The tricky requirement that ends up existing and torpedoing attempts to clean up feature flags is a requirement for long-term holdback.
e.g. "Test was successful so it's rolling out to all users, minus a 0.5% holdback population for the next 2 years"
This then forces the team to maintain the two paths for the long-term, ensuring the team might get re-orged / re-prioritize their projects sometime a year later making the cleanup really hard to eventually enforce.
> "Test was successful so it's rolling out to all users, minus a 0.5% holdback population for the next 2 years"
Man, I couldn't imagine being a user in such a situation. "Oh, I guess I'm just not getting the better functionality?" Even worse if I were a paying customer.
It’s actually usually the paying customers asking via support to be added to the holdback, improved experience or no.
This is more true for larger flags that substantially change the experience and may not implement niche or edge-case functionality. Obviously you want to avoid these kinds of tests if possible but it’s not always possible.
The exact same point applies to Twitter's 3rdparty API getting killed off, and both moves are still a mystery.
It'd be easy to say "as a condition of getting this API key, you agree to display ad elements as they are served in the feed, and on click, open their associated URL in the system browser". All the ad-targeting is done server-side anyways, and attribution via unique links is easy.
Yes, it would be interesting, because you'd expect materials to cost roughly the same wherever you are in the country (modulo shipping costs), and cost of labor to account for much of the city to city difference.
A former landlord of mine, whose house I was renting in Palo Alto at the time (2021), shared that they were planning to kick off a major renovation that would total around 800K$ all-in.
That's an absolutely stunning figure to renovate a 3bdrm home, considering I've also heard anecdotes from outside California, of completely stripping down a similar-sized home to the studs, redoing all plumbing / electricity / walls / flooring / high-end-everything in the kitchen... for under 250K$.
So, where's the extra half-million dollars going? The delta in renovation costs alone between these anecdotes represents 10 years of the average California constructor worker's salary [per the BLS](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm).
Older tradespeople are retiring and younger participation in the trades has not kept up (for a variety of reasons). Labor improvement costs will only go up if you or unpaid help (friends) are unable to do the work. Higher level thesis is structural demographics in general compressing productive worker cohort.
I have been talking to people in the construction/trades industry for a long, long time. I sell them stuff.
At least for the last w20 years I've been talking with them, owners cannot find employees. It's the biggest complaint that I hear.
I talk to construction company owners all the time and journeymen make $100,000+ per year. Not at all the companies, not the shitty owners, but if you look, you will find that money.
This is way better than an average university education in all but a few majors like computer science.
Not only that, but as you apprentice and learn the trade, you get paid, unlike university where you pay.
When I went to university, you could get any degree, it didn't matter, because tuition was $600 per year. Get an English degree or art degree. You could pay your tuition and books and fees working a summer job.
Now, if you go to university, anything other than a computer science degree is a waste of money and time, more or less. Most of the STEM field majors suck - you don't get squat for a biology degree or chemistry degree, or so I hear. Only computer science is a sure thing. Oh, there might be a few weird degrees you can make massive money in, like petrochemical engineering or whatever, but jobs are far and few between, and there's no a massive market for those type of degree, unlike computer science.
I have known electricians making well over $100k, and a carpenter who does the same.
Both work 6 days a week, long days, and often physically demanding work. The electrician is at least union and has protections through them; he pulls data center gigs on his off days.
This is also around Northern VA, where $100k salary is fairly unimpressive; it's not SF or Vancouver, but housing ain't cheap and $100k ain't what it used to be.
Shipping costs are a massive deal in construction so you’re stuck with local materials and local workers. Which recursively means your also stuck with fairly local factory workers making those materials etc.
That said, the upper end of materials get crazy expensive anywhere. From basic linoleum floors in bathrooms, the next rung is tile and underfloor heating systems, and above that people are importing hand crafted marble from Italy etc. So each bathroom could have a 100$ toilet or a 15,000$ one etc.
Any high COL will have expensive trades people. Maybe when demand quiets down or more people start chasing money in the trades will prices come down, but it is $800K ATM because that's what it takes to get on the list.
I was quoted $150K for a full kitchen renovation in Seattle. Ugh.
That's what prices in the US should have been like, but housing and food was kept artificially low for decades due to use of migrant labor. The US market could stomach stagnating wages because illegals did all of the work for at or below minimum wage.
Now there is a shortage of trades and COVID + "build the wall" anti-immigration pushes meant there are no migrants, so you're paying regular price for 1st world labor.
> but housing and food was kept artificially low for decades due to use of migrant labor.
Food maybe, but housing? It has been rising since the last huge housing bust in the 90s, with only a blip downturn after 2008. Migrant labor is great because they want to do those jobs at all, and it isn't really about wages, poorer Americans just seem to be content to complain about immigrants while watching FoxNews with no ambition to do those jobs, richer Americans are the ones employing those migrants in the construction and agriculture (as well as Trump-style hospitality) industries while at the same time using illegal immigration as a wedge issue.
Construction costs in London are significantly higher than in the north of England.
I'd be surprised if this isn't common worldwide. Tradesmen are generally in high demand in these areas, it's not like McDonalds where you can just pay minimum wage + $5 and hope for the best.
