> I would take your dad's offer. I would start working with him.
But, don't give up coding. You will succeed if you continue to practice.
Don't just write code for yourself or as an attempt to start a business. Instead, join a major free source project that you would use and find interesting by fix bugs and then submitting the fixes. Continue to do this and if you are good enough and like to work on the project enough, you may become a core part of the team. Eventually this will help you build connections for other work. Developing yourself is often more important than developing a product for a business.
Give that 5 years, then will have more experience to guide your business ideas.
This isn't the path for everyone. Some get lucky and work on the right product at the right time. But, if you've given it your best effort, try something else. Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
But if he is publicly regretting donating a kidney, won't he be preventing many kidneys from being donated?
I just don't him going public with his opinion as a good thing. It may become something he regrets even more than his kidney donation.
Even the reporter and the post's title is irresponsible. If I were just reading through the headlines, it would influence my feelings about donating a kidney.
Instead, the title could have been "Kidney-donating doc pleads: please register as an organ donor" and have similar content in the post, but with the main point being that people should register to be an organ donor if they die.
Maybe it should influence you. From what it sounds like, he was essentially misled as to how unlikely it is that he could suffer complications down the road. If you (or anyone else) is less likely to donate because of that, perhaps that's a good thing. Not good for the potential recipient, perhaps, but good for you, which is just as important.
To any Walmart developers reading: thank you for open sourcing this!
However, there's something I'd like even more than your time spent on this project. Currently, walmart.com will indicate to customers that there is inventory available in-store that there sometimes isn't. This can lead to a terrible customer experience when you order something that runs out of stock after you order it, and your order is just cancelled. It seems like there should be the ability to have it backordered at the price at which you purchased. Could Walmart instead always honor the price at which an item was purchased online even if stock in-store runs out, and give the customer the option to cancel the order or get a 20% discount on any item if you don't want to get it on backorder? Right now this can be done, but it requires the store manager's approval, which can involve having to file a complaint, which seems completely unnecessary.
Flew two planes on my phone. Both normal designs. Didn't see the point.
Caught one and then put my stamp on it, too. That was neat.
Still, I think there is a missed opportunity here. If I could design the plane however I wanted and compete with others, that would've been fun. But, I have no reason to go back and do it again, because there is no challenge.
Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.
I get not accepting a counter-offer, although I know one employee that took a counter-offer that was insanely good and has been in golden handcuffs ever since, but couldn't be doing better financially.
However, I think that retention agreements and other "bonuses for staying on" can be helpful, even though I think that really what employees want typically are positive changes that would keep them from leaving (like firing a terrible manager or changing a policy) that cost less than retention agreements or counter-offers in many cases.
The best case is never to get in this situation by paying really well, hiring really well, and firing bad employees when necessary.
Nevermind the fact that all over the world people have been living in smaller houses on average compared to those in the U.S. for many years.
But, what I think is unfortunate in house design and construction is that houses are built for use < 100 years, aren't easily upgradable via conduits, etc., and assume that weather and electricity/gas/water usage and cost as a fraction of income and will stay consistent.
As for materials, Aerogel's Spaceloft http://www.buyaerogel.com/product/spaceloft-10-mm-cut-to-siz...
that could significantly decrease residential energy needs is barely spoken of, few spend more on quality insulated windows, many are content with hardiplank vs. masonry even though brick provides better insulation and doesn't need painting, cold-formed steel is a better option and would reduce deforestation in combination with increased taxes on the paper industry to drive consumers to use electronic alternatives, the same crap roof shingles are used and few use solar even as solar technology has vastly improved.
We could be building small modern castles that we could hand down, but instead we still build cheap throwaways.
But, what I think is unfortunate in house design and construction is that houses are built for use < 100 years
We could be building small modern castles that we could hand down
While I see value in structures standing as monuments to be handed down to future generations - mostly large structures built for public use - I can't say that I've met a 100-year-old-house that hasn't had significant shortcomings. Renovations upon renovations to upgrade electrical, plumbing, HVAC have the potential to make building interiors look like a hodgepodge of bolt-on improvements. Then, one still contends with features that fall out of modern building code: that narrow staircase or the low ceiling in the basement or no windows in the bedrooms.
