phyller

I was accepted into the Georgia Tech CS masters program without any formal education in CS. I have significant practical work experience though. If you don't have an undergrad degree at all, I'm not sure a master's degree is appropriate? If you don't want to get an undergrad degree, at this point in time that has some logic to it, but you are committing to a path where you will not be getting formal degrees. There are things like Coursera specializations that can provide training and some level of certification.

Whoever it is, Musk said that no one would have majority control. So it wouldn't be a takeover unless it was hostile. The recent action on the stock has made a hostile takeover, particularly by the Saudis, more possible because of the sheer number of shares available in the market. But if that was happening I don't think the stock would have dropped the way it did today.

I tend to agree with Mark Kelly that the added bureaucratic overhead would be unnecessary. The Space Force and Air Force would have to have all sorts of complex channels to work together where they overlap or hand over jurisdictions, share facilities etc. There would be a whole new set of top level leaders, uniforms, all that.

The one thing it has going for it though, is that in the Air Force space is going to forever compete with its other missions. Cyber security, air dominance, air transport. It will always be up for cuts to support those missions, it would be hard to earmark money to just go to support space capabilities. Plus the Air Force would need to fight with the Army and Navy for funding for space related things. Whereas a Space Force would just take all three branches funding and just do space.

I don't know what would be best.

Holy crap, I was envisioning all loose graphene floating to the top of our atmosphere, eventually surrounding the planet with a diffuse, fuzzy silver plating. That would be one way to take care of global warming :D

Maybe a better title would be "Graphene shot into the stratosphere"

Do be fair, anyone could jump in front of any car with a regular driver and direct it with hand signals. If someone was standing on the road in front of me directing me into another lane I would do it, with or without an orange vest.

"The only thing objectively inmoral is imposing one’s own moral standards and viewpoints on others." So the only really moral thing is to a) think that there are no universal moral standards b) universally apply this moral standard of no universal moral standards.

You have a great mind to be able to hold both of these thoughts at once, and be able to sincerely express them both in a single sentence. I assume then that you would not have a problem with an Afghani policeman who recently immigrated to your country raping your kids, because that is morally acceptable in his culture [1]?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/asia/afghanistan-mi...

It's ironic to me that some anti-control people that buck against the system don't seem to have a problem when it's them making decisions for others.

Making the drug and trying it on yourself is one thing. Sharing it with someone else who understands you and how you made it is somewhat similar. Convincing random people who don't know you to take it is crossing some sort of line, and setting up a situation where people are taking your homemade version of a non approved medication without even knowing it is just plain wrong. I know they are already taking heroin, but these are still people and not your lab rats. You shouldn't be making their decisions for them about what goes in their body.

In their do it yourself lab, what are they doing to remove stereoisomers?

You have multiple engineers working with each other on the same code base, reviewing each other's code before it can be merged into the main branch.

Then you start to find which engineers the other ones don't like to work with.

From this point of view, I guess you should make an exception and treat tech debt complaints more seriously when it is coming from the devs who wrote the original code.

Sometimes in order to meet business needs and get things out the door you have to cut corners that you need to go back and take care of later, or you are crippling the future growth and stability of the project. I like your final point "if every change to a bit of code introduces new bugs then that might be a reason to tidy it up".

I think sometimes proper testing is the first thing to go in a time crunch, and good tests improve velocity. If you know that the entire app is being tested automatically, you can develop a lot faster and more fearlessly. Plus writing good tests inherently makes the original code better. You find and fix hidden bugs, and you refactor the code to be more testable which makes it better in other ways.

I think you are half right. It would take wars exactly like Irag and Afghanistan. And here we are, testing autonomous vehicles. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my understanding was the current raft of autonomous technology was supported in it's early stages by DARPA, with their priorities set by what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Someone I know frequently relays an anecdote. They were designing a new military helicopter. One of the requirements was that if the pilot was injured the aircraft should be able to return to base and come to a hover. They were trying to figure out how to cut weight. My friend said, well, if we just remove the pilot and all the equipment needed to support them, we'll lose a lot of weight, and the vehicle will be more aerodynamic. His suggestion wasn't taken seriously. That was before Iraq/Afghanistan.

