alister

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151.
by alister 7y ago
Wouldn't it make more sense for the VCs to make 375 bets of $1M each rather than 1 bet of $375M? Just the other day we heard about the troubles of 23andMe that had $786M in venture funding. Are there any examples of startups that got &
152.
by alister 7y ago
What, no mention about glass being an even more viscous liquid? I grew up believing the story about medieval church windows being thicker at the bottom because the glass had flowed downward over a period of centuries. It turns out that med
153.
by alister 7y ago
> The company raised ample venture capital -- $786 million, according to Crunchbase If I might go on a tangent, isn't that an insane amount of money for the VCs to hand out? Apple with a $1 trillion market capitalization (the most
154.
Rogue Chinese Genome Editor Sentenced to Three Years in Prison(reason.com)
1 points by alister 7y ago|0 comments
155.
by alister 7y ago
I have a knot problem that I think pretty much everyone has encountered. How do you tie a bundle of branches or a cardboard box or something compressible as tightly as possible? The first way everyone tries is to cross the rope like you wou
156.
by alister 7y ago
> approaching a CENTURY without any significant advances in physics If we changed that to 60 years, I'd make an even stronger statement. It seems that all the great theories and discoveries in all scientific fields happened more
157.
by alister 7y ago
Along with counterfeits, another issue that makes shopping unpleasant is that many products are superfically different but underneath are the same thing. You can see this most clearly in a retail store when the products are side by side. Wa
158.
by alister 7y ago
> Within a few weeks of publication, there were more than 8,000 Diners Club cardholders. By the end of the year, membership was near 100,000. It sounds like a success right from the get go. But I don’t understand the motivation of thos
159.
by alister 7y ago
I wonder what prevents a fish that goes down to 100 meters from going down to 300 meters or 3000 meters. Does it feel an internal pressure that tells it to not dive further, or is it the amount of light or availability of food it seeks? Sin
160.
by alister 7y ago
So we have FedEx, Walgreens, and Wing (a.k.a. Alphabet, a.k.a. Google) all collaborating on this. Any of these huge companies could have run a pilot project by themselves and had a head start over the competition. I wonder why they joined u
161.
by alister 7y ago
> 75% of their profit is from the membership fees I've heard that before, but I can't see how it could be. My back-of-an-envelope calculation: Let's say I spend $1000 per year (I'm estimating low). According to the
162.
by alister 7y ago
What, no mention of ALH84001? I was mesmerized by the live TV press conference by a large group of NASA scientists back in 1996 of evidence of life on Mars from the analysis of a meteorite: "Scientists headed by David McKay of the John
163.
by alister 7y ago
It’s possible for climbers (though a climber doesn’t experience the rapid decompression that a jumper would). Mount Everest at 29,028 feet is significantly higher than the 23,000 foot fall that Ivan Chisov survived, yet a few rare people
164.
by alister 7y ago
Sorry for a meta comment here, but does anyone enjoy long articles in “Twitter format”? The formatting is ugly, it’s transient, and beholden to a third party’s whims. Much better would be a blog article and a link to it from Twitter.
165.
by alister 7y ago
On-the-fly encryption, Truecrypt as the canonical example, has this property too. The key is always in memory, decrypting text on the fly, but a reboot or period of inactivity will wipe the key.
166.
by alister 7y ago
The choice of wood for residential housing is based on cost. Trees are plentiful in the U.S., so wood construction is the cheapest option. In countries without lots of trees, they’ll use concrete, stone, or something else.
167.
by alister 7y ago
> In 1927 in New Jersey, a man named Salvatore Merra was wrongly executed because of the want of a semicolon in a jury’s sentencing Here are the actual words that led to his execution: "In the Merra case the dissenting justices po
168.
by alister 7y ago
My suggestion would be to comingle them with the Show HN submissions; they’re the same thing with a different way of phrasing the title. If someone wants to look specifically for old posts, you have that covered with the year filter (wher
169.
by alister 7y ago
It's great fun to browse older ideas and projects and to see them in a new light. But you're missing out on lots of postings from 2008-2012 because people used to preface the title with Ask HN: Review {our,my}{startup,app,site,we
170.
by alister 7y ago
> It's fine. Really. I can tolerate some bloatware (like games), but what about the telemetry? Are you OK with that or did you find a way to disable all telemetry?
171.
by alister 7y ago
I'm glad to see that setjmp() and longjmp() are still allowed. I'm just kidding by the way. For those C programmers who haven't encountered these before, it is a powerful way to do a "goto" in C. Powerful in the se
172.
by alister 7y ago
> We’ve all owned flash memory cards that have stopped working for no apparent reason. MicroSD cards and SSD drives use exactly the same technology (NAND flash memory), so it’s a mystery to me that microSD cards are unreliable, but S
173.
by alister 7y ago
No, even toilets in new buildings don’t flush well. I mentioned that I’ve seen toilets that pass a great deal of water—-more than is typical in the US and Canada—-and still can’t get rid of a bundle of toilet paper. Blockages downstream may
174.
by alister 7y ago
Here’s a toilet puzzle for you: Why don’t toilets in Brazil flush as efficiently as those in the United States and Canada? In Brazil it’s pretty standard to have a waste paper basket beside the toilet for throwing away toilet paper. Hotels
175.
by alister 7y ago
For anyone who’s wondering if this is a physical button or an on-screen button and what it looks like, you can see it here: https://www.phonearena.com/image.php?m=Articles.Images&f=nam... (The cartoon mocking Bixby in t
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by alister 7y ago
It seems to do that too (comparing against a list of the top 500 passwords): https://github.com/bdmac/strong_password/blob/master/lib/str...
177.
by alister 7y ago
I had it airplane mode, but I could see an argument that the GPS is receive-only (it is not transmitting, so not affecting the airplane), so it is not disabled in airplane mode. (I saw comments on the Apple discussion site that they used to
178.
by alister 7y ago
> What home user even realizes they can change the clock time any more? Indeed. Even if you have the temerity to go and change the clock, the iPhone is secretly maintaining the true time internally and can use it or revert to it at wil
179.
by alister 7y ago
> My Garmin FR235 is an indispensable part of my running gear, and no mobile phone has come even close to replicating it. I like a standalone self-contained GPS over a smartphone-based GPS because of (a) no dependence on a cell network
180.
by alister 7y ago
Even older actually, 52. (He was born Aug. 1937 and Garmin was founded Oct. 1989.) > In 1989, they pooled their savings and persuaded Dr. Kao’s Taiwanese relatives to invest seed money. With $4 million... That's $8.4 million in 20

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