shagie

Yes, being a steward on a ship that has a few months between port of call is tedious... but you don't start out as a captain with the interesting things happening. You've got to work your way up the ladder and he started out on the bottom rung. Ship's Steward | Life at Sea | https://youtu.be/U02ndHzJGic as a book.

One of the things about the series though... there's no grand military conflict going on. There's no fighting aliens or heroic space marines. It's (initially) the story of a young man getting his family suddenly pulled away from him and thrown into the Deep Dark as he searches for his place. Not actively... though he gets that advice too. There's also a component of needing to take an active role in making life decisions compared to letting life drag you along (things tend to go less well for Ishmael when he lets life pull him).

Book 1:

    “Look in your handbook, young Ishmael, and consider that your feet are already on a path. It might be wiser to select a branch before one is thrust upon you by circumstance.” With that, he strolled out of the galley.

    His knowing look told me he remembered his own advice to me in the mess deck of the Lois. To choose a path before I found myself on one that I hadn’t chosen. “You once told me that I should consider that I’m on the path I’m supposed to be on.”

Books 4, 5, and 6 (Double Share, Captain's Share, Owner's Share) have much more going on with the decisions (and are likely more relatable as someone closer in age) than the equivalent of a day in the life of a unskilled 20 something... but the day in the life of the unskilled 20 something sets the foundations for how the decisions (and problems) of the man he becomes are dealt with.

From book 6:

    "... Ms. Maloney, as soon as you signed the Articles, you became a spacer." I almost smacked myself in the head for saying that. I couldn’t even imagine how many times I’d said I wasn’t a spacer. I sighed inwardly at my own stupidity.

I don't see it as him being insecure about himself as such. He's as much of a chad as any physically fit 19-year-old is...

He's still as culturally insecure at 20 as he is when he's 40 - trying to figure out how he fits in as a spacer who wasn't born to a spacer family.

So how does one handle the cultural insecurities at different points in one's life? At 20? At 40? nearly 50?

Book 5 gets a bit into the difference between the expectations of a planet (or station) life and that of a spacer and the stress there on relationships (and how they can work).

From the start of In Ashes Born this is stated quite clearly when talking to a therapist:

    My sessions with Mal Gains continued to be interesting even if I didn’t find them terribly fruitful. He introduced me to more family-of-origin stuff. He placed great store in the idea that I’d been raised in a culture of academe with its values of knowledge, truth-seeking, and reputation but then shifted to the culture of spacer with values like dependability, competence, and upward mobility.

Wil Wheaton in Ready Room has some episodes about Lower Decks. The Crossover episode https://youtu.be/3SiYyIAz5xU and the final recap https://youtu.be/NK94dXm2Wis

I'd also generally suggest Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny ( https://www.youtube.com/@Dropping-Names ) where Brent Spinner and Johnathan Frakes chat with people about movies and TV. While it's not about Trek, it's a frequent tangential topic. I believe it's helpful in the context of "how much the fandom extends to other people in the entertainment industry."

Book 4 has a time jump of college - four years are a few paragraphs... and then he's an officer in a very unhappy ship. Books 5 and 6 finish off the 'share' sequence. If the first three are coming of age of a youth, the next three are the coming of age of a man.

If you're going through and reading them, at this point I'd switch to the "Run" series which has two young women in a very small ship in the toeholds. There's a lot of world building associated with it. These have much more of a plot to them.

Dark Knight Station: Origins might be a good read at this point if we're establishing a reading order which establishes the backstory of two characters (one who appears in Home Run, the other who appears in Suicide Run). Home Run fills in some gaps outside of Ishmael. The three books together help with some of the larger backstory that will show up several times.

This then brings us back to Ishmael with the series In Ashes Born, To Fire Called, and By Darkness Forged. Not going to provide any plot elaboration that might spoil previous books (things do keep building).

And lastly, there's the "School" series with SC Marva Collins with School Days, Working Class, and Hard Knocks... and this is as far as the author has gotten with the Solar Clipper series.

---

If you had trouble with the 2nd, finish the 3rd and then give the 4th a try. I like the entire series and its world building. The mundanity of Ishmael's life (where exciting is often not a good thing). I really liked the later books - especially In Ashes Born.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/206519-solar-clipper-univer... - you'll see that Half Share is the lowest score of them.

