ndonnellan

I was going to chime in to second this. In a former life I worked on power towers and we had designs for air receivers that would potentially work really well with this type of system:

- High temperatures - Intermittent solar input not a problem - tall central structure (?? maybe a plus given the paper's tall storage vessels)

But high temperature air receivers have their own problems, mostly around receiver material properties (thermal cycling / stress) and heat loss. It's really hard to focus a lot of light from the sun into a tiny aperture, because the sun isn't really a point source, and no mirror is perfectly shaped.

Portland, OR (NW Oregon in general) also has a lot of planted Giant Sequoias! So it may not be strictly true that they are super picky. I imagine as climate warms, the PNW will become a better spot for Sequoias. Unfortunately at the cost of trees that like it cooler and wetter e.g. Western Red Cedars.

I would plant one, but their trunks get huge quickly, and I see a lot of busted sidewalks around here due to that.

https://www.portland.gov/trees/sequoiadendron-giganteum

Source: https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/tracking-nationa...

I think the key paragraph is buried:

"Though water itself does not absorb much light, and neither does the hydrogel material itself, when the two combine they become strong absorbers, Chen says. That allows the material to harness the energy of the solar photons efficiently and exceed the thermal limit, without the need for any dark dyes for absorption."

So when water is combined with hydrogel, they absorb more light -> more light = more energy -> more energy = more evaporation.

I wonder why Wired didn't provide any hyperlinks despite mentioning the site (italicized) several times. Seems like common internet courtesy. Perhaps just a direct-from-print copy.

If you want all these things and exponential growth, check out Neptune's pride: https://np.ironhelmet.com/ for basically "diplomacy in space with a few extra dimensions". I haven't played in a few years (it was great at the beginning of the pandemic), but it was a lot of "fun" in the same way that diplomacy is "fun". Except with a space theme and a lot of anxiety waking up at 2am hoping your fleet arrives at an empty star system and doesn't get immediately obliterated.

This appears to be a repost/summary/blogspam of a 2017 kotaku piece: https://kotaku.com/the-notorious-board-game-that-takes-1500-...

Thanks for the reply! Sorry I don't have any great sources off the top of my head. It makes sense that you'd want to restrict the scope of the article to make it more understandable.

I've only been part of one startup, and it went nowhere, but it's very common (ubiquitous?) for prospective employees to be sold the "if we IPO for $1xB" line when that likelihood is laughably small; hence my suggestion to lower the expectations with some lower numbers.

But props for getting this all down!

I like the structure of the article and it's a good procedure for evaluation compensation, but my nitpick would be it could be more helpful if it included more realistic numbers.

Do 5% of startups actually reach 1B valuation in 4 years? No. Uber took 10 years to IPO. I don't know the average, but I would imagine based on a cursory search that it's closer to 7 or 8 years for highly valued companies in the past decade. And 5% seems extremely high for billion dollar IPOs.

Also, only 2 startups are compared in the NPV calculation. What about joining a BigCo / FAANG? That would really put it into context.

On the other hand, the math gets slightly better if you assume you leave after some amount of vesting. I thought danluu had a post about this, but can't find it. Staying in a startup until the bitter end is almost never the optimal choice, especially if you have inside knowledge of its progress.

https://tldroptions.io/ - This was posted a few years back, and while it doesn't give tell you the likelihood of a particular size of exit, it does help give an idea of the type of dilution and final equity value (with no discounting though).

You mean like Optimizely? I thought most startups these days had absurd adjectiverbnoun names.

If you're looking to cut down on solar heating, steel roofs or even lighter colored or painted roofs would be a far more cost effective option.

I think the legal definition of NA beer is maximum of 0.5%.

I may be misremembering, but I think Athletic Brewing mentioned their beers are closer to 0.2 -> 0.3% on average.

But even at 0.5%, that would be 10 NA beers to add up to one average alcoholic beer at 5% assuming equal volumes.

This is the important question. At my previous job the results of internal surveys would have these fairly high numbers, like 20% of employees don't think they will be here in a year.

But if you looked at the previous year's numbers, it was something like 18% or 15%. And the previous year's actual attrition was closer to 5-8%. So perhaps you could extrapolate if you had the attrition rates combined with survey data, but surveys are a much weaker signal.

One of the first comments I heard from coworkers on work-life-balance was "hope you're not working with a team in Mountain View", and they weren't referring to just the time zone difference (we're in Austin). Before Covid the office was empty before 8:30am and after 4:30pm.

I think it's obvious this list doesn't take into account cultural properties or medium sized cities, as others have commented.

Yes, I think your reading is correct. The article makes claims the paper does not about comparing Vertical vs. Horizontal wind turbines.

Caution though: this can lead to blind spots. I witnessed a critical bug become exacerbated by the first fix because the developer and reviewer had essentially co-wrote the solution, so the sign-off was essentially a rubber stamp.

If you want the least bias, you should find someone to review something that hasn't been deeply involved in designing it. And for pieces of code that are small enough, reading and getting up to speed shouldn't take that much time. I prefer sending reviews to engineers that are familiar with the area of the code, but we don't do pair-programming so the implementation hasn't been seen before.

We do, however, do a lot of design work before a single line of code is written.

*also this is at google.

Summer months in most of the southern US are extremely hot (in Austin, 4-5 months of the year could have temps above 100F), so for example here is CA in August (see graph in article for demand): https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-californias...

