hectormalot

Depends on and culture. Quite common where I live to commute by bike (Netherlands), even up to 45 minutes, also in winter.

But you’re right of course for eg UK/US in most cases. Difference between ‘where companies are’ and ‘where (affordable) houses are’ is much bigger in less bikeable countries.

Unlikely that this kind of growth suddenly happens. Growth of +\- 20% can usually be handled (eg booking a larger room for the lectures). So studies can usually grow their teaching base as needed.

Exceptions happen: eg the popularity of CSI lead to a huge boom in people wanting to study forensic sciences. IIRC they were allowed to limit the seats for those studies back in the day.

Similarly, dentistry and doctors have a fixed amount of seats. They have a lottery that is biased based on your high school grades.

Overall I think this system has the better outcomes ‘on average’, but that the true top students are not challenged as much as they would be in a more selective system such as the US/UK

> Unless there is convincing data otherwise it would still be a filter for wealth. If a college degree provides opportunity then the wealthy will arrange for their children to have college degrees.

As a counterexample: Dutch universities can’t select for students (for most studies), and annual fees are ~€2k annually (regulated). There will be some bias towards wealthier backgrounds that are more able to invest that money and time, but compared to the US/UK systems I expect it is minimal.

This is not unique, I think systems in the Nordics and Germany similar.

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I think it’s mostly been phased out by now, the few places (historic city centers) that have it will bridge the 2 phases to get a single phase of 220V. I think 127V equipment hasn’t been sold in like 20+ years

For the Dutch perspective. Dutch grid operators consider 3X25A the default these days, but many older houses are indeed still only 1 phase (eg 1x35A).

There are mainly 2 categories for stoves, but I don’t think a 2 phase option exists: (source: just bought one)

1. ~7.4kW with a double group (4 pins) connection. That gives you 2x16A, but is still only one phase, just split over 2 fuses.

2. 10kW+ with a 3 phase connection (also 4 pins), in this case it actually is using 3 phases.

Dutch prices are regulated. The annual fee for a 3x25A connection is the same as for 1x40A. The next step at my grid operator (3x35A) is much more expensive.

That’s not how I experienced cases.

There’s no standard question to cut labor cost by X%. One of the things in the case interview is how structured you approach problems. If that problem turns out to be how to reduce cost, one possible approach is to go over all the major costs and ask if/how you could reduce those.

Yes: For labor the potential answer could be (1) paying people less ($/hr) and/or (2) doing the same work with less people (automation, lean). Exploring the option does not mean it’s a desired path. (Eg perhaps the company in the case is already below market wages and has a retention problem)

I don't think the title is doing Intel justice in this case. The graphics performance went up substantially, as did the IPC. Intel decided to trade-off part of the IPC improvements for a lower power consumption. Combined, Ice Lake seems like an improvement across all dimensions for me.

Perhaps we've just been spoiled with the leaps that AMD has been making recently.

Is it any different with code? Developers don’t always stick to the procedures either.

I have ‘unit tests’ in my excel files on the last tab. Eg, the sum of all lines in the Data tab must be the same as the sum of the annual revenues in the dashboard tab.

With a bit of conditional formatting it’s easy to see if a test is failing as well.

I like programming for lots of things, but ask me to do a business case or some one-off analysis and I’d use Excel in most cases.

As someone who has been the manager in those discussions I see four things to help your manager be supportive:

1. The company policy: of the company has a no-remote policy this will be very difficult. If the company has a limited-remote policy, it’s already much easier, it means asking for additional remote days on top of existing policy and provides you an opportunity to show that you are productive working remote

2. Your productivity and mutual trust: on the individual level I like to believe everybody can be productive remote. On the aggregate it didn’t work that way though. Some people would use the remote time for personal matters and chalk up a day with limited output to ‘I was doing research’, others would have twice the output they had at the office. It’s difficult to know up front where someone will fall on that scale. If you can show with 1-2 days remote that you can be productive, it’s a huge help in this decision

3. Spill-over effects. If others in your team are (possibly) not productive remote it might be difficult to give you a full remote opportunity. Others will expect the same privileges and it might be easier to limit it for everybody rather than explaining individuals that I dont trust them remote yet.

