damoncali

An oversimplification: Interest rates are going up over the long run in an effort to keep inflation from getting out of hand (very generally, asset prices go down when interest rates go up). The risk is that it will worsen unemployment before we're ready for it.

Pretty sure nobody would enjoy a 5g return to earth...

Pretty much. For me, I think bootstrap comes out ahead even the projects that wanted to tweak everything. It gets a little messy, but not as messy as building from scratch.

Projects that allow you to work within bootstrap's limitations and simply tweak the colors and other basics are a dream come true and wind up looking great. Not design award grade artistic, but functionally very good in a way that's not hard to look at.

Square only offers an advance based upon your cash flow history. There is still risk, but they recoup their loan at a pretty good pace which makes the implied interest rate very high. But- it can be a good deal for the vendor anyhow because it is unsecured, and there is guaranteed cash flow with which to repay it. If you don't make any money, you don't pay anything.

But square appears smart enough only to give the money to people who are fairly certain to have stable enough cash flow to make it work.

On the one actual square example I've seen it looks like the repayment is on the order of 6 months, and is a total of roughly half a month's cash flow.

Democrats and Republicans are more similar than different. They both represent the financial elite to the detriment of those with less power. Sure, they may trade off from year to year on issues of little relevance (which party did Andrew Jackson belong to again? Abe Lincoln?), but in the end they're in lock step when it comes to who owns whom and what.

Who keeps Wall St in control of our banking regs? The popular answer is Republicans - the party of big business. The actual answer is that 4 of Hillary Clinton's top 5 all time donors are Wall St banks. In return Clinton talks tough about wall st - but only be saying we ought to "enhance" the volker rule. You can guess who will come up with that "enhancement" as well as I can. Ask a small bank what they think of Dodd-Frank (named after two Democrats, btw - and vocal "opposition" to Wall St excess). So much for the party of the little guy. You can go on and on like this for both parties. The only constant is that they support the rich.

You don't need to be so literal. When you look at honeycomb, for example, the manufacturers provide strength data in much the same way you'd see it for a solid metal. When you model it with finite element software, you treat it as an monolithic material - you don't model every fold of metal. In that sense, honeycomb (and this stuff) is a material in that it's used the same way. The properties of the "material" already account for its micro-structure.

Just by looking at it, I doubt there is enough shear strength to make it a useful sandwich panel web. Then again, I've been wrong before. But metallic/composite honeycomb is pretty well optimized stuff as it is.

Pretty cool. Returned some gibberish, and some solid sparks for topics. I wonder if you could tweak it to rank the relevance somehow. Maybe have users train it by clicking/removing crappy results, or some such. Not really my specialty - just thinking out loud.

I left because of all the down time. It was crushing. They didn't even try to make busy work - they just pretended everything was fine.

I don't know who James Hansen is. The above is how I think NASA should operate, not how it actually does. I think NASA gets easily distracted by science, when it should be an engineering organization devoted to space and flight (more space than flight these days). Many smart people disagree.

How long have you been there? I've been gone for over a decade, so I'm curious if you can confirm a suspicion I've had recently - that NASA has a bit of Silicon Valley envy and are trying to emulate the tech startup world in ways that may or may not be appropriate to their mission. When I worked there during the .com bubble, nobody cared about Silicon Valley at all - it very much had a military industrial complex feel to it.

I would take it a step further. I used to work at NASA, and I never even thought about a patent. Not sure if we could have even gotten them, but the idea couldn't have been further from my mind.

To me, and what I would guess were most of the engineers around me, the whole point was space exploration. Full stop. Not climate studies, not "science for science's sake", but engineering (not science) to get us into space.

Maybe there is a role for a government organization dedicated to researching quasi-commerical science and engineering, but I would hate for NASA to become that agency. I want NASA focused on putting men in space.

I might take for granted that I have an MBA, and worked quite a bit in other fields before I started freelancing. Might be entirely different for a younger person just starting out.

I've been at this a while ;)

But I think even new freelancers need to just trust their gut. If it sounds flakey, it generally is.

I hadn't really thought about it, but yes, I generally know right away. I sometimes need a little time to assess the project's scope or technical detail, but personality wise, I know almost instantly if the client is going to be a problem.

