The headphone was a very small analogue receiver that had it's own micro-battery, an inductor and amplifier - all about 4mm wide and 8mm long. You would place it deep inside the ear channel and it was invisible even to a person standing right next to you. The signal was induced by a coil you would wear around you neck and you would pipe raw audio into it.
Personally for theses kind of things I used to use one earphone in my left hand, wearing a long sleeve shirt and laying my head over my left hand, covering the whole operation :)
I’d go on an expedition. Himalayas in April or November. Alaska in the Arctic summer. Or South America in their summer. In 2016, I had a month long sabbatical and spent it in Nepal, which was worth every minute.
I’m not the parent commenter but I recently spent almost a month in Nepal. Most of it was trekking in the Annapurna region. There are “teahouses” along all the trekking routes (some areas have more than others), which are mostly very basic but very cheap. I wasn’t alone but I met many people who were. It’s easy to befriend other people on the same route and stick together for awhile.
Aside from trekking I spent a few days in Pokhara and Kathmandu (Thamel), but much preferred the mountains to the cities.
There is an early project for the .eth TLD to support DNS queries so that you can't point to http. I assume that should work with https too. But the ethereum blockchain can only run dapps.
I'm most excited for the mountaineering / backcountry application in the short term but as critical mass develops in urban areas, there could be an interesting ecosystem that develops around this even without repeater functionality. Anything from people discovery like Tinder to b2c interaction like OrderAhead could build on top of a comm stack like this.
Given the volume of Peninsula-shuttled tech workers living within a mile of 16th and 24th st bart stations, I'm surprised to see those so low. Garbage in, garbage out from census data for transient, high-rental areas like the Mission, Noe, Castro, Bernal, Potrero. Indexing to rental rates in these areas is likely more reflective of wealth (via affordance as a proxy) http://sfist.com/2013/03/07/map_average_rent_for_1br_in_san_.... Awesome visualization though.
Within a mile doesn't matter - the OP is measuring by census tracts, which are quite small. For example, if you zoom in on this [http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map], you'll see that the Mission BARTs' census tracts (201 and 209) extend to only within a couple of blocks from the stations, which seem from my daily commute to be the poorest and most run-down parts of that area. (The tracts are even small enough that there's a separate tract - 208 - for the stretch of Mission between the two BARTs.) While some of the tech workers I know do indeed live between Van Ness, Valencia, Cesar Chavez, and Market, a lot live a few blocks east or west of that line, e.g. on the west side of Valencia, or in the area between Folsom and Potrero.
A side question, though - is there a specific year when the shift of tech workers to SF picked up steam? I'm finding a wave of articles complaining about the Google shuttles in 2012-13 (about when I moved out to SF), but I don't have a good feel for how far along the process was at that point.
Based on rapidly increasing rents over the past 2 years in these neighborhoods, tech worker density has increased a lot. Anyone living in these areas in 2009-2010 will tell you that they'll never break their lease because market rents are 50-150% more than what they're paying due to strict rent controls.
People have been complaining about tech workers in SF for at least 15 years now (since the first boom). It's a standard (if not especially factually supported) gripe at this point.
It's possible that the proliferation of private busing has made it more visible to residents, however. It used to just be everyone drove.
WePay is an agent of The Bancorp Bank (because of laws like these), so they are exempt from most money transmission laws.
On the other hand, FC § 1827 makes it a crime for any entity to aid an organization that would otherwise require a license. So who knows what's going on there.
Do you really believe the correct solution for these problems is to essentially make every financial startup a DBA of HUGE_BANK_X? That's one of the main reasons we don't see any innovation in the banking space where things are desperately underdeveloped.
A benevolent banking startup could do a lot of things to really help consumers, and they could do them EASILY with what we have in place now. They could implement reasonable and sustainable fee structures and they could set account transactions up such that fees are avoided instead of maximized. Big banking wants to keep things right where they are, of course; if they could possibly get a fee out of you based on your account's activity, they are going to do everything possible to make sure that things execute in such a way that that activity occurs: arbitrary holds and delays on checks, manipulation of transaction post orders, intentionally confusing account summaries ("account balance" and "available balance", and sometimes worse), nickel-and-dimed on fees for normal usage ("0.50 analysis fee", "5.00 new card fee", "5.00 maintenance fee", and soon, "5.00 debit card fee"), and many, many other things all collude to create a horrible experience for the end user.
"Front banks" like WePay, Braintree, or others, can't really do much about these processes and have to forward the BS received from the big banks on to their customers. You can create a pretty frontend, like BankSimple, but the reality is that you can't really make much of a change when you're subject to all of the same problems that your end users are already struggling to deal with every day.
I called them after talking to them at a conference. They said that they're not representing any technology companies. I asked about WePay; they said that was an usual exception.
From what I've heard they're totally dysfunctional internally. Also, every time you add a middleman, the price of your product goes up. We can charge 1.5% flat per transaction because there are no middlemen. We run the whole network.
He taught a class at UC Berkeley this past spring. The course was excellent, and he brought in some amazing industry speakers. I wondered the same thing about how he balances.
