InclinedPlane

1821 ms·

3541.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's a good joke but HN isn't about jokes, people are trying to having a conversation on a topic and random jokes merely make that more difficult.
3542.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
If you'd actually described any relevant aspect of Hyperloop your criticism might have more credibility, as it stands it has none. Hyperloop is not a vacuum tube train, and the primary mechanism it relies on is non-trivial.
3543.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Additionally, a progress bar which initially advances quickly but advances slowly at the end is perceived to be slower than a progress bar that is purely linear with respect to time. And a progress bar that starts slow then finishes quickly
3544.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
They've been paying out an ok dividend for a while but not really enough to make up for the flat stock price.
3545.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
You should be using profit not revenue (also, not all quarters are the same, using merely the most recent one is a bad practice). Measured in terms of years of profit being hoarded google is at 5 years, Apple is at 1 year, and Microsoft i
3546.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
The US criminal justice system is very much about punishment and retribution and almost not at all about rehabilitation or protection of society. That's the sort of system one would expect in a medieval country, we can and should do be
3547.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
The fascinating thing is that this is the norm in business, not the exception. You may think, how can that be? Wouldn't that cause companies to go out of business all the time? Guess what, companies go out of business all the time. Mos
3548.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Manning[1], the Pragmatic Bookshelf[2], and Apress[3] have been the best in my experience. They cover relevant topics and technologies, the books are typically written by experts and written well, there are ebook versions of everything at r
3549.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Many people will point out that the antibiotics given to animals are mostly different from those used on humans. However, as your example points out there are actually only a small number of families of antibiotics each of which share a spe
3550.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
The problem stackexchange faces now isn't failure, failure is easy to spot and often straightforward to fix. Instead they risk not living up to their potential, and not by a small amount but by orders of magnitude. With enough effort t
3551.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's not necessary to be evil in your heart to nevertheless do things that are evil or have very negative consequences. EE was classic bait and switch. Moreover, they monetized cloud sourced answers without adding anything of value to
3552.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's worse than that, there's pretty much no effective way to use the site to learn about a topic. It's a very effective Q&A site but that's all it is; it was meant to be slightly more but has never managed to achiev
3553.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Somewhat related, most people don't realize how far along Iraq's nuclear program was at the time of the first Gulf War, even despite the Israeli raid on Osirik. Iraq had enriched a large amount of Uranium using calutrons, had reco
3554.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
To make things crystal clear here: the US has vastly reduced its deployed nuclear warheads and stockpiles over time. The US currently has less than 1/10th as many warheads deployed as during the peak of the Cold War, and that number is
3555.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Syria was developing a nuclear program before they had their facilities bombed by the Israelis. Saudi Arabia has shown interest though they don't want to rock the geopolitical boat, but if Iran developed the bomb then it would likely s
3556.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
> It's the feedback loops -- clouds, biology and so on, that are the challenge. There's a name for those systems. It's called "the climate".
3557.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
TEPCO and Japan's NISA are not the most trustworthy or competent of organizations, they certainly have a lot of room for improvement. However, I think you're misinterpreting the importance of the age of the Fukushima reactor desig
3558.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's almost certainly not going to matter. Go back and read my post above and ask yourself whether there is any chance whatsoever that the Fukushima disaster could possibly cause 50 million deaths. That's fifty million deaths. Why
3559.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Is there some Universe where developer time is not synonymous with cash money dollars?
3560.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Yet another example of how schools are more about incarceration and control than education. Right now with public schools in the US we're at the edge of spending less per student on teachers than on administrative staff and other expen
3561.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
In effect you are saying that we have a better understanding of the long-term evolution of the climate than we do of the long-term evolution of Earth's economy. There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case and considerable evi
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by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Fukushima used a more than 50 year old reactor design, it has very little bearing on either the risk or feasability of building new nuclear plants. Moreover, even factoring in the risk of extremely outdated or outrageously unsafe by design
3563.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
I updated my post to make it even more clear. Hydropower is for the most part great when it's available, but it's not available everywhere and it also doesn't come without significant environmental cost. It would not be a net
3564.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
You're overlooking the opportunity cost that comes with spending effort and money on "forestalling climate change" today. Read my other post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6388344 ) for why this is like
3565.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
No non-CO2 emitting energy system is currently a credible source for base load electrical power except for nuclear. Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed everywhere and everytime it&#x2
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by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Ah, pascal's wager. So, which god do you believe in then?
3567.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
> The people who are the most affected by climate change are the poorest and least able to relocate. The people who will be the most affected by climate change will be the folks living decades if not centuries from now. And those peopl
3568.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Any analysis that proclaims "the internet is X" is one that I am immediately disinclined to trust, because the internet is an enormous and complex medium. Imagine someone saying "books are X" or "movies are X".
3569.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Ah yes, this sort of thing. Facebook, like the internet, like blogging, like twitter, like crowdfunding, like videogames, like books, like e-commerce, is not some crazy new universe, it's just a medium where human beings can do what th
3570.
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
I think you can beat wikipedia by focusing on its weaknesses, but anonymity is not one of them, per se (at best it's a weakness as well as a strength). Notability: a dumb policy that is more harmful than good. Mod/admin power trip

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