1,807 karma · joined July 4, 2019
However, some are no longer mined in the US, like tin, since 1993.
(For people unfamiliar with "rare earth minerals", they're not rare. But today their mining and processing is mostly done in China.)
The hornbill is the most aware animal that I've seen in zoos - they actively watch the visitors, even beyond their enclosures.
This is the first time I've seen somebody domesticate them:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-your-thoughts-on-the-hornbill
If you are a traditional sysadmin with limited programming experience, then you have a very tough road ahead of you in 2021 - getting up to speed now is not picking up "stuff", think of it as a new career.
You should stay at your current job and work on devops projects to learn the devops tools and skills and get proficient at basic programming first.
After that, start on more advanced programming.
If that doesn't get you through interviews, then LeetCode. I put this last because even with a fair amount of practise, most people can't finish a difficult problem in 30 or 60 minutes and pass the test suite.
I don't get why interviewers sometimes start with, "Sorry, this is the problem, but nobody ever finishes it." (One was write a hash library with tests in 30 minutes, for a devops role.) You just have to move on to the next company.
The doctrine of the US Air Force is that they will have the best airplanes at any cost to achieve air dominance. They literally don't care about price as long as they get the lethality and qty. they want.
Hence they will never look at low-cost fighters like the F-5, A-10 or A-29 for their own use, except as maybe trainers or Marine use.
The F-22 is no longer made. Around 189 were built and there's about 150 left. It's a great plane, but the low count is a great concern in case of war (with China.) You can lose 150 planes in a couple of days in a kinetic war.
The F-35 has numerous show-stopping problems, plus even more numerous irritating problems. The US needs about 1,000 operational ones, plus another 1,000 for our allies, to be an effective deterrent to China. (Since the US has 11 carriers, that's enough F-35s to populate them.)
The reason we need so many planes is that China has almost 18,000 ships, which can be used to blockade (defend) the S. China Sea (a tactic they accidently discovered in the last Taiwan Strait conflict.) So that leaves aerial/ICBM attacks.
The US MIC has prioritized pork instead of results, so we need to work on qty. The Biden administration is perceived as weak gobally, which is unacceptable for a superpower - that gets millions of people killed until the US demonstrates dominance again.
(WW2 in Europe started due to US isolationism. Both Germany and Japan thought of the US as country bumpkins in 1940. Today, the CCP thinks of us as decadent and divided, thanks to BLM and antifa.)
During a border dispute in 1969, Russia decided to nuke Beijing because they wouldn't take no for an answer, but the US foolishly told them not to. The CCP has already threatened in 2020 to use nukes against the US if the Three Gorges Dam is attacked.
The only reasons the CCP hasn't successfully invaded Taiwan yet are:
- the Taiwan Strait is about 80 miles wide at the narrrowest. Considering Germany couldn't invade Britain, which is only 20 or so miles from France, you can see how 80 miles is a very strong deterrent.
- Russia told the CCP to stop saber-rattling on previous attempts
- The US came to Taiwan's aid in the last two attempts, and has a policy of including Taiwan under its umbrella (like half the world's countries.)
So here we are, on the brink of war with a President who can't climb a flight of stairs on his own.
I've looked at cnn.com a few times, and at least their homepage appears to be dictated solely by the left. The hagiography on Kamala Harris a couple days ago looked literally like something the CCP would publish: "Kamala is the last person in the room", etc. I thought VPs were supposed to just golf? Why is Kamala shadowing Biden if he's not senile? (She's in just about every public picture of Biden, standing just behind him.)
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/25/politics/kamala-harris-cnntv/...
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Twitter has said they regret suppressing the Hunter Biden story before the election, and WaPo issued a retraction on their quote of Trump asking an election official to redo results (that quote was one of the Pelosi's "reasons" for the second impeachment.)
https://nypost.com/2021/03/25/dorsey-says-blocking-posts-hun...
https://nypost.com/2021/03/15/washington-post-runs-correctio...
The more you compare the MSM with actual events, the less they match.
