curtis

We haven't had the draft since 1973. What's in question is registration for the draft in case we ever decide we should need it again. I think this is largely a moot point, since we're well into the information age, and identifying all American citizens of a draftable age is likely pretty easy whether they are registered or not.

The last paragraph of the article you linked:

>So, yeah. The maximum price-per-vehicle for a Chevy Volt is $250,000 per vehicle — right now — if you make all the most pessimistic assumptions and the government hands over all their grant/subsidy money to companies who don't meet the goals built into the programs.

And this particular article was written in 2011.

I've wondered if you could do something similar for keeping birds from landing on flat elevated surfaces. I wasn't thinking stripes though, more like reflective holographic surfaces so the birds couldn't even identify the flat surface as flat. I'm inclined to believe that the crows would figure it out sooner or later though.

Here's another one: "The Parachute That Saved a Plane", https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/amazing....

This BBC article about Atlantic ferry pilots might also be interesting: "The pilots who risk their lives flying tiny planes over the Atlantic", https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34484972 (HN Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685358).

The Zephyr is using Lithium-Sulfur batteries, which have a better energy-to-weight ratio ("Currently the best Li–S batteries offer specific energies on the order of 500 W·h/kg" according to Wikipedia [1]).

These aren't commercially available though. Twice the performance of currently available automotive batteries is a major advantage for aircraft applications.

Pretty cool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery

It's not at all COTS, but the Rutan Voyager [1] spent 9 days in the air on it's round-the-world flight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager

Can we get rid of recruiters altogether?

Yeah, I know that's an absurd idea, and I don't know any way we could really do that. But we are always going to have problems if we continue to insist on having non-technical people serve as the initial point of contact for technical positions.

I wonder if the increase in serious delinquency is being disproportionately driven by loans to for-profit institutions.

This article addresses the issue directly:

"Student debt a harsh math lesson for US graduates as wages lag" - https://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2018/03/student_deb...

For instance:

> Compared to their peers at other colleges, students attending for-profit institutions -- mostly those classified as inclusive, part-time or two-year -- are falling behind in their debt repayments. Twenty-two percent at for-profit schools were behind on their academic loan payments compared with six percent of students at public institutions, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve.

If you use a rock to smash up a bone to get to the marrow, I wonder if you also get, as a side-effect, a bunch of bone flakes, some of which are sharp enough to be used as a cutting implement. Maybe primitive hominids were smashing bones for sharp flakes before they started flaking rocks to make cutting tools.

A different but related point:

Having a map is not the same thing as knowing the way.

This is one reason why documentation isn't nearly as useful in software development as people think it should be.

The control group was drawn from Jews who were born in Palestine between 1911 and 1945. I think it's likely that this group would likely have been almost entirely Ashkenazi Jews, because there was substantial emigration of European Jews into Palestine prior to World War II.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah.

(It's not relevant to your point, but although Sephardic Jews are not Ashkenazi Jews, not all non-Ashkenazi Jews are Sephardic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews.)

Fecal Transplantation for Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection in Older Adults: A Review - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jgs.12378

Fecal Microbiota Transplantation for Clostridium difficile Infection: A Systematic Review - https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2288521/fecal-microb...

I just cribbed these from the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridioides_difficile_infec... so I don't know if there's better or more recent studies.

> We are cleaving into two nations—one where daily life revolves around the car, and the other where the car is receding in favor of walking, biking, and transit.

Walking, biking, and transit are not actually the same thing, except that they are "not driving". So it's more accurate to say that there are two kinds of commuters, those that take cars and those that don't. There's absolutely nothing new about this though. It's likely true that more people are not driving these days, but that's got more to do with the fact that more of us are living in large cities where it's simply not possible for everyone to drive, and where transit is more practical because of the density.

This notion that at some point in the future there will not be people commuting in cars is just dumb, and kind of tiresome. There's a lot of noise being generated by people who think driving a car is flat out immoral, and I'd contend this isn't a moral issue it's just a practical one, and I really wish it were treated this way.

> It didn't work: there were people who could answer those questions indistinguishably from an exploit developer who nevertheless couldn't write a 1995-era stack overflow exploit if their life depended on it.

Do you think the problem was that they couldn't write that particular kind of code, or was it the more general problem of not being able to code well in general?

It's dumb, but in the past when I felt I was wasting too much time on the internet, I added some entries like this to my /etc/hosts file:

  127.0.0.1	reddit.com
  127.0.0.1	www.reddit.com
  127.0.0.1	m.reddit.com
  127.0.0.1	old.reddit.com

This is such a minor impediment, but I found in practice that it greatly reduced the time I was just fooling around websurfing. I don't think I ever disabled Hacker News, but I've rarely been able to blow multiple hours here, either.

> So you made a commit. What artifacts change as a result? What do you need to rebuild, retest, and redeploy?

If you're using Git, then typically for each push to the remote repository you get a notification with this data in it:

  BRANCH        # the remote branch getting updated
  OLD_COMMIT    # the commit the branch ref was pointing to before the push
  NEW_COMMIT    # the commit the branch ref was pointing to after the push

  # To get the list of files that changed in the push:
  git diff --name-only "$OLD_COMMIT" "$NEW_COMMIT"

Once you know which files changed in a push you can figure out which artifacts you need to build. Right now you'll have to write that tooling yourself since I don't know of any off-the-shelf tools that do it. In my company's case, we have "project.yml" files scattered through the repo telling us which directories have buildable artifacts and what branches each one needs to be built for. The tooling to support this is a few hundred lines of Bash and Python. In our case we're still small enough that we can brute force some stuff, but we can easily improve the tooling as we go along.

