Recent content by bdh

Unfortunately for CA I think earnest money is typically 3%, and for SF bay area prices that's a big chunk of change. We're just getting started in the process here, so I'm not sure how much is negotiable in this area. People get so many offers on a house so quickly that it wouldn't surprise me...

Right, so just to add some specifics, you still typically get the inspection done between the offer being accepted and closing, but since most houses get 5-10 offers people are now making offers with no contingencies on the inspection just to make their offer more competitive. So, you can still...

I'm fairly handy and not afraid of DIY for a fair amount of stuff, but yeah, stuff like asbestos abatement I'm obviously not going to do. Electrical doesn't bother me for doing a circuit or two, but rewiring house is definitely more time than I want to spend. Yeah, I need to check what's...

Yeah, just to clarify, I'm not planning on quibbling with someone who knows what they're talking about just because I've read about it for a few days on the internet. The big problem here is a lot of houses go from being listed to having a signed contract in under 2 weeks. I think a realtor we...

Hello All, Does anyone have any tips for buying a home without getting an inspection? The Mrs and I are getting ready to look for houses in the San Francisco Bay area, and with the insane housing market here almost everything seems to get sold as-is. There's typically no opportunity to have...

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I've heard lots of good things about Bruges. Probably wouldn't be too hard to make it up there on a weekend...

I'm probably going to be in Leuven, Belgium 1-2 weeks for work towards the end of this month or early Feb. Does anyone have any beer related tips for the area (old/traditional breweries, good bars, local beers not to miss, etc.)? The trip details aren't totally ironed out yet, so I'm not...

Well, ok, we could continue to go back on forth about whether or not we should call the MMSE Baysian with a Gaussian prior since it “approximates” things with just the covariance matrix which is the sufficient statistic of a zero-mean Gaussian, when/how this relates to the MLE or MVUE, what...

I wouldn’t say I’m “confusing” the two problems, but yes, perhaps making the analogy to statistics was not the best one to make as this seems to have spurred a tangent discussion about various statistical estimators (as an aside, the MMSE estimator is Bayesian, so if you’re talking about...

I'd argue the function of interest here being something like the sum of squared errors is more out of mathematical convenience and historical precedent than having much physical meaning for the problem. The squared error is making an inherent statistical assumption that the noise in the model...

Yes, I agree calling the Excel solver is much easier than writing one's own optimization code (assuming the Excel solver can handle things such as non-negativity constraints and the like - I haven't played around with it much). My point was more along the lines that by modern optimization...

The math behind solving optimization problems is way more advanced than what is needed for making automated salt/acid addition calculations. Things like getting as 'close' to a desired ion concentration profile are fairly simple (even taking into account things like requiring all the additions...

I vote for a sticky too - this seems like an obvious sticky candidate.

Here in Baltimore the city 'helps' homeowners with this by just writing up the whole block to make sure there's a big enough job to get a contractor interested: https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2014/11/19/single-complaint-about-a-busted-sidewalk-brings-fines-for-a-whole-block/

If you want feedback from people who've tried similar things you might try asking over in the cheese making forum. This seems to essentially be cheese making with a final step of adding ethanol to the whey to purify the lactose. I don't see a reason for this to be unsafe if you use all food...