johnny99

Schools in SF are a mixed bag, but many of them are very good. We have a 6 and 9 year old, who started in a parochial school. We switched to a well-regarded local public school, and getting a fantastic education.

Edit: after reading some other comments, I should note, the lottery system is problematic. We got lucky and got a good school near us, and SFUSD stats show most people get one of their top few choices. But in a worst-case scenario, you have a long commute to a bad school--and you leave. The intention is good--to make good schools available to everyone, not just those who can afford the good neighborhoods. But until you land your kids in a school you're ok with, it's a big stressor.

A ruler works great: https://cyclingtips.com/2016/09/how-to-check-for-chain-wear-...

I think it's in part because they are their own getaway vehicles. And they're often parked outside, so you don't have to break in to anything.

I've had a chain break once in probably 30k miles of riding, and only because I'd monkeyed with it (taken links out when converting to 1x7 speeds). Pros put unreal amounts of torque on equipment that's crazy light, and their chains break very rarely. Not something I'd worry about.

Same in SF. I carry around a lock that looks like it could have been used to anchor the Titanic.

Depends on the bike, but can be true. Fifteen years ago you might have had 7 cogs in the back, and today you can have 10 or even 11. Which means chains are a little thinner, to accommodate the extra gears.

Also, depends on mileage not years--an old, unridden bike will be fine. You can usually get ~3k miles from a chain without having to change the cassette (the cluster of gears in the back). If you let the chain go too far, it stretches, which wears the cassette out more quickly, then you need to change both. You can judge chain wear objectively by measuring the distance between chain links.

My daily bike doesn't have have indexed gears (it doesn't click when you shift), which will last longer. I use fairly cheap chains/cassettes, and just replace both every 10k miles or so. Simpler.

I used to be a bike mechanic, and have gotten to work 90% by bicycle for the past two decades, so I'll take a stab at some of the questions:

- Belt drives are great. They're sturdier than chains, cleaner, and something I love, quieter. The angle of the belt doesn't change, the way a chain does, which means you can add a chain guard, as this bike does. Which keeps it yet cleaner. You can ride to work without worrying about grease on your pants.

- Whatever people ride in the Netherlands, a half-decent bike is a lot more pleasant than something slapped together. The gears don't grind, the brakes work, they weigh less--which hardly affects speed, but makes them easier to lug around, take up stairs, etc. Fancy carbon is unnecessary for commuting or about-town, but $500 for a quality bike that will be easy to maintain is reasonable. I speak as someone who has three frankenbikes in the garage--slapping something together is fun, but it's like getting an $800 car. Likely to be a headache.

- That said, bike shops tend to be snobby, and try to get you to buy more than you need. Regular people don't need carbon, or 30 gears, or to spend >$1k.

- It's nice that this is an integrated system. Fenders are great (again, keep you clean), and are often a pain to get on without them rubbing or making noise. Having them built in is a big plus, and makes the price more reasonable. Likewise, the trailer, racks, and bags that are made for this are all reasonably priced, and presumably work together well.

- If there are hills near you, 2 speeds suck--I live in SF and I'd be pushing this thing up hills all day. I'm also not a fan of coaster brakes. But this is a geo/personal thing, ymmv.

- If you're going to order a bike online and want something cheaper, two people in my office bought a Schwinn Discover on Amazon for about $270, and they're great bikes. They came in good shape, partially assembled, but benefitted from my doing a quick tune-up. Even if you paid a shop to do that for $50, still a lot cheaper than the Ikea bike, which itself could probably use some fine-tuning.

Predictive analytics tells them you need more coffee tables. Many many more.

We too almost always reduce the sugar in recipes, and also find it usually improves flavor. Though the article says Nestle has made a "scientific breakthrough" so that you get the same level of sweetness with less sugar--so their products may remain overly-sweep goop.

Probably healthier at least, unless their re-engineered sugar has weird side effects like Olestra does. I'll take high sugar over "anal leakage" any day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects

This is great news! I'm an expert in AI and I didn't even realize it :-)

Nonsense on stilts. Extrapolating $3500 in your first week of media-driven traffic into a $15k/mo run rate is ridiculous. Calling it "AI-powered" is a whopper too.

