These are start-ups, right?
The article is talking about Fortune 500 companies, not start-ups.
Having said that the top 2 ones are pharmaceuticals. I wonder whether the fat salaries trickle down to their bioinformatics divisions.
So -basically- SO says that a lot of its contributors behave like bullies but, being unable to actually yell at them (because SO needs them) tries to fuzzy out/alleviate the issue by taking the blame for them. I don't see any way that can work out.
For what is worth I can testify my own little experience from that pit.
* Contributors who downvote other answers without any excuse/explanation/commend (I guess it makes their own answer seem better).
* A tiny minority of users ever upvoting (that's a largely thankless community).
* Moderators that are being extra harsh with language usage (I'd say most of SO users are not native English speakers but this does not stop some native ones considering themselves somehow superior). *Extended usage of points, badges and several other facebooky notifications to tap into your dopamine receptors.
Living in a van might also be part of the answer to the skyrocketing rents wherever there are jobs worth their salt.
Which -housing- is one of the real big markets that desperately needs to be disrupted as it siphons money out of the productive sector into the rentiers' black holes.
"that industrial automation has been responsible for the loss of up to 670,000 jobs since 1990. But just in the period between 1999 and 2011, trade with China was responsible for the loss of 2.4 million jobs: almost four times as many. “If you want to know what happened to manufacturing after 2000, the answer is very clearly not automation, it’s China,”"
I think globalization in general would be more accurate than "China".
Yet I also think that automation is also a factor which even though might not be the major one yet it can very well be in the near future. I'm in IT industry and I've witnessed at least one line of job going out of the window - namely manual testers- due to automation. I bet everyone has similar stories from his own walk of life. Yet most of the jobs lost in my locality was due to them being shipped to low cost countries. So - all in all- these two factors work in parallel and probably globalization is holding up automation up to a point (where automation cost > low wage worker).
Why not worrying about the same thing about Saturn though? The best thing would be to slingshot Cassini in outer space like Voyagers but I guess they wouldn't have this option here.
The moons of Saturn are small even compared to the earth. One could expect far more "wreckage" to survive the entry to a moon.
Getting into Saturn, however, is vastly different. Casssini has broken up into many smallish, white-hot pieces only to eventually merge into clouds of ammonia at -200C that are blowing at extreme velocities. Further down, there are clouds of water at 0C and then metallic liquid hydrogen. Perhaps pieces could end up there or on the rocky core? Saturn is a weird place.
How much worse than an autoclave is entry to Saturn?
Titan is actually larger than Mercury. Just something I learned yesterday while reading Cassini posts. It really puts the size of Saturn into perspective.
Gas giants are a much less obvious place for native life to evolve, at least from our understanding of life. Enceladus appears to have liquid water, which makes it much more likely (still slim).
That said, Arthur C Clarke included giant city-sized lifeforms floating in the clouds of Jupiter in his 2001, 2010, 2061 series. And Isaac Asimov wrote "Victory Unintentional" in the robots series.
However, it was evaluated as inferior to the option chosen (there was apparently no concern at all about contaminating Saturn itself); see the slide titled "EOM Options with Science Evaluation":
This is the key point and deserves more attention. Mission control was not concerned with space junk impacting the moons. They were concerned with biological contamination altering potential evolutionary trajectories on any of the moons. Saturn's atmosphere was deemed to be sufficient to cause the requisite friction and head to cleanse Cassini from any such potential contaminants.
This is not true. You're right that it would quite slow, but end-of-mission options were investigated that would have sent Cassini all the way to Uranus or Neptune:
Titan specifically (none of the other moons are big enough to have any significant effect). Even if you're aware of that, it's a pretty surprising result, since it took so much more delta-v to capture into Saturnian orbit than it would to escape (mostly because we wanted to fly Cassini to Saturn and capture it into orbit in a reasonable amount of time; the trajectories that could've been used to escape from Saturn were quite slow).
noted that it would've been possible to escape (in the year 2014) to Jupiter (2021), then use gravity assists to also visit Uranus (2029) and Neptune (2061), or use Jupiter or Uranus to escape the solar system. Cassini also could've used any of Io/Europa/Ganymeda/Callisto's gravity to be captured in orbit around Jupiter, or entered into orbit around Neptune using Triton. I assume the main reason none of these options were chosen was that, with limited fuel remaining and the spacecraft not expected to remain operational forever, it was seen as more valuable just to stay at Saturn until end of mission (as well as pick up a bit more science diving the probe into the atmosphere).
