In the U.S., many credit cards bundle short term credit, rewards, travel benefits, insurance etc. This bundling is why merchants can pay up to 2-3% in fees.

The payment clearance and settlement parts are much cheaper. That's why many countries are able to build domestic payment rails (e.g. Pix in Brazil) that process transactions at low cost.

XeLaTeX: https://nullpaste.org/mcKAFOqJmbZv

PDF output: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rfaio8a6pgem98fy8cxzb/princip...

I've moved to Codex 5.6-Sol. Much saner English, much better at execution, and gets stuff done in a matter-of-factly kind of way (Claude Code is a mess these days -- it gets things wrong and goes around in circles).

But I'm harness agnostic and am not locked in. I just keep my issues in Kata Tracker (https://www.katatracker.com/) and switch harnesses/model when I need to.

Being loyal to a particular model/harness seem unwise to me.

There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp.

I’ve learned that US usage patterns are not representative of rest of world.

More saliently, HN users’ conception of others’ usage patterns are absolutely not representative.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49453739

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I also ate canned snails which were also affordable (CAD1.99 per can if I remember correctly).

I also have a writing steering file that makes Opus’ writing less insufferable. Otherwise it’s really bad.

I also have an interlocutor skill that makes it less epistemically arrogant (ie Less Wrong asshole tendencies). With this skill I can have a real discussion with it instead of it trying to one up me.

I didn't actually want to leave, but I was staring at the prospect of not unemployment, but underemployment.

Canadian industry doesn't really that many companies that can absorb Ph.Ds. It's not a money issue -- I was willing to accept Canadian pay. This was ca 2010s, and there were very few homegrown Canadian companies that had enough scale to need high level R&D (this was before Shopify and the rest). It was either you did your own startup and found your own funding or you worked entry level engineering jobs doing things like testing or audit work.

All the design and original engineering work happened at HQ in the US or Europe -- the Canadian office is usually just a branch office.

In the US, it's analogous to Chicago offices of big tech firms. They're just marketing and sales offices -- the real engineering work happened on the coasts (SF/Seattle or NYC).

So I reluctantly left Canada for a US company that although not famous, had a global footprint. Whatever I worked on immediatley had global impact because engineering was done in the US office and replicated worldwide. I learned a lot about how to operate at scale and over international markets.

Canada is a small country that has an education system that punches above its weight -- Canadian schools are excellent. But it has an industry that unfortunately doesn't. Somehow Canada has tried and failed a few times, with Nortel, with Blackberry, etc. to develop champions. Something is preventing Canadian companies from scaling. Even far smaller countries like Sweden have companies that are global (IKEA, Saab, Volvo etc), so I'm not sure why we can't do it too.

Maybe the old saying that Canadians are "hewers of wood and drawers of water" has some truth -- it's easier to extract resources than to compete on differentiated product.

I profile sql performance and LLMs find more opportunities than I could. All it takes is real data, a sql repl and an agent. Just ask the agent to use the repl to EXPLAIN and profile the sql. It works amazingly most of the time.

Here are some cases:

You can get food for under $10 at many casual NYC restaurants -- if you just order an appetizer.

Also a snack is not a meal. For instance, I noticed a Salted Egg Yolk Bun in NYC for $1.50. But that's not really a meal (unless you get 4 of them). https://cheapfoodmap.com/spot/golden-steamer-new-york-ny

The average check price in NYC Chinatown can easily be under $10 if you get the right combination of appetizers/snacks.

Furthermore there are places where you can get food by the pound. Technically you can get a prepared meal at Whole Foods ($12.99/lb salad bar) if you get it just under 0.76 lbs. If you're light eater, then every Whole Foods in the country qualifies as cheap eats. Then the map will be saturated.

  Counterexample to Jacobian conjecture:

  ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)

"As written, this is an explicit counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture. I checked it using exact symbolic algebra.

I do not see an algebraic catch in what you typed. Unless a term or exponent differs from the intended expression, it appears to disprove the conjecture. This deserves serious independent checking rather than casual dismissal."

Waiting for someone to write the Lean proof.

IBM is already not the best at making strategic calls. I can't imagine them being saddled with DRAM business with its repeated busts.

There is graveyard of DRAM companies that never made it.

But it has been dormant for years and early attempts at syncing didn’t work well. I paid to support the sync effort but we saw nothing for years. That’s a painfully long time.

But Seattle does have very low social wattage.

p.s. I should clarify about Lynnwood since this is contentious for folks. For me, Lynnwood produced more social collisions that I care about than Seattle does. It had a lot of immigrant businesses, actually good restaurants, bookshops, hobby shops, etc. where people lingered, even though it's true you have to drive everywhere. It doesn't have urbanity, but it produced more lived energy than an actual urban place like Seattle did.

I also used "suburban" in two senses: physically suburban versus socially suburban. Lynnwood is physically suburban. But Seattle felt socially suburban: private, subdued and short on spontaneous public life -- at least to me (as someone who doesn't drink). An actual suburb like Lynnwood felt less socially suburban to me, with its late night cafes and things to do.

Same with Ballard. It's a fairly quiet part of Seattle, but the social collisions there were somehow better than say SLU.

Liking Ballard doesn't mean I endorse its energy. Ballard is one of the quietest parts of the city (the Nordic Museum is there), but people were also the chattiest, which is why I liked it. It provided a brief respite from the Seattle Freeze.

Ha, those writers don't live in Seattle full time. They're only visiting.

Seattle has trappings of a city, but socially it doesn't feel like one in the way Chicago and NYC are (ok they're bigger, but hear me out -- it's not the size, it's the people). To me, Seattle feels like Cleveland but with more money.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I would visit different neighborhoods from Capitol Hill to ID to Northgate to Ballard (I liked Ballard the most) almost every weekend, and everything just felt so subdued compared to a city that is truly alive. I had to take trips to Vancouver -- a similar city but more alive -- just to get my dose of city energy. Even Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy.

The city itself has too much monoculture -- predominantly tech bros or hipsters or nature people -- but that's not enough diversity to create true energy.

The food scene was uniquely mediocre relative to its wealth and size. It had pockets of good stuff, but overall just very little risk-taking and experimentation in the restaurant industry because of the economics (min wage is $21.30 which is fair to workers but hard for small business owners) and insufficient population density to turn tables at a high rate (the land is fragmented by water and mixed elevation), and high proportion of food-as-fuel population.

Seattle attracts who it attracts because of what it is -- introverted, nature loving, affluent in a countercultural way. But this does not create a vibrant city.

Seattle's social energy resembles that of a paradoxical population who want to live in a city but are secretly suburban people.

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/satellit...

But I also think that focusing on residential internet as the only market might be thinking too small.

There's aviation, maritime, defense, telecom/enterprise backhaul, remote industrial (oil rigs, mines, etc.), and those guys are are not paying $135/month.

This might unlock new applications, like remote sensors and autonomous devices that are out of coverage areas today.

John Deere's farming equipment for instance is already on Starlink, and those things are basically computers on wheels.

The only issue is that satellite internet needs line of sight to the sky. Underground/undersea applicatons are basically out.

We're talking to strangers at the bus stop, at the grocery check out, or just wherever. It's just phatic conversation, nothing needs to come of it. Chicagoans aren't just friendly, they actually love the art of the conversation -- every conversation is a chance to put in the reps.

But the minute you step into the suburbs, this habit disappears.