bmcusick

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121.
by bmcusick 9y ago
Robot production lines need robot technicians to support them. I doubt you'll find many of those in Bangladesh any time soon.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
$0.33 per shirt, anywhere in the world, is nearly as cheap as the cheapest sweatshop markets. I expect most commentary will look at this using a US vs China thing, but I'm more worried about SE Asia and Africa. They need to climb up th
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Sigh. I mean, they're right, but they're also still missing the concept of "What kind of fat?". Different kinds of fats effect you differently. This has been known for a long time. One my favorite blog posts summarizing
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by bmcusick 9y ago
I've reached app saturation. I already have apps to do all the things I use my phone for. Really new use cases don't come around often.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
If you're going to put 20 million tons of perfectly identical gram-sized craft into orbit somewhere, it seems a lot more sensible to launch a factory to the Moon rather than launch all that mass from Earth. The CO2 added to the atmosph
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Maybe I could have said it less bluntly, but I replied because I favor honest discussion over silence. If I'm going to not do someone a favor, I think it's better to say why than to ghost them.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
I knew it would be unpopular. But communities aren't like cool articles. You cannot just share them with anyone without affecting their quality and nature. There's a reason that fraternities and such work on an invitation-only sys
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by bmcusick 9y ago
I have one site that checks all these boxes and I love it. And I'd never post the link to a HN thread. A good culture and community is a fragile thing.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
If crypto-currencies really succeed, they're going to be worth a lot more than they are currently. They're still a really tiny market. For comparison, Bitcoin is ~60 billion USD and all the gold ever mined would be worth trillions
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Losing weight is about two rates: your calorie consumption and your calorie burn. Calorie consumption is easy to see. It's how much food you eat. The numbers on the nutrition label might not be perfectly accurate but they're good
131.
by bmcusick 9y ago
> How does energy usage scale with the number of users in general? You're confusing Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin nodes. Bitcoin nodes verify transactions. You can run a Bitcoin node off your home PC. It doesn't use much energy. B
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by bmcusick 9y ago
No, sorry, that's not how Bitcoin works either. If the whole world used Bitcoin and the market cap of Bitcoin was over a trillion dollars, a 51% attacker could still only double-spend its own transactions. As long a public key crypto i
133.
by bmcusick 9y ago
>> and it's no more harmful than any other use of electricity > That's a tautological statement. Sure, if you take it out of the context of the rest of my comment. But OP asked if Bitcoin would stop being an ecological di
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by bmcusick 9y ago
> If the world's economies ran on bitcoin we would need a stupendous amount of energy to keep the miners running. You've misunderstood something about Bitcoin if you think this is true. Bitcoin miners use resources based on the
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Bitcoin mines are in western China and Oregon precisely for the abundant and cheap hydro power. That's not so bad, ecologically speaking. Bitcoin is only as ecologically harmful as the source of the electricity used to run the miners,
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by bmcusick 9y ago
I recall a character from a Neal Stephenson novel who killed themselves after their retina implant got hacked and they were shown non-stop advertisements even when sleeping.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Arguably the third thing is ISRU (In-Space Resource Utilization), aka, mining asteroids for fuel and materials. But that's not immediately necessary and doesn't count as "around the corner".
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Fully & Quickly Reusable Rockets (refuel & refly, like jets) Obviously both SpaceX and Blue Origin are the leaders here, but once they do it the other majors will either have to build the same thing or drop out of the industry. Ther
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by bmcusick 9y ago
> This is one of those occasions where a Hacker News appears to think they've thought of something that someone who's been thinking about this stuff for a very long time, and has the money and track record to back it up, disagr
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by bmcusick 9y ago
All true. But the base of the pyramid is that Japan doesn't have the legal and regulatory barriers to construction we do, so their infrastructure just costs a lot less. That makes everything else (like fares) more affordable, which inc
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by bmcusick 9y ago
I love Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX, but I just don't see Hyperloop/Boring Co as viable or useful. It's true that LA traffic sucks, but the only solution you need is good transit planning with existing technology. Throw in s
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by bmcusick 9y ago
BREAKING: Building a car factory and battery supply chain requires a lot of up front capital.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Twitter Lists that I curate myself, The Old Reader (RSS), Hckrnews, Google News
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by bmcusick 9y ago
> Teaching is an incredibly valuable job. Almost no job is paid the full value it produces. There's always a split between the buyer of the job (whoever is paying the wage) and the seller of the job (who is receiving the wage). If t
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by bmcusick 9y ago
One factor in Tesla's favor then is their stated objective of handling the solar roof installation in house. Unless they resort to the same shady practices that Verizon uses for tower installation, direct control (and responsibility fo
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Right. Great point. It could cut risks in half if it lasts twice as long.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Maybe. I saw a Google X talk a couple years ago from some grad students at MIT that wanted to build a nuclear power plant that closed the fuel cycle loop. (which is what you're talking about). They made some very grand promises about h
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Plus with Tesla's solar roof, you might say that the additional risk of solar is zero, since it's (probably, I'm guessing) no more dangerous to install than any other roof.
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Not to detract from your larger point, but rooftop solar is not most of the solar market. Utility scale solar panels (the fields of solar panels on 10' poles) is a lot bigger, and has lower risk. Another thing to think about is that wi
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by bmcusick 9y ago
Ctrl+F "Solar", "Wind". No matches found. That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list? Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do p

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