stackcollision

Yes, this is kind of like "of course the remote is in the last place you look, why would you keep looking once you found it?"

A little more than a year ago I was working on a very space-constrained device: only 2kb of program flash (an attiny23 for those curious). I had to use libusb with this, which ate up a huge portion of that space. My first shot at the main program put me over the limit by almost 500 bytes. By the time I was done, I had packed the program + the usb lib into the program flash with 4 bytes to spare.

Man, was that fun.

Thank you for mentioning this. Things have to get to their destination somehow, and if you replaced these ships with their equivalent carrying capacity of another form of transport you would probably get even more pollution.

This and "disrupt", please.

Ah, thank you. I was starting to get a bit of vertigo on how prescient this was, I felt like I was reading The Machine. Now that I know it's satire it makes a lot more sense.

Thank you for saying this, it's exactly what I've been thinking since the start.

Maybe that's true, but the fetishization of 'disruption' is getting a little ridiculous. I'm certainly downloading this.

To be fair, based on some of the other statements I've seen attributed to Churchill, I wouldn't be surprised if he had actually said that.

I recall a case where the courts did not agree with you. I can't remember names or many details, but the gist was that some guy realized that one of the pages was taking an fdat argument that was his userid, and by simply incrementing that number he could retrieve the data of any user he wanted. He presented his findings to the company (something major, like AT&T maybe), and they immediately sued him. He fought in court saying he wasn't malicious and was "white hat" as you say, but I believe he was convicted.

Does anyone remember this case?

My grandfather said that he went broke twice in his life: once when he was sued, and once when he sued someone else. Lawsuits are expensive, and if this game isn't making enough money to warrant that money-sink, they might end up putting themselves in an even worse position.

When I get into conversations about what space combat would really be like (if it ever even happens), I usually cite this book, and summarize the combat in one sentence: "The ships are taking evasive actions for shots which will hit them in 3 months." That's usually all it takes to make them really understand that space is nothing like you see in Star Wars.

On the other hand though, Heinlein makes a good case for interplanetary war never happening in Time Enough For Love. "The second best thing about space travel is that the distances involved make war very difficult, usually impractical, and almost always unnecessary. This is probably a loss for most people, since war is our race's most popular diversion, one which gives purpose and color to dull and stupid lives. But it is a great boon to the intelligent man who fights only when he must — never for sport."

An interesting digression, but he also makes the case for why a common currency between planets is completely impractical (like was mentioned in the news a year or so ago). The entire book is a great read, and it's probably tied for 1st in my list of favorites.

I've never used a piece of software from HP that I've thought was of any quality. We use several of their enterprise development tools where I work, due to an ancient contract and some political contrivances, and nobody is happy with them.

And don't even get me started on their printer ride-alongs. It's just a printer, HP. I don't need 10 programs to use it.

The slack action from a mile-long train is one of the most awe-inspiring, bone-jarring manifestations of raw power I have ever experienced. The first time I felt it, it established in my mind the idea that freight trains are forces of nature rather than vehicles.

Passenger trains also experience it (though the gear on these trains are slightly stiffer), but those cars are designed to have a much smoother ride, and they are also much shorter (8-10 cars instead of 80-100+). On a long train, it sounds like thunder coming from the front, and then a split second later the entire world shakes.

Absolutely true. I think when people say that robots are going to replace low-skilled workers only the uninformed are imagining an entirely self-sufficient factory that only has one door that the raw materials goes into, and another door that the product comes out of.

What we really should be imagining is a factory floor where instead of 50 people on an assembly line, or instead of 20 waitstaff at a restaurant, you only need one or two guys who know how to replace parts on the robots

As I said in my post, it's anecdotal yes, but I know at least two people who are in this situation.

Take one of them for example: She can't afford to eat every night. She can't get a good job in this economy, and she's got debts from the portion of college she did attend that are weighing her down. The loan providers aren't going to forgive those debts just because she didn't finish.

But yes, I knew someone was going to call me out on hyperbole as soon as I posted that. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the vast majority certainly don't become humongously successful like we are being led to believe they will.

If college really isn't for you then so be it, it's your decision. But dropping out because these famous people did it is really stupid. For every one dropout who turns into Gates, there are thousands who go hungry every night (anecdotal, yes, but I know at least two).

Dropping out != a path to success in its own right. The reason these famous dropouts are successful is because they were either intelligent and worked hard, or they got lucky (iirc, Zuckerberg only dropped out after he had a viable product, so that should hardly count).

It seems to me that the media is pitching dropping out of college as a magic pill. If you're ready to put your head down and work your butt off then more power to you, but getting out of school isn't even half of step one.

I knew a feminist in high school who wanted to photocopy my draft papers so she could sign up too. Definitely not legal, but she was absolutely adamant that if men and women were to be equal, women should have to defend the country too.

