curtis

I think Rust is the clear winner for OS-level programming. I'm not at all sure that it's the right solution for application-level programming. I think Go got two things right for the statically compiled application-level space: Fast compile times and garbage collection. Of course I feel like they got everything else wrong [1], but that's what we've got in that space right now. I think that D might be a much better fit for this space, but it doesn't matter because Go has sucked up all the oxygen.

[1] I realize that this is not a universally held opinion, but it certainly seems to be pretty widely held.

Back when Andrei Alexandrescu was working at Facebook, I had hoped that Facebook would adopt D as a standard language. That didn't happen, and it seems unlikely that D will get a powerful corporate sponsor. I think that would have greatly helped D not just in terms of resources, but also in terms of popularity.

In an ideal world, good programming languages would win or lose on their own merits, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the world we actually live in.

Apollo 12 landed right next to the Surveyor 3 lander, and the astronauts removed a few pieces from it and returned with them. When NASA disassembled the video camera later they found microorganisms still alive on the device.

This article asserts that this was the result of a clean room failure after the parts were returned to Earth: https://www.space.com/11536-moon-microbe-mystery-solved-apol....

This is not as exciting as the notion that some bacteria might have survived for years inside the lander on the Lunar surface, but it still illustrates the risks of failing to maintain a proper clean room environment.

I wonder if this is the wrong way to go about it. You could design a spacecraft so it's heat resistant, and then once it's fully assembled, stick it in an oven and heat it to say 200C and just let it sit for a couple of days, or however long it takes to heat all the way through.

I'm sure this would present some design challenges, but it doesn't seem to me like it would be insurmountable.

This is probably the best article I have seen on this particular subject. I expect that many HN readers would also like to read it, but because the subject is extremely contentious, I think it will be impossible to discuss it here without the submission getting flagged.

Something that I'd missed in previous articles about the El Faro sinking:

> Then, at 0554 , the captain ordered a turn to port to get the wind on the ship’s starboard side, generating a port list. A few minutes later, El Faro lost propulsion

---

> Log books indicated no more than 26 inches of oil in the sump in the months before the accident ( a ). With this oil level, the bellmouth would not take in air (lose suction) with an 18-degree list to starboard ( b ), but would lose suction with an equivalent list to port ( c ).

They had other serious problems, but loosing propulsion in heavy seas is very serious indeed.

This is just flat out wrong. We do get more cloudy days than any major city in the U.S. but we don't actually get that much heavy rain. This is at least partly offset by the fact that the temperatures are much milder year round. Seattle barely gets any snow in the winter, and rarely gets very hot in the summer.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle#Climate.

I'd think that for half that much money you could greatly upgrade BART and more importantly extend it into the central valley.

It takes me a lot longer to write the code than it does to format it for readability.

I'm inclined to think that the reason that auto-formatters are popular is not because manually formatting code is hard, but simply to head off nitpicking in code review.

I think there's a better solution to the "style nitpicking in code review" problem: Just don't do it.

If you're nitpicking style during a code review, chances are good that you are not looking for real problems.

> By using it, you agree to cede control over minutiae of hand-formatting.

I may be in a minority, but I do not want to cede control over minutiae of hand-formatting. Am I the only person that feels this way?

If interest rates rise and then fall again over a relatively short term (several years or longer in the case of real estate) then housing prices might not fall much because owners will pull property off the market and wait for it to improve. The reduced supply (possibly greatly reduced) will tend to drive prices higher even as interest rates are driving them lower.

I'd much rather code on a whiteboard than do a take-home assignment. I may be in the minority but I rather suspect I'm not the only one.

I can understand that some people find whiteboard coding really stressful. I never have, and I have found take-home assignments to be a huge time-sink which typically results in minimal feedback (and sometimes none at all).

Maybe the right thing to do is to just give interviewees a choice.

Finland is cold but Finns most definitely are not -- 5.3 million people and two million saunas [1].

[1] https://finland.fi/life-society/bare-facts-of-the-sauna/

From the article:

> The results also showed that although female doctors attempt suicide far less often than women in the general population, their completion rate exceeds that of the general population by 2.5 to 4 times. It also equals the completion rate of male doctors.

This squares with what I have seen elsewhere. Doctors don't have the highest rate of suicide attempts, what they have is the highest rate of suicide successes.

Any time you see a news report about doctors having a high suicide rate it is natural to think that doctors are more likely to be suicidal. But this is wrong. Instead, doctors who are suicidal are really good at killing themselves.

> Back in the day, there were a few more women in CS :)

I actually think this is probably wrong. Back in the day there was a higher percentage of women in CS. It's possible that in absolute numbers there are as many women today in CS as there was then. That's because there's probably a lot more people in CS overall.

I also think it's likely that back in the day most college-educated programmers had EE degrees, not CS degrees, so what you'd really want to look at is the percentage of women in CS and EE, not just in CS.

> what kept the mesopotamians away from farming from 20000-10000 years ago?

Actually, this is one that we do have a good answer for: The most recent Ice Age was still well in effect during that time period.

I can't find anything that says how the Type 212 submarines store hydrogen. After thinking about it though, I think they must be using metal hydride storage. Submarines already have to be ballasted to offset the buoyancy of the crew compartment, and given the low density of liquid hydrogen, they'd need ballast to offset that too. Liquid oxygen is slightly more dense than water, but not enough to offer much compensation.

It seems like you could use the metal hydride batteries as your primary ballast that you'd need anyway, and get the hydrogen storage pretty much for free (in the weight and volume sense, anyway).

