- March, 2015
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Dark side of start-up acquisition
Quoting from a news article about a recent startup acquisition in Bangalore:On the very next day after the acquisition, as many as 20 of the firm’s 50 employees got pink slips from the company, according to a report. The people asked to leave were employed in project management, engineering, user interface, testing and marketing. The reason cited by one of the employees was that the company no longer had suitable roles to offer to the employees.
The lay-offs highlight a dark side of the start-up culture in India, where initially high-profile acquisitions grab headlines, but not much is said about what happens after these deals transpire.
- January, 2015
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Your spending power is less than what you think
Your income is not as much as you think it is. Let me show you why using the numbers from the US Census Bureau for Santa Clara county
Median household income (in 2013 dollars) is $91,702 .However, note that this is not the amount that comes into the bank. The employer deducts the federal tax from this. A rough estimate of the income tax would be 27% (standard deductions, no dependents). This leaves $66942.46 .
After the Federal government takes its cut, the state government levies the state tax on the income. For California this would be 8%. This leaves $61587.06 .
Now let us calculate how many hours someone needs to work to get $61587.06 into the bank. A workday is 8 hours. Mean travel time to work in(minutes), is 25 minutes. Let us assume that he/she gets 21 days of vacation. This means that including the commute hours, subtracting vacation hours and assuming 5 days a week, he/she work 2069.55 hours annually.
So, your hourly earning rate is 61587.06/2069.55 = $29.75. Read that again: the median hourly earning rate is $29.75 . If you do not account for the tax cut and the time you spend in commute, you will believe that your hourly earning rate is 46.65 . However, that is not what an employee earns.
Next, let us see how this converts to buying power. Suppose someone with median income wants to buy shoes with a sticker price $100. The sales tax in California is 8%. What this means is that he/she end up spending $108 on the shoes. To earn $108 , this person needs to work for 3.6 hours.
I have made a spreadsheet to make this calculation easier. . If you want to figure out your spending power, create a copy of the spreadsheet and fill in the cells with numbers that apply to you.
Some ballpark numbers (for California):
- if your annual income is $50,000 , you need to work 6.7 hours to spend $100
- if your annual income is $100,000, you need to work 3.3 hours to spend $100
- November, 2014
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Faster setup of virtualenv with devpi
Setting up the virtualenv can take a significant amount of time because it pulls down packages from PyPI. I was surprised that it does not try to use the locally installed packages. One way to speed up the rebuild is to use a local caching mirror of PyPI. This can be accomplished by using devpi.
Step 1: Install
devpipackagesudo pip install devpi
Step 2: Add the following lines in your
/root/.pip/pip.conffile[global] index-url = http://localhost:3141/root/pypi/+simple/ extra-index-url = https://pypi.python.org/simple/
From now on, pip will first try to get the package from devpi-server running on your localhost first and if you do not have devpi-server running, will fallback to pypi.python.org .
Step 3: Start the devpi-server on your localhost:
devpi-server. Try installing a few packages or build avirtualenv. The commanddevpi-server -startwill start the server and put it in background.TODO - figure out how to start this from init.
- October, 2014
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which fonts should I use in my browser in Debian
Short answer : Verdana
To install Verdana, do
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installerand set it as the default font in your browser. - September, 2014
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gaslighting
In 1938, a London stage play told the story of a husband who drove his wife insane. In order to convince the wife that her own brain had become an unreliable narrator, the husband dimmed the gaslights in their home and told the wife she imagined the change. The play gave rise to the term “gaslighting,” : "a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making him/her doubt his/her own memory and perception". The name of the play was Gas Light - May, 2013
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They’re our servants, tools
"You can see that our real problem is another thing entirely. The machines only do figuring for us in a few minutes that eventually we could do for our own selves. They’re our servants, tools. Not some sort of gods in a temple which we go and pray to. Not oracles who can see into the future for us. They don’t see into the future. They only make statistical predictions—not prophecies. There’s a big difference there, but Reinhart doesn’t understand it. Reinhart and his kind have made such things as the SRB machines into gods. But I have no gods. At least, not any I can see."
- September, 2012
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note to self - emergent behavior
An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. How does it apply to distributed systems?
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