cletus

41 ms·

271.
by cletus 4y ago
Even on the issue of accelerating and decelerating to a system you fly through or near, in the case of a colony ship you would need to carry that fuel and pay the energy costs for housing it, accelerating it and decelerating it. With a rogu
272.
by cletus 4y ago
So for a colony to last centuries in interstellar space with little to no prospect of resupply of any kind, you have to build in an awful lot of redundancy. You also need to cater for growth. You need a lot of infrastructure for long term c
273.
by cletus 4y ago
This is something I've thought about on and off for awhile. For completeness, I believe that the speed of light is a hard limit (and no I don't believe in any end-runs around this like warp drives, folding space or wormholes). Sec
274.
by cletus 4y ago
Civ games go through a cycle. When they're first released there tends to be a lot of issues and gaps. Subsequent expansions tend to fill out those gaps. The expansions for Civ4 added a lot, for example. I played at least 100 hours of C
275.
by cletus 4y ago
Turn-based is best for single-player games. After all, with multiple people, you end up waiting for somebody to take their turns. If turns are sequential you end up a lot of time waiting. Real-time is generally a better fit for multiplayer.
276.
by cletus 4y ago
A true successor to the Civ4 mod Fall From Heaven 2 [1]. As an aside, I enjoyed Civ4 way more than 5/6. They might have hexes and Civ4 (and earlier) may suffer from the Stack of Doom problem but I don't enjoy the dance of units th
277.
by cletus 4y ago
Carding conventions like bidding conventions are public. Let me give you some examples. When defending a trump contract and you, as a defender, lead a side suit, what card you lead describes your holding. An example is you tend to lead top
278.
by cletus 4y ago
It's a shame that Bridge's popularity is waning because it is a very interesting and skilful game. It suffers from having a relatively high barrier to entry. A lot of comments here are from people who clearly have never played the
279.
by cletus 4y ago
A little over 2,000 years ago was the height of Rome. 2,000 years before that the dominant empire not that far from there was Assyria. 2,000 years before that it was Mesopotamia and woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. This is about our
280.
by cletus 4y ago
I hope this is successful. I really do. Given the long dormancy of HIV I really wonder how success is going to be effectively measured. Won't it take years? The mechanics of how a single cell works is mind-blowing. The mechanics of how
281.
by cletus 4y ago
Here's one thing people who don't live in NYC may not understand: many streets have built up buildings on both sides. In an open area with normal low-density houses a lot of sound would dissipate into the open air. In NYC it refle
282.
by cletus 4y ago
Pretty much everything is more complicated than people (including engineers) think. Take a simple example: selling clothing in a retail store. Sounds simple right? You have an inventory of items and someone pays for it. Should be a simple t
283.
by cletus 4y ago
I used OKRs on several teams to varying degrees at Google. Not a fan. Here are my complaints: 1. It makes organizations slow and inflexible. I used to joke that as soon as another team was involved in something you needed to do it would pro
284.
by cletus 4y ago
I agree 100%. Compiler errors are strictly superior to runtime errors. It's as simple as that.
285.
by cletus 4y ago
IMHO the #1 thing you can do for developer productivity is to reduce the development feedback loop to under 30 seconds and preferably under 10. Why? Longer than that and you have two choices: 1. Work on simultaneous tasks at once. This incu
286.
by cletus 4y ago
Black holes created from energy are called Kugelblitz black holes [1]. The article correctly points out the difficulty of doing so with traditional lasers. But if we can ever figure out a way to reflect (and thus lase) gamma rays (or some o
287.
by cletus 4y ago
So Activision-blizzard has been mired in controversy for several years now. Lawsuits, scandals, etc. A lot of content creators have quit producing content for their games and people wonder if Blizzard can recover. IMHO Blizzard is one good
288.
by cletus 4y ago
I like the simplicity and how opinionated Go is. There's typically one way to do things and that's incredibly useful. But lack of real enums for me falls into the "How is this a thing?" bucket. Like Java introduced what
289.
by cletus 4y ago
All of the factors I listed apply to China. But even though both countries have similar populations, around two-thirds of H1B applicants are Indian nationals. Bodyshops are a big factor here. This flood of H1B applications is a big factor i
290.
by cletus 4y ago
This is an emotional subject. I've gone through this but come from a country that has a relatively easy path. The source of the huge delay for Indian-born people is these four facts: 1. India has a population exceeding one billion; 2.
291.
by cletus 4y ago
This is a really good account of the immigration system. I've gone through this myself. My path was significantly easier. As an Australian citizen, I got an E3 instead of an H1B. This is both easier to get and has no uncertainty with a
292.
by cletus 4y ago
I guess I've been living in the US too long because I just don't understand some (not in this article to be clear) like to shit on Crossrail. I happened to be living in London in the early 2000s at the inception of the project and
293.
by cletus 4y ago
The seach result speedtest is unrelated and was being developed at the same time IIRC. It has a similar philosophy to the Ookla speedtest: just to test if your connection is sufficient and not test the max capacity.
294.
by cletus 4y ago
I worked on Google Fiber and one of the things I did was write a pure-JS speed test. At the time, speedtest.net still used Flash. Why did we need this? Installers used Chromebooks to verify an installation so we wanted to be able to tell if
295.
by cletus 4y ago
This is roughly equivalent to saying we should put people in jail for 5 years for speeding because for some people a $50 fine just isn't that much. Punishments need to be proportionate. Executing people for stealing hub caps may well r
296.
by cletus 4y ago
Yes, because these plans are actually unlimited. There are no quotas. There are no soft caps. There are no hard caps. There is no throttling of your traffic beyond a certain threshold. Why? Because the ACCC outlawed any plan calling itsel
297.
by cletus 4y ago
In what world do you think the ACCC, which only really has jurisdiction over Australia, should fine Uber some large portion of their worldwide revenue of $6B for misleading messaging about cancellations?
298.
by cletus 4y ago
It's kinda wild to see people here dismissing this. The US equivalent to the ACCC is the FTC is absolutely toothless and ineffective. The ACCC has teeth and has had real impact on many industries. For example, ISPs were essentially for
299.
by cletus 4y ago
The issue is supply. It's limited. And of those you can't just walk into a store and buy one. You have to be a valued customer. This typically means buying things that aren't watches that have much higher profit margins (sinc
300.
by cletus 4y ago
So I really like mechanical watches but I've kind of lost interest because it's nigh-on impossible to buy anything new (unless you're a high net worth individual) and the secondary market is utterly insane. Example: Rolex Day

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