I've mentioned the series before... and I'll pitch it again. Nathan Lowell's solar clipper series. It starts with Quarter Share. The first book starts with:

     Call me Ishmael. Yeah, I know, but in this case it’s really my name. Ishmael Horatio Wang. My parents had an unfortunate sense of humor. If they had known what I’d wind up doing with my life, they might have picked a different one—Richard Henry Dana, perhaps. Exactly why they picked Ishmael Horatio is a long, and not terribly interesting, story that starts with the fact that Mom was an ancient lit professor and ends with my being saddled with these non sequitur monikers.

GoodReads has a number of reviews that are spot on - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2334538.Quarter_Share (the writing is something that is "cozy" to some and "boring" to others... I liked the series but there's definitely a "nothing happens and there's no plot" aspect to it).

The main character starts out as a quarter share working in the galley... cleaning coffee urns.

A traditional data center's rack is about 10 kW of power. A rack in an hyperscaler datacenter averages at 60 kW. (Source: https://www.nlyte.com/blog/data-center-rack-power-costs-a-co... )

While cooling is theoretically possible, being a third of a rack in a data center...

https://www.racksolutions.com/news/blog/how-many-servers-doe...

There are about 35,000 racks in a data center.

But also... that's not the scale that's being talked about.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...

    A chief reason to put orbital data centers in space is the free, limitless power from the Sun. Based on the schematic SpaceX released, each of its AI1 satellites would have solar panels encompassing about 600 square meters, or about 1.5 times the size of a basketball court. These solar panels would generate 150 kW of peak power and 120 kW of average power for computing.

It's "easy" (as far as launching a rocket is "easy") to put a satellite into space. The scale needed to replace a single data center is what's being questioned.

The proposals talk about tens of kilowatts for a satellite - a fraction of a rack.

Individual data centers get measured in gigawatts.

xAI has its Southaven data center under construction and estimated to consume 2.0 GW. If we assume the SpaceX planned satellites and the 120 kW of average power - that's 17,000 satellites to replace one data center.

... and that's assuming that you're putting all of them in the sun synchronous dawn dusk orbit so that you can get 100% solar availability. If you put in in a different orbit you're getting 50% sun and need some combination of more capacity (more satellites), more battery (more mass), and more solar (more mass to charge the battery to supply power).

Scott Manley's video is an excellent "can you" given the power for a single satellite based on Starlink in space. The answer is yes - you can put 10 kW of compute in space without too much difficulty.

Can you put 2 GW of compute in space to offset one data center on Earth?

    My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds. No doors: the arched entrances are farcaster portals, a few opaqued with privacy curtains, most open to observation and entry.

    ...

    The architect, a student of the legendary Millon DeHaVre, has incorporated several small jokes into the house’s design: the steps go down to the tower room, of course, but equally droll is the exit from the eyrie which leads to the exercise room on the lowest level of Lusus’s deepest Hive, or perhaps the guest bathroom which consists of toilet, bidet, sink and shower stall on an open, wall-less raft afloat on the violet seaworld of Mare Infinitus.

The orbit that this is in doesn't meet that criteria. While it is in a near polar orbit, it is not in a dusk dawn orbit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit ). Half of its orbit is in shadow.

As I wrote this, it is above Campo Grande, Brazil. The time there is 10 pm.

https://satellitemap.space/sat/100902

    1 A0902U 26227V   26304.16445033  .00002596  00000-0  13395-3 0  9997
    2 A0902  97.4408  13.1552 0001768  65.9370 294.2048 15.17216777  4461

And to Patrick Steward's opinions on it...

> According to Ronny Cox, Patrick Stewart hated Livingston's presence in the ready room, and constantly petitioned the producers to remove the fish. Stewart, a strong animal rights advocate who opposes many forms of pet ownership, felt that using a captive animal in an ornamental display was "immoral" and inconsistent with TNG's core theme of exploring the inherent dignity of different species across the galaxy. Cox, who called Stewart's point "well taken", stated that Livingston's temporary removal in "Chain of Command" was thus a "sort of a bone they threw to Patrick".

https://agents.stackoverflow.com/all

> Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.

> Indeed, you can’t even have a discussion. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow, not knowing what to expect, and try to conduct a discussion when they should be answering the question. The trouble here is that answers are always listed in order of votes, not chronologically, so the discussion instantly becomes scrambled when the votes start coming in.

> Instead, we have editing. Once you’ve earned a little bit of reputation in the system (and there are all kinds of ways to earn reputation), you can edit questions and answers.

> ...

