crdb

If you are going to do something risky and you are smart, you will usually, from the start, hedge your bets and plan for failure. It's just good practice. And it's not done by giving instructions to the person, but by selecting the right person with the right values, skill set and intentions for the job, so there is no paper trail and plausible deniability.

In this case just as with Jerome Kerviel, the fall guy story has to be believable when you dig, so that he can take the heat and the people responsible for setting up the system within which he operated, the people who took the decision to promote him and give him the resources to create the problem, walk away scots-free.

For example, newspapers receive thousands of pieces from hundreds of writers, the way the editorial line is kept is not with the editor telling the writers "we want you to stick to these positions and PR this line", but by the editor picking the writers who happen to really believe in the positions they want to promote on that day. Then he can say "conspiracy theories! of course we don't tell our writers what to write! this is totally independent journalism!". The editor is absolutely responsible for the editorial line and positions of the paper and by judicious selection can absolutely act in the interests of his backers/shareholders/directors, without asking his journalists to corrupt their standards.

Have you tried correlating visits from different devices from the same IP? E.g. if you get 2 devices from 3 St John St within an hour, then the same 2 from The IBM Building again within an hour, you can make a fair assumption that's the same person (you need the second site to isolate family members).

I've never implemented this - never had the time nor clients who wanted it enough - but have always wondered whether it might work. Maybe later this month. In declarative SQL, naturally.

Been doing it for 2 years. Funnily enough I just had a discussion on this topic with my current CTO/co-founder (I'm the business guy).

Pros:

- indeed you bill much more per hour, so in theory spend less hours.

- your work actually gets implemented, because you bill much more per hour. Generally "project management" is much better because they are buying a product and are incentivised to get a return on their investment.

- you deal with CEOs/managers as a peer, and learn (faster) from successful CEOs as a result.

- you will rapidly learn to sell. How do you differentiate yourself from the other 1,000 consulting outfits out there? How do you justify charging 5x what that Bangalore outsourcer is charging?

- it's a series of small successes that give you a boost psychologically when the product is so far away and the startup side seems not to be progressing.

- you think you're different because you're not taking money from "these risk-averse people" who "don't understand" your product. You'll get there the hard way but own everything at the end! Once this feeling becomes less important to you, you are ready for seed investment.

Cons:

- by far the biggest is the time suck, and focus suck. You're context switching constantly. My first CTO quit in part because he was consulting as well, and the product got nowhere for months because we invested too much time in our main client. This time around I'm the only one consulting, CTO is full time on the product. It's still exhausting and inefficient, and he's justifiably annoyed when I'm unable to do startup stuff because I'm focusing on clients. Client takes precedence because you cannot screw up with them, you're delivering a professional product at certain standards. The business stuff is very important, more than it looks, and so the product launches later, sales happen later, marketing happens later, etc. which hurts the company because time is also a currency, arguably your most precious. The dynamics are well depicted in the movie Primer, where one of the group is working full time to pay for the others to build their time machine experiment. Watch the group dynamics when he returns home late at night.

- at some point you'll have to cut off clients, when your startup takes off. When this happens, if you were actually good at consulting, it's going to suck for them. If you are professional and ethical, this hurts you as much if not more as it hurts them, you grow to like a good client.

- Clients quit without notice. In my case, one sold to a larger group, another ran out of money. Then you're scrambling to fill the gap and spending time doing consulting sales instead of startup sales, because cash is king.

- should probably point out: what you bill and what you do is not exactly the same. If my client wants me on site for a 1h meeting, I'll probably commute half an hour there, then have lunch with the PM afterwards, then commute back to my office - total 3 hours for 1 billable. On top of which you are now on the Manager's Schedule [1] and have important opportunity costs from not having blocks of time to yourself.

A nice parallel is when I was a student and many of my colleagues had this idea in their head that they could be "everything" - have a phenomenal career, be a helicopter parent always there for the kids, retain a cool and active social life with Facebook worthy trips. After a few years they all ended up picking one of the three, because there's only so many hours in the day, and sleep deprivation actively harms your ability to think, which is a prerequisite to making progress in at least two of the above. You can't be an MD at Goldman and know what your kid was up to at school today.

