skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You spin up your station. You're not limited to whatever accidental value holds on the planetary surface. This was all studied back in the 1970s and 80s, and free-space development makes way more sense: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/
It's a natural monopoly via network externality.

Leave facebook, you miss information your friends and family post to facebook because that's enough.

Leave whatsapp - you now can't message with encryption to a large number of your contacts.

But yes, absolutely you should have signal. Everyone should. That's not the reality we're faced with. Whatsapp message to Dad is better than plaintext - that doesn't mean facebook can be as crooked as they like when they provide that.
That doesn't exactly answer the question now, does it?

Tu quoque fallacy.

It also presumes my lack of awareness of the additional problems.

As I'd commented and cited in this thread: mobile-device distracted driving is a factor in 25% of motor vehicle accidents.
I should mention that 40% of an airliner operating cost is fuel burn, if I recall correctly. That makes fuel efficiency a BFD to airlines and therefore Boeing and the engine makers. They'll spend a metric ton of money for even small improvements.
As important as security is, and as much as I think Linux should be secured more proactively, I have to take issue with two things mentioned:

1. Most devices are not administered by IT Professionals

This is true and must be taken into consideration, but while every layman can't be a sysadmin, neither can you, I think in 2016, simply take a position of "I don't need to understand any of this, and everything should Just Work." I don't think that's realistic, if you want the home automation we see in the Jetsons, if you want smart devices in your home setup to make your coffee at exactly 5:56 AM, then you need to step up and take a little responsibility for learning how this stuff works and how to set it up. Now is it realistic for end users to perform kernel updates, testing functionality, and changing out for new packages as needed? Of course not. But a basic understanding of the underlying technology helps in a long way in troubleshooting the inevitable problems that will arise, and in letting you choose, intelligently, what OEM's to do business with.

2. Manufacturers leaving devices un-updated, unmaintained after production

This is asinine, especially for the devices that require online connectivity. You already have a more-or-less constant WAN connection, so why on Earth can't these devices update their firmware when required? The answer is of course that after-sale support is not profitable but that too is unacceptable, if you're going to bake computers into your products, you as a company need to step the hell up and support them, not just throw them on the market for a quick buck and then run away with the cash.

My 0.02.
>promoting gay rights (however incompetently) is not "US imperialist foreign policy."

Pray tell why Pussy Riot got a spot on 60 Minutes, then?
If you're property owner you want things to improve around you as it increases value. Problem is there an older class of people who vote and attend city council meetings that don't want things to move forward. They squash things like building high density housing right next to a metro stop. They fight things like extending metro lines and almost killed the purple line extension. In our case, they fought fiber(FIOS) in our neighborhood and won because they didn't want the streets dug up.
Very interesting. I believe a similar function could be built in to the browsers using the custom search functionality if one can figure out how to implement multi-parameter queries. I think chrome doesn't allow this[1] but it is possible on firefox [2].

I know one way I would use this --
On chrome I have 'rr' set to go to the subreddit following it; and have 'r' set to simply search all of reddit. It would be great if there was someway to specify two parameters one - the subreddit I am searching and two - the search terms I want to search for within that subreddit.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10265777/how-can-i-do-mu...

[2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Multiple_parameter_keyword_searche...
> What need is there for purpose

Well, if we are just piles of goo that randomly became sentient, then there's no objective "need" for purpose; we can simply keep existing and eating and sleeping until we die and decompose.

However it seems obvious that most people, at some point in their lives, wonder about purpose and meaning--which raises the question of why we wonder. Is there something planted within us that causes us to seek answers to these questions?

> or morality

I suppose the sociological answer would be that morality provides guidelines for behavior which help society operate smoothly, as opposed to everyone doing whatever they want, stealing and killing without consequences, which would prevent any kind of civilization from developing.

Which I guess raises a chicken-and-egg question: where did morality come from? How did the first guy who realized that chaos was holding civilization back (before "civilization" even?) convince everyone else to stop doing what they were doing and follow these rules he came up with? "Hey, man, don't steal my stuff and kill me. If you do, we'll keep having chaos, and we'll never be able to develop a society and make progress." Somehow I doubt that would have been convincing to a wild-eyed savage who was in the habit of raping and pillaging.

> and why ask that of your god?

I think this depends on who your god is--or more specifically, whether you believe a god exists. If there isn't one, and we are our own arbiters of truth and morality and meaning, then I suppose it's personal preference whether you care about these things; many people seem happy to live in ignorant bliss, and then they die, and what does it matter?

