alephnil

20 ms·

151.
by alephnil 12y ago
The problem with wave energy is not to make a device that makes energy from waves, but to make one that can withstand the storms that invariably are present wherever there is wave power resources, and at the same time remain efficient. Most
152.
by alephnil 12y ago
If this story had happened in real life, and the problem had been more complicated than anticipated, and Charlie had realized this, it would be likely to fail, because he did not have enough leverage toward the upper management to get the r
153.
by alephnil 12y ago
The universe represents itself, but no part of the universe is able to predicts its own future in detail, and is as such no simulation, at least not of itself. It just exists. The reason I said "a Newtonian universe", is precisely
154.
by alephnil 12y ago
> Isn't mention of chaos theory irrelevant? That was my first thought as well, but consider a chaotic system in a Newtonian universe. Laplace' demon must then have the capability to simulate the universe to be able to predict i
155.
by alephnil 12y ago
Indeed, and arguably, even if you go really far back, even fields like physics and mathematics spawned out from philosophy. Physics was originally known as "natural philosophy" for example. Biology came into existence independentl
156.
by alephnil 12y ago
I know vim, but I don't think that change much. In fact, if I lost a month of work and did not have any printouts or even notes, I would in most cases be able to redo it in 2-3 days, and unlikely no more than a week. The reason is that
157.
by alephnil 12y ago
As other have mentioned, his focus on input devices is a misguided. If I lost a month of programming work, and only had a copy on paper, I would in most cases be able to type it in less than a day. My limitation is in logical reasoning, not
158.
by alephnil 12y ago
It may not be hate speech, but it is not very constructive and have a smell of conspiracy theory.
159.
by alephnil 12y ago
It does not help that it is just a small number of cases, as even a small number of cases will have have a chilling effect on free speech. The "somewhere between UK and US" comment is theoretical and is about what the written law
160.
by alephnil 12y ago
This makes it a square rigged boat, which is the traditional rig used by old sailships, and most traditional sailboats. That rigtype makes it hard (impossible really) to go up against the wind with a small angle, and this simulation is quit
161.
by alephnil 12y ago
Distilled water is neutral, but natural surface water with low mineral content still has CO2 disolved in it, and usually also some SO2 and NOx, which makes the water acidic, so what's wrong is the comparison with distilled water, not t
162.
by alephnil 12y ago
It is hard to check if you don't have a map to check against, but in the waters I used to sail in Norway, all lighthouses seems to be there, but no rocks or areas with shallow water are marked, which makes the map useless for navigati
163.
by alephnil 12y ago
It depends what you want. If you think of the ordinary CPython interpreter, that is unlikely to ever reach the speed of Julia, and I don't think that is even a priority for the Python developers. So if execution speed is very important
164.
by alephnil 12y ago
Ideally tests should only test high level features and their invariants, so that a new implementation of some part should only break if the new implementation is actually broken. Unfortunately, many unit tests are written with a lot of assu
165.
by alephnil 12y ago
That is not really the case for supercomputers though. Here Linux drivers obviously have first priority. If you are thinking of video driver it is a totally different story.
166.
by alephnil 12y ago
Without Infiniband or similar proprietary buses, it is usually not considered a supercomputer at all, but merely a cluster.
167.
by alephnil 12y ago
I don't think this description is entirely fair. What is expensive with these computers is the fast interconnection buses between processors and modules, which is needed for many scientific problems that can't easily be divided in
168.
by alephnil 12y ago
The reaction used by is not reversible, so the alumimium in the battery will be consumed, and the battery is not rechargeable. This is only said implicitly in the article. Thus this is more a fuel cell, using aluminium as fuel.
169.
by alephnil 12y ago
This remind me how the first picture of a human was being taken. Louis Daguerre took pictures of busy streets in Paris, but because the photographs had an exposure time of around 15 minutes, the streets looked empty. The exception was a guy
170.
by alephnil 12y ago
> So what you're saying is that since incompetent firewall admins have blocked all applications except the web and no amount of reason can convince them to do otherwise, all applications of the future should be tunnelled through HTT
171.
by alephnil 12y ago
Reddit has already been through that cycle. Reddit ca 2006, before subreddits, was not too unlike hacker news, in that it had inteligent posts with inteligent discussion. The seeds to what Reddit eventually became was certainly there, but t
172.
by alephnil 12y ago
The friction of the tidal forces would generate enourmous amonts of heat, and that energy would be taken from the rotation of the earth and moon, causing both the moon and earth to be locked into synchronous rotation. At least if the moon d
173.
by alephnil 12y ago
Yes. In java at the time if you wrote a number with 9 or less digits, it would always be considered to be an int. If the number was above 1 billion (10 digits), you had to end it with an L (1000000000L), probably since it possibly could ove
174.
by alephnil 12y ago
Many said this in hindsight, but for OpenSSL it was no lack of people that said this in foresight as well, i.e. they complained about the shoddy code quality of OpenSSL long before the heartbleed attack. One of those was Poul Henning Kamp,
175.
by alephnil 12y ago
I agree that a 128-node computer would not be called a supercomputer regardless of interconnection, my point was more the other way, that a computer without fast interconnections would still be called a cluster, and not a supercomputer rega
176.
by alephnil 12y ago
I see that you talk about "large clusters". In the HPC community there is often made a distinction between clusters and supercomputers, where the latter implies fast interconnect between the nodes, allowing synchronization of data
177.
by alephnil 13y ago
There is waste with thorium reactors as well, so they need to be well run by competent people just as a conventional reactors. That said, the waste is easier to handle for several reasons, particularly in the liquid fuel type. The waste in
178.
by alephnil 13y ago
It should also be mentioned that when people use Fortran, it is usually because they need the fastest numerical processing available. An interpreter would usually not meet that need. With JIT compilers embedded in interpreters, the differen
179.
by alephnil 13y ago
That is not really the reason. The reason is mainly BLAS, that implements some of the most commonly used linear algebra operations (matrix multiplication, matrix solvers, singular value decompositions etc). This is implemented in optimized
180.
by alephnil 13y ago
> Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation. By combining these two tags, you were a trailblazer. Except that blink o

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