cletus

147 ms·

1021.
by cletus 6y ago
Lots of talk about shrinking the magnets required (which is a big part of ITER’s cost). Useful of course but the article doesn’t mention the big problems of neutron embrittlement.
1022.
by cletus 6y ago
If I had to choose a language to teach programmers to absolute beginners, I think I'd actually go with Go. I understand the predilection for Python but there are some parts of Python that are just... odd.
1023.
by cletus 6y ago
The sad fact is that woolly mammoths are gone. I mean you might be able to extract DNA and gestate it in an elephant or whatever but it won’t be a woolly mammoth, not a wild one anyway. Why? Because it won’t know what to do. They’ve shown t
1024.
by cletus 6y ago
Note that often equity holders are the biggest losers in a Chapter 11. Secured creditors and bond holders may well end up owning the company.
1025.
by cletus 6y ago
It’s a painful lesson to learn but the key here odd to recognize when someone is a sufficiently large customer than a default represents an existential risk to your business. Businesses tend to go the other way and be more accommodating to
1026.
by cletus 6y ago
"Chunking" is an important concept here. Think about learning to read in.a script you're unfamiliar with (eg Cyrillic if your native language uses Roman script). You need to learn the shape of the letters so you have to keep
1027.
by cletus 6y ago
IT's not clear to me from this article why exactly a Big sur update needs 600MB of firmware updates and ???GB of dynamic linked libraries. I must confess to not really knowing the design and consequences of Big Sur's sealed system
1028.
by cletus 6y ago
Some general thoughts: First, let me say that on mobile devices, I literally loathe Face ID. There are lots of reasons for this: - Fingerprints are just more convenient. Apple, for example, argued the false positive rate way too high. For m
1029.
by cletus 6y ago
Yeah this has increasingly become my view [1]. It seems to me that Bitcoin has only really solved one problem: to allow transactions that governments don't allow and there's really two classes of that: 1. Illegal stuff 2. Capital
1030.
by cletus 6y ago
A flat tax with an tax free income threshold would actually be great. For example: - Exclude the first $50,000 - Tax the rest at 25% - Eliminate deductions (this will never happen). This includes the standard deduction. - Make efforts to al
1031.
by cletus 6y ago
So this is wrong on several fronts. First, taxing companies is not "double taxation". Companies are taxed on profits. Paying taxes on behalf of employees and paying taxes on profits are mutually exclusive. Second, not taxing compa
1032.
by cletus 6y ago
To be fair, I have found Java’s JRE to be relatively painless. It’s fairly simple to have multiple installed and choose which one to use as a command line option. Python OTOH...
1033.
by cletus 6y ago
Compile time memory safety? Unless you have an existing code base or a necessary integration or requirement that demands it, I honestly wouldn’t start a C/C++ project in 2021 all other things being equal.
1034.
by cletus 6y ago
Why? Well, for one, Go produces a statically linked binary and C# requires a runtime be installed. If we’ve learned nothing from Java and Python, it’s that managing runtimes and environment can be a huge pain point. EDIT: swipe keyboard put
1035.
by cletus 6y ago
Yeah, I'm on board with the idea that expensive or not-recommended operations should be more verbose to discourage them. But you'll find other expensive operations (eg prepending an element to a slice) are much less verbose. At a
1036.
by cletus 6y ago
There's an episode of the (excellent) podcast Hardcore History by Dan Carlin that explores the topic of MAD and articulates it extremely well (IMHO). The episode is called the Destroyer of Worlds [1]. [1]: https://www.dancar
1037.
by cletus 6y ago
That's.... actually movies in general (IMHO). To me the last 20 years has been the true Golden Age of Television because streaming has enabled the rise of serialized TV as the best medium to adapt long form written content. Movies are
1038.
by cletus 6y ago
I'm a little surprised deleting an element from a list is this hard but that seems to be a case. That seems like an API oversight. You shouldn't be writing your own code for what is a fundamental operation. As for leaking Goroutin
1039.
by cletus 6y ago
The mistake a lot of companies are making is they view ML as a replacement for humans. It's not. At least, it's nowhere near that now. You should view ML as an enhancement for humans. So the problem here is that no ML system witho
1040.
by cletus 6y ago
So no one knows for sure of course but many suspect that early mining by likely Satoshi owned wallets (2009 era) yielded some 1.1m BTC, worth >$50B today. So the likely reasons someone sitting in a notional value of $50B+ who hasn't
1041.
by cletus 6y ago
Keynes said "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Trying to short Bitcoin seems like a great way of becoming more anecdata for this.
1042.
by cletus 6y ago
I am beginning to wonder if energy is what will eventually doom Bitcoin. Currently, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina [1]. Another article suggests the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is equivalent to New Zealand [2]. It's not ju
1043.
by cletus 6y ago
Applying for US citizenship is actually pretty straightforward unless there is something weird about your case (eg a conviction). Nowadays it can take a lot of clock time. But the application itself (N-400) is easy.
1044.
by cletus 6y ago
I think a couple of good things may come out of the pandemic: 1. Big companies being more amenable to remote work. I don't see a total shift to remote to be likely or even desirable but a partial shift is good; and 2. An end to the ult
1045.
by cletus 6y ago
I saw several of these attempted at Google. They never went anywhere. Probably the most public was Google Wave. Here's the problem: you can't create the same environment without the same risks and rewards. Google employees get com
1046.
by cletus 6y ago
A gym's ideal customer is one who pays but never uses the facilities. One can imagine that if you often used the facilities, particularly at peak times, they almost want to discourage you,
1047.
by cletus 6y ago
There are several publications I would willingly support (eg The Atlantic, the New Yorker) but I don’t and this is the reason why: I absolutely refuse to subscribe to services that are going to be a hassle to cancel. It’s the gym business m
1048.
by cletus 6y ago
Modern physics is well beyond the point where I, as a layman, can really understand it. It still doesn't make sense to me how gravity is put in the same bucket as the other three "fundamental" forces. Since the universe is ex
1049.
by cletus 6y ago
I worked for a time in Zurich years ago so this may not be current but there are some tech jobs in Switzerland (eg Google has a decently sized office there). It's less than in, say, London. Switzerland is actually a dream for car-free
1050.
by cletus 6y ago
Consider a simplified tax system: - 10% of the first $100,000 - 20% of the remaining - The standard deduction is $20,000 Now consider three incomes: $40,000, $80,000 and $200,000. 1. $40,000 is $4,000 (10%) tax to $2,000 (5%) 2. $80,000 is

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