skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) ~6mo to recruit a team and agree on the broad plan. During that a combination of more comprehensive literature survey, meeting with the experts, investigating university research programs solving key problems which could be funded, etc. Concrete deliverables around a well communicated-to-public plan, simulation, etc., both of the launcher and application/payload.

Probably (to be altered): ~1y to recreate the subscale systems used at various universities, set up basic capabilities, etc. Obviously faster if I can just work with UW or one of the other groups. Another...2-3y to build the first subscale prototype capable of putting 1 gram into space (without circularization), but with a rocket second (and maybe third) stage.

Parallel development of the ~1m scale projectile, boost rocket, circularizing rocket.

Parallel development of LEO satcom payloads -- initial payloads inert, then maybe some remote sensing/beacon/etc. payloads, and suboptimal but research/commercial satellites. For a full LEO 1-3Mbps to the handheld terminal constellation, need frequency licensing, a lot of consumer electronics and specialized electronics, etc.; it used to be a 5-10y project even given standard satellites -- it probably could be done in 2-4y today. One huge advantage of low-lifespan LEO: you can rev the satellite design every month.

(Another option is doing the LEO satcom stuff in parallel using a conventional launcher at lower density.)

The full production scale system to orbit is probably ~5y after the first subscale to space.

(My real problem here is I have another much more practical startup which is unrelated, and in an area where I'm an expert, unlike this, where I'm merely interested. I'd rather do that, make money from it, then build this when I can at least contribute 3-5mm to it myself. So that pushes all of this out at least 3y and hopefully 5-10y. If I suddenly have a lot of cash, I'd probably be able to pay to have some of the earlier engineering work done on this, and if I had the right team, could probably just be an investor/boardmember.)

3) Kenya is probably the win (definitely Horn of Africa or South America; nowhere else is economically viable). Ethiopia also works. It would be done with full US ITAR compliance -- physical custody of the site, local construction and education, but no weapons proliferation. Ethiopia and Kenya are pretty solid US allies. I'd expect there would be a Bn or greater of host nation military/police assigned for outer security.

4) Ablative coatings, carbon/carbon structure. Only getting cheaper/better. I don't know much about the state of the art here, but it has been feasible for decades using older tech.
What I mean (and tried to put into context with my last paragraph) is that for someone below poverty, luck is the most important factor. Moral factors like work ethic don't matter. I've known lots of people with incredible work ethic for whom that quality has not helped. They're still working hard at their retail jobs (or laid off from their hard labor ones) 20 years later. Some work ethic is required, no doubt, but it's much less than most people out of poverty believe. In contrast, if one is well-connected and wealthy to begin with, luck and work ethic aren't important at all. Even being financially irresponsible doesn't have much effect in that case, in my experience.
Ask HN: What happens when a solely-responsible engineer quits a startup?
For example, at a company that has "an" iOS developer or "an" Android developer, as opposed to a team - a pretty common arrangement in startups, I think. This person would be entirely responsible for a component of the company's product. They might be the only person at the company that even knows the language they're working in, if the backend/web engineers are using Python, Ruby, or JavaScript for their server code - doubly so for an iOS developer, since Swift knowledge isn't anywhere near as common as Java knowledge.

How does the replacement process work? The team would be interviewing someone without any knowledge of the language and frameworks that candidate would be working in, and dropping them into a codebase that no one can explain to them, even if the documentation coverage is great.
It really isn't that much of a burden to ignore an email.
"Treating workers as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded is a central part of the revised relationship between employers and employees that techies proclaim is an innovation as important as chips and software."

Really? I've never heard that and never met a single person who thinks this. I guess pieces like this just like to pull things out of thin air. It makes zero sense for any non-executive to think this way and most techies are not executives.
Seattle's bus system sucks - and it's not just gridlock.

There aren't enough running to make it make sense. This is probably because there aren't enough people actively taking the bus... because there aren't enough running.

It would be ideal if they raised the gas tax significantly and funneled the money into a better bus system. Get cars off the street and add more buses.

Who's gonna vote for that, though?
As a college student, I've considered recording lectures, but have never done that for two reasons: overhead and referencing.

How much time did it take you per lecture just to clean up the audio recording? My guess is 10-15 mins. The way I see it is that it's not a lot in general, but if you factor in the cost of context switching, it can become a time sink.

Then, as you noted, there's the task of writing a pseudo-transcript to make later referencing easier. Without it, the audio is completely useless in my view. But there's a trade-off here between granularity and effort required to set it up.

I might still give it a go though, just to see if I can manage it for more than a few weeks. I get distracted easily :(
> This was a great opportunity to elegantly explain the distinction, sans snark, sans agenda, but they failed so miserably even comments in this HN discussion are still using the wrong terminology.

