curtis

I'd like to see a similar map for Seattle.

Planks created by riving can have a triangular cross-section rather than a rectangular cross-section. The first picture at http://lumberjocks.com/MattNC/blog/37466 is a good example.

> We can't build any public infrastructure in the US anymore.

I know it feels that way, but it's not strictly true. Here in Seattle in the last decade we've built a new floating bridge, multiple miles of underground light rail track, and nearly two miles of deep bore road tunnel.

I think there is a real problem that our new infrastructure is way too expensive and takes way too long to build, but we've demonstrated that we can definitely build new stuff.

I think something similar to the original Hyperloop proposal can work, but I'm not going to actually believe it until I see at least one real world implementation.

Here's my proposal for an alternative to the new page from a few years ago:

http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page-scr...

The Hacker News submission page dumps you into the new page whenever you make a new submission. I usually take a look at some of the other new submissions at this point. Otherwise it's fairly rare that I check the new page.

> ... nothing would have gotten rescuers onto this scene any faster.

That's true in this case, but might very well not be the case in a future accident. That rescuers were able to reach the Leviathan II so quickly in this case is partly due to some very good luck after the accident -- crew members spotted a flare just floating in the water and were able to fire it. It was this flare that the first rescue boat saw.

Here's a handy link from the Quora article:

https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Elon+m...

And from elsewhere: https://haselonapologizedyet.com/ (In my opinion, Musk absolutely needs to apologize, but I don't know if he ever will.)

From Musk's recent interview with Bloomberg [1]:

“I have made the mistaken assumption—and I will attempt to be better at this—of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season,” he said in an hour-long interview with Bloomberg Businessweek for this week's cover story. “That is my mistake. I will correct it.”

It seems like Musk ought to be smart enough to generalize from "Twitter" to any sort of media (I don't think Unsworth is on Twitter), but I guess maybe he's still working on it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-13/-the-last...

This longer BBC article on the rescue is the most complete report I've seen so far: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44791998.

It's kind of amazing to me that we are still learning stuff from Ötzi's remains since they were discovered back in 1991.

It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans). I would presume so, but that makes me wonder what the source of that larger vocabulary -- Malay? Javanese? English? Other languages native to the Indonesian archipelago? All of the above?

The article's premise is that it seems like nobody in Indonesia speaks Bahasa Indonesia well, because it's always a second language. I can't find a good reference right now, but I think that's wrong. I'm under the impression that in Jakarta and the surrounding areas (probably tens of millions of people) Bahasa Indonesia really is spoken as a first language. I think this area has historically been Malay-speaking anyway, and modern Indonesian is very closely related to Malay, so this wouldn't be a big stretch.

Some things I learned when I was in Singapore and Indonesia about 10 years ago:

- Our Singaporean host had business dealings in Indonesia and he said he could get by just relying on his Malay language skills, so it seems that Malay and Bahasa Indonesia have a decent degree of mutual intelligibility.

- In one of the national museums we ran into an American professor who had been teaching part time in Indonesia for many years. Among other things, he mentioned that when Indonesia was founded, the government created a standard vocabulary for the language at the same time. He thought that that was one of the smartest things they'd done.

- One Indonesian woman that I spoke with (who I presume was Javanese) mentioned that one of the benefits of Bahasa Indonesia was that the Javanese in one village might not be mutually intelligible (in the practical sense, anyway) with the Javanese spoken in another village a few miles away. But you could always switch to Bahasa Indonesia to communicate.

- The word "Bahasa" means "language", and in Indonesian languages always seemed to be prefixed with ""Bahasa", e.g. "bahasa Indonesia", "bahasa Inggris", "bahasa Jerman". However, I recall several times hearing Indonesians using just the word "bahasa" when clearly referring to the Indonesian language. This was speaking in English though, so it might not be representative of how they'd say it in Indonesian.

> Claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence.

I don't think that's justified in the case of Bahasa Indonesia, or indeed any language which is more widely used as a second language than as a first. And it's pretty much a dialect of Malay, which also has a long history as a second language used for trade.

You might also find this article about "One-Hundred-Foot Wednesday" interesting: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/DESPERATE-RACE-FOR-SU...

In my experience, simply finding early stage startups is hard. Oftentimes they don't even have a web page during the earliest stages, and if they do, you likely wouldn't be able to find it, and then it might not have any contact information, and if it does have contact information, you have no idea what they're doing, to know if it's worth contacting them or not.

I think it might be easier to find early stage startups if you try to aggressively network in that space, but not being much of a networker I couldn't say. I guess I should add that I'm in Seattle which seems to have a much smaller startup scene than the Bay Area.

I got my most recent job through AngelList but in that case I didn't use it to research companies, I just spammed every startup listed in Seattle that had an opening I was remotely qualified for, and then just talked to whoever responded. Before that I had basically scraped CrunchBase for startups in the Seattle area that had received funding at some point or another. I applied at a bunch of companies, but I don't think I got a single interview out of it.

