skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
R&D funding for rocketry has been very sparse, and large scale rocketry has consistently been extremely risk averse. Because of that there have only been a few different rocket engine designs which have been advanced towards production suitable for use on orbital launch vehicles. In the US, for example, there was a period of development on LOX/Kerosene engines in the US during the Apollo program but then the Hydrogen fad came along with the Shuttle program and that largely stopped until SpaceX came along. The SSME, RS-68, and SpaceX's engines are the only rocket engines with more than 500 kN of thrust that have been developed in the US in decades. That gives you a sense of how sparse the development landscape for rocket engines has been.

We simply have not explored much of the design space for rocket engines as of yet. We haven't even explored many of the most promising propellants (LOX/Methane being one example), let alone most of the rocket engine designs. Pursuing a new engine design and scaling it up to a size suitable for orbital rocketry is typically incredibly expensive and difficult, which is why it has been done so rarely.

Additionally, government backed R&D has often suffered from a bit from "Wile E Coyote" engineering. If a project works on something new and that project fails, or sometimes merely ends, then whatever was being worked on is often abandoned and treated as though it's impossible. Just look at the failure to followup on the DC-X work, despite the program overall being quite successful. Yet now there are several companies who are following up on those design principles (VTVL reusability) such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and now Firefly. Aerospikes have a lot of potential but also a lot of difficulties, nobody has ever put in sufficient work to figure out whether those difficulties are surmountable.
> Android could

I honestly don't know enough about the Android business to comment.

> AdSense has nothing to do with search

I think you're focusing far too much on the technology and not nearly enough on the power that comes with being king of search. What if Amazon or Facebook manage to come up with a truly compelling business offering that competes with the open internet (the former by controlling logistical infrastructure, the latter by controlling social infrastructure, and both by reducing payment friction)? A shift would happen where the purchase point moves from the "open internet" (which is really Google's walled garden) to Amazon/Facebook territory. Suddenly AdSense becomes less attractive than a Amazon/Facebook affiliate alternative and webmasters everywhere switch to the option that pays better.

I sincerely hope this doesn't happen, but I don't think it's particularly far-fetched.
Hmm. Preface: I do not work at Google.

> I would love to see one single company that isn’t dominating a market with no cash cow in-flow that can succeed without strict discipline, sharp focus, hard work, and hands-on management

I've worked for plenty. I'm not going to name them because it's tactless, but they were both huge monolithic corporations and small-ish companies that were pretty profitable. I'm sure others have too. Those companies that you think to yourself, "how the fuck are we making money when we're so fucked up?". I wouldn't say it's a rare scenario. The idea of companies as "hyper-efficient market machines" is pretty laughable.

In fact, I've met plenty of people who worked at IBM (the company he alludes to being one of these strict discipline companies) who said IBM was/is a complete mess.

> why have the majority of initiatives at Google either failed or been financially inefficient and unprofitable

The majority of initiatives full stop are failures, or unprofitable. This is kind of pointless without comparing Google to other companies.

> When interacting with sales people at Google, I am shocked to see how untrained and inefficient they are

This is admittedly one of Google's faults: they're awful at customer support and the like in general. Well known, but it seems to be working out fine for them.

> If there are known companies with great sales cultures such as Oracle,

Google is doing considerably better than Oracle in most senses of the word. One possible conclusion is the author's, that Google succeeds in spite of this because of their search monopoly. The alternative is that maybe a strong sales culture doesn't mean as much as the author thinks for the bottom line.

> everything else in the Google world, you get $5 billion or 10 percent of Google’s revenue. Peanuts!

Peanuts? Facebook's revenue last year was $8 billion.

> Google is in a situation of monopoly with its search business

Why do they continue to be a monopoly? There are certainly competitors. One explanation is because they continually offer the best results, because they hire the best software engineers, because they have free food, and offer "20% time", and etc...
> I'm old enough to remember the web before google, and it was terrible.

Yep. I worked for a newspaper when AltaVista was the best thing going and I'd help the librarians and research team craft queries to get information based on understanding the finer points of AltaVista. When the Google beta was available I showed it to them and was never called on again. It was like magic compared to what went before.
it's not a taxi service, and I have one of the insurance companies that is ok with ridesharing. I am sure they have plenty of actuarial data that allows them to set the rates accurately.

I'm not double dipping because I won't be deducting gasoline or insurance expenses as a part of the .56/mi deduction. (I don't keep my gas receipts)
Vox Media Raises $46.5M in Round Led by General Atlantic
That's not a sufficient explanation. It has been more than 15 years since they launched.

I would argue that their monopoly isn't due to that initial insight but a) their relentless improvement of search over the years, b) their technology infrastructure that made large-scale computing much more manageable, and c) their early lead in dramatically reducing computing cost, allowing them to spend dramatically more computing power per search than their competitors.

