curtis

> Accounting for housing costs, California has nation’s highest poverty rate

I assume that the underlying study breaks the population down into quintiles or deciles based on income and then looks at spending on housing for each group, but it's not clear from the article.

If you simply compare average income to average housing costs you're going to get a skewed result. A software engineer living in the Bay Area could be well over the national average for housing (40% or 50% of income, maybe more in some cases) but they're definitely not contributing to an increased poverty level.

Another way of looking at this is that California's poorest counties are in the Central Valley. I suspect this is also where California's cheapest real estate is at.

Surprisingly, tunnels have very good earthquake resistance. See http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Status/Blog/tunnels....

John McCain's citizenship was more complicated than most people realize. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause#Jo....

The C2 Wiki is where I first learned about things like refactoring (http://wiki.c2.com/?ReFactoring), rubber ducking (http://wiki.c2.com/?RubberDucking), and DRY (http://wiki.c2.com/?OnceAndOnlyOnce).

I understand why he does it, but the guy needs to relinquish direct control of his Twitter account to some trusted lieutenant who can serve as a sanity check before tweets go out.

In fact this might be a good idea for any people on Twitter with large numbers of followers, especially those with significant responsibilities.

I'm under the impression that a higher prehistorical concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere is widely accepted at this point. Higher atmospheric pressure is not something I've heard anything about though.

Wikipedia has a nice graph showing high and low estimates for the historical oxygen level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen#/....

From the referenced article [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...]:

> It is possible, however, that giant pterosaurs represent old, flightless individuals of a species that were capable of flight when younger, their flight anatomy simply being retained from a previous stage in their life history. However, if the maximum flight sizes suggested by Sato et al. [17] and Chatterjee and Templin [19] are correct at 41kg (5.1 m span) or 70 kg (6.65 m with ‘heavy’ estimates), then the largest azhdarchids would have grown up to six times the mass and twice the wingspan of their terminal flight size. It seems unlikely that enormous azhdarchids would continue to develop their physiologically expensive flight apparatus, and coincidentally with a mechanically appropriate scaling regime, throughout such extensive growth under flightless conditions. The same point is true, though to a lesser extent, for large Pteranodon that also bear obvious flight characteristics despite having exceeded the suggested wingspan limits of flight. If anything, the scaling regimes of pterosaur wings dictate that the flight characteristics of giant pterosaurs (the size of their deltopectoral crests, robustness of their joints) - become more exaggerated with size and age (e.g. [76]), precisely the opposite of what would be expected in animals that lost their flight ability as they grew older.

This doesn't help me understand the physics of large flying reptiles, but it does make a plausible argument that they were in fact real.

On a tangential note, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the notion that a flying reptile the size of Quetzalcoatlus (believed to have wingspan on the order of 10 meters) could ever get airborne.

This has made me wonder if it's possible that juvenile Quetzalcoatlus could fly but adult Quetzalcoatlus could not. Natural selection would presumably select towards smaller and smaller wings on adults, but maybe this could be offset by a serious evolutionary advantage bestowed on juveniles from being able to fly.

I don't know of any bird existing or extinct with this kind of lifecycle, but maybe you can find something similar in insects?

> People complain that dockless rental scooters and bicycles block the sidewalk, but I have never experienced being blocked by one.

I've certainly seen Lime bikes mostly blocking the sidewalk here in Seattle, and I rarely if ever see cars parked on the sidewalk.

This is probably not normal HN fare, but it has a really clear summary of what exactly happened, which I think many HN readers might appreciate.

The biggest deficiency I found in Jenkins is that GUI-based job configuration is great for simple setups and one-off jobs, but the moment you throw in any sort of parameterization it becomes a real headache. At that point you really need to be able to configure your jobs in code.

I am under the impression that the dome is entirely decorative, which does seem kind of nuts given its size.

Kim did stay with the vehicle (and his family) for something like a week before going for help. I think this might have been the right decision at that point, because his youngest child was 7 months old and would not have been able to survive without food nearly as long as an adult would.

Kim's wife and children did stay with the car and were rescued some time later. But at the point that Kim left the car he had to be thinking that searchers weren't going to find them in time.

I've often wondered if Kim's fatal mistake wasn't leaving for help but rather leaving the road he was on and going cross country. By the time he made the decision to do that, his thinking might have been very seriously impaired indeed, though.

