spiffage

I just came across this walkthrough if you decide to give it a try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx2H3IV9SG4

Walkability in rich countries is expensive precisely because lots of people want walkability, and that want is underserved. It's signal that we should allow more of it to happen!

Thanks for telling us about the option to use the original aspect ratio! I'd basically given up and might never have found out.

We've also shot ourselves in the foot with land-use policy in SF/Silicon Valley. When engineers build products at a company that succeeds, the gains end up accruing to landlords.

It's been de facto illegal to build more housing units for a long time. Engineers here largely either win the stock option lottery or leave (and be put to less economically efficient use) once they start a family.

Under these rules, Silicon Valley won't be Silicon Valley for much longer. Indeed, the people who speak up at city hall meetings and are the biggest activists in elections talk all the time about how much they want the tech industry to fail.

My big hope has been that when Silicon Valley cedes its mantle, it's at least to a country that's relatively friendly to western values.

I loved this essay when it came out, and I still think it's pretty great. But I'm forced to acknowledge that a big reason I was on board with it is that the identities I was given to choose from when I was young didn't appeal to me.

And I'm forced to acknowledge that for most people, their identities do work and make them happy in ways I can only sort-of understand. And maybe they lower our society's level of epistemic virtue, but people may never let them go, and it's not obvious that we ought to try to convince them to beyond a certain point.

I like balioc's perspective here https://balioc.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/responsa/. The whole thing is good, but he responds to PG's essay specifically with:

"I could answer by saying that, in many circumstances, identity really is necessary for hedonic well-being. [...] the world isn’t set up to provide us with constant sources of utility, so it’s much better to have a constantly-accessible utility generator inside yourself, even if that generator requires some finicky maintenance."

Mayor Burt's not pro-housing. He's just the least anti-housing of the anti-housing majority on the city council.

Subsidies would be mostly unnecessary. Merely allowing the housing to get built would be a gigantic improvement.

If you go to a city council meeting on the peninsula, 80% of the residents speaking say things like this. In my experience, even most tech workers speaking are the ones who bought property in the 90's and want to lift the drawbridge now that they've got theirs.

The sentiment that the Bay Area can't allow more homes to be built offends me, and it hurts even more that people who feel this way are the vast majority of voices that reach city councils, and that they're far more organized during elections.

Sure. Palantir, like other successful enterprise software companies, has a variety of large, enterprisey customers. But saying that Palantir collects health and financial data on people sounds super scary, when in fact Palantir isn't in the data collection business in the first place.

In this case, it's appropriate. Palantir doesn't "collect health and financial data on people", and I've never seen anything in the press that suggests they do.

I'm pretty sure employees at both Palantir and SpaceX wear company-branded clothes a lot. I know that's the case at Palantir for sure.

I liked the class notes better. Zero to One seems to target people who want the more important ideas in a denser format. Reading the book was a nice refresher two years after the notes, but not much in there is new.

I appreciated the PSA.

Snowden had a far higher level of access than Manning.

I was on an American team at the ACM world finals in 2004 and 2005 (and the top American team in 2005, which was a bad year for the US). There was very little pushing us to participate or practice, and I mostly did it because I thought the problems were more interesting than my classwork. Talking to participants from eastern Europe gave me an interesting perspective, though. It became clear that for American students, the prize was ~$10k (nice, but not a huge deal) and the cost was neglecting classwork. For an eastern-European or Chinese student, the prize was an American job. Some of those students even felt embarrassed about how hard their countries pushed these contests.

The indication that I've gotten from employers in Silicon Valley is that success in these contests is, if anything, overvalued as a signal for hiring. So the author is correct that the incentives aren't lined up to get CS students to participate in programming competitions.

I don't know whether this will be a problem for the US. It isn't right now, but you could imagine a potential future where US vs China in programming competitions becomes like chess competitions between the US and USSR during the cold war. I'm sure if that happens, the US will step up the participation incentives.

The first step to doing that is to understand how drones are being used by local law enforcement. Right now, the FAA makes information about manned aircraft available to the public, but not drones. This is the difference. Right now, the public has the tools to understand how they're being surveilled by manned aircraft, but lacks the tools to understand how drones are doing it. It's not a diversion of focus.

Paypal and Palantir are both good examples of new technologies that Thiel started that _did_ solve important problems that previously had no good solutions.

He's backed plenty of Web 2.0 nonsense that didn't solve important problems (and just backed lots of new companies in general), but Paypal and Palantir are actually counterexamples of that.

Most libertarians I know are fully aware that they can't stop the government from debasing money and devaluing savings anytime soon.

The reason tech companies rely heavily on stock-based incentives is to align the interests of the employee with the shareholder. You want the group to have a shared fate. Cold, hard cash, while attractive to people who haven't yet joined, doesn't align interests as well as stock does.

I disagree. When I'm interviewing, I take any line item on a candidate's resume as license to hammer them on their knowledge of that technology and its paradigms.

I'm saying that a person taking the same risk to save just 2 people is more heroic, even though peoples' intuition is the opposite. Risking yourself to save 2 people takes guts and a serious commitment to the greater good. Doing the same for 100 people takes guts, but is kind of a no-brainer.

People often think of the less extreme act that more people can get behind as being more extreme. It's the same reason that the person who risks death to save 100 people is more heroic than the person who risks death to save 2 people.

Hired in 2006. I was really serious about it. I was a year out of school (C+ GPA) working at a place I knew I didn't want to be. I had just started to grasp the seriousness of my situation as I stared into the abyss of an Office Space-style cubicle farm future. I knew I wasn't up on my stuff after slacking my way through school so I spent months coming up to speed on algorithms, code architecture, best practices, etc.

I wouldn't say I expected to get the job, but I nailed the interview. I've since moved on from Google, but the stuff I learned during those months has been incredibly valuable for my career.

No. As a person of relative privilege, it's your duty to generate value for the world with as much aggression as you can muster.

The world is a crazy place full of pleasure and suffering. The world doesn't care what you deserve; what matters is what you're gonna do about it.

I've been out of school for five years, and it's amazing the degree to which my first full-time salary didn't matter at all in retrospect. In fact, it still doesn't, but now I have the perspective to know that.

Absolutely go for what will make you grow the most.

I'm a huge fan of the motorized standing desk. I probably only actually stand up about 25% of the time, but it's an important 25%.

Palantir software is almost completely Java.

Their play wasn't "we're pulling out." It was "we're not censoring anymore." As far as I know, they're still not censoring anymore. Seems to me like a win for all involved.

It was still news to me.

Palantir Tech in Palo Alto: http://www.palantirtech.com/careers/positions