_rpd

50 ms·

481.
by _rpd 10y ago
> This smells of a publicity stunt to me. I don't know, some people are irrational about plants and farming. Sure we've grown all kinds of plants in orbit before, but maybe potatoes need to commune with the Earth in order to g
482.
by _rpd 10y ago
> radiation levels on the Red Planet are about the same as those in low Earth orbit ... which coincidentally is where the experimental potatoes in the article were grown.
483.
by _rpd 10y ago
They grew them under microgravity conditions in orbit, so they probably aren't going to have trouble coping with 2/5ths gravity.
484.
by _rpd 10y ago
> we'll either be bringing water, or distilling it there Probably just melting some of the more than five million cubic kilometers of water ice that has been identified at or near the surface of modern Mars ... https://en
485.
by _rpd 10y ago
> depending on whether there's water available on Mars Actually, we've recently confirmed that there are at least five million cubic kilometers of water ice on Mars ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_o
486.
by _rpd 10y ago
Hydroponic farming doesn't use soil ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
487.
by _rpd 10y ago
It's possible to grow potatoes hydroponically, so growing them in unprocessed Martian regolith is unlikely to be important until the number of Martians hits six figures.
488.
by _rpd 10y ago
> On the other hand, "questions of law" are the part that I think can be executed by a smart contract (once the facts are input) I think if you meditate about what qualifies as "taxable income" you'll be much les
489.
by _rpd 10y ago
Yes, even if a legal subsystem is instantiated in which parties agree to abide by "programmatic contracts," the vast majority of people will not willingly use it. When an extremely precise condition is set, some party will eventu
490.
by _rpd 10y ago
> Whether the conditions in a contract have been met is very often a matter of huge debate - this is what "law suits" are about. Exactly. While laws and contract terms are written in natural language, this is an AI-complete pr
491.
by _rpd 10y ago
I know someone who is smart and reasonably concerned about privacy issues, but she loves the thing - uses it instead of a shopping list. I was quite surprised that she would compromise for such a trivial convenience, but it made me revise
492.
by _rpd 10y ago
The declensionist narrative is really in fashion right now.
493.
by _rpd 10y ago
It's just one step removed for paying a journalist to write an article for your brand/product. A practice which is now common place ... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/business/media/spo
494.
by _rpd 10y ago
While this letter appears to be sincere, it is willfully ignorant of the decades long shift of some academic departments from a stance of "ivory tower" objectivity to the deliberate choice to use their prestige and power as politi
495.
by _rpd 10y ago
> an estimated 38 percent of the EU budget will be going to farm subsidies. Farms as a share of total employment are quite small (about 2 percent) That really is astonishing. However, I suspect the comfort drawn from industrial revoluti
496.
by _rpd 10y ago
It zooms past the now expected AI hype and doesn't stop until it is deep in science fiction. The correlation of Facebook-likes with personality traits is no more profound than the correlation of particular personality traits with watch
497.
by _rpd 10y ago
So much tech journalism falls prey to the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence ... http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...
498.
by _rpd 10y ago
At some point attention becomes the ultimate resource. Most people earn income by paying attention to somebody else's projects. But with a little introspection and basic goal setting training, many people identify projects to which t
499.
by _rpd 10y ago
The "AI" being discussed is mainly competent data mining and machine learning. If we stay at that level, then there are easily bigger shifts that we've adjusted to in the past. But self-improving AI is truly on a different l
500.
by _rpd 10y ago
It would be even more astounding if the new Chinese traffic was genuine.
501.
by _rpd 10y ago
It was only just described in a Science paper, so you are probably going to have to wait 10 years before you can buy it at your local hardware store.
502.
by _rpd 10y ago
This is key, otherwise a bike being available at the right time just becomes too rare. Also, getting sign-off & GPS to work reliably in urban environments - it is super frustrating paying by the minute and being unable to stop the clock
503.
by _rpd 10y ago
You're right, it is just trending. Here is the press release this article is based on ... http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-t...
504.
by _rpd 10y ago
> As of Wednesday, the company has once again changed its trending algorithms. Personal preferences are now out of the equation. "Facebook will no longer be personalized based on someone's interests," Facebook says in a pr
505.
by _rpd 10y ago
In the context of formal tournaments, people would likely be more accepting if there were separate competition classes.
506.
by _rpd 10y ago
> Their digital products are clearly the product of old-school newspaper people trying to adapt their product to a web browser I think by far their main concern is how to get people to pay for reading their digital product in the same wa
507.
by _rpd 10y ago
I wonder if nostalgia articles get as many clickthroughs from GenXers as they do from older generations?
508.
by _rpd 10y ago
Our current theory of gravity doesn't even explain how galaxies form and rotate unless over a quarter of the universe is made of unspecified "dark matter." We are children playing on the shores of undiscovered oceans.
509.
by _rpd 10y ago
> How would self-driving cars result in larger and more grisly accidents? Algorithmic error - algorithm responds poorly to rare environmental condition (naturally or artificially generated). Emergent behavior error - algorithm for indivi
510.
by _rpd 10y ago
How will the law define "fake news"? This is not a minor problem. "Contains a factual error, beyond reasonable doubt?" "Likely to mislead, on the balance of probabilities?" "At least one non-typographical

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