nlavezzo

I'm partial to my FoundationDB shirts :)

I think your characterization of "the public" outside of tech / academia (and I'd add medicine, finance, a few other professions) is pretty accurate in terms of academic knowledge.

Swap the places though and send someone who's held various mechanic, repair, manufacturing roles to a high end cocktail bar full of academics and let them ask questions on topics they know, and they'll be shocked (or maybe not) at how most of these academics basically don't know anything about how the nuts and bolts machinery that keeps the world running actually functions in real life, and certainly couldn't do most of the work themselves. They'd probably also come away thinking they'd rather have a random person from their dive bar in Nebraska help them for a day at work on a hard project than one of the people in the fancy bar.

Without being able to rely on these masses of the un-academic "public" to run the world they live in, the academics would largely be helpless and their knowledge useless as they starved to death as the world crumbled around them.

Specialized knowledge and training is amazing, and it allows us to advance as a civilization, but I don't think the average "academic" is much more intelligent or capable in the raw sense than the average person in "the public". Both are needed for society to function and progress. Without the academics there will be no progress, and without the public it will all break down.

Of course, there are also people who have little useful knowledge / skills / motivation either practical or academic. These people can however just as easily exist in the social / family circles of the elite, as in those of the public, so I don't think it's fair to throw them in either group for judgment.

That’s not how option pricing works. This is a private company, and it was raising money using preferred shares. The employee shares underlying the options would have been common stock.

At least once a year the company would be required to do a 409a valuation to set the FMV for those underlying common shares and thus the strike price for any options in the next year or less. The 409a valuation for common shares is pretty much always going to be significantly discounted vs preferred for a variety of reasons like lack of liquidation preference, lack of liquidity, etc. These discounts are often 50% plus, but the shares likely have a 1:1 economic value to other share classes in a sale, except the most recent preferred that get to use their preference.

Anyways the reality is going to be determined by each company’s details, but option strike prices at private companies are generally much lower than the current going price for preferred due to the discounts provided by the 409a valuation.

The 15" version of this pan is magic. It is super easy to season (apply some oil / butter, get it really hot a few times, wipe it off with a rag, repeat) and is very non stick with just a light coating of oil. Of course never clean it with soap. Water only if necessary. Afterwards I always just pour some oil on and wipe it clean with a paper towel.

https://www.lodgecastiron.com/product/carbon-steel-pan?sku=C...

You can always just use an iPhone and turn on screen time, with tons of restrictions. You can "remove" the browser, adding apps, of course any app you want (including core ones like messaging), and keep a few useful ones like Google Maps, etc. Then have your wife or someone else set the passcode on it and bam, you have a "dumb" smart phone. If you ever need full functionality for something like a trip abroad, etc., you can have them unlock it. I do this with my wife sometimes because I don't like all the distractions, or even the distraction of resisting the urge to be distracted. Works great.

This is awesome!

I've spoken with some people there and this is basically their plan. Technology and experience in making significant genetic changes in large organisms likely ends up being valuable for lots of things less flashy than de-extincting famous animals.

I think it's probably earlier (elementary, middle) schools that just don't provide opportunity for kids that are very advanced to pursue materials that are actually challenging or interesting to them.

Your neighbor doesn't currently have the right to do anything they want with their property though. They don't absolutely own it and have some kind of sovereign status. They can't turn it into a gas station or auto repair shop. They have the right to exclusive use of the land for the purpose of a single family dwelling built to certain specifications and abiding by various guidelines and regulations.

When each neighbor bought into the neighborhood, they all signed up for this same basic deal. Many of them would likely have chosen to not spend their money on the property had their neighbors not been bound by the same rules.

What is being proposed is a significant change to those rules that every owner at some point agreed to. This absolutely does affect everyone in the neighborhood because an older neighborhood is more than a collection of unrelated properties, it is a collection of actual homes of similar size and character with a particular feel and aesthetic.

A change to the rules may absolutely be necessary for the health of the city / population as a whole. Totally agree with this. Don't pretend though that it's not coming at the cost of infringing on the existing homeowners' reasonable expectations of what they bought into when they purchased their properties. Again, maybe it does need to happen, but homeowners are not unreasonable for wanting to keep their neighborhoods as they've always known and loved them.

> many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being

I'm not advocating for low density suburbs or for things to remain unchanged.

My point was that the implication that some kind of nefarious prejudice was the main reason for homeowners wanting to keep the status quo, isn't fair or accurate.

I'm sure at town meetings there are plenty of unsavory things said, and people with prejudices show up in disproportionate numbers. It's just not accurate or OK to imply that all property owners seeking to keep their neighborhoods from rapidly changing to higher densities are doing so out of prejudice. Give people the benefit of believing they are primarily motivated by rational self interest rather than some irrational prejudice.

I totally agree parks are an amazing solution and can create really nice places for kids to play safely. We love our parks. That said, even if the end product is objectively better for the current homeowners due to new amenities, etc. there is still a long period of lots of construction they'll have to endure that might be the only years their kids are at an age where they'd normally be wandering the previously quiet neighborhood. None of this is simple, and it's going to be a trade-off between the valid interests of the existing property owners and the valid interests of the larger metro area population that needs a place to live.

> The answers are very uncomfortable.

Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons?

Of course their desires alone shouldn't be the final word on proposed changes to codes, but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice is a pretty big leap given the many obvious benefits of the status quo for them.