What destroyed most of the empires was succession battles resulting in civil war, all through the late 1800s.
I've been watching the Fall of Civilizations Youtube channel, and the South Americans really messed up succession.
- built one of the first wind tunnels, and published the most accurate performance data in the world:
https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/tunnel.html
https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/results.html
- built one of the first aero engines, and first using aluminum:
https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/onlin...
The above items are simply amazing, and shows how the Wright Brothers couldn't be denied. (You can see later "aero engines" in the Hiller Museum in San Carlos (near SF) that can't even carry their own weight.)
It's true that the brothers weren't killed while flying, but Orville was seriously injured crashing in 1908, and his passenger died from a head injury.
Source: commercially-rated pilot, study aerodynamics.
What I have noticed is that job postings for dedicated embedded/firmware programmers paid about half what I was already making, so I never put that on my resume.
So I think you're misguided: nobody's going to give you a job as a junior embedded engineer (since they would have to supervise you and debug your code, or face a failed $$$$ hw project), and even if they did, you'd earn half what a CRUD developer can make.
But if you're going down that road, learn the linux tool chain, including how linux boots.
You can find the IBM DOS era BIOS listing manual on ebay.
Source: lived along one of the Mountain View circuits, would see 3 autonomous vehicles from the same company in a row doing their "miles" with no other traffic. Even if they crashed into each other, it would be from the same company, so why report it?
However they have other very large islands (Sumatra, and part of Borneo) that could be settled, so it's not an insurmountable problem.
China's and India's large populations are their Achilles heels - they need vast quantities of food and water, yet China imports 50% of some food items, and India relies on Himalayan headwaters that China is diverting.
It's not a big loss when managing production databases in practice because with large tables you roll forward, but it would be nice for dev/qa environments.
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/cannot-roll-back.htm...
Source: DBA.
Being part of the EU means following their absurd economic migrant immigration rules, and later bailing out half of the members, who lied about their finances when joining and are bankrupt.
Also, I'll take populism any day over elitism, especially British elites.
When ATMs were introduced in Canada in the 70s/80s, it was common to believe they were infallible. When customers claimed they were short-changed by machines, often they were prosecuted for fraud or attempted theft.
I'm sure HNers can think of dozens of ways a machine could be wrong ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine
Also, regarding the Postmaster article, note that somebody working on that project would likely face great difficulty in convincing anybody there was a systems problem.
There was some article a few years ago that said the apps they looked at didn't actually run faster after making some routines parallel, so it depends, and you will definitely have more debugging to do.
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernig...
Also, there's nothing magical about pointers - scripting languages use "handles", which is the same thing except they're read-only to the end-user programmer.
The real challenge with C is multi-threaded programming, so don't do that if you don't need it.
I study WW2, and just off the top of my head, the Manhattan, B-29 and V-2 projects took longer and cost around $2 billion each in 1945 dollars. The economies involved spent over 50% of GDP on war materiel. So no, corona wasn't even the biggest war project.
> We shut down huge tracts of human life and attendant economies to save the lives of the oldest and weakest. We're still doing it.
I'm not sure it was a good tradeoff, and I would say there wouldn't have been a lockdown if there was enough ICU capacity, which BTW didn't seem to increase in the past year (China built new hospital buildings, but I don't know if they were equipped.)
I would argue that corona was the first smartphone pandemic, which pushed control down from the federal govt. to state govt. and individuals, causing sensationalism and distraction (ie. "do masks work or not?", "omg the number of patients increases every day!", "how is this going to affect my White House run (Newsom)", etc.)
> mRNA is bigger than a bomb, and fully peer reviewed.
WW2 arms were amply demonstrated.
One of the Yahoo founders drove a subcompact car for years, and one of the Intel CFOs never told his family that he was worth $1 billion until his kids were grown.
That was a big deal in SV, and resulted in big-company executives getting bodyguards, black SUVs, and sometimes even separate office buildings for top mgmt.
