Ankaios

The Logitech Trackman Marble FX trackball.

I still use it every day, but I won't be able to replace it when it breaks.

Anybody have any clever ideas about how to short Theranos?

ULA was formed at the end of 2006. The United States had no rocket reliability problem at that time. (Not counting rockets in development, of course.) The Enhanced Expendable Launch Vehicles (Altas V and Delta IV) had good track records when they were merged into ULA—each already had several flights under their belts at that point.

That isn't a SpaceX concept—it was proposed by some NASA people.

This specifies NASA's job:

http://history.nasa.gov/spaceact.html

(That's actually the original 1958 version. It's been amended occasionally since, but that will give you the gist.)

There are specific things I would alter about NASA's current course (including killing two projects worth a total of about $3 B per year) and I would amend the National Aeronautics and Space Act to alter its long-term trajectory regarding human activity in space, but much of NASA's job has been clear for decades.

No. Your claim was that the government should let Milner et al. "take the front of the stage." Their work is fantastic, but it is focused on some narrow but important topics. There is a vast amount of other progress continually being made by NASA. For a healthy ecosystem, we need both sorts of actors (along with others) building on each other's efforts.

As far as I've heard so far, they aren't planning to develop a low-boom design any time soon. Their first planes will be conventional from that perspective. (That's confirmed by a post by their founder, Blake Scholl, in that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329634.)

NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was formed from a pre-existing agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), that did amazing work advancing the field, and that work never stopped within NASA.

Also, to be clear: between Milner's two (fantastic) projects, he has committed $200 M, to be spent over roughly a decade. NASA's budget is about $19,000 M annually. For fast, efficient progress we need both—large amounts of government resources as well as private-sector funding of ideas that NASA and NSF are overlooking or not prioritizing for whatever reason.

The quiet supersonic transport is potentially commercially viable, but without a demonstration that the technique actually works in flight, the size and risk of the investment necessary to try it have seemed to be too large for the private sector. (The concept has been out there for a while.)

Another motivation is a desire to understand the design principles and behavior of such concepts at a deep and general level. That's not usually something industry does—often industry's level of analysis and experimentation is just "good enough" to get a job done. If that gets repeated a few times, it leads to both wasted effort and a proliferation of mediocre designs. (As another example, that motivation also drove the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics—NASA's predecessor agency—to undertake an exhaustive study of airfoils. NASA still undertakes quite a bit of research from a similar perspective.)

  Sooo many people on HN despise ads (rant after rant about
  using adblockers) yet hate paywalled articles.

They aren't necessarily the same people.

Anybody know which retirement funds and other institutional investors are most exposed to Theranos through VC and other investment?

3He fusion is easy—you can do it in a garage with some hacked-together equipment.

However, 3He fusion with net power output is exceptionally hard, even with complete disregard to cost. Much harder than deuterium-tritium fusion. We don't know how to do it yet.

Do you seriously think these guys haven't heard of Project Orion or wouldn't use Orion's approach if they thought it was best? In case you didn't notice, Freeman Dyson is involved with Starshot.

Freeman Dyson co-led Project Orion.

We need a solution that scales similarly or better than the problem.

Anyone want to write some Black ICE? :)

  When the first three leaders named are the top 3 enemies/adversaries
  of the US/Britain - Putin, Xi and Assad - my own little conspiracy
  canary started chirping.

Is the leak because they are adversaries, or are they adversaries (at least in part) because they are the sorts of people who would participate in the leaked behavior?

Internet Style alert: Don't capitalize associated press any more.

The Post is owned by SpaceX's competitor, Jeff Bezos.

Retaliation for the blackout in Crimea?

I don't know if this is the case for the parent post, but some people use LibreOffice while referring to it as OpenOffice.

I personally use LibreOffice quite a bit, but something about the name sounds silly to me, so I avoid speaking it. I usually refer generically to "a word processor" instead.

The point is to avoid the problem, rather than to stumble into a state from which it is difficult to restore the status quo ante.

Please do not mistake "anticipating risks" for "fear of uncertainty and the unknown." This a risk for which the likelihood currently appears low, but the consequences could be grave and hard to reverse. At least to my mind, that warrants a bit of attention.

I would hope that privacy is perceived as important prior to the nightmare scenarios becoming "actualized," because afterward would be too late.

Unfortunately, I don't think that perception is as widespread as it needs to be, despite your alarm.

Yep. That's roughly the upper limit of the range that I think would make sense for a nationwide basic income, and even that wouldn't fully cover Social Security or lift everyone out of Medicaid eligibility.

(I don't think it would make sense to actually start that high—I would experiment with lower levels, and on more local scales, to try to understand the economic effects. Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if the maximum benefit to the full economy and to general well being occurs for a Federal component of a basic income near the FPL, though.)

That would serve a somewhat different purpose than Social Security—a lower income throughout life rather than a higher income in retirement.

Regardless, though, it seems like there should be relatively elegant options for achieving both objectives with one system if we want to. Perhaps just increase the basic income after some age. (That sets off some warning bells in my head, though—it could be a step toward complexity and means testing.)

I have a friend who is on a condo board on the Peninsula who has been claiming that tighter outflow controls have been affecting purchases since around April. I've been curious about whether this is just his perception or reflective of a broader trend.

A workable implementation will probably end up somewhere in between—many programs might continue to exist, but the number of people they support would decrease, as would the level of support.

If the basic income was set somewhere near the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) for an individual, it would be ~ $1000 / month [1]. (This is just for a rough sense of scale. I don't actually think it's a good idea to specifically aim to match that number, but I suspect we shouldn't go much above it. That's a longer discussion, though.) That wouldn't completely cover Social Security for everyone—the average monthly retirement benefit is ~ $1300 [2]—but it would cover a large chunk. Further, the minimum eligibility level for Medicaid is 133 % of the FPL [3], so if we'd like to maintain our current standards, provision of a roughly FPL basic income won't obviate Medicaid for everyone. (Medicare's qualification criteria are primarily age based, so the number of eligible beneficiaries would be unchanged by the existence of the basic income.)

[1] http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines

[2] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfact/stat_snapshot/

[3] http://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by...

There are two US spacecraft in sight: SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner. That's what the article is about.

(Well, there is a third US human spacecraft in sight, but I suspect it will be irrelevant compared with the other two.)

Mountain View doesn't have rent control.

That's not why Congress is funding Commercial Crew insufficiently. They're up to a different game. Delaying Commercial Crew won't help ULA much—the looming (latest) threat to ULA by SpaceX is reusability of the Falcon 9 first stage, and that is going to happen soon regardless of Commercial Crew. Also, NASA doesn't need to "catch up" to SpaceX—NASA is wants SpaceX and Boeing to get these vehicles flying by 2017 and has loudly and sincerely requested full funding for the Commercial Crew Program to that end.

There's another pair of elephants (well, pigs) in the room that together are devouring $3 billion worth of resources per year that could be better spent on other space investments, including the Commercial Crew Program.

Commercial Crew never stopped. Congress is not funding it well, though.

Are there any swaps or other tools that provide a reasonable mechanism?