Shenglong

I haven't posted in years, but felt the need to weigh in on a food topic that's dear to my heart:

With ground meat, the two things you're looking to develop with heat are flavor and texture (and safety). The problem is though, that while texture can be developed as a function of time, flavor can be harder to develop since it's mostly a product of the Maillard reaction (browning). Unfortunately, as you develop texture (heat up the meat), the muscle fibers contract and squeeze out water, which lowers the temperature of your cooking surface and mitigates Maillard development. This is exacerbated by using ground meat, which isn't as insulted as say, a steak would be, which means water comes out faster. This leaves two major ways to develop flavor: 1. Sear your meat before you grind it -- easy said, but a pain in general because it involves cutting and semi-freezing the meat chunks after searing, slowing down your cooking, or 2. Working in batches and trying to get your ground meat to brown before the heat causes the water to come out, which is slow.

Both of these options suck. For any aspiring home cook, I'd say the best thing you can do for your food is to buy a high heat source. Use a powerful induction stove on the highest setting, and you can brown your meat without batching it as the water evaporates faster than it can collect (up to a point).

This is awesome--really excited to see this need being solved.

Everwise | New York, NY | Onsite | Software Engineer, Architect | Onsite

We're a Sequoia-backed SaaS company, has developed a completely new model for talent development. Our mission is to help the world’s professionals reach their full potential by connecting them to the people and resources they need to thrive at each stage of their career.

About Engineering @ Everwise We're a small engineering team based in NYC. Day-to-day we leverage Agile, Ruby on Rails, AWS, React, Redis and Postgres. We're very adaptable and looking for someone who welcomes the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.

Responsibilities - Build and enhance the front-end of Everwise's web applications. - Turn mockups into working products. - Rapidly prototype new features and quickly iterate on what works and what doesn't. - Analyze site/page speed and help provide performance solutions.

Your Qualifications - Experience with client-side JavaScript and MVC frameworks (Backbone/Angular/Ember is a plus). - Experience with mobile optimization, HTML5 and CSS3. - Experience with object oriented server-side programming, Ruby on Rails a strong plus. - Understanding of unit and functional testing best practices (Rspec, Jasmine, Protractor, and Selenium are bonuses).

Benefits We offer a very competitive base salary and bonus potential. We also provide a full benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid time off (PTO), employee stock option plan and transit benefits.

We would consider relocating the right candidate to NYC. Feel free to apply at https://www.geteverwise.com/careers or shoot me an email (shenglong@).

Everwise | New York, NY | Full Time | ONSITE | Senior Software Engineer, Senior Front-end Engineer, Software Engineer In Test

We're a small engineering team based in NYC, who come from all walks of life. We have successful startup experience and embrace processes and technologies that amplify output.

Day-to-day we leverage Agile, Ruby on Rails, AWS, AngularJs, Redis and Postgres. We're very adaptable and looking for someone who welcomes the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.

We offer a very competitive base salary and bonus potential. We also provide a full benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid time off (PTO), employee stock option plan and transit benefits.

As a personal note - I joined about two months ago, and have had an amazing time here. We have a bunch of excitable people, play with an adorable office dog named Cooper, and everyone has a tremendous amount of fun. Our interview process is both fluid and fair.

Find out more/apply at https://www.geteverwise.com/jobs/ Or, feel free to email me a pitch at [email protected] and I'll pass it along :)

Everwise | New York, NY | Full Time | ONSITE | Senior Software Engineer, Senior Front-end Engineer, Software Engineer In Test

We're a small engineering team based in NYC, who come from all walks of life. We have successful startup experience and embrace processes and technologies that amplify output.

Day-to-day we leverage Agile, Ruby on Rails, AWS, AngularJs, Redis and Postgres. We're very adaptable and looking for someone who welcomes the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.

We offer a very competitive base salary and bonus potential. We also provide a full benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid time off (PTO), employee stock option plan and transit benefits.

As a personal note - I joined about 6 weeks ago, and have had an amazing time here. We have an adorable office dog named Cooper, and everyone has a tremendous amount of fun. Our interview process is also both fluid and fair.

Find out more/apply at https://www.geteverwise.com/jobs/ Or, feel free to email me a pitch at [email protected] and I'll pass it along :)

Not entirely the same thing, but somewhat related: I used to run the largest Ragnarok Online private server for its time, and this AMA is really nostalgic. Well, except how great their community seems to be.

All throughout running a server, I asked myself whether the community was unbecoming (not just towards us, but towards each other), or whether we (and the servers before us) were just doing a terrible job at fostering a positive environment. A few years after we shut down our server, I heard a rather famous League of Legends player had started a private RO server, and a few months later, heard that he flipped out and told the community to f--- off, shutting the server down.

It's hard for many people to imagine a community more "toxic" than in League, so I had just figured, perhaps the failure wasn't our fault. Reading the comments in this AMA really makes me think though, that there was actually a solution, and we had just failed in community management.

