curtis

The reason why China is spending a lot more on infrastructure than the U.S. is because they didn't have a lot of infrastructure to begin with and if they want some they have to build it.

The U.S. already has most (not all) of the infrastructure we need. A lot of what we need to build is to replace existing infrastructure which is getting old but technically still works.

Comparing Chinese to American infrastructure spend is comparing apples to oranges.

Furthermore, if you want to look at where America is wasting money, compare the percentage of GDP Canada spends on healthcare to the percentage the U.S. spends. The difference is likely larger than the 5% or so of GDP we've been spending on defense.

And keep in mind that most of U.S. spending on defense isn't warfare, it really is defense, partly because we have obligations to defend other countries, some of which might be at substantial risk right now (We have no obligation to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, but we most definitely have an obligation to defend Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).

I don't know if a re-usable Electron will ever make sense, but it's an interesting engineering problem to think about.

As lithium-ion batteries improve the potential mass fraction for each Electron stage gets better: lighter batteries mean more propellant. In a decade (maybe sooner) it might become feasible for the first stage to retain enough propellant for a propulsive landing like the Falcon 9. And in this case I think there's a big pay-off with the electric pumps: there's no need for a hoverslam, since the engines should be able to deep throttle to an extreme degree that's not practical with conventional rocket engines.

In a shorter time-frame the Electron first stage, because it is so small, is probably air-recoverable using the same approach that ULA is considering for recovering Vulcan engines.

I'm not certain that the title does the article justice.

The advice the author received was:

> In the future, stay the Hell out of other people's code.

However, the author goes on to reject this advice and gives some alternative advice instead.

Even if this is a good idea, it seems like a slider is the wrong way to control it.

You really only have a few discrete levels, and as a reader you probably always want to be able to tell which level you're at. So maybe some radiobutton like UI that's anchored to the window.

I think "High-tech jackal-dogs" would make a better submission title. It's used in the article as a section title and it seems like it better represents the content.

> Despite its intense temperature, the peak power generating density of the core overall is similar to an active compost heap...

I've seen this comparison before and it also seemed quite surprising to me. But in hindsight maybe it shouldn't: The sun is already billions of years old and it hasn't burned out yet.

Another way to think of it: A larger compost pile has to radiate more heat out of the same surface area as a smaller heap because of the Square–cube law [1]. Now imagine a compost heap more than 800,000 miles in diameter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

This article has a lot more information about the Sulimov dog: https://www.rbth.com/longreads/jackals/

One thing to keep in mind is that there is a big difference between Indian developers who work for outsourcing firms in India and Indian developers who work directly for American firms here in the States.

I've personally worked with a lot of great Indian developers (H1Bs, naturalized U.S. citizens, and native born U.S. citizens). I've never worked with an Indian outsourcing firm, but I've also never heard anything good about them from people who have.

> In the end, the sci-fi trappings of our love story are irrelevant: ...

Just before I got to this paragraph I was thinking how this article could have been a science fiction short story similar to ones I'd read back in the 80s or 90s.

I'm still waiting for my flying car, but we may be living in the future after all.

The title (currently "1st anthropologist to visit says Sentinelese aren't hostile") isn't going to sound right to anyone who is familiar with the most recent news. What he's saying, however, is that they're not friendly, but in the contact attempts he was involved with the Sentinelese repeatedly warned the contact teams away, but never resorted to violence.

> ... you are more out of touch than the president telling us we need to "rake the forest floor". I don't want to come down too hard on someone proposing an idea in good faith, ...

I think this is a terrible response. If you want to disagree with me I think you can do it without being a jerk.

I know people on Hacker News have no love for multi-level concrete parking garages, but it seems to me that such structures could easily be engineered to withstand the effects of a fire like this one. This way residents could shelter in place, or at least shelter "nearby", in the event of similar massive, fast-moving fires.

If you built structures like this in most every neighborhood, well, I guess they'd be big eyesores, but then, on the other hand, you could get rid of a bunch of on street parking.

The film is a straight up criticism of fascism and authoritarianism, but it's not a criticism of the book because Verhoeven only ever read one or two chapters of the book.

The article at The Hollywood Reporter is better: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/stan-lee-marvel-comic....

They're boosters, they can boost themselves, so it seems like you could make them delta-V neutral.

Atlas V regularly launches with solid fuel boosters which are much larger and more powerful than an Electron, so it seems like there's no fundamental reason it wouldn't work. The economics is a different story, of course.

Atlas V is slated to be replaced by Vulcan sometime in the next few years anyway. Vulcan has a re-use story, but it involves only re-using the engines, not the entire stage. Full stage re-use like Falcon 9 has the same problem as Atlas V, there's no way you could deep throttle the main engines enough to land an empty stage.

It seems unlikely that anybody (most especially ULA who are very conservative) will turn Electrons into bolt-on boosters for an existing stage design. But integrating small electrically pumped rocket engines into a new design might be considered a lot less risky. Especially with SpaceX having fundamentally changed the economics of the heavy launch business.

I can't help but wonder if there are some interesting applications for electrically pumped rocket engines beyond just the small satellite market. For example, could you attach 3 or 4 Electron-derived boosters to an Atlas V first stage and use them to land it like a Falcon 9?

I found this part particularly interesting:

> By morning, he had deciphered a complete, previously unknown Arabian zodiac. “We’d thought that they were place names, and, in a way, they were,” he told me. “They were places in the sky.”

