Then the commits in the PR are not held to the standard of being acceptable to apply, and they are squashed together when the PR is merged.

This allows for a work flow in which up until the PR is merged the “history of developing the PR” is preserved but once it is merged, the entire PR is applied as one change to the main branch.

This workflow combined with stacked PRs allows developers to think in terms of the “smallest reviewable and applicable change” without needing to ensure that during development their intermediate states are safe to apply to main.

Imagine you have some task you are working on, and you wish to share your progress with people in bite sized chunks that they can review one at a time, but you also don’t want to wait for their reviews before you continue working on your task.

Using a stacked set of PRs you can continue producing new work, which depends on the work you’ve already completed, without waiting for the work you’ve already completed to be merged, and without putting all your work into one large PR.

Where in the world is the answer no? Maybe if you’ve freshly immigrated to a new country or something?

That is a very scary thought, but it’s also scary for me to think that so many people live such isolated lives, it’s such a foreign concept to me culturally.

Even people who are self or outwardly destructive, do not deserve the outcome the author got.

I think a harder to answer question is, assuming there are not enough resources to help everyone in need (in a practical sense) should we prioritise the “more deserving” over the less.

Every human who is suffering deserves compassion, but should we deprioritise those who are suffering partially because of their own choices?

It’s so gross contrasted with the theme. The very first paragraphs start with a poor attempt to humble brag his”credentials” as not just a “normal” homeless person.

The self mythologising, the framing of negative things more like the weather than consequences of his choices.

The fact that despite privileged upbringing and working in tech in the valley he has no one willing to offer him a couch.

The most striking for me is the framing of his own grandmothers death as exceptional, proving his lineage is special.

Calling others NPCs, framing of stealing from stores as being the heroic action, even with approval from grandmother.

I feel this is getting redundant. I’d love to hear if anyone disagrees and what their thoughts are.

Do you still have the hardware? Does revisiting the project and using some signal processing to try and extract color images sound like fun? I would be excited to collaborate on this if you had energy for it!

Yes of course we need to properly escape all strings that we render / use parametised queries to avoid injection attacks, however we also need defense in depth, so all fields need to reject code that looks like sql or html.

It was easier to just add this that push back. Sigh.

Why is this nonsense on the face of it? This is just how kites work. Do you imagine that kite surfers just overpower the kite with their might and pull it back to the ground when they've had enough?

A 5 - 8 square meter sail is really teenie tiny.

It got me thinking about strange units. Like how for example a car's mileage can be thought of as a surface area (distance per volume), or in this case how for every pidgeon speed, drive capacity and length there is an equivalent bandwidth capacity * (distance / (distance / time)).

I grew to really like the engineer that invited me to the project. He was a well known expert in the field with a wiki page, books, academic eminence and everything, and he offered to mentor me etc.

I travelled with him a few times from FB's London office to the prototyping site and he was always very generous with hotels, travel etc.

Eventually someone pulled me aside and mentioned that he had "alterior motives" and had repeated the same pattern with previous young men. I was honestly so saddened and betrayed, and afterwards couldn't believe I had been so nieve as to be made to feel special by him.

They were using an off the shelf 'drone' autopilot based on an open source project PX4, which I had some experience with.

I was asked to visit the location with the prototypes and spent the weekend trying to get their RF, magnetometer and GPS calibrated and working with their carbon composite prototype in the way.

I was expecting that they would already have an expert working on this, but instead I found some very senior hyper specialised engineers that were experts on helicopter rotor design for example, but could literally not read the instructions on an FTDI based usb to serial cable and connect their laptops to the autopilot.

It was a classic situation where you connect the projector in english class and the teacher thinks you're the next Donald Knuth.

So when I joined the project, the physical aircraft was based in the USA, but the software team for the autopilot was based in the UK.

For some reason - I think it was the very high altitude capability - the USA considered the autopilot to be munitions.

When I first joined the project, there was this bizzare situation where it turned out to be simpler and easier to occasionally ship the entire aircraft across the ocean, than to send software updates over the internet.

I'm not sure how long this lasted but I was assured it was temporary.

I worked with a famous engineer who joined Facebook from a well known british aircraft manufacturer. He was an aerodynamics expert and was trying to solve the problems of flutter and other dynamic instability in the extremely large, high aspect ratio, lightweight composite wing.

I wasn't officially told this, but I believe the reason the project failed was two fold:

1. Traditional satellites became cheap enough that high altitude pseudo satellites weren't worth it anymore. 2. Facebook free basics (internet.org) achieved enough success partnering with traditional mobile network operators that it wasn't needed.

I have some pretty crazy anecdotes to share about the project if anyone is interested?