I stumbled across this the other day when I was supposed to be working.

The geodesic framework is pretty cool, but the architecture of the headquarters building is really cool too.

Here are a few images that I particularly liked:

https://oh.reel-scout.com/up_images/8/1883578.jpg

https://oh.reel-scout.com/up_images/6/1883586.jpg

https://oh.reel-scout.com/up_images/5/1883565.jpg

https://oh.reel-scout.com/up_images/5/1883585.jpg

These are all from slideshow [1] which has a lot more pictures both of the headquarters building and the dome. (After about the fifth picture of the dome I was starting to get bored. It's worth it to persevere, though, since there are a lot of nice shots of the interior of the headquarters building later in the sequence.)

[1] https://rs.locationshub.com/Slideshow.aspx?lid=053-10059511

The first 15 or so slides from the slideshow are mostly just of the geodesic framework. After that there's a bunch more slides of the associated office building which is pretty interesting if you're into mid-century modern architecture.

Direct link to the slideshow: https://rs.locationshub.com/Slideshow.aspx?lid=053-10059511&...

> If you find yourself on a failing project, squandering tens of millions of pounds and hundreds of man-years of talent, pause for a moment. Think about the fact that almost 140 years ago, civil engineers stopped building bridges that fell down. They stopped building them because the failure of one bridge was laid bare so publicly.

> Think about the fact...

You can think all you want, but it's unlikely to do anybody any good. Sometimes the fault for a failed project lies squarely with the engineers, but this is not at all the usual case. The people who are most responsible for failed software projects is management, and not just engineering management, but the people who engineering management reports to.

And the biggest problem management has is not simply lack of understanding of the nature of software development projects, but, often, a profound lack of interest in learning.

I don't know what to do about that.

I probably won't ever do a homework assignment again, unless I feel like I absolutely have to. It's not just the time involved, it's the time involved plus the apparent necessity for me to ask what the results were.

It seems obvious to me that if a company asks an applicant to do a homework project, then when the applicant submits the project, the evaluation and feedback (positive or negative) should happen automatically and quickly.

It's not related to tsunamis, but you might be interested in the Black Sea deluge hypothesis[1].

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

Not may people appreciate that at the peak of the last ice age, "sea level" was 400 feet lower than it is today. It's likely that there's a whole bunch of archaeological sites that we can't easily get to right now, even if we could find them.

We're a small startup, and we don't have a really structured process. Also I have been the only person asking a detailed coding question (in consultation with my boss). Everybody else on the team has been responsible for those other questions.

I should also add that I personally prefer to do coding questions in person on a whiteboard, rather than doing them during a phone screen with some sort of collaboration software.

My technique of explaining the algorithm before asking the interviewee to implement it works way better with both people in front of a whiteboard.

I'm not saying everybody should do it this way. I'm just saying that this is my current approach and it seems like it's working OK.

Many people believe that it is completely unreasonable to ask an interviewee to write code on a whiteboard at all. I disagree with such an absolute position. I do think it can be a reasonable thing to do, but only if you are asking the interviewee to code something really simple.

When I say simple, I mean really simple, like FizzBuzz simple.

There are interesting questions you can ask that are really simple which are not FizzBuzz. I've used the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm and more recently Selection Sort. I should stress in both of these cases that I carefully explained the algorithm before asking the interviewee to code it up. Even though these algorithms are quite simple, I do not expect the interviewee to have memorized them.

I do expect someone who is a professional software engineer to understand the algorithms after a decent explanation and then write code which will implement them.

I also don't necessarily expect the interviewee to get the code exactly right. I just expect them to demonstrate that they could write correct code given enough time and access to an actual computer to test the code on.

Jordan Weissmann's response in Slate is worth a read:

Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem The Atlantic trots out a familiar argument blaming the upper-middle class for income inequality. It’s wrong.

https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-...

Here's Weissmann's concluding paragraph.

> Stewart and Reeves are right to point out that the American upper class is bigger than just the top 1 percent. There are, indeed, many layers of economic privilege in this country. But they’re doing it in a way that essentially asks us to forget a lot of what we’ve learned about how income and wealth are really concentrating in this country. The 1 percent vs. the 99 percent may not be a perfect shorthand for what ails the economy, but it’s a whole lot more useful than what they’ve offered up.

I probably learned as much from BYTE as I did from my CS classes in college.