> There are lots of good ways to edit things. You can improve spelling, grammar, and even copy edit any question or answer to make it better. After all, for the next 20 years, this question will be the canonical place on the web where programmers will come to find out about enlarging fizzbars without overwriting snibbits. Anything you can do to clarify, explain, or improve the question or the answer will be a public service. If there’s code in the answer, you can debug it, refactor it, or tweak it to make it better.

> You can also improve on the answers. If an answer is incomplete, expand on it. If an answer has a bug in it or is obsolete, you can edit it and fix it. Because Q&A in Stack Overflow are editable, you can safely link to a Stack Overflow permalink knowing it will always have a good answer. Stack Overflow won’t have the problem of other sites where obsolete or incorrect answers have high Google PageRank simply because they’ve been on the Internet for so long. If someone finds a security bug in an answer, it can be fixed… it won’t keep coming up in Google’s results for years and years poisoning future code.

https://youtu.be/qYWBBFJKlPM

https://youtu.be/NMcLXG6PXto

Also from Andrew Sorkin...

    • Joshua Malina: Jeremy Goodwin (Sports Night) / Will Bailey (The West Wing)
    • Janel Moloney: Monica (Sports Night) / Donna Moss (The West Wing)
    • Felicity Huffman: Dana Whitaker (Sports Night) / Ann Stark (The West Wing)
    • Clark Gregg: Calvin Trager (Sports Night) / Mike Casper (The West Wing)
    • Timothy Busfield: Director (Sports Night) / Danny Concannon (The West Wing)

Incidentally, this is one of those times when the comment section of YouTube becomes the most wholesome place on the net.

The clips that the channel puts out... are... let's say interestingly timed.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheWestWing

For example, https://youtu.be/LwNtZgLPCpg was posted 13 days ago (October 16th).

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Oct29-5.html

It ends with:

    Yesterday, The New York Times threw a wrench in the works. It reported that Dan J. was not happily living in his quiet fishing village reading books about fish and tending to his garden when he suddenly decided to run for the Senate. Nope. In fact, Peltola's team combed through voting lists to find all the Dan Sullivans in the state and then carefully selected Dan J. and helped him get on the ballot. This sort of trickery is actually not unusual. Other candidates have been doing this kind of stuff for years. The question is whether it will affect the election. Republicans who were planning to vote for Dan S. will still do so. The big unknown is are there many Peltola voters who will be disgusted by this trick and switch to Dan S. The disclosure may not be fatal, though, because: (1) not all Alaskans will even know about this before they vote, (2) some Alaskans have already voted, and (3) some people who like Peltola will admire her cleverness for pulling this off.

    The revelation could possibly affect the lawsuit, but probably not. Parties often recruit candidates. In primaries, it is not unusual for parties to (financially) support someone on the other team who they think would be a weak general-election opponent. This kind of stuff is actually the original use of the thing we call rodent reproduction. Republicans did it this year in a couple of Democratic House primaries, for example. It is scuzzy, but perfectly legal, to contribute to a candidate who you think is a weak opponent to your candidate. In fact, there have been many primaries where a Democrat switched his or her registration to Republican in order to vote for a crazy fringe candidate, and vice versa. Nevertheless, this development is not going to help Peltola. (V)

One of the oft repeated ideas is that you got points for closing questions.

You don't. The only ways to get rep on stack overflow is described at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

    You gain reputation when:
    
    question is voted up: +10
    answer is voted up: +10
    article is voted up: +10
    answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)
    suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)
    bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount
    one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount (see more details about how bounties work)
    site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)

The scaling focuses around discoverability, (the rate of) asking questions, and the amount of time available for people to curate (which includes helping new users get onboarded).

Much of the early days of Stack Overflow, discoverability was trivial. It was easy to find an interesting question because few things were asked and this was the days when there was a lot of changes. We're dealing with 2008 and beyond - there were a lot of new frameworks and languages being updated then... Spring 3, Backbone, Knockout, Angular, React, Vue, Spring Boot 1, Java 7 and eventually Java 8.

This was a time of rapid change and the experts were answering on Stack Overflow - and it was scaling up to meet that demand with additional tools.

But it also started becoming a place where students were posting questions (every September you'd get the "how do you draw a triangle with stars?" questions 20 times a day in the Java or Python tags...)

This started being visible in 2010 with question quality and by 2014 it was a full on epidemic.

