HN user
The book is interesting, but the level of detail he goes into in some of his speculation is completely unjustified. It's kind of ridiculous.
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." - von Neumann
The telcos are running utilities and should be regulated like utilities. And they should especially be regulated this way if they are heavily subsidized build the infrastructure in the first place.
Biking in Soma is incredibly dangerous. Everyone I know who bikes there has had an accident at some point in the last few years. And I suspect its getting worse with Uber and Lyft drivers who pour in from elsewhere around the bay and have no familiarity with the streets at all.
I don't think Paul Graham owes Michael O Church a damn thing. PG has always been clear that he built this site as a place for a certain type of reasoned discourse with a certain tone. And he enforces that as he pleases, as he should. He did, after all, build this place with his own two hands and he pays for it out of his own pocket.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if people have a secret "tone score" or similar that is assigned by moderators every time they make a nasty comment. And if that is the case, looking back on Church's comments it should be pretty clear that he'd have racked up one of the highest (lowest?) tone scores on HN. His comments are full of bitterness and hatred and scorn.
This is certainly kind of legislation that could come down to a close vote, especially if IV throws around some lobbying dollars against it.
A little advocacy will go a long way, and it will be very interesting to see if the tech industry gets their act together enough to support it in any meaningful way.
I tutored teenagers in physics and math for a while to make ends meet. And they love snapchat. They are also basically ready to be done with facebook.
There are two reasons they prefer snapchat to facebook and texting, respectively, both of which basically come down to privacy:
1) Their parents are on facebook
2) They know that what they say today might look stupid tomorrow, and facebook (and the phone companies) save everything, forever.
Basically, they have figured out that what they say when they are 13 will look ridiculous when they are 17. And what they say when they are 17 will be really cringe-worthy when they are in college. They also know that facebook's track record on privacy is awful, so even if they went through the trouble to create different types of friend lists, with different access settings, etc., facebook could just change everything tomorrow.
I could easily see snapchat expanding to build an entire social network built around the "only see for 10 seconds and its gone" feature, and droves of teenagers moving onto it. If they do, facebook could be in serious trouble.
Have to interject here on the off chance that some gmail engineers are paying attention. That's nice that you like it, but forcing the new compose on users is just plain inexcusable. It breaks a number of things for me that I actually use in my work on a daily basis.
Here are just 4 things that it breaks for me (note: copied from elsewhere):
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
No can do. I refuse to turn shortcuts on because there are at least 2 (and maybe more I'm not aware of) ways to send the email I'm currently drafting. Command + Enter, or hitting shift, then enter.
I've learned from past email programs that's a recipe for disaster. Turn those two off and I'd gladly use keyboard shortcuts.
The new compose has at least 4 things that are broken for me:
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
And that's just off the top of my head...
I did try it just now. See my above comment.
Disaster.
1) I just turned it on, and it is not customizable at all. You cannot create custom tabs, and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created.
2) When you turn it on, it disables Gmail's multiple inbox. Multiple inbox is the only thing saving my email from being a complete and utter disaster right now.
3) Judging by how they are forcing the new compose on everyone it is reasonable to expect that they will force us to use this as well. (The new compose screws up at least two workflows for me, btw. For example, sending a form email to several people is now a pain because I have to manually click "edit subject" to remove the "Fwd:"). If they force this on me, it will completely destroy my ability to use gmail. If they want me to leave gmail for good, that would be the way to guarantee it.
What a mess.
I'd say the goal is to find a survivable planet that can support billions of people. In that sense, the amount of water ice that is in a couple of permanently shadowed craters is really negligible. And on Mercury you're talking about only a narrow zone around the poles that you can support people if you excavate massive amounts of rock underground.
If you're talking about the energy required on Mars to change the atmosphere on a planetary scale, is there a source that says that would be a limiting factor? None of the research on this that I've seen considers it to be an issue. Mars receives about 1/3 the incident sunlight that Earth does, measured at vacuum. But the amount of that incident sunlight that will reach the surface will be higher on Mars due to the thin atmosphere and lack of cloud cover.
