Realizing that I can keep running notes has been a great productivity hack for me. I have long been a heavy note taker but struggled at how to best tie them all together.

Something like a spark file, or a single evernote file for interesting data points that come up in a project has made this a lot better. Sure it may take time to read through, but I know where everything is now and it doesn't require some complex tagging or filing strategy.

I’ve used podswap for my Gen 1 AirPods and it was fantastic. It took a couple cycles for everything to be back to normal (full charge, full volume) but they were up front that it takes a few recharges for everything to settle in.

Absolutely no complaints.

I understand how full charge might have an adjustment period, but how is volume affected?

Higher volumes require more current, the circuit probably limits what it pulls from the cell until it has learned about it to avoid damaging it.

Can you explain why this is the case? Why would it take a couple of cycles for everything to return to normal if it's just a straight battery swap?

Honest question, would a 3 year time-to-failure be considered imminent?

Consider the de Soto bridge in Memphis, TN, the one that carries the I-40 over the Mississippi. A crack in a main truss was found earlier the year during a scheduled inspection, and the bridge was closed immediately. Some guy on a holiday took photos in 2016, and the crack was visible then: https://www.wmcactionnews5.com/2021/05/18/photos-show-i-brid...

So - yes, things hold up until they suddenly fall over.

We bought a Zinus mattress recently. $260 for a queen size and pretty great so far.

My kid sleeps on one, while I sleep on a Casper, so I can compare side by side. They're more or less the same thing for all intents and purposes, except Zinus is 1/4th the price.

Yeah this is the one I had. I would guess the product is very similar to Casper

Those are probably books from Academic Library partners, since they tend to have the rarest and most valuable stock.

Every book that comes in gets scanned and assessed to one of a few possible streams: - List for sale across all markets - Donation (too many of that title in inventory, desired by one of the specific literacy partners) - Recycling (too many of that title in inventory, not desired by literacy partner, or condition too poor) - ARC Books

That last business line is the Antiquarian, Rare, and Collectible group. These books are diverted to a team of people whose sole job is to manually price these books and work with rare book dealers as well as some of the more high-end marketplaces to move them. This went for more than books as well, as sometimes there were interesting related pieces that came in the door.

Also, fwiw, when I was there any book like this that sold for > $500 had a whole separate commission structure where at least half of the sale price would go to the group that sourced the book. So if an academic library sent a book from the early 1800's, and that sold for $15,000, they library would get $7,500 back.

As a prior BWB employee (with no equity or outcome from this sale) I'm happy to respond to some of these concerns.

"Very much enriched the owners" is quite a stretch. Especially considering pretty much every equity holder was wiped out ~5 years ago when they had to raise money to stay in business.

The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco. Before that he lived in a townhome in suburban Atlanta. This business is not and never has thrown off cash. At best they've made as much money in profit as they've donated, in cash, to literacy causes over the life of the business.

A "very small percentage" donated to charity is up for debate based on everyone's belief of what that means, but all charity payments were made as a percentage of net sales revenue, which was essentially the money that came in from any sale. The only cost that was subtracted out was marketplace fees when selling on Amazon, ebay, etc. Sales percentage back to the book sources (academic and public libraries) and non-profit partners (on all sales from all sources) were paid out before shipping costs were even accounted for.

"Their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity" is not true. Drop box books accounted for < 10% of all books sourced and even less than that of revenue since those books are typically the lowest quality stream (slightly better title mix than thrift purchases, but much higher logistics cost and risk of spoilage). The business is almost entirely dependent on public and academic library partnerships.

There were many, MANY monthly all hands meetings we sat in where the business lost money but wrote 6 or 7 figure checks to literacy partners. Donations were not a function of making money.

BWB was a great company full of people who truly cared about the mission. Some people did well, but nobody got rich off this business. If they didn't move most of the corporate activity out of Atlanta and up to Indiana I would still have been happy to keep working there.

>The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco.

So your evidence that one of the founders didn't make a lot of money is that he owns a million dollar home in central indiana? A $1m home in the midwest is going to be very, very nice and probably an order of magnitude more expensive than the average home in the area ($148k in Indiana).

But that is good to hear that they really are donating money. Because their huge "Donate books here" boxes are very misleading.

Do you know any one at Jenson Books or who the owner might be :) That's the biggest mystery from my entire time selling books on Amazon. They're by far and away the most frustrating seller in the marketplace.

I truly despise them. They can't POSSIBLY make money on so much of their inventory without lower negotiated FBA rates from Amazon. It's not just a few like with BWB, but over 75% of their inventory seems entirely unreasonable to sell at their market price.

I am always sad to see responses like this. Statistics is a very well-defined mathematical discipline, and any good research firm will use weighting techniques to adjust for demographic-based likelihood of response. The results they get from this are very accurate.

If you have concerns about Edison's methodology or application of standard survey weighting then I think that could be a fruitful conversation. But implying that 1,500 responses can't be predictive for a country of 350 million is woefully misinformed.

Phone surveys were accurate when robocalls and cellphones didn't exist. Now you're only sampling the people who aren't discerning enough to reject unknown numbers.

Having concerns about their methodology would imply that they've actually shared it. The closest they get is a hand-wavy answer to the discrepancies between Facebook's data and their own:

> We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, “Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?”

That answer doesn't event make sense. Given that Edison have gone to the press to promote their report and this particular number, you'd expect them to have a good answer on the discrepancies. They should definitely know what the Facebook numbers represent, especially given Facebook publicly disclose their definition of an active user in SEC filings.

Fair. I do commonly do social statistics myself and have to deal with worse. My gripe was moreso that it's a random digit dialing survey (which I think would be full of bias for a purpose like this) instead of the actual usage statistics that facebook provides. Also, sampling is simply a hard thing to do. And their definition of leaving is pretty poor.

Also if we want to get nitpicky, while there is a significant drop between 2017 and 2018, there is no significant drop between 2019 and 2018 (62% -> 61%, p value of .57), despite the headline being 'Facebook Usage Continues to Drop' :)

Also, any methodology problems can be mitigated by the fact that they did the same survey with the same methodology in 2017, and compared their results. You expect to get better accuracy by asking people then and now "do you use Facebook?" than by asking them now "do you use Facebook, and did you use it two years ago?"

That's because Tesla has a ridiculous valuation.

Market cap isn't a measure of the resources a company has at its disposal.

GitHub has something like 75 million repositories. GitLab seeing a spike of ~40k repos being imported so far would need to continue for 5 years to match GitHub's current scale.

So does Sam denounce the previous actions of YC banning companies who supported SOPA from demo day?

Either YC is an organization that takes political stands or it's not.

I think those organizations were wrong to support SOPA, and it was wrong for us to say we wouldn't invite them to Demo Day.

Thanks for the honest reply. I think that helps some of us square the circle on why you felt so strongly about not cutting ties.

It does a lot to make sure this doesn't come off as "YC won't take a stand on political actors unless it directly affects almost all of our founders."