> ... but the task of greening the high seas fleet is far more daunting.

I think large ocean-going vessels is one place where hydrogen might make sense. The biggest problem with hydrogen is storage, but when you start talking about really large fuel tanks storing liquid hydrogen becomes a lot more practical. All of the hydrogen powered automobiles I've heard of rely either on high-pressure gas storage (requiring heavy tanks) or metal hydride storage (requiring heavy metal hydrides) which pretty much make them inferior to modern battery-electric vehicles.

Storing cryogenic liquid hydrogen doesn't have the same weight penalty, but has a huge volume penalty, plus it has the additional problem of keeping the hydrogen really cold until you're ready to use it. However, on a cargo ship, the large volume of the tank probably isn't a big restriction, and keeping the hydrogen cold enough is going to be a much smaller problem. That's because heat-loss is going to be proportional to the surface area of the tank, rather than the volume.

Hydrogen still suffers from energy loss at production. Hydrogen production by electrolysis is nowhere near 100% efficient, nor is turning the hydrogen back into motive power, either with internal combustion engines or with fuel cells.

On the flip side, I think as long as wind power makes up a substantial portion of electrical generation capacity, there will be times when the cost of electricity actually goes negative. If you can do most of the hydrogen production at times when electricity is really cheap, and you are planning to store it for relatively long periods of time anyway, then most or maybe even all of this overhead can be offset.

"World War Z" [1] -- the book, not the movie -- is based on the premise that people would work together to ultimately overcome the zombie plague. Notably, Max Brooks wrote "The Zombie Survival Guide" [2] before he wrote "World War Z".

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zombie_Survival_Guide

> If you were diagnosed with a possible brain tumor/cancer requiring an MRI to confirm, would the 50 to 90-day difference in MRI and diagnosis result in a measurable difference in outcome, if you did in fact have a tumor?

I would assume in a case like this that they'd move you to the front of the MRI line.

It's entirely possible that there's an area the size of Kansas inside Texas that has experienced negative growth in the last few years.

I think it's possible that many towns would have benefited from different policies (and I think that's an interesting subject!), but I still think many of them didn't have any real choice.

Many smaller cities and towns have suffered the loss of vibrant downtowns, but I can't help but wonder if we are misidentifying the causes.

Over the last half-century (probably more) we've seen a big part of the economic base for these small cities and downs either disappear or move away. Agriculture used to play a much bigger role in the economy as a whole, and a particularly large role in the economy of many small towns. And manufacturing used but much more distributed across the country in smaller cities and towns. But a lot of those factories have closed down.

As a consequence the tax base in may of these towns and cities didn't go away simply because retail businesses moved out of the city limits. They may have gone away because the entire GDP of the surrounding area dropped.

For reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sectors_of_US_Econom...

The reporting on exactly how DNA was used to identify the Golden State Killer is still pretty limited.

It sounds like they submitted DNA from GSK crime scenes to a number of genealogical sites and got back one or more familial matches. From that match or matches, they were able to backtrack to a specific suspect.

Once the suspect was identified, they were able to surreptitiously obtain the suspect's DNA, then they directly tested that DNA against GSK DNA samples, and were able to confirm the match.

It hasn't been stated directly, but it seems like there is plenty of still-usable DNA from GSK crime scene evidence, even though it will now be 30+ years old.

How does this compare to other warehouse jobs? My impression is that warehouse jobs almost universally suck.

This sounds like a credible alternative to me:

> Dr. Kistler argued that it was still possible that Pacific Islanders voyaged to South America and returned with the sweet potato.

> A thousand years ago, they might have encountered many sweet potato varieties on the continent. When Europeans arrived in the 1500s, they likely wiped out much of the crop’s genetic diversity.

> As a result, Dr. Kistler said, the surviving sweet potatoes of the Pacific only seem distantly related to the ones in the Americas. If the scientists had done the same study in 1500, Pacific sweet potatoes would have fit right in with other South American varieties.

I remember an issue of National Geographic that had a photo montage of about 40 different kinds of potatoes that are still being cultivated in the Andes today. They didn't have any sweet potatoes(1) but I can imagine that in 1500 there were as many different sweet potato variants being cultivated in various places in the new world.

(1) Sweet potatoes are not a variety of potato, so this isn't surprising.

I wonder how much of the "1%"'s wealth is in stock. My guess is most of it, at least in the United States. If you think that's a problem, and most of this wealth is in the stock market, then that may be a good argument for increasing the tax on capital gains. I don't expect that to happen anytime soon, though.

The Gizmodo article by George Dvorsky (https://gizmodo.com/why-neanderthals-had-faces-that-were-so-...) goes into more detail.

> There are already some serious questions about quality control at Tesla,

Quality control specifically for the Model 3 or quality control for the Model S? Clearly the Model 3 quality isn't good enough right now, but it seems quite likely that given time they should be able to bring it up to Model S levels. I don't know if that's good enough, but I think it might be. Will Tesla have time to reach that quality level? I think they probably will, but they may have to raise more money to pull it off. And they may have to raise that money at a less than favorable valuation. However, the idea that they won't be able to raise money at all seems unfounded to me, just like the implied notion that they can't fix the quality problems.

There's a big difference between "Tesla is struggling" (yes they are, and it's not even the first time) and "Tesla is going to fail".

"Nahua" as in "Nahuatl", the language of the Aztecs, although maybe it's a more general term which includes related languages and peoples.

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