doh

Thanks for putting me on this topic. Will do much more research.

I keep thinking about this topic for a couple of years now (hence my question). I wonder if combination of new technology could be made into much more useful microwave, even if the cost was not suitable for personal use (at least initially).

The dream is a microwave with "single button" (start/stop) and a temperature scale (lukewarm, warm, hot, boiling) that consistently heats up food correctly and doing so within very short period of time (below 3 min).

The issue is time. They absolutely work better than microwaves, but microwaves are popular precisely because they are just much faster.

I am not expert, but my understanding of cyclonic inverters is that they are able to lower power output and thus achieving more even cooking. That also implies slower time. I am more interested in precision while retaining the speed. But it's something I looked into myself too.

Thanks for the context. That seems to invalidate the idea.

Rather than heating food more or less, I care about equally. Couldn’t combination of thermal camera and ultrasonic transducer achieve the goal?

If they indeed need a contact with the object, then obviously that wouldn’t work. But I am not sure why the air molecules couldn’t carry it.

I know this is maybe completely out there, but could focused ultrasound be used to heat up food? The current issue with microwaves is that they heat up food very unevenly. I am sure the current cost is quite prohibitive and all. I'm more interested in the science part itself.

I think that’s the crux of the point. Americans are trained to be demanding customers. Whatever is then packaged as a product/service for purchase, will be treated equally.

As you pointed out, students pay a lot of money for their education in US. Shouldn’t they have a say in it? If that’s not good for the society, maybe it shouldn’t be sold as a product in the first place.

As a European living in the US it took me many years to adjust to the return system in here.

In "Europe" (I'm super generalizing here), to return a product, it has to be in pristine condition, you have to the original receipt and even then they will go over it like you are smuggling drugs into the country. In US, nobody cares. This is built into the business model. You pay higher prices due to returns, but then you buy more stuff because you don't worry about returns.

When I first moved to the US, I was extremely careful with money (didn't have any). So every purchase was carefully planned and I worried about it long after it was done. Then I made a mistake and bought pair of shoes. They were uncomfortable. I felt like an idiot. But I already wore them, so now I am stuck. I told my colleague about it and he looked perplexed.

After bunch of back and forth he decided to teach me a lesson. He took me a to a grocery store. Bought a can of corn. We walked out, he opened the can, dumped half of it in a trash can. We walked back to the return counter. My heart was pumping so hard I was losing sight at moments. He put it down on the counter and said: I would like to be refunded. I thought the clerk is going to smack him silly and me with him. But he didn't even flinch. Gave him few coins and we were on the way.

This was 18 years ago. I since very well adjusted to the system, maybe a little bit too well.

That is really sad news. Ian was an inspiration. Sorry for your loss and the loss of the whole community. He will be greatly missed.

Surprisingly good read. Not because I thought John is going to wash dirty laundry, but you know, they went through some emotional things. His story is truly inspiring though. Very engrossing.

> According to Jerry Yang, chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees, Tessier-Lavigne will step down “in light of the report and its impact on his ability to lead Stanford.”

Jerry Yang, as the same Jerry Yang that co-founded Yahoo. Didn’t know he is on the board of trustees at Stanford.

Imagine if Goodreads (or similar) only allowed ratings for unreleased books if the publisher submitted the ebook into the system. The system then embeds it into GPT4 and if one wants to submit a review they have to answer a question (or multiple) about the book to verify they actually read it.

I am involved with a non-profit that provides ISA (income share agreements) to convicts to get licensed truckers [0]. The founder started it due to similar experiences as you described and changed the lives of many people already. Wish this was institutionalized rather than being done as singular organization, but it's a start.

[0] https://freeworld.org

Isn't it their job that they get compensated for? If I am not completely off, if this is a paid job (most likely with overtime and extra for weekend), then they have absolutely no reason to do that early.

Yes. HN is an absolutely fantastic community. That's why we are here. As every community it has its own idiosyncrasies. Recognizing them and poking fun into ourselves strengthens rather than weakens then community.

> three of them said there were already similar projects out there

Quintessential Hacker News

The main difference is eventual vs strong consistency. Scylla scales great, but then the developer has to guard the consistencies. And that is quite challenging job, that usually trips even the most experienced developers.

There is a middle ground, storage systems/databases that both scale and provide strong consistency. FoundationDB, Citus, etc.

SQL databases are not only easier to query, but also enforce data consistency. While querying is their core job, it's hardly the only one.

This was the logic Brex started with when they first introduced their corporate cards.

The rolling window started wrecking havoc very quickly. For instance, we gave all employees $300/month budget for parking garage. However, on some months they would charge the card on 5th of the month, on another at 11th, etc. It was literally unusable and we left for another provider (later Brex also went back to calendar days).

While this might not be an issue for your application per se, the real world operates on calendar days. You will quickly run into situations where 30 day rolling window not only doesn’t work but is explicitly causing problems.

My 2 cents.

FoundationDB is not a SQL database either though.

“In 2015, SVB President Greg Becker submitted a statement [0] to a Senate panel pushing legislators to exempt more banks – including his own – from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.”

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114shrg94375/pdf/CH...

It’s a coincidence. This had to be in works for months (or something substantial had to go down). Also, they get subpoenaed all the time across various committees.

It’s said that life is a marathon rather than a sprint. But I think it’s mix of both. More challenge one takes on, more they have to sprint. To me this favors willpower (shorter bursts) than discipline (long periods).

Obviously one needs to brush teeth every day, but that’s in my book a habit. It becomes fairly automatic and low stakes over time. But pushing through a final in a school, or working on a presentation for your boss on Friday night is different.

Willpower also favors lazy people like me. It allows me to do whatever most of the time and then push hard for short bursts.

Which Article 13? If you mean of the European Copyright Directive, it was renamed to Article 17 and passed 4 years ago.

Common cause makes strange bedfellows.

Maybe they license it? Maybe they cross license things to each other?

Wait, the same Gil Amelio that ran Apple? Need to read more on him. What an amazing tidbit.

It reminds me of this [0] video of Steve Jobs responding to a heckler.

This is also very common on Twitter. Someone states a generic observation and people nail them with exceptions.

[0] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o

Well, electricity moves similarly to a fluid (not really but the simplified version allows one to reason about both the same way).

It hit me in school that these are very similar and once you understand one you can apply many of the learnings, but especially the high level logic on the other.

We were one of the first Brex customers. Moved millions through them before deciding to move to another provider. They were always full of surprises, but not the good kind.

While they since fixed many of the quirks and improved the overall service significantly, their priorities were always misaligned with the ones of their customers. The cherry on the top for me was when they purchased a restaurant in SF instead of fixing glaring bugs.