venus's comments

find_by_id/find_by aren't "wrong", they're just different. Sometimes you want to fall back to nil instead of raising an exception.

Code from these outsourcing shops is never particularly good. They sell on name, trust and client relationships - the product just has to work, and it usually does. They can't attract and keep top devs, who don't want to work on boring client projects, and won't pay to get them anyway.

They're inevitably junior-heavy, supervised by 2 or 3 year seniors, who do a reasonable job of keeping things in line but there's only so much you can do. The code ticks all the boxes for testing, etc, but is far from inspired and usually built with the present, not the future, in mind. There are uncomfortable organisational incentives to not over-deliver in quality - wouldn't want changes and maintenance to be too easy, and it's not like the client is tech-savvy or they wouldn't be hiring a "name" shop in the first place.

Most really good programmers who know their value (that I know, anyway) are working for product companies, where quality is visible, valued, and rewarded, or are highly-paid consultants/freelancers.

> Many contracting firms are taking anywhere from 50-75%

The only firms I know of taking that kind of cut target governments, which carries a lot of risk and is very high-touch. They need a fancy office and a lot of overhead just to stay in the game. Perverse, I know, but the way things are.

The firms in question then charge very high rates to cover all this, and keep a large percentage of it, as you say. The contractors who actually do the work end up seeing about as much as they'd see in private practise (~$800-1000/day from a chargeout of maybe 1800-2200)

Source: friends working for this kind of company in Australia.

> 20 or so years until upload and cloned bodies become accessible

That's an... optimistic time frame.

I hope so. Currently, VC money is a horrible market distortion that encourages what is basically dumping - companies with good products and actual business models being starved of oxygen by cashed-up competitors who simply give products away for free. I'm not even sure of the economic term for it but wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal in a few years, after we've gotten more sophisticated.

Take a second to think about what you're saying. You're basically talking about prison revenge scenarios. Do you seriously think the real reasons are ever going to be admitted?

"Your honour, I didn't shank him because I hate hispanics, it's because he stole my dope!"

You reckon? It's basically surrounding the thing with chicken wire. How expensive could that possibly be?

Expense can't be the reason. Maybe the reason they don't do that is because the guards want their phones to work.

Thanks for the recommendation! Bought.

Probably more than 50% of the books I buy come from recommendations on HN, and I've been rarely disappointed.

> 1. Apparently everyone in Santa Cruz goes to bed early and gets up early.

Probably some selection bias at work here. It's possible the type of person who's buying and wearing personal fitness monitors is also the type of person who gets up early.

> Maybe I'm the only one that sets my alarm on the hour

Probably my OCD coming out but I only set my alarm with minutes beginning 0-4 and ending with 8. I'm sure everyone has their own habits. On the hour seems so numerically boring!

I suppose it'd be better than being Boeing and going in front of your stockholders to explain why your marketshare is radically down because you refused to conform to the measurement system 95% of your customers are using.

It's a non-question anyway. Boeing planes already report fuel load in litres. Funnily enough, flight levels are internationally represented in feet (well, 100-feet) so there's a "win" for you. Also, ground speed is measured in knots!

The fact that you had to go back to the 60s to find a similar incident helps the GP's point, not yours.

And do you have any supporting evidence for your claim that migrant labourers are any worse off in SG than they would be elsewhere, including their home countries? I had believed they were pretty well treated.

> the ambulance took forever and the guy who was ran over was dead by the time it came

Wonder how long it would have taken in India.

> If I'm going to live in a surveillance state anyway

Well that's just it, isn't it. I view this kind of thing as absolutely inevitable, but it can happen covertly, with unknown motives, no transparency, no checks and balances - or overtly, for the good of society and with transparency.

To me, the surveillance state is kind of the flip side of the war on drugs. Drugs are impossible to fight and we may as well just bring it out into the open and regulate it. Well, this is the government version - it will happen, so let's bring it into the light. It's happening anyway, and is as unstoppable as the technology which enables it. We may as well accept that, and have a mature conversation about how to manage it for the good of all.