Money buys you the time to focus on the startup and that's much more valuable than it looks. Of course this comes up on HN all the time, I just wanted to add a bit of flavour and an extra data point.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I do have a few questions...

Is there a way to do TV attribution beyond multivariate statistical learning models attempting to gauge the impact on other channels based on broadcast period? (i.e. treat the offline channel as a categorical variable)

What is "dynamic" attribution modelling? Does this mean the attribution model changes depending on who you perceive the customer to be?

What is the best way to do multi-device tracking if you don't have a login?

You can also ignore UTM terms altogether, and use a single ad ID, then structure your marketing channel/partner/etc. exactly how you like it at DB level.

Aside from being more correct, as you don't duplicate this information with every session, you can update your "UTM parameters" at any time (keeping a history table, naturally) and avoid enormous and growing sets of rules to map previous structures to the newest one.

The first scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace should be required reading for engineering graduates, particularly the hyper-rational Sheldon types. I'm referring specifically to the impact Pierre has on the people at the party, the importance of manners, why small talk, etc. War and Peace is generally a great book because of how much it captures about human nature and power plays and it is still relevant today. It has a reputation for length but I found it much more readable than, say, Lord of the Rings.

Delta Force by Col. Charlie Beckwith. Think your company has red tape? Try the US Army post-Vietnam. It's a great example of someone moving through bureaucracy to achieve great things and taught me to stop making excuses based on organisational behaviour. The Phantom Major by Virginia Cowles is in the same vein with some phenomenal hustling lessons. I still think of both men whenever I think whatever I'm doing is hard.

Dynamic Hedging by Taleb was written whilst he was a pit trader and is the most intuitive introduction to thinking about options I've read. It informs my thinking about decision making in terms of probability, path dependency and higher order greeks, and helps me take risks in a smart manner. I recommend it to a lot of people but nobody takes it up because (I'm guessing) it's only available as a second hand paper copy, and people think trading options has nothing to do with their life.

Legionnaire by Simon Murray was recommended to me by my thesis supervisor shortly before graduation. I respected his opinion so I read the thing and it blew my mind in what people were capable of doing when pushed to the edge. Murray went on to have multiple interesting careers and set records as a helicopter pilot.

There are two books that were lessons in what they did not teach me.

Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma/Solution presents a very enticing idea but I think the core explanation for what it covers is much better set forward in Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat. There are regular sub-threads on the book on HN so I won't go into it further.

I also read a couple of Jack Welch books and thought, wow, this guy knows what he is talking about. This was before 2007. After 2007, I heard from a few people - including very smart investors - who basically put GE's success down to the 30 year bull market and to the growth of GE Capital which became something like 60% of the company and indeed did almost take down GE with it after Lehman. It introduced the possibility that some famous leaders and gurus might not be as competent as they are branded to be and it's important to check for confounding variables.

The first had a small team (< 5) of also highly paid senior developers like him to build and maintain a set of systems. I wouldn't call it "manage" so much as "coordinate colleagues". The second was working alone.

In both cases the work was difficult to do, difficult to share across a team (solve a few hard problems well rather than cycle through hundreds of small JIRA tickets) and highly value adding for the company which is why they were willing to pay.

One reason you put filters is to import foreigners. I haven't seen the US side of things but in other locations I've worked, you are required to list jobs on a national jobs database for a couple of weeks first and in theory to prove you couldn't find locals before hiring foreigners. The H1B system looks similar.

If you already have a candidate in mind, making the JD fit their CV both repels other qualified local candidates ("it says 4.5 years of Erlang backend experience, I'll get rejected") and makes it easy for you to justify the foreign hire. There's usually someone in HR who used to work for the relevant government ministry who will tell you exactly how to word the job ad and later visa application and appeals.

Note in case not obvious: I'm not advocating doing this.

> How do you tell the difference between a company that does value their engineers from one that doesn't if both companies say the same thing?

