CrankyPants

She really isn't. Her efforts at Google, especially as time went on, were increasingly mediocre, and at Yahoo she's proven to be little different.

What she has going in her favor is that Yahoo was mismanaged to an utterly stunning degree before her time. I don't doubt that a more sensible approach is going to do net-good things for them.

But there's just no way she's going to be included in the same chapter of history as the other names given.

Perhaps better than mainstream, ad-supported commercial counter, but that's hardly the gold standard. "Not as terrible as those who go whoring for ad dollars" isn't a ringing endorsement.

State-funded is not terribly far off, either: if funding depends to any real degree on the political climate, then the conflicts are unavoidable.

The line between state-owned and state-controlled is incredibly thin, and is only one catastrophe away from being wiped out.

Google literally has one product that keeps nearly all of their lights on.

They're far more vulnerable than most people think.

Sorry if I wasn't clear: my comment wasn't intended to be seen as a commentary on serious journalism, nor was it a commentary on the quality of journalism practiced by the subjects of the article, etc.

It was a commentary on Americans' perpetual Chicken Little mindset, and the way that feeds and funds a theatrical press, and the circular nature thereof. Everything is portrayed as being impending doom incarnate, whether it's by news outlets, marketers, religious coalitions, irreligious coalitions, etc.

America has over a fifth of the world's economy, the most military might in history and therefore control of the waterways the world over, the best breadbasket-and-navigable-rivers combination on earth, and yet every few days there's some new bogeyman around the corner that will end The Republic in a fortnight–especially if you change the channel now!–as if the winds aren't currently about as fair and the seas as following as they could reasonably be.

The Shutdown really didn't threaten any of those things in any practical terms, nor did the Boston Marathon bomber, nor did Aurora, nor did Anna Nicole Smith's offspring's paternity or whatever staged shock was programmed for the latest awards show.

Investigative journalism is wonderful. Enabling the emotionally manipulative theatrical tactics of any political entity is not investigative journalism; it's being the press arm of politicians (without even invoicing them for the help), which many, many news sources-of all stripes–are more than happy to do. Yet strangely, they continue to be held in esteem, mostly because they've always been held in esteem. (It gets worse when one's own team is the basis for most of that esteem.)

If journalists want to change the world for the better through journalism, as opposed to just maximizing ad rates and helping get their team elected, then they will only do so if they're more interested in being journalists than they are in making any particular argument, or seeing any particular outcome.

But how anyone can look at this endlessly breathless coverage of every last thing that bleeds, blows up, or politicks, and not see how utterly contrived most of it is, is beyond me.

Will it come in black? 700c?

There was virtually no possibility of default. It was theater, and the more people bought into the idea of default, the more it fed into the narrative.

It improved both mechanical and aero grip at the same time, but the primary purpose, as per Toyota's senior chassis engineer, was to be able to stabilize the aero platform, specifically around pitch. Which makes sense: same reason active suspension came into being, even at the expensive of grip. Aero gains are more productive, on balance, than mechanical grip gains, at least in Formula 1.

It was moveable ballast, plain and simple. In its early guise, was totally unconnected from the suspension. So that's a pretty easy distinction to make vs. springs/dampers/anti-roll bars.

It's been two to three years away for about ten to fifteen years now.

You're right, but just don't expect it to be there in two to three years.

I know it'll sound like I'm just coming at the same thing from the other side, but the purpose of the mass damper was not to allow for more compliant suspension, but to stabilize the aero platform.

And the way the regs were written at the time, "any specific part ofthe car influencing its aerodynamic performance must be rigidly secured to the entirely sprung part of the car (rigidly secured means not having any degree of freedom)," and "must remain immobile in relation to the sprung part of the car".

The regulators fully understood its benefit–as did McLaren, Ferrari, Toro Rosso, Honda, and Midland, who were all testing their own versions of that system–but it's hard to see how a moving weight strapped to the sprung part of the car in order to improve the aero platform is anything but illegal.

Eh, it's been covered by the BBC (by the astute and experienced Gary Anderson), by Racecar Engineering, a highly respected publication, among others. Hardly forums and low-end 'blogs.

The Wired article, while to be commended for bringing the appeal of the technical challenges of Formula 1, demonstrates a shallow and incomplete understanding of the issues at play, unfortunately. It's unsurprising, but a little disappointing.

Organized crime has anything but "all but mysteriously disappeared". Not sure what your point is.

Jobs created in third-world countries by globalization are sometimes preferable to the local alternatives. It isn't a given that they're inherently worse.

Having lived as a volunteer in some pretty poor places, I've seen it firsthand. Not saying that's true everywhere, or in every situation, or that there aren't terrible abuses, just that the world is considerably less black-and-white than we sometimes think.