Feminism is about equality, when it's done right. Unfortunately, it's been perverted into "down with the patriarchy". We call those people "Feminazis".

s/class/common human decency/g

I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'. This happens in any workplace (my mother was a secretary, and had to leave one of her companies because her boss was consistently making advances), but in technology especially so.

Perhaps this is a symptom of the social environment a lot of programmers seem to have in common. A lot of us spend our teenage years alone or with a small group of very close friends. Because of that, certain people might not develop a full understanding of social customs, or worse: deride them as 'silly'. This is a fundamental mark of immaturity, and most people and most programmers grow out of it. Some people don't, and I think it's especially common among programmers because they (and yes, this is stereotype) tend to be very solitary.

People like us tend to spend a lot of time online, where you can make sure you only talk to people who are very similar to you (case in point: HN). Not being forced to talk to people with different opinions results in stunted social growth. A huge part of life is learning to interact with people who are different than you.

When you throw someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with social norms and is used to having everything their way into an office work environment, they generally don't mesh well.

It doesn't look like anyone in this thread is denying anything. Most of the comments here are about how amazingly accurate every single one of these is.

I think I'm out of the loop a bit on the chain of events. Last I heard, the FCC were the ones holding back the tide by classifying ISPs in a way that prevented them from limiting bandwidth. And then recently a court stripped them of this ability, opening the gates for ISPs to manage their bandwidth how they wanted. Is there a step somewhere after this that I missed where the FCC turned into the enemy? It seems strange to be protesting the FCC like this, when afaik they were the ones who were on our side for so long.

But please, someone correct me if I am wrong. I'm not as knowledgeable as I'd like to be on this.

You don't need to be overpaid to buy expensive image-"enhancing" crap, you just need to be very stupid about managing your money. I see plenty of people on the subway wearing Beats who don't look like they could buy their next meal. I'm sure there is at least one person in the world who has spent money from their third mortgage on those things.

Is there a repository somewhere of really great bug reports like this? Something along the lines of "commits from last night".

I have not heard about a west coast launch pad, but I was wondering how they planned to actually accomplish the landing. We (almost) always launch west-to-east, to take advantage of the roughly 400m/s you gain from the Earth's rotation. It wouldn't make sense to launch from the east coast and then have the boost fly back to get to land.

From what I've heard, this is because many Asian countries have a culture of information flashbang. The Yahoo homepage is extremely cluttered and busy, which fits in with what they expect.

The Google homepage, in contrast, is just an empty abyss they can't get anything from. Here in the States we seem to value minimalism, which might be one of the reasons people go to Google (aside from it being a great search engine).

Can you clarify what you mean? Maybe not 20, but 15 years ago my dad was mucking around in the guts of our family computer, performing his own upgrades. By the time we got rid of that thing the only original component was the case. And nowadays you can order any piece of hardware you want off the internet and slap it in.

Once this is out, you are paying a premium to not deal with modules by not getting one. It's a $50 phone you can swap components in and out of as upgrades become available. To me, that's infinitely better than buying a new $300 smartphone every other year.

But there's also a second appeal. Right now, phones are impenetrable black-boxes. You get what the manufacturer thinks you want. The reason I think a modular phone will become very popular is the same reason the AR-15 is the most popular gun in America: because you can play with it. You can swap parts in and out depending on what you need.

"Oh, I'm going hiking today? Better stick my extra-big battery and wide-field camera into my phone."

"Apple's putting a new zillion-byte SSD in the iPhone 9Q? Well good thing I can just buy the zillion-byte module for my modular phone instead of having to buy a whole new one."

And a million other examples.

You wanted to jump out of planes, you were good at it, and you got selected to be one of the elites. Your talent for this and other things drove you towards your success. However, other people see jump school as the key to success, rather than a door to something they enjoy that having talent opens.

The same thing can apply to YC. There are a bunch of people with good ideas and talent who want to be successful, but they hate jumping out of planes. They think that if they can just get into YC and deal with not really enjoying it that much, then they'll be putting themselves on the inside track and it'll be smooth sailing from there. I don't think that's really a great outlook on life.

When he says that the employer is sponsoring learning in that company's particular area, he is right. Learning is not just sitting down with a textbook and taking notes. In most jobs, especially computer science, you're learning every day. You're adapting new solutions to problems, and taking that experience with you. That knowledge can then be applied to future problems.

His company is paying him to solve problems in a particular space. Once he solves them, he knows how to solve them in the future. When working on an OSS project in the same space, he can apply the techniques he learned at his job to that project.

My sister dated a cop for a while, and he offered to give her a PBA Card (Police Benevolence Association, what everyone calls the "Get out of jail free" card). She declined, not because she was particularly honorable or had an aversion to corruption, but because she said she would feel too awkward using it.

"What do I do? When they ask me for my license do I just...hold it out and say 'let me go please'?"

I looked at the code and I'm pretty sure I saw that the payload size variable was a long int, so I was confused by this too.

How could they do that to Ludwig Van!?