xputer

Made me think of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNN_(Dutch_broadcaster)

I'm sad to say this even happens at FAANG. So many engineers seem to either not want to or not know how to optimize their own workflow as they're building it. It's really frustrating when you want to contribute something to their project and the development workflow for verifying the application still starts after making any changes is "upload the 5GB deployment bundle to AWS". Like come on, you can't seriously expect people to be productive that way.

A Pokémon game made by Rockstar Games sounds pretty sweet.

Yes, luckily it seems cities are slowly starting to realize that allowing cars everywhere and infinitely widening roads is not scalable and, more importantly, does not create a pleasant environment for people to be outside in.

The future is definitely creating more walkable/cyclable cities and improving public transit. Self driving cars have the potential to make things even worse by generating new car trips that otherwise wouldn't have been made.

The problem with grouping people into advantaged and disadvantaged groups along lines of race and ethnicity is that you will end up grouping some people that are actually from a poor background into the "advantaged" group and vice versa. No matter how you put it, that just doesn't seem fair and I find it appalling that this somehow became acceptable in modern day America.

There is PureTuber as well. Haven't tried it yet, but from what I read it has a similar experience to Vanced.

It's better to donate to a public bank. According to the AAP the child itself is almost certainly not going to be able to benefit from their own stem cells because whatever disease you're trying to treat them for is most likely already present in the stem cells. It can be used to treat siblings though. But overall the advice is to donate to a public bank unless you already have a child with a medical condition in your family that could benefit from cord blood from their sibling.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/119...

From what I can tell it's better to donate to a public bank. According to the AAP the child itself is almost certainly not going to be able to benefit from their own stem cells because whatever disease you're trying to treat them for is most likely already present in the stem cells. It can be used to treat siblings though. But overall the advice is to donate to a public bank unless you already have a child with a medical condition in your family that could benefit from cord blood from their sibling.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/119...

My employer makes us do this and I absolutely hate it. It slows me down so much. I now have to effectively maintain two machines that cause issues at twice the frequency. The server isn't even notably faster than my MacBook. Moreover, in my experience, the uniformity of these cloud development machines also encourages developers to get lazy and start making all sorts of assumptions about the environment the application runs in. This makes it impossible over time to run the application locally and will cause issues during the inevitable hardware upgrades in the future.

The US may be big, but the majority of people live in the same small set of metropolitan areas.

Google the word "modal filter"

I think this article misses the point. Estimation should never be a goal. It should merely a tool that helps with identifying risks early on and that helps with identifying the "minimum viable product (MVP)". The term MVP was never mentioned in this article and I don't see how you can have a serious discussion about project estimation and dismiss the benefits of agile without even mentioning the term MVP...

Clear demonstration of why initiatives such as "public money public code" are so important. https://publiccode.eu/

The Netherlands just implemented an 8% property transfer tax for investors in the housing market. This seems to have discouraged a lot of investors from buying up homes in the past year compared to previous years. Still there are massive shortages on the housing market though.

It always strikes me as odd that many houses and apartment buildings in the US west coast will have entire walls with zero or nearly zero windows in them. Apartments and houses here are so much darker than in Europe.

It's not about making the roads more narrow or winding per se. It's about deliberately slowing cars down where they need to, through the road design. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc

Besides that, roads in the US are generally poorly classified. They're often trying to both function as both high throughput roads and destination serving streets. Such hybrid roads are known as "stroads" and they're bad for everyone involved. Stroads are bad for moving cars fast due to the many conflict points (driveways, intersections, etc.) that force drivers to constantly slow down. They are also bad at serving destinations because the many conflict points make stroads very dangerous, especially if you're not in a car. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM

Sorry but this is just so wrong. American road design is super predicated on personal responsibility. We design roads that are as wide as freeways and then put a little sign on the side that says 35mph speed limit. What we need is less focus on personal responsibility and accept that people make mistakes, we're all human after all. Our roads should be designed with human error in mind. The road design itself should make it natural for drivers to slow down near dangerous areas. See this video for example: https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc

Yes, also it is to be expected that Uber has a large number of drivers that only do a couple of riders per week while a smaller number of drivers work full time. The larger number of drivers that only do a few rides of course would be in favor of flexibility, but this ruling is as far as I understand mainly about protecting those who work for Uber full time.

Nothing wrong with government subsidized rail. The government subsidizes cars too by funding the roads. I assume you're not in favor of turning all interstates into toll roads? Also in the end it's cheaper to get started with laying down rail early than to wait until after people have moved into the area and you have to displace some of them in order to build the rail line.

Somehow "detailing restrooms" has me picturing someone claybar-ing and waxing toilet seats.

No need to give up single family homes at all. Just make sure every suburb has a dense multi use zoned core with shops and apartments above the shops. Then make that core easy to reach from all across the suburb by walking/cycling/bus/rail (yes that will take away some of the space allocated to cars). Then as a bonus, connect those cores to each other with rail. This is essentially how Dutch suburbs work.

Amen to that. Actually getting it done is a big hairy problem I'm afraid though :(

That's pretty scary, don't brakes contain asbestos?

What about the Fire tablets that flip the volume control hardware button whenever you change screen orientation from portrait to landscape and vice versa? I always mess up because of that.

Interesting, thanks! Here is a link for mobile readers: https://outline.com/pcYcSh

I'm staying away from Lenovo ever since buying an IdeaPad laptop in 2018 with a fan so obnoxious that I literally could not get any work done. Lenovo needs to get their shit together.

I was pleasantly surprised by the focus on esthetics in the article. So many places in the US look so artificial or industrial. One thing that was missing though was creating density and the need for mixed use mid rise buildings with shops and restaurants in the ground floor and apartments above it. This is ubiquitous in virtually all cities we regard as great places to be, but in the US it is often illegal to build like this nowadays due to zoning regulations. So you often get shopping malls with huge parking lots that are completely abandoned after 7pm and residential areas that consist purely of houses and are devoid of any interesting shops.

3 or 4 plexes are not going to solve the housing issue in the bay area, because many single family homes are already being used that way. They need to build dense urban cores with residential high rise and mixed use mid rise. Ideally close to Caltrain and BART stations, but additionally every single family zoned neighborhood should be given such an urban core. That way it would create more dense pockets all throughout the area, which would make it possible to bring alternative modes of transit into all neighborhoods by connecting these dense pockets with rail, bus routes and bike lanes.

Very similar experience for me. I have a hard time spending time on hobbies at the moment, because it feels like I should put that time towards my PhD instead of "wasting my time and energy". Yet, I somehow have no problem spending hours every day on reddit, YouTube, hacker news etc. because I think I tricked my mind into believing that those things don't cost energy so it's ok. Unfortunately they don't really bring joy and fulfilment the same way hobbies do.

I think the real problem for me is that the work of my PhD is never fully done until I've defended and submitted my thesis. It means that even though I definitely don't get even close to doing 40 hours of actual work per week, it feels like I am working all the time, which is exhausting. It's bad feeling like you are not supposed to take a break and wind down. It's probably why people burn out all the time...

Much of the US technology sector runs on Chinese immigrants...