BurningFrog

There is nothing more abundant than the extra room there is in space!

Earth orbit is more constrained, but it's very far from full. Geostationary orbits are about 20% full, but the rest is practically empty still.

"No it's not" replies and silent downvotes instead of arguments didn't use to be how HN worked.

Sad to see this place becoming a normal web forum.

The message I responded to was about visible light:

"Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?"

The topic is seeing the night sky.

SpaceX is by far the most cost effective way in this world to send things into space.

That is very valuable.

Satellites only reflect sunlight when in sunlight. This only happens near sunrise and sunset.

The night sky will be unaffected by satellites for the foreseeable future.

> Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible

250 years of constant automation has never produced large scale unemployment, despite obsoleting everyone's jobs several times over.

> If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies

We already have at least 5 companies only in the US. Your whole premise is false.

Flood legends are very common among ancient Eurasian cultures.

As the last Ice Age melted away (20k–8k years ago), there were very likely several major floods in the region.

Are you saying we have no evidence that Exodus happened, or that we have real evidence that it did NOT happen?

There would be 5-6 days without time every years?

Do something so you don't lose on time while "typing" the solution!

Adding a second for each letter you type is a crude version.

English is the universal aviation language.

In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.

Completely restructuring society seems so simple to some people.

Typically, people produce about as much as they consume, so a growing population normally sustains itself.

This is one reason to dislike the NASA process of building one huge prestige telescope every few decades.

So... the headline is about performance per dollar per dollar?

> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo

Even if this is true, so what?

Idiots get sick at least as often as others, and the medical system needs to work as well as it can for that population too.

"Poor" is a relative concept!

If everyone gets 10x richer, half the people will still be in the poorer half, and will still feel poor in some sense.

This is surely not the only factor in this story, but it's you need to keep it in mind in these discussions.

You spend that money on defense, not war!

This kind of mind reading could easily become the end of human privacy.

That's bad enough in democracies, but the consequences in more common forms of government seem really dystopian.

In a dictatorship, the money goes to the dictator and his friends.

OP was making a geometric observation.

Doing pair programming well is a skill you have to learn from someone.

Putting two regular programmers together in front of a computer will typically annoy both and not accomplish much.

I was fortunate to learn from experienced people, and I've had very good experiences with it.

The public is always against new technology that makes jobs obsolete.

This is awkward because the immense progress of the last 250 years has mostly come from such technology. Yet few people are aware of this.

I hope we can continue to progress by eliminating jobs, but the current backlash is probably the biggest I've seen in my life.

There are 3 million people working in the US military.

Very few of them ever come close to killing anyone.

Mostly they're white collar workers doing regular desk jobs, where AI is just as useful as in other industries.

Everyone is starting to use AI. I use three AIs daily. Why would the US military be different?

That essay really shook me into understanding things I had never thought of, and I've been better at my job ever since.

I remain grateful to Joel for the insights!

In 2026, test suites can and should handle much of this uncertainty. If Nancy wrote a good test for her fix, we can rewrite and refactor with much less fear and risk.

I think the argument is more that jerf has that skill, experience, and domain expertise.

Around 20% of people have a fear of needles. Around 4% have a clinical phobia, often intense enough to induce fainting.

I suspect a lot of "vaccine skepticism" is just an expression of such needle phobia.

Maybe developing more needle free vaccine delivery mechanisms would solve a lot of this problem. I have much doubt about arguing people out of phobias.