At a certain point, one cannot predict the housing requirements of the future and it would be more economical, and humane, to just start from a pile of dirt once again.
> At a certain point, one cannot predict the housing requirements of the future and it would be more economical, and humane, to just start from a pile of dirt once again.
That's true. But if the next generation did not have to build their own houses it would give them a 'dividend' passed down by the previous generation and that wealth would ultimately give them more economic freedom and fewer opportunity costs.
Then with those advantages, any problems will be easier to face, such as starting from the pile of dirt again.
Otherwise each generation is constantly facing the same struggles with paying the rent.
Also consider, and I think this was implicit in what the OP was saying, that closed loop systems might make many existing problems relating to maintenance obsolete. So the next iteration of building might take place in two or four generations from now instead of for each one.
Sadly truly effective maintenance free filter technology appears to be holding closed loop systems development back. I know Kamen was trying to build a Slingshot mechanism but so far as I know this has not bourne any fruit. This is the kind of unsexy, hard stuff that Silicon Valley need to be pulling together.
2) Lots of young adults are going to chase the best opportunities in their fields, which are not accessible from the towns they grow up in.
3) Even only children don't get to inherit the house until parents die or move to a retirement facility. This is moving later and later into middle age, well after the "I want a house and marriage and kids" stage.
This is a misunderstanding. I was not taking about inheritances. The word generation can have two meanings. One is for each iteration of family members. The other is with respect to human society. I meant the second.
If houses could easily last 100-200 years without structural alteration being necessary then some generations would never pay for housing, just as we don't really pay for the capital cost of building most roads but the continued upkeep of them.
There is a thought that the "disposability" of Japanese housing [1] has played some role in Japan's economic issues. Housing can still serve as something of an inter-generational value transfer even if children don't end up living in the actual house/land. (Which I agree isn't all that common.)
>Housing can still serve as something of an inter-generational value transfer
Except inheritance comes when you need it least: late middle age, when the house is already paid off or close and there's little time for savings to compound before retirement.
Paying for (most of) your children's education is a much more effective form of inter-generational value transfer: it comes at the time young adults face the greatest expenses relative to their earning power, and lets them reap the benefits of a high-end career without excessive debt (so they can actually build wealth).
I don't disagree with any of that. At least given full healthy lives and reasonably successful careers, inherited money from parents is often going to come after it would have the greatest impact.
But if housing is treated as a more disposable asset (which is presumably less efficient in many cases than updating and remodeling) the cost of that decreased efficiency comes from somewhere. Perhaps from a grandchild's college fund.
The way that people live changes over time. Any house built 100 years ago is functionally obsolete and needs significant remodeling to be comfortable to modern middle-class Americans. And have you ever been in a castle? The look nice to tourists but actually living in one would suck.
Masonry construction is problematic in earthquake zones. It can work with enough steel reinforcement, but then the construction costs become too high.
In any place worth living the real value is in the land, not the house. Build houses so that they can be easily deconstructed and the materials recycled instead going to landfills.
>In any place worth living the real value is in the land, not the house.
That's a pretty sweeping generalization. I know that, for some people, life isn't worth living outside the core of a few hip cities, but they're really not the norm.
In general, at least outside of cities, the value of any structures tracks tends to track to the value of the land--assuming the land isn't very large (10s of acres and up). I'd guess that equal values for land setup for utilities and the structure itself is a fairly typical rule of thumb in a lot of places. (The median price for a home is about $200K. The construction cost for a new house is going to be a pretty significant chunk of that.)
While I'm charmed by the concept of a totally custom tiny house, built to fit my lifestyle, I also find the "movement" a bit amusing. It's as though Americans haven't been living in trailers/campers for generations. This is just the glamorous version of it.
> Other cheaper insulation types are really good already.
This is short-term thinking.
I don't expect the insulation in my house to be sufficient for the significantly increased and/or decreased temperatures caused by deforestation, CO2 pollution, ice melting, etc.
