Islam gave rights to woman at a time when they were treated as property everywhere else in the world.
In modern time, I have never heard of someone disqualifying menstruating women from celebrating. Though they are not expected to fast or pray during that time. My wife missed the first and last week this month -__-
That is beyond the pale. As we've warned you before, and as you've continued to break the site guidelines, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There are plenty of products that launch on top tools and frameworks that are worth far more than the underlying will ever be. OpenAI is creating products, DeepMind was creating tools.
It's not a matter of skill as much as objective. And DeepMind would still be starting at zero if they decide to pivot to products.
And here I thought that Google would achieve AI supremacy because of all the data they have been vacuuming for decades, turns out they haven't even thought to utilize it?
How did they drop the ball so hard? OpenAI has been around for less than a decade and as a smaller team with less resources was able to make a better product.
Though this is usually how it goes - big successful companies begin to bend towards regulatory capture after having their period of upstart growth and disruption. They make as much money as possible for shareholders on their cash cow and its management culture's primary objective to make sure this is not disturbed.
Think about how many decades head start IBM had to perfect search, but search wasn't their core competency.
Delivering advertisements is Google's core competency.
> I personally think the first man down the ladder on mars should be a woman
Shouldn't it just be the commander of the mission?
The way you speak is so condescending to women, as though they wouldn't have the ability to earn their place and it has to be handed to them. I can't speak to your intentions but it's not equality if you thought it was.
You're making the meritocracy argument and it is disingenuous. You don't have a monopoly on understanding "equality" and it is certainly not as simple in our society as you assume.
"seems fair to me" is hardly enough basis for a claim either. I did go on to state how it is impossible in our society today - do you actually disagree with that?
Theres nothing disingenuous about thinking the person that earned the honor should be the one to do it. Your claim that I think I have a monopoly is disingenuous. GP stating it should be a woman, just for being a woman, is being disingenuous.
Most women I know appreciate the "perks" of being a woman, but none of them are under any delusion about it. They would be insulted if they lost on equal footing, and were rewarded for it anyway. I've never met anyone who was happy knowing someone let them win.
If you want to make an argument that men and women are never on equal footing, I could understand that but I'm not even sure what you are proposing instead.
What I'm saying is that "earned the honor" - or rather that there is a single "best person" - is already a flawed assumption. Meritocracy is thoroughly debunked so anyone asserting it is either way out of touch or being disingenuous.
The reason is because of historical oppression and entrenched systems of oppression still in place today. In that context, meritocracy only serves to reinforce the status quo.
I'm sure NASA can come very close to a true meritocracy - but that doesn't change the fact that there are benefits to having women in visible positions of power, accomplishment, etc. There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
> but that doesn't change the fact that there are benefits to having women in visible positions of power, accomplishment, etc
So you're making the same proposal. You want to hire a woman because she's a woman. This is a massive disservice to female empowerment.
> There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
This is an absurd line of thinking. If two people truly are equally qualified, some immutable trait like race, sex, etc. should not be the determining factor. If you are ok with someone being hired for a job because they are a native american or a woman, then you should also be ok with someone choosing to only hire white men and asian men. Both of these scenarios are racist/sexist.
SLS will never reach land, you'll be splashing down in the middle of the ocean, stuck inside a tin can getting battered by waves until NASA can scramble their limited resources to get you.
The booster presumably like you will have been thrown into the ocean. Very wasteful system.
This is pretty hyperbolic. In the shuttle era, these contingencies were thought of and planned for. The amount of preparation NASA would do before shuttle launches was incredible, including flying medical and rescue teams to the chosen launch abort sites.
"Preparations of TAL sites took four to five days and began one week before launch, with the majority of personnel from NASA, the Department of Defense and contractors arriving 48 hours before launch. Additionally, two C-130 aircraft from the space flight support office from the adjacent Patrick Space Force Base (then known as Patrick Air Force Base) would deliver eight crew members, nine pararescuers, two flight surgeons, a nurse and medical technician, and 2,500 pounds (1,100 kg) of medical equipment to Zaragoza, Istres, or both. One or more C-21S or C-12S aircraft would also be deployed to provide weather reconnaissance in the event of an abort with a TALCOM, or astronaut flight controller aboard for communications with the shuttle pilot and commander."
Do you think that is fundamentally different with, say, Boeing or SpaceX?
If you look through all the failures and close calls in aerospace they are often rooted in human psychological errors. The pressures that lead to them may change with different organizations, but they don't go away.
This almost sounds like the start of a joke.... 'so an engineer, a politician, and an accountant walk into a bar.' One's the head of SpaceX, one's the head of NASA, ones the head of Boeing. So yeah, I do think there's a fundamental difference there.