> But by the time a candidate is passed a phone screen that’s a validated lead. A company that was really desperate to hire wouldn’t treat validated leads so poorly.

They certainly shouldn't treat validated leads poorly, but we've seen ample evidence that they often do. Part of the problem may be (I'm less sure about this part) is that it is essentially the same people -- and same organization -- managing the overall hiring process through all stages of the funnel. They start with a shotgun process and they keep using a shotgun process in later stages when they absolutely shouldn't be.

It's better if you've got a prospective hiring manager inside the company that wants to hire you and is keeping an eye on the overall process -- this is what often happens whey you're recruited by employee referral. However, this just isn't an option at places like Google (and I think Facebook and Amazon as well) where you get hired into a global pool rather than hired into a specific team.

There's one specific problem with tech hiring that generally doesn't get a mention and maybe should: HR hiring staff apparently has a really high rate of turnover, especially among contract sourcers and recruiters (and it seems like many of these people are contractors).

One really easy way to get ghosted during the recruiting process is if your primary handler quits, gets fired, or just doesn't get their contract renewed.

I don't think this is the primary problem with tech hiring, but it might be a quite significant secondary problem.

> That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce.

The thing that is not scarce from the recruiters' view is applicants or maybe even resumes. This is because anyone looking for a job can easily, due to the magic of the internet, apply at dozens or even hundreds of jobs. And applicants don't even have to apply for jobs any more. If you're on LinkedIn, they can come looking for you, and again, due to the magic of the internet, there are plenty of possible people to consider for a job.

So instead of artificial scarcity we have artificial abundance.

This problem seems to be analogous to the online dating problem. Technology has made one part of the problem far too easy and this causes big problems in other parts of the pipeline.

Centauri Dreams can be highly speculative at times but it definitely does not do clickbait.

Note that the title on that article is actually "‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails". I suppose it might have been different when submitter submitted it, but that seems unlikely.

Having now read the whole Wikipedia article I can say it was way more interesting than I expected at first.

I'm skeptical about the idea of dropping astronauts into the Venusian atmosphere and then trying to get them out again. On the other hand I think maybe you could make a case for a manned Venus flyby mission. This would allow for teleoperated robots on the surface with relatively minimal latency over, say, a few days. This is good because you maximize rover effectiveness over the short period of time before the coolant runs out.

A flyby mission would only take something like 15 months which puts it within the maximum limit for astronauts to be in zero-gee. This would make a flyby mission much safer than a Mars mission because it's a lot shorter and doesn't even presume to make a landing (floating?). It might serve as a decent intermediate step between lunar missions and Mars missions.

Of course I'm personally looking for any good excuse to do any kind of manned mission that would get us out of low earth orbit, so I'm not completely objective.

One thing that is important to understand is that the income tax only makes up about 50% of federal revenue. The next major source of revenue? Payroll tax. Income tax is a progressive tax. Payroll tax is definitely not progressive.

According to this source [1] in Fiscal Year 2016 income tax made 47.3% of federal revenue and payroll tax accounted for 34.1%.

I don't know what the exact numbers are if you take both taxes into account, but I do know that the headline [2] is at best grossly misleading because so many people are going to forget about payroll taxes.

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sourc...

[2] "Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Taxes in 2016"

King County Metro (Seattle) had a system like this back around 2003. Interestingly enough they did not have GPS on the buses, they'd simply instrumented the trip meter which was plenty good enough since buses were (usually) running along fixed routes. The real time location of the bus was displayed in a fairly crummy Java applet, but at least for the route I live on it worked great. I just waited for a bus to show up on the map about a mile from my apartment and that gave me plenty of time to walk to the nearest the bus stop.

I have found One Bus Away to be completely inferior, to the point that I usually don't bother to check it.

We haven't really colonized Antarctica either, but there's been a permanent human presence there since the 1940s or 1950s.

Similarly, I don't know if it makes sense to colonize Mars, but I think it makes absolute sense to have permanent bases there. With a human presence on Mars we will learn things about that planet in years that will otherwise take many decades through robotic exploration.

> > Clearly the way to close the wage gap is to get women to stop having kids.

> That’s one way, the basis of the rest of this comment is then predicated on this being the only way, and as such only has to deal with this.

Did you completely skip over my very next sentence? The one that starts with Of course I'm not serious, ...?

> There is the massive assumption here, “the wage gap is caused by women” without any evidence to back it up.

This on the other hand is a completely fair thing to note. I'd suggest splitting that out into a separate comment, because a discussion of the available evidence is a good thing to have independent of how you may feel about my rhetorical approach in my original comment.

We're thinking about the problem all wrong. Clearly the way to close the wage gap is to get women to stop having kids.

Of course I'm not serious, but then I personally don't care if there is a wage gap as long as it is not being caused by workplace discrimination against women.

If instead it's the case that the wage gap is caused by women (disproportionately to men) making an informed choice to de-prioritize work in order to prioritize childcare, then I am totally alright with that.

Maybe the impact of the wage gap is too big even if it's caused by women making informed choices. We could choose to offset it directly, for example by subsidizing children -- kind of like a basic income just for kids. By doing it that way we could make the system largely agnostic about whether it's a father or a mother deciding to prioritize childcare over work in any particular case.

I was confused by the diagram as well. And it's only after reading your comment that I discovered there were lines of two different colors!

What is eBPF?

https://qmonnet.github.io/whirl-offload/2016/09/01/dive-into...