Yes, we will have moved out by the time it will matter, but I think my children and their children could've potentially lived comfortably in our house had it been built with the best materials available today. And with more insulation, air conditioning wouldn't be causing even more warming:
Only the wealthy have the luxury of being able to engage in long-term thinking about this stuff. Most regular people have to stretch their finances to purchase a house at all, so they have to make compromises on building materials.
By building smaller houses with better materials, we can reduce the energy requires to heat and cool them, slow acceleration of CO2 generation, and reduce maintenance costs.
If you can't afford to even build a tiny house with great materials, perhaps you can with the help of several family members or friends or we could work out deals where domiciles are time shared during the day; while you're at work, someone else can live there. We really only need a place to live for 1/3 of the day unless you're too young/too old/sick/diseased/injured.
If you don't want to think about the long-term future of humanity or just don't give a crap about your ancestors- fine, but I'm not with you on that.
We're past the tipping point now, so we have to come up with better solutions, or we're screwed:
> If you can't afford to even build a tiny house with great materials, perhaps you can with the help of several family members or friends or we could work out deals where domiciles are time shared during the day; while you're at work, someone else can live there. We really only need a place to live for 1/3 of the day unless you're too young/too old/sick/diseased/injured.
That's great except most of the population (at least in the US) lives on, very roughly at least, the same schedule so they need the space at the same time between 8pm and 8am.
Could be, but those fast growing species are sometimes non-native (to the country), not integrated into the native ecological system over centuries of adaptation and symbiosis, huge water suckers, stifle native plant and tree growth, etc. And often the native forests with much greater biodiversity (and multiple
plants valuable and tradionally known and used for food, fibre, fuel, firewood, shelter, herbs and medicines, etc., have been chopped down to plant those monoculture tree farms for, say, paper alone. Seen and know of actual cases of this in some parts of India I am familiar with. Even the state goverments now know of this and there are now some efforts to reverse the trend. An example: eucalyptus and wattle in the mountains of South India, particularly the Western Ghats.
> Nevermind the fact that all over the world people have been living in smaller houses on average compared to those in the U.S. for many years.
Yes, my TH will the size of an average townhouse in sq ft in Ireland.
> what I think is unfortunate in house design and construction is that houses are built for use < 100 years, aren't easily upgradable via conduits, etc.
I agree but if you're clever you can low-tech hack by inserting pipes through the wall which contain what I'm going to call 'guide wires'.
That shall allow one to insert new cables into walls in the future.
You have to appreciate also that buildings get a 'deep upgrade' every 30-50 years. If only because with today's shit tier new growth wood and shoddy craftsmanship a house deteriorates around the time people finish paying a mortgage. What an unholy alliance there exists between bankers and building/material standards...
> Aerogel's Spaceloft that could significantly decrease residential energy needs is barely spoken of.
Don't tell internaut that! Things said by internaut in the last three months include:
> we do not see things like technologies to make heart attacks impossible or cheap aerogel insulation, the kinds of leaps we made in the past that really lifted all boats.
> using a material invented by them called aerogel (thin strips!) to thermally isolate the studs to prevent thermal bridging, it'll cost me just 1300 to raise the R (insulation) value by a min of 10% - 20%
> suppose the manufacture of aerogel could be brought down by 2 orders of magnitude.
The caveat I have to mention is that getting cheap aerogel production is not enough by itself to effect large industrial level change and an order of magnitude drop in energy bills for new builds. We also need an AR system (a special pair of glasses/goggles) that highlighted the places in the dwelling that require foam, special housings around penetrations, beads of chaulk, all in order to prevent the air escaping. Good insulation is close to worthless without the correct methods to prevent air infiltration.
Myron Ferguson does a nice demonstration of what I'm talking about on Youtube.
The passive house people are getting there but that will take forever unless they can be augmented by AR. So that is a good B2B start-up idea.
> We could be building small modern castles that we could hand down, but instead we still build cheap throwaways.
Yeah. The next generations should not have to worry about building their own houses unless they really wanted to.
My problem with modern building systems is that they are biased towards modern architecture styles I dislike. My attitude is the same as most normal people. Passive house cannot succeed without allow traditional building styles to exist.
Since houses are viewed as bank accounts and not as dwellings by most US folk, it is going to be difficult to convince them not to value marketability over efficiency. Especially since the energy cost is small compared to the finance fees and property taxes paid.
