comicjk

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271.
by comicjk 7y ago
Residence also obligates one to pay taxes, and all of the infrastructure you mentioned can be improved with money.
272.
by comicjk 8y ago
The nature of a PhD is to study one sub-discipline long enough to reach the edge of human knowledge, and then expand it. Often this is so difficult that a set of multiple diverse projects is not practical. But not always; in my PhD I worked
273.
by comicjk 8y ago
If you like Herodotus, you should also try Thucydides, who wrote just slightly later. His attitude towards history is strikingly modern, to the point when it's a shock when he mentions some "new" piece of technology that&#x27
274.
by comicjk 8y ago
The salary comment does seem out of place compared to all the issues about the advisor/student relationship. But, as an independent axis, money can reduce stress. The easiest example is a shorter commute and more reliable transportatio
275.
by comicjk 8y ago
The premise is that Sri Lanka has unusually low crime and unusually high suicide, and the following argument is trying to explain that. But judged by murder rate (the most consistent crime stat), Sri Lanka doesn't have unusually low cr
276.
by comicjk 8y ago
Your premise is mistaken. Sri Lanka's murder rate is lower than that in the US, but that doesn't make it low by international standards. I doubt that Buddhism has much to do with it. For example, both Israel and Jordan have much l
277.
by comicjk 8y ago
Commercial airplanes are much safer than cars (because they're rigorously maintained, observed, and operated by professionals). Little ultralight planes might be the best analogy for this project - but they're used by thrