state of Rhode Island currently reimburses the MBTA for all operating expenses south of the RI/MA state line, and they just funded a commuter rail extension south of Providence to attract intra-RI commuters to take transit to Providence instead of driving. However, even providing incentives such as free parking, ridership at these stations has pretty drastically missed expectations [1], and the trains are scheduled to take the same time as the bus takes in rush hour traffic. The commuting situation/parking isn't bad enough in RI like Boston or New York to make the train obviously beneficial time/money wise, when you lose schedule flexibility of when you can go to/leave work.

B. The site of the proposed train station only has two passenger tracks and is located in a high speed (125 MPH or 150 MPH) zone. Starting service to the station is not as simple as just refinishing it and having trains stop there: Amtrak (which owns the tracks) would probably insist that the state of Rhode Island quad-track through the station so that its trains can pass a stopped commuter train.

C. It's difficult to get transit projects funded near state borders, because of the mindset of "we paid for it and they all go work in the other state!".

Providence is a pretty fast-growing city, so it's possible that in 5 to 10 years the traffic situation makes a much more compelling case for people to make use of transit, but additional commuter rail service there is a kind of hard sell.

[1] http://wpri.com/2015/05/18/south-county-rail-ridership-far-s...

I would argue that when people read articles critical of transit, they aren't necessarily thinking of the environmental benefits or the fact that the transportation they use gets a subsidy. And newspaper articles on transit don't put it into context by saying "the interstate next to the railroad costs about as much". Controversial subjects get eyeballs, and that's what the papers want.

Public transit is a very visible part of government for people who live in cities that have it, and it's controversial because it's partially financed with taxpayer money whether you use it or not.

I feel like especially in southern California, there are a lot of people in the suburbs who don't use public transit and who feel like the money spent on transit ("moving poor people around") should go to road projects instead which benefit them.

I was recently in Miami, and my friend who lives there said to use Lyft instead of taking the bus or the metro, because "it's only used by poor people". I compare this to Boston, where people complain about MBTA crowds and management, but in general if you're near a subway stop you'll take the subway over Uber of Lyft (when it's running).

You may not have seen that many dedicated electric car charging outlets, but I bet many of the RV parks you've stayed at have a 220 V / 50 A NEMA 10-5 connector, which can give you about 30 miles of charge per hour in a Tesla. Not a supercharger, but decent.

Availability of non-Tesla electric charging depends vastly on where you are. In the northeast, there are a bunch of places that have 2-4 EV spaces with a CHAdeMO connector which (anecdotally) are always full. So if you're planning a trip cross-country, you basically have to stick to the interstates for superchargers.

If you have an RV, you probably think that traveling cross-country via only the interstates is a pretty bad way to see the sights though :).

Even better point than mine. This is probably gonna suck for independent medical practices.

I've been working on a web app that integrates with Office 365 using OpenID Connect. If someone is signed into their Microsoft account instead of their corporate account, the sign-in process just gives a generic error page with light-grey text explaining the error at the bottom of the page.

I know some of your pain :)

I suspect that the removal is actually an artifact of them saying that later versions of Windows will be incremental updates to Windows 10. Normally they would just wait until Windows 11 to make the change, but since they can't do that any more, they just roll it out in an update.

Yeah it was a bait-and-switch for small businesses.