protastus

It made them look extremely bureaucratic and slow.

We've been hearing about declassified reports about UFOs for years, indicating ignorance about airspace incursions.

It took a gigantic Chinese balloon slowly traveling uncontested across the country for the government to be sufficiently embarrassed and take action.

This is the essence of anti-trust.

The Amazon retail business would struggle to compete effectively on its own, and would have to work on its weaknesses. As a whole, the economy would be better off.

Every complex project lives and dies by a relatively small group of true believers.

From the outside, we don't know who they are, but sometimes we get a glimpse of their passion.

The solution is escalation.

The problem in the US is far bigger than the cost of medical education.

The US doesn't have single payer healthcare. For every medical professional actually helping a patient, there's a legion of bureaucrats (administrators, insurers, accountants and lawyers, along with all their support staff) spread over a huge network of businesses adding their cut. Go to the ER and you'll be getting bills for it 2 years later. This massive overhead needs to go away to enable price transparency and reasonable costs.

Depends on the company. In large companies it's very common for the vast majority of HR matters to be delegated to contractors or fresh out of college hires, with no experience managing people, and little authority.

The author touches on media companies having a perverse set of incentives. This seems to me as a space ripe for disruption, that the dinosaurs have failed to capitalize on. Newspapers are dying a slow death, and that's very dangerous for democracy.

For example, r/askscience offers a solution through moderation. Have a panel of known experts who review, comment and possibly even veto all topics of the day. Journalists rarely are experts, so pair them with consultants who have been vetted by the company. Today, the counterpoints to bullshit are at best buried inside the article in the form of a quote, and that's not strong enough to offset a false headline.

My take, as a developer and a manager: everyone sniffs this out. It's a well known marginal dev archetype. For now, this behavior can be compatible with stable employment, but the tension around accountability sets a ceiling in career advancement.

If we experience a white collar recession, the toxic players will have to reevaluate their behavior.

My interpretation is AF447 had one pilot refusing to let go of bad assumptions, exhibiting extremely poor stick and rudder skills, and going rogue with the controls. It's a scenario of one individual exercising profoundly bad judgement, further enabled by his peer not forcefully taking over.

Loss of pitot tubes only implies loss of air velocity indicator. The attitude indicator, the altimeter and the thrust levers worked fine. I still can't believe they intentionally reduced thrust and pitched up for an extended amount of time, and not only thought this was a good idea, but didn't crosscheck the most fundamental instruments to confirm that the plane was flying level. And then proceeded to ignore stall warnings and stick shaker.

The human error was so severe that I'm not convinced that better alarms could substantially mitigate. At the end of the day, if a pilot forgets how to fly a plane, then their peer (presumably still capable of independent thought) needs to have the presence of mind to take over.

This low effort article is not an example of fine journalism.

This is clickbait. The anonymous author wants to make you angry, and it starts with the headline. The article is shallow and provides no insight into what the program looks like.

If the author gave a shit about actual reporting, they'd provide context about other programs that tried similar things, and their results. How are the kids held accountable? What type of training is offered? Is there a pipeline into internships and employment?

Accenture relies on a revolving door of young, cheap, inexperienced labor.

A developer in the U.S. has far better employment options.

Corporate records and correspondence can be made public due to a lawsuit. So the risk of disclosure isn't new, and anyone should consider it whether they work at a startup or at a large company.

Just another incentive to act with integrity and keep personal correspondence out of corporate systems.

Indeed. I used to look down on the balloon framing + drywall construction used in the US. Until I bought a house in an earthquake zone and learned that my preferred building techniques involving brick and mortar would be completely unsafe. Then I thought about cold climate energy efficiency, and my way was pretty much terrible and once again inadequate.

Understanding the requirements made me develop a lot of respect for balloon framing.

Tax code reform (simplification) is completely orthogonal to public safety.

He mentions a CPA at the end but I didn't catch any mention of an attorney. I wonder why.

The state bureaucracy doesn't care about you. The tax code is enormous and only gets bigger. The bureaucracy's game is to claim you screwed up with minimal transparency. Nobody will volunteer to do a deep dive on your case, nobody has an incentive to help you, and nobody is accountable for their mistakes or lack of effort.

It's very difficult to play with these rules, and an attorney can help change the game.

About planets and stars in daytime: https://www.skysurfer.eu/daystars.php

The concept here is processing gain, which is algorithmic. It's what enables the miracle of GPS, even though satellites are 20000km far away, there may be clouds, rain, etc and your phone doesn't come with a satellite dish. Also used in CDMA radio for civilian and military communications, it allows reliable transmission at negative SNR by spreading the message over a huge space. In the case of GPS/radio, the space is frequency. Here, the message is coordinates of a rectangular crop of the sky, encoded in the (huge) space of few million pixels. On a per-pixel basis, the SNR can be negative -- looking at a single pixel I can't tell you with confidence if it contains a star, because the shade of blue is just too close to average. But correlating the entire image against the correct "code" (a clean star field), tells me whether I got the location of the sky correctly. Intuitively: accumulated over the entire image, the noise statistics are such that the noise stays bounded, and the tiny amount of signal adds up.