You check if they put their money where their mouth is. Generally, a (well-funded) company that pays its (senior) engineers the same as or more than its executives values engineering. To name two, I've noticed both Google and IBM immediately matching friends' competing offers no questions asked. I know two other engineers whose base, cash salary was over USD 400,000 / year. Cash is very expensive to managers, and enormously expensive to startups (equity less so, but still quite a bit) so it is a reliable signal.

A subtler way might be to check the flavour of engineering projects, and particularly their time horizon. Bringing up Google again, one SDE mentioned using machine learning to automate managing their infrastructure. That's the kind of risky, ambitious, long term project you want to look for.

I personally take mentions of intangible things as negative signals from experience. Something along the lines of if someone is trying to reassure you about something, it means they think it's an issue.

> It sorta reminds me of how, when a "measure productivity by number of tickets closed" policy gets enacted, everyone just starts creating tickets for every menial thing they do.

I had a client who did this and so I started logging everything, pasting the commits etc. with the start and end timestamp of each group of actions (e.g. "created X table, met these issues, solved them like this").

Then I looked at the log and realised I was putting in way too many hours compared to the contract because I wanted to get the job done well, and cut back to the hours they were paying for.

> is it too late to become an MD? or start a PhD?

There was a grey haired PhD student in my department. He told me he had built and run an investment bank in Los Angeles for most of his life then moved to Cambridge (UK) to pursue a PhD in engineering and he was having a blast. It was probably easier for him than the young ones since his kids were grown up and he already had a career and money.

The value of the option will rise with volatility. It is more apparent if you delta hedge leaving you with a net gamma position (i.e. hoping for quieter or more volatile markets depending on whether you are short or long gamma). Selling an option puts you in a short gamma position whether it is a put or a call.

The subtlety is that volatility falls slowly as prices rise AND rises much faster as prices fall. So (equity) options become much more valuable when things go badly. Check the S&P500 vs VIX and watch how the VIX explodes upwards with each market correction then slowly drops back as prices rise.

The metaphor can only go so far. He does not specify the underlying in the article but the mechanics described imply the company's health. If the bet is correct, the company will do well and "volatility will fall" making the option less valuable. You could say the impact of the damage made by technical debt is less important because you have more resources to deal with it (this is how spaghetti ball codebases start, but in the medium term it holds).

On the other hand, if the company does badly (fundraise fails, product does not grow as expected) the relatively small payoff from technical debt is exponentially more expensive and might well wipe out the tech side or slow down development enough to allow the competition to win faster. This is why I say the damage is "potentially infinite" (where infinite is used colloquially rather than formally).

In particular, an unhealthy company with a lot of technical debt will rapidly see its top technical talent bleed and find it hard to hire (I'm not theorising - I've many times heard developers who interviewed at well known places tell me afterwards "I liked the pay, the people and the brand, but the codebase was a mess and life is only so long"). Thus the damage done is rapidly exponentially higher than the reward (traders will refer to "convexity" or non-linearity in the model, convexity being the degree of curvature) throwing you in a death spiral.

You can even fit in the volatility smile: as more experienced developers ("the market") have in aggregate picked up on the convexity of the technical debt trade, they are more reluctant to take it on the more improbable the payoff is - that is, they compensate for the kurtosis of the return distribution (which is why buying deep out of the money options all the time hoping for 2008 to happen is a bad strategy).

I recommend Nassim Taleb's Dynamic Hedging which despite the dry title explains these ideas quite intuitively.

> it is entirely possible taking on technical debt is required for a largely unbounded success

> Time to market is a vital metric for everyone

I disagree with the first statement (I know plenty of exceptions, enough to statistically consider that it is false) and disagree with what you imply with the second. Google launched against 5-6 strong, established search companies. Copying the then-strategy of paid listings was not going to work, and their technology had to be ready before hitting the market. Theranos is an example where the technical debt did not pay off. Time to market was not as important as getting the tech to work.

I had a long meeting/debrief yesterday with a C-level from a freshly failed, large internet group. Their CEO and CTO's strategy to get out of the hole was to technical-debt-and-grow a dozen products in parallel in the hope one sticked; whilst several stuck, they did not have the expertise or willingness to do the work to stop the products from breaking, and the company failed by running out of money (which, due to technical debt stopping the accountants from having any visibility, surprised them all).

