splonk

I have no particular data to support this, but anecdotally, my biggest issue with Cruise testing a couple years ago was that it was excessively cautious - randomly braking for no obvious reason, dithering at intersections trying to yield, that kind of thing. I could live with that.

Now (literally yesterday) a driverless Cruise car trying to make a left turn was yielding to me walking across the intersection, and then suddenly decided to go before I'd cleared the intersection. Would it have hit me if I hadn't scurried out of the way? I don't know, but it didn't inspire confidence, and it doesn't take many experiences like this to turn public opinion. Cruise in particular seems to have made their cars more aggressive in my small personal sample size.

I've only been to Olfactory a couple times but as far as I'm concerned it's a massive improvement over Triple Voodoo. I do like Harmonic as well, it's just even farther out of my way than Olfactory. Basically the only time I ever went to Anchor was when I was walking home from Dogpatch and didn't feel like stopping by one of those other places first.

I believe the distilling operation was separated from the brewing operation when Sapporo acquired it (I think maybe they had to remove the still through the roof with a crane?). I used to drink some with a guy who worked on the distilling side and tried a few of the Old Potrero variants, but none of them were really to my taste. Certainly unusual and worth trying, though.

Anchor actually did have a bunch of more modern beers after the Sapporo acquisition, but they were only available at the taproom. They only had retail distribution for the old reliable flagships (and then had a rebranding that was not well received).

The local reports were that Anchor had been slowly losing money for years before the Sapporo acquisition. Supposedly Sapporo was intending to use the Anchor facility to brew Sapporo locally and then eventually found out that the site wasn't really suitable or would require too much renovation. Whether this led directly to the Stone deal, I don't know (I doubt it, given relative sizes, but it may have been a contributing factor). In general, even before the Sapporo acquisition, Anchor was slowly getting pushed out of local bars by other, smaller local breweries. Once I started seeing things like Standard Deviant's kolsch or Harmonic's pilsner taking up one of the taps in smaller restaurants that only had 2-4 taps, the writing was probably on the wall.

I suspect one of the local breweries will be happy to acquire Anchor if Sapporo's going to sell it off at fire sale prices (c.f. Cellarmaker/Rare Barrel, Drake's/Bear Republic).

SeatGuru isn't perfect but it'll be right more often than not with the seat dimensions, especially on popular routes.

Realistically I think airlines have figured out that they're mostly competing on price, not seat quality. Very few people price out flights and then choose the one that's $20 more expensive based on what the seats are like.

(I used to own a LotR)

LotR has three different "main" multiball modes (one for each movie), as well as the Gollum multiball (just 2 balls, normally). The Fellowship multiball is the one that requires hitting essentially every shot on the table.

The particular thing about LotR is that the multiballs can be stacked with the "story" modes (from shooting the center ring). Depending on how flaily you are, this can make the story modes easier or harder, but generally I find that it makes them safer if you have enough ball control. When my overarching goal was to reach Valinor (which requires beating a certain number of story modes, as well as all the multiballs), the general strategy was to spam Two Towers multiball as much as possible on top of a story mode.

I just saw this video of Ronnie O'Sullivan falling over due to trying to lean on a virtual snooker table, and I'm almost certain exactly the same thing would happen to me the first time I tried to nudge a VR pinball machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMceVbo3Tm4

> Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.)

To expand on this a bit, the actual maintainer of the machine is probably the most important factor of the quality of the barcade, at least if you're the type of person who cares about rulesets for games and will be irritated if something doesn't work because of a broken sensor. I like enthusiast owned/operated places because the owner who's actually playing the games will notice problems and fix them, as opposed to bars where any problems with the machine will either be broken until the maintainer gets around to it on their scheduled route, or possibly the problems never get reported at all. One possibly useful proxy for this is seeing where your local leagues play - in general they're more likely to be in places with well-maintained machines.

For San Francisco:

- Outer Orbit is my favorite place, even though they've recently removed a couple machines for more seating (more evidence that the bar/restaurant is the money maker). The owners met playing pinball, are heavily involved in the local scene, and do the maintenance themselves, so the machines tend to be in great shape. Decent Hawaiian food and a quite good beer list.

- Free Gold Watch is the place everyone always recommends because it has the most machines. My feeling is that they don't keep up on maintenance well enough because I always have trouble with tables always having enough small things broken about it that it's impossible to advance some modes. (On pretty much any modern machine every lane/ramp/hole is probably going to be required for some mode or another, so a single broken sensor breaks the entire game if you're trying for wizard mode.) It's definitely the place to go for the arcade experience with a lot of machines to choose from.

- the Alamo theater actually has a reasonably decent room upstairs from the bar, across the hall from the theaters. Doesn't seem to get rotated much and I'm not convinced it's maintained regularly, but it doesn't get much traffic so it doesn't seem like stuff breaks quickly there. A lot of people seem surprised when I mention it's there.

- Gestalt always has machines in decent shape, but the bar itself might close any month now.