First, I want to clarify that there is no "they" here: while I share the opinions of GNU and the FSF---and am quite involved with both---this article is not written for or by GNU (otherwise it'd be posted there).

Explaining the distinction without explaining the purpose behind it is almost useless---that'd boil down to "please say GNU/kWindows to give credit to the GNU Project". But that completely misses the point.

Credit for the GNU Project is important, but the underlying, more important _purpose_ is to talk about users' freedoms. So of course there is agenda involved. And what you call "snark" is a factual analysis of the problem. Hackers are known for their snark; I purposefully left it out of the article. (So I am curious what you think is snarky.)
Yep, I linked that, too, in another comment here. Very fitting.
Well you just made a pretty unfair comparison since you added up to 64000 for all four lanes vs 100000 people /per track/ on a 4-track railway. But I think your assumptions are all pretty optimistic. You wouldn't be able to run cars that close together on a multilane roadway because cars would need to move between lanes to enter and exit which would cause pipeline shocks if there was that little room.

Anyway the main difference between my claims and yours is that yours are speculation, while mine are based on history. We've seen five million people disembark at actual railroad stations. It's happened. We don't have to speculate.
Ask HN: Are all recruiter calls this bad?
I don't have too much experience in dealing with internal recruiters, but I decided to give one a call after they reached out to me multiple times. My experience was fairly unpleasant and I'm wondering how it compares to what you've encountered.

I'll cover the basics just to add a bit of context. They're an online retailer of women's products, and the project involves an application for facilitating support calls from their customers. The outreach email mentioned that the VP of Engineering was interested in my skill set given that I've been a Lead Engineer at a couple of startups. On my end, I've been doing contract work for over a year now, and figured that I should be open to new opportunities. So we set up a call, and it's all downhill from here.

The recruiter started off by downgrading the position from a Lead Engineer to a Senior Engineer. This is after telling me that they reached out to me because of my experience as a lead, and after informing me that I would still be leading a team, and that I would be responsible for the architecture of the project. I would have pretty much all of the responsibilities of a Lead Engineer, just not the title (aka the pay).

The recruiter then spent 15 minutes negging my experience, telling me how much smarter their employees are than I am, and informing me that the biggest perk to working there is the fact that I would have the opportunity to be surrounded by their brilliance. The conversation finally ended when I asked for salary ranges for this position and he refused to provide them.

In retrospect, it seems like this recruiter is out there just looking for someone to screw over. So, are recruiter calls typically this bad? Do recruiters always balk at providing numbers? Am I taking crazy pills to think that this behavior was out of line? What has your experience been like?
Notice that the hot zone spans across jurisdictions that deliberately opted out of Medi-Cal, and generally opposed public health measures in general. Sad, because if Zika gets rolling there, the people who will most need access to health care will be the working poor.
I am currently working on a post (completely coincidental to the existence of the submission) attempting to determine the difference in domestic box office revenue from movies with male leads and movies with female leads.
The problem with generated Makefiles is that you start to debug the generation step, if possible, if you want to tweak things, whereas a Makefile written by a human is usually easy to edit. Alternatively the generated Makefile could use overrides from an optional .mk file to be sourced, but that's not what I've seen with automake or cmake.
Well if they are joint coordinators, they we should share equally in the fruits of our effort. It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to swallow the empty rhetoric these sorts of people and corporations put out which is totally insincere. But you are in this relationship, you need the money and don't really have a choice in the matter of rejecting the culture or the values being pushed upon you without consideration for your needs.
Why the gulp-rev-all is in blacklist?
Open Translators to Things: An Open Approach for Accessing Similar Things
you're describing a rural area, not a suburban one.
Light rail is extremely comfortable. People actually open their laptops and do work. There are a bunch of reasons for that which were discussed in another thread yesterday. From there, it doesn't matter whether it's 20% faster (which it actually is, compared to busses, not even counting additional capacity).
I am a user, both gulp-rev and gulp-rev-all. They are totally different. The reason "gulp-rev-all": "duplicate of gulp-rev" in the blacklist is not reasonable. gulp-rev-all is do a better work then gulp-rev do when i need handle resource dependences.

i use gulp-rev-all in more then ten projects in my company. it sovles our problem when we use CDN.

being simple and composable does't not mean being crude and can't working.
> Age implies wisdom and experience

Age implies obsoleteness and poor health. (I can stereotype too!)
GNU is a fully free/libre replacement for the Unix operating system, not just a collection of GNU programs:

https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html
The US is in almost all things far less free market than the rhetoric would have you believe, and this is a bipartisan thing. The American right throws free markets under the bus as much as the left, but often for different reasons.
I think for average people, such as myself, age is definitely an advantage in being a manager. I tried it at 24 and hated it, felt totally out of my depth.

