cbr

M-Pesa is part of what lets GiveDirectly transfer money to poor Kenyans so efficiently: http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/give-dir...

The PageSpeed Insights tool gives itself [1] a high score [2]; what this link is showing is that it's giving its documentation pages [3] a low score. Not that that's much better.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

[2] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

[3] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

$24k is the marginal cost of the recording. In this model the band's living is paid for by touring.

> if you enjoy music that features live instruments I just > don't see how it could be free. There's too many people > involved who need to eat.

One model people talk about is where recorded music is free, this boosts popularity, you fund the recordings through more people coming to your live shows. If you do 40 live shows a year, and giving away your music brings in 30 more people at each show paying $20 each, that's $24k: enough for a new album each year.

    If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was
    bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email!

Ctrl+Shift+V

    Compare that to virtually zero notable stories of
    C++ projects switching to Go.

A lot of projects at Google have switched from C++ to Go, and the people I know who work on them are pretty excited about working in Go. Here's a blog post by a coworker who leads the Chrome Data Compression Proxy project:

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/rewriting-large-pro...

> It makes H1B sweat-shops unfeasible

Calling a $60k job in tech in the US a "sweat shop" really trivializes the term.

The number of cloth diapers you need to buy is roughly proportional to the amount you'll go through in one day. So learning that babies typically go through 3X diapers/day instead of X doesn't actually change the cloth/disposable tradeoff.

That said, 30 seems high to me. Our kid probably peaked at about 8/day.

(We started with cloth diapers, but the amount of time washing them was just too high.)

Google maps thinks it's 36 minutes from Richmond station to Embarcadero station, and all the other combinations are slower. Where are you travelling between?

    Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of
    the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs
    with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden.
    They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units
    of labor.

Seems like you could make the same criticism of grocery stores.

"Pizza" doesn't have to include tomatoes. For example, "pizza bianca".

Has anything changed with pilots unions?

"The interaction between labor laws and FAA regulations results in pilot unions having a strong claim on 100 percent of an airline's profits. An investor in a unionized U.S. airline should not expect to see a return on that investment and, indeed, should expect an eventual Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing to wipe out his or her investment altogether."

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

"I drive Uber in the mornings before work"

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/3qkc7h/tesla_a...

> the actual cost of firing some one isn't that high

The legal cost is low, but the social cost of a workplace where people often get fired is high.

> you're trusting the people running the CDN to actually serve the JavaScript you request

Subresource Integrity [1] lets you fix this, and is in FF 43 and Chrome 45.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/

What fraction of the time does adding a new road slow down traffic? Or, equivalently, what fraction of the time does removing a road speed up traffic? If this fraction is high we should be experimenting with closing roads: that's a very cheap way to improve infrastructure.

> Yes we have a fire hose of content and people need people > like librarians to help utilize that fire hose more.

Or we need to get better at automating the process of helping people find what they're looking for. That is, keep improving search engines.

Cycling on sidewalks feels safer, but it's actually more dangerous. [1] The problem is that cars don't expect something moving quickly on the sidewalk, and so hit cyclists at driveways and intersections.

[1] http://www.bicyclinglife.com/Library/riskfactors.htm

Are there commodities where you do think people should be allowed to corner the market?

I pull the comments in with: https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/commen...

(Which isn't completely up to date; I have some changes I need to push public like hn-support.)

The techs measured vapor at 37,000 ng/m3 after the first day of cleanup, at which point there was no longer any easily visible mercury. Like water, mercury doesn't need something to vaporize it; you just end up with some vapor as long as there's liquid present.

(Post author here.)

Add in the meter, at maybe $600. [1]

Two months is a lot of time to take off work, though you have to be making a lot of money before it isn't cheaper to do it yourself if it takes you the same amount of time.

On the other hand, I suspect professionals are faster and better. The main person on this job after day three was someone who typically worked on mercury cleanups full-time around the state.

[1] http://www.ebay.com/itm/Jerome-431-X-Mercury-Vapor-Analyzer/...

* $50k is less than the down payment.

* We didn't know how much it would cost as it went; it was pay-as-you-go.

* That would make it hard to buy a house in the future.

* I don't like the idea of walking away and making it their problem.

Thanks! I'm glad you like the design.

It's a slow evolution of doing the minimum necessary to keep raw html readable as things change. It started out as completely unstyled, then gained a max-width as screens got wider, and eventually a little bit of media-querying to make things look better on phones, but it's still really basic.

Thanks! Definitely look around; that's what it's there for.

If you're interested in the donations stuff, I'd suggest checking out www.givewell.org -- their research is really top-notch.

Just reread the inspection report; they didn't notice it.

Sorry, typo for "dusty". Fixed.

We did have a home inspection, but the only way to find this would have been to rip up the floor or bring in a mercury vapor analyzer, neither of which are customary (in the US or UK).

    No harm ever came to us as a result.

I think you're probably right, but how do you know? It's very hard to compare yourself to a version of you who didn't have that kind of exposure as a kid.

This is actually what we did: $5k deductible, filed for this once it was clear it would be well over $5k. But we missed a step: check the policy before you file to confirm that the policy actually does list coverage for the loss.