There ought to be a name for a minimal UBI that can allow people who are normally just scraping by to bridge short periods of unemployment, unexpected expenses etc. £4K wouldn't be much for the average Hacker News reader, but for people on minimum wage it could make a real difference. You can't really call this "Basic Income" though, because that term comes with the build in assumption that it's enough for a person to live pretty comfortably. I've been thinking of this as a "Really Basic Basic Income" ("RBBI"?), but nobody seems to be talking about such a thing.

> Estimates about the arrival date for the dingo range from 4000 to 18,000 years ago. But Sue and her colleagues, in light of their findings, are suggesting that the arrival of the dingo occurred much later than commonly reported, writing that 3250 years is “currently the oldest reliable date for the dingo in Australia”.

These "oldest" bones are actually younger than previous estimates (indeed, much younger than some estimates) for the dingo's arrival in Australia.

> Climate change in Australia between three and five thousand years ago has been posited as the primary reason for the extinction of tigers [thylacines] and [Tasmanian] devils from the mainland, but if this new date for the arrival of the dingo is accurate, the dawn of the dingo and the extinction of tigers and devils almost coincide.

Interesting.

One reason that we should consider discounting Gatty's conclusion is that we now know stuff that Gatty did not know. Gallagher reports that the sextant box had two different numbers on it and he reports what those numbers were:

3500 and 1542

We do not have documentation for those specific numbers. On the other hand, if you take a look at the second link I posted (https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bullet...), you'll see they have an actual picture of a Brandis sextant box with the numbers 3987 and 1542 on it. They have a couple of tables with other sextants that they have identified with similar numbers, including:

  Brandis 3511  N.O. 1585
  Brandis 3527  N.O. 1599
  Brandis 3987  N.O. 1584

That doesn't conclusively identify 3500:1542 as a Brandis sextant with Naval Observatory number 1584, but it does look mighty suspicious.

If that is indeed the case, then the sextant box the islanders discovered definitely dates to 1919 or later, as does the skeleton that was found near it.

Even if we accept this conclusion, it does not constitute certain proof that Earhart landed on the island. It would seem to provide some solid support for the idea though.

If we combine this with other independent lines of evidence (radio reception reports, interviews with people who were on the island in the early 1940s, etc.) you can make a stronger argument.

I think the best evidence supporting TIGHAR's Nikumaroro/Gardner Island Hypothesis is the sextant case discovered on the island in close proximity to the unidentified skeleton.

We don't know what happened to the sextant case or the skeleton, so they're only know from the original reports from the British colonial authorities at the time.

This is the text of the radio-telegram mentioning the sextant serial numbers:

  Some months ago working party on Gardner discovered
  human skull – this was buried and I only recently heard about it.
  Thorough search has now produced more bones ( including lower jaw )
  part of a shoe a bottle and a sextant box. I would appear that

  (a) Skeleton is possibly that of a woman, b) Shoe was a womans and
  (probably size 10, c) Sextant box has two numbers on it 3500
  (stencilled ) and 1542 – sextant being old fashioned and probably
  (painted over with black enamel.

  Bones look more than four years old to me but there seems to be very
  slight chance that this may be remains of Amelia Earhardt. If United
  States authorities find that above evidence fits into general
  description, perhaps they could supply some dental information as many
  teeth are intact. Am holding latest finds for present but have not
  exhumed skull.

  There is no local indication that this discovery is related to wreck
  of the "Norwich City".

  Gallagher.

The notable thing to me is that the sextant case had two different serial numbers on it.

A scan of the original document can be found here:

https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Taraw...

The two serial numbers fairly conclusively identify the sextant as a Brandis sextant that had been surplussed by the U.S. Navy sometime after 1918.

This page has more information about the sextant:

https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bullet....

If the sextant post-dates 1918, then it and the associated skeleton are either associated with the 1929 wreck of the Norwich City or they belong to the survivor of some other accident. Given the location of the island where the sextant and skeleton were located, it seems unlikely that they would be associated with the Norwich City.

The only other loss in that time period in that part of the Pacific Ocean is, as I understand it, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.

> The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives.

Are you saying that had the NYT reported things differently the Iraq war wouldn't have happened? That seems unreasonably strong because it implies that the New York Times had a greater responsibility for the war than did the president and congress.

I think monorepos make a lot of sense when you're talking about millions of lines of code. I'm not at all sure they make sense when you're talking about billions.