Utilities can't design just for the average month, but the worst ones, and the worst hours of the worst days. Building new peak demand (peaker) plants is very expensive and most consumers probably don't see the actual market prices during those times. Shifting load by a very small percent could result in a decent cost savings and/or avoid building new capacity.

I doubt the rotation speed is 1/s, that would imply pi*220m/s at the tips or 2488 km/hour! Based on animations, it looks more like 1 rotation per 20 or 30 seconds. 20-30kWh seems very reasonable for a house's consumption.

If I had to guess, I'd say they were talking about (in most US restaurants)

- Ask for check -> waiter brings check -> put card in fold, wait ?? minutes for waiter to return to grab card -> wait ?? minutes for waiter to run card and return it -> sign receipt and leave.

On a busy night, this ritual could last 15-20 minutes.

To be fair, in some countries in Europe (and a small number of restaurants I've been to in the US), it's more like:

- ask for check -> waiter brings hand terminal to table -> swipe card, then leave

After reading this, I searched for and found this report on earthquake impact from 2018 (for both "the big one" and a smaller, 6.8 portland hills quake), I believe based on the OP referenced data:

https://www.oregongeology.org/pubs/ofr/p-O-18-02.htm

All I can say is: yikes!

Nope, middle-tier US city.

One of the offers was FAANG, but a small office. To be clear, I did not do most of this over email, but I used very similar wording in my phone calls.

I never had more than 2 offers at once, and I don't think you need to try and time everything so that you can bet everyone against each other. You really just need 1 other good offer, which was my case. And non-negotiable deadlines have always been extended. Some companies got annoyed that I didn't decide within a few days(especially startups, probably since they are trying to hire super fast), but others were very patient and willing to let me finish interviewing as long as I was upfront with the timing.

> It's over the top to send them long messages in writing that you will never accept whatever number they give and reserve the right to disagree anytime.

I don't think that is the take away at all. You need to be clear that you are still interviewing and thinking things over, and once I got offers from my top choices, I made it clear exactly what it would take to get me to accept immediately, and that counter-offer was not a fantastical number. If you set goal posts, you can always point to them as your reason for not accepting. It's definitely bad form to not provide any feedback on what you're willing to take once you get far enough into the negotiation.

If you're not a compelling candidate, and for at least one of the companies, I wasn't compelling enough, they absolutely will stop the conversation.

But I think it's a case-by-case thing. Not every company will respond the same. I also spent a fair amount of time researching what different companies probably paid for a generalist SWE, which for FAANGs is a lot easier these days, so I knew what some boundaries were.

I was reading this comment on my phone and had to jump on my computer to say: you should absolutely take this article/Haseeb seriously, yes people say these exact things over the phone.

I was looking for a new job in the recent past along with a family member (both software eng. roles), and spent a good chunk of time doing research - reading articles like this - and practicing (eventually via companies early in my "pipeline"), and while I didn't use these lines verbatim, the conversation was actually a lot closer to that than you think.

And we both received NON-TRIVIAL adjustments to non-negotiable offers. And we were both very surprised it worked.

It may seem stilted or awkward, but I think that's the point. Recruiters and experienced managers have their own script that is more-or-less designed to make you feel awkward; make you feel like you're getting a great deal and asking for more is greedy. If you get more comfortable with being awkward, while still remaining professional and having clear expectations (vs. saying "not good enough, want more"), and you have a good alternative, you can use these strategies.

Tire particulates are worse than _exhaust particulates_, not necessarily emissions, an important distinction. CO and CO2 are not counted as particulates.

My first thought upon seeing the images in the article: that's not a B-17! But the microprose announcement makes it more clear that the B-24 will be added, https://www.microprose.com/games/the-mighty-eighth#

[edit] historical note: my grandfather was a tailgunner in B-24s.

We have tons of those in Central Texas! But they're not aggressive at all, if a little curious. Definitely huge. I've also seen a few tarantula hawks, which look very evil.

Still puttering along with my 2012 Air, only replaced the battery once. I've definitely been waiting to upgrade and this looks promising, but I also have a company laptop again, so the pressure is lower to get my old Air replaced.

I try to put 3 bags in the passenger footwell, and then distribute the rest as evenly as possible with the seats down. But yes, it's pretty close :-)

I have to unload a few before I have clearance to back up our long driveway.

I have been fitting a little under 1000lbs of sand / gravel in my hatchback (elantra gt) a few times this past week. It can also handle 10' 2x4s for short drives. Given than I only need that a few times a year, it's a no brainer. Also, Home Depot rents trucks/vans for $30 for 75 minutes; U-Haul is better if you need them for the whole day.

I sometimes wish I had a small dumpy pickup so I could put bulk stuff in (and full 4x8 sheets), but mostly it's fine without.

Related: my dad looked to replace his 92 Dodge Dakota, single cab, long bed (which was a great, functional truck) and could find absolutely zero similar size trucks out there (short cab, long bed, no ladder required to get to the front seat). You can probably design them on the manufacturer site, but no dealers will have them in stock.

> You might think that programmers are expensive–the salaries of programmers are quite respectable in comparison to other industries. But if this were true, a lot more effort would go into improving programmers’ productivity, in particular in creating better tools.

...

> I am immensely impressed with the progress companies like Google or IBM made in playing go, chess, and Jeopardy, but I keep asking myself, why don’t they invest all this effort in programming technology?

It seems like Google does invest in programming technology, but a lot of that tech is internal. Google spends an order of magnitude more money on employee productivity than any other job I've worked at. But that's probably because at previous jobs we spent <<1% of salary on tools and didn't have economies of scale.