But if you believe that a god does exist, who created us, who exists outside of our universe, then said god would necessarily have the power over our life and death, and any afterlife that may come, and so it would seem sensible to inquire as to what that god wanted of us--just as a child tries to please his parents if he wants his parents' approval and support, or a soldier tries to please his superiors, or an employee tries to please his employer.

Of course, many people either don't believe or don't care, and time will tell how it turns out for them. In the end, we'll all find out whether a god exists and whether there's an afterlife.
Is "60 Minutes" now in charge of the US's imperialist foreign policy? I thought it was just a news magazine show on CBS, I didn't know it was owned by the US government.
I personally think it makes sense for SpaceX to offer to take over Tiangong I, the Chinese space station that's going to be deorbited soon. It's older and not suitable for safe habitation anymore. If SpaceX could use their launch capacity to bring up fuel tanks and to boost the orbit, it could do well as an orbiting fueling station.

Just launch tankers and fill up tanks on Tiangong and then the space craft with passengers would just have one trip to the space station to fuel up and then go to Mars.

China is going to throw away the station anyway, so might as well give it (or lease it) to SpaceX for a good price in exchange for at-cost refueling for their own ambitions.
I find it's more of communication problem, because what you assume they know does not match the reality of the situation. Like you ask "can you program?" A mechanical engineer who did a little VBA could apply for that job... People who stay in school all their life rarely get opportunity to be current and relevant stuff used today. This is referring to new grads. They just celebrated a huge life achievement without actually knowing what they don't know with a :D face... some more resourceful ones would find these kind crack-the-interview stuff and maybe get a job - to know what you know for compensating what you don't know. I'm wondering what if tech hiring reach out to students in school and learn what hiring people don't know and work with school to teach what students should know would probably have saved a lot of time... Again, this refers to new grads. I've seen too many not getting jobs these days.

Well. Communication problem exists with professional hirings as well. I blame engineers' lack of empathy (both interviewer and interviewee).
> JS almost forces you to write garbage.

There are ways to work around this...

First, ES6 brings a lot of enhancements to JS. However, it also makes JS even more complex and unwieldy because now you have all of these new and old language features co-existing.

If you use a tool like ESLint, you can limit yourself to a subset of the whole ES6 standard that I think is a decent programming language.

There's also other ways to go at it, by using a language that compiles to JS like TypeScript, however maybe that would be considered cheating in the context of this argument.
I grew up in an underserved community and in poverty, so this is a situation that is near and dear to my heart.

I am also an advocate of internet privacy and against big companies selling my data to 3rd parties, but I believe a trade off is needed here.

Google and Facebook are free, but they sell your data to advertisers and 3rd parties in exchange for your usage, I would imagine that a startup that caters to those without discretionary income would need a similar business model, at least in the early stages.
I really like Blendle and think it's great for people like me that consume a lot of high quality journalism and are willing to pay for it. The big question in my mind is how it will, or if it intends to, achieve mass appeal and bring high quality journalism directly to all as it does to us.
Having written many hundreds of thousands of lines of 68K asm I can admire this for its archaeology and desire to understand how things used to work. Also, would never go back, it was painfully slow going.
I agree with most of what you said, but this is a bit naive:

> If you prefer dynamic languages you are just a bit lazier and short sighted.

In theory, the only drawback of a statically typed language is the up front work required to make the compiler happy. In practice, you end up losing a lot of expressive power, and abstractions that were previously effortless now either add a lot of verbosity/complexity, or are simply impossible. Scala is the most expressive statically typed language I've seen, but even there you often have to jump through hoops to implement certain abstractions in a type safe way. The decision to use a dynamic language is not about laziness.
It is a lot of good jobs that pay fairly, do not require skilled labor, post-secondary education, or high IQ, and is not difficult, strenuous or dangerous work.

I have certainly done this same work myself. It is an excellent position for people without many skills and/or the desire to pursue education. And it is not an appropriate use of time for those of us who do have more skills. Therefore it is highly reasonable and efficient to outsource these tasks to those unable to make things or to design things, and/or not motivated for whatever reason to seriously pursue and master such tasks.
> Where a jet loses a lot of energy compressing the air

It does not loose energy from this. The compressed air expands afterward, returning almost all the energy.

> The best jets are about ~35% efficient at turning energy in to forward speed.

Where are you getting these numbers? I'm seeing much much higher numbers than that then I google it.

> Assuming an electric motor is 80% efficient and the propulsion is 80% efficient, you'd be looking at 64% efficiency.

Again, those numbers don't sound in the slightest bit correct.

> Using your numbers, that means an electric plane would use $25,000 worth of electricity.

What? Run your numbers again. I assumed 50% efficiency for Jets and 100% for electrical.