And as the other poster says, bulk materials are, well, bulky. Timber is comparatively expensive in the UK because we don't have vast forests like the US.
Any hash calculations using a "read from stdin or a pipe" strategy, in my experience, is fraught with issues caused by an extra newline at the end of the input possibly being there today, and not in later checks, or vice-versa.
When people claim they wrote a prediction at some later date, they always have to document the EXACT command used to avoid this, e.g. `echo "smart prediction" | md5sum`
Sure. The case in question is verifying a hash someone else gave you, so the problem you mention is present regardless of what verification method you're using.
I'm shocked and disappointed at how expensive retrofitting insulation into a minimally insulated 1930s Bay Area house actually is. I estimate gas heating costs at around 2500$ / year (nov-march), while insulating floors, walls and roof would cost a shocking 60K$ for an average size 3bdrm.
If the insulation cuts heating cost in half, that's a 1250$ savings per year, meaning a 48 year break even time assuming zero discount rate. It absolutely doesn't make sense to do the work unless there's a massive tax subsidy or contractor costs come down (which is bad for the environment)
@jpdaigle Clearly too many factors play into however you received that quote...But, maybe this can help you...
Years ago, i researched insulating my home...an old home that was split into 2 living portions...and whose front half/portion was built in late 1800s, and back portion of home was built around late 1910s. So, you can imagine it was pretty much a sieve, just burning our money. So, i did get a few costly quotes...but the cheap husband in me wondered if i can do things piecemeal....and i assure you that its possible. There are lots of factors to consider....but you can research and determine for yourself.
Here is my suggestion:
1. Contact your electric company/provider...and ask them if they offer a free energy assessment. Ours did, and it helped us determine the exact zones/sections of our home where we had the worse heat loss. This assessment was so valuable, i wold have paid to have this done!
2. Research where you/your family spend the most time in the home. My opinion is that the bedrooms should be the last places to insulate, since blankets (and bodies) help keep things warm in this type of room.
3. Consider which areas of the home can be insulated via easier methods - like spray foamy stuff - which may only need little holes and not necessary to tear down full walls, etc. Some of these foams are not as insulating as traditional options, but the ease and cost is more than enough to justify things.
4. Ideally start on the outside walls of the home, and of the specific rooms/area where you will focus your first work.
There is so much more on thios topic...but keeping the work low in scope, and iterative really can help...its all about being clever here. Good luck!!
Numbers don't look great but you would need to consider the following too.
Any cooling cost you have that will also benefit from insulation and the fact that within 10years time you most likely need to upgrade the gas heater with something non fossil.
Also it is questionable if gas prices will remain where they are currently.
You could prioritize insulating some areas instead of all of them. Attic is the most effective and easy to do since it is usually open. Walls are less effective but expensive to drill holes or open up walls. Floors or basement are least effective but easy.
That is what I did, insulating the attic but not getting around to the walls and basement.
Construction is incredibly expensive. Why that is complicated. In a lot of the ways the problems though is our lack of newer affordable homes. Newer homes tend to cost more and have all the tech. Older homes are cheaper but paying someone else to upgrade them is crazy expensive.
I thought I’d like the OpenComms but the Bluetooth stuff seems flaky. Not sure if this is everyone or just me, but if you pair them to 2 devices (e.g. a phone and a laptop), then shut down one of those, the Aftershokz will beep every few seconds thereafter to let you know you lost the connection, even while you’re using the other audio source.
It’s crazy: shut the laptop and walk away to listen to a podcast on your phone and they just beep beep beep.
Some product categories seem to have the middle of the market (quality wise) hollow out and disappear, so all you've got left is the low-end crap and high-end pricy versions, with no middle-range left.
One example: try to buy a nice metal or leather band for an Apple Watch. There's the low-end ones, which are 4$ on alibaba re-sold on Amazon for 12$. There's the X00$ Apple-made first party ones, and that's it. Nobody's making a really nice ~45$ leather band without the Apple name (that's obviously not just the cheap alibaba ones with a better marketing site).
The Palo Alto school meals are by no means healthy. At least at my kindergartner’s school last year, nothing’s really prepared onsite, it’s mostly microwave-in-a-bag fast food (factory made burritos, pizza, 2-ingredient sandwiches). Often this would come with a side of fruit (canned and sweetened) and crackers.
My kid would always bring a lunch from home but often return with it uneaten, because when you pit healthy home cooked food against microwaved pizza and crackers, for a six year old, it’s no contest.
I’m still supportive of the program - if there are starving kids in our community, of course having free options is great, I just wish they’d managed to have a cook onsite so it wouldn’t be so factory-made and artificial.
> Also, you can call the place in advance and just come to pick it up, no wait time
I suspect both the orderer and order-taker are both a bit happier to have orders come in online instead of taking calls. It enables a bit more asynchrony and batching, and removes the potential for miscommunication.
Big advantage of moving food ordering online is that it's gotten rid of trying to read off an order through the phone to someone who barely speaks English, standing next to the phone in a loud kitchen with dishes clinking and people yelling in the background.