Appropriate optics will increase the SNR so that bright stars can actually become visible. Per the link above, mag 2-3 stars are visible with a 10cm telescope (looking through the eyepiece; no filters or digital sensors needed). So if the conditions are right and the optics are good, you may actually see a few stars reliably, and the scenario reduces to the B-21 hangar scenario.

Finally, it's worth noting that even a consumer grade CMOS sensor will sample at 12 bits per pixel (4096 linear levels) with low noise. The human eye cannot discriminate a luminance difference of 1/4096 relative to full scale, not even close. Using the naked eye for intuition here is misleading, because this is a scenario where a sensor is far better at registering the small additive contribution of a star under daylight, and this is the key to enabling the processing gain through math.

> If the "DC value of the sky" could be removed with a simple high pass filter, then there would be no need of doing anything else. The positions of the stars in the sky would be known, and techniques like the one in the article would apply.

This doesn't make any sense. Even if one could estimate ground truth DC, removing it would leave noise at every other frequency bin.

But this is beside the point. Your questioning isn't coming from a place of curiosity.

I direct you to the HN guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

The claims from pifm_guy are reasonable.

This is a scenario with extremely high coding gain[1]. The DC value of the sky can be removed by high pass filtering. Finding the rigid transform (rotation+translation) between two images captured by the same camera, assuming no distortion[2], assuming the image pair has substantial intersection, doesn't require calibration.

Dropping the "same camera" and "substantial intersection" assumptions requires searching the entire sky and also finding an unknown scaling factor. It all comes down to the images having low enough noise and high enough resolution, relative to the search space. The math is sound.

You're not entitled to a tutorial in signal processing, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_gain

[2] Astronomy lenses have very small FOV and very small distortion.

PhD programs, requirements and exams aren't standardized across institutions. Everyone's experience is different.

PhD graduates are extremely diverse in every possible measure. Some are deep generalists. Others are hyper specialized. Some can walk on water. Others leave you wondering how they managed to graduate.

SSE, NEON and AVX are fundamental for anything reducible to matrix and vector arithmetic (e.g., signal processing and ML inference on the CPU).

> It is hard to find simple enough code to vectorize at all.

It's hard to find code simple enough for the compiler to efficiently auto-vectorize.

Anything that reduces to GEMM will parallelize in practice extremely well, and there are many excellent libraries with SIMD support (MKL, BLAS, ATLAS, Eigen, etc.). However, these libraries rely on kernels carefully written by experts and benchmarked extensively over decades. They're not the output of running naively written code through a super smart compiler.

All of this is extremely relevant to what you bought your PC or phone for. It's also not in the kernel, and therefore Linus seems to be unaware of their pervasiveness and utility.

I stopped ordering books from Amazon after twice receiving books shipped loose in oversized boxes, with obviously inadequate padding, leading to corners damaged in transit.

This would've been unthinkable in the old days (Amazon customer since 1995).

I'm assuming you order from Amazon marketplace retailers who you trust, and do their own shipping.

> Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.

It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate.

The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.

Getting laid off and getting fired are different things.

The attitude reminds me of the Nick Burns character from SNL.

> to be insulting to another colleague during an online talk.

When did this happen? In the podcasts and interviews I heard, Loeb was often provocative towards the establishment, but I never saw him make negative comments about an individual.

I think Avi Loeb is legitimately excited about this topic. He's also aware that the public is tremendously excited and inspired about the possibility of UFOs, alien flybys of the solar system, etc.

I think he's achieved professional recognition, paid his dues playing the game of academia (very successfully), and is now pursuing things that he finds most exciting. The man has co-authored a thousand papers, literally, so I doubt he'd get much marginal excitement from hypothetical paper #1001, i.e., another instance of fitting a curve through noisy data to build support for an obscure model that very few researchers care about.

He has also pointed out that it's an invitation to ridicule in academic circles to talk openly about UFOs. He doesn't care though (why would he?), and that for sure is triggering folks who take themselves very seriously.

> As far as I know the protection against "taking a jet and crashing it into a building" is a squadron of fighter jets that are quickly dispatched to (if necessary) shoot down any plane on a risky path.

It's 16 miles from JFK airport to Manhattan. A jet plane can fly this distance in less than 5 minutes at sea level, within a normal flight envelope.

There's latency recognizing from the ground that an airliner needs to be intercepted, launching alert fighters, and getting authorization to shoot down.

Trust is involved in allowing a big container to be loaded on a plane.

Like a new (std::nothrow) meaning!

... I'll let myself out.

I no longer have the patience to navigate Amazon's terrible search results and have lost trust in the quality of their inventory.

Nowadays I only order from Amazon if the order is a time critical item that only they can deliver on time for a reasonable price. That's less than 5% of my purchases in dollar amount.

I've been a customer since 1997. Amazon has impressed me with their ability to play the long game, and I don't understand the long term incentives favoring Amazon here.