> The state I live in has well over 100,000 MW of generating capacity. Given that scale, supplying energy to planes doesn't seem so ridiculous.

It's not about the energy usage, it's about how do you connect the thing to an airplane. Do you plan to move cables the size of telephone poles? 100,000 volts?

Have you seen electrical substations? Does that look like the kind of thing you would put on an airplane?
> So you're saying bower is cancer? Webpack is cancer? Babel is cancer ? JavaScript module system made popular by nodejs is cancer?

So I write a ton of JavaScript including plenty in node. But make no mistake bower, webpack, babel and npm are all crap. They're hacks. Bandaids to make ES6, the web and JavaScript modules packaging and installation work correctly. They all have their own issues, huge dependencies (I mean holy crap it took me several minutes to install Babel last time I did it all just so I can use slightly different syntax and deal with map files? ugh).
Pretty close. They'd present a problem, then expand on it. The problems would keep evolving, so that kept it engaging. Then at a certain point, they'd say we're done, we're about out of time, etc - and we'd have a few minutes to chat about life, technology, etc.
Imagination is cheap. I can imagine a unicorn that shits gold, and cures all diseases with a touch of its horn, but that doesn't mean it exists. It's only useful to talk about practicalities, and the fact is that everything you listed is outside of our technology today.

Everything.

Every. Thing.

We have never made a self-contained human supporting ecosystem in a box. Seriously. It has never been made, and not for lack of trying. It is really difficult. Case in point: Biosphere 2[0]

There is no breathable air on Mars. You go outside. You die.
There's no magnetic field, and so the surface radiation is a lot higher there. You stay on the surface for a martian year, your chance of terminal cancer goes up 5%[1] And we haven't even discussed what the people are going to do once they get there. Seriously, there's no resources to make it pay.

As Bruce Sterling put it[2]:

> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

[1] http://www.sci-news.com/space/science-mars-radiation-measure...

[2] http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004-Bru...
I think you're misreading OP's intent. I read it as, "don't be contented and call yourself 'middle class' when by standards of days past you're struggling to get by" or something of the sort. Hyperbole, but not malicious.

I could be wrong though. Some people are just assholes.
> They already think corporations are people with religious rights

No they don't. They think people, when organizing into corporations, do not lose their rights just because they did something together.

Example: you have freedom of speech, and US Constitution and US laws recognize that.

You can print a newspaper and freedom of speech protects you. Now, printing a newspaper is hard. So you ask a bunch of people to help you, and you call these people together "The New York Times Corporation". Is printing the newspaper together still covered as your free speech?

The US Supreme Court thinks yes, it is. I think they are completely correct. To think otherwise would be to say people have free speech right, but only to the point where it actually matters - where they can speak so powerfully and loudly that the government and other people in power have to listen.

In our modern world it is virtually impossible to achieve it without organizing - and so by pretending that after organizing people lose their rights that they had before would be to rob the First Amendment of its meaning and turn it into a sham, when you can only speak freely when it does not matter.
You are going in circles. I'm cutting it off right here:

> the only publicly available evidence is that your resignation was voluntary. Voluntary implies optional. Optional implies you could stay. There's no leap of logic here.

You're wrong: "voluntary" does not imply "optional" in any scenario where the possible outcomes are not mutually exclusive and exhaustive. It's as simple as that. The old saw about the sergeant calling for volunteers and saying if you don't put your hand up, then you'll be "volunteered", comes to mind.

> Well there you go! There's our answer. You weren't fired, you resigned. Right from the man himself :D

I suggest you write less and read more. I've said I resigned since I in fact did resign on 3 April 2014, on my blog, in a statement to Mozilla employees, and on HN every N months, including on this very HN page today. If you didn't read any of those statements, then you simply weren't paying attention. If you read and ignored, bad on you. Either way, you've used up my patience, and probably many others'.
I suppose it could, but of all possible values, it seems exceedingly strange that they'd fall on essentially the same number. It seems much more likely that it has basic physics behind it, but I'm not sure what it is.
The parent comment asked a very valid question and I believe your third line was entirely un-necessary. I think you took it a little too personally and ironically if anyone else would have made such a comment, it would be flagged or downvoted into oblivion.

Look at it this way: if you're a musician and you're looking up to people for inspiration or advice to make great, interesting music - do you look to Kanye West or do you look to someone who failed to achieve success as a musician but then went on to become a record company executive? You look to Kanye West.

(to continue the analogy) So when a group of musicians are suddenly looking to the record company exec, it raises an interesting question: why?