Eliminating zoning rules and "voluntary" homeowners associations and eliminating property taxes would help.
> Since houses are viewed as bank accounts and not as dwellings by most US folk, it is going to be difficult to convince them not to value marketability over efficiency.
Not worried about that.
The costs of heating and cooling a dwelling + the maintenance and upkeep are actually way in excess (1x - 2x) of the original house price adjusted for inflation. You get... dis-economies of scale the more you go up.
Housing markets are cyclical over long periods with nil capital gain.
Put the two together and you see a dismal end as entropy catches up. Not even to mention that this process shall accelerate if economic growth falters.
> Especially since the energy cost is small compared to the finance fees and property taxes paid.
Energy costs at first appear to be a small encroachment, but they really mount up over time in the most astounding way. I don't have a graph to hand but I remember being very impressed by it.
What is called THOWs or Tiny Houses on Wheels do not pay taxes or association fees. They are classified as vehicles and hence do not need to pay property taxes. They are also not very likely to encounter HOAs since complaints drive them away on their wheels to greener pastures. Sometimes they visit RV parks and pay those fees but those aren't very much.
> Eliminating zoning rules and "voluntary" homeowners associations and eliminating property taxes would help.
Of course! And I think such 'revolutions' will happen in time, because 'living like a normal American/European' will just become uneconomical.
Categorically yes, like genetically, but phenotypically no. TH are more home-like and more comfortable, even at this early stage in their evolution. RVs can be quite luxurious but in my opinion they are distinctly different to THs.
That can mostly be attributed to the use case:
RV (original intent) usecase was temporary living, moving often, the TH usecase is permanent living, moving rarely.
Fine Home Building is the HN of construction tech, I never fail to find something useful that saved money or gave me an idea or prevented me from doing something stupid. I'm sure I wouldn't have come across the concept of a Rainscreen (despite reading several construction books) but for them and I suspect that alone saved my butt.
By pipes as conduits did you mean empty PVC piping or routing within existing pipework somehow?
Thanks for mentioning fish tape since I wouldn't have heard of it before, it looks like the correct terms are 'draw wire' and 'fish tape' and they are used together.
PS- I'd be worried about these being controlled by an AI or hacked. MQ-9's are small and go 300 MPH, so, while they're deadly, I wasn't worried about them as much. F-16's can go 1,350 MPH and can be "well-armed".
USAF just bought 30 more QF-16's bring the fleet to 106. Then "Air Force leaders are expected to buy a total of 120 QF-16 target drones through 2019. Optionally Air Force leaders are considering buying a total of 210 QF-16 through 2022. The fleet should last until 2025."
These are target drones, and unlikely to be armed with anything or operated near high-value infrastructure susceptible to the relatively minor impact damage of which a QF-16 might be capable.
And why would you have a small very expensive fleet of fast moving drones that can carry bombs? Targets/training only? Wouldn't that be wasteful? Wouldn't those be expensive to just send in for recon or shooting down a plane or even a bombing run that they could use other manned aircraft for? What would they be best suited for?
"...the Pentagon is also modifying Turkey’s current fleet of F-16s to carry the bomb.":
I'm not against the USAF trying to improve its defense.
But, if a remote-controlled nuclear-armed jet were controlled by an AI, or by a terrorist, that would be a big problem.
I understand that it's expensive to find and train good pilots, and it takes a long time. They are a limited resource. So, I can see why you'd want to replace them with drones- you save a lot of money, could expand the fleet more quickly and with less expense, eventually.
But, that expense is a safeguard. It keeps really bad things from being able to happen. We shouldn't be making anything nuclear-capable more easily remotely-controllable. And if the US does it, others will. Even if the US were to be completely safe about it, other states might not be.
from the article "The decision by ACC certifies 15 QF-16s ready and available for target operations, according to an ACC release."
As throwanem said these are target drone which we have been doing with the F-4 and other planes for a long time. They have gone beyond their service hours for the airframes.
Nobody loads nukes on a target drone. Nobody uses target drones near civilians.
