ballooney

28 ms·

271.
by ballooney 14y ago
Well, god gave us Bayes' rule for a reason. The article does not point out that sampling quora users might not be (I would say is probably not) an unbiased estimator of the the students of these places as a whole. Quora attracts a certain k
272.
by ballooney 14y ago
> First, it's difficult to google/copy-paste That's a feature! No seriously. Among an august audience like HN people might have more discipline to properly grok the code they're copying, but I know of plenty of places where people will
273.
by ballooney 14y ago
> You can have fun of course but for some reason social things tend to draw you in and prevent you from focusing on what's important in growing a business Your premise seems to be that The Purpose Of Life is to have a successful busines
274.
by ballooney 14y ago
It's very difficult to recreate mars on earth sufficiently (without bonkers expense) to thoroughly test at full scale, but there are some interesting ways you can get close. For example, the parachutes that will be used on Mars deploy at a
275.
by ballooney 14y ago
Catchy.
276.
by ballooney 14y ago
I think that isolating data and applications into their own directory on a PC makes total sense. Only if you're starting from a position where there is only one kind of application to handle one kind of data. But as a counter exa
277.
by ballooney 14y ago
Sometimes you need to spend a bit of time with your head not quite so high above the parapet, just learning, not being the Great White Hope for lots of dependants. I left a well paying job where I was expected to be the exciting bright youn
278.
by ballooney 14y ago
It probably is partially to do with HN, the kind of place that has a demographic further up the spectrum than a random sample of society, whose ability to reason sometimes suffers from a tendency towards talking and thinking in absolutes.
279.
by ballooney 14y ago
> How can I not take his advice? For example, you might have a good idea in some interesting field that doesn't happen to particularly involve the Internet. At the moment it just seems like everyone arriving in California with a tent an
280.
by ballooney 14y ago
Google and Facebook are the exception to the rule. You are not going to be them. Also google are not making elevators to the moon, don't be so silly. Photocopiers used to be banned, with huge punishments for ownership, in east Germany due t
281.
by ballooney 14y ago
I rather agree with this. I love that there exists one person with a lot of cash, and technical chops, and the right attitude. That's rare and powerful. But as someone fairly familiar with the space industry I do see a lot of gushing nonsen
282.
by ballooney 14y ago
Don't underestimate the usefulness of hard real time io that's easy to implement. It's nice being able to be able to guarantee that some function will run exactly 0.2 microseconds after a voltage hits a pin, for example. Simple micro contro
283.
by ballooney 14y ago
Thank you also for 'pitch to investors'. When you 'pitch investors' (like in the blog post) you are presumably either, depending on your cultural reference points, 1) Hurling them at a man who wants to hit them with a bat (a bubble metaphor
284.
by ballooney 14y ago
A lot of the modern research in 'big data' analysis is/was driven by physicists. Bayesian Inference is about trying to make a decision about what you can infer from an observation or series of observations, and the impetus for this came fro
285.
by ballooney 14y ago
I sympathise with Daniel Hunt in my heart though I rationally see where you're coming from. If I were to give a nice blank canvas as a gift to a child and they were to smear excrement all over it, in my gut I'd be annoyed but I could probab
286.
by ballooney 14y ago
I suspect it requires too much everything (cpu, ram, io speed), by several orders of magnitude, to run on an arduino. If you're seriously asking, and this isn't some kind of internet meme/joke I'm not familiar with, you might find it intere
287.
by ballooney 14y ago
At Mach 6 it's just too hot and energetic to compress and stabley combust, as I understand. Recall that stagnation temperature is a function of the square of velocity. The reddit article says the compressor 'puts heat back in' but that's a
288.
by ballooney 14y ago
Interestingly, right now in Oxford UK is being tested a precooler for the sabre jet engine designed to power skylon spaceplanes to Mach 6 in air breathing mode (before going to orbit once out of the atmosphere with stored oxidiser). This pr
289.
by ballooney 14y ago
I would add that an advantage of Matlab for number bashing is a much more native handling of linear algebra. Let's say you have two matrices A and B, in matlab I could write: A*B*A' Whereas in python it would be (approximately):
290.
by ballooney 14y ago
Quite right, I should have said Space Shuttle Main Engines, as that is what they were actually called. Apologies for the ambiguity.
291.
by ballooney 14y ago
The space shuttle engines could do (and did on I think 5 occasions) the same thing. That is why they turned on before the solid boosters were lit, to be checked out by the avionics. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VELYTzUrjc [Edi
292.
by ballooney 14y ago
You're flirting with the assumption that something must exist on the Internet in order to exist at all. Or even that there's a strong correlation. That's a bit scary!
293.
by ballooney 15y ago
He talks about Mars quite publicly already and various of SPaceX's corporate videos contain CGI dragon capsules landing on mars. Also he's not 'sticking with near space for now' to avoid being called crazy as you imply, he's sticking to nea
294.
by ballooney 15y ago
Your mass scales with the cube of linear dimension. Parachute drag scales as a square of linear dimension. What this means is that the chute gets bigger much more quickly than the payload as you increase lander mass, to the point that you q
295.
by ballooney 15y ago
Yes indeed, and even sillier was that the engines were built by an entirely different company in a different state. But that just goes back to why private money is smarter - it's not allowed near senators who each want their slice of cake.
296.
by ballooney 15y ago
Quite incorrect. If we rewind to the golden age in the 60s, the US's Saturn V had 5 F-1 engines on the first stage. The UK's Black Arrow had 8 identical engines in 4 pairs. Russia's Soyuz has 20. Similarly, if you ask anyone at SpaceX they