trefn

I wonder if you could make the kite itself lighter than air to avoid issues where the wind dies down? E.g. a kite shaped airship.

I have a similar tic. I just edit my hosts file to redirect those requests to localhost. Then when I mindlessly navigate to one of those sites it doesn't work and I realize I did it unconsciously. I do the same for gmail because I have the same tic for checking my mail.

If I actually want to go to one of those sites I just edit the hosts file and comment out the redirect line.

On my mac, the /etc/hosts file looks like:

  # #
  # Host Database
  #
  # localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
  # when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
  ##
  127.0.0.1 localhost
  255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
  ::1             localhost
  fe80::1%lo0 localhost

  127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com twitter.com www.facebook.com reddit.com
  127.0.0.1 mail.google.com

I don't know if the parent comment is correct and that the difference is tax deductible... but if so it is real money.

If the marginal tax rate for the Dr. is 50% (like it probably is in CA) then a $300 deduction is $150 in tax savings.

It may just look different now.

At my company (Mixpanel), the modern equivalent is our support team, which is filled with smart, hungry people who want to get their foot in the door in tech.

Now, we have former support folks all over the company (sales, sales engineering, services, software engineering, product - just to name the departments I can think of offhand), who are often our top performers as ICs or who have grown into leadership roles. Some have left to start their own companies.

It's actually been one of our most effective hiring channels!

we're a/b testing the button copy... the Starter package is free and the Growth package pops up a plan builder with pricing.

It's complicated because the price is based on your user volume so there's not a single price to show. We've heard this feedback though and are working on an improvement!

(founder of mixpanel here)

I'm really excited about this release - sampling has been necessary to support some of our largest customers for many years, but has a bunch of issues, as Vijay points out in this post.

I love the fact that moving sampling to query time lets us beat the tradeoff - we get something like 90% of the speedup of ingestion time sampling with none of the downsides, and the only incremental cost is storage which is cheap. It's a big win.

I hadn't heard of this person before, but a couple of points resonated with me:

First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling:

In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.

To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.

There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life).

Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.

Sabine Baring-Gould is a character in a non-canon Sherlock Holmes novel by Laurie R. King called `The Moor`. If you enjoy fictional accounts of widely knowledgeable characters, I recommend it :)

(I work at Mixpanel)

Honestly you could probably write a quick pipeline to dump your json data into Mixpanel and then use JQL -- it would be a little hacky but if you have less than a few million rows it shouldn't be too much work (and would still be free at that volume).

I just got a Feldgrind after breaking two low-end hand grinders in as many years. I laughed out loud with joy when I first started using it - it feels like a tank in your hand and results in an incredibly consistent grind.

Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" goes into great detail about Isaac Newton's life, and his focus on alchemy and theology. It is of course fiction, but well researched and utterly fascinating. I recommend it!