anguswithgusto

This + one that mined book blurbs

Curation is solid. Depends on who they pick as the subject matter expert, but for example, their Shakespeare biography recommendations are themselves from one of the best living Shakespeare biographers. [1]

I find "Five Books" picks better than Amazon recommendations, and faster than Google/Reddit searches. Example: search "wine book" on Amazon and it's all wine textbooks and pretty-but-vapid coffee table books. Meanwhile, Five Books will suggests Kermit Lynch's fantastic cult classic wine memoir [2].

[1] https://fivebooks.com/best-books/shakespeare-biography-james...

[2] https://fivebooks.com/best-books/randall-grahm-wine/

Hey, I'll drink it?

Yeah, gonna repeat it next weekend! Everyone had a lot of fun. TO answer your question: we did indeed use multiple (break-out) rooms. As for speech/voice... I spent a lot of time on Omegle as a teenager, so video + no audio is natural to me but may not be for some people. Feel free to ask me more questions via email: cbswishes at gmail.

I did a mystery murder on Zoom yesterday where only the organizer/host had audio. It had the feelings of an IRC chatroom but with video. More people could actively talk (30+) than on a regular Zoom call, which are rife with interruptions in even very small groups.

"Tragedy"?

Like it or not, male technologists are privileged beneficiaries of SF's broken social order. They might not be individually responsible for what's broken, but if there is "really such a tragedy" in the city, it is certainly not the fact that some guys are being stereotyped and mocked on Twitter.

IMO, this is a more sophisticated article on the unit economics of food delivery. (However, it is a little older): The Food Delivery Death Star (2016) https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

For artists, yes: The Chelsea Hotel.

https://medium.com/@bagelboy/make-america-bohemian-again-de8...

Just imagine writing a program with the most perfect, functional, well-documented code.... but obfuscated and self-referential to the point of total unreadability. That's what Joyce did with FW.

It's enjoyable to listen to (audiobook-wise) after a tall glass of scotch. Not unlike, say, Gertrude Stein. The euphony and cadence of sentences, the unlikely word pairings, the stark impenetrability of it—it gives it the pleasure you'd get from an abstract painting. Certainly not everybody's glass of prune juice, but in those strange moods you can get yourself into, it can sometimes hit the spot.

Definitely not required reading for your moral (or even literary) education, though. It's a madman's backflip of a novel; something you'd write for a lark once you knew you had nothing to prove.

Okay so this isn't totally related, but there's something about the mélange between pirates and techies that just makes my heart sing. I get that this course is just supposed to be fun/a joke... but the cultural kinship between pirates and technologists is actually strangely similar. Maybe MIT isn't structured like a pirate ship, but startups most certainly are. Great read:

https://medium.com/@bagelboy/why-pirates-are-feared-5be709ae...

I have an iPod touch and (perversely) like not having data when I'm out. I can still use Google Maps and connect to WiFi when necessary, but prefer when my psychic default isn't always "plugged in".

Of course, I'm a market of one. I imagine the real reason the iPod touch still exists is for kids too young to have phones.

I thought this was a pun on the headline (implying that Urschel was not only a Ravens OL, but the author of a study.)

He's actually a math Ph.D at MIT! Crazy.

Ah yes, that holy grail of humanity: starting a business.

Thank heavens that the czars of capitalism have given us such a generous outlet for all that latent human potential—unlike say, starting a family, starting a full-time art project, starting a humanities Ph.D without crippling debt, starting a round of chemo while unemployed, or starting our dinners at 6pm like our ancestors managed to do for ~200,000 years.

"In order to popularize potatoes in France, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier placed armed guards around his potato fields, instructing the guards to accept all bribes and allow people to "steal" the crop."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier

It is not Monopoly money, it is...

>decks out Monopoly money with a bunch of smart-sounding technological bells and whistles

...ephemeral hyper-velocity funny money!

"The new, subtle ways" of signalling wealth in this article are neither new, subtle, nor interesting. You're telling me:

-Rich people bragging about going to/sending their kids to nice schools

-Eating fancy food

-Ostentatiously namedropping highbrow pop culture

are some sort of recent phenomena? Come on :)

tl;dr: rich people spend more on education and fancy lunches for their kids. Also, they pay attention to reading the right magazines, like The Economist and The New Yorker so everyone knows they went to fancy schools.

Choice quotes:

>"Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars..."