4. Interactions: if the office has a weekly townhall, or if we have a quarterly long-term planning session, can you join these, or do we need to setup video and mics for that? It helps if you can be in person on these moments (even if you’re not convinced they’re always useful)

I’ve been programming in Ruby for years (as a hobby / small passive income project), and about a year ago decided to reimplement a small part of it in Go. Both for learning and because it was a bottleneck in the application.

Recently I needed to fix some things in the original Ruby code, and it felt like freeclimbing after getting used to ropes... I called a function and started wondering how I could have any guarantees that it returned something useful. Benefits of static typing really ‘clicked’ for me at that moment. I still love ruby though

Im under the impression that lambda gets expensive if you have many requests. E.g. the story on ipify that showed 1000s of USD on lambda vs 100s on Heroku:

“Today the service runs for between $150/mo and $200/mo depending on burst traffic and other factors. If I factor that into my calculator (assuming a $200/mo spend), ipify is able to service each request for total cost of $0.000000007. That’s astoundingly low.

If you compare that to the expected cost of running the same service on a serverless or functions-as-a-service provider, ipify would cost thousands of dollars per month.”

I have a simple SaaS product that plans emergency shifts for dentists (evenings and weekends). The value is in 1) fair planning, 2) a single source of truth on who is on call, and 3) reminders. It makes $300 a month with minimal cost and almost no time spent. Since it is B2B I only have to send invoices once a year.

Anecdata of course, but it has been like this (and profitable) for the last 7 years. At least proofs it is not impossible (I also never really invested lots of time in it to get to this state)

I think i can bring it to 30k a year with sufficient effort, but then again, my salary is higher than that so it doesn’t make enough sense to switch my time to do so. (The growth problem of course is sales, not tech)

Not in NA, but most taxis at Schiphol (Amsterdam airport) are either Tesla’s or Hyundai Ioniqs.

Spoke to a driver about it once and the Tesla’s rarely do more than a single charge in day.

I find this (short term estimates) only work when you are self sufficient as a person or team. E.g. as soon as something like: “I need to get access to the managed AD service” or “the service desk needs to be trained to handle requests on this new feature” come in, I find planning to be very difficult. That AD access technically takes 10 minutes, but might take 2 weeks of approval meetings and emails.

Especially prevalent during the initial start of a new project

I think it’s the default policy. My rMBP from 2012 started to have battery issues and I got a $300 quote for replacement that included a new top car.

Got the $80 battery from ifixit and replaced the battery relatively easily. It did have me pour generous amounts for aceton (nail polish remover) into my MacBook to unglue the battery though, was happy that everything still worked after.

Actually I was thinking of hot rolled. Turns out the regional differences are huge:

Hot rolled in US is 928$ per metric ton

Hot rolled in EU is 620$ per metric ton

China is in the mid 500s.

Unclear to me if the new US tariffs are to blame, gap is larger than the 25% I expected.

Source: http://steelbenchmarker.com/files/history.pdf

Eg look at the acquisition of Anheuser Busch by InBev.

AB was a profitable company, but InBev is just very good at efficiency in brewing. IIRC they paid handsomely above market price at the time and were able to translate their efficiency to AB in such a way that the combined reduction in cost and uptake in revenue creates value net/net for InBev (and therefore AB)

640$/ton won’t be profitable as that’s about the current price for high end steels.

OTOH, I remember industrial electricity prices to be closer to 7-10cents per kWh, so it won’t be that far off what we have now.

