It looked interesting - is it really $400 a month for access to the course, or is there some other way to just take the course without some kind of certificate?
This letter gets posted time to time. Definitely one of my favorites for explaining the rationale on spending money pushing boundaries when there are plenty of things that money can do to help people in need now.
Another co-worker is the one who put together proto-repl for Atom so you'll see a lot of similar functionality in the two. I still use Atom and proto-repl just because I've been too lazy to get familiar with VSCode. But when James has demoed the debugger functionality in his VSCode plugin it looks great.
> There is noone who can decide to work one hour more at his workplace and get paid for it, then donate the money to charity.
There are plenty of people that can make this exact choice. I'll work extra hours on occasion when my job is willing to allow us overtime, but not requiring it. Admittedly it's generally my stove broke and I need X dollars to replace it, not me donating the money.
Not trying to upset you, just trying to help you see that the story is not crazy. I'm not sure if you've tried trading futures or options before.
I've never traded futures, but I've seen with the amount of leverage that options provide makes the story quite believable (easy was probably not what the prior commenter meant).
I just want to jump in and comment that 30x gains in a year are not really that crazy with out of the money close to expiration options. I've had 2 different years in the past with better than 30x gains (and years where my options account went to 0).
If you had bought out of the money puts with a near term expiration for an index like SPY and it dropped 10%, you could be talking 80-1000 times return depending on how far out of the money and how close to expiration.
Disclaimer: I do not recommend out of the money options trading for anything other than pure gambling on money you couldn't care less about losing.
I had no idea this was out there. I found a bunch of old projects out here from a program I work on in the realm of Earth Science. Things from 2002 and 2004 that have probably not been used in over 10 years (and some from the same time frame that are still in production).
It has been really hard for us to open source things lately - our last project took more than a year. I did find it on this page: https://github.com/nasa/earthdata-search. We are still working on open sourcing a couple more of our projects.
We've been told one of NASA's recent goals is to significantly improve the open source process so hopefully we'll see more of the current projects become open source.
We've tested out DMS to migrate from a 3 node Oracle RAC to Oracle RDS, and I was incredibly impressed. They list a bunch of limitations in their documentation that you should look at first. It migrated our roughly 1 TB database in two hours and ten minutes and handled replication flawlessly - not a single record discrepancy between the two database systems over a week long test. We were not expecting it to work that well and doubted that it would work with RAC as the source.
They announced three products initially. Two Powerwall products (7kWh daily cycler and 10kWh emergency backup) and a grid scale product called Powerpack. The product that was canceled was the 10kWh emergency backup. They are still selling the grid scale Powerpack.
There's an index.refresh_interval setting. It defaults to 1s, so by default your data will be available for querying within one second after being indexed.
Great comment which really made me think. You are right that unmanned projects are a no brainer. I would argue that both are important, and even with the budgets we have, we have been able to do both.
You made two assumptions that I would not, which make me believe we should continue to pursue manned exploration.
1) We have 5 billion years to figure this out.
There are many ways in which humanity could be wiped out on Earth, not just the death of the sun. Also I remember Elon Musk had a counterpoint to this as well that it's not a given that technology will always move forward. We need to exploit this chance while we have the capability.
2) The cost difference between a manned and unmanned mission are 1000 to 1.
That may be true for some missions, but I can't imagine that is anywhere near true for something like science missions for a station in low Earth orbit like the ISS. I would be interested in knowing what the actual cost differences are.
I found an excellent book talking about realistic sustainable solutions. It is from 2008/2009 and so solar costs are already dramatically less, but is still a great read.