This is a long winded way of saying that, yet, in my experience getting into a good startup is pretty much just luck.

There needs to be a corollary to Betteridge's law, to the effect of "It's a stupid question."

Tesla is not trying to reinvent the way cars are made. Car manufacturing lines already rely heavily on automation. What's notable about Tesla is that they have been trying to automate production to a higher degree than is typical for the industry.

Don't get me wrong here, this is a big deal, and it's caused Tesla some problems that they could have avoided. But "more automation" is not revolutionary and it's not reinvention.

You don't need a single tree across the entire timespan you want to look at. You can assemble a series of overlapping samples from a number of trees that lived at different times during the timespan of interest.

From Wikipedia [1]:

> A fully anchored and cross-matched chronology for oak and pine in central Europe extends back 12,460 years, and an oak chronology goes back 7,429 years in Ireland and 6,939 years in England. Comparison of radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages supports the consistency of these two independent dendrochronological sequences. Another fully anchored chronology that extends back 8500 years exists for the bristlecone pine in the Southwest US (White Mountains of California).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology#Growth_rings (the final paragraph of this section)

I think it's rather likely that the vast majority of poorly-behaved women also don't make history.

I find it hard to believe that teacher quality doesn't matter at all. I'm not sure that that's what this study is telling us. Maybe it's just telling us that there is no significant (or at least measurable) difference between teachers that are a little bit below some threshold and teachers that are a little bit above.

It surely isn't telling us what would happen if you replaced all the teachers in a school with teachers recruited from the top 5 or 10 percent of all teachers in the country. I really want to know what would happen if you did that. On the other hand, suppose it works really well. We still can't replace all the teachers in the country with the top 5 or 10 percent of all the teachers in the country, so it's not like that would be actionable.

The Aztecs may have had trouble getting enough protein for the simple reason that they were primarily a heavily agrarian culture dependent on Corn (Maize) as their primary staple. Of course it seems like most agrarian cultures, regardless of their staple crops, have suffered from this same problem.

The Spanish reports of the scale of human sacrifice cannot be taken at face value for the reasons you say. On the other hand there is absolutely no question that the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations were practicing human sacrifice and at a considerable scale, because we have a lot of direct archeological evidence to that effect.

I can't help but feel like there's some missing information here. One piece of information that's missing from the headline but not the article is that the jogger was not a Canadian citizen, which may have complicated things, but doesn't seem like it should have complicated things so much that she needed to be detained for two weeks.

One possibility is that the jogger not only wasn't a Canadian citizen, but may not have been a fluent english-speaker either.

This still seems screwed up though.

Algolia's "Last 24h" view is often a nice alternative to the HN front page. It's more stable and it's also a good way to find articles/discussions that drew a lot of attention and then got flagged.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page... (it's not working at the moment for some reason)

The "Past Week" view is still working: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...

Currently there is an agreement between the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army [1] that the air force will control most fixed-wing aircraft and the army most helicopters. I think this is completely dumb and should be dispensed with right away. The air force could then relinquish the A-10s and any future ground support aircraft like (hypothetically) the Super Tucano to the Army if the Army cares to pay for it.

This would help ameliorate the current situation where the Air Force seems compelled to try to cancel every airplane that's not the F-35.

[1] Apparently this originates in the "Johnson-McConnell agreement of 1966" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson-McConnell_agreement_of...

Context: https://www.archaeology.ie/underwater-archaeology/wreck-view...

A much larger number of people attend college today than in the past. Since most of the smartest people were probably already going to college, increasing the size of the pool would almost certainly decrease the "average smartness" of college students.

Alternatively, you could just say that historically college students were disproportionately the "best students" during primary education, and increasing the size of the pool would result in more people who were not as good students attending college.

The United States had mustard gas munitions in the European theater in case they needed to retaliate against a first use of chemical weapons by the Germans. In 1943 the Germans launched a successful air raid on the port of Bari, Italy [1]. One of the ships destroyed in this attack was a U.S. freighter carrying mustard gas munitions. Many allied servicemen and Italian civilians were exposed to mustard gas in this attack, and their treatment was impaired because the military command absolutely did not want to reveal the presence of chemical agents to the Germans in fear that the Germans might use that as a justification for using their own chemical weapons.

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

I think you can pretty much kill anything if you heat your spacecraft enough. Of course, you might kill the spacecraft too. It might be very difficult indeed to destroy certain types of spores, and the "cook the spacecraft until they're all dead" approach might be possible but completely impractical for any real budget. Obviously any temperature that's hot enough to melt standard space-hardened circuit boards is going to be difficult. On the other hand, it sounds like the clean room approach is no panacea either.

As an interesting tangent, the engineering used to design a heat-resistant spacecraft might be re-used to design a long-lived Venus surface probe.