I consider their failure to be entirely due to the idea that technical debt is required for a large unbounded success, which was like a religion for the CEO and CTO. Had they gone "private equity" (cut headcount, focus on core business, invest time in cleaning up) they might have survived long enough to become profitable again.

Many business founders will not have the resources (reputation, money, or even just hustle, EQ and maturity and leadership) to get a good technical co-founder and will have to either take shortcuts, or reconsider their decision to start up without said resources.

But the success is not directly inherited from technical debt. Technical debt bought time that enabled the success to happen (maybe before the company ran out of money, or allowing it to launch months ahead of the competition), but the company would not have failed if you somehow built it "properly" and otherwise met those constraints.

In other words, you can rationally make the decision to take on technical debt if it allows you to meet those constraints. It isn't a black and white decision.

It seems obvious to say this, but I know plenty of founders and investors who have had success (survivorship bias - if they hadn't they wouldn't be investors/founders) with the technical-debt-and-grow method and therefore apply it to every problem.

More like selling a put: you're hoping it expires out of the money, but if volatility goes up, it will be expensive. Upside is limited and short term, downside potentially unlimited and in the long term, so if your discount rate is high (due, perhaps, to low cash reserves) then the NPV of the trade still makes sense.

People who sell a few puts get away with it for a while, but make it your business and you better be too big to fail.

If everybody is selling puts and levering up, you better do it too or you'll find yourself out of a job. And if volatility increases, everybody is exposed at the same time so you won't get personally blamed anyway, and your career will be just fine.

I don't quite understand what you mean. Mind expanding on your point?

It's tough finding books that don't send a message to the receiver. I particularly remember a colleague expressing disappointment at whichever secret Santa gave him The Fountainhead at the office Christmas party (he was pretty left wing).

The four I remember gifting were Asimov's entire Foundation series, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Phantom Major by Virginia Cowles and See you in November by Peter Stiff.

I have mixed feelings about this Guide and I think it's important to see the backstory.

The origins of the Michelin Guide were to be a trustworthy guide for its salesmen travelling around the country. Gradually, it became the de facto standard for an impartial guide that not only checked food quality with experienced, anonymous inspectors but also consistency with repeated visits - all costing a fortune, all more than made back with sales. Chefs would literally kill themselves for losing a star (see [1]). The Gault Millau became the Michelin rival but few other guides or competitors really existed.

This has been true in London or Tokyo as well as Paris. You could trust the Michelin Guide: not only would your meal be good, it would be roughly at the level implied by the stars, and it would always be good.

However, I suspect the internet killed sales of the paper guide and generally, as with movie piracy, reduced the amount of money people were willing to pay for the information. Why pay when you can check any of a thousand blogs and newspapers and grab the latest stars there? So the Guide needed a new strategy and Singapore is sort of the hard launch of it.

This Guide was financed (cannot find a source now) by both the tourism authorities (fair enough) and various corporate sponsors (not so good for impartiality). Various writers (see for example [2]) have pointed out the large presence of Resorts World Sentosa restaurants (this is also where the award ceremony was held) and the absence of young interesting chefs or many restaurants that are on par with the starred.

(Examples: I'm personally surprised not to see Gunther's anywhere in the rankings, since the restaurant has been around for years, is a massive favourite of the community, has a chef with pedigree in Singapore (Les Amis, starred), the service is friendly (I've eaten there in shorts a couple of times surrounded by suits and it was STILL friendly) and despite the eye watering dinner prices there's a $35 set lunch with 3 courses and petits fours which is one of the most generous in Singapore. No mention of Hakumai, where a Singaporean chef with a decade of training and experience at the best sushi-yas is doing very interesting things with the same Tsukuji fish used at every other high end sushi-ya in the country. Pollen is not listed; I haven't eaten there, but corporate friends who have and who do these things all the time often told me they thought it was "the best", and Jason Atherton has stars in London where the standards are higher.)

