captainperl

Being from the Detroit area, I find many of the comments here naive as one can't compare Detroit to an average urban city.

To understand what Detroit is like, watch a film like "Escape from New York" or a WW2 bombing documentary.

There are areas with no police or fire forces.

Also, the soil around mfg. plants (and downwind) have metal contamination. The air quality used to be worse than anything in China today, with choking curtains of black and red soot and oxides which precipitated into the soil.

So do your homework, get your firearm certifications and spend some time there before any relocation or investment.

It is a great location if you want cheap industrial space or your own truck marshalling yard (true story) and you don't need city services like elementary schools. Check out "Detroit Steel" to see more:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6403968/

One of the most interesting geology articles I've ever read.

> in the US, it’s basically impossible to involuntarily lose citizenship

Over the past 20 years, several laws have been passed that erode proof of citizenship:

- id documents with an expiry date are not usable after that date (expired passports used to be accepted for domestic non-travel uses)

- the Evite database decides whether you can work at many companies

- parish records are sometimes deemed unacceptable as proof of birth, disallowing the reissue of other documents like passports

- some people have duplicate SSNs

- in the past year, a small number of people in both the USA and Canada have been told their original and valid citizenship documents were not valid by Immigration, with the burden of proof on the citizens.

The money is there - $250 million per year for social workers alone in SF and increasing ...

The will to build a single unit of housing for homeless people isn't though.

> I'm now locked out unless I upload a driver's license or passport id to prove my identity.

No, If you wait long enough (12-24 months of inactivity) they'll email you a magic "open sesame" link that bypasses the login screen. No account password or session cookie needed.

There's several interesting things about this:

1) You could modify the "open sesame" link to login as anybody else who is inactive.

2) Your profile will be slightly broken, as they do numerous software updates weekly apparently without migrating inactive account data reliably.

How do I know this? My gf handles 100% of our social media presence, so I just have a FB account for occasional software testing. HTH! :)

> Isnt the point of the certification to be the expert? I'm just a math guy that can read.

Enrolled Agents (EA) are very good on average as tax accountants. Not perfect, but if talk to them mid-reporting period and they'll have heard of new rules.

Beyond that, what you need to know about "professionals":

1) The job of a CPA is to collect their fees.

2) The job of a lawyer is to collect their fees.

3) "Professionals" rank larger entities ahead of individuals in fees and advancement.

> Because as I understand it, the US was largely aloof until Germany started pursuing atomic weapons ...

No. The USA public was isolationist until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Germany stupidly declared war after Pearl Harbor in sympathy with Japan.

The key things to understand about WW2 are:

1) Germany and Japan declared war on a country they couldn't invade because of geography.

In other words, the USA did not have enough deterrence at the time to prevent WW2. [paraphrasing Victor David Hanson]

The B-29 was the ultimate weapon in WW2, not the atomic bomb (which was dropped from a B-29.) So much so that Russia spent vast resources after WW2 copying it down to the last rivet.

2) The USA was already the "arsenal of democracy" a year before Pearl Harbor. Historians regard Pearl Harbor as more of a trap than a victory for the Japanese, which would have required both sinking all of America's carriers plus a successful land invasion of Oahu to end well.

3) All sides thought that bombing the enemy's cities would break their will to fight. As any chess player knows, people will fight to the bitter end with very few exceptions.

BigCGI looks interesting. I signed up for your newsletter.

I'm ambivalent about WW1 since the US didn't do much fighting (too late into the war), and it was mostly trench warfare that wiped out European royalty, not necessarily a bad thing IMO.

But the inter-war years and WW2 are a fascinating epic.

The WW2 European conflict resulted from Germany losing WW1, but not being occupied. The WW2 Pacific conflict resulted from the USA embargoing Japan after they "colonized" Manchuria.

Yeah, I've been following the laundromat saga. If he can't develop a property like that one, then nobody can in SF.

Similarly, you can see a remarkable model airplane collection by Edward Chavez at SFO now. It was sponsored over two decades by the Nut Tree restaurant owner:

https://www.flysfo.com/museum/exhibitions/masterworks-edward...

Same with the Chilean Atacama mine collapse rescue.

The Chilean president gets credit for unwavering support for a rescue, but the American drilling team ultimately was the successful one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiap%C3%B3_mining_accid...

What's interesting is that this is happening in aerodynamics today as students and researchers rediscover on youtube the amazing Shell Oil-sponsored "High Speed Flight" videos from the 1950's - they're like an instant Masters Degree:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bELu-if5ckU

TLDR;

11,000 words of gossip about GE CEO promotions with no insight into the actual business problems.

Makes the authors look like incompetent wannabe "journalists."

Atmospheric disturbance was a major problem for the SDI (Star Wars) project.

They came up with solutions, and no doubt there are more and cheaper solutions today, given advances in materials, computing and astrophoto stacking techniques.

Note that they were able to use off-the-shelf tank infrared detectors ($50,000 each) to detect ICBM launches from space, so I suspect even more cross-pollination 35 years later. For example, fiber optics are orders of magnitude better now.

I believe he was 19 years old.

The reddit post was interesting but not helpful (actionable) for other patients.

In the USA, if you experience the symptoms of a heart attack, you just take a taxi to the emergency ward, walk up to the receptionist and say, "I think I'm having a heart attack."