That project got canceled, my friend retired. I have another friend working at the same company. They are building an autonomous helicopter.

*Edit: ok looks like someone else already noticed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600849

Right, but to your original point. You said Venezuela is a capitalist country. Is Norway socialist because they used capital to acquire assets, and Venezuela capitalist because they used force to acquire assets?

I don't think most people here have a problem with a democratic country with socialist leanings, which maintain a largely market economy. People have a problem with populist leaders who promise to enrich the poor by forcefully taking the means of production away from "capitalist pigs" and using the wealthy and the West as a scapegoat for all their problems. No one complains about Sweden and Norway, but the propaganda that goes around in Latin America is the more violent kind. And I don't see how that doesn't fall under the umbrella of socialism.

Oil is not too far from the all time highs, it's certainly much higher than when Chavez took over. Why isn't everything better? They killed basic market economics, including (especially) in the oil industry. They made it so people are afraid to invest in business in Venezuela. They didn't want to admit that their policies were killing the economy, so they doubled down which just made it worse.

I was arguing against US intervention. But since you asked... Mali. When i was there the local pharmacist had a picture of president Ford, of all people, up. Turns out the US had run a program to eradicate a particularly nasty parasite in the region. They'd also built the road, the irrigation canals that allowed them to grow rice, and the bridge that connected them to the other markets. I'm American and i don't know this stuff, gauranteed this is not being reported in the foreign press.

Kenya is one of the more stable countries as far as Africa goes. When i was there i was surprised to learn from the local newspaper that the majority of their governments entire budget is foreign aid, much from the US. They use that money to pay Chinese (not American) companies to build infrastructure.

My Iraqi friends, particularly a friend from Mosul, criticized the US. Apparently the problem wasnt that the US came (Hussein was largely feared and hated, and abused his people), but that they didn't take enough control, and so left a power vacuum which was filled by criminals (which would probably happen in Venezuela). However more recently the downfall of ISIS can be credited to US intervention.

My Libyan friends were frustrated by the US lack of intervention, though a little help was provided. It's amazing how oppressed people don't have a voice. I didn't know they hated Gaddafi until the revolution happened, then they were so incredibly passionate.

South Korea. Or do you think North Korea is better?

Every country in Europe. Especially Eastern Germany. But you deliberately exclude them. However a few eastern European countries had some US airstrikes to stop genocide, which actually seemed to work pretty well.

Pretty much every developing country that has been peaceful and stable has received large amounts of monetary, economic, or other aid from the US.

How do you quantify bad things that didn't happen? I would posit that since the end of WW2, the entire world on average has been more peaceful and prosperous than any other time in history. Billions pulled out of poverty. The vast majority of people living their entire lives without experiencing war.

But again, for both the US and Venezuela's sake, I think it is important the Venezuelans fix this.

China, when it was actually socialist and redistributing wealth, took itself back 100 years and probably produced more human suffering than any other event in world history. So yea, perfect example. Then they reformed and decided to maintain the propaganda but in actuality become capitalist, they became the biggest success story in history. Today, China is more capitalist than the USA. They provide less social services to their people. A few wealthy people control the means of production, and use it to get returns which they invest in more production.

Russia hung on for a while, caused the second largest amount of human suffering in history (only second because they had way less people to start with), and eventually economically collapsed despite having incredible natural resources. They rebuilt along capitalist principles and were doing well until recently. I've read some very interesting articles which talk about how it is almost mathematically impossible to create a smoothly functioning planned economy the way Russia was trying to do it. I wish i could remember where they were. They had smart people who really tried. When the incentives are not lined up properly for the workers and managers to benefit directly from their own production, it is just too hard to control all the variables.

And the moment that happens every single bad thing in Venezuela for the past 15 years and the future 1,000 years will be their fault. The entire world would condemn the USA as imperialists and there would be protests in the streets. Europeans would scoff at American brutality. And 5 more Chavezs with their socialist revolutions would be born, raging against US hegemony. That's what Chavez did in the first place, he was "protecting Venezuela from the imperialist USA". All the problems caused by his socialist revolution were actually because of US interference. There are still people today, here in this board, that believe that.

