joshstaiger's comments

I highly recommend Robert Greenberg's "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" if you have any interest in Classical.

Available on audible:

https://www.audible.com/pd/How-to-Listen-to-and-Understand-G...

It's long (36 hours, broken up into ~45min lectures), but very engaging and accessible. He goes through the entire history of Western music from Pythagoras through the 20th century. He covers everything from (very basic) music theory to how trends in society and technology influenced the music that was produced in each period.

After listening to the whole thing, it gave me a much more fully formed mental model of how different eras, composers, and styles relate to each other.

And from there it's become much easier to dig in and appreciate different areas of the repertoire, rather than idly trying to absorb disparate pieces that would come up on radio/streaming.

1000 times this.

You're going to get a lot of snark from people saying things like "don't", or "learn python instead".

This epitomizes "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

Bash has many cringeworthy aspects, but we have to deal with the world as it is, not the world as we would like it to be, and the reality is that bash is the default shell on 99.9% of unix boxes you encounter — even if you use an alt shell on your machine.

Coworkers machine? Bash. Default AWS AMI? Bash. init script to bootstrap $DAEMON? Bash. ssh to a server at your workplace? Bash. Random O'Reilly Linux tutorial? Assumes bash.

My advice?

Take some time.

Sit down.

and read "man bash"

cover-to-cover.

at least once.

A lot of the illogical things in bash make a lot more sense once you understand its parsing/expansion rules. And once you understand what is in the language vs an external terminal program in your PATH.

Since that sounds unappealing (and I scoffed at that very advice for many years), I've also found the wooledge bash guide to be very helpful.

I'm not sure if you'll see this 2 days later, but I've been trying to make heads or tails of your example and I think there’s a mistake in there somewhere.

Maybe I'm hopelessly lost, but, for one, the inverse of

    ( 1  1  1)
    ( 1  2  3)
    ( 1  2  4)

is not:

    ( 2 -1  0)
    (-3  2 -1)
    ( 1 -2  1)

On the off chance you see this, any pointers?

Your code stops compiling with a pretty unhelpful error message. Y'know, like Segmentation Fault 11, and a stack trace into the swift compiler sourcecode if you're lucky.

XCode doesn't always crash (though it does, frequently), but syntax highlighting goes away at the first hint of an issue.

1000 times this. I've been really enthusiastic about the idea of a modern, compiled, type safe, systems language, backed by a major tech juggernaut.

But the compiler crashes and sourcekit instability are just breathtaking (even in 3.0+). I'm surprised I haven't seen this get more attention.

I'd (somewhat) expected something like this for the first few releases, but two years in I'm starting to think the team bit off more than they can chew with the type system.

Very cool! I'll be keeping an eye on this.

This year I've been experimenting with these DIY self-watering grow containers:

http://earthtainer.tomatofest.com/pdfs/EarthTainer-Construct...

Very little maintenance after the initial assembly and planting, and I've had pretty great results so far.

I've heard about aquaponics before, but never dug into it. I'd be interested in hearing about its advantages over a (presumably less involved) traditional container setup like mine.

Only if it is invested offshore. If it comes back to the US, it will be taxed. Same situation as before.

Sure, but Berkshire is also explicit about the fact that they only acquire pre-existing "remarkable" businesses.

They may benefit from the firehose, but were already self-sufficient without it.

That’s in stark contrast to the Google/Alphabet model, where there’s no way driverless cars could exist independent of the adwords firehose.

It’s waaaay more speculative. On the order of VC investing. Rather than Berkshire’s value investing.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

I feel like it’s going to be hard for a company like Spotify to compete on price. Their margins are already thin from what I hear, and they don’t have a hugely profitable hardware business to subsidize their service.

I get this argument for any other company.

But at this point Apple has gone to great lengths to control the entire toolchain from the OS to the compiler to the chips that run the instructions the compiler produces.

It’d seem odd if they didn’t go with something home-grown as their language of choice.

Google search the headline, then click on the first result.

There is a better, longer version of the video here: http://vimeo.com/18913413

He elaborates on collaborating with other people, connecting disperate ideas, and managing creative people

or

“How to stamp out creativity in the rest of the organization, get a bit of respect going.”

Good feedback, thanks.

You can hide items and product categories you’ll never eat.

I hate eating processed foods, too. Just click the hide buttons next to those categories (Snacks, Canned Foods, et all), and you won’t see them again.

Unfortunately we don’t have Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods yet, though :(

It's useful (at least for me) even if you only go to one store.

We use historical data to judge how good the sales are for items at any given time — and it’s surprising how much variation there is week to week.

Usually when I shop, I’m looking to get fresh meat and produce of some sort. If salmon is steeply discounted this week, I’ll spring for that vs chicken breast that is only slightly discounted from the norm.

He used MS Paint for a long time (seriously).

But apparently he's upgraded to something called SmoothDraw3 and a Wacom Bamboo Tablet.

http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq#equipment

You’re misrepresenting the data. Gas may have been $1.616 in Dec 2008, but it was $4.114 in July 2008, and ~$3 in Feb 2008.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/23/news/economy/three_dollar_ga...

The price is volatile (especially on either side of a financial crisis).

Really looking forward to future discussion. Congrats!

Probably a good time to point out that the email field in your profile isn’t listed publicly. It’s there for pg to contact you if need be.

If you want others to see your email, put it in the about section.

AppEngine's task queue uses http requests to do offline processing.

In fact the new limits only seem to apply to these types of requests — not user facing requests.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/overv...