williamDafoe

The most brilliant guy I ever knew was a founder of the field of computational geometry. He has probably co-authored 500 papers by now. he was a paper engine and would hold court with 10 or 15 people and they would all figure out how to prove the theorems in a paper. His students said that when solving problems he just never seem to to go in the wrong direction ever at all! At age 29 - already a full professor - he got the NSF Wasserman award - top researcher - all fields of science. His dad was a farmer in Austria. He was the first computer scientist to ever get the Wasserman award. Herbert Edelsbruner.

Look up azkenazi Jews on Wikipedia, the average IQ of that subgroup is 108 with similar variance, apparently. But they also suffer from haemophilia and other genetic inbreeding disorders...

Smokers lungs experience something like 1000x more radiation than a visit near Chernobyl. My dad was a student of von Neumann. In the 50's it was fashionable to smoke, drink martinis, and drink lots of coffee, and exercise was for chumps. My dad didn't live even as long as von Neumann, and died of a heart attack.

Ed Witten at Princeton, who reduced the number of dimensions in string theory, is called "The Martian" by his affectionate (but disbelieving) grad students ...

I can say, based on proving new NP-completeness complexity theorems and also optimal algorithms in my CS Theory PhD thesis, it's like a little orgasm light turned on in my brain for about 36h. Not as intense but definitely an extreme glow of elation that I carried around for almost 2d. Nothing like it since ....

He was a member of the US gov JASONs team.

Bullet #3: Yes they keep blacklists, I worked on the web crawler for many years. But the article does not understand or differentiate between blacklists for content farms, spam domains, link farms, infinite spaces (that aren't calendars) etc. Blacklists are low level url regexps. In ~2015 some spammer in China overnight created 100 million websites to boost priority and each page had 1000 links. Google saved them all! This will literally crush the web crawler, slowing it by 20000x or more, like a snake swallowing an elephant. Or it will crash the crawler and we'd have to write manual code to cleanse the search logs and add blacklists to keep it from happening again, right away.

Blacklisted domains are blacklisted forever, because they crash the crawler. This happens 1x - 3x times per year. Changes here are all tracked and only owners of the first stage of search (who have no connection to the ranking algorithm) have change rights.

Bullet #5: search quality is assessed by thousands of contractors worldwide and you can become a part of the crawl quality team, although it doesn't pay that well in the USA. The book they follow is 180 pages and available on the Google website for many years. It has guidelines for how to determine sexual, offensive, or illegal (or child porn) content in ALL countries. It has guidelines on how to rank news source reputation and credibility.

it depends on the company most companies take away your options 90 days after you leave and they are known as "golden handcuffs" because nobody wants to leave! Some companies like Lyft allowed early hires to keep options for up to 7 years. This can actually be a problem because there are SEC rules limiting private company stock (not option) ownership to 500 shareholders at most. Many companies let you exercise options when you leave by buying them. I did this at one company - but the owners were crooks - and when they raised a new funding round of $3,000,000 they just put it in their personal bank accounts of the CEO + 5 VPs and shut down the company!

It was a chat forum website called fuckedcompany.com. today a similar website is thelayoff.com. there is one subforum per company and everybody spreads rumors about how near is the end at xyz.com and why ...

In November 2000 my options were worth $2.4m on paper but they did not start vesting until January. In January they were worth -$1.5m and never exceeded the strike price again, at a company that is still public and worth > 10 billion today. They laid me off in february. I got healthy in 2 months and found a small startup with a 15% paycut but the CEO was a WeWork-level crook with a jet and he absconded with all the money 8 months later and it failed. I finally got a stable job in mid 2002.

That graph is biased in that it only covers discovered groups and only half have been discovered (older groups are likely more likely to have been discovered). Assuming it's NOT biased something happened in the 2nd half of 2014 to destroy traffic to Yahoo Groups.

All messages will stop on Yahoo groups (last one of the bullet points.)

PG&E is the worst power company in the western hemisphere. First in 2000 they had massive power outages due to early deregulation which led to the impeachment of governor Gray Davis. In 2017 the company killed thousands of customers and billions in property because of fires they caused! Now in 2019 they are doing massive shutdowns and directly killing their customers on life support! We have the highest prices (.22c a kilowatt hour) despite having lots of of green power generators who get half that rate based on a crooked "wholesale" reimbursement scheme! California could do better with any 3rd world power company, PG&E is always horribly run ..

Remember that CA impeached the governor Gray Davis in 2000 for power outages .. I bet that PG&e is thinking of doing the same thing today to Gavin Newsom!