I hear this a lot but don’t fully agree to the premise of ‘having no choice’. I published an article once and asked the professor if he was willing to publish open access. His answer was that he was open to it, but that if I was looking for a career in science, publishing OA in the current journals would require more effort from our side to justify the importance of our work. (The other author wanted to stay in science, and wanted to take the easier route, so in the end we decided to publish the old-fashioned way)

Just to say: you have a choice, the OA path just requires more effort. And depending on your area of expertise, the OA journals can actually be very good.

I agree with your conclusion though: change at scale requires universities to change their behavior. Before boycotting Elsevier, a good start would be to move evaluations away from ‘impact factors’ to e.g. h-index.

35k is low even for straight out of university. With a few years of experience it’s closer to 50-70k€ (57-80k$)

That said, when I was doing the math on moving to the states, a +80% increase in salary still left me with less money in NYC vs Amsterdam. (I have kids: healthcare + kids education + rent basically wipes out your income in the US, it doesn’t in Amsterdam)

Its not even that new, REDstack started a engineering scale trial of salt-potential electricity generation already a few years ago. (https://www.theafsluitdijk.com/projecten/blue-energy/wat-is-...)

Another non-obvious (to me) thing it needs is the ability to drain the brackish water you’re creating. At scale this probably involves at least a long canal or pipe, and makes the setup more difficult that “let’s just put this were the river meets the sea”

As an employer I've had a bunch of responses from earlier posts on the monthly HN jobs thread. However, most of these have been very generic, and I think most of them were automated. Out of ~70 people we hired last year, I think we hired only one via HN.

I’ll bite. There was no indication in the article of anyone with an MBA in particular being responsible for these issues. The reasoning reads as: “lots of stuff is going wrong” ==> “must be because they have management with MBAs”

Why try to make this link if it isn’t there? What if I replace MBAs with ‘foreigners’, ‘women’, ‘people who read HN’, etc?

Why do we need this? Does blaming non-technical people for the failures of management make us feel better about ourselves?

+1 for Amsterdam (the Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht). Rent is getting more expensive, but quality of life is very good, healthcare is 60€/month, top universities at 2000€/yr and overall good job prospects

Mostly, I think GDPR makes reasonable requests for how you obtain, handle, store and use personal data. I think that the compliance cost for a company already doing ‘the right thing’ should be relatively low.

(Argument hinges on the idea that GDPR does overreach in what it asks to be compliant, happy to be proven wrong)

Anecdotally I'd say that research salaries in Italy seem quite low. I did an internship together with an Italian student in Switzerland. He had a full-time offer in Italy for what was seen as a good salary. Still, he made substantially more as an intern in Switzerland than he would make as a scientist in Italy.

In the context that I've seen them used, the interviewer usually provides information if asked (and says so up front). e.g. if you don't know the # of inhabitants of Italy it should be completely okay to ask.

In any case I don't think it is about the calculation or the final number. It's really the approach that you develop that's interesting.

I've seen this mostly used in (management)consulting though, where you actually are regularly expected to solve problems that you might not have deep understanding of. When I was interviewing developers I discussed how they would architect an application to solve a specific problem. It gives similar insight and is closer to the actual job.

“I’d like to understand how you structure problems, we can do a different topic if you like?”

“With ~50M people capable of clicking ads, and assuming they click one ad a day at 20cnt CPC, it would be around 3.6bn. I think my assumptions are on the high side, but order of magnitude is probably correct”

If done well, solving a problem (not a brain teaser) together can yield insight in how people approach new challenges.

If I’m hiring for someone to do what they already know this indeed not a useful question. on the other hand, if I expect the role to tackle various business problems as well I’m not sure what would be a much better way to get a sense on this. (Specifically because I’d want to discuss a not-too-complex problem that is outside your usual area of expertise)

Any particular airlines or airports? I've flown from Frankfurt to Amsterdam without checks (they have automatic gates for boarding cards at security and the gate on both sides). In the case of outgoing Schengen flights for amsterdam there is for sure no police ID check (unless of course you fly outside of Schengen).

Airline crew did check my ID last time flying to Italy with Vueling (at the gate), but this was not a border check but just a name-check with the boarding pass.