Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | recharged93's commentslogin

Cause those mega companies have to fulfill short term profits.

SpaceX is doing revolutionary things no doubt. But it has one clear mission compared to other companies.


I imagine Boeing te al were started by people who had a passion to fly, loved flying, needed to fly.

But time went on and like embalming replaces blood with preservatives, level headed business people took over to maintain the status quo.

No doubt in decades SpaceX will succumb too, and this is why need a constant flow of new companies


Do grades even matter anymore?

Unless you're applying to a gov't job, you're connections, friends, professors that like you, github accounts, art or MBA portfolio are the tools that move you "up" in the world. And in that order.

Online education dilutes GPA too. As well as more tech skill degrees (devops certs), aka those were called trade/vocational schools in my day.

I've never seen a GPA on an intern application/resume in the last 3yrs. Unless and (unfortunately) its from a visa student. Hmmm.


GPA, in my experience, seems to map exactly onto your ability to wrangle a good GPA. That set of skills is largely orthogonal to solving hard problems or making useful contributions to a team.


To me, that just sounds like your teachers and professors were piss poor at their job and had no idea how to grade properly.


I was referring to my experiences with hiring engineers. Throwing shade about people's education isn't cool.


yeah in software this might make some sense, but say you want to become a doctor... I don't imagine a github profile is going to move you "up" in the world :p


What industry do you work in? In my experience most out-of-college jobs require your GPA, with some jobs (e.g. management consulting) GPA being a major differentiator amongst applicants.

I actually don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to know an applicant’s GPA. Surely if they got a 2.1 that communicates something about their work ethic, ceteris paribus.


> Unless you're applying to a gov't job, you're connections, friends, professors that like you, github accounts, art or MBA portfolio are the tools that move you "up" in the world. And in that order.

Letting high-grade overachieves who don't have connections, or well-placed friends, advance into the ranks of the elite is how the elite keep themselves relevant.


It matters as a filter.


+1

ML requires you know exactly what you want. And not what you need...

If you're not exact, disaster is imminent. Uber accident comes to mind.

Yes, rolling stones reference too.


Great, a scooter in the rain, cold, wearing a suit/dress, and avoiding traffic and people. Carrying nothing...With crappy tires.

Yep, a unicorn business...


It's not for every climate, sure. However, I ride one to work once a week and it always brings a smile to my face. You can't go 5 minutes in LA without seeing someone on one.


Basically the gov't employee, son, and likely others we don't know about lost their jobs and even blacklisted.

I say 90% of VC back companies are blowing smoke to the endpoint investor, public and consumer. 100% of those companies have miracle products that scale forever and work... In 1 specific ise case: the demo booth. They oversell. I see 2 out of 10 startups bring a viable product to the global 2000 table.

Spacex: we can go to Mars, but haven't even launched a Mars rocket. Google: AI is here, and the product? Waymo, logs millions of miles, is just sunny conditions?

The common strategy: lie(aka promise), sell the future, hopefully you get the solution and hit time to market. Holmes was following the same playbook, BUT just gave up, and that's got her investors and comsumers furious. If she apologized, AND stuck with it, investors would still back her, and the public flac would have subsided....VCs were sold on her future.

On the opposite end, aside from real mistakes is a company like Apple: they sell the future and deliver.


I don't think those examples match very well. Theranos really didn't have anything that worked. Spacex has rockets that work and satisfied customers. They aren't going to Mars yet, but most of their current satellite launch customers probably really don't care.

And of the various self-driving car efforts, Waymo seems one of the most careful, both in their engineering and PR. I don't recall them making any claims they can't back up, but I may have missed some.


Holmes was not following the same playbook, there's a big difference. What you say holds true for the early investors who may have been sold the future expectations, however, long after that Holmes recruited investors by stating that they have a "working Mars rocket" that's being used right now, when in fact it was smoke&mirrors using altered Siemens machines instead of the claimed Theranos technology.

The difference between saying "we expect to have X working within a year" and "we have had X for a year" is that if X doesn't work out, the second sentence is a crime of fraud. And Holmes was on the wrong end of this difference.

They're not prosecuting for the broken hopes of 2004-2006 investors (who were sold a future that didn't materialize, oh well), they're prosecuting for misleading the investors of, say, 2014 by lying about the achievements of their first 10 years.


> Spacex: we can go to Mars, but haven't even launched a Mars rocket. Google: AI is here, and the product? Waymo, logs millions of miles, is just sunny conditions?

I don't think that is their literal message and goal. SpaceX's real mission is to innovate space travel which they've been capable of doing and have demonstrated with clear achievements.

SpaceX's revenue is in the billions and is very close to profitable. It most likely would be profitable if it wasn't constantly spending money to expand like Amazon in its early years.


The difference is that SpaceX realizes the goal is aspirational, and isn’t signing people up for doomed rides to Mars right now.


Exactly. If SpaceX started taking deposits for a Mars ride within the next two years there would be a problem.


Used to be developing hardware and software swarm tech for drones. shows. (yes, I'm that guy)

Company didn't want to spend millions in sustainable infrastructure and evolution (we found another company to do it, they threw big bucks! Wink!) and instead politics pushed things to wilder [IMHO, unachievable] ideas. But that's research nowadays: politics and money. Went into walking robots last year, and... similar result. Now in product development, gluing s/w libs and resoldering circuits from a CM overseas. What a roller coaster last 5 yrs. But it pays the bills.

Hard to do anything challenging today, once the MBAs and sales folks come in (now at very early stages) all challeneges get snubbed for the release date, presentation deck, ecosystem "messaging" and manufacturing.


Bingo.

The only mass market "free, but pay at some point" model is ads. Nothing else. That is the last 10yrs of Silicon Valley and pretty much every startup today. Cause if you have a great idea and decent execution, FANG companies have so much power to enter the market and crush you, 1st mover advantage is the exception nowadays. Or at least buy you out, github is a perfect example.


Check out activepower. They've been in the flywheel biz for awhile for data center power.

But they've been struggling for a viable business last 10yrs.

Area required and noise are big issues.


Dumb question: couldn’t a vacuum chamber and magnetic bearings overcome those issues?


Active Power's UPS systems do use magnetic bearings:

  Immediately after the output is transferred from bypass to
  the power stage, the flywheel field is excited which also
  provides magnetic lift to unload the flywheel bearings.
Source: http://www.activepower.com/en-US/documents/3801/wp108-operat...


I thought of snr as a trigger, and sensitive to design-- it accounts for antenna setup, thus different for every phone.

Why not use HDOP, VDOP? It's a better inidication of how off you really are (likely within CEP). Pretty much every new drone AHRS uses DOP values vs snr...


the various DOP values assume there are no local obstructions. This method attempts to take in to account the local environment and determine which satellites may be obstructed. DOPs can't help with that.


Yeah, exactly. DOP can provide an artificially rosy picture of the satellite geometry and visibility when you have clean reflections that looks like LOS satellites.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: