beat

86 ms·

691.
by beat 7y ago
Thanks for the link. I'm getting one.
692.
by beat 7y ago
Is conference room air making us dumber? No, the stuff we do in conference rooms is making us dumber.
693.
by beat 7y ago
Although I'm not a big nuclear power fan for various reasons, I'm really happy to see someone approaching it with an eye to realistic safety, modern economics, and compatibility with a renewable-based grid. It'll be interesti
694.
by beat 7y ago
The perfect is the enemy of the good. We have a carbon problem now , that is causing real damage now . We shouldn't be turning our noses up at "stopgap" just because it doesn't do everything we can dream of doing.
695.
by beat 7y ago
Look at it from an economics standpoint... because of the efficiency loss, energy from this process would always be twice as expensive (or more) than freshly generated renewable electricity. So you'd only want to use it in places where
696.
by beat 7y ago
But that's just being narrowly pedantic. You're asking if we can; I'm asking if we should. To be really ugly about it, suicide is a 100% effective way to prevent cancer. Doesn't mean it's a solution, because cancer
697.
by beat 7y ago
Ok, let's put this a more complex way. There are problems caused by drug prohibition that have nothing to do with addiction - namely, the black market. Prohibition creates a market where courts and the legal system cannot be used to se
698.
by beat 7y ago
I don't think it's "incredibly clear" at all.
699.
by beat 7y ago
I wonder how many people get killed walking into traffic while staring at their smartphones?
700.
by beat 7y ago
A substantial fraction of people become addicted to opiates when they are not freely available, too. Which begs the question... is addiction the problem? Or are the problems consequences of restricted availability? To put it another way
701.
by beat 7y ago
Signals play nice with threads. It's sloppy thread programming that doesn't play nice with signals.
702.
by beat 7y ago
You're being pedantic. The point is, many people use that lobby. Sure, the owners can legally run 24x7 porn on the screens if they really wanted, but wouldn't we all be better off with no screens there at all?
703.
by beat 7y ago
Speaking of computing environments... the minimalist nature of HN is one reason I allow myself to keep using it, even while shutting FB/Twitter/etc out. I'm seriously thinking of switching my computing over to an iPad, to get
704.
by beat 7y ago
I went on a major social media purge two months ago today. I feel a lot smarter - like, able to work my brain better. I'm seeing it in my political thought. I used to debate politics incessantly online, with the usual partisan bounda
705.
by beat 7y ago
The boundary between "developing world" and "first world" is a lot blurrier than you think. Is Iran a "developing world" nation, or a "first world" nation? Their birth rate is lower than that of Europ
706.
by beat 7y ago
Why does it have to collapse? The failure of capitalism might be just a brief blip as we transition to the Next Big Thing.
707.
by beat 7y ago
So what if capitalism (and socialism) falls apart? Feudalism fell apart two centuries ago, and we're fine. It'll just be replaced by something that more accurately reflects available technology.
708.
by beat 7y ago
The population growth isn't coming from new births, which have leveled off. Rather, it's coming from people living longer. This is true in every nation that manages to crawl out of utter poverty - within a generation or two, birth
709.
by beat 7y ago
I have a whole lightning talk about this, called "Why Software Sucks". The premise is that we are always dealing with the boundary between "barely works" and "doesn't work". Adding more stability, more fea
710.
by beat 7y ago
Wow! Glad I missed that one!
711.
by beat 7y ago
I've cut most social media and cell phone use out of my life (I still allow myself HN and a particular musician's forum). Something that drives me nuts now is people staring at their phones while ostensibly hanging out with me and
712.
by beat 7y ago
Signals are fundamental to the unix design. That'd be like "I want a car, but without any wheels, because wheels are often implicated in crashes". Depending on OS internals within threading is a problem. Libraries that implem
713.
by beat 7y ago
That's because mmap() predates multithreading (at least as a usable production approach rather than a lab experiment). It's best for IPC, not sharing between threads. I forget sometimes that the young'ns never grew up in a wo
714.
by beat 7y ago
The first serious bug I ever dealt with professionally was a result of the hazards of mmap(). This was 1995, and I was working on AIX with a system that used a series of shared memory buffers for IPC. It was originally written with shmat(),
715.
by beat 7y ago
I can't help but localize this to my own home. I live in the "Twin Cities", on the Minneapolis side. The two cities are different (and competitive) in many ways. One key difference is their attitude toward historic preservati
716.
by beat 7y ago
I grew up with tractors from my dad's landscaping business (old Case Construction Kings, with a PTO and farm-like attachment system rather than a backhoe). It was always funny at a worksite, when one of the college kids he'd hire
717.
by beat 7y ago
One interesting suggestion I saw for controlling costs was putting a cap on downforce. This would end the incredibly expensive race to the bottom aero war. Better low profile tyres would be great for performance (and looks), but it'd b
718.
by beat 7y ago
I think it's more likely that the next season, everyone else would be doing the extra pedal thing too. That's kinda how F1 works. Someone comes up with an innovation, and the next season it's either banned or universally adop
719.
by beat 7y ago
Meh. Introducing DRS because they've made overtaking too difficult? That's a kludge, not an innovation.
720.
by beat 7y ago
I've found F2 to be much more exciting than F1 this year, and I think a big part of it is that the cars don't have as much "innovation", and are much closer to identical performance-wise. Barring some surprise changes or

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