MrDunham

In fairness, 2017 was threeish years into its development [0]. It's come a long way in the following 6. I've gone months forgetting to update and when I do have had few problems.

That said, in the last year or two there have been sitting updates that broke things — several were vendors updating their integrations.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Assistant

in the article they state "still hav[ing] years of runway"—before the layoffs. seems like they've extended it to around a half a decade?

Can we all agree not to mention Dark Sky anymore? I'm not through the grieving process yet.

But seriously, what a great app that is sorely missed now.

On the flip side, often the acquihires are ways for VCs to get a soft landing for a company that isn't working and return a little capital. There are reasons that venture capitalists maintain close relationships with acquisition decision makers a big tech companies.

Source: in the VC industry

True, but radians or degrees are general more abstract.

"0.24 degrees per hour" (assuming 12 work hours per day) just doesn't really ring to me... and I have a mechanical engineering degree.

Reminds me of a story back in engineering school where a boat holding the appropriate amount of passengers at full capacity became overloaded and sank.

Turned out that the average weight of an American had increased in the decades since the Coast Guard had most recently set guidelines.

While I didn't find a link to the story, this news article [1] references a couple of boats sinking for that (assumed) reason and the Coast Guard increasing its average assumed weight per person by 25 pounds.

Makes me wonder about a lot of infrastructure for EVs. Bridges are an obvious one but I wonder about overpasses in areas that get a lot of standing traffic.

[1] https://eturbonews.com/overweight-americans-sink-old-boat-sa...

> The U.K.’s National Crime Agency announced last week that it’s been busy setting up phony DDoS-for-hire websites that seek to collect information on users, remind them that launching DDoS attacks is illegal, and generally increase the level of paranoia for people looking to hire such services.

This... might actually be effective.

One major reason I stopped using Kazaa/LimeWire back in the day was growing fear (and experience) with files being laced with malware.

Throw out enough landmines to make someone think every service could be a trap... seems smart.

Banking was the interesting one — the FIFA execs moved money and most bank wires (or ACH... I forget) end up going through the U.S. in one way or another if they're international.

I believe something similar was a major reason that a whole FIFA scandal was able to be taken down by US prosecutors.

Despite many people never setting foot in the US a lot of them use the US banking system or some of the piping that is predominantly US-based to move money around…

Meaning that the US can get involved.

From what I can tell it's extremely difficult to do business without having anything you do touch something based in the US. IE if you do business nearly anywhere, Uncle Sam can (almost certainly) prosecute

it's a good point. From my understanding it was the difference between having a business and not having a business.

So, more a fight for survival than a fight for just profitability.

Though my memory is fuzzy… We were talking about this over Thanksgiving dinner after several drinks and haven't discussed it since

So, crazy enough, I know the head lobbyist for the group that was fighting against that kidney dialysis thing.

It's been struck down three times and, according to her heavily biased opinion, would seriously adversely affect access and choice. The company spent something like several hundred million dollars fighting that proposition and two before it.

Crazy that one special interest can get some signatures to fight for something like that with the only real goal to boost their profits well another special interest fights against it to save theirs.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars are burned in the process.

From the original Show HN[1] a commenter wrote:

""" As an intermediary in 2020, you're likely to see a lot of people target you in various ways because they don't like things that people are using your platform for. They may threaten you with lawsuits, complaints to law enforcement, boycotts, DDoS, trying to get your payment relationships cut off, trying to get your other platform providers to cut you off, etc. If your platform has a high profile or is used to sell something high-profile, journalists and politicians may publicly second-guess your content decisions (both things that you did remove and things that you didn't remove).

I don't want to alarm you about this, but it would be nice if you could figure out any content and moderation policies ahead of time, explain them clearly to prospective sellers, and then see if you can stick to them when other people disagree with them. """

Seems a bit prophetic - at least for the need for content moderation policies (and maybe not so much grandfathering)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482168

Could someone help me see the ties to hacker/dev/startup culture here?

While I agree that this is news and it's a fascinating story, it feels like something more for Reddit than for HN. But that's probably my naïveté or dad-of-an-infant sleep deprivation.

Interesting story just doesn't seem like HN material. But please correct me if I'm wrong or help me see the connection

I knew they were big but this gives so much more tangibility to the scale of these turbine blades.

Forget a banana, "bike for scale"

They almost certainly have income tax - I can't speak to it though (we chose a different suburb nearby). Many of the cities do have an income tax and property taxes are quite high (I pay $1k/mo on a mid six figure home).

The full-load is still ~half of CA though, in my experience

I moved to Columbus after growing up in the Bay Area ~5 years ago, am friends with the head of economic development, and my wife worked at one of the data centers near Intel.

It's hard to describe the sheer amount of land available there within only a 20 minute drive from a top 20 population town. Although I'm still a self-described snobby Californian, there is quite a lot to do here (except skiing and the beach).

But to answer your question, that area is: 1. Close to a city (which Meta found out was important because no one wants to live in a place with two restaurants and crap schools) 2. They ran fiber in a 30 mile dia ring around most/the entire city 3. There is water galore 4. There is abundant and cheap electricity 5. There is (decent) access to talent 6. The schools are good and real estate is cheap, so you can import talent (like me and my wife) 7. The governor's office is very business friendly 8. Taxes are low (for everyone, there is talk of going to 0% income tax)

So - this isn't really "why does a data center want to be near Intel" and more "there is a lot of assets in the immediate area that makes it wildly attractive to tech and other companies" and Columbus (and New Albany) has been extensively aggressive in getting these projects.

Side note, we have: * 3ish AWS data centers (DC) * A Google DC (I think under construction) campus * Two Meta DC campuses (10 500k sq ft buildings built and planned)

I don't think Microsoft nor Apple are here... yet. Wife was on DC site selection and nearly always they all end up in each location just down the street from each other.