Mars is a non-starter? I think you've received some bad information.
Average radiation on the Mars surface is 10-20 rem/year. With a thicker atmosphere it will be less. And for people spending 12-15 hours a day indoors in shielded dwellings it will be a lot less. It's not a showstopper at all.
But the goal isn't to just colonize any old planet. It's to colonize a place we can successfully terraform. Mars is the clear winner in that respect, and it's not close.
Mercury needs basically a planet's worth of water and atmosphere to be imported. Mars on the other hand could be (we hope) good to go. The only question for Mars is whether there are abundant amounts of nitrogen locked up in the soil. But even if not, the amount of stuff we'd need to import by bombarding the planet with asteroids would be orders of magnitude less than for Mercury.
This is the best explanation. What I think a lot of the public doesn't realize is where the money comes from when you walk into a bank and you get a loan from that bank (instead of depositing the money from somewhere else).
They basically are just creating new rows in their databases. Just like the names-on-paper example above, someone just types "+$X,000" into the row that represents the money in your account. And then someone types the equivalent of "adastra owes us $X,000" into a row in another database for their balance sheet. It really is money created out of thin air.
But then I suppose all money is actually IOU's created out of thin air... It's just that for some reason people think it's only the federal government that can create new IOU's.
'Rather than steal money from depositors' accounts, Bhalla just invented a new account for himself. "We went into the database where the accounts are and set up an account with $14 million," Bhalla explained. "We just created $14 million out of thin air."
I remember the first time I discovered this is how banks operate when I was a kid. It's really pretty mind-blowing when you think about it. And knowing how full of bugs most software is it really made me question the entire banking system. (My mind has still yet to be put at ease on that...)
ITAR, like all US federal regulations codified in the CFR, have the full force and effect of the law. See the first couple paragraphs here for further explanation: http://library.law.unh.edu/AdminLaw
How do you know if something is subject to ITAR? The State Department has a big list. It's called the US Munitions List (USML). At the time Zimmerman said that, PGP probably wasn't on the list. But I assure you, blueprints of guns are absolutely on the list.
Absolutely yes this is a risk. Do not do this. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is not something you want to mess with.
If only someone had predicted this exact possibility 3 years ago...
"[2] In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to."
-Paul Graham, What Happened to Yahoo http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Edit: giving this another 30 seconds thought, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a friend of Mayer's sent her PG's essay when she first agreed to take the job. If she hadn't realized it already, she almost certainly would have seen this strategy as the correct one (use Yahoo's war chest to get more A-players into the company through acquisitions), and she's been executing on it ever since.
That's not correct. The US government doesn't subsidize SpaceX, it purchases launches and technology. It's just a customer. And it buys those things for much cheaper than before. You as the tax payer are actually saving money compared to what NASA and the DoD were spending on the big contractors.
I would put it this way. They're not responding to your ideas, they are responding to you.
A thought experiment: imagine Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk is sitting across from one of these people, selling your same idea. The exact same idea, with the same words. Do you think they would respond with that quick reactionary criticism? Of course not.
I suspect you've failed to communicate first something that is much more important than the idea: why you are impressive. i.e. why it is that they should even be listening to you. You probably just figure you're being humble, when really you should spend more time talking yourself up (not in a douchey way) before talking about your idea.
Bezos, or his handlers anyway, can be pretty outrageous with this kind of stuff. Water landings of VTVL's have been talked about since the 1960's by various people. It would be pretty ridiculous if he was granted the patent for it.
The first stage isn't going at orbital velocity of course, but the second stage is. The SpaceX announcement for Grasshopper refers to both:
http://www.space.com/13140-spacex-private-reusable-rocket-el...
I'm sure they'll start with just the first stage, but you can't just do a powered descent - that would leave it in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. It has to be a return-to-launch-site maneuver and landing, which is what you see in the video linked to above. At the point where the vehicle does a 180-degree turn (referred to as a "death swoop" by rlv enthusiasts), it's going Mach 6 and is 1000 miles downrange. That's hard.