Having been through and been humbled by many life experiences means I can show more empathy and understanding. On the other hand there are many very switched on young people, so like always we should ignore age and judge people on their merits.
Have they actually proved that Zika is even causing microcephaly?
I am interested in this as well. If anyone have any good read on the topic please share!
Move on. Their loss. Don't think too hard about one person's behaviour.
I tend to favor organizing by feature...

/feature/subfeature/(constants|actions|reducers|api|controls)

This way features can be N layers deep, a given feature may not have all of those pieces, some may be data only, some may have actions that are called from other features... in the end, the data/controls etc are closer to the feature that binds them. Api is to abstract any foreign system integration (api calls), where actions (action creators) may use it, and the reducers manage the result... Redux workflow, variance on structure.

Tends to work pretty well that way. Actions/reducers may listen/dispatch those defined under other features... again, it's the shape of the data and application that defines these features and their structure.
well, yeah. all of that is true.

but consider this: america was built by people trying to leave europe and to a lesser extent asia, not rebuild it elsewhere. and it worked great, until it stopped working (recently). i think we'll figure it out eventually, it just won't be for a while.

see the resurgence of city centers and farmer's markets, for example. also, for what it's worth, american cities that are forced into small areas because of water or economics (sf, ny, isolated parts of LA and chicago) result in a euro-like end result.
Let's back off with the Amazon hate. Right below it on the same list is Google with an average tenure at 1.1 years. Nobody tries to use that as an argument that Google burns through workers who quit in dissatisfaction.
The question lacks nuance; its black and white, more than people's supposed morality. In reality, the World is complex. Maybe there isn't a way to save everyone, but people aren't going to take your word for it. The real-world answer is to look for a way. Ask black-and-white questions; get stupid, black-and-white answers.
Build systems are a good case for a domain-specific language that just knows about how to build things. Make may not always be the right DSL.

"Here's a Haskell library, go write your own build system in Haskell" is technically a solution to every build problem, but not a very practical one. Especially because Haskell libraries are themselves so hard to build on a fresh system!
Single page applications are mostly logic. Front end linked to back end programming. Regular web sites are content presentation - what the WWW was originally conceived for.

Search engines index content first and usually discard what javascript renders - that is why people are told never to use Document.Write() to render text, however tempting it may be.

Now there is a difference between using Document.Write() to output text to a HTML document and using something like JQuery which for most cases would only influence how text within elements is to be rendered. If javascript was disabled on a website properly using JQuery, a search engine would still see the content within the elements, whereas on a page using DOM manipulation like the Document.Write function the rendered content would still be hidden because the function can't be executed.

As search engines often take page loading speed into account to render their results pages and rank websites it is advised to put the JS at the end, when the content has already been loaded and transform its presentation later.
Not "relatively easier"... quite literally just two commands! The people behind FastBoot are amazing.
I agree completely. My choice is redistribution. Tariffs and pitch-forks both shrink the pie for everyone. Striving for efficiency and progress at all costs, and then redistributing the results seems like the clearly optimal path to me.
> The trouble is, GNU is only _part_ of the GNU/Linux operating system.

GNU is a fully free/libre replacement for the Unix operating system, not just a collection of GNU programs:

https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html

GNU never has been all GNU software---GNU wrote tools that were needed, and used free software when it was available.
Show HN: React, RxJS, ES6, Webpack Barebones Starter Kit
IMHO, it's not that common (or wise) to split roles like that, fwiw.
Link to the actual paper: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/4/e1501693
Australia has a 40-60,000 year old history of hunter-gatherer wandering (known in Aussie English as walkabout) deriving in unbroken tradition from the very first population to migrate out of Africa.
Don't underestimate the value of the monorail that can transport someone 6 blocks in light speed.
I'd say most, but not all.
Meanwhile, the magnetic pole is moving 4000 times faster.
This. There's a very good reason the system looks and acts like it does.
Here's the other extreme - the liberalism of the working class, the Union Pacific Railroad. 150 years in business. 40,000 employees. 86% belong to a union. 20% are military veterans. UP claims 3 million hours a year of training time for their employees, and that's all paid time.

It's not an easy life. Here's a recruiting video.[1] They open by showing workers in a railroad yard in Chicago at 5:47 AM in a snowstorm. Management training starts with jobs like that. They show a management training session on how to deal with conflict. There's a lot of travel. One of the trainees says "UP operates in 23 states, and I went to 21 of them in my first year."