My words of wisdom here: lots of people focus on product development, but the community is often just as, if not more important; don't neglect it.

This is a pretty crass statement to make. If the focus is full-on navigability, I agree that contrast in the navigation bar is paramount. Yet, for many sites with simplified features, the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself.

This is especially true for sites like Airbnb (as in the example) where in addition to emotional response, there is an immediate focus on activating users. The focus shifts from full navigability (logging in, become a host, etc) to searching for a listing.

Can anyone related to this explain to me why Yahoo Weather is listed under their "success stories"? As the PM on the project, I can say without a doubt this was not done externally. It was built through the sweat and tears of the wonderful engineers and designers on the team.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fie0qrk7ecpphib/weather.jpg?dl=0

This just seems like blatant lying to me.

There's a good amount of criticism as well as praise for her, and I'm not entirely sure your question is entirely fair.

The reality of it all is that transformations take time, especially when things at Yahoo had been so Scott Thompson'd. Marissa has been rebuilding a sinking ship from the inside out - where most people would've just tried to patch it up as it slowly sank, or sold it off for parts; I think that's what's admirable. I think that's why people defend her. She dared to defy the status quo. She dared to employ the same dedication as founders do day in and day out, and she demonstrated over and over again, the audacity to take risks.

I find it stranger that more people don't defend her. All of us should know that technology companies thrive or die from the inside; it's why startup founders spend such a disproportionate amount of time hiring great people. To anyone who actually bothered to pause and compare Yahoo's culture today to yesterday's, it would be obvious that Marissa's conviction and aptitude is heralding a new era of prosperity; the transformation is apparent - and even if not yet absolute, it is still miraculous.

Remember: people -> product -> profit

"Sub solen nihil novi este"

I've been backpacking around SE Asia for a few months now, and this sort of system has been active on an ad hoc basis for years in Chiang Mai, Thailand. There, it's expected that "red cars" (seemingly the only active taxis), will pick up other passengers.

They'll stop for passengers flagging them down, and check location before issuing a quote, if in fact they're on the way. While this made traveling really cheap, there were times where a 10-minute trip stretched into over half an hour. I'm interested to see whether these services will customize allowable wait times to the individual, or whether all ride-sharers have roughly the same tolerance for delays.

But, to say that any one company copied another in this case is a pretty stupid argument to make. I asked myself this question the first time I rode with Uber, and I'm sure many of you have as well. I would imagine that any good PM would've thoroughly investigated it; it's pretty obvious.

For all the Asians who flush - I would be very careful about trying this at home. It seems like it'll have the opposite effect of what's intended.

The alcohol breakdown chain reaction in the body (I'm not a chemist) is ethanol -> acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. The ethanol causes your to be "drunk", but the acetaldehyde has some arguably worse effects (headache, tiredness, flush). Asians typically process ethanol -> acetaldehyde way faster than others, but the acetaldehyde -> acetic acid can be really slow. If the yeast is mimicking ADH and not ALDH, you're just going to suffer even more.

Again, I'm not a chemist or a doctor, but from my preliminary internet research and anecdotal testing (though I have quite a few different data points), Famotadine (OTC), and higher levels of APO-Ranitidine (can be prescription) seems to slow the rate of ethanol -> acetaldehyde, balancing out the drunkness effect more, and giving you more time to process the acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. I typically go from maxing out at 2 drinks / 3 hour period, to about 11 drinks / 3 hour period on Ranitidine, given favorable conditions. I've had lower levels of success with Famotadine.

Interesting. Increased security, faster response times, and public image at such a cheap rate is probably a no-brainer for large tech companies like Facebook.

I feel like we're going to see more private funding for public positions in the (perhaps distant) future, but I suppose the obvious question is: at what point does private funding of public officials become theoretically troublesome? Some would call this the start to an unsettling change.

For me, what's frightening about this is how often I used to reflect on my own life, and at times, couldn't actually be sure whether I was useful or just overrated. People would tell me what a great job I did and praise the amount of time it must have taken, and while I'd smile nervously and modestly reject their attribution, I'd often be left silently thinking, "I don't think this was as difficult or took as long as you think it did." It took a while to just accept that I did my part.

While there is danger in exaggeration, I also warn that there is arguably more danger in being too modest, and understating your own importance and value of your work. I've met extremely talented individuals who were being paid less than a third of what they deserved because they believed that their "work will speak for itself" or because they "don't believe in self-promotion". There is a healthy balance to be struck; remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self.

There are better ways to do that than the ways listed here, though. For example, taking credit where credit is deserved is extremely useful, but ONLY when you're speaking to someone far removed, such as at a job interview. On a team, you'll get further by promoting and pushing through other peoples' accomplishments when they are too timid to do so. You'll earn respect from both parties, and you'll breed a more productive atmosphere which can only benefit you in the long term.