nether

Aeronautics is just as stagnant. Whenever news of new small aircraft startup hits HN though, most comments are negative.

I just can't get over how terrible an idea a PayPal founder starting a rocket company sounded. "Good ideas often sound bad," no joke. I was a pretty harsh critic of SpaceX in its early days (I was an aerospace engineer and have followed private spaceflight since its inception) and once they got over some failures and staffing issues, they've really blown me away.

Yep; John Mark, a guard. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2y5sbt/iwasa_guard_in...

> I personally think Zimbardo is a self-promoting sensationalists more than a serious academic researcher and I think he was aware that this had the potential to make his career.

The aforementioned chat is a bunch of softballs. I do think this study warrants much more scrutiny.

Even in the hobbies, particularly sports, subreddits I see a lot of narrow mindedness that I don't see in other forums for the same activities. Like asking how to do X type of cycling, the top comment will be some exhortation on how you must do ABC with Z bike or you will die. Versus bikeforums.net, where people will chime in with a more "anything goes" attitude, and seem to have greater depth and breadth of experience.

> Now almost half of my feed is filled with photos of old Trabant, Lada or Opel Kadett cars, and I love that.

This is why some of my friends prefer Instagram as their primary social network. It's mostly hobbies, food, very little politics.

A gas tax is basically regressive according to this paper (pdf page 9):

> The gasoline tax’s tendency to place a greater burden on low-income households is often stated as one of the strongest arguments against the tax [West, 2004a, 755]. Taxes on gasoline have been shown to be regressive in numerous economic studies. A 1989 study by Poterba concluded that gasoline taxes were about 15 percent of pre-tax income for the lowest income groups in the U.S., compared to 2.8 percent for the highest income groups [Poterba, 1989, 325].

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.554...

Would this disproportionately hurt lower income earners who live in the cheaper suburbs and have longer commutes? Easy to ask for that pigovian tax when you've got that sweet downtown loft.

Accelerated C++ involves working on a program to analyze student grades. The book itself is excellent, but the overarching project is very dry.

I came to assess the self-driving tech, but now I'm jamming.

The problem is, sometimes they work. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657508. One of the reasons OkCupid didn't ban duplicate messages is that often they led to successful exchanges.

Bumble forces women to initiate contact, which greatly cuts down on the nasty messages from men. http://www.xojane.com/sex/feminist-dating-app-bumble

> The best thing about Bumble is that regardless of who I swipe right on, and who swipes right on me, I easily avoid those horrendous first Tinder messages that ask me for threesomes or whether I like dragons, and if I do, whether I want “these balls dragon” across my face

The US National Park Service policy on garbage in the wilderness used to be burning it and burying the remains. It's not uncommon to find old scorched beer cans at some campsites today. They also casually encouraged interacting with animals, including bears.

I saw these weird drapes folded around me that were brown, green, and white stripes. They were gently heaving, and I knew that they were living creatures that were watching over me. I didn't take enough to have a full breakthrough, but in that moment I was certain that I was dying, with all of my consciousness welled up into my head, as if that's all I was. When I came to and regained awareness of my limbs, I was relieved to feel tears on my face because I guess that meant I was still alive. For a couple of weeks I wondered if I really had died. The feeling was that strong. Now, I think that's absurd, but still a tiny part wonders...

The lesson learned was that I needed to start questioning my convictions more. Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something. I try to maintain a little bit of skepticism and doubt toward every thing these days.

Mechanical engineering is not being a "mechanic." They rarely build or install anything with their hands. Usually we sit in cubes running software to analyze physical systems (like air flowing over a wing) and write up the results. We use a lot of math. Technicians, who usually don't have 4-year degrees, handle the actual fabrication and maintenance.

(In case you've forgotten, mechanics is a branch of physics dealing with force, acceleration, mass, that sort of thing.)

Both aircraft are so incredibly safe with vanishingly low accident rates, that it'd be nearly impossible to suss out accidents due to the respective designs versus pilot error, weather, carrier procedures etc.

> Flying is not a valid commute solution and never will be because of physics. All things equal, the energy requirements to change elevation will be too great to justify adoption.

That only ensures that flying cars will always be more expensive than ground cars, not that per capita income will always be too low to have mass adoption of flying cars.

In LA at least, this is common among high end restaurants. Certain chefs have relationships with specific farmers, or they have food buyers select the best produce at the Santa Monica Farmers Market. I suspect most restaurants just buy from normal distributors because it's cheaper though.

> 13 years ago, that is 2004 noone would openly talk about the NSA

Nonsense. The movie Enemy of the State came out in 1998 and the NSA was involved in the production, though the agency was portrayed negatively, to its chagrin.

> Whether Musk becomes a space industry visionary -- or the latest in a string of delusional Don Quixotes -- remains to be seen. Doubters call Musk's vision pie in the sky, a gross underestimation of the technological and commercial challenges SpaceX will face.

> But Strategic Insight's Kaplan said that "probably a couple dozen entrepreneurs have tried this in the last 10 years, and they've all gone out of business. It's easy to say you're building a cheap, simple rocket, but that and $2 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks."

Isn't everything PR?

Good thing that South African PayPal founder ignored the doubters in the early 2000s. They were saying the exact same things.

Since he was a draftsman I bet they'd look something like this: http://www.ardigitech.com/images/mech2.jpg. No point in making them look like actual photos, with shading, when you could just take an actual photograph instead.

By "hand drawn" do they mean freehand, or drawn with manual pencil drafting techniques? Because both are done by hand, and really most trained draftsmen produced drawings of that quality (even lettering would look like it was printed).

Most likely response: who the fuck is Ycombinator, and why on earth would I want to work there?

He could shit on a plate and they'd eat it up. "Masterful distraction! Wow! He's been planning this for weeks! MAGA"

There's also a single non-university group: Reddit's rLoop, http://rloop.org/.

Are there any that work in temperatures below freezing? I'm living in my car and using a propane heater when it gets cold.

Full interview: http://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cli...

Err thanks, correct link: http://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cli...

Everyone these days is ostensibly "pro-science," just as many anti-vaxxers claim to be "pro-vaccine." The administration merely wants to review the scientific integrity of the EPA's work, and prevent the likelihood of any erroneous, possibly non-scientific data from being spread.