I imagine you could take almost any demographic and put them in a low density neighborhood with big yards, trees, low traffic, and neighbors that they've known for decades, and they're going to resist change.

> Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision

Totally agree. The state or larger city, etc. is also a community that should be able to make rules that promote the welfare of the great majority over the objections of a small minority, as long as they take care to not harm the small minority unnecessarily. I just think the solution is thoughtful modification of existing codes, possibly forced by larger jurisdictions, and not just a free for all where almost anything goes as was proposed by the parent commenter.

To be clear, my comment was more a reaction to what I perceived as the idea that any zoning of residential areas by the community that lives there is unacceptable and that you should be able to do literally anything that's not actively endangering your neighbors. That would result in most neighborhoods being much less pleasant due to a few owners deciding to do things against the interests of the many.

I think the "community" can also extend to something as large as California. If California as a community decides it's in the best interest of that community to loosen some zoning restrictions in particularly high demand areas, fine. Do it with thoughtfulness and as much respect for existing owners' interests as possible while still accomplishing the desired objective. That's similar to a smaller community deciding to change the rules to account for some new undesirable behavior of certain community members.

> If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.

The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors.

People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason. Creating some guidelines to create a desirable, pleasant and safe environment for them and their families is totally reasonable and has been the historical norm for most of the history of civilization.

Of course things can get out of hand and over-reaching. If the people decide together to change it though, they can. I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.

I've done this in the past too and it works. Right now though I have it set so that I know the passcode to unlock it all, but that small amount of pain to go and unlock it is enough to make me pause and think about whether I actually do need to check the news, etc. Very rarely is the answer yes, but when I do need an actual smart phone (confirm a ticket on some random website for example) it's nice to have the ability to do so. Just have to have the discipline to lock it back down!

I second the Capuchin crypt - it was very cool.

I’ll add recommendations for good gelato - Frigidarium and Gelato del Teatro, both near Piazza Navova / Campo cello Fiori (areas worth a visit as the side streets there aren’t as insane as most of the center, often quite peaceful).

Also, if you can get reservations, Armando al Pantheon is super good traditional Roman food. We also love a small hole in the wall across the Tiber called Il Miraggio. It’s a small local trattoria that is popular with all the local families and has good basic Roman staples.

There’s also a church called the Basilica of San Clemente which is kind of near the Coliseum, and it’s super cool because it’s actually three churches built on top of each other. The first one dating to the earliest days of Christianity, then one more middle ages and one more modern. There is also even an ancient Roman cult temple under all that. You go down way deep into the ground to see it all, it’s very interesting.

I had really bad arm / wrist issues about 10 years ago due to overuse of crappy small keyboards on laptops, etc. Mechanical keyboards (after a bunch of physical therapy / massage) have been key to keep my arms healthy.

After trying probably 10 different "ergo" keyboards, the one I landed on that has been amazing for a decade is the Kinesis Ergo Advantage2

https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/advantage2-keyboard/

It is split, so helps with that angle, and also has depressions where your fingers go so your hands aren't cocked back causing additional strain. It also has a couple options of the mechanical switches used. Anyone struggling with pain from typing, I'd suggest looking at it. It has a learning curve but it's worth it.

Just like jet plane rides, air conditioning, cell phones, etc. were only for the rich and powerful initially. Capitalism encourages efficiencies which drive prices down over time.

My wife (a former PS teacher) just literally created a microschool focused on project based collaborative learning and lots of outdoor activity so that we wouldn’t have to send our daughter to that system. We thought we might get 10 kids enrolled the first year and got 34 and are waitlisted. There is a huge demand for alternatives, and we don’t live in a progressive area of the country.

Does anyone here have any good science they can point to that would help us understand what the short and longer term effects of prolonged Calorie Deficit are on your Basal Metabolic Rate? I've heard a lot about the BMR going down significantly and staying down, after significant calorie deficit weight loss, leading to people gaining back a lot of weight even if they are eating a lot less than they were before.

Now, how to explain this to my 3 year old...

Man, I wish sleeping in was still an option.

For those asking about use in production, Wavefront just posted this:

"Wavefront by VMware’s Ongoing Commitment to the FoundationDB Open Source Project"

https://www.wavefront.com/wavefront-foundationdb-open-source...

FoundationDB was a company that existed in the market, licensing our database technology for quite a while. Licenses don't necessarily terminate upon acquisitions.

FoundationDB at its core is not a graph database. You could build a graph database on top of it, using FoundationDB as a very strong and feature rich storage engine, however you'd like. It would be much simpler to do than building a new (especially a distributed) graph database from scratch.

The core product is a distributed, highly fault tolerant ordered Key Value store with true serializable ACID transactions. All of the layers (including document, graph) sit on top of that and inherit its ACID properties, scalability, fault tolerance, etc. It doesn't appear to me that they released any of the top level layers, but those are MUCH simpler to build, and that's where the OS community can step in.

Wavefront's co-founder just tweeted this: https://twitter.com/panghy/status/987022825457266689

Finally it's out! @WavefrontHQ managaes petabyte scale clusters with #foundationdb today!

Well for one, Spanner is not available except as a service.

Another (non-technical) founder here - and I echo everything voidmain just said. We built a product that is unmatched in so many important ways, and it's fantastic that it's available to the world again. Will be exciting to watch a community grow around it - this is a product that can benefit hugely from OS contributions as layers that sit on top of the core KV store.

Founder here. To the best of my knowledge, you are correct. ACID is getting thrown around a lot these days, and not being used in its strictest sense.