I'd add that another important choice was ignoring the modern business dogma of revenue maximization. They kicked the hell out of the early search advertising market by limiting things to well-chosen little text ads, something that was initially lower revenue but delivered much higher value to the users.
Program Offers Bitcoin Entrepreneurs Camplike Atmosphere
I did not know Burger Heineman did this port.
Mother of all – Wiktionary
Check the references, he cites Cattell, about whom this was written: http://www.ferris.edu/isar/bios/cattell/genetica.htm

"""Cattell’s critical remarks about Hitler in later years trivialize the horrors of the past and the dangers inherent in fascist ideology. In Cattell (1972, p. 406), for example, he compares Hitler to "the murderous Hippie cults of California.""""

""" Despite this, Cattell could write in 1938 that the "envy" and "hostility" of the "Atlantic Democracies" over "the rise of Germany, Italy, and Japan," was uncalled-for. Citizens in these fascist states had "disciplined their indulgences" and focused their energies on "a religious purpose." The rise of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany "should be welcomed by the religious man as reassuring evidence that in spite of modern wealth and ease, we shall not be allowed to sink into stagnation or adopt foolish social practices in fatal detachment from the stream of evolution" (Cattell, 1938, p. 149). After five decades of reflection, Cattell has concluded that the legacy of this catastrophe has been a mental "disorder" he calls "ignoracism" - the inability "to consider the scientific possibility that races may show statistically significant differences" (Cattell, 1972, p. 262). In other words, the Nazis created such a revulsion to racism that it resulted in "ignoracism" - the refusal to accept the reality of racial differences! """
I'd recommend checking to see that the heatsinks are clear. I was having horrible slowdown on a 2010 MBP that I realized after a lot of hair pulling was due to thermal issues. Pulled the fans/heatsinks, there was a solid mat of dust between the fans and heatsinks. Cleaned those up, and suddenly the fans never even spun up to audible levels.
I don't mean that all of what we do is soft. I mean about 50℅ of it (in my case anyway, the rest I spend on data structure design, performance, testing, maintainability etc etc.) I'm saying that it is more like architecture than civil eng. Because it has such a large soft design component it will always elude a hard engineering approach.
Another special characteristic of Google is its sales force. When interacting with sales people at Google, I am shocked to see how untrained and inefficient they are.

Did the author just make a wild generalization about a very large number of people, backed up with no evidence whatsoever? Why yes they did. Come on, the least they could do is offer up an anecdote to justify that bizarre claim.
Some funny things in there:

switch (gamemap) {
case 24: /* Secret level? */
nextmap = 4;
break;

Source: https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do/blob/master/source/gam...
Well, ok, don't mind if I do.

"I'm self employed now, so take the following with a grain sf salt - it worked for me though. When I was dealing with HR, I made sure to growl a lot while talking, and stand in front of the only exit. There's a kind of sociopath that will only act with some consideration if they realize that their skeletal integrity is at risk, because they're the sort of people who would do that to others if given the chance. I don't beat up people at random, but you can bet that at least some sociopaths would if they thought they could get away with it - use it against them. Not to mean that all HR folks are sociopath, but you do get quite a few."

Again I say, pump the brakes, internet tough guy. Who would do this to an HR lady? Who would need to?

You have a real boner for physical violence and intimidation-- I didn't have to dig for hours to find you saying something else crazy. Believe it or not, there exist a variety of socially acceptable outlets to get your ya-ya's out against trained opponents your own size. I think (after giving you the benefit of the doubt on not just being a bullying thug, which is how you come off) you'd enjoy it quite a lot, and get an outlet for this aggression that isn't setting you back in your career.

Seriously. Try a boxing gym. Boxing is very underrated these days. Worked wonders for me, back when I was getting in lots of fights.

Be well man. You got some demons chasing you.
Excellent. RIP Cordova.
In a Smalltalk-style message passing system, each object has its own little parser. When you send it a message, the object will parse and interpret it however it wishes. Essentially, you send the object a sequence of tokens, it parses the tokens and generates some executable code that it then invokes.

In C# (or Java), it would look something like this:

interface Message : IEnumerable<Token>
{

}

public class Foo
{

public void Consider(Object sender, Message msg)
{
//possibly validate sender...

Executable result = this.Parse(msg);

if(result.IsValid)
sender.Consider(result.Execute(this));
else
sender.Consider(new MethodMissing());
}

private Executable Parse(msg)
{
//the ability to parse the message depends on the state of this object
}
}

The basic idea is that the object is always in control of what it does. Methods are extremely late-bound because the code for the method may not even exist until the object first creates it in response to a received message.

