commonturtle

This is a really good point. Training, equipment, and horse-power would have given knights huge advantages over peasants.

Took a look. I think your resume as probably as good as you can make it. It's easy to read with a few achievements nailed down for each role.

Anyway in my experience people will likely spend < 1 minute on your resume, so you begin to get diminishing returns to improving it very quickly.

I'd just post on blogspot or a free blog from wordpress.com. Then use HN / Reddit / Twitter for discoverability instead of relying on Medium.

You could still send a physical card, I suppose, even if you can't meet in person? Lovepop's popup cards are pretty nice: https://www.lovepopcards.com/collections/best-selling-pop-up...

Interesting, a sort of artificial photosynthesis; converting CO2 + water + nutrients into edible food.

Edit: Found an interview with the founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iv0857U3UE. Basically the idea seems to be to grow bacteria and use them for food instead of plants. Bacteria can probably be grown much more efficiently than plants can, so that saves on a bunch of resources.

I don't understand why Fox News accepted the outcome of the election so readily. No "this is rigged!", "stop the count!", etc.?

Does someone understand the power dynamics at play here? Is Trump not useful to Murdoch anymore? Or has Fox News always been a more reputable news source than I assumed?

Thanks for pointing this out. I was wondering if there was a catch. So this might be a good way to heat things but not to generate electricity.

Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications was one of the best technical books I've ever read. Perfect mix of theory and practice for someone who understands the web stack but doesn't understand how distributed systems are built.

Why did pollsters do so badly? The shy trump voter hypothesis doesn’t seem compelling to me.

I saw Taleb’s video on this topic too but couldn’t really follow it. Does someone have a eli5 explanation for someone unfamiliar with how financial arbitrage works?

The inbound tourism idea is something I didn't think about. Transmission may depend a lot of people transporting it from one geographical region to another, and that might be less common in the developing world simply due to worse transport networks and people living and working more locally in general. E.g., more people from the UK go to Spain on holiday than people from Gambia.

A few I wouldn't have guessed in a million years:

- India's biggest export is oil. I didn't know India even had significant petroleum reserves.

- UK's biggest exports is cars.

- New Zealand's biggest export is.. milk?

Yeah, I'm just not sure what's happening in Asia, South America, and Africa. There were stories about lots of cases in a few countries but the number of deaths was quite low. Europe and North America seem to be the brutally hit but other places seem to have got through the pandemic without much trouble.

Is it the vitamin D? We should really try to figure out why these regions have done so well and try to replicate that in Europe and NA.

Wow, I didn't know this existed. I had the itch to play some of the games of my childhood a while ago (mostly roguelikes and interactive text adventures), but was too lazy to set up Dosbox. To be able to run them from my browser is just great.

2 hours / day of practice for 30 days will give you enough ability to clear Leetcode style questions. Trust me, it will be worth it. At Microsoft, you have plenty of autonomy over your life and work. Even if you don't work very hard, you get to do interesting things and deliver things of value.

At Infosys you might not work very much, but you will spend long hours in the office. You will have little autonomy and your boss will have great power over your life. Your work will be incredibly boring. In short, it is the worst of all worlds: not low-maintenance, not interesting work, and also doesn't pay as well.

I think life at a lot of the huge tech cos is pretty relaxed. Especially the older ones: Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, etc. Put in your 40 hours a week (if that), and chill.

The next generation of tech cos (Google, FB, Amazon, Netflix, etc.) are trending in the same direction but life can still be pretty hectic at times and they tend to fire people putting in the bare minimum.

Artists including themselves in their art was also common during the renaissance. Da Vinci apparently included himself in his painting Adoration of the Magi (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/adoration-of-the-mag..., see figure on the bottom right).

Agree with the need for moderation. But to 'spend slightly less than your opposition' might be insufficient; you don't usually have one opponent but a few. In that case your first opponent knows if you have to spend all your ammunition taking them out you won't have enough resources to fight off the second opponent. So they reason they can push you around quite a bit because you can't afford to retaliate.

