Hacker News Reader

phurleyon Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point

I agree with the other commenters about this being incorrect, but there is in hindsight an even bigger deal -- getting to examine the rocket (not fished out of salt water) after the flight and learn from that is huge and often overlooked.

phurleyon Things I wish I’d known before fulltime RVing (2017)

Do you worry that there is more or less an arms race with competitors like arvie.com, and the entire industry is basically just adding service fees on top the costs of booking a site?

Not sure there is a fair approach beyond a lottery. Parks could embrace demand, and auction the sites off, but that is trading one bias for another.

phurleyon One Giant Leap for SQL: MySQL 8.0 Released

I have one in my backpack I am parking now.

phurleyon 1981 Radio Shack computer catalog (2015)

Kids these days :-)

Check out the add https://habrastorage.org/getpro/habr/post_images/5b6/a0b/e6d...

Makes me feel better about the 2 grand I dropped after I graduated from college on a 1G hard drive.

phurleyon LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

It does not look like your target market, but I imagine this would be ideal for pet/valuable tracking. Put it in a collar or bike seat and if your fido goes for a stroll and does not come back you can search much faster with an easy drive down the road. Same thing to help find a stolen bike.

If the transmitter could be inductively charged in a dog crate or where I park my bike -- it would be very convenient too. Ping time could be much slower, even once a minute would be plenty fast. Appears you could get 24 hours transmit and gps without too much trouble in a pretty small package.

phurleyon Apple 1 Motherboard Sold for $905,000

It was sold to a (wonderful) museum, The Henry Ford (http://www.thehenryford.org/), which every geek should visit at least once.

As an artist walks through an art museum and can see the progression of ideas from antiquity to the present. As an engineer you can walk through the history of technology at The Henry Ford, from a black smithy to a tour of a modern assembly line and most all stops in between.

You would be hard pressed to think of a better home for this machine. 900k is a lot of money, but I am glad it will be in a great museum, rather than at a private collector's home.

phurleyon A Raw Deal in Michigan

I live in a Detroit suburb, a large number of the residents here are engineers, many for GM, Ford and Chrysler, but quite a few for Toyota, Hyundai and other foreign suppliers (like Bosch and Yazaki). I see many domestic, but almost as many imports here.

I think a lot of the stigma is gone, certainly there is considerable pressure for people to drive their employers vehicle to work, but at least in my (relatively upscale) neighborhood, I would feel no social pressure against, and I bet I would have a bunch of engineers come visit, if I dug up a 100k and put a Tesla in my driveway.

phurleyon Generation Later, Poor Are Still Rare at Elite Colleges

Objective qualifications are not the primary filter. The biggest advantages are from a higher level of networking, your fellow students are generally from a higher income bracket, have better connections, etc. Similarly the best paying firms tend to focus on the more prestigious universities as well.

All of this leads to a situation where wealthy parents have the education and means to ensure that their children have the advantages to give them a better chance of going the more selective universities, adding another level of systemic injustice based on wealth.

phurleyon Patients’ Symptoms Raise Concern About Ebola in New York

http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/facts.html

You are far more likely to be infected by malaria than ebola. Ebola is scary and makes for great news that draws lots of attention -- but it is largely sensational and not truthfully something you need to rationally fear, unless you work with infected individuals.

phurleyon Starbucks to Provide Free College Education to Thousands of Workers

So you are stating that only the wealthy can morally have children? And this does not make you wonder if the country/economy is no longer moral?

phurleyon Target Confirms Point-of-Sale Malware Was Used in Attack

Not commenting directly on your assessment of the state of PoS systems, but how does a software vendor (not OS or sys admin) protect against targeted malware that is able to get access rights to your RAM space from scanning for well known track signatures?

I agree more can and should be done, but protecting against targeted malware by a sophisticated attacker is a very difficult problem. The amount of money at stake is large, so the resources expended by the attackers is also large.

Personally I believe that the current credit card system is broken and needs a significant change, but this is a very difficult process.

phurleyon What is your best programmer joke?

An mechanical engineer, physicist, and computer programmer are in a car driving down a steep mountain when the brakes fail. The careens around bends picking up speed until they finally reach the bottom and the car rolls to a stop.

The engineer hops out of the car and begins inspecting the brakes for the source of the failure. The physicist grabs a pad of paper and starts calculating the maximum angular momentum and friction coefficients.

The computer programmer looks at the car, then at the mountain and says, "let's push it up to the top and see if it happens again."

phurleyon The Russia Left Behind

Education outcomes, not debt fueled enrollments:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/06/13-facts-h... (in particular check the graducation rates based on income quartile).

Access to health care:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1483879/

Food is a harder thing to pin down. There is no doubt that americans of most any income level have access to sufficient calories, but trying to purchase healthy fresh fruits and vegetables takes up a significant portion of my monthly income (family of 5, a long distance from the bottom income levels), but I could buy huge quantities of bread and rice for much less :-)

phurleyon The Russia Left Behind

Upper education, health care, healthy food? It is easy to ignore if you are not at the bottom, but all of these things are less available to a growing number of people.

phurleyon How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits, and why it matters

I have a real issue with the current NSA practices and with much of the government surveillance attitude, that said this generally sounds like a case of doing it right.

I like that there was a court order for specific cell towers near the robberies, it would be better if order specifically requested the intersection of the towers or in someway restricted further use of the information to prevent long term and or continued use of collected data for unrelated cases, but I do not find this to be egregious.

This was a case of law enforcement using reasonable tools to do their job and a judge was in the loop -- I think the there should be a requirement to show probable cause, but a I think that a judge should be able to see that in this case there was probable cause to believe that anyone who had been at X number of the banks at the time of the robberies was a probable suspect and the collection of the data would be warranted.

My issue is when law enforcement (or other 3 letter agencies) collect (and retain) all of this data (and email, and license plates, and security cameras...) for non-specific uses. This is a significant infringement on our personal privacy and a threat to our democracy.

phurleyon I launched my weekend project 7 months ago on HN – here's CameraLends today

Trust me photographer's really love their cameras :-)

phurleyon Teaching Square Roots to a Five Year Old

I have three children and they frequently will ask me question that either I never knew, or have long since forgotten. I take these times to demonstrate another lesson -- how to learn.

When I was a child it would end up with a trip to the encyclopedia (we were a Collier's family) and if that did not satisfy our needs, a visit to the library. A few times, we have had to visit the library, generally so my kids can check out a book or two on a specific interest, as the internet/wikipedia/kahn academy now have so much content there are few things an interested mind cannot learn.

I think it is very important for children to learn how to learn and how to admit when you don't know something.

phurleyon 3D Printing Revolution: The Complex Reality

Really?

Maybe I am just old and remember using manual typewriters, line printers, dot matrix. Now when I get amazingly crisp nearly instant typeset output from just about everything in seconds I am still amazed.

phurleyon Usenet – what have you become?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting the movie studios can have a movie that "never recoups their cost" and yet they somehow make money off the enterprise. I am not saying they don't occasionally take a bath on a bad bet, but they do well most of the time (the percent of break even or better is much higher than they like to admit).

phurleyon PeerTalk: iOS and OS X Cocoa library for communicating over USB

Inquiring minds want to know, I would love to write a true DSLR tethered shooting app for IOS.