bcbrown

9 ms·

31.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Light travels a foot per nanosecond, more or less. I believe this can be a real constraint in IC/motherboard designs with gigahertz+ clock speeds.
32.
by bcbrown 4y ago
> I would experiment and try to re-word homework questions so that interesting StackOverflow answers appeared in search results. That's a really interesting pedagogical approach, I like it a lot.
33.
by bcbrown 4y ago
> Mostly I’m surprised it’s that easy; I would have thought anything that can radiate heat slowly and consistently would by necessity also absorb heat slowly and consistently, making it difficult to capture most of the heat from a fast-b
34.
by bcbrown 4y ago
That's a really interesting link, but I don't think it's really the same process, or answer my objection. I don't think "melting point" is the right concept for the phenomenom of combining water and sucrose cry
35.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Fascinating stuff, thanks for the explanation.
36.
by bcbrown 4y ago
I'm curious how water would lower the melting point of solid rock. I'm aware that adding ethanol to water lowers the boiling point of the resulting solution, but that's a combination of two liquids. I can't think of a ph
37.
by bcbrown 4y ago
"My things" are things that are mine, that I own or control. When I buy a book, or a car, or a spoon, it becomes my book, or car, or spoon. But that doesn't mean it was made with me in mind. A "me thing", and this
38.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Maybe unit tests are at the wrong abstraction level to test for state-dependent bugs.
39.
by bcbrown 4y ago
I'd be impressed if AI wrote a test suite that immediately found a bunch of valid bugs. I'd be nonplussed if it wrote a test suite that "passed" on the first try. The presence of passing tests does not imply an absence o
40.
by bcbrown 4y ago
In early high school in the 90s, I got my parents to buy me an (expensive) copy of Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science by Peitgen, Jurgens, Saupe. The end of each chapter was a Basic program for calculating and displaying various f
41.
by bcbrown 4y ago
I've been to just about every national park in the lower 48. Here's some of the less-well-known ones: Great Basin has a good hike to the peak, a cave system with guided tours, a nice (summertime) campground, and hiking trails to a
42.
by bcbrown 4y ago
A nice quote that seems rather relevant right now: > To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.
43.
by bcbrown 4y ago
I'm guessing you hear a lot more about the failures/impending failures in LBO financing than you do the successes/non-defaults. You could calculate the implied probability of default from the POV of the lender by comparing th
44.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Funny too, that you're posting an archive of that site, not the site itself.
45.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Someone writes up an interesting story about a pretty neat achievement in developing a system under extreme time pressure of which they're understandably proud, and your response is to criticise a sentence from the introductory framing
46.
by bcbrown 4y ago
The fact that methane absorbs infrared/near-infrared frequencies is also the mechanism that causes it to be a greenhouse gas.
47.
by bcbrown 4y ago
When you read someone's personal account of their career, and it doesn't match your experience, your response is to stop reading it? Wouldn't you want to keep reading to see why your experience and their experience are so dif
48.
by bcbrown 4y ago
This essay mentions the work of Alfred Korzybski. The book containing his life's work is called Science and Sanity. I've read about half of it, but I found it to be very challenging to read. For anyone interested in what he has to
49.
by bcbrown 4y ago
This article makes it sound as if there's no large American Chestnuts, but that's not completely accurate. The largest trees in the US are a pair of trees in Thurston County, WA, that are 80-90' tall with ~10' circumfere
50.
by bcbrown 4y ago
That's an interesting way to think about it. In some respects it could be viewed as a way to funnel to total YC investment into the "more-functional" startups in the network. Companies that provide more value (to other startu
51.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Demeyere brand skillets are fantastic. They're fairly nonstick - I can scramble eggs with only a little sticking, hamburgers or sausages will leave residue, but it's easily cleanable. They aren't super cheap, but they won&#x2
52.
by bcbrown 4y ago
> “It could be unfair to do this, to sort of induce people to rely on the email alerts,” Bruckner explained, saying that if Coinbase started and stopped email alerts without properly notifying users and that this was proven to have “caus
53.
by bcbrown 4y ago
The company is called Darn Tough.
54.
by bcbrown 4y ago
> isn’t it an instantaneous thing and not something you need to extinguish? I'm not familiar with the details of this accident, but in general, not necessarily. Air is normally an excellent insulator. But when voltages are high enou
55.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Language in Thought and Action has deeply affected how I think about thinking. I've read it three times now, and there's one or two dozen other books from the same school of thought that I've read since reading it the first t
56.
by bcbrown 4y ago
"Many years ago," Gaspar said, taking out a copy of Moravia's The Adolescents and thumbing it as he spoke, "I had a library of books, oh, thousands of books -- never could bear to toss one out, not even the bad ones -- a
57.
by bcbrown 4y ago
It may be an ambiguous version, but it'll be the same version as the repl you get when you type `python`, and it'll be the same version that'll run your script when you type `python script.py`.
58.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Lupine is a legume, and legumes host nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Nitrogen availability is frequently the primary constraint on foliage growth.
59.
by bcbrown 4y ago
I grew up around the corner from him. I distinctly remember his house having some great halloween decorations. His comics are amazingly good.
60.
by bcbrown 4y ago
Of the languages I've used in anger, Ruby is perhaps my favorite language to write code in. I think Python and Java are both easier to use in a large shared codebase, and one of the biggest reasons is that it's sometimes a lot har

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