austinl

19 ms·

151.
by austinl 8y ago
This reminds me of a practice in Japan, where employees who can't be laid off (for legal reasons) are sent to the "Boredom Room", to essentially do nothing until they're motivated to quit. https://www.nytimes.
152.
by austinl 8y ago
Reminds me of VC Fund My Life . It's an index of discounts offered by startups, which you more or less know they're taking a loss on. Clever name. http://www.vcfml.com/
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by austinl 8y ago
I'd much rather have scooters parked on the sidewalk than cars on the road. I previously used Lyft or Uber to get to work, now I primarily use Scoot, Bird, or Jump (depending on the distance/availability). I've found all of t
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by austinl 9y ago
“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western
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by austinl 9y ago
Here's another great article about a fake security app that was making ~$80,000/month. After selecting "Free trial", the app signed you up for a $99/month subscription. For a while, it was ranked #33 in Top Grossing
156.
by austinl 9y ago
I avoid asking people where they work or what they do for as long as possible, and instead try to focus on interests and hobbies. I've heard too many conversations in S.F. that follow a kind of judgement ritual. If you work for a start
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by austinl 9y ago
Worth noting that $2B is roughly 13% of Twitter's market cap. Fascinating to think how one person simply using your service is worth that much.
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by austinl 9y ago
China is also pushing 1 in 5 cars sold to be electric by 2025. The government definitely seems to be taking the problem seriously. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/business/china-hastens-th... )
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by austinl 9y ago
This is the way FluentU works ( https://www.fluentu.com/ ). They have content with 2-3 subtitle tracks that can be toggled on and off. Then you can click on specific words in the subtitles that you don't know, it'll
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by austinl 9y ago
+1 for iTalki and Fluent Forever. There are so many apps out there that give you the illusion of progress (e.g. the author's "74% fluent") but with nothing to show for it. There is no way you can get around practicing speakin
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by austinl 9y ago
I recently wrote a blog post about how we use Nix at Pinterest (just the package manager, not the OS). It helps us give all developers and CI an identical environment. On iOS, we run most build commands and other tools through the nix-shell
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by austinl 9y ago
I'd highly recommend the Netflix documentary Icarus . The filmmaker starts out trying to more or less replicate the doping routine of Lance Armstrong while competing in amateur cycling. I don't want to give anything away, but the
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by austinl 9y ago
For iOS engineers, I'd recommend reading over the Kickstarter iOS application ( https://github.com/kickstarter/ios-oss ). They use a lot of interesting stuff, like FRP, lenses, etc.
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by austinl 9y ago
If you're flying with another person, you can try booking the window and aisle, then hope the middle doesn't get filled. If someone does take the middle seat, they're usually willing to trade so you and your partner can sit n
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by austinl 9y ago
I'd recommend watching the video of Elon Musk debate Michael Gass (of ULA) at a US Senate hearing. It's over an hour long, and really gets into the differences between the two programs. Link to the part where Elon starts talking:
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by austinl 9y ago
I'd recommend the book The Grid as a primer on how stuff like this can happen. Energy is strange, in the sense that everything produced needs to be used more or less immediately. Maintaining the energy grid is a careful balancing act
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by austinl 10y ago
I've found Kayak's app to be pretty useful + up to date for tracking flights. You can input a flight number, or search for flights based on departure and arrival airport. I haven't found any other app that reacts to delays or
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by austinl 10y ago
Wanted to point out 21.co ( https://21.co/ ) which essentially does this. You can send a message to Ben Horowitz, for example, for $100 (which he donates all to charity). While Ben is on the pricier side, David Lee (of SV Ang
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by austinl 10y ago
That would be Sergey Aleynikov [0]. I'd recommend reading Flash Boys by Michael Lewis [1], who covers this story in detail. Sergey's case seems much more nuanced, and if I remember, Lewis takes his side on a number of issues. [0]
170.
by austinl 10y ago
I just finished the Elon Musk biography — there's a good discussion about how Tesla was founded on the premise that the market did not yet recognize how cheap lithium ion batteries had become. The original prototypes involved connectin
171.
by austinl 10y ago
There's an unfortunate cause of excessive app rating prompts — what's shown in search results/top charts/other areas is the average of the latest version, not the overall aggregate. If you're at a company that does
172.
by austinl 10y ago
I just read two books that I thought would be unrelated, but ended up being very related in a way that was fascinating to read the two in tandem — The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. The Sw
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by austinl 10y ago
> “This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather
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by austinl 10y ago
Related: there's an unfortunate cause of excessive app rating prompts — what's shown in search results/top charts/other areas (on iOS) is the average of the latest version , not the overall aggregate. If you're a
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by austinl 10y ago
I've also experienced this several times. I just went through the wave of shopping emails that come from Black Friday in the US, and found that most of the time I only unsubscribed from the company's "Black Friday" list.
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by austinl 10y ago
Reminds me of Douglas Tompkins (the founder of Esprit and The North Face) who has done this on a much larger scale in Chile and Argentina. He's used his profit from selling his share in both companies to buy over 2 million acres of l
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by austinl 10y ago
This 10 minute video is a great introduction to the P = NP problem and computational complexity theory if you have no context. I've shown this to plenty of friends (including those outside of computer science). Essentially, "does
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by austinl 10y ago
Saw it mentioned below, but if you're interested in this stuff, I'd wholly recommend watching a documentary called "The Barkley Marathons" on Netflix. It's a 100-mile race through the woods in Tennessee, with a 16,5
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by austinl 10y ago
I found an internship, and my roommate has found his last two full-time jobs through "Who's hiring?". I haven't checked the thread recently, but I appreciated the early days when some companies had a filter for people co
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by austinl 10y ago
I'm a long time Civ player, and I'm curious to see how the AI compares to the previous versions. I've been somewhat disappointed in the past, because the challenge of playing on the higher difficulties comes less from a smart

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