mandevil

66 ms·

781.
by mandevil 6y ago
Helium-3 coming from active seafloor vents has something like 10x (to in some locations 30x) the ratio of 3He/4He in the atmosphere. This is so consistent that it is often used as a way to detect underwater vulcanism. Yeah, it's s
782.
by mandevil 6y ago
The reason that Facebook employees continue to leak like a sieve for Buzzfeed and the rest of the news media- and to spread embarrassing stories like this- is that clearly they don't feel like their work is valued by Zuck (and Kaplan,
783.
by mandevil 6y ago
If you postulate a still non-existent fusion reactor, and then postulate an enormous industrial lunar mining program- 150 tons of lunar regolith gets you 1 gram of He3- this might, might, might work out. Most people who crunch the numbers t
784.
by mandevil 6y ago
Human error is a terrible concept, a crutch for bad engineering. Take the story of the VSS Enterprise (SpaceShip Two) that broke up back in 2014. It broke apart because the co-pilot hit a button four seconds early[1]. But if hitting one but
785.
by mandevil 6y ago
Wife is a pharmacist, can confirm this is true. In school she worked for a chain where everything IT related was done on an awful MSDOS program- she would get calls from other pharmacists asking how to do something and I would hear her walk
786.
by mandevil 6y ago
Well sure, I don't have a contract with Dr. Kogan, so what can I sue him for? There is no breach of any contract between us. I do have a contract with Facebook, so they are pretty much the only people I can sue. They can turn around
787.
by mandevil 6y ago
Right. Who would count their karma points here on Hacker News and make a big deal about how many strangers anonymously clicked on the up arrow next to their post?
788.
by mandevil 6y ago
On the first question, there is some scholarly debate, but as far as I can tell as an outsider the general consensus is that there are fewer deaths due to armed conflict than anytime in the last two millennia. Even something as terrible as
789.
by mandevil 6y ago
And test pilots regularly died in the old system, and come home to their children in the current one, so I prefer the current one. The point is that it isn't "they were test pilots, so crazy" it is "in the 1950's an
790.
by mandevil 6y ago
I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they w
791.
by mandevil 6y ago
This is a special behind-the-scenes article describing how the journalist did her work. If you read the article with JS turned on, you would see a link to the original article this is the backstory for: https://www.nytimes.com&
792.
by mandevil 6y ago
If you had actually read this article, you would see that Mr. Smith admitted he was guilty in legal documents under penalty of perjury. Is that enough due process for you? In fact, this article is mostly focused on how the optics -a high pr
793.
by mandevil 6y ago
For better or worse, when you get to a certain size you absolutely NEED that level of bureaucracy. You can't get 120,000 full time employees plus probably another 100,000 contractors to work together without establishing a clear hierar
794.
by mandevil 6y ago
Not sentenced yet, even though he plead guilty in October 2019. Apparently there have been some things that delayed his sentencing since then?
795.
by mandevil 6y ago
Also, any task that involves reading or writing files will, in the presence of cutomer antivirus software, turn into a random number generator on whether the read/write goes through at all, how long it takes, etc. We are constantly hav
796.
by mandevil 6y ago
One company I worked for a few years ago, I joined right as a just such a ground-up rewrite of their core system was coming into place. Everyone in orientation was telling me "You'll be spending most of your working life dealing w
797.
by mandevil 6y ago
And their handling of it has only given them more PR problems.
798.
by mandevil 6y ago
As a manager, your job is to manage people to get results, and if you are insecure enough about managing those people that you feel you have to enforce some sort of idiotic one size fits all policy then you shouldn't be a manager and s
799.
by mandevil 6y ago
If you read the article, you'd see that there is a critical thing where he got a 70 million dollar refund, in a manner which probably violated IRS Guidelines. This has been debated since 2011, and has still not reached a decision. If t
800.
by mandevil 6y ago
The article says "What the tax records for Mr. Trump’s businesses show, however, is that he has lost chunks of his fortune even before depreciation is figured in. The three European golf courses, the Washington hotel, Doral and Trump C
801.
by mandevil 6y ago
Based on publicly available stories, Palantir doesn't actually gather data on its own: they are purely an analysis platform for data that their customers already have (or have separate contracts to buy). It sounds like their secret sau
802.
by mandevil 6y ago
At one point I worked at a company founded in 2005ish, so one of their core things was an ontology. We found that while some very generic things were reusable (person and address, say) almost everything that drove business logic was differe
803.
by mandevil 6y ago
Note that two day approaches are not a real requirement, it's a choice that is made for operational flexibility. On Gemini 11 all the way back in 1966 NASA demonstrated docking a mere 94 minutes after launch (essentially one orbit). Ho
804.
by mandevil 6y ago
The main thing necessary to understand Buran is... why the big heavy delta wings? It is clear why the US shuttle has them: Reference Mission 3A/3B, which the USAF added to the design requirements in exchange for political cover in Cong
805.
by mandevil 6y ago
Talk to a reporter about why people leak. The reason people leak is when they feel that the organization doesn't listen to them and they can't steer the organization any other way. If your employees feel respected and listened to-
806.
by mandevil 6y ago
I'm not even sure that it's fair to say that Athens failed to preserve it's architecture and replaced it with the concrete monstrosities. Athens grew so dramatically that there simply wasn't much of a city to preserve: i
807.
by mandevil 6y ago
DDG doesn't run its own crawlers- it has a contract with Bing for that. DDG is a privacy-protecting wrapper around core Bing search.
808.
by mandevil 6y ago
The UK hasn't gone it alone in a air-to-air focused fighter since before the Arrow was cancelled (The English Electric Lightening, I think). Every more recent fighter that was primarily about air-to-air has been multinational.
809.
by mandevil 6y ago
Fortunately, Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for figuring out how to build a neutrino beam, which is much easier than detecting them. Basically, slam a proton beam into a few feet of something big and
810.
by mandevil 6y ago
Isn't that because credit cards came later to the EU, so they had better standards because they didn't have to worry about supporting huge quantities of obsolete technology? I don't know the exact details on credit cards, but

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