So how would you characterize that difference, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses? I have a few thoughts but would be curious to hear yours first.
While this is an interesting question I'm not going to give an especially interesting answer. I see things as you might imagine. And while it might seem unfair I'd also appeal to reality. It's now been more than half a century since a human left low earth orbit. NASA and Boeing (et al) had all this time to succeed. They failed, and there's no real excuse for their failures besides themselves, and their own motivations.
Keeping it brief SpaceX/engineer is genuinely trying to get people to Mars, largely driven by ideological reasons with extensive technical creativity/competence backing them up. Accountant/Boeing wants to make more money. Outsource our software development to guys in India bidding $9/hour? Awesome! That's another 0.037% profit, what could go wrong!? Something doesn't work? Who cares!? We're on a cost+ contract baby, what you call "failure to deliver", I call delivering value to my shareholders!
And then there's the politician. In this particular case, he's not only a life long politician but also 80 years old on top. The only 'bright side' is that, due to his political influence, he's gone to space before. On the other hand Charles Bolden was a genuine astronaut and absolutely everything one would think they would want from a NASA head, yet he was a miserable failure. It may simply be that political style leadership (even when not a politician) isn't really conducive to meaningful progress in modern times.
>They failed, and there's no real excuse for their failures besides themselves, and their own motivations.
I'd argue the incentive wasn't there until CCP. That was the fundamental difference in the last 20 years. Without CCP, I don't think SpaceX would be successful, either. But I will say they've done much more than the Boeing at executing on that incentive.
I do think you may be overly cynical in your characterization, though. It wasn't too many years ago that Boeing was listed as the most desirable company to work for by college students. The reason isn't that they thought it was because they couldn't wait to gouge the public coffers, it was because aerospace has always been considered a sexy engineering discipline. You'll almost never find a civil engineering firm on those lists because "roads and commodes" just aren't considered cool.
Back to the question, I'll weigh in with my perspective. They are all responding to incentives, albeit different ones. But we have to acknowledge the downsides of each. SpaceX is awesome, but they aren't without their own psychological pressures and biases. I've brought it up elsewhere in this thread, but they have wanted to rapidly iterate rather than fundamentally understand some of their design issues. I suspect this is partly cultural (where operational tempo matters more than scientific rigor...i.e., "we don't need to know why it works, as long as it works") and some of it is business (i.e., they have specific contractual deadlines to consider). Those are also some of the issues that lead to mishaps dating back to Apollo and Shuttle.
Considering you seem to think the legacy downsides are due to the business/shareholder side, do you see the same issues encroaching on SpaceX if they go public?
Absolutely, I do believe that SpaceX going public will largely be the death of that company. And, depending on when this happens, it could even herald the second death of space in America. The one thing that's good here is that Elon has stated that he will not be taking SpaceX public until transit between Earth and Mars is well established.
The point I'd make is that leadership really matters. Boeing, at its peak, almost certainly had orders of magnitude more talent than SpaceX did in its early years - in no small part because of what you mentioned. And they absolutely had many orders of magnitude more money and access to funding. But their leadership was just absolutely abysmal, and consequently the potential of that talent was left completely untapped.
But on the other hand, like you mentioned there are incentive problems. Even though Boeing failed to tap into their potential, their stock price has been constantly and steadily going up for decades. Even their planes literally falling out of the skies was but a brief stumble, the damage there largely repaired owing to the start of a profitable new war. So in this regard I doubt their leadership is particularly disappointed with their results. They achieved what they set out to do after all. And that's pretty disappointing.
>The point I'd make is that leadership really matters.
I wholeheartedly agree. You're probably aware, but there have been a number of good write-ups detailing an overall erosion of engineering leadership at Boeing [1].
>Elon has stated that he will not be taking SpaceX public until transit between Earth and Mars is well established.
I think maybe the difference between you and me is that I take many of Musk's promises with a boulder of salt. If I was a gambler, I'd bet that we see some wordsmithing about what the definition of a "well established Mars transit" when it comes time for an IPO.
A decade ago, the word was that SpaceX would go public "when we are reliably launching F9." Then Tesla went public and Elon decided he didn't want anything more to do with public companies. If anything, I think that statement should only be interpreted as it absolutely not happening before that condition is fulfilled, not that it will happen once it is.
... they have wanted to rapidly iterate rather than fundamentally understand some of their design issues.
You say this with seeming knowledge of the thoroughness of SpaceX's failure investigations. Care to elaborate how you can say this with such authority?
H1-B should be only allowed in circumstances where foreigners are paid the same wage as their American counterparts, and the employer should have to front a sizeable fee to bring them in to disincentivize replacing American workers and incentivize training Americans instead.
