aardvark291

My PhD in experimental physics took seven years, which is also the average time to completion in that field.

The discrepancy here may be that "PhD time" in the US usually includes a masters, while it is counted separately elsewhere. That said, even if you break it down, my MS took 2 years and the PhD took another 5.

Life finds a way.

meant to write, "rest of the _civilized_ world". :-)

Germany is my main example ... my German friends were astonished when they visited the US to see our rickety electrical infrastructure (among other things).

This is why the rest of the world has abandoned above-ground power lines in favor of secure underground power lines. Fewer fires, fewer black outs...

Privatize the profits, socialize the losses...?

Does this mean Otto is being shut down?

What is explosive welding?

Can this be summarized as "competition is good for the marketplace"?

> giant SAGE installations at McChord and in Moses Lake

What's that?

> earns enough to buy 100k kcal per day

Calories alone is a pretty limited view of nutrition. Sure, I could drink vegetable oil or eat donuts for every meal...

"________ is not very complex and uses pretty much only textbook data structures and algorithms" is pretty much a false statement for any engineered product.

Suppose your laser-zapper spacecraft is solar powered. The force of the sun on its solar panels is approximately the same as the force imparted by its laser beam on the target garbage.

This is to say nothing of the propellant required to transfer the laser-zapper spacecraft into the same orbit as its target garbage.

>Databases are not very complex and use pretty much only textbook data structures and algorithms

skeptical expression

You're not arguing that it's legal; you're arguing that you're unlikely to get caught. That's different.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969979

> You will have signed an Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement for anything like you mention to be enforceable

Yes, and signing this agreement is a condition of employment.

If your side-project is at all related to your day job, this most likely runs afoul of your employment agreement and IP considerations. Typically, your employer claims ownership of all IP you generate that pertains to your work or its business. For example, if you work at Google, I think it's essentially impossible to simultaneously work on any other side project that you wish to commercialize that will not be owned by Google.

NPR is "publicly funded" in a colloquial sense (pledge drives, etc), but it is not significantly "publicly funded" in the sense of "funded by the government".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding

»During the 1970s and early 1980s, the majority of NPR funding came from the federal government. Steps were taken during the 1980s to completely wean NPR from government support, but the 1983 funding crisis forced the network to make immediate changes. According to CPB, in 2009 11.3% of the aggregate revenues of all public radio broadcasting stations were funded from federal sources, principally through CPB;[37] in 2012 10.9% of the revenues for Public Radio came from federal sources.«

> Scott Meyers ... promptly exited the C++ community

Huh, TIL http://scottmeyers.blogspot.fr/2015/12/good-to-go.html

> 10/20/30/40 vesting schedule

What does this mean?

1990's era "Software Defined Radio" ... sounds like it's running Windows, using CORBA?!

I think there must be a net increase. In Oakland, parking lots are being replaced with mid-rise apartment complexes. There is an impressive amount of construction under way at the moment.

What does this mean? I don't really understand the quote.

I love it for the wonderful, engaging "war stories" and practical approach. It's not as theoretical as CLRS but much more practical, approachable, and readable, making it likely a better choice for most programmers.

It's almost certainly not in the form of elemental mercury (which would be a liquid), but a solid mercury compound.

It turns out that manned space flight capability just isn't very useful.

> Long story short: some people will make a mint. A lot of people will lose their shirts.

Zero. Sum. Game.

I agree that that's how it should work, but I wouldn't be surprised if Coinbase wasn't completely orthodox in their accounting. Replies below indicate that they may indeed be counting customer deposits as "revenue".

> "People have been safely and intelligently using cruise control for... decades?"

More than half a century in mass-market automobiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_control#History

In many ex-soviet bloc countries (e.g. the Baltics) and other countries with sort of 2nd-world level of development (Greece), railroads are terrible (either due to lack of infrastructure of inability of the government to maintain it) but bus service is excellent (easy to rapidly improve road quality with a new government, easy for private companies to spin up bus service).