But, the big idea is that an object is just a little computer, and in a computer system, a computer is the smallest thing that you want to recapitulate.
Or in Clojure, it's

(sort #(compare %1 %2) coll)

To reverse it

(sort #(compare %2 %1) coll)

Where coll is the collection you want to sort. Same caveat applies with:

(reverse coll)

Try as I might I can't get Clojure to bench slower than its comparative Java. I see no reason to program in Java anymore wherever possible.
Here's a functional discussion and implementation of (primarily) deletion that I once did as a project thesis: http://www.reinference.net/llrb-delete-julien-oster.pdf

The reason I mention that:
"There already is an algorithm for deletion available, which Sedgewick [2008] presented alongside his introduction to Left-Leaning Red-Black trees. This algorithm, however, while being pretty concise, follows a very imperative approach, containing a lot of nested if-else-blocks and breaking several invariants during its run by design, later fixing everything up using several auxiliary functions. [...]

Instead, we follow an approach which is closer to what Okasaki [1999] did with his seminal, purely functional implementation of insertion in Red-Black trees. That is, our algorithm relies purely on pattern matching and simple recursive decent. Moreover, of the three functions it consists of, the two which implement the algorithm’s bulk are completely self-contained, i.e. do not rely on auxiliary functions."
If you're demanding that the workers live somewhere particular then of course you're going to be paying more when that "somewhere particular" is more expensive. For remote work of comparable quality, it does not make sense to me that it should be adjusted based on where the worker decides to live.
Tell the people that created the webservice I have to consume this!
Sure! please add us to your list info@realitycrowdtv.com
There are various ways to analyze the arguments in the article, but even before we get to that my main objection is that the author never answered the "why" of "why Eric S. doesn't know why Google works."
Nobody expects ENTITY sections in XML, either
Terse overview of the Z-Machine architecture: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/overvi...

A short history: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/appd.h...
Bootstrap vs. Foundation: Which Front End Framework Is More Future-Proof?
What a great resource. I'm in the process of writing an article on AWS & DevOps to be published on AirPair.com. I'll probably include a link to this.
Recipe for making great software:

- Build a good team. Keep management overhead and bullshit to a minimum. Motivate people by giving them really good people to work with and not pulling crap compensation games.

- Do your product three or four times. Rule of thumb: When you're absolutely sick of re-writing the thing and you're ready to work on something else (probably at about this many repetitions) you're reaching the point where you have a decent solution.

- Work on something hard and fun that people actually want to buy.

- If someone in management tries to cram a methodology down your throat, or a salesman knocks on your door with a rad new way to do scrum, kill them and stuff the body with all the other miserable wastes of oxygen who tried to bamboozle you with snake oil.

I dunno. This stuff is just bloody hard, and every silver bullet I've ever seen -- especially the ones that management loves or that use the word "paradigm" in their literature -- has been a dud.
The ‘smart spoon’ is one of Google’s best purchases in years
You're missing my point.

Put plainly:

You're not a billionaire. Acting like one is a poor strategy. We plebians are well served by being nice if we want to move up the bracket.

By all means, when you are rich and powerful, act like kind of a prick. You might need to act like a prick. I honestly couldn't say, but you could make a very plausible case for not being sunshine and rainbows all day, saying 'no' a lot, and pushing people pretty hard. (Lying, cheating, and stealing is another matter-- these are principally the actions of desperate people. Being a tough businessperson doesn't make you a jerk, though.)

But do yourself (and the rest of us) a favor and don't go there until you have to.
Ask HN: A company wants me to do professional training, how much do I charge?
I had a very large firm reach out to me regarding professional training for AngularJS. The training will take 40hrs (15 live webex, 12 live Q&A via WebEx, 13 providing e-mail support), and I have to write a curriculum around the specific topics they want me to cover during the live training.

This is the first time I've ever done professional training, and I don't know the standard pricing for this sort of thing. Specifically, when do you typically charge by the head, by the hour, etc and how much for each?

(PS - if anyone here has done professional training before I'd love to pick your brain sometime)
That cloud server does other stuff, but the cost isn't really a factor for me. IRCCloud doesn't let me connect with an IRC client. I can only use the mobile apps or my browser. Many don't mind that limitation, but it's a deal-breaker for me.
I would have to agree with you.
The argument can be made both ways. One can say that Python is better cause readability.

Many can give examples of successful or failed projects in both languages but it's just conjecture.

The only correct way to look at language choice, and the only objective one, is to use the language you are productive in. The best language is the one you master.
Spinal cord has successfully been grown in a lab
For web and mobile apps, you need programming ability and tooling (bug tracker, source code control, editor/ide, test/release system, etc.)