One part of this is that the original community of people who followed Jeff and Joel's blogs and helped barn raise the site had gotten smaller as an overall portion of the site because of that explosive growth. Some people wanted it to be a place where any user could get help with a question (and closing questions was antithetical to that) and others were looking for it to be more of a wikipedia. That conflict still simmers.

Another part of this is that a smaller and smaller percent of the overall user base was using the curation tools available. Fewer people were closing questions (that really did need to be closed) and helping onboard new users with expectations. When there are 6000 new questions a day that represents a lot of work for the volunteers to try to onboard them. Initially, everyone came from the same point and there wasn't much onboarding needed. With its growth, a lot of new people were coming to it from the approach that it was a forum or immediate feedback chat.

That growth without scaling up the tools for onboarding and curation (making it easier to do) meant that the people trying to help new users and make discovery of well written questions easier had less time per user (or question) to do so... and got increasingly curt - they couldn't spend 5 minutes per question anymore and instead were trying to do things in 30 seconds or less.

This was the beginning of "Stack Overflow is unfriendly."

The attempt that corporate had from this, instead of making it easier to help people took away curation tools and close reasons were made more specific... which in turn meant that the people trying to close questions to make discoverability of well written questions on the home page easier were incredibly pedantic in order to meet those reasons.

Some of the tooling is set up to be able to handle 6000 questions per day, and scales poorly back to having 100 questions per day.

The user base of Stack Overflow at 2 months old is very different than Stack Overflow today, even if it has the same question rate. There are very few people who are around to help onboard users (diamond mods if you read this - there's 25 of you and 100 questions per day... you can spend 5 minutes per new question per day to help onboard the user for expectations and still have half an hour a day for other moderation tasks).

Many of the people who did curation when SO was growing and at its peak have become disappointed with Stack Overflow and while they may look at it to see if its a site where their contributions would again be appreciated... though the changes that corporate appears to want have been additional curtailment of curation tools and have even proposed removing close votes all together ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438185/the-company-... ).

---

Stack Overflow is mostly dead. It lingers on, but every change that is being attempted or proposed in trying to get more "engagement" takes it further and further from being a place where new knowledge is collected and collated.

I would attribute this mostly to there aren't any curators left - so everything they try building turns into a mess. Corporate has leaned too hard on the community to do curation and diamond mods have largely stopped doing curation in favor of moderation.

With low activity and the largest ratio of staff and diamond mods to active users, this would be an excellent time for those two groups to completely take up the task of curation and onboarding to set a new standard for how it should be done... and if they aren't willing to do it, that really suggests that the final nail in the coffin is in place waiting to get hammered.

Batteries have a much faster dispatch time than pumped storage. Pumped storage is good for offsetting reduction in other production capacity, and its dispatch time is faster than peaker plants, but its not as fast as a battery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_Uni...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41833

2020 numbers had 22,894 MW of capacity. More storage capacity for power is needed.

The "where are things located" is in the mountains where there's a significant elevation change. Most of the country is too flat to have pumped storage be practical. Installed pumped storage in Michigan (about 2GW of capacity there) does little for the power demands of North Dakota.

And then... there's also building new ones.

    Even though FERC has issued licenses for three proposed pumped storage projects since 2014, no new pumped storage projects have come online in the United States since 2012. EIA’s most recent survey of planned power plant additions shows no pumped storage projects under development.

    At 5:12 a.m. on December 14, 2005, the northwest side of the upper reservoir was overtopped when water continued to be pumped from the lower reservoir after the upper was full. This led to the catastrophic failure of a triangular section of the reservoir wall and the release of 1 billion US gallons (3,800,000 m3) of water in 12 minutes. 

   ...

   As of 2011, Ameren was reported to have paid a total of close to US$200 million in settlements related to the 2005 breach.

The current PRs: https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers/pulls

Yes.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/f...

One can debate how the change in political polling has been done over the past decades. Reverse polling (weighting) vs forward polling (weighting).

https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2026/09/16/weighting-pol...

https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surve...

Seltzer used (and consistently used) forward polling. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5177322/high-profile-io...

    Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.

If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/former-miami-lawmaker-fra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Artiles#Election_fraud

It failed in 2024 when it didn't weight its model to handle differences in demographics vs the sampled population. She accounted for age, sex, and district - but not education, party identification, or past voting behavior. (The specifics of why the model failed is up for debate, but it was the same model that had been used for many years and was reasonably accurate).