New realities engender binary responses. We haven't had time to develop checks and balances on the seismic shifts in what's possible with privacy, and intrusions into it. I think we'll land somewhere in the middle--carving out privacy in some places, adapting to less of it in others. I don't think we can just declare "privacy is disappearing," full stop. It has always waxed and waned.

We don't have to look 1,000 years ahead to see the cost of lack of transparency though. False news and obfuscation of his ties to Russia are big parts of what got Trump elected; if there had been transparency about those, it might not have happened. It's connected to privacy--obfuscation is a form of privacy (maybe not in code, but in politics). Clinton's loss of privacy through hacked emails set up a false equivalence. Almost everything in Wikileak's release of the Podesta emails was either nonsense or small potatoes, but it got way more press than Trump's ties to a hostile foreign government--successful Russian maskirovka. That's totally nuts. And Comey's flip-flopping, in the name of transparency, was the coup de grace--there was absolutely nothing there, as he himself admitted after the damage was done. "Transparency" about the wrong things is a distraction and a weapon.

I couldn't agree more about the need for respect and tolerance.

Thanks for that--great piece.

Totally. It's like manufactures having their own gas stations, with incompatible nozzles.

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Solana Generating Station, a 280MW solar concentrating plant, currently, uses molten salt, which allows for six hours of energy storage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Molten_...

HR software hadn't seen much innovation for years, it's refreshing to see newer entrants getting money and traction. We use Lever's API, it's a delight.

You are not the only one. My immediate thought was, what's up with the dazed-looking Microsoft stock humans.

Because we're not Vulcans?

People just love, it's a thing that human animals do. Questioning love is like questioning your elbows, or that you sneeze. It's part of being human.

I presume you're referring to Smule suing Shred, which I think has gotten so much attention (deservedly) because it's so rare. Off the top of my head I can't think of another such example, but I can think of scores of side projects turned into companies, including my own, without employer interference.

You should take precautions of course--read inventions agreements very carefully--but I wouldn't at all go so far as to only do contracting. Especially if you live in California, as others have noted. Half the companies in SV were started by people working at Google or Facebook.

Given the low cost and ubiquity of sensors nowadays, you'd think it would be feasible to require car makers to test emissions in real time, in the real world.

That a software engineer does not make.

Why are stats so important? Do big numbers mean more than doing the morally and legally correct thing?

I also question the assumption that taking steps toward accountability and community will hurt the numbers. Maybe in the short term, but if your site becomes a cesspool it will eventually drive your real users away anyway. If you figure out how to sustainably handle the filth, it may be possible to attract a much larger audience who would otherwise have been repulsed. Yik Yak is an example of that strategy.

It's true. All of my programs go from line 665 to 667. I've never made a commit on Friday the 13th, ever--and the one time I did it caused irretrievable data loss. Once I walked under a ladder, and it broke the build.

Give up on that newspaper, not news.

With a few exceptions (NYTimes, WSJ) newspapers tend to go just deep enough to distract, but not deep enough to inform. Read The Atlantic or Salon or other long-form stuff, read the more substantive news links off HN, but read.

Your initial instinct was a good one, reading well enriches you. Not reading makes you boring. And while I think it's profoundly worth it in the long run, learning about the world isn't necessarily supposed to make you happy.

Very much agree. When I was a kid I watched one (and only one) of the three network news channels, read The New York Times + the local paper, and that was about it--this was before the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, so talk radio hadn't yet metastasized. It was hard to get alternative opinions in either direction, even if you wanted to.

Compared to that social media is a cornucopia/vomitorium of diversity. Alternate opinions are easy to find and sometimes hard to escape.

Money quote: "For better or for worse, people will view it as historically significant," said Prof. Randall Kennedy, who teaches contracts and race relations law. "But I hope it won't overwhelm this individual student's achievement."

Where do they get the "2,000 unique visitors" bit from? And 100 downloads... are they referring to the 92 forks?

I think Public Affairs does not get Github.

She's delightful. She drops a bit of a math joke at 2:25, which goes right over Letterman's head.

I agree with both, though they do seem superficially contradictory (inflammatory, but propelling something we desperately need). Would you care to elaborate?