HN algorithm magic. You submit a leftist story (that is no propaganda but it just paints the world in its factual colors). The story gets upvoted quickly so it makes it to the front page (which will get it up voted even more). Then the magic invisible hand of the market appears and the story gets lost in HN underbelly.
Note to self: Why am I still bothering with HN? It is exactly like the general IT crowd. Anything worth discussing is not.
sssst - you will get downvoted for asking such questions.
Answer: HN is pro-capitalism first and foremost. Everything else -democracy and truth included- take a back seat here.
@HN admins: you can hide your heads in the sand as much as you like. Good luck and thanks for the fish.
UPDATE: OK - I'll take at face value the replies and apologize for the attack to admins. I'm still not following though why/how this is flagged.
Actually, while HN is certainly strongly pro-capitalism, I regularly post lengthy comments here about socialism and have gotten plenty of upvotes from comments that have quoted things likethe Communist Manifesto to make my argument.
It's more likely to have been flagged because there's always some that flag political discussions of any kind not directly related to tech, and even more that flag political discussions that they expect will get heated because they don't think those kind of discussions belong here.
I'm strongly left wing and have not noticed any particularly strong bias either way in terms of what type of political articles get flagged. Specific subjects are more likely to be a trigger.
Yea I'm not left-leaning by any means, but I don't care if it's pro-anything. It's a discussion and the points of the article aren't delusional. Discussion on if the analysis is right is something I thought was pretty common on HN.
Why is this flagged but posts about how automation will ruin everything and we need a UBI aren't? It's the same topic. Same discussion but from different perspectives.
HN does have quite a few left wing commenters, but also a very large liberal and libertarian portion that often express concern about where capitalism is heading without necessarily wanting socialism... But in either case I think this article's comment-section is a bad one to judge by - the headline draw in a specific subset of commenters with a specific interest in the idea of the collapse of capitalism, which I suspect will disproportionally include left-wingers.
flagged? It transcends me why this post might be flagged. And it will be a marker of very bad undemocratic qualities of this forum if it stays like that.
Flagging is the result of user action. Speculation, but one reason may be that users think the discussion is likely to generate much more heat than any additional new light on the topic.
I'm not following though. So -any user can flag a post without any need to justify his action? Where is the value in that? Only posts that are at least neutral to all get to pass? Then we end up talking about anything but the things that actually matter in fear that they will generate "heat".
The posted article is much more decent than most anti-Trump articles that were the norm in here the past months. Personally I cannot wrap my head around it being flagged. If this is a result of a defective process then fix the process - that is if this is supposed to be a forum of reasonable practical people trying to find solutions to problems (aka hackers).
Multiple users need to have flagged a submission for it to receive a '[flagged]' label.
My initial comment is not meant as arguing for or against flagging in general or for this submission in particular. You asked why it might have been flagged. Another commenter responded similarly:
If you've noticed submissions from the past couple of months, you've likely come across user discussion about flagging and what submissions are appropriate for HN. For example, there was a Political Detox Week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
As an aside, I think it's a difficult process figuring out how have civil and substantive online discussions. Just asking people to do so, even if they're generally reasonable people, doesn't seem to be enough. Some topics will nearly always result in flame wars of various temperature, and too many of those can drive away those who are willing to be reasonable. I respect your desire to want to dig into topics like this, and they're things that should be discussed. That said, it's a legitimate question if this is indeed the forum where they can be discussed constructively. That's not necessarily a failing of HN or its community, either. It just may not be the right tool for the job, so to speak. There are other forums other there.