- Emporium/Musee Mecanique - I don't go to them often, but they're both more generalist arcades, so they'll have a few machines at varying maintenance levels.

I'm not sure how often https://pinballmap.com/ gets updated or how its coverage is outside the SF Bay Area, but it looks pretty accurate for me.

> They usually show the actual price, or the actual price minus a $2 tourism tax.

In my experience this is not true in the US, although God only knows how they segment their customer base for tests.

I use booking.com frequently but not exclusively, but that's mostly because I have more familiarity with the domain than most. It's perfectly fine for figuring out availability in an area (although you may also want to check airbnb) and then making a decision about how you actually want to book.

I wonder if commissions have dropped a lot in the past ~5 years, or if your hotel just has a better rate. I remember hearing that average commission back then was in the 20% range (less for major chains with negotiating power), and I know that Booking/Expedia would be happy to kick down 8-12% for any traffic people referred to them. Any startup with zero volume could sign up for an affiliate account to get access to Expedia's availability and booking APIs and get 8% for each booking, and larger customers could negotiate that upwards. I think I saw 14% for one supplier, but I don't remember if that was Booking or Expedia or a smaller company.

This is more likely to be the hotel's fault than Booking's. You'd likely have the same issue with any third party aggregator. Many hotels (much like airlines) regularly overbook as a business decision, and third parties don't really have any visibility into this kind of thing. It's less likely (but not impossible) for this to happen to you if you book direct, and it's helpful to inform the hotel if you're going to be arriving late.

Plenty of reasons to dislike Booking, but this particular one is more of a systematic issue.

Agoda is owned by Booking.

I rant about the 2.5-10 scale on every Booking thread. It's not totally fake but it's very deceptive.

When I had access to a large amount of rating data, the median rating on Booking was 8.1. If you can filter for business travelers (not sure if the UI allows this, but the data might still be in the page), that drops down to mid 7s.

Part of the push for loyalty programs is that Booking (and Expedia) have tried to have a "most favored nation" clause in their agreements with hotels that states that hotels can't advertise a lower price elsewhere...unless they have an existing relationship with the customer. Hotels are often paying 20%+ in commission, so they're highly incented to get you to sign up for their program and give you free wifi or whatever and a few bucks off the room price.

EU regulation is pushing back on the MFN clauses, but I'm not sure what the current state of things is.

I did some work on hotel booking for one of the the "small" players in the space (at the time, a distant third in the EU after Booking/Expedia). The majority of their room availability was sourced through the two big players. That's probably going to be the case for most aggregators, and there's a fair chance that your favorite non-Booking/Expedia aggregator is actually just selling you their content and collecting around 10%.

Previous thread about using GPT3 with Ghidra:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34250872

Interesting, I stand corrected. I've been on several Amtrak lines across the country in the past couple years, but things have been changing pretty quickly, and I haven't taken that particular line.

Hope you enjoyed your Malort.

Very pleasant travelogue. I enjoy long distance train travel when I have the time for it, and I think is a pretty helpful post for those considering it.

> Also, economy does not include meals in the dining car and gets you no access to the observation car.

I'm pretty sure observation cars are open to all passengers, regardless of ticket status. Certainly nobody's ever asked me for a ticket when going into one.

(Too late to edit original post)

Just to illustrate how long locksmiths have been a problem, here's an article from 2009 talking about locksmith spam on maps. The techniques have changed but the general reliance on sketchy tactics hasn't.

https://searchengineland.com/despite-fixes-google-maps-still...

I used to work in this field (verifying local business listings). Locksmiths are traditionally the spammiest and scammiest industry of them all (along with taxis, before rideshare cut down their ROI). Basically any service area business has huge incentive to spam any and all business listing providers, and for whatever reason the locksmith industry became the worst of them. Flower delivery and personal injury lawyers often fall into the same bucket. You'll still see companies named "AAA Locksmith" and the like because this behavior dates back to the days of the Yellow Pages.

As to why Yelp is better than Google on this, I'd guess it's either that you got lucky, or that Google is more targeted than Yelp these days. I'm not up on the current state of how listing verification works now, but it's possible that Google's process is easier to target than Yelp's, and if there are any weaknesses, a locksmith marketer will figure it out pretty quickly.

This is more or less how my office was in ~2014-16. I believe some property developer turned a bunch of apartments near the Caltrain station (1 Bluxome St.) into offices, so the building was a mix of residential and startups (e.g. Goldbelly was based there for a while, and I think some VC fund of Michael Arrington's, and plenty of others I've forgotten). My office was in a loft, where our company was in the loft area and a different company had the downstairs living area, and we both used the bedroom (with a door) as a meeting room. IMO it wasn't really any worse than any other open office plan and had some benefits, like a full kitchen.

BlaBlaCar does this in Europe but I don't know how much uptake they have in the US.

> many airlines still need to modernize.