>"Knowing which New Yorker articles to reference or what small talk to engage in at the local farmers’ market enables and displays the acquisition of cultural capital, thereby providing entry into social networks that, in turn, help to pave the way to elite jobs, key social and professional contacts, and private schools."

This article is really stupid.

Cool initiative. I've yet to find a reason to switch from Transit to Citymapper in NYC, but it's always exciting to see pure tech companies (like Snapchat) try their hand at physical products.

The Citymapper folks are obviously very smart and I am stoked to see how this pilot project works out!

I'm surprised at how much flack this article is getting here on HN. Is it because we're all making those sweet 1% salaries in tech?

All my non-tech/finance friends are paying obscenely high rent, crippled with student debt, can't afford houses, can't afford cars, and three times as educated as their parents, but paid less than their parents were. In the case of unpaid internships (unavoidable for lots of industries, especially in the arts and media), many aren't being paid at all.

I think there are some possible cultural reasons (our generation being, on a whole I think, a bit less materialistic and not as motivated to work hard, boring, financially-rewarding jobs [like accounting] and more likely to want those sexy art, media, and non-profit jobs.) But overall I think the Boomers have dealt a real bum hand to their children.

Spotify (by a large margin), then YouTube (for discovery) and /mu/ (for community).

I still used What.cd for music I wanted offline access to (for running, flights, etc.) as well as the occasional leak or obscurity. But before I got Spotify I was downloading multiple albums a day.

A real tragedy. More than a torrent tracker, What.cd was a beautiful, vibrant, and positive community. Knowing someone in real-life who was a fellow What.cd'er was enough to form an immediate friendship. (Knowing someone who'd give you an invite was another way ;)

I found high-fidelity versions of albums, singles and EPs I couldn't find anywhere else on What.cd. It was faster, more thorough, and cleaner than every other music resource (let alone torrent tracker) around. When I was young and broke, it was my primary way of engaging with music, discovering bands that I'd never heard of, and to this very day remained a crucial part of my music discovery "stack".

With that said, What.cd had been dying a slow death for a while now. With the rise of Spotify et al., the need for a private torrent tracker and the requisite accessories (seedboxes, external HDs) has been dimming. What.cd used to be far-and-away my #1 music resource; today it was probably the 3rd or 4th, suitable for finding obscure releases or ones unavailable on streaming sites because of byzantine licensing deals. Back in the day though, What.cd was THE SPOT for hearing popular releases before anyone else. Today, leaks are less prominent, as labels have gotten tighter about protecting their music, and musicians have gotten savvier and prefer to "leak stuff" themselves. For that reason, total download numbers on What.cd have been in decline for years, the community has gotten a bit quieter, although it's still been an extremely valuable resource to fill in the gaps between all the big music streamers.

A truly sad day. RIP What.cd. You will be missed.

I read a great piece recently that explains why these big tech-cum-delivery companies treat their drivers so poorly. Worth checking out: https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

PayPal co-founder Max Levchin on Thiel: “He bets contrarian not when he knows he’ll win, but when he knows that his odds of winning are much better than most people think.”

Makes you wonder with all of Palantir's massive data-mining if Thiel knew something the public didn't.

crazy is relative ;)

Haven't been to the other cities on your lists but Valencia is AMAZING!

Unlike SF, we have great public transit! Most startups are a 5 minute walk from a subway stop, and it's cleaner/less crowded. Few people own cars here. (But granted, the snow is no joke!)

Montreal startups hiring:

-Transit (transitapp.com)

-Unsplash (unsplash.com)

-Hopper (hopper.com)

-Breather (breather.com)

-Sonder (sonder.com)

-Busbud (busbud.com)

-AmpMe (ampme.com)

-Fuzzy AI (fuzzy.ai)

-Frank & Oak (frankandoak.com)

You can get a pretty nice 1 BR apartment in Montreal for ~$600 US/mo. Incredible bars, beautiful people, great schools, bike paths, and lots of outdoor rinks to play hockey in the winter :-)

FYI: Montreal startups operate in English!

I was running social media for a startup and learned that one of the bosses was paying a freelance copywriter $90/hr. I quit my job the next day.

Took a lot of effort to build up the portfolio. I basically tried to avoid content mills and focused my effort on clients I knew I could write a reliably successful piece for (between 2k - 50k hits).

As you allude to though, the back-and-forth does dilute the rate quite a bit. But it's still fun as hell.