SeoxyS

I remember eating at Oola in SF once and wondering what "hand-cut kennebeck potatos" would look like. The answer: just regular old french fries.

After tax and tip… I'd be happy to have a beer for $10 to go along with my nonexistent meal.

There are plenty of ancillary reasons to avoid overflying hurricanes when possible—such as passenger comfort, to avoid possible turbulence; or if it disables nearby diversion points in case of an issue inflight.

But people here are making wild claims that overflying hurricanes is inherently dangerous and puts lives at risk. That's factually incorrect and is what I came here to correct. You (and others) are making examples about the NOAA's Orions (which are reinforced to fly through, not over hurricanes, flying into the wildest parts on purpose), and or other turboprops which fly 10-20k ft. That's not what we're talking about here… we're talking about commercial jet aircraft which fly at 30-40k ft. Business jets fly even higher, sometimes up to 52,000ft. Just this week, I flew private in a Citation X at 49,000ft.

Non-rev refers to any non-revenue passengers. You're conflating NRSA (non revenue space available) with non-rev generally. There's also NRPS (non revenue positive space) and "must ride" flyers in that category. This flight was picking up airline personnel, not revenue passengers.

Your having lived through hurricanes on the ground is entirely irrelevant to a discussion about the safety of overflying the hurricane.

At the flight altitudes of a commercial jet none of the effects you mention happen. You need to plan your path carefully for the descent, landing, and takeoff. But at cruising altitude, hurricane winds are not a major safety concern.

Ok, they're not entirely harmless (e.g. if you fly into an hailing embedded thunderstorm at low altitude). But overflying one at cruising altitude is 100% safe.

E.g. the plane in this story flew through the eyewall of a hurricane at 1,500 feet. A commercial jet flies at a cruising altitude of up to 45,000 feet.

This raises an interesting point. Do you know how long we've been accurately recording cyclones?

Two points:

1) Hurricanes are actually harmless to planes. The only part of the flight that includes any danger is landing, due to wind and low visibility. But flying at cruising altitude or even through the storm is fairly harmless, as most winds are horizontal and nothing out of the ordinary for a plane. Keep in mind that the NOAA regularly flies commercial jets (such as a Gulfstream V) into hurricanes. Also keep in mind that never in the history of aviation has a plane been brought down by a cyclone. Thunderstorms, on the other hand, are much more dangerous. The main difference is that in a cyclone, air moves horizontally, while in a thunderstorm it moves vertically in bursts, which is much more difficult to navigate.

2) From what I've heard, this was not a commercial flight but a flight mainly aimed at evacuating non-rev airline employees. The main issue with doing this flight for regular passengers would be fear and discomfort due to turbulence. Airline employees on the other hand are used to flying, know that turbulence is harmless, and would rather just get home.

I've escaped on one of the last flight before a hurricane / large storm twice now (once out of HKG before a large typhoon, and once in PVR before a milder storm).

Once you're in the air, and once you reach cruising altitude, you're fine. The real danger is landing in the storm, with low visibility and high winds.

That PVR-SFO flight was the scariest of my life; with no service and FAs strapped to their chairs for the entire 4h of the flight.

A lot of my trust in Amazon eroded after the whole co-mingling fake-eclipse-glasses fiasco. If I can't trust Amazon to tell me accurately where the stuff I buy on their website is coming from… how can I trust them in the retail grocery world where there's so much more middlemen and variables in play?

As funny as this thread of jokes was (and it was; I had a good laugh), I don't come to HN for jokes. I come for interesting, deep, and intelligent discussions. I don't find much value in amusing jokes… isn't that what we have Facebook or Reddit for?

Think of AngelList as a platform for angel investors to leverage their expertise with outside capital. These days, founders don't raise on AngelList, rather angel investors use AngelList to raise capital for their deals. There's a group of people who have very good instinct, connections, and dealflow, but don't have enough personal liquid capital to be writing frequent large checks. There's also quite a bit of capital that doesn't itself have this access. AngelList brings those two groups together; and it all happens privately behind the scenes. Angels can write 100k+ checks out of lightweight funds, or on a deal-by-deal basis. Outside investors can get exposed to high quality early-stage deals.

Considering I'm a single healthy guy in SF and have gone to the doctor maybe twice in the past ten years… this is straight up highway robbery! I should just ditch health insurance altogether…

I'm on COBRA in SF and pay close to $1000/mo. Ridiculously expensive.