Ah, that's not totally fair. There's places to go that aren't shopping malls - I miss the hawker centres and food streets, and there's some great walking to be had.

That said, the single best thing about Singapore is that it's a gateway to the rest of SEA. Changi is the best airport in the world, IMO, and you can be in Thailand or Vietnam in an hour for $100. No malls there! (Well not by CapitaMalls, anyway)

Why is this being downvoted? It's exactly right. The distance to beacons is extremely unpredictable. Just holding the phone or a beacon in your hand slightly differently is often enough to make the estimated distance change by 10m.

And yes, it's a huge barrier to usefulness.

Are you talking about yourself? Living in a first world country, access to first rate medical care, not dying of malaria in sub saharan africa?

Because you could be.

If wanting to live a very long time makes me hubristic then hell yes I'm hubristic. But I think your definition is way off. What's hubristic about wanting to live? Are thousand-year old trees "hubristic"?

> Even if I'm fit and healthy age the age of 90, I can't imagine wanting to, y'know, do things beyond care for my grandkids and such.

So let me get this straight. If you had the exact same physical and mental ability as you do now when you are 90, you'd still want to do nothing except care for your grandkids? Nothing else at all? You wouldn't want to travel, work on interesting things, maybe try a new career? Why on earth not?

Well, because it's 1am, and as you say, assumptions. My bad.

But less assumption than you might imagine. If there had been massive investment by billionaires in "alternative" approaches to anti-aging like deGrey espouses, I probably would have heard about it. Of course it's possible that it's happening in secret, but unlikely.

I guess I also just have a different mindset. Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire, but it just seems so conservative. I mean, forget anti-aging if you like. A team in Japan reckons they can build a space elevator for $8B. You're dying, you've got $20b, fuckin' give it to them! If they succeed, you go down in history as the man who enabled the space elevator. If they don't - well who cares, you're dead. Whose kids need $20b?

Like I said, maybe this mindset changes, but shit, at age 90 and with that much money, I'd certainly be prowling the VIP section of kickstarter for some big ideas to make a dent in the universe.

I don't mean any disrespect by all of this. He seems a very decent man. But I think the reason Elon Musk gets so much love around here is that he's a billionaire who's actually willing to make some crazy bets, and that's so very, very rare.

Mea culpa. I didn't read the article. Glad to hear he was supporting medical research.

And I didn't really mean to say de Grey had all the answers - I'm by no means a fanboy. But I think his approach deserves a lot more attention and research dollars than it's getting. It's far too premature to write it off as "not panning out" - with respect, the medical establishment's efforts aren't "panning out" either, with orders of magnitude more budget.

I am not a doctor either, but I am a student of history, and history is replete with established fields of study resisting disruptive (and correct) new ideas until the very last. I'm not saying this is the case, but it is something we need to consider when you write of the dismissal of all these "working scientists", with their educations and investment in the status quo. It seems extremely plausible to me that a maintenance-based approach will win in the end, and de Grey's work, while not perfect, is at least a decent first effort.

And I doubt this 94-yr-old had any specific knowledge. 94 is on the upper end of a normal lifespan, given healthy lifestyle and the best medicine money can by. It's a little disingenuous to claim that by pure dint of that longevity he knows more than de Grey, who has spent years studying the matter, doctor or not.

I don't understand these old bilionaires. It seems there's so much work to be done, and possibly a great deal of low-hanging fruit, in anti-aging research. Who's to say what Aubrey de Grey et al would have been able to deliver by now if given a few billion ten years ago?

You can't take it with you. Give it to science, FFS.

I think you're being downvoted because your comment was basically offtopic and inflammatory, not because you dared to break some kind of taboo. I'm not at all religious, and your comment annoyed me also for its obviousness and vague smugness.

Anyway, there's some schools of thought which consider religion to be a necessary evil for pre-scientific organisation, so I'm sure enlightened future scholars will be studying religion's phases from its medieval heyday through to its current last hurrahs with interest.