The number of startups that reach a liquidity event is about 1%. a liquidity event is the company gets sold to a bigger company or an IPO. 99% of companies fail to be sold and fail to IPO. about another 9% of companies become zombies which means they don't die but they don't thrive. Options or RSUs are stranded and not saleable due to SEC rules. The other 90% fail.

the numbers reaching liquidity events are higher in Silicon Valley maybe 5% of companies reach liquidity events but the Outlook is still poor for most start-up companies.

What? How can optimizing the most important criteria to the company (MBA salaries) - done scientifically by the MBAs - not lead to more success which is measured (or at least validated) by the number of MBAs hired in the next year?

My friend ran an LED manufacturer in Taiwan. They were destroyed by China's federal government policy which basically subsidized (free housing) all the Chinese LEDs until all the Taiwan companies were dead.

Quite frankly I couldn't see the benefit. We already have solid state led lasers operating at THz speed. What is the actual improvement in this? Nick Holynak already demonstrated laser transistors more than a decade ago ...

SWEs who don't touch infra show up because universities today pump out a lot of book-smart real-world-dumb graduates.

SREs make 5-10% more than SWEs at Google.

People are listening to too much government propaganda. The percentage of Americans employed is actually EXTREMELY low! The gov press releases EXCLUDE all those unemployed pesky minorities with a category called "discouraged"(= non white) workers! Excluding this recovery, employment is at a 35-year low!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO

The funnel at my company in my division for software is 700:3.

He is a beneficiary of having a free office at MIT like a faculty member on sabbatical there, at the recommendation of his friend, Gerald Sussman.

Except for the temple in the middle of the island which had a very special room with no windows and locks on all the doors.

These people are trying to create an American cultural revolution, like China's, in the 1960s.

My son went to the toughest high school in California. He didn't become a national merit commended student because "oh Californians are just simply smarter than Iowans so we have moved the goalposts for California kids". He scored 34 on the ACT = 1500 on the SAT because of hard work and sacrifice but he wasn't allowed into ANY "selective" schools because "oh your ZIP code indicates you are privileged and you must have crammed for the SAT. And hey did you hear the news? The SAT means nothing! ". He only did 4 hours of homework per night but was in a school district which educated kids from arguably the #1 University in the USA so the competition was stiff. He was embarrassed and shamed by his friends for having a B+ GPA.

He was forced to go to a state school 3000 miles away which accepts 70% of applicants - at huge tuition cost - because it was a backwards state school not implementing "The new cultural revolution!". He applied to 12 schools - none "most selective", none "extremely selective", 1 "highly selective", and 9 "moderately selective" and was admitted to 2 of the lowest schools on the "moderately selective" list. The next rank lower is "admits everyone".

Meanwhile I know parents who pulled their kids out of the toughest high school because class rank is THE ONLY THING that universities care about. They sent their kid to a low income school and their achievement test scores plummeted. Their strategy was to "win by slackibg," in the new cultural revolution! This is so they could get into Harvard and so that Harvard could feel good about itself and assuage its white guilt.

My son's dad is self made, losing his own dad at age 13. The dad took many financial risks and moved twice to be in better school districts, to challenge the son. His mom came from dirt in China (daughter of a hotel maid). Their hard work has been classified as "privileged background" by virtue of their zip code. The parents inherited $50k total and were both self made and lived like paupers until age 35 to advance their educations, then took high risk unstable jobs to catch up in life...

I literally have a box of pre- USB-C cables. S-Video VGA RCAx2 Coax RCAx3 VHS hi-fi optical HDMI DVI-A DVI-D and a LOAD OF SIMILAR crapola! the box is 12" x 18" x 12" and it's FULL!!! Good riddance!

You can't get a Lyft to the airport At 4:15 am ($30 fare). Been there, failed that.

In Japan the cabs cost NOTHING, like Uber and Lyft when they have a sale; I spent the 2nd half of June in Japan and never exceeded $10 in fare.

A lot of Chinese ships burn spent USA motor oil (illegal to burn in the USA) on the way home, ergo, free trip home! And the entire smoke plume lands in the USA . .

Warehousing won't solve the greed problem at USPS. The $5 poll tax on all shipments is just insanity. Stamping "priority mail" on 1st class packages and using red, white, and blue boxes doesn't justify their greed and incompetence, no matter what the USPS execs think ....

I foresee that withing 6 months China will have 100M square feet of dropshipping warehouse space in Vietnam. This is another in a line of Trump "look busy, change nothing" initiatives, the only difference this time (vs the border do nothing initiatives) is that this time the problem is real, unlike the non crisis at the border where immigration is near a multi decade low!