Edit: it's also centrally located and a 12 hr drive to 60+% of the US population. Good for manufacturing and data centers.

Also, another poster noted very low natural disasters and seismic activity

Deep in the article it mentions a 15 dB reduction in noise compared to a turboprop at the same thrust.

Unfortunately, though, they don't give hard numbers… If that's 120 dB versus 135 dB it's still too loud for urban environment. But 105 dB versus 120 would make a huge difference and likely be tolerable for a city if it's kept to landing pads on skyscrapers.

This is interesting and, possibly, they've become a victim of their own success.

Back in 2011 @bluehat and I started one of the first professional hacker houses in Silicon Valley (Palo Alto).

One of our competing hacker houses had somebody die at it (found out later it was of meningococcal meningitis - yay fun terrifying times). I believe we had multiple calls from Airbnb support to help absorb some of their guests.

I also distinctly remember multiple times where we had support contact us trying to help a guest who had a last-minute cancellation from someone else. But my data is super old… We shut that hacker house down around 2016 that was around the last time I had any of these kind of calls. I also haven't hosted in 5 years.

One of my all time favorite everyday engineering things I've learned is the absolute bonkers amount of energy needed to boil water (vs nearly any other fluid).

It's so commonplace yet absurd/impressive when you really think about it.

What an unbelievable and incredible coordinated tribute. I only managed to get through 35 of over 100 tribute comics but the magnitude the coordination is absolutely stunning.

So, I have some inside knowledge on this one.

There were many people who were axed as part of the layoffs days after start.

But these layoffs were planned for months.

The thinking was either 1) we can rescind job offers and give them nothing or 2) at least give a severance package to people who expected employment.

Now, I'm not excusing that there are cases like this that fall through the cracks. It really really sucks.

I'm not sure how to process it... when you're laying off 10k+ people there are bound to be "bugs"/misses and general failures.

Should META have preemptively rescinded this employee's offer so they got nothing but at least didn't move? Maybe. Or give months of pay as an "I'm sorry our timing was awful (like they did)" in exchange for their own failure? Also a bad option given the move.

I feel for this person. They got caught in get crossfire and that really blows. I'd be pretty pissed.

In the other hand, the thought behind what happened was admirable - even though it created some awful edge cases.

META has done a lot to draw ire. In this case I was impressed by management's decision not to rescind offers and save maximum money but to acknowledge that people would have quit jobs, moved, etc and give severances.

A counterpoint could be "why give the job offer in the first place"? Given the level of secrecy and reality of a nearly 90k person company - it's highly doubtful that the people involved in the hiring process had any idea of the impending layoffs.

Still - super super crappy for anyone who relocated due to the offer.

> And no shame in getting philosophical. It may not have been time. Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he

This is a really good point. My wife and I often laugh about how in high school especially and college too we wouldn’t likely have been friends, much less good romantic partners. Both of us then were different people yet now both of us are perfect for each other.

But back then? Likely not even friends.

This is an important point… I purchased a website about 3D printing at the beginning of this year and have been steadily improving the content quality and posts… Only for a recent Google update to obliterate 90% of my traffic overnight.

Two months later it’s starting to recover but that’s not the bedrock of a business you’d like to build upon.

Clicking into the article you see that it was built over the course of five years. And from other comments it seems that ~half of his revenue is from Patreon.

That means that five years of labor has netted a salary of $60K per year (only $30k from YouTube)… Almost certainly that’s top line revenue and not net profit.

That’s… not much for the work involved. The benefit here is with this strong presence and smart thinking he can likely turn this into significantly more income. Perhaps as an affiliate for travel sites or packaging historical vacation packages. But it certainly dissuades me from any business model where showing ads is the primary revenue driver (unless you on a platform, of course, a la Google, Meta, et al.)

> That guy on TikTok would be me. :)

This is something I adore about hacker news.

Person a: “I saw a person doing something super interesting the other day”

Person b: “Hi! That was me.”

Happened to me just a week ago (I was person a)

Love it. I’ve heard Joe Girard did some questionable things to get in the door (calling during the day to get the spouse, then calling later an insinuating that spouse had requested a call) but he also did a lot of things that was digging the well for long term growth (the Christmas and birthday cards, for example).

Love it, thanks for the comment

Both? The hardware? I loved what you did and would love to replicate it.

I really wish they had opened sourced this. Was just thinking of exactly that post, thanks for finding it.

It really makes a difference to have hand written with a pen as long as you have a font with multiple letter variants/subtly differences between the same letter used repeatedly.

I really wonder what font they are using. The big challenge is not finding a handwritten style font but finding a font with multiple different variants of each letter.

It becomes painfully obvious if you have two of the same letter in a row that are exactly the same. I’ve only found a couple of fonts that have that variability within a single letter and it’s pretty stunning how big of a difference it makes

I would bet it would have a pretty decent effects. I’m a digital marketer/growth guy and right now I think the least crowded inbox is the mailbox.

But not standard postcards or mass mailers.

An example: I worked for an apparel company selling custom apparel (shirts and hoodies mostly) to army Battalions/Companies/Platoons…

We managed to grab 28% market share of an army base for $150.00 by sending a sales letter with a knock out offer and a Rubik’s cube (there were actually two rounds of mailers but the total of both of them was $150)

Had the company’s supply chain not imploded it should’ve brought as much as $300,000 in gross profits of the course of the year. I’d say a 2000x ROI is not bad for a week of work and a couple hundred dollars in materials.

I think lumpy mailers à la The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes are a phenomenal way to cut through the clutter with CPM‘s skyrocketing and conversion rates plummeting for PPC marketing.