2,218 karma · joined March 12, 2011
https://reconcilingstate.substack.com
Feel free to reach out or refer me for technology consulting!
https://www.highemprise.com
stephen AT highemprise DOT com
Not long after that, I found out that Palantir got their first energy industry customer. Some employees in Palantir thought it wouldn't be worthwhile to go after oil & gas companies because they viewed them as old school and slow to adapt to new ways of doing things. However, in those days Palantir was focused on acquiring no more than one customer per industry, because they were trying to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and wanted to demonstrate how many industries they could serve. And then, due to a contrarian within the company, they did get an O&G customer, and it was the biggest single deal so far in the company's history.
What I don't know is exactly how well they served that customer. What I do know is that they were selling the customer on the idea that they have sooooo much data and they're leaving tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily boost savings in the company. Stick all this data into Palantir's product and we'll help you on a million fronts and therefore boost your profits significantly. One example is the longevity of machine parts and all the data you can get about historical wear and tear, etc. Now, this is what they were selling, and I don't know which areas ended up being the most helpful, but yeah, as someone else in here said, they were insisting on customers putting in all the data they have and the product would make connections, or reveal insights, etc.
Even if it's a crude product by Star Trek standards, you've gotta admit there is probably a ton of low-hanging fruit like that in most companies, and a lot of the time they don't go after all that because they're making money, but just don't have extra manpower or expertise to look into all that, so if Palantir delivers on the promise to boost the bottom line, then I guess it's worth it. It also means there's room to compete, although a big problem is even if you're a sharp cookie, Palantir probably started with way more business connections than most nerds will ever have.
edit: flaking out, since I can't think of a better way to describe what's happening :)
And honestly, using Rails or other server-side frameworks, you can get very far with way less effort than those expensive front-end teams by simply using Hotwire:
Sending down rendered HTML using Hotwire Turbo requires far less time, and HTML over the wire is in reality no heavier than sending down JSON. If you absolutely need a bit more interactivity on the front-end while avoiding a server roundtrip, it's easy to drop in little Stimulus JS controllers as-needed. From my journeys to and fro in the real world, I've seen most projects do not need more than that, and are arguably wasting budget trying to use heavier tools than that! For most sizeable projects, you can do more in Rails & Hotwire with fewer developers than a 6-person team using their favorite server side language and React. I'm not saying you have to use Ruby on Rails. I'm saying I wish the dev world would embrace this paradigm in whatever their favorite language/frameworks are.
Would've been a good place for me to live as a young man as I grew up on sausage. The most common variety I ate was made by my Texan-Czech grandparents and other relatives. It often had venison and pork if someone had gone deer hunting recently enough. The venison was a nice touch but the pork helped it to be less dry. So delicious, and the archetype by which I measure all other sausage. The closest recipe I can find is from Prasek's Family Smokehouse in Hill (original Czech spelling is Prášek). They have multiple varieties, with and without jalapeño, but the all-beef and pork & beef have a flavor extremely close to the kind made by my relatives. I'm extra fortunate since you can now find them in HEB in Houston.
:edited my first sentence to clarify it's not quite indentured servitude :)
Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...
The Free Press
A decade ago, I shopped for the first time at the most famous furniture store in this part of Texas: Gallery Furniture. Growing up anywhere within an hour or two of Houston in the 80s, Mattress Mack was more recognizable to a kid like me than any news anchor or any other television personality. Before the 80s was over, I'd probably seen him hop in the air hundreds of times with a fistful of dollars, talking about how Gallery Furniture will save you money, and he's still going strong today. He even toured big city and small town schools warning kids about drugs. Anyway, I had gotten by for years on hand-me-downs and IKEA furniture, but it was time to replace something ratty, and I walked in there with a vague impression that it might be more pricey than other stores. They told me it was all made in America (some places up north like Indiana?) and when I was asking about cheaper sofas that a guy over 6 feet tall could comfortably nap on, they pointed me to one they said was made locally in the Houston area. It was very long and had a very simple design and had firm foam that wouldn't sag (something I had asked for), and they let me have it for $500, and it felt like much better quality than a lot of the prettier stuff in other furniture stores.
A couple years later when I got married, we were looking for a nicer sofa, and I figured out that the local furniture maker that Gallery Furniture had been selling was called Living Designs Furniture and had a factory in the East End:
https://www.livingdesignsfurniture.com
Their factory's showroom was very bare, but it was full of pieces, including a colorful chair in the shape of a stiletto shoe! We found an elegantly shaped light gray sofa long enough for me to sleep on, and again with high quality foam, and they built one with some slight customizations we wanted for $1,081 total. Unreal, because we have a white sofa from IKEA that isn't much less, but the quality is on another level!