With that, IMHO your job looks more like a writer than an engineer, and your product feels more like a serial TV show than a skyscraper. Key skills: identifying a compelling story line, building awareness and engagement with a loyal audience.
I always loved RS when growing up. The problem they solved for me was simple. I needed a cable or other small esoteric part. They had it. I could get it that day and get to work.

The issue is they charged $20 for a cable that you could now buy from Amazon for $1. I know people who would buy the cable from RS for $20, order it on Amazon, wait the 7-9 days for it arrive. Then return the $20 cable to $RS.

Basically, their core purpose disappeared. Amazon has killed them much the same way they killed Border's.
(price of)

To the extent that [Agile software development] is [an excuse for not thinking], it's a bad thing. - Leslie Lamport
> Android could. If they spun that off into it's own company it would be worth tens of billions, minimum.

That's tricky. Android's success depends heavily on phone vendors, and the vendors -- at least the large ones -- have only bet on Android because Google's control over it is relatively subtle. If Google tries to extract too much money off of Android, you'll see phone manufacturers forking it in a heartbeat.
The 40 hour work week was meant for labor work, not thinking jobs. Applying that workweek to devs has to stop. One can only think and plan for maybe 3 to 4 hours a day.
Being a Minecraft admin is super fun, like a D&D dungeon master.
The link to the implementation is 404 and I can't find it in that directory either. A quick search of LLRB trees suggests that its only advantage is supposedly "easier to implement" but that doesn't appear to be the case in practice. In fact one of the links I found is http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/notes/llrb.html

It almost feels like LLRB trees are a bit of a scam.
or create a web-based matchmaking market. I think the reason why it may not have happen already is because of regulations shrug - i'll ask the next time i'm speaking to a lawyer
The point is that nobody reads the standards.
Multiple CDs/DVDs could develop errors in them by the time you try to read data off of them, especially if you bought them from the same vendor around the same time.

parchive files are great, but they won't help if the metadata referencing them doesn't get corrupt. The DVDisaster site talks about this in a section called "Shortcoming of file based recovery on optical media".[1]

I personally like to secure my backups using all three methods:

A - Create par2/QuickPAR error correction files
of all my important data.

B - Augment the ISOs that I create of my important data and the
par2/QuickPAR error correction files I created in step A with
error correction data using DVDisaster.

C - Burn multiple DVDs from different vendors and bought at
different times with the augmented ISOs I created in step B.

I also periodically make ISOs from old DVDs (created using the above method), correct any errors they may have developed using DVDisaster and par2/QuickPAR, and burn them on to new DVDs.

This method requires more time, money, and DVDs than using any subset of the above, but it gives me more confidence in being able to get at my important data when I need it.

[1] - http://dvdisaster.net/en/qa.html#recovery
Static typing comes with benefits and costs. If you don't want to pay the costs and can forego the benefits, dynamic typing is fine.
> I don't think waterfall is actually used in other disciplines, perhaps we were just cargo culting back then?

I think this is half right. There was quite a bit of cargo-culting going on. But the fundamental error was to try to apply the project-management process for the construction of other kinds of artefacts to the design of software. I wrote about this very topic here:

http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-enginee...

You're correct that no other engineering discipline attempts to use waterfall-style project management of its design process. They don't really use it in the construction process either (in practice, design tends to continue alongside construction), though it probably has at least been attempted.

It was no surprise to see that the authors of this piece are in fact among the originators of the Rational Unified Process. They claim to have corrected their mistake; in fact they are still pushing the same wrongheaded ideas as they were in the 1980s.
Exactly, I felt the same. I believe it (cooperation, attention to detail, much less hype and lawsuits, etc) is because of the responsibility. If I sue competing startup and they will get distracted and miss their scaling problem and begin to return 502 errors - herd will call me a "fighter", some call me "this jerk, who's smarter in the courtroom than at the keyboard", etc, VCs will like me, anyway, I win. If I sue someone making a competing ARINC interface, they get distracted, miss a race condition and then 502 people die... I also get distracted, and another 404 people die.
Well, it's a little bit worse than 502 error. And there's so many training and so many manuals, books, anecdotes around how many people may die if we don't "put enough assert()s in our code" that you just stop thinking about hype and lawsuits and gold miners.
And how, exactly, is this relevant?
Dy vajza blejne tre banane – Barcaleta dhe Parodi Shqip
Surprised SICP isn't mentioned.
I went through each quote carefully while adding some missing ones to my fortune clone/database at https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup and noticed two things versus modern sources: (1) The weight lent to optimization related concerns seems higher than today. (2) Comprehension of the non-electronic context of programming seems higher than today.

I think these are probably valid cultural reflections, potentially ascribable in part to the (edited, time-lapse) nature of paper-publishing versus electronic.