anusinha

11 ms·

61.
by anusinha 14y ago
Basic thermodynamics: converting heat into work is inefficient. A photovoltaic can go straight from the energy of the photons (admittedly restricted to a particular band that they were designed for) with less loss.
62.
by anusinha 14y ago
Moore's Law in Silicon will eventually run out. This is true and is physically provable. And there are already a lot of smart minds (at Intel and at a few other companies and at many universities) developing post-silicon technologies. It is
63.
by anusinha 14y ago
Studying organisms like these would certainly teach us a lot about cellular maintenance and extremely slow patterns of gene regulation. Relatedly, note that storing information in DNA is the longest lived form of information storage. Harddr
64.
by anusinha 14y ago
> I realize this sort of thing is a little too weird to be a commercial success Nothing's ever too weird. Ten years ago, people were afraid to put their real name on the internet. Standards will shift, as long as customer/user privacy i
65.
by anusinha 14y ago
Note that there are many industries in which passive income is simply impossible. Yes, this is _Hacker_ News, but fields outside of software engineering do exist.
66.
by anusinha 14y ago
This is not _entirely_ relevant, but I would like to illustrate the complexity and cost of the problem. Many large pharmaceutical companies have completely pulled out of the market for developing drugs in one of the three main classes of di
67.
by anusinha 14y ago
You have to do the latter. If you just switch without making any noise, then the company just sees you as percentage of users using the competitor's product. Not very meaningful. You have to write a short letter saying why you once used &#6
68.
by anusinha 14y ago
Will I be carrying a flash drive around in five years? I use my current one (that lives on my keychain) no more than once a week, and that's only to interface with computers that are offline. How about a system where I hold my phone up to s
69.
by anusinha 14y ago
I think it's important to note that although biological systems are still well out of our reach, chemical systems (using quantum chemical methods) is being done increasingly better, and we can learn a lot about various systems, ranging from
70.
by anusinha 14y ago
To be fair, Gaussian is orders of magnitude worse. See < http://www.bannedbygaussian.org/> .
71.
by anusinha 14y ago
In any conversation about Markdown, I think it's appropriate to mention Textile [1] as well. Textile is fairly similar, intended to fulfill the same niche of markup with slightly different syntax. Personally, I prefer textile because I thin
72.
by anusinha 14y ago
Relatedly, there are powers in the pharmaceutical industry that would love to be able to carry out syntheses in space. The lack of an effective gravity force allows crystals to grow larger and this would be a useful property.
73.
by anusinha 14y ago
It seems as though ASICs are the method of choice for every high performance system. The examples that come to mind are supercomputer interconnects and the completely engineered from scratch Anton[1] machines that DE Shaw Research uses for
74.
by anusinha 14y ago
Some thoughts about the coder culture and how it relates to women can be found on this really interesting blog post. http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/the-ugly-... I can't say that I agree with all of it, but it's definit
75.
by anusinha 14y ago
This was a really great article, both using thermodynamics and inorganic chemistry. If you're interested in more theoretical applications of symmetry (or, in its proper mathematical formalism, group theory) to chemical systems, a good start