I'd really like to see a resurgence of products like this in the USA. I've heard of some custom sofas costing several thousand, but somehow this local company is managing to sell at a lower price point. 18 years ago, a buddy of mine was living in Charleston, South Carolina. He had talked to a local high end furniture maker about doing a 3-year apprenticeship to learn how to make fine furniture, but in the end he knew he'd make very little per year in wages (he estimated $35,000 or so). Instead he pursued another dream and went to Napa Valley for a one-year course at the only open-wheel racing mechanic school in the country and ended up working on an Indy Car team for a dozen years. Hopefully more guys like him can find the furniture maker route feasible in the future if American consumers can escape the throwaway mindset. The average household doesn't need expensive Amish Craftsman offerings. A lot of people could afford this local furniture maker we have available, but I understand it could be a risky business venture to try to compete with the stuff shipped over the ocean.
I'm no Photoshop expert, but someone else in this discussion pointed out that Photoshop has some filters or other tools that do edge detection and can yield much more accurate results. If the techniques could be replicated in a SaaS then you'd have a much better product. Of course, if it could be done in a desktop Mac app or an iOS app, I might choose that for privacy reasons.
Our lightweight SaaS was focused on analytics related to share of wallet and return on capital and improving insights into client relationships. With our tool, an investment banker could perform some tasks in seconds or minutes that normally an MD expected a junior analyst to do in hours or days. Not rocket science, but useful. And not as expensive as Dealogic. I wish I could say our creation was taking the world by storm, but we haven't been involved for many years and as so often happens with acquisitions, they didn't really execute well on our original target audience and took it in another direction.
Among the 4 production B2B Rails apps I've been adding features to in the past year, the only one using jQuery was created 13 years ago. None of the others ever used jQuery, and using Hotwire Turbo to replicate SPA functionality is easy nowadays.
One of the Rails apps serves a Flutter mobile client on the front-end, and as much as I appreciate all the lifting Flutter does for me, the sheer amount of code required to support that is enormous and laborious in comparison to writing a few Turbo frame tags in the fullstack Rails app. If not for a few gotchas that the client app needed, that mobile app would have been done with Jumpstart Pro iOS & Android with Turbo Native (great code reuse potential).
Users of Rails apps leveraging Turbo frames or streams don't think those apps feel more shiny and cool and performant than legacy SPA frameworks such as React, and the modern Rails developers spend less time churning out code.
"Biologically, a protist-disease vaccine is more difficult to develop due to the mechanism and pathophysiology of diseases such as malaria and chagas."
More on vaccines for protozoal diseases:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961066/
Specifics on the difficulty with a vaccine for malaria:
https://www.malariavaccine.org/malaria-and-vaccines/vaccine-...
You asked: "fednow"
We're sorry but we need more details to give you a complete and accurate answer. Can you please rephrase your question?
https://www.jpmorgan.com/payments/solutions/fednow
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-07-29/heres-now-...
About 4 years ago, I got scammed when I sent a payment to a local preschool and later found out the preschool did not receive those funds. Someone was illicitly reading their emails and and also had control of a discarded email address the school no longer used and routed my Zelle payment to the bank account associated with that. The school suspected a former employee, but nothing ever came of it even though there was a police report and I also filed a complaint with the feds. A police officer called me several months later to say the case had ended up in his lap but he didn't see a way to do anything about it. Chase had multiple meetings with me, and they even knew which bank the funds had been transferred to, so it made no sense to me that there was nothing that could be done to retrieve the funds. Eventually the whole saga just ended with no resolution, and I figured if that person was so desperate they probably needed the money more than me.
Anyone have more insight into the underlying mechanics and why we can't confirm recipient identity/account as a Zelle user?
2007 financial outlook - "The Krispy Creme (KKD) Donut Boat Don't Float" https://247wallst.com/investing/2007/06/04/the_krispy_crem/
Picture of a boat that actually doesn't float: https://www.deviantart.com/theuniphotoghrpher/art/This-Boat-...
Houseboat for rent: https://www.travelocity.com/Hartwell-Hotels-This-Boat-Dont-F...
Church sermon title: https://journeyorl.podbean.com/e/when-your-boat-dont-float/
Poem title: https://inprinthouston.org/event/first-fridays-presents-rebe...
2002 article about a Ford/Mercury car: https://www.deseret.com/2002/6/11/19659250/marauder-muscle-c...
Fishing forum: https://www.fishexplorer.com/co/fxrforum.asp?action=det&pid=...
Boating forum: https://forums.sailboatowners.com/threads/new-to-the-forum.1...
Australian website asking "What happens if your boat don’t float?" https://www.aussiemob.com/beer-can-regatta/