From 2023, here's a description of her polling methodology:

https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/10530/j-ann-...

    But it's difficult, even I know where to look and a lot of the methodology statements get hidden or are inadequate to make that assumption. The main thing I'm going to tell you that distinguishes us from most other polling, not all, there's some very good polls out there that do what I do, which is we don't make assumptions about what that future electorate is going to look like. We let the data -- we try to get out of the way of the data showing us. So, you'll look and they'll say how they weighted the data, this that and the other, and then they include in that who the likely demographics of the 2024 caucus are likely to be. And I go, really? How do you know what that is likely to be? Or they're weighting it based on who they voted for in the 2020 election or other factors like that, or maybe they're only talking to people who have caucused before. And this approach I call polling backward, that if you're creating a model of the future, what are you going to base it on? You're going to base it on what happened in the past. And I know that things can change. So, I want to have my fingers off the data, my dirty fingers I try to keep them off the data, so it will reveal to me how that's going to go.

From 2024 https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/11885/j-ann-...

    But for everybody else we keep them on the phone to get age, sex, what county they live in. That is going to give us some geography so that we can weight all of those people, I think there were 1,100 and some in our final poll, to look like the state of Iowa because that we know. And then we extract from that those people who made our likely voter screen and interviewed them. So, if they are proportionately more women who pass that screen, they are going to show up here but they are weighted at the statewide level. It's a little geeky. But one of the things I've been thinking about is with caucuses we take you if you definitely or probably will participate and maybe our screen was too tight. I don't know, there's no way to undo it and sort of check, well what would the probably people have said, because we very politely terminated the people who just said they would probably vote. But that has been our system since 2008.

    Last week the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood Polls with questions about the authenticity of its surveys. In response, the team behind the supposed pollster acknowledged that its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”

    The project had an impact on election campaigns, with polls it did since June on many races, “shifting from one midterm battleground to another,” the New York Times reported, including Michigan, Maine, Kansas and Wisconsin.

    ...

    The media has reported that Wedgewood began releasing polls in June. On July 7, a story by Urban Milwaukee raised questions about a Wedgewood poll on the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin. Up to then, the most recent Marquette poll had shown Hong with 14% of the vote, and a more recent internal poll released by the campaign of Sara Rodriguez showed Hong at 22%. But the Wedgewood poll had Hong at a whopping 30%, which could “help convince Democrats who doubt her electability that she is running away with the race,” the story reported, noting that Wisconsin Republican Chairman Brian Schimming had said that for Republicans Hong would be the best opponent.

    ...

    But the Wedgewood “experiment” clearly sought to push Democratic voters in a way that would help Republican candidates. Just as it tried to elevate the candidacy of Francesca Hong, the most liberal candidate in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, it released a fake poll showing Mallory McMorrow, the moderate candidate in the Michigan primary for U.S. Senate, “plummeting into single digits,” as Time reported. “McMorrow said donations ‘dried up’ and she was ‘hounded’ with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the infamous’ Wedgewood poll numbers.”

AI hallucination could be a way to generate fake polling data, but that doesn't matter given that the intent is to generate fake polling data. It could have been done with a bag of dice just as easily.

Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 (8 months ago, 366 points, 178 comments)

Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 (9 months ago, 140 points, 71 comments)

Oh, deer hunting season... when half my team is already on v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.

I'm already taking the next week for v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike... and two weeks in December too!

And what's more... I'm getting paid for this v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.

I haven't put the requests in properly - I should do that. I still have 252 hours of v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike time that I need to use in the next two months (or move to other places... some carry over to next year, some moved to the sabbatical time account).

Some of the "you have how much vacation?" is because I am part of a union. Though I'll note that the union also has a "no strike" clause that would prevent me from actually participating in an unauthorized strike (such as this one).

The software that I work on is the boring "line of business" type things for keeping the internals of the organization moving smoothly. No advertising, no dark patterns, no social media (unless you count the internal department message board).

Random techies taking a week (or more) of PTO in November is expected and entire teams moving to a skeleton crew for periods of time in November is something that is already planned for. This is even less impactful if it's scattered across companies.

While my workplace sounds like your ideal, I probably make 1/3 to 1/4 of what my peers do (if I had stayed in working at a company where tech is the revenue generating faucet). Many people have baulked when they see the pay range for the position and the corresponding impact that that would have on their lifestyle.

If you want to protest these things at your employer, start a union at your employer. Here are the steps: https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...