My advice is that if components need to release together, then they ought to be in the same repo. I'd probably go further and say that if you just think components might need to release together then they should go in the same repo, because you can in fact pretty easily manage projects with different release schedules from the same repo if you really need to.

On the other hand if you've got a whole bunch of components in different repos which need to release together it suddenly becomes a real pain.

If you've got components that will never need to release together, then of course you can stick them in different repositories. But if you do this and you want to share common code between the repositories then you will need to manage that code with some sort of robust versioning system, and robust versioning systems are hard. Only do something like that when the value is high enough to justify the overhead. If you're in a startup, chances are very good that the value is not high enough.

As a final observation, you can split big repositories into smaller ones quite easily (in Git anyway) but sticking small repositories together into a bigger one is a lot harder. So start out with a monorepo and only split smaller repositories out when it's clear that it really makes sense.

> The garage door is a rather complex place to put them as their are a huge range of styles and you would need to either fit the opening and replace the mechanism, or design a door for each existing type sold. On top of that wiring up solar to your house is the tricky part not putting something on a roof.

I think to be practical you'd need a manufacturing line that could build variable sized doors. Since I'm a software engineer and not a manufacturing engineer I don't know if that's economically feasible or not.

There are clearly plenty of places where it wouldn't make sense. On the other hand, I can easily imagine that there are a million houses in the Great Plains and desert west where trees aren't a big problem.

I've been wondering for a while if vertical solar panels on the sides of buildings might make sense. Today (for no reason that I know of) I started wondering if might even make sense to put panels on parts of a building that don't directly face the sun at all.

That's what lead me to this particular article, which examines the efficiency of putting panels on north facing roofs.

I explored the vertical panel idea in a blog post last year: http://curtisb.posthaven.com/the-solar-garage-door. I don't know if that idea would work, but I was trying to imagine an application of the idea so absurdly simple that a startup could easily use it to bootstrap into a more lucrative market.

Other than housing the cost of living in the Bay Area isn't drastically different than other large metro areas in the US. If you're coming from London, I expect you'll find everything to be cheaper.

Also the climate will be a lot nicer.

Companies should never be responsible for managing the retirement savings of their employees. I can't imagine that this every made any sense, but it's an idea that comes from an era when there were a lot of big stable companies that people believed would be profitable for an entire lifetime. We've now seen ample evidence that such companies are really unusual.

I don't know if this is good or bad or what. But at least it seems like Larry Ellison is someone that will never be intimidated by Elon Musk.

Neither of them are normal, but they're not the same thing. The allegation is that BamBrogan was the target in the noose incident, and there is some security footage which seems to corroborate it. In the axe incident BamBrogan allegedly took the axe to the office wall. That's pretty crazy but so far nobody has claimed he was trying to intimidate somebody else. In this case it's maybe interesting to note that it wasn't just any axe, but rather "The CEO [BamBrogan] had built the axe at Jeff Bezos’ MARS conference this past spring." [1]

The guy definitely seems flamboyant, but that's not the same as unstable. I mean he might be unstable too, but I don't think one can draw that conclusion from the reporting.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/14/18128848/hyperloop-arriv...

I don't know if BamBrogan is an "unstable guy" or not. But I'm not at all sure your summary "who was ousted form Hyperloop one by the whole board and officers" is accurate based on what was reported at the time.

For example, from an article in Wired [1]:

> The lawsuit against Hyperloop One includes a security camera image of a man, apparently Afshin Pishevar, holding rope and walking through the office. BamBrogan allegedly found a noose on his desk after complaining about company operations.

The axe is the only thing that seems weird, everything else you quoted can easily be explained by the fact that they'd failed to secure more funding and had to shut down even though they didn't want to. Many of us on Hacker News have no doubt experienced this kind of situation first hand.

Also I should mention that although Arrivo was started by ex-Hyperloop One people they were definitely not doing a hyperloop system.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/07/hyperloop-lawsuit-brogan-bambr...

> All the articles I've read say people are having less sex.

All the articles I've read say that married people have the most sex. They also say that a smaller proportion of the population is married these days.

Any study that doesn't explicitly account for the above is not going to tell you nearly as much as the headline would lead you to believe.

Geoffrey Landis made a proposal for a polar landing site for the first manned mission to Mars back in the 90s. One of the clear advantages is that you don't need to bring hydrogen with you for the return trip, but instead you can just make it from the ice. Landis proposed the mission for northern hemisphere summer so that solar power would be constantly (or nearly constantly) available. One thing Landis didn't mention but is worth considering is that ice could be used for radiation shielding, either by tunneling into it or by melting it and reforming it into a surface structure.

However, landing on the polar ice cap has some downsides, not least of which is it would be the most boring place on the whole planet to land.

Korolev crater might make a good alternative site since you could conceivably land near a substantial amount of easily accessible water ice while still retaining easy access to terrain that is not ice-covered.

[1] http://www.geoffreylandis.com/pole.html

This article reminded me of Geoffrey Landis's "Polar Landing Site for a First Mars Expedition" [1], which seems like an interesting idea (easy access to water ice has some real benefits) except that the polar ice cap is probably about the most boring place on Mars to land.

Some place like Korolev crater might be a good compromise, with (possibly) easy access to water ice while retaining access to non-ice-covered Mars terrain.

[1] http://www.geoffreylandis.com/pole.html