plan6's comments

> 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.

> I admire the author's selflessness.

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.

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.

Congrats, Sam! That's a really nice article.

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.

>> 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'.

Pipes can be conduits. And instead of guide wires, many use fish tape.

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.

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:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-be...

> 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:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/sunday-review/air-conditio...

Substantially improved insulation in new housing and stopping deforestation could get the world back on track.

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.

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."

http://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=27741

"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."

http://www.boeing.com/features/2013/09/bds-qf16-09-23-13.pag...

"Where Have All the Phantoms Gone?" (2008) is a good personal story about the QF-4's:

http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/where-have-all-...

F-16's can carry nukes.

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.":

http://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22037

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.

Note that QF-16's, not F-16's, are the unmanned/drone version of the F-16.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...

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."

http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2016/03/qf-16-targ...

To those not in the know:

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