This is a good example of why anecdotal evidence is a bad way to make decisions (also - why the entire world is making the humongous mistakes of ditching nuclear right now because of a couple examples of things going wrong; despite nuclear having saved millions of lives vs. the few it has cost).

For every example like this, there are many more you can point to where NOT having self-flying planes cost everybody on board their life. From hijackings like 9/11, to rogue pilots like MH370 or the Germanwings crash, to simply human error like the SFO Asiana crash, the SFO Air Canada almost-crash, or the Tenerife collision, or the Air France Atlantic crash, or many many more…

Planes are already pretty much fully automated. Humans make mistakes far more often than computers. Pretty much every airplane crash in the history was caused by simple human error. The more we automate, the better.

As someone who also flies >150k miles a year, I'm happy about this.

Developing a mechanical way of doing this from scratch is much more efficient than developing the entire stack of technology abstraction layers (from transistors to CPUs to computer engineering to LEDs to OSes to programming languages and runtimes, etc.) to achieve this digitally.

Some spinning weals, gears, and springs are much much much more efficient!

I think gentrification is awesome. I fully support improving the area with new restaurant, bars, stores, housing. Local housing values will improve as the area becomes more desirable. Also key is cleaning up the crime.

Mid-market has vastly improved since Twitter, Uber, Square, Zendesk, Microsoft, etc. moved in. It's no longer a crime-ridden sad part; it's now vibrant with grocery stores, restaurants, cafés, bars, housing, etc. It's a great success story for redevelopment.

Some people call it gentrification.

It's pretty sad that the local community has been so self-destructively negative about the benefits of a major tech company moving in. This could've meant new jobs, new housing, and new life to what is currently a pretty crime-ridden and sad part of the bay area…

I've implanted ACH file format and, worse, FedWire BAI2 file parsing… it's absolutely archaic. The worst part is that various partner banks will have differently erroneous variations of their implementation of the BAI2 spec… so we had to intentionally code buggy version to match the bugs they had on the other side… ridiculous.

Some people prefer the culture, the food, the party scene, the girls. Also, it's pretty safe and comfortable for expats. Also, English is widely spoken in Southeast Asia

You think the NSA can convince a mainland Chinese company to install backdoors for Americans? Seriously dubious…

The Spark is significantly inferior to the Mavic, and since the arms don't fold up, isn't even any smaller than the Mavic. I have a Mavic Pro and there's zero chance I'd trade it for a Spark even if price was more of a concern.

Also: no 4K video (makes a significant difference in sharpness even when downsampled), 2-axis gimbal (that's the real killer) and significantly shorter flying time (16min vs. 26min, but that's really more like 10min considering you have to bring it home with enough lead time).

Saying "antifa" are simply anti-fascists is like saying "nazis" are simply nationalist socialists. There are extremist groups on either side of the ideological spectrum. (which often share a lot of ideologies too)

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'd love to grab a pair from you too if you have extra :) ; and to pay for its cost / shipping to SF of course.

Can definitely relate with the author, as I'm also a native French speaker who's mostly entirely switched to English. I find myself doing everything in English in my daily life and thinking in English.

I'm starting to run into issues when expressing myself in French, losing less common vocabulary. French being my native language, the idea of losing it bothers me quite a bit. I take every opportunity I get to practice by conversing in French when I can. But already, I sound like a foreigner in my own country…

I also used to speak Standard German, Swiss German, Russian, and Spanish fluently, and a bit of Japanese. Those are mostly lost; at best I can say very few transactional things, and understand the rough context of conversations around me.

Forgetting languages is a real downer…

Long-term capital gains hasn't been 15% for a long time. We can thank Obama for that. Furthermore, in any state that's remotely desirable to live in, you can throw in another 10-13% on top of those 20% capital gains.

US taxes are absurdly complex and expensive. The upside is that the system can be fairly easy to game / optimize.

You don't have to sell short, you can buy puts which give you far greater (not unlimited) upside than your capped downside.

Nowhere near enough space on Necker (my friend just went there) for a massive conference like this. Would be cool, though.

The right thing for a company like Apple to do with extra cash (other than dividends and buybacks) is to invest it. There's only so much innovation it can do as a single entity… but as a VC firm (à-la Google Ventures) or as an LP (into Sequoia, KPCB, etc.) or as diversified fund (à-la Berkshire Hathaway) it can drive more value for its shareholder and more innovation through investing capital. Note, this is pretty much what Apple is doing.