It's the total opposite of the "brogrammer" culture. Not only does UP hire many women, the women go out in the field, wearing all the heavy protective gear and doing hard work. UP is insistent about this.[2] It helps that they're a union shop, where employee discipline is formal. And this is in a culture much more macho than programming.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMViWazEYoc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVH8pASu-og
Either that or proactive lawyers. California is a no-cause state. Only when you state a cause, can it be used against you for bias.

[Edit] Don't know about other states.
>Public health policy doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Yes, as any public health official will attest, public health policy happens best in a climate of unbridled fear and panic.
You read stories about WWII and other military decisions which followed this sort of logic and sent millions of people to death or tested chemical weapons on their own troops. It was exactly this sort of contrived sort of logic. And you are absolutely right we always have other options available, if we just tune the axioms in our logic to look for those answers.

It's funny but we see superheros in comics and movies deal a lot more effectively with these questions then we do some of our leaders. Who frame it in terms of win and lose, and the worst part is when they go against people that use that sort of logic, they are locked into these sorts of zero sum games.
They're fundamentally the same thing. Your spending is somebody else's income.

But a consumption tax which is collected by the merchants provides the government with the least information. All they learn is that Walmart reported selling $8,500,000 worth of auto parts this quarter, not who your employer is or what specific customers bought what specific products.
> I will put $100 into an index fund and bet the proceeds
> that self-driving technology will not be competitive with
> rail by 2040.

Longbets? [1]

(They don't seem to be very active though, so if anyone knows better alternatives, you're welcome to share)

[1] http://longbets.org/
I go a minor step further, and pull out the components/actions/reducer by feature... additionally I'll separate out api into a separate file, for interactions with outside pieces (cors/xhr, etc), this way action creators don't have the logic for xhr requests (fetch or axios), and it's pretty clean... I use redux-thunk and redux-actions too.

Even for angular, it's a pretty nice workflow... I really don't care as much for angular as react. When the workflow is mostly the same, the quirkiness of angular (1 & 2) just stand out more imho.
It depends on the type of company you're talking with. In my experience the recruiters at large, established companies will be very professional and positive - they're looking to make the company attractive to you as much as you want to seem attractive to them. On the other hand my experience with smaller, less-well known, companies (including many startups) is very variable. The recruiters there have significantly less training (if any) and aren't given clear requirements from management on what candidates to look for. More specific to your questions, it's not uncommon for this type of recruiter to pull a bait-and-switch on things like salary, title, etc. To me that's a warning signal that they're trying to get you to commit and then pull a fast one. By the time you get hired you'll be demoted to junior engineer with low salary, given that the recruiter was talking about their team so highly and will say that you're less experienced in comparison.
It's happened to me several times, but that doesn't make it right. You're absolutely right in thinking it was crazy and out of line. My personal advice to you would be to walk away, their behavior is not a good sign of things to come.
Well that was a bit unusual:

> Posted by Thomas Frank

...

> Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? [...]

...

> Let me just add that, as Frank makes clear in his brilliant new work [...]

...

> [...] Frank does a typically brainy thing.

You usually don't see people review their own books from a third person viewpoint, or point out how brilliant or brainy they are. The few times I have seen that have been in contexts where they were obviously trying to project an image of a giant ego for humorous purposes. I'm not familiar enough with this author to know if that's what he's going for in this review, or if he is seriously praising himself.
I thought any direction relative to the north pole is south? What does "east" even mean in relation to the north pole?
Simple geometry argues that you can fit more people on dedicated train cars than a fleet of independent vehicles. You don't get 100% of the benefit of stop-free transit in the real world because there will be pedestrians - you need a dedicated right of way. The argument for independent vehicles was made with rail PRT too, and it only ever reached a niche campus-and-airport market.

What you get from autonomous vehicles is improved flexibility, and that improves all transit modes while only slightly changing the dynamics that make rail vs. bus vs. car interesting.
I'm consistently amused by the amount of learning, tooling and dependencies needed to get these things working (and not very fast at that). Accomplish the same [1] in 15.5k (min): actually fast [2] vdom view layer, router, isomorphism and observers. IE9+ with an additional 9.5k of polyfills [3].

Disclaimer: i'm the author.

[1] https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm#isomorphism-html-attach

[2] http://leeoniya.github.io/js-repaint-perfs/domvm/

[3] https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm/blob/1.x-dev/dist/polyfill...
Please take a look at a brief history of the GNU Project:

https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html

GNU is more than a collection of GNU programs; when free software existed, it was used. The result with a complete Unix replacement.
Like the Silicon Valley TV show, the truthfulness of the specifics of this story aren't really the important part. If public perception of startups is as childish frat house like cults, that is a problem whether or not specific startups are in fact childish frat house like cults. I mean that is the exact reason why we use the phrase "frat house" as a pejorative regardless of the merits of specific fraternities.