Nope, I've heard others mention it before as well. I subscribed to the newsletter at one point and I don't think I've gotten a single useful technical article (which is fair, that's not necessarily his niche), but I have gotten a bunch of emails that just doxx random people.
I'm so glad to see this book mentioned on here! It was my favorite as a kid and it still holds up today IMO. I have one of the newer editions at home and this comment reminded me to go page through it a bit. Still brings a smile to my face.
Yeah, I also found that very ironic. And the amount of detail it goes into on spam and abuse detection systems before shamelessly telling you how to get around them. I kinda have to respect how blunt it is, honestly.
There are some parts that are useful without seeming too scummy - the bits on tone and how to actually write a good email, for instance. But the bulk of this is just an outright guide on how to spam.
> There's a reason you don't see immigrants from all over the world coming to the US to open charging stations the way you saw them opening gas stations.
As the other commenter said, AFAIK, the majority of a gas station's income comes from the convenience store, no? Profit margins on gas are really low - Google says it's around 2%.
* many prime charging station locations are where the gas stations currently are. The high installation costs and long charging times mean you’d lose money swapping them 1:1 right now, and most gas stations are already optimized to hold the max pumps per spot of land.
* it is challenging to find new locations not least because cities have found out that gas stations are pretty problematic uses of land when it comes to neighborhood desirability, traffic, etc. so many are loth to approve new charging locations.
The cons of a gas station in the neighborhood are when it's a convenient store with pumps. The sale of lotto, beer, smokes, and low cost food attract it's own crowd that the NIMBYs do not like. Switch that to a storeless unmanned set of pumps, and all of that goes away. I've seen a few of these types of locations around town. Just an awning with a few pumps under it. That's pretty much what all of the electric charge locations look like. Just "rent" spots at existing places on the highway with parking nearest the main road (which is typically the least desired spots in the lot). Pretty much any hotel would be a good candidate.
Eh there are a ton of other downsides. By their nature, high-throughput charging stations with lots of curb cuts are bad for walkability, eyes on the street, etc. that people want in their neighborhoods. For example many cities now ban new drive throughs.
And the convenience stores are the thing that makes the money at gas stations.
> And the convenience stores are the thing that makes the money at gas stations.
Because the gas is expensive, you need to hold inventory (and have a tank that needs to be insured and inspected and ...) and a lot of the profit is going to huge oil companies.
If you are running chargers, there is no inventory and the cost is whatever the electricty costs are.
I suspect that chargers could actually be a profit center as opposed to gas pumps which barely break even and sometimes go negative in profits.
Sure, they are slowly getting added, but the incentives are pretty low. The vast majority of apartment-dwellers charge either at work (if they are lucky enough to work for a large enough company that builds chargers) or at a public charging station
> Is the idea of living and moving around in a city full of autonomous vehicles actually appealing to anyone? I personally find the whole idea completely disgusting for a number of reasons.
Assuming they're safe and cheaper than current Ubers/taxis? Yeah I'd be fairly okay with it. I don't think it's necessarily ideal, but I definitely can't relate with "completely disgusting", personally.
Public transit is nice and all but walking to and then waiting around at bus stops (especially in bad weather), squeezing into a crowded bus or train, stopping at intermediate stops, making transfers... there's definitely downsides. I don't use Uber/Lyft/Waymo often but I have to admit walking outside and having a climate-controlled, comfortable ride right there, which takes you straight to where you're going, is pretty nice. If it cost less and was more eco-friendly I'd probably use it more; we'll see if they can tackle that.
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised by all the uniform praise in the comments - NOT saying it's not a cool tool, it's definitely very impressive and the author's done a nice job, but I could never really see myself using this. Mainly just because flights are super expensive, I can't see myself trusting a bot to make the best choice instead of spending 10 minutes of my own time to potentially save a lot of money. I guess it's a different world when you're a super frequent flier (or when your company is paying, of course).
It reminds me of the Carvana ads that called out home delivery for cars. Like, it's definitely neat, and I'd love to skip scummy dealerships, but convenience is wayy down my list of priorities when I'm dropping that much money on something.
Worth noting: if you don't specify a time of day in your search, you will see the cheapest flight on that day.
Bots can analyze several thousand flight options (which even the sim does) in a few seconds. So odds are it catches a deal someone might otherwise miss.
Also, because BonBook searches direct w/ airlines, it sees inventory not shared with Google (and regularly has better fares).