No, US court rulings say that mgmt. has "wide latitude" in how the company is managed. It's up to shareholders and the board to step in if they disagree, but since they appointed mgmt., it's rare for major disagreements.
Which makes sense in a capitalist country, as there is little central planning outside of certain industries like defense and banking (regulated.)
(In both the US and UK, the govt. tells industry how many airplane or ship builders they want, and who has to merge. After WW2, this caused concentration in the airplane industry. My understanding is that Northrop was told to drop the F-20 (an upgrade on the F-5 and a challenger for the F-16) to focus on their bomber contract, and then still told to merge.)
I'm not going to comment in detail about offshore tax structuring like Ireland except to say that it is an abuse of tax avoidance.
The article talks about young men playing video games excessively. A contributing factor is that online dating women are looking for the top 5%-20% or so of men now (combination of appearance and hypergamy), so the bottom 80% to 95% are not dateable online.
(A recent survey said women are only interested in the top 4.9% of men in dating apps, versus the previous estimates of 10%-20%. This is called unrestricted hypergamy and has horrible consequences for both women and society at large, as those 4.9% of men essentially have harems of short-term relationships because they can, and the other men can just play video games.)
I've never heard somebody say, "I want to accumulate the fruits of workers' labor", so I think the understanding of motivation is backwards - it's to create a company or solve a problem, and if workers are needed, you hire them. This is HN, so for most readers should be obvious.
The deeper psychology is that most men need a purpose in life, and a startup is very purposeful. Whether it succeeds or fails is kept by financial score, but it still serves the purpose of getting up daily, focusing on tasks, and trying to "make a dent in the universe." (Richard Cooper)
Note that there's a very small world-wide market for satellite launches, which won't pay for the above. The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake, as noted by both ULA and ESA.
Elon Musk is a welfare queen, as all of his businesses rely on govt. handouts and rebates.
I guess if your partition time interval was known to be very short, like a flaky ISDN link, it could make sense for some use cases using retries, but then you should just get a better link.
CockroachDB discusses a multi-city vehicle sharing use case where multi-region transactions could be worth consideration, but I'm skeptical:
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/multi-region-use-c...
(Developers and students get all excited about distributed systems, CAP, etc. but as a DBA, network partitions are largely not solvable from both technical and business standpoints. The solutions that do work include using vector clocks, or investing in a very reliable network, which is what Google is doing with dedicated fiber.)
1) It was towed up the canal a short way to a "lake" area for inspection. It was leaking immediately after the grounding, and probably does have minor hull issues, but no update since it was freed.
(Steel ships rely on the forces of floating - having water push up and inward to maintain the hull shape. They're not designed to be grounded or to be allowed to sag in the middle.)
2) It was never out of Egypt's custody.
The Hekla-3 eruption likely ended the Bronze Age c. 1100 BC, wiping out 95% of all Mediterranean cities. The first crop failure was bad enough, but the second year's starved almost everybody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hekla
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hekla_3_eruption
Note that all societies were very religious (superstitious) whether Aztec, Mayan, Mediterranean or African.
Christianity largely grew after the Byzantine Roman Emperor, Constantine, converted around AD 312.
(The Roman Empire was so large that it had two capitals, Rome in the west, and Constantinople (Byzantium) in the east. The latter became Istanbul in AD 1453.)
The more money you have in China, the more scrutiny you will get at some point. Then you disappear for 3 months like Jack Ma.
It's rumored that each of the Top 100 CCP officials has $2 billion. Pretty impressive savings on a $22,000 annual salary, isn't it?
https://qz.com/329584/does-chinese-president-xi-jinping-real...
1) forward symbol references
2) moderate type checking (at both compile and run times)
3) Mojolicious.
They would like to have their sanctions removed while keeping their nuclear program - there is no scenario where Iran will stop short of having ICBMs.
It's pretty common to have to re-interview for engineering jobs with the acquirer. A lot of engineers get cut in that scenario.
So make sure you update your resume and ask around if re-interviewing will be required.