It's absurd that every other nation is allowed to prioritize the employment of their own people but the US should just bring foreigners in to do the job for less. H1-B is a total scam as it stands.
Agreed. Foreign labour visas should be for hiring the tech-equivalent of Lionel Messi/Serena Williams/Kobe Bryant (pick your sport). 99% of the time it's just used to get someone to write CRUD apps for 60% of what you would need to pay a local hire.
Why are we using self reported data from a company known for deleting unfavorable information instead of it being published by the Department of Labor from official filings that have legal consequences for falsifying?
H-1B employees are required to be paid what similar employees in the specific geographic area are paid or at least as much as similar non H1B employees within the same company are paid.
I’m not sure where this idea that H1B employees are underpaid comes from. When you consider the wage requirements, and the fact that a company is required to cover most of the costs of the H1B process, an H1B worker almost certainly costs more to the company than a non H1B worker, with additional risks (such as their visa being declined at any point requiring the company to spend potentially tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to intervene).
The one advantage that H1B workwrs provide companies vs non H1B employees is that they cannot switch jobs easily, because the constant renewals mean they would need to justify the expenses to each new company, and many companies simply do not accept H1Bs because of the costs and complications involved.
The difficulty in moving jobs is also evidence of the fact that companies arent just dying to hire H1Bs for the sweet low wages.
Edit: What’s actually absurd is that the US has the highest wages in the world by far for industries in which H1B employees can work, and people think that this is bringing down their wages. Oh, also the people who do think this have absolutely no idea about how the program works, what costs are involved, how employers actually think about hiring an H1B worker (avoid unless absolutely necessary), and how much H1B workers contribute to the economy.
They also can’t seem to make the obvious connection that if the H1B program didn’t exist, the people doing those jobs wouldn’t stop existing. They would go back to their countries where they will do the same work at a fraction of the salary they were being paid in the US and still enjoy a dramatically higher standard of living. As opposed to being paid more than their colleagues, while paying US taxes and receiving absolutely 0 benefits from the government.
Every H1B employee paid taxes to fund the government handing out free money to Americans over COVID. 0 H1B employees received a penny from that money even as their American colleagues who did the same work, and paid the same taxes, got hundreds of dollars back.
I want to acknowledge that I know many people who have H1B visas because they legitimately could not be replaced by any worker with a US residency. I wish nothing but the best for them and I hope that any visa reform makes it easier for them to stay and work in the US as long as they'd like.
But as the source article touches on, most H1B visas are sponsored "staffing firms", whose business model pretty straightforwardly involves cheating the system. Could Disney World lay off their tech workers, then turn around and sponsor H1Bs at a lower rate? As you correctly identified, no, that's not allowed. But what they can and famously did do in 2015 is:
* Lay off their tech workers.
* Pay Cognizant and HCL, two staffing firms, to provide substitutes at a lower cost.
* Allow Cognizant and HCL to sponsor H1Bs at a lower rate, arguing (perhaps honestly!) that they've tried and failed to recruit American residents.
Given the prevalence of this business model, and how openly contemptuous it is of the intent of the H1B program, it seems fair to wonder how above-board the program is in general. If you ask a lawyer for help running your H1B recruitment program, are they going to walk you through how to avoid hiring H1Bs unless absolutely necessary? Or are they going to help you figure out all the tricks to get more people so you can hit your headcount goals?
It’s the reason we’re so entrepreneurial. Four out of ten unicorns are started by first gen immigrants originally on the H1B with Indians leading the pack and Israel in second.
It not absurd, they’re the reason we have over half our jobs. Your thinking is too short term and ultimately very destructive.
How is that different from everything after Google Search. Alphabet is even structured around the idea of not being able to pick winners. I can discern some long term strategy in Android Automotive and Waymo, but nothing is sacred when it comes to cutting off products that are not growing.
It's one thing to say that Sundar hasn't led Google to innovate much in his tenure (I agree there), but to say Google hasn't picked any winners since Google Search?
- Gmail (largest email service at 1.5B users)
- YouTube (by far the biggest video sharing platform)
- Android (most used operating system in the world by number of devices)
- Google Maps (maps service with the largest userbase)
- YouTube TV
- The whole Google Drive Suite
- Chromecast/Android TV
- Chromebooks (made huge inroads in the k-12 education space)
What I mean by "not picking winners" is that Google admits they can't foresee, for example, the acquisition of YouTube turning into a first-tier social network. Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks.
> Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks.
They put minimal effort into their products and prematurely sunset them if they don't perform well enough. Their organization is either so fragmented or toxic that they launch products that are competing against eachother.