And then we get to the food courts. Yes, including a chicken rice stall and a bak chor mee stall have gotten the "new Michelin Guide" what they wanted - massive PR, as seen by many of the comments on this thread and virtually every headline everywhere. Yes, hawker food can be good and filling. But it's also quite commonly good. I've not been to either of the starred stalls but friends have and confirm they are nothing that rare - you can probably find a similar quality stall in your neighbourhood.

So, either you star them all - after spending a year and a huge staff to create a good quality guide - or you don't star any of them, because the standard of cooking is far below what - even in Hong Kong - used to pass as the minimum for a star. Just yesterday, I was hesitating between two stalls facing each other, both of whom were making their noodle fresh from flour even as they served customers. This is normal and starring a hawker is like starring a bakery or cheesemonger in Paris (not Pierre Herme, more like your decent neighbourhood bakery) or a chippy in London or a kebab or pizza truck in Berlin. It's a massive departure from what the guide stood for.

On the other hand, Singapore is the ideal city for this departure, because its food review scene is completely and utterly commercialised. I ate yesterday at a delicious, packed restaurant which has 2.5/5 on Yelp and is ignored by bloggers. I've talked to chefs who have confirmed that bloggers and reviewers literally come in and say "I have X visitors, feed me your best food for free" and in some cases "if you don't, I'll slam your restaurant" (one did not, the threat was executed). The bulk of the high spending customers are brand driven - a chef that trained at a French 3* place told me he could not sell his boeuf charolais hanger steak because the customers repeatedly requested wagyu fillet and got angry at him for not stocking it. It makes it hard to spot where are good places to eat and as such everybody relies on word of mouth, friends' recommendations, and so on. Michelin was sorely needed but at the same time, could get away with what they did big time: now a steady stream of affluent foreign tourists will be directed like a hose at the awaiting arms of RSW's various commercial ventures, and the next year's Guide list price can probably go up multiples once the data is in.

I am sad as a Frenchman that one of the last bastions of French excellence has just died out like that. I hope Paris and Tokyo will not follow.

I recommend anybody who wants to understand why the Michelin was a big deal watch "L'Aile ou la Cuisse" [3]. The fight between integrity and encroaching corporate interests is absolutely there, and beyond the comedy, you get the message: journalism is about getting past your short term interests, fighting those who want to use you as a shortcut to profitability, and enlightening your readers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Loiseau#Death

[2] http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/food/unhappy-with-mich...

[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074103/

If we're listing Liszt pianists, I think John Ogdon should be up there (his B minor sonata is how I finally "understood" the piece) as well as Richter and maybe Argerich and Brendel (for his Annees de Pelerinage).

Ogdon's Campanella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6aLKPtF6uc Ogdon's B minor sonata, IMO the magnum opus of Liszt's life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q1tNCVGpt0&t=6m Richter's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc4hJtKm278 Argerich's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n04GkRTC_Lo Brendel's Deuxieme Annee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XjrjzXjjA&list=PL9D990D86C...

And for a totally different take on the latter, also listen to Bolet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVxEG12-1Ps) and Lipatti (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzn2fkUdUnI).

> What are the chances you will ever in your life be able to afford to buy anything bigger than an apartment/condo (aka a house on a piece of land) in Singapore?

About the same as in Paris, London, New York or Tokyo. The difference being there's no "outer suburbs" where you can get a landed property cheap at the cost of a 1h+ commute. At the end of the day, where you live is about acceptable trade-offs. London hedge fund managers bid millions of pounds on houses in SW7 that an accountant in Ohio would pass for $200,000.

I have many friends in Bangkok raving about the quality of life there, but I think it's for an earlier stage of life. At this point in time, I value the rule of law, equality before the law for citizen and foreigners, stable infrastructure, stable non-corrupt government, etc. much more than I used to, and cities like Bangkok (or any PRC city) whilst a bit more exciting are just too much work.

In terms of actually running a business, every company I know of that has its owners in Bangkok somehow has incorporated in Singapore or is owned by a Singapore holding company. I think that has to do with farang ownership restrictions, again, didn't look too deep into it.

