austinl

14 ms·

31.
by austinl 4y ago
I've lived in SF for almost 10 years, and it saddens me to live in such low trust community because of all the crime. It changes people. I've had my car stolen once and broken into several times. I've had two bikes stolen, on
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by austinl 4y ago
In the US, I used to receive multiple spam calls a day. A few years ago, I turned on the iOS setting that sends all phone numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail and haven't looked back. It's occasionally inconvenient—may
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by austinl 4y ago
Many of my childhood friends have given up on the idea of ever owning a home, which is really tragic. Home ownership is a key driver of upward economic mobility, so the fact that a larger proportion of the most recent generation is locked o
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by austinl 4y ago
I once sat next to a dean of private school on a plane—she mentioned that the ~100 parents that sent their children to the school signed an agreement that they would restrict their children's access to social media until 9th grade. I h
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by austinl 4y ago
I graduated in 2015, and I had several classes where exams involved writing pseudocode by hand—particularly the algorithms-focused classes. I think universities will continue to do this.
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by austinl 4y ago
I grew up in Austin in the 90s and currently live in SF. My family still lives in Austin, so I visit fairly frequently. I think this was well-written. The Austin that exists today is unrecognizable from the Austin of my childhood—particular
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by austinl 4y ago
When I talk to friends about what I'm working on, I call it a "small business", and not a "startup", even though its purely software and could scale without substantially growing costs. I think the word "startu
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by austinl 4y ago
Speaking of pumping the breaks, I really enjoyed the recent documentary, The Year Earth Changed , which explores how the lockdowns from COVID had a significant positive impact on the natural world. The message is optimistic—essentially, it
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by austinl 4y ago
Possibly my favorite quote from Meditations (the Martin Hammond translation): "... you would never say of him that he 'broke out a sweat': but everything was allotted its own time and thought, as by a man of leisure—his wa
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by austinl 4y ago
This general idea is known as "sortition", and actually has quite a long history. In the United States, and many countries, sortition still has a role–people are randomly selected for jury duty. However, in ancient Athens, one cou
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by austinl 4y ago
I think titles of PRs matter, and at least for me, they're often identical to the commit message (either a one commit PR, or multiple commits git-squashed for one PR). I suppose it depends on your use case, one example is that I use th
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by austinl 4y ago
I've become more open to paying for subscriptions over the years—especially for apps that continue to release updates or provide new content. Just to add another data point, I'm currently at $858.21/year: Music, TV Apple On
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by austinl 4y ago
Even though Socrates was condemned to execution, there was some expectation that he would choose to flee the city instead—that exile was a viable alternative and he wouldn't be pursued. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the juror
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by austinl 4y ago
A few of the Goodwills in San Francisco are full of company swag and it's kind of bizarre. Like hey, I could buy this Uber-branded Patagonia jacket having never worked there. Also weird in a way to subject less fortunate folks to wear
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by austinl 4y ago
A friend has worked in construction project management for almost 40 years, mostly in Texas. A few years ago, he moved to San Francisco to work on the Van Ness project, which was approved in 2003, began construction in 2017 (!), went $40 mi
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Citadel Is Moving Its Headquarters to Miami from Chicago(bloomberg.com)
4 points by austinl 4y ago|1 comments
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by austinl 4y ago
I'd highly recommend the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich. It's about the engineering team at Lockheed Martin that designed the Blackbird (and the U-2, and several other amazing planes), and describes many of the engineering challen
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by austinl 4y ago
This reminded me of another fun programming game called Elevator Saga ( https://play.elevatorsaga.com ). Essentially, you need to write the code for a system of elevators to transport the maximum number of people in a given time
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by austinl 4y ago
It's interesting to consider that the total global human population could possibly peak within our lifetime (although more likely around 2100). Global population growth rate has already peaked at 2.1% in 1968, and has since dropped t
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by austinl 4y ago
> “Hey I got 90% of what I wanted really quick! Neat!” “…oh turns out that last 10% is basically impossible, eh?” Adam Kaump I've been working on an app that's mostly SwiftUI for about a year now. It feels magical when it works
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by austinl 4y ago
> I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. I think the author's reasons for quitting are valid. But I would also say that "lo
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by austinl 4y ago
I think Parag is making decisions that he sees as inevitable, whether the deal goes through or not. The deal, and all of the discussions that have come from it about the future direction of Twitter, is probably enough of a catalyst for cert
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by austinl 4y ago
Also born a US citizen. My experience was fortunately not as bad as yours, but it still gives me a bit of anxiety every time I return to the US. I can't imagine what it'd be like as non-white foreigner. I was flying back from Peru
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by austinl 4y ago
I was previously a PM at a company where I got to interview a lot of content creators on various platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc). Specifically creators with large enough followings where it was their sole source of income (typic
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by austinl 4y ago
In the United States, I think the larger problem is that expensive college became the default. It also became common for universities to increase the course requirements for graduation, making it more difficult to graduate in 4 years. At
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by austinl 5y ago
This was my first experience using TikTok as well — I think those videos will always appear to new users because they get a lot of engagement. But if you swipe past them quickly, you'll likely never see them again.
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by austinl 5y ago
The most productive engineers I work with just stack PRs. No diff is ever more than 200 lines changed. Sure, sometimes it's annoying to fix things in the stack, but I've found that keeping PRs small is an overall velocity (and saf
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by austinl 5y ago
The ancient tech myth I see the most is the idea that the recipe for "Roman concrete" was lost, and somehow modern engineers can't figure out how to make a superior mix. Certainly, Roman engineers built incredible unreinforce
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by austinl 5y ago
Ah, another quote misattributed to Twain. Looks like it was submitted as a letter to The Economist in 1971 — I'll update the parent. Thanks for pointing this out!
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by austinl 5y ago
Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety of languages [2]. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Germany, for exa

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