You will get priority over everybody else, minimal forms, and you don't need insurance to get initial treatment.

If you can think of other reasons for the symptoms, like you went to the gym for the first time the day before and have chest muscle soreness, then you can just sit in the lobby while you sort things out. (Walking up a flight of stairs at the hospital is a good DIY stress test. Some on-call doctors actually ask what entrance you arrived at, and if there's a ramp, they know you're prolly ok if you walked in.)

> this is many orders of magnitude less likely than you getting killed by a meteor strike.

No, a thousandth of a percent = 1/100,000, which is more likely than the meteor or murder scenarios presented.

Also, if "some company" turns out to be Amazon or EMC, then it's not only higher than that, but certainty in some cases.

> There is also the environmental impact to consider. Air travel has a much larger emission profile compared to train travel

I'm not sure that's true.

Heavy locomotives require a lot of fuel, and aircraft turbine engines are fairly efficient these days (airplanes roughly get 1% more efficient per year, compounded annually.)

Railroads also divide the landscape, which has a highly negative impact on wild-life roaming and migration patterns.

For the people reading these postings, I noticed there's some misunderstandings about California HSR ...

1) It's not for transportation. It's a jobs and pension program for appointees. State leaders are willing to spend $100 billion (or more) of taxpayer money for $1 billion of pork.

2) The state cannot even manage Caltrain well, which is only 50 miles long (SF to Gilroy.) There's no way they can manage a route 400 miles long.

3) Domestic airlines do a good job of intra-state travel already.

4) There was never an affordable model for building HSR. It never made any sense financially for California.

5) Residents of Palo Alto and Atherton will sue the state into oblivion if they don't bury the HSR. And the state won't because tunnelling is $2 billion per mile.

> Right to work laws say you have to a right to work or not work.

No, they mean employees have a choice to join a union or not (ie. pay union dues or not.)

In other words, they're a legal tool to weaken unions by reducing their membership and revenue.

Boundary-layer aerodynamics. The head is literally flying on a cushion of air.

> DC motors are multiple times smaller and lighter than the equivalent powered turbine engine when you consider the entire system.

Airplanes this size can use cruise missile engines, which are very light. See the F-5 for more info (7:1 thrust to weight ratio.)

> On top of that you totally eliminate the need for variable pitch props

Why is that? Variable pitch props have nothing to do with engine type. They're variable to be more efficient depending on RPM and speed.

> You also negate a lot of hydraulic systems (and their redundant backups) without the need for things like fuel pumps, thrust reversers,

Not really. A lot of flight controls are boosted with hydraulics, and thrust reversers are for increasing drag (descending faster or slowing down.) None of these depend on engine type.

The real issue with electric planes is that they're a fire hazard. Already people have been killed when their electric plane's battery caught fire mid-air:

https://www.flyingmag.com/two-people-killed-in-first-crash-e...

The JAL 787 battery fire was a near-tragedy and resulted in interruption of service to SJC for 2 months:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_...

I find the most erroneous posts on HN to be about airplanes and databases.

There are several ways to update the root password in MySQL with zero down-time, either by manipulating the user table, using replication, or using other accounts (ie. most people grant excessive privileges to role accounts.)

https://www.percona.com/blog/2014/12/10/reset-mysql-root-pas...

Airplanes always get most of the energy from ascent back in descent.

VTOL will get less back because it's grossly inefficient.

Note that drag needs to be deducted from the potential energy. There's parasitic and induced drag.

> The airport is international - any airport of any size is

If there's no Customs and Immigration services, then it's not really an international airport - you cannot legally fly from a foreign airport and land in a local airport that doesn't have those services in the USA and likely other countries.

Source: pilot

> sounds like you have problems in your org unrelated to vault.

Unfortunately for engineers doing the deployment, Vault magnifies any weaknesses your organization already has. That's the nature of centralized key mgmt.

For example, I know one large company ended up using macros to unseal Vault to solve the key mgmt. problem I mentioned. In other words, the unseal keys are in plain text on the servers.

Probably happening more often than you would initially expect since nobody wants to drive down to the data center.

The remarkable thing with AWS KMS is that it's so seamless - it's idiot-proof compared to a self-hosted distributed system.

Hi Mitchell.

I had to kill a rollout of Vault at one billion dollar (revenue) company for the following reasons:

* the engineers doing the PoC could not/would not document how to operate it in production

* the managers did not take the unsealing responsibility seriously ("I'm in mgmt., don't call me on Sundays again.")

* our network was perceived as flaky.

Some cheap solutions are:

* provide some pre-written runbooks for administering Vault that people can cut-and-paste into their wiki

* provide some diagrams and scenarios for unsealing that can be adopted

* have the Vault server monitor and log network health (latency, bad packets, etc.)

Java used to be Hindu, as evidenced by Borobudur and other monuments.

If you're working in Indonesia and your boss is Muslim and you're not, the fastest way to get ahead is to convert.

That plus other one-way traps reinforces Islam as a dominant religion.

To go into detail why Germany couldn't invade or even annoy the US mainland in WW2, they didn't have a credible navy and never had a strategic bomber fleet.

Hitler started WW2 5 years before the German navy was built-up, and most of their aviation was for close air support.

Even the English Channel ended up being too much.

In summary, both Germany and Japan declared war on a country they couldn't invade, the USA - how futile is that?