austinz

28 ms·

211.
by austinz 13y ago
I'm not sure I understand why implicit interfaces are better than explicitly declared interfaces. (This is an honest question.) I do iOS stuff occasionally, and in that world one of the main purposes of interfaces (in Objective-C, prot
212.
by austinz 13y ago
0.02%, if you are building a hypothetical network of power plants with the same total surface area as the state of Maryland in orbit.
213.
Agreement reached on deep sea mining(bbc.com)
1 points by austinz 13y ago|0 comments
214.
by austinz 13y ago
According to [1], the surface of Earth receives 89,300 terawatts of power from the Sun on average. According to the stats at [2], world power consumption in 2008 was ~17 TW. So even if we could somehow build the tens of thousands of these p
215.
by austinz 13y ago
It's not a given that rectification/conversion losses are necessarily greater than, less than, or equal to the gain in base output. A lot of whether that is true depends on how much solid state power electronics improve over the c
216.
How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm(spectrum.ieee.org)
63 points by austinz 13y ago|76 comments
217.
by austinz 13y ago
I have a little model Stirling engine that sits on my desk at work, something I built as part of a machining class in college. It still amazes me how lathes, drill presses, and mills, machines that perform such simple tasks, can transform r
218.
by austinz 13y ago
The term "Exo Core Intelligent Operating System" sounds like meaningless marketing babble. I would have liked to believe otherwise, but there is no substantial technical information that I can find on that website. If anyone can e
219.
by austinz 13y ago
I always considered it fascinating how so many of China's cultural heroes were people who built great works and disseminated knowledge. (Not that Chinese mythology is necessarily unique in this manner, of course.) - Shennong, who inven
220.
by austinz 13y ago
I disagree. Ease of retrieval of information is one thing, signal to noise ratio is also important. For every 'superstition' being destroyed on the Internet there are (e.g.) a plethora of people reposting the discredited "NAS
221.
by austinz 13y ago
> Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach
222.
by austinz 13y ago
To be fair, the C community doesn't see the relative simplicity of C as a liability, and believes that there's an argument to be made that, in the hands of a competent and careful engineer, C is a good choice of language for certa
223.
by austinz 13y ago
I left my very first job because I, too, ended up bored and learning almost nothing. But I do remember that I was too scared to bring it up, because I thought there existed a possibility that the (very small) company might preemptively let
224.
Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?(bbc.com)
213 points by austinz 13y ago|270 comments
225.
Learning From Korea's Disaster(nytimes.com)
2 points by austinz 13y ago|0 comments
226.
by austinz 13y ago
While it is true that fundamental weaknesses in cryptographic theory may be discovered at any time, the implementation of cryptosystems is, I would assert, still very much like engineering. Broken theory is distinct from broken implementa
227.
by austinz 13y ago
I see the implementation of cryptosystems as an engineering endeavor little different than designing, for example, a commercial airplane, a bridge, or a radiation therapy machine. In all cases you have a system whose failure can result in a
228.
by austinz 13y ago
His story resembles Ray Kurzweil's quite closely: an eccentric inventor with an extensive and impressive portfolio, parlaying his accomplishments into advocating shoddy pseudoscience. In Cheiky's case, Google is involved through t
229.
A thirteen year-old eagle huntress(bbc.com)
80 points by austinz 13y ago|14 comments
230.
by austinz 13y ago
I would have enjoyed it more if the text boxes containing the annotations were larger than business cards. Honestly, I would have enjoyed it the most if it were a standard long-form article. But even allowing the annotation boxes to be &#x2
231.
by austinz 13y ago
Thanks for the context. I wonder what you call a person who is willing to do anything and everything for personal gain, because he sees the people around him as nothing more than means to an end?
232.
by austinz 13y ago
It would help to know why you're failing. - Do your project ideas never get finished? - If not, is it because of technical issues that make it difficult to get your product working? - If not, is it because you lose interest or the peop
233.
by austinz 13y ago
I built a decently polished open-source clone of 2048 for iOS over a weekend, and from HN's front page it's obvious many could (and did) do the same for a variety of platforms and languages. It's popular to talk about how ide
234.
by austinz 13y ago
Excellent! Thanks a lot.
235.
by austinz 13y ago
Is there a toolchain I can use to compile and load plain C onto Arduino boards? I'm not too familiar with the development environment, although I'd like to try some stuff out with the hardware I have.
236.
by austinz 13y ago
I built a decently good-looking Asteroids clone using SpriteKit during the iOS 7 beta, and a pretty polished iOS 2048 implementation more recently. Both projects took a little longer than a weekend, and I don't consider myself a partic
237.
Cybathalon 2016: A Competition for Augmented Humans(spectrum.ieee.org)
1 points by austinz 13y ago|0 comments
238.
Objective-C 2048(github.com)
2 points by austinz 13y ago|0 comments
239.
by austinz 13y ago
I like my smartphone, but I am a strange person who despises both talking on the phone and sending text messages. So the fact that my smartphone is so bad at doing both those things is, to me, a net positive.
240.
by austinz 13y ago
Is the stuff they talk about in the article true? Devs discussing banging girls over the weekend and having NSFW conversations that sound like they were ripped out of a 3 AM freshman dorm room filled with marijuana haze? Code filled with va

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