It's not meant to be an attack on your character or your achievements...it's just an interesting question. Or at least, that's the way I interpreted it.
How is YC-HN not unlike a cult such as Scientology?
I have studied HN some 2 weeks now, and just ventured to comment 1 day, I find that there is a very thin mindset. 'Karma' on HN doesn't mean what it should mean, Karma mmeans what goes around comes around, on HN it means a sock-puppet can affirm ( circle-jerk ) another sock-puppet and rack points. So what.

YN-HN appears to be a feeder for some kind of VC creepy scientology like cult. I notice there is no free talk of real entrepreneurial, and there is no tolerance to mention that most high-tech jobs suck after your 40 years old.

If i had to guess it would be that HN is ran by iQtel the CIA front in SV where they want to find you malleable minds to feed their high-tech jobs in Utah ( NSA ), or some terrible boring place back east. The idea of forcing someone to hang out with them in SV for 3 months, isolated from the real world is troubling.

Also taking any money from VC to start a biz is NOT real entrepreneur, the idea is U the owner OWN 100% of your company, and when U play with a VC, they own 90% and you are just a cog in their machine.
Working class means you work for your money. It's even in the name.

Middle class falls between working class and upper class, the bourgeoisie so to speak.
Or it would require a family to be able to support itself on one full-time income instead of two, so the other spouse can maintain the house.
Glad you're asking!

I built Wormhole Network https://wormhole.network with the idea of making remote access very easy and as secure as possible.

Disclosure: This is SaaS and I've built it.

Wormhole builds an overlay network where you can run any L3 protocol really. By default we provide DHCP for IPv4 within the 100.64.0.0/24 (yes, just a /24 by default as it suits most users, it can be customised or even disabled under request). We have chosen this address space to increase the chances of non-overlapping with your own networks.

The advantage of running an overlay network like Wormhole are:

- No need to open ports anywhere or do any inbound NAT or PAT. All traffic is outgoing. By default UDP, but the protocol would fall back to 443/TCP if needed.

- The above means it works pretty much anywhere with an Internet connection that lets you browse the web.

- Your devices' IP addresses inside Wormhole could be always the same, regardless of where they are. Think of migrating your servers to a new hosting? Keep the same IP. Do you team mates move frequently, work from home at times or even from their favourite coffee place? No problems, they'll keep the same IP address.

- Full access between devices inside the network. It works like a real LAN. No need to open ports to reach out to your development server nor leave any other services reachable from the internet. You could lock down all inbound access from Internet to your servers and still reach them through Wormhole.

- All traffic is encrypted. Note: We don't roll our own crypto. We rely on SoftEther's (see below).

- No need to configure a VPN with your cloud/hosting provider, provision VPN hardware nor anything like that.

- Multiplatorm Linux, Windows and macOS.

- It all runs on free, open source software: SoftEther https://www.softether.org so you can audit the software (and it's not ours, people are using it all over the world for VPN)

The architecture is based on central servers that route the traffic among the peers in your network, hence why full connectivity can be accomplished always with only outbound connections. It is important to choose in which server you want to create your connection, so the latency is as low as possible.

Learn more about us in our documentation section: https://wormhole.network/docs/

We currently have a few hundred users and are looking into making the product better by listening to your feedback. We have a free tier without time or traffic limits, available in three regions (US East, Netherlands and Singapore); it just has user limits. No credit card needed to use it.

I'll be extremely happy to receive criticism, suggestions and any other feedback in general here or directed to pedro /at/ wormhole.network
...except for the whole sync/async (libuv) thing. And the bits they added on top of V8, like Buffers.

Maybe Javascript == Node.JS then?
Nominal interest rates are zero. We are living through the largest debt bubble in history. How is it surprising that assets are all incredibly overpriced?

Yes, of course it will end in tears.
Actually it seems a little like the opposite. Their software is actually translating language quite well in the real empirical world, while the the programs built with language rules were never able to do nearly as well.
When a discussion forum discourages skepticism and criticism, you tend to end up in an uninteresting "That's awesome, bro!" echo chamber. There's a big difference between trolling / negativity and battle-hardened cynicism / constructive criticism. Good mods help sort it out.
Funny enough, I use Python primarily, but when it comes to deploying small standalone tools I have a list of things I want to rewrite into something like Go so I don't have to deal with dependencies. In my little experience with Node it seems even worse. One petty but relevant fact is that Node isn't installed by default while Python generally is.

I can definitely see prototyping something in whatever language is convenient and after proving its usefulness rewrite it in a language that fits wider goals. Their motivation[1] seems pretty solid.

[1] https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli/wiki/Motivation
> weird invisible things that trip you up like hoisting

Huh? How can you get tripped up by hoisting? I'm genuinely curious.