You won't find a bigger supporter of SpaceX, and no one wants Grasshopper to be doing operational flights tomorrow more than I do. But it will take 10 years, minimum.
Keep in mind no one has successfully done powered vertical landing from orbit. It's never been done. (Well, not from Earth orbit anyway. The LEM landed vertically from lunar orbit.) SpaceX is getting a taste of how hard this is by trying to recover their first stages using parachutes - their every attempt to do so has failed.
If they could focus the bulk of their engineering workforce on this problem they might be able to do it faster. But they have to massively scale up production to meet the orders they've taken, they have to keep their reliability up, they are constantly working on performance upgrades for Falcon 9's engines, and they have to get Falcon Heavy going to crack the DoD market. Oh, and there's this little thing called Dragon and NASA's Commercial Crew program. Something about launching those living sacks of meat and bones we call people tends to hold your focus pretty intensely.
Depends on how much time you have and how big we're talking about. If you have years, or lets say a decade, you'd probably try a bunch of things in parallel. Some strategies could be crazier than others, but you wouldn't waste too much time on things that have huge technological risk. Landing a automated mining robot + mass driver seems far-fetched. As does painting it (for something kilometers in diameter, how would that work exactly?)
So you're probably talking about one or more kinetic impactor missions to try and deflect it billiard ball-style. Before those actually launch, the laser-ablation strategy seems like a pretty attractive option to do in parallel. You'd build an array of lasers that ablate the surface of the asteroid, ejecting material that works as reaction mass. Northrop has 100kw solid-state lasers working right now: http://optics.org/news/1/7/13
Seems plausible that you could get something up and running quickly to see if it would work. Before either scaling it up or dropping back on the riskier impactor missions.
It's normal for any NASA mission. Your average comsat launch isn't going to get any press coverage, and the military sure isn't holding press conferences after their classified missions. But pretty much every NASA science and space station mission is going to get a lot of interest.
The space industry's go-to place for minute by minute updates on any launch is Spaceflight Now:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/005/status.html
Here's the last couple of updates:
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013 1527 GMT (10:27 a.m. EST) "It appears that although it achieved Earth orbit, Dragon is experiencing some kind problem right now," said John Insprucker, SpaceX's Falcon 9 product manager. We'lll have to learn about the nature of what happened. According to procedure, we expect a press conference to be held a few hours from now. At that time, further info may be available."
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013 1524 GMT (10:24 a.m. EST) ANOMALY. SpaceX is reporting some type of anomaly on the Dragon spacecraft. Deployment of the solar arrays was supposed to occur at T+plus 11 minutes, 45 seconds, but on-board cameras did not show the panels unfurl as planned. SpaceX's webcast cut away from the solar array view and went to a slate.
If I had to guess, I'd bet workers can now do 8 hours of work in 3, but because we're required by cultural norms to be in the office 9 to 5, people find things to waste time on to stretch it back out to 8 again. (Hmm, there's lots of places to waste time on the internet. But what tech workers would really want to meet this need is a website that is substantive and technical, so they don't feel guilty about spending time there...)
I agree, that's the key to the whole thing right there. It says to me that, if I had to guess, I'd bet he didn't call them and headed out despite the range being short, because he knew he was about to be stranded and have a tantalizing story. And when asked, he could always say he followed their recommendations to the letter.
Also, the amount of weasel words he manages to use on a lot of his other explanations doesn't exactly help his credibility...
Interesting. Here's the relevant bit:
"[Quoting Elon]'The final leg of his trip was 61 miles and yet he disconnected the charge cable when the range display stated 32 miles. He did so expressly against the advice of Tesla personnel and in obvious violation of common sense.'
"The Tesla personnel whom I consulted over the phone – Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino – told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored. I did not ignore their advice."
If I had to guess, I'd bet they talked to him on the phone, saying "Try plugging it in for an hour, that should fix it", figuring after an hour he would call them back if it needed more charge. He didn't call them back, and instead set out knowing he was about to be stranded and have a great story, since he could always claim "Well I followed their advice to the letter! It's their fault!"