Most of the travel industry runs on old software that would horrify a lot of people here, especially those who've never worked for a large, 30+ year old company. When I used to interview a lot of people I made it a point to mention some of the more "interesting" aspects so they'd know what they were getting into.

One example: ever tried to book a flight a year in advance? On a lot (almost all?) of systems you can't, because the underlying date format is "DEC27".

Edit to address a couple comments: logistics are hard and there are plenty of reasons why airlines wouldn't want to support booking that far out. However, the reason you can book a flight 330 days from now but not 360 days from now is almost certainly due to the date format. (I believe the windows used are less than 365 days because it's helpful to be able to have dates in the recent past. I remember seeing documentation for 360, but AA and United seem to be in the 330-340 range on their websites).

> I'm sure there will be fees.

Those fees are going to be in the neighborhood of $40k/year. I couldn't find any good documentation, which I suspect requires going through more of the sales process. However, this page [1] has children's rates as $15-20k/year, and another article suggested around $25k/year for adults. That's assuming double occupancy though - single occupancy gets an 18% discount off the rates for double occupancy.

[1]: https://knowledgebase.storylines.com/assessment-for-single-r...

People lie about their hands and reasoning at the table all the time. Amateurs are worse at it, but even pros get caught out saying dumb stuff now and then. Normally we just point and laugh at their obvious attempts to save face. At the end of the day I think I've just seen so many weird hands, even from good players, that one more just doesn't move the needle.

One example: I've played hundreds of thousands if not millions of hands, and at least once I've accidentally folded half the pot at showdown because I misread the board. If for some reason that had happened in a tournament and my hole cards were known, it would be pretty easy to make the argument that I was cheating to pass chips to my opponent, instead of the actual reason of me being an idiot and not knowing how to read a hand with thousands of dollars in front of me.

Former pro and high stakes player here. I don't know the principals involved and as such have no particular strong opinion on whether any cheating occurred, but this particular situation of a ridiculous hero call based on a very specific read is common enough that it doesn't raise any red flags to me.

Mostly I just want to comment to say that any analysis involving her hand equity against a random hand is flawed. For one, bluffs generally don't come out of a random range. Probably more importantly, someone deciding to have undue confidence in their read and acting on it is more common than some people here seem to think. It's pretty clearly a bad call under almost any reasonable analysis, but I wouldn't have been making a living if people made good decisions all the time. In this particular hand, if you convince yourself that the opponent has exactly 8c7c (not hard to do), it's also going to be pretty easy to convince yourself that a hand with the Jc in it is a good enough candidate to snap off that bluff.

Meta-considerations about offering to return money or the likelihood of choosing to burn an exploit for a very marginal situation don't seem particularly convincing one way or another unless you know the principals well. However, if I had to choose one word to describe a high stakes poker player, "erratic" would be a pretty good one. Basically I think anyone uninvolved who's sure of what happened is probably being overconfident.

Fagradalsfjall in Iceland in 2021 was more or less a self-guided tourist attraction. I went twice a few weeks apart. Depending on the state of the flow there were different viewpoints and paths. There were a few search and rescue teams around during daytime hours, and some recommended paths, but I wouldn't call it a controlled area in any way. In general the lava flow was more than slow enough that you wouldn't be in any danger from it unless you did something incredibly stupid (and some people did, although I don't believe anyone died). In some of the valleys farther from the main caldera the lava was barely moving - if you were so inclined you could go and poke it with a stick. People brought hotdogs as a joke to roast over the lava. I imagine you can find pictures online easily enough, as hundreds of people were going up there every day.

The more technical writeup [0] linked at the bottom of the article doesn't specifically mention it, but it sounds like they probably booted off the Live CD to get access to the registry.

> You can’t analyze the registry live on a windows machine because it locks the NTUSER.dat files by the process id (PID) 104 known as Registry.exe. Any useful registry information will be found in that process, and we recommend getting a memory and VAD dump of the Registry.exe process as soon as possible. You can do this quite easily with the REKALL tool, which can perform live and dead memory analysis on Windows machines.

[0]: https://blog.unit221b.com/dont-read-this-blog/0xdead-zeppeli...

This is the "most favored nation" pricing clause that major OTAs like Booking and Expedia try to put in their contracts with hotels. Usually the phrasing says something along the lines of how the clause doesn't apply if the hotel has a previous relationship with the guest - this is part of why hotel chains push so hard to get customers to join their loyalty programs. If the OTA is taking 20% off the top, the hotel can get you to sign up for their program and then sell you the room for 10% off, and everyone but the OTA wins. Another way hotels try to get around this is offering free breakfast, wifi, better rooms, etc. for directly booked customers, while showing the same price as the OTA.

~5 years ago the EU was starting to push back on the legality of the MFN clauses and I was under the impression that Booking.com had scaled back their usage of them in some ways, but I don't know the current state of things.

While I'm at it, my usual rant about Booking.com's review system - the scale is actually from 2.5-10, and the median score is 8.1. Don't be fooled by those "above average" 7 scores.