jchallis
jchallis on Hacker News
Lutke is a German who has lived in Canada for decades. Why comment on American tax policy ? Seems out of his lane .
Read the Wikipedia page on the sunk cost fallacy. Knowing what you know now , would you have continued down this path ? The biggest costs are always opportunity costs and investing in something that isn’t likely to pay off robs you from higher value alternatives (including rest, recharging and joining a more successful venture) .
Working on a streamlit app this second... I think its death has been exaggerated.
Your instincts are good here. Whatever complexity Pizza Hut has it comes from being the weakest of the Yum! Brands siblings — KFC carries the international profit, Taco Bell owns domestic. Pizza Hut is slow growth, perpetual restructuring, and a weird inherited obligation to always serve Pepsi.
Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.
He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
One factor is definitely underreporting. Several “accidental deaths” in the 1950s were code for suicide.
Only about half of Americans who go to college finish their degree. The saddest part of the college debt crisis are the kids with debt and no degree to pay it off.
And all available from Project Gutenberg!
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/40If you are looking where to start, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren's "How to Read a Book" is an excellent and practical introduction to reading these books. They offer some very practical advice on how to go about this : Elementary Reading (basic decoding), Inspectional Reading(skimming for structure), Analytical Reading (deep, thorough engagement with one book), and Syntopical Reading (comparing multiple texts on a topic).
Happy Reading!
Tax planning can help here. By converting the house to ownership by a tax-advantaged trust , a family absolutely can continue to extract rent from a former property without selling. Doubly so if the mortgage is paid off.
Classic PE healthcare playbook hitting a wall: governance red flags (board resignations over antitrust violations), Medicaid exposure nobody’s buying their hedge on, and 5x leverage on a home health rollup that can’t get financing done at any price. Market’s saying no for good reason.
When Goldman can’t get your $2.5B home healthcare deal done in this market, and you need to come back with audited financials hoping for better conditions… the market’s already told you everything you need to know.
Good marriages are built on aligned goals : what kind of family you want, the balance between spending now and saving for the future, how you spend your time . Focus finding a partner who is aligned on where you want to go : rest will follow.
I feel this article acutely. My mother has a house full of antiques, fine china, and silverware that she values enormously but has essentially zero market value. Most pieces wouldn’t cover my monthly electric bill.
Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it:
1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.
2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want.
3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them.
4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.
Miami and New Orleans are about 1800 km from New York.
Denver is 2600 km from New York.
I can confirm - in the past three weeks, I requested a $5K raise in salary on offer and it was accepted in <20 seconds by hiring manager. This has a roughly $100K NPV. This is identical to the predictions in patio11's original piece.
Education for kids with special needs is one place where the best schools can be 100x a median school - it’s worth contacting the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts to understand what resources you should be using now.
Speaking as a dad of kids with special needs, the goal is independent living with accommodations. What are the accommodations you can provide (cane, dog, Braille mastery) that maximizes the chance of long term independence.
Would love to hear more about this. Indiscrete Thoughts is one of my favorite books.
Globe and Mail is Canadian.
Includes most of Tennessee as well - Nashville, Knoxville, Memphis and Chattanooga are in this group.
Red October used the usual gyroscopes approach that gets more and more inaccurate as it sails. I think a key plot point is that they need to surface to take a latitude / longitude , precipitating much suspense.
The big big downside of gravity waves is that they have no dipole radiators - with electric charge you have + and - and that allows very efficient propagation. For gravity there is only one charge ,and this allows only quadrupole radiation - making it extremely awful for transmission.
A typical sub drifts by only a few tens of meters per day - obviously this builds up . The point of the BEC gravity map is to reduce this inaccuracy an order of magnitude, thereby extending the subsurface range of the subs.
This is the most obvious practical application of my PhD topic. A Bose Einstein Condensate is an extremely sensitive detector of gravity- a nuclear submarine could use it to make an ultra-accurate map of the world based on variations in the gravitational constant g. This would remove one of the primary reasons subs need to surface , in order to GPS lock.
It’s a naval chart that would not require surfacing.
A French postdoc in my lab swore this was the moneymaker for our entire subfield, and it seems he was on to something …
A super personal anecdote: my dad took my mom to see Alien on a date and realized that because she could sit through that - she was the one.
They were married soon after.
Sci Fi horror is pretty close to the polar opposite of my mom’s comfort zone, so I guess watching Alien was a test.