IIRC in its heydays the British government had 'the rule of three': a policy of making sure the Royal Navy could take on the top 3 naval powers and still come out ahead. Something like that is what the US is going for today, and I'm not sure they're wrong.

'Waste' is the wrong way to look at it. It's like someone looking at the human body and complaining about the huge amount of energy spent collecting waste from the body and passing it out via the urinary tract. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the body didn't generate any waste in the first place and thus didn't need a urinary tract in the first place?

The problem with this scenario is that it is unrealistic, just like assuming there is a way of having an absolutely peaceful world.

A planet with billions of agents each who are moderately self-interested will result in the agents trying to take things from each other by force. To protect themselves, the agents form groups and aggregate their resources, using them to produce war-making abilities that can deter other agents. 'Tis the way of the world.

The wonderful thing is how far we've come in making the world safer over the last 2000 years. In the west we have a largely functional police force and judiciary that will protect and provide justice to every citizen regardless of their political influence

As compared to 2000 years ago of course, as compared to some utopian ideal we have a long way to go, as recent news in the US shows :)

Tbh I still think Netflix is a very good deal. For $14/month you get access to a huge selection of movies and TV shows that you can watch with no commercials. Where I'm from a ticket to the cinema costs about that much (excluding popcorn) and will plough you with 10 minutes of commercials and movie trailers for the privilege.

People will happily pay $30 per person for dinner in a restaurant multiple times a month, but are reluctant to pay $14/month for access to a huge library of endless entertainment. Why?

I'm open to just learning things for fun too; although ideally would like to be able to apply them somewhere.

What I fear is traditional retirement that I've seen some people choose: spending the rest of their days watching TV and grumbling about 'kids these days' :)

Yeah the title is misleading and the results are probably not going to replicate in humans. But surprisingly the comments on this post are really interesting and good quality.

That's an incredible story. I always enjoy reading about how people have managed to stay active and learn new things well past the typical retirement age.

What does your dad work on exactly? When did he start programming?

I hope I'm able to age so well; I'd love to get a law / medical degree at 65 and start a whole new career in my 70s :)

Lockdowns vary so widely across countries that to use the term lockdown as a standard term is misleading. E.g.: The UK had a national lockdown in April-May, but people were allowed to go into work if they couldn't WFH, but in many other countries, everyone had to stay at home no matter what.

Woah, I didn't notice that Jared Diamond wrote this article. The style felt familiar.

14. I used Turbo C++ and wrote little command line apps that solved polynomial equations and drew ASCII shapes :)

Now I have a good excuse for all the spicy food I eat :)

But seriously, sample size seems small, only ~1200 across chill eaters and non-eaters. Effect size seems pretty small too from the graphs at the end of the article. Given the current reputation of nutrition science I suspect the result is just noise.

Well, I am sympathetic to your point about the appeal of e-ink devices: great battery life, easier on the eyes, and lower costs. Things like the Kindle, the Remarkable tablet, or the Boox have great potential.

I'm just skeptical about an e-ink phone on a custom OS that doesn't support modern apps. Some apps may be unnecessary, but most users IMO expect to have things like GMail, WatsApp, Zoom, etc., on their phone.

I ask this with no malice: What makes people work on projects like this? I'm willing to bet that the phone is bound to fail and their OS will be doomed to obscurity. How do the creators not see this?

Three reasons I don't think it will work out: 1. A huge number of people use WatsApp, Facetime, Messenger, etc., for sending messages and making calls. This OS won't support any of these apps. 2. We may hate our phones at times but we use them for a variety of daily tasks, all of which are difficult on this phone: Navigation (Google Maps >>> Any other Sat Nav system), transportation (Uber, etc.), food delivery, information retrieval (Google, etc.). 3. Even if you wanted a minimalist phone, you could probably just get a cheap feature phone instead of this one.

Oh wow, I didn’t know ikea had a motorised standing desk. Would be more than happy to pay $500 for that; hand-cranking the desk up and down gets tiring after a while.