There's nationalized in the sense of, only the government can control this resource, it is owned by the people. Good. Then the government builds it and spends money on it. If you have a good government you get a good resource for the people. If you have a bad government you get a mess.

The nationalization referred to in Venezuela, is someone invests their own resources in building something, legally with the approval of the government. After they have built it, the government comes with people with guns, and says, "this belongs to us now" and either the owners go away, or go to jail, or get shot. Is that what they do in Norway? Do you think smart, capable people with access to capital want to work in Venezuela? Or maybe all those people left and provide their services to other countries.

And by the way, this Venezuelan kind of nationalization sounds too me like the kind that Marx was advocating, it's real socialism too.

China is not a great counter example. Chavez actually did things to redistribute wealth, and when certain goods got too expensive they fixed prices, and when the businesses failed or refused to operate at a loss they were nationalized.

China has a state plan and they invest in businesses. That means they provide resources to businesses instead of taking them away. Maybe that sounds like just better implemented socialism. Or maybe it's just literal capitalism on a scale never before seen. Think about it. What does the government of China provide to its citizens? If you are poor in China, will the government take care of you? No. It might provide you with a job, though. The USA is more socialist than China, the government will provide food, housing and even medical care for you and your children. You cannot be refused from an emergency room because you cannot pay. A few extremely wealthy people run China, and make decisions that are in their best interests. They invest their capital to get returns. Sounds like capitalism to me.

The government has routinely nationalized both foreign and domestic businesses and expensive infrastructure, and sets prices on goods. When this caused inflation and shortages they responded by nationalizing more businesses and setting more prices, and trying to enforce a false exchange rate. I'm not going to bother explaining how this is self defeating since everywhere this has been tried the same things happen, and if you can't figure it out it's because you don't want to.

The article title should read, "Scientists able to temporarily induce some symptoms of aging in young mice". If they could have reversed symptoms of aging in actual old mice they would have done it.

You might want to do some research on that one. Hitler might be considered an amateur compared to Stalin.

Or hundreds, or even thousands

I recommend the movie "Eye in the Sky" as a great encapsulation of one aspect of the moral struggles in this area. I wonder if the people who made that movie know that it is being shown at the US Air Force Academy by many of the instructors as part of the required ethics course for cadets.

You miss the point. The point of a trial is maybe he wasn't a terrorist after all. Someone who is in fact guilty of certain crimes does in fact lose some of their protections, they can be detained.

Innocent people should be protected from arbitrary detention, therefore everyone should get a fair trial to determine if it can be proved they are guilty, while they have the ability to defend themselves. An innocent person who is wrongly accused of bombing a kindergarten is just as innocent as a person who is wrongly accused of stealing a candy bar.

Exactly. And if these rights are a good thing (which as a nation we have theoretically decided they are), we should be giving them to non-citizens as well. I think it is always good for a) government having to prove guilt instead of the accused proving innocence and b) the severity of the supposed crime not being a determining factor in whether or not the accused gets a fair trial in a timely manner.

I think Javascript has been rapidly getting better, as a language. Every time you hear a front end dev complain about having to support IE, consider that an endorsement of the way HTML/CSS/Javascript has been improving. No one is complaining about having to use the latest version of Javascript to support the new Chrome.

Comment about not posting irrelevant inflammatory statements removed and turned into a submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17490716

Think about it this way. The guy who, with his nature and peer pressure both strongly incentivizing him to cheat on his wife, and still not cheating on her, that person is much more likely to be trustworthy. At least predictable and dependable.

Went to the comments to say exactly this. It's a much simpler setup!

Ironic that the first step in making someone more honest is, apparently, to lie to them. I guess we need to keep at least one liar around to make the rest of us more virtuous.

Every time I open a nautil.us page it opens a bunch of processes that max out several cores on my CPU and eventually my cooling fans boost up to maximum. Hmmmm.

I should email them and tell them that they are a respectable and responsible company that ensures they nor their employees nor their advertisers would ever run unnecessary code on their visitor's machines.