It really does seem like there are only morons at the helm. A company with as much resources as Google should not continue to fail so badly. My suspicion is as Jobs said of Apple during his time away, the company is being totally run by the product guys not the engineers.
The point of solar on a camper van is to charge an auxiliary battery used for appliances. The range gains for the main battery pack are so minimal it wouldn't make sense unless the car spent the majority of it's time parked in the sun between locations.
> it wouldn't make sense unless the car spent the majority of it's time parked in the sun between locations.
That's exactly what people do with these things. You drive them for a few hours. Then you park it and you go off enjoying nature, or whatever it is what people do while camping for the next few days. Most cars in fact don't drive the vast majority of the time. They just sit there parked for well over 90% of the time.
It's not going to make a massive difference to range of course. But even keeping the battery at the same level or slowing down energy depletion while you are camping helps. And best case, you actually leave the camp site with a bit more range than when you arrived there. That's useful.
Which I believe is true for most consumer vehicles. They spend most of their time parked somewhere and little time actually being driven. The same is true of people, they spend 95% of their time sitting and very little time actually being active. However, in both cases peoples perceptions are warped by their exposure to the activity, they only pay attention to their interaction with a vehicle or moving when they do it, so it seems to them to form a major part of their life when actually it is quite small. A well known psychological bias. It is a big surprise for many people when they buy an activity tracker and find out they don't actually do much most of the time. I used to drive two hours a weekday to and from work, about 20,000 miles a year. Using a car continuously all year at 60mph would be 60mph x 365 days/year x 24 hours/day = 525,600 miles/year. So 20,000 miles per year means using a car 3.8% of the time. The other 96.2% of the time it could be charging via solar (and it can charge while driving also). Still, the amount of power from 600W of solar panels on a van is not huge, 4.8kWH per day for 8 hours of intense sunlight per day. Could take a week or three to charge an EV fully. People can choose where to park, so it seems like enough to be useful in many situations. Having solar panels on an EV could mean it would never be truly stranded, though having to wait a day or more to get to a charger might be bothersome. In a rainy/cloudy season solar panels would have much less value. If it was a $500 option on a mass produced EV it seems worthwhile. At $1000 I'd think twice but might still buy it.
> The panel can charge the ID Buzz while parked or driving and is capable of generating enough power to provide an additional estimated 1,864 miles of range over the course of a year. Averaged out, that's just over 150 miles of range a month, which isn't massive, but hey it's something, right?
Average miles driven per year is 13,500 or around 260 miles per week. The better way to look at it is 1864 / 13500 which maximally gives you about 13% of those yearly miles "for free."
With WFH, I wonder how those averages have changed. Some folks are using cars much less often.
However, as someone who has prior experiences with keeping a low mileage car, I'd say parking it out in the sun is a terrible goal. You really want it garaged to slow purely time-based deterioration if you are not hitting high miles per year. A power hookup in the garage is the way to go, and then get house solar if desired.
So then, this car-mounted solar is only useful during an extended outing where you are away from your usual parking. Can it ever become cost effective for the value it provides in such short bursts?
Those numbers seem widely optimistic and probably assume the panels are always optimally generating, when panel placement is a huge performance factor.
Those panels are maybe generating 0.1 kwh in the top quartile of exposure, and have a battery over 50 Kwh in capacity.
On an amazing day you may charge a single kwh. That's a 2% increase at best.
Every single naive person asks why they can't put a solar panel on a car and get rid of gasoline. They don't understand the surface to output relationship of solar power. This is mainly a marketing gimmick. Ideally those panels could be optimally placed and generate their full potential. Using them so inefficiently is a waste.
Things are worse than ever and reading comments like this that dismiss it genuinely confuses me. So because other cities have similar or worse crime rates, we should just accept it?
Urban decay is happening all across this country and it needs to be addressed aggressively before you or someone you know gets stabbed to death.
Things are not worse than ever. Things are slightly worse after the pandemic, but nowhere as bad as the 70's. Feel free to check the statistics.
Anyway I agree we need to get aggressive, but a lot of folks thinks that means more cops. We spend a hell of a lot on police, but police don't address the root causes of most crimes.
We need to aggressively invest in urban areas with new housing, job opportunities, drug treatment, gang disruption, violence interruption, mental health care, and other meaningful interventions in the cycles and circumstances that lead people to commit crime.
It's harder to depart from the median situation in a large geographical region one way or another. All else equal (which is never the case, consult a real criminologist), San Francisco probably can do more about its property crime than violent crime, under the very general principle of regression to the mean.
In modern time, I have never heard of someone disqualifying menstruating women from celebrating. Though they are not expected to fast or pray during that time. My wife missed the first and last week this month -__-