Cushman

94 ms·

871.
by Cushman 14y ago
Naively, it seems like a settlement offer should only be legal if you have actually filed suit. Filing requires you to put your cards on the table, and opens you up to countersuits for wasting everyone's time. Otherwise, you're essentially
872.
by Cushman 14y ago
I think you're glossing over the fact that POSIX time was designed to correspond to UTC without needing additional information. Since leap seconds vary in response to solar and geological phenomena, converting from TAI to UTC requires an
873.
by Cushman 14y ago
This is definitely something you should worry about if you rolled any of your own time code. The POSIX standard is consistent across days, including leap seconds. That means that your Unix timestamp will jump back a second: it will go from
874.
by Cushman 14y ago
Not totally on topic, but how is that an "almost unimaginable coincidence"? Given the number of people who are involved in similar things, and the number of people at your average high school, it pretty much goes without saying that some pe
875.
by Cushman 14y ago
I don't think I buy that this isn't "newsworthy" for tech. This is a responsive aesthetic, previously relegated to the occasional experiment, adopted by the trendsetter of UI design in their flagship software. Not the story of the decade,
876.
by Cushman 14y ago
It's a bit more complex than that, I think. It's easy to distinguish careless cheaters from good players. It's hard to distinguish conservative cheaters from good players. It's also hard to distinguish good, nonconservative cheaters from r
877.
by Cushman 14y ago
This + RubyMotion is getting dangerously close to Heroku for apps. Not sure what that means exactly, but I'm super excited.
878.
by Cushman 14y ago
Why do LED lamps heat up? If all light sources exhibited thermoelectric cooling, this wouldn't be an invention. Are you asking something more specific than that?
879.
by Cushman 14y ago
I think I understand what you're saying now. In vacuum, an object will radiate until it reaches absolute zero; in air, however, you're constantly being heated to the ambient temperature, meaning you can't radiate your way down until the air
880.
by Cushman 14y ago
> If you could convert thermal noise into light and beam it away, you could use that as the cool side for a heat engine and have a perpetual motion machine. By "beam it away", I assume you mean into space or somewhere else you don't car
881.
by Cushman 14y ago
You pay for it with electricity. That's what a heat pump is, ya?
882.
by Cushman 14y ago
Hmm, are you getting this from the paper? It's not obvious to me from the abstract. [0] From the description given, the diode uses current to exchange ambient heat for emitted light. It cools the device, and heats whatever the light falls o
883.
by Cushman 14y ago
Of course they didn't beat thermodynamics, but still, assuming they can scale the tech up to a useful power, it's a light that's also a cooling element. That'd be more than kind of neat, wouldn't it?
884.
by Cushman 14y ago
I don't have a big problem with their ideas about AI just because they're so disconnected with reality. I mean, if we go another thousand years without an apocalypse, it seems more or less bound to happen, so in the abstract it is something
885.
by Cushman 14y ago
> ...is it still the same person when you wake them up? This is pretty much where I land on this. Given any empirical theory of consciousness, it's never going to be "I get to live in the computer," just "I die, but a copy of my brain l
886.
by Cushman 14y ago
Love it. Times like this I wish there were more of a sketch comedy scene in our community... Not sure whether to go with "The AWS Enterprise" or "Bob the Cloud Mechanic".
887.
by Cushman 14y ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky's younger brother died in 2004 and it inspired a lengthy email thread about the subject.[0] I expect it is not so much about wishing not to die, which even a transhumanist must admit is at least no worse than living, but w
888.
by Cushman 14y ago
As does the pervasive use of acronyms. Not to harp on it too much, since I don't think they're bad people, but there's a cultish vibe for sure.
889.
by Cushman 14y ago
> the "basilisk" debacle Hadn't heard of this, just read the RationalWiki article-- and it is fabulous . LW literally derived religion and then took that seriously enough to cover it up . That's fantastic.
890.
by Cushman 14y ago
It's nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks this. I think it's really telling that a community which is ostensibly concerned with the science of achieving desires spends so much time focused on the "problem" of akrasia. It's also hear
891.
by Cushman 14y ago
I think one big difference is right there in the word "company" that comes up in each of those examples (or the equivalent "site"). Companies are inherently profit-motivated, so every one of those examples is something done to make money, a
892.
by Cushman 14y ago
Kickstarter is being used a lot for preorders rather than fundraising. There are a lot of obvious reasons someone might want to do this despite technically not needing financing.
893.
by Cushman 14y ago
Competitive fencing is also a far cry from realistic swordfighting. (There's a whole bit in Snow Crash about that, actually.)
894.
by Cushman 14y ago
I'm in from the headline alone.
895.
by Cushman 14y ago
Indeed. "Engaged with" doesn't ever describe a marriage proposal in any case, so it's hard to imagine a native speaker being confused. (The idiom is "engaged to".)
896.
by Cushman 14y ago
That makes sense if it's just you, but you must be losing a lot of potential contributors by not being on Github, let alone not using any version control. Are you just not that interested in contributions from the public? If so, I think it'
897.
by Cushman 14y ago
HN needs more conversations like this. Edit: Ooh, controversy. I'm quite sincere about this-- love to chat with whoever disagrees.
898.
by Cushman 14y ago
I think I'm saying something more fundamental than "the number isn't important", though it's true I was a bit terse. The thing a layman needs to know about c in order to understand this is that it isn't a measurement of speed as we're used
899.
by Cushman 14y ago
Well, yeah, it is tautological. If there weren't a limit on the rate of information transfer, everything possible would happen instantaneously and there would be no way to really experience anything. Call it selection bias if you like. The
900.
by Cushman 14y ago
c is 299,792,458 m/s only because the meter is so defined; it makes just as much or more sense to say that the speed of light is 1, and this is where we get the Planck units. From this perspective, it becomes obvious that the question, "Why

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