That seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. SpaceX is more important than whatever issue you disagree with Musk about. After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering in the aughts, I switched to software because the practical alternatives were building missiles for Raytheon or going to GE and trying to figure out how to make gas turbines 1% more efficient. SpaceX jump-started a commercial aerospace industry that was utterly moribund as recently as when Hacker News started up.
Sorry to burst your bubble but SpaceX is Raytheon now. You should look at what they're doing with Starshield, SDA, Golden Dome, NRO, etc. The commercial stuff was small potato stepping stones made more palatable to engineers, but the pivot has already occured.
To be clear, I have great respect for military work. I used to work at a defense contractor. But in terms of building a career, it's a heavily regulated industry with little room for growth. SpaceX is doing defense work, but it has not pivoted to being merely a defense contractor. SpaceX's valuation is triple that of Raytheon and Lockheed put together. The market expects it to continue pushing forward on commercial space.
What’s your basis for saying that? It makes no sense. Even if Golden Dome was a trillion dollars, which it isn’t, that wouldn’t support a $1 trillion valuation. Defense contractors average around 10% profit. Raytheon got $24 billion in government contracts in 2023. Its revenue is about $90 billion, and its valuation is $277 billion.
Funding for Golden Dome was $24 billion in 2025 and 13 billion in 2026. Even if SpaceX got all that money, it wouldn’t move the needle on SpaceX’s valuation.
Traditional defense contractors have low profit margin because of the cost plus pricing on the contracts. They literally are only allowed to charge the cost they incur plus some fixed profit percentage. As such, they have incentive to drive up the costs, so that their profit, while low percentage, is on high base.
SpaceX wouldn’t need to so that. Companies like Anduril already are trying to win contracts on fixed price model, and if they succeed, they’ll have much higher profit margins than Raytheon et al.
The estimates that have Golden Dome at anything close to a trillion dollars are posited on the assumption that it will be much more expensive to build than the administration believes it will take. If it ends up as fixed price bids and costs less than people think, it will be well under $200 billion.
That's right.. and Golden Dome (which is definitely a mult-trillion dollar program if space based weapons are employed) has a bunch of convenient oligarch properties like built-in planned obsolescence with orbital decay that amplifies a launch monopoly.
Getting all the calories you need from (plain white) rice just about meet minimum protein needs for a sedentary lifestyle (around 50g protein). For every 100 calories of rice there are about 2.1g of protein, so for a 2000 calorie diet of just rice that would be 42g protein. But eating 10 cups of rice is a lot.
Protein-wise, an all cabbage diet would give you more if you’re meeting calorie needs - 5.1g protein per 100 calories, or 102g protein for 2000 calories worth of cabbage.. but that is a heck of a lot of cabbage (17ish lbs)!
Let’s be real though, people should be eating a varied diet and not just a single food. And perhaps not a junk food only diet.
Any issues about amino acid deficiencies from that? (as opposed to protein more generally?)
When I was growing up, there was a vogue among my fellow vegetarians for the book Diet for a Small Planet which suggested that we needed to eat a diversity of amino acids in each meal, hence "complementary" proteins at the same time. This concept then seemed to fade away completely because it appears that the body can actually successfully make use of amino acids even when consumed at different times. But they have to be consumed eventually!
This was the selling point for a Mexican cuisine staple: that rice & beans had all the complementary proteins. But, good to hear that the body does not need to have the complements in the exact same meal.
Because it's a competitive market and offering a lower price than your competitors helps you earn more business. If your competitors lower their prices and you don't lower yours then you'll lose business.
This is a wildly optimistic view for insurance companies in particular. You basically need to jump providers every few years, or else you're overpaying.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be an argument against what I'm saying. The fact that you can shop around and get a better rate demonstrates the fact that insurance is a competitive market and companies will lower rates to win business.
Or they could all just agree to not cut prices so everyone profits more than with a race to the bottom. Not the first nor last time for this to happen.
Undercutting the competition pays off when they're much smaller and you can eliminate them that way and subsequently raise prices.
They could. It's very hard to enforce a cartel like that when there are a large number of competitors. It's a prisoners' dilemma with dozens or hundreds of participants. It only takes one defector to break it.
If you've ever shopped for car insurance, it should be pretty clear that there isn't a cartel holding prices high. Prices differ substantially across insurers, and are influenced by many other factors as well. Premiums are much lower if you have a clean driving record and no claims, or if you drive a car that's cheaper to repair, or less likely to cause injury, or you're of an age/gender with less propensity to crash, or live in an area with less automobile-related crime. Why would they give you lower rates for these things when they could just keep the premiums high and collect more profits?
It's optimistic to think it will even do anything to stop drunks. It's a $5 wrench problem. They think all this tech will stop drunks, when in reality some guy gorded out his mind on vodka is paying his 12 year old his weekly $20 allowance to blow into the machine.
To be fair, it's not about blowing into the machine, but a bunch of sensors all around the driver, e.g. looking at the finger pressing the button to test your blood alcohol content through your skin, detecting alcohol particles, etc. So you better hope your passenger isn't drunk LMAO
Age verification passes? Now not only would extra costs be added for users to verify their age, that sounds like an age verification passes is a form factor that could easily be resold to someone else.
Interesting how the depackaging was done - curious what the mill setup was looked like. It seems like achieving .001” on manual mills isn’t uncommon; which would be about 25 micrometers, so in line with the depth of passes that were being taken here. I can see how the magnified view of the part would be helpful.
Given the teeny tiny endmill the author was using, I suspect they were using a small mill with a very fast spindle. Maybe something like a Taig or a Sherline.
Edit -- I see on another post the author has a Sherline 5400 mini mill.
That looks interesting, but I feel like it’s likely to be close to impossible to join. Feels like it would be weird asking someone you know for an invite.
If you wanted to do the clean-room approach for something like chardet in a less controversial way, instead of having the AI do all the work couldn’t the AI generate the spec and then a human (with no exposure to the original code) do an initial implementation based on the spec?
As part of the relicensing ZeroMQ did a few years ago, they sought permission from all previous contributors (yes, it was a multi-year effort). Code contributions that they weren’t able to get permission to relicense resulting in the corresponding lines being removed (or functionality rewritten from scratch).
I would imagine there must also be some aspect of uniqueness to it as well for even recognizing where a line of code came from… otherwise almost every Python script might have copied this line from a GPL licensed program:
`if __name__ == "__main__":`
I have no idea where that line first appeared, so figuring out what license it was originally written under would be difficult to track down, and most software only has license info at the file rather than line level.
However, I’m pretty sure the opposite will happen and the stock valuation will go past the moon to mars and beyond.
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