Again, it's a very personal outlook and if I could go back in time 10 years, I would head straight for somewhere like Bangkok or Beijing.

The other thing is that when I get box fever (which is rare, my box is comfortable) I just fly somewhere. You can rent a 2 bedroom bungalow steps from the (deserted) beach on Rottnest Island offshore Perth for around $120/night. The flight takes 5 hours and the ferry another 45 minutes. One of many options, including Thailand and Bali.

Current budget:

- SGD 2,400/month for 80 sqm, 2 beds, on the other side of the hedge from the Istana (the Presidential residence). Mango tree outside the window. Couple of hornbills live in the neighbourhood. A further SGD 150/month for electricity and water. Managed building, so everything is new and works and can get replaced free if it breaks. I know people paying less to live in landed houses but they are very good at searching. Rents drop fast outside the centre; I saw a 120sqm 4 bedroom in Bukit Panjang (~1h from CBD by MRT, 20 minutes Uber) which was going for SGD 1,500/month in 2014.

You can also pay over SGD 15,000/month for a super penthouse in the best condo; there's quite a bit of demand for these because Americans with a high enough salary can offset their tax bill with it, so instead of giving it to the IRS they live lavishly.

- SGD 400/month for food including frequent "nice" restaurants (sometimes every night). This is helped by going to wet markets instead of supermarkets (in my case Tekka Market just down the road). I could probably cut that to SGD 50-100 by cooking every meal or eating only in hawkers (SGD 2-4/meal).

- SGD 200/month on Uber, mostly out of laziness. The MRT is ultra cheap (SGD 0.8 a short ride, maybe 1.2 for a 1h ride) and about as fast but requires an extra 5-10 minutes walk both ends. The 25 minutes ride from the airport to my flat cost me SGD 17 last night at 3am with a 2 minutes ETA.

- SGD 40/month for health insurance, this is for AIA gold max whatever (I asked for the best coverage they had) although only covers hospitalisation. Wife has corporate insurance which covers me, so GP visits etc. are free anyway.

- around SGD 500/month for flights. Both the yearly/bi-yearly flight home (usually around 1,000 return) and the various trips to Sydney, Tokyo, etc. which at the moment are every month (around 200 return, thanks budget airlines!). I typed my original comment from Sydney. I think I spent almost 50% of the year abroad in 2016.

- I "get back" around 1.5 extra rents thanks to the ultra low income tax rate (between 4-8% for a typical developer salary).

As far as I know, I could not get that quality of life for that money whilst being as central in any of New York, Sydney, Paris, Geneva, Zurich (maybe just, because of the high salaries), London or LA. I think it was doable in Berlin when I was last there (2010 or thereabouts) but have heard of skyrocketing prices since; also, Berlin is damn cold in winter. It's probably doable in secondary US cities like Chicago. I'm not familiar with SF but based on the rents I've seen, it's definitely not doable there.

Costs skyrocket when you have children if by then you do not have PR; in particular, the frequent pickups and drop-offs mean you either need to buy a car (which costs more than an American house) or take a lot more Ubers. House prices are comparable to capital cities in countries with equivalent GDP per capita; if you can't afford a flat in New York, Paris or London, you can't afford it in Singapore.

It's also quite expensive to drink due to high alcohol taxes. In my experience France, Italy and Spain and perhaps Germany are cheaper; the UK and the US are about the same. If alcohol is important to your social life, that can also rack up quickly.

Singapore.

Aside from the obvious ease of doing business bit, I like the rule of law, weather, food, infrastructure, people and values (both Singaporean, and the expat community), low COL (for a developed country), international outlook, English as first and main language, ease of flying to cool places including the PRC and Japan, and the jungle in the middle that you can trek in any time also has a place in my heart. It's a great "home".

Problems are usually technique, razor, brush and cream. DE shaving needs a bit more effort.

Technique - are you using the right angle (experiment) and pressure (none - the mere weight of the thing should be enough)? Check videos if necessary. Are you making enough lather? Leaving it on long enough? Good technique sort of happens with experience.