"Next up, live fire testing moves to Holloman Air Force Base, N.M. The military will ultimately use QF-16s for weapons testing and other aerial training."
You are correct. It seems like they don't plan to use them intentionally to carry nukes. They could perhaps be fitted with one and possibly wire it into the self-destruct mechanism, but that would take a lot of work, I'd think.
They do carry a bomb, though- it's not meant for combat, but could be abused for such to make the entire plane a bomb carrying device, if it were taken over:
"Granted it is removable, but they also carry, as it was described to me, a 2000 lb class (or maybe more reasonably it was 500#, but the 2k figure seems to stick out in my memory for some reason) HE warhead in the spine for range control/destruction purposes if anything goes awry. Long story short, it would take a lot more money and a lot more testing to ever make them combat capable."
Those are absurdly high figures for a range safety package - it's a self-destruct system, meant to terminate out-of-control flight by making the platform no longer airworthy. You don't need a Mark 82 to do that.
Indeed, a firsthand source [1] describes the QF-16's range safety package thus:
> A small ball of flames burst from the middle of the aircraft, followed by thick black smoke, but no sound. The sound followed soon after with a deep reverberating boom.
> The extent of the damage went undetected at first, due to the amount of smoke billowing from the wreck. Once it cleared, it revealed the F-16 had been split in half between the cockpit and the wings.
Something on the scale of a 500- or 2000-pound bomb, as this random forum commenter suggests, would've scattered pieces of aircraft all over the hardstand, in which it would also have left a hole.
Look, the Air Force has plenty of real combat drones with actual remote weapon controls. This is simply a target drone program to follow up of QF-4 program since we are running out of old F-4s. No sane actor would do anything you suggest since there are purpose built drones that have actually been used to do weapons release. We have enough existing ability to drop weapons that the new Navy drone will actually be used for refueling missions to keep the hours off the F-18 airframes.
It's also worth considering that, if Skynet decides she wants a squadron of B61-armed F-16s to play with, there are easier ways to get one. Like, oh, lying to people.
Why do people get so hung up on the idea that a superhuman AI can't gain access to weapons if there are no weapons equipped for direct remote control? Why expect a superhuman AI to have difficulty suborning humans through deceit? I mean, don't get me wrong - I tend to think that whole avenue of existential threat analysis owes much more to science fiction and the seductive nature of apocalypticism than to anything in reality. But if those are your priors, this seems a very odd
oversight.
I've heard of a situation where a disgruntled military contractor who was recently terminated stole a helicopter from base by flying it away. In this case the cause was inadequate physical security procedures. But this is something that happens, and something that people consider defending against.
1. Plan 9 was led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie and released (closed source) by Bell Labs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs ) in 1992. In 1996, AT&T decided to deprioritize it. Lucent open sourced it in 2000 and free sourced it in 2002. It was a process-based OS where each process had its own filesystem (called a namespace) where each process could share virtual files (via 9P, later 9P2000, protocol) in the other processes' file systems. Like Unix (and Linux), files could represent devices. UTF-8 was used everywhere (since Ken Thompson invented it). rc was the default shell, rio was the windows system, plumber allowed system-wide hyperlinking, and sam and acme were the text editors.
2. 9front is a fork of Plan 9.
3. If you refresh the linked page (the main page for 9front), it has a new picture. There are a lot. Some are really bizarre, like the man in the wheelchair in front of the elevator. Others like the shot from Jurassic Park are funny and wrong- "it was a Silicon Graphics workstation (using IRIX, the SGI System V based Unix) running a three dimensional file system browser." (not Plan 9 which was not Unix) http://movies.stackexchange.com/a/9746
But, don't give up coding. You will succeed if you continue to practice.
Don't just write code for yourself or as an attempt to start a business. Instead, join a major free source project that you would use and find interesting by fix bugs and then submitting the fixes. Continue to do this and if you are good enough and like to work on the project enough, you may become a core part of the team. Eventually this will help you build connections for other work. Developing yourself is often more important than developing a product for a business.
Give that 5 years, then will have more experience to guide your business ideas.
This isn't the path for everyone. Some get lucky and work on the right product at the right time. But, if you've given it your best effort, try something else. Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is the definition of insanity.