Interesting, the last one is pretty surprising. I kind of just assumed all airline booking systems (Expedia, Google Flights, Kayak, whatever) all used the same underlying service - maybe SABRE or something, but that's a total shot in the dark. Would love to hear what the difference is, assuming you're comfortable with sharing!
Can share a bit of background: (TLDR; airlines want to keep more profit so are witholding some fares.)
A system called GDS (Global Distribution System) was built in the 60s as a data transmission standard. Was used by airlines to publish fares (among other things). But it was complicated so aggregators (Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport) were born to ingest all this published data and make it easily searchable.
When travel went online in the late 90s, Online Travel Agents (OTAs) were using this data, and since then most new OTAs have too. (An example; Expedia's first patent minimized GDS searches per customer request, saving them $$).
But, because OTAs take a cut and airline margins are thin, IATA (group of airlines) came up with a new system called NDS (New Distrubution Standard) in mid 2010s. Since its an XML standard that anyone can consume direct, airlines have been trying to push everyone onto NDC by simply not publishing certain tickets via GDS, requiring OTAs to book X% of tickets via NDC and even removing inventory entirely.
Some examples: American trying to go full NDC recently but getting pushback and Turkish Airlines pulling out of Sabre.
Is there a reasonable way for me to consume this data directly? I'd love to be able to pull a big pile of flight prices and mess around with the data, but I'd prefer not to pay big money or have to register as a travel agent or anything.
For what it's worth, I hate leetcode with a burning passion, have no real interest in math, and yet I personally find Advent of Code quite fun and enjoyable.
I have found AoC fun, but on some of the later days time constraints make it a little stressful (full time job + kids constrain my time).
I've done it (and completed it) the last five years. I used it to try out a few languages (Haskell, Idris, Lean) and did it in python one year I was feeling lazy. I've got a project going now, and I probably should do that instead.
However, that project is a programming language, so this is a way to test practicality. But solving problems and fixing shortcomings in the underlying language at the same time may be a bit too much. (It's a dependent typed language, so there is a lot of subtlety to deal with.)
> You don't need to be aware of 1000s of foot guns for every block of non rust code. But you do have to remember dozens of pedantic rules
Have you tried using rust-analyzer? I'm usually a bit of an IDE skeptic, but Rust is one of those languages where tight integration with the IDE really helps IMO. It's night and day, I honestly wouldn't want to write Rust without rust-analyzer, but with it it's quite pleasant.
I deleted all IDE features (other than good highlighting) and I'm never going back! I kept adding more and more IDE features, and my subjective enjoyment and happiness writing code kept decreasing. I deleted them, and I love writing code again!
I think the fact that the language is aggravating without complex and tight IDE integration is one of the best indictments of the language there is. Java is another language that's intolerable without impossibly complex IDE support. The more rust matures the more it feels like that.
Unlike your parent, I don't use an IDE at all, I write Rust in just a plain vim, no language server, I don't even bother with syntax highlighting.
Still, I'd say that actually the distinction that's aggravating you is almost entirely that Rust won't compile a lot of code that's nonsense, whereas in C++ that code compiles - it's still nonsense, but it compiled anyway. I think that's just plainly worse.
The very first time I used rust for a work project, I tried to implement a tree... well actually I tried to implement a linked list first, later hoping to expand it into a graph.
The distinction that's aggravating me is the compiler refuses to compile code that I know is correct, but it's not smart enough to prove it, so it just gives me the finger instead.
> There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
> statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.
But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.
well, "cool" is too subjective to really say much, especially when only thinking on a micro level. I think a better phrasing of that is that "dumbness" is being more mainstream today (in the US) than before. Some states are back to banning more books than ever in schools, the country was split over something as basic as medicine ( a few choosing horse de-wormer over a professionally approved vaccine), etc.
There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".
The U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2022.
The top five math-scoring countries in 2022 were all in Asia.
U.S. students' math scores have remained steady since 2003.
Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.
The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 12th in its 2024 Competitiveness Report after ranking first in 2018.
I'd say 16th (<20th percentile) is really bad when the US is 2nd in spending (behind Luxemburg, apparently) per student in the world. especially if science is the best statistic to show to begin with.
falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.
Nope, I've heard others mention it before as well. I subscribed to the newsletter at one point and I don't think I've gotten a single useful technical article (which is fair, that's not necessarily his niche), but I have gotten a bunch of emails that just doxx random people.
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