Razor - is it a good one? I've owned a few cheap razors and never managed to make them work, something to do with the proportions. The blade has to stick out just so and the safety bar (or comb) be of just the right size. My two current ones are Merkur 12C and 42C, the former for when I'm paying attention, the latter for speed. I'm getting a Muhle R41 for fun.

Brush - do you own a good one? If on a budget, the other poster's Reddit wiki has a lot of good suggestions for boar and synthetic options ("budget" badger is not a good idea). This is important to get a good lather.

Many "starter packs" include a low quality brush and razor leading to bad first experiences.

Cream/soap - it's amazing how many are on the market and simply do not do their job. You have to keep trying until you find one that works with the water in your area to produce a slick, lasting lather. For me personally dealing with Singapore water the best are Godrej blue tube (menthol), Arko and Proraso.

On wiggle room: I tried it with the 12C after reading somewhere about how the "old guys used to do it" and guess what, not only does it not work but you will get nicked. The less wiggle room the better.

I've always wondered why there might be a difference for blades.

Creams and brushes, sure. If you have very soft, sensitive skin and soft straight sparse hair, you won't enjoy a hard brush and you won't need as thick a lather as someone with thick curly hair, so you might prefer a softer brush (less "backbone"). And some people might have adverse reactions to lanolin or find menthol irritating rather than refreshing.

But a blade's sole job is to cut hair, for which, presumably, the only quality required is sharpness, preferably retained for as long as possible. Aside from a less sharp blade being less of a pain on someone with softer and sparser hair, I can't see how blade experience would vary from person to person. What's your (or grandparent's) view?

Excellent first link, which led me to their "to avoid" list. It mentions that "Soapworks Ltd" is now making shaving soap for various companies, including Trumper, and that this soap does not lather.

I've always found the reviews for Trumper soap incomprehensible as it never lathered and if by miracle some lather was produced, it would not stay longer than half a minute...

I would say it's use, and in my experience it depends on the blade.

Most recently I bought a 100 pack of each of Feather and Derby blades (the latter were so cheap, it was hard to resist...). The Derby literally blunted during the shave, whilst a Feather remains acceptably sharp for (i.e. starts tugging after) about a week of daily shaves.

You can tell the difference when you change the blade and there is slightly less tug.

Interesting, I have the opposite experience. I much prefer walking in streets designed by central planners to accommodate modern crowds (Singapore, central Beijing, central Chengdu...) than twisty narrow streets there for historical reasons (Hong Kong, especially the stretch from Central to Sheung Wan, especially on weekends; but also the "preserved" hutongs in Beijing).

The reason is crowds: try walking through Sheung Wan, or Singapore's preserved shophouse streets in Chinatown, on a Sunday afternoon and see what average speed you achieve... And you can also spot crazy drivers better in a large, wide-roaded grid than round the corner of a hutong where you have to spot the direction of the rapidly approaching noise so you know which side to jump. Not to mention: the sun can actually shine if the roads are wide, in tight streets you are in the dark even at lunchtime.

Smog is a problem which can be solved, as much of Europe and the US have demonstrated. China will eventually move industry out of the cities and drive with catalytic converters.

Where tight streets might win is when they are coupled with a pedestrian area. "No cars" is still the most pleasant walking experience.

> value being extracted from the business and taken overseas

Anecdote: looking for a flat in Cambridge, I found a great one overlooking Market Square, last two floors above that cornish pasty store whatever it is called. We got a good deal because we agreed to take over the lease immediately from the two current occupants, who seemed in a terrible rush to leave.

I asked them why, they said Index Ventures just invested double digit millions in their company and part of the terms included an immediate (literally) move to Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, I've forgotten the name of the company but the image of wealthy Americans sniping off the best British companies stuck in my head ever since.

Yes, you are right. Database Systems.

Good catch. Too late to edit the comment.

Yes, I meant C.J. Date's "Introduction to SQL".

I was trying to get a link to the latest edition which appeared to be the 2nd link on an Amazon search for "Date introduction to SQL"... anyway, it is continuously edited so it's worth seeking the latest version which has twice as many pages as some of the earlier ones.