avz

18 ms·

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by avz 11y ago
This bbc article summarizes a few interesting points from the paper: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12378934
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Physiological Ecology of Mesozoic Polar Forests in a High CO2 Environment(aob.oxfordjournals.org)
1 points by avz 11y ago|1 comments
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by avz 11y ago
> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at the time when his programming abilities started to decline. Citation needed. Even accepting the results of various studies that show age-correlated decline in
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by avz 11y ago
For comparison: * the aphelion of Sedna, the most distant dwarf planet of our Solar system is at 937 AU from the Sun [1], * distance between Proxima Centauri and the binary Alpha Centauri is 15,000 ± 700 AU [2], * one light year is 63,241.1
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by avz 11y ago
> France does have regulation, but so does the US It isn't about the presence of some regulation. It is about the burdens and costs associated with it. French regulations are very cumbersome and costly, especially when it comes to
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by avz 11y ago
I think the reason the original essay was so controversial is that it set out to demonstrate that a society faces a binary choice: * We allow both startups and inequality. * We attack both startups and inequality. This is perhaps most clear
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by avz 11y ago
> Startups are good for a variety of reasons, and they also happen to cause income inequality, ( emphasis mine) One of the points of the original essay is that startups don't just happen to cause inequality. On the contrary pg
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by avz 11y ago
> At least wood stoves are carbon neutral. Only if you grow a unit of mass of wood at the same rate at which you burn it. Otherwise the stove actively transfers carbon from forests to atmosphere.
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by avz 11y ago
> This is not hard to understand. Gov’t officials believe that the work they do is different in kind. We're talking about public servants . They're given some power and privileges only so they can do the job of serving the pub
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by avz 11y ago
This is very interesting and highly relevant! Thanks!
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by avz 11y ago
This battle is very important: two questions it will answer are these: 1. Are APIs copyrightable? 2. If APIs are copyrightable, does providing an alternative implementation of someone else's API (the way Android provided an alternative
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by avz 11y ago
> Why not? Intention does matter. A military which aims to reduce civilian casualties and fails is less evil than a terrorist who deliberately targets civilians.
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by avz 11y ago
The article seems to imply there is real malice and deliberate intent to deceive the public in the media coverage of civilian victims of Western attacks. This is one explanation, but I don't see conclusive evidence of this in the artic
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by avz 11y ago
> Yes, cells can divide only a limited number of times. And then they die. But guess what: your body is capable of creating new cells. If I read this correctly, you imply that "creating new cells" is somehow an alternative to c
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by avz 11y ago
You're missing this important point: > His effort to be courteous made me feel that I was different, the odd one out, the one we must be careful around and treat like a fragile flower. We should respect all our colleagues equally
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by avz 11y ago
> MAX_PATH in xnu (the OS X kernel) is 1024 so it's not unsurprising that things get weird when you have paths at least 1025 characters long as in his example. What is surprising is the asymmetry: you can create the symlink, but c
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by avz 11y ago
> Why was Rails successful? I don't think Haskell aims for this kind of success. Abstractions can be useful and they can be beautiful . If your goal is to "easily build functional CRUD apps" you need the former. If you
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by avz 11y ago
Never is a strong word. For one, we know nothing of the remote party's biology and medical achievements. In fact we don't even know whether the remote party would be a biological entity at all. They could be an engineered AI built
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by avz 11y ago
Like all other animals, we don't generally pause to critically examine the merits of the instincts that drive our behavior. Unlike all other animals, we're actually capable of doing so! I applaud VHEMT for openly and critically co
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by avz 11y ago
What makes you employable today may or may not make you so in two or three decades. For example, if an increasingly large fraction of cognitive employment is taken over by technology it is possible that the skills related to direct human-to
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by avz 11y ago
Both would be best, but if I had to chose I'd go for smart. I've seen smart, but unkind people learn to be kind over time. I doubt a kind halfwit can learn to be smart. That's presumably the case because smartness defines you
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by avz 11y ago
Looks like a case of the Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855
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by avz 11y ago
One relatively new thought in the manifesto is the explicit disagreement with the old assertion that the finite resources of our planet cannot sustain continued economic growth. The fundamental reason why economic growth can continue at a f
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by avz 11y ago
It is high time for such a change. It seems to me that tech culture is a better fit for scientific research than academia. Scientific research is by its nature risky and uncertain. The current risk-averse culture of academia with its focus
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by avz 11y ago
At the level of an individual increased risk does indeed reduce the expected outcome of an endeavor. However, societies where individuals are willing to take higher risks end up reaping the benefits that are only accessible by taking higher
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by avz 11y ago
The argument doesn't really make assumptions about how you contribute to a business. Investors fighting for higher capital gains also drive up the costs for the business they fund. Higher ROI is how an investor increases her wealth r
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by avz 11y ago
It's easy to be cynical (apologies if I'm misreading intentions here) about reduced paychecks. There is one complexity here that generally doesn't get mentioned. There are two mechanisms by which we get richer. One is by incr
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by avz 11y ago
Software neural networks are a poor approximation of biological ones, but it may still be interesting to compare spike frequency distribution to see how general this observation is.
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by avz 11y ago
> Each technologist has a choice whether or not to work on these systems. The answer should always be NO. Technologists is not a politically or economically homogenous group. You can find engineers who would like to work on anti-satellit
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by avz 11y ago
> One of the consequences of this axiom is that every subset of the real numbers has a least element according to some ordering. An even weirder consequence of AC is the Banach-Tarski paradox [1]. Other examples of how mathematicians com

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