Clues:

Does the client respect your time? Texting me at 11:00 PM to talk about your project isn't going to work. Bad. Do not let the client intrude like this. It will drive you mad.

Does the client want to defer payment because they're talking to a big customer who needs to sign on? That's utterly unrealistic. Bad. Clients who are about to sign big customers are well past the dev hiring stage. This speaks to poor business management skills.

Does the client have leave a wake of unreliable developers in his path? If so, tread carefully. One is ok- there are a lot of flakey devs out there. Two is not. I once had a guy ask me if I could asses his previous dev's work as support for a small claims case. Um. no.

Does the client want to offer equity instead of cash? This is almost always bad. People who know what they're doing generally have some cash to get started, and generally prefer to use it. You might find a good client doing this, but it's very rare in my experience.

Does the client want to talk about entrepreneurship or does he have something to build? I get a lot of talkers. See the part above about respecting my time.

Has the client actually thought about what it is he wants?

Does the client have wildly misplaced sense of the technical scope of his project? Just say no.

Does the client come off as lacking in confidence? This isn't horrible, but they tend to be short lived, one off projects.

Can the client communicate clearly? This can be a real problem if they can't.

Does the client want you for crunch time because he planned poorly? <- Reread the last 4 words of this sentence.

Does the client want you to work with some cheap overseas code because they blew half their budget on what they thought would be a good deal and don't realize they have to start over now?

The theme is people in over their heads. Sometimes it's just not going to work, and if you pay attention, you can tell pretty easily.

Agreed. I meant that when you operate outside of the law, there is no legal recourse, and therefore you might have to resort to violence.

Criminal businesses must by necessity adopt some of the work of governments because they are outside the scope of what the actual government does provide. You can't take your rival drug dealer to court over a dispute. You have to settle it in other ways. The threat of force isn't always a business model. Sometimes it's a substitute for legal recourse.

Two things:

1. When I talk to someone about a new project, I do it in person or on the phone, not email. This is important.

2. The first call is always to see if the work would be a good fit, and I'm clear about that. If the client or the project isn't a good fit, I just say so. "I'm not the best guy for this work right now, you might want to talk to so and so".

You're assuming one will be built before the patent expires.

I think the point the parent is getting at is that nothing about business guarantees constant, compounding growth. It's not just mathematics, it's population growth, productivity, capital distribution, etc. - lots of stuff that we take for granted that results in constant growth rates, but that doesn't necessarily have to.

The approach was more novel when he first started beating this drum well over a decade ago. You have to compare it to 1999-era corporate powerpoint practices. We've come a long way in terms of expectations of the medium.

It's all relative. Compared to Dresden, small guided missiles are positively humane. Heck, the hammer that was dropped on Fallujah makes a drone look meek. War is by design very ugly.

Inconel has been around for decades. It's just a nickel alloy. Nothing terribly special about that.

You can replace nothing with this, though, which is what most people have access to. I don't think anyone expects these to spit out Kubrick films. But I bet it records better than I do.

As a parent it would be a very welcome thing to be able to watch something your kids are doing and record it at the same time without sacrificing the quality of either experience.

Am I the only one who thinks elm is an email client? I must be getting old.

Also, look what happened to Slicehost after acquisition. Rackspace woke up, realized Slicehost customers are cheap, and drove them off by raising prices.

I don't read him regularly, but I read it as him downplaying index funds as some sort of arbitrary, socially derived benchmark, which just isn't the case. He glosses over - he surely knows this given his background - all the efficient market theory that created the index funds in the first place.

There is a good reason that index funds are very difficult to beat consistently, and it's not because they are copying all the hard work everyone else does for fees. It's because you don't get paid for specific risk.

It's not too hard to find some pretty far out folks from all walks of life where I went to school (CU Boulder). I heard the same thing and more from the students there, and that was 20 years ago. I got a chuckle out of it at the time, but they were very serious about it.

Since 2010 or so, I've had to monkey with code to get it to run in Safari (desktop and mobile) more than I've had to mess with it to work in IE. My, how times change.

So yeah, the problem is Safari. Thinking it will go away because of choice is naive. It's the default, and defaults stick around.