I've never understood why it's totally noble for an individual to take pride in his own ability to craft something nice by virtue of his skill and experience, yet when the US (not so much other nations) does this on a business, institutional, or otherwise collective level, someone invariably comes out of the woodwork to criticize it.

Edit: Way to prove me wrong!

This seems to be his point:

> More consenting adults being arrested for consenting.

The "consenting adults" argument is tough to make when hits are being put out.

You do realize he (allegedly) paid to have someone killed, right?

Relative to the air it's flying through, yes. Relative to the ground? Not so much. And that's what matters most when transitioning from or to being a ground vehicle (takeoff/landing).

That a story is about one political topic doesn't really seem to justify bringing up a fairly tangential political topic, and certainly not in that fashion.

Yeah, the basic income is tough because it doesn't address all of the elements that discourage self-improvement, but it does address some.

I'd be curious to see what the net decrease/increase in costs would be if the US wiped out the vast majority of assistance programs and switched over to a basic income. After that, someone would need to take a stab at seeing what the net increase/decrease is from the change in incentives and general societal structure.

The existence of controls doesn't necessarily equate to effectiveness.

Pair ineffective cost controls with a massive, complex, bloated, ineffective framework, and it doesn't seem to follow that the result is by inspection necessarily better than the status quo. Nor was my conclusion on costs, therefore, a complete non-squitur.

And since when is marginally bettering a fairly lousy status quo somehow laudable? That's a remarkably disappointing outlook.

Many Republicans hate it because their team lost, which is a poor reason to hate a bill, but just as poor–and perhaps more insidious–is that many Democrats cheer its passage, while knowing very little about it. Because their team won.

We've seen that story played out time and time again, in both parties, on myriad issues.

We really, really can do better than that, on all sides.

Which sounds awfully different from saying that poor people shouldn't get subsidies.

But, since you bring it up, why should or shouldn't healthcare be coupled to employment? One could argue it's the cause for much of the trouble we're in, with a lack of portability, increasing costs (same reason sports seats have become prohibitively expensive for many individuals), so what's inherently evil about employers admitting that increased labor costs will almost necessarily impact their hiring?

For that matter, why is or isn't a medical device tax the best way of funding those subsidies?

Those are the kinds of things that we could be discussing–tho probably not as comments to this particular article article–not doing what you are.

To be specific, you're preemptively ascribing the worst possible motives to anyone who disagrees with you on a pretty charged political issue, in a fairly off-topic quip in response to nobody, which is a pretty bad way of raising the level of debate. Debate the issues if you want, but your original comment is going to be difficult for you to justify as anything but partisan politics.

People who disagree with you may not be inherently evil. Hard to believe, sometimes, but no matter what side of an argument you're on, it's not a very productive or proper default assumption. Assuming bad faith won't help anyone, whatever the side of almost whatever the issue.

Its cost controls are weak, at best. There's no way the country will come out the other side of this with cheaper healthcare.

There will be, of course, (truly) great stories about people who were suffering because of the evil practice of dropping customers from coverage when they get sick, and their finally getting the treatment their agreement with the insurance company should have entitled them to, but the total costs, and the costs for nearly everyone, will increase considerably, and some nice examples aside, it's unlikely to improve the quality of care, either.

It's a bad bill. We didn't have a good bill on the table, either–the whole system is fundamentally flawed–but it's a bad bill, functionally speaking. Whether it's really Romneycare, Obamacare, Heritagecare, etc., is irrelevant–it's a horrible system, and people who spend a good amount of their day trying to optimize things really surprise me when they don't acknowledge its numerous and deep flaws.

It's a post heavily implying that motives for opposing the PPACA–also known as Obamacare–have to do with wanting to harm poor people.

That's highly political, quite partisan, and well-beneath the standard to which we should hold each other, regardless of whether or not we agree or disagree with his stated politics.

Meh, it's your view. There are plenty of people who oppose PPACA for reasons besides trying to stop poor people from receiving subsidies on their health insurance.

I think he's being ironic.

SAR wasn't dispatched.

Right, so: like he said.

Blue-sky concepts which even the inventor himself doesn't want a piece of aside, I don't think the scramjet qualifies as air transportation, unless transporting an unmanned aircraft counts.

You know, he's not being entirely unreasonable.

When one considers that publications have people whose job it is to try to write link-baity titles, it doesn't always make sense for HN submissions to use the article's title.

Consider: it's not infrequent that writers loathe the cotton-candy bait their articles are given.

Well, that Myriam dude's going to be upset.

Agreed, but there's a way to do it and there's a way to do it.

There's a world of difference between: "Don't leave your equipment unattended, boys and girls" and "heads-up: we've had stuff go missing in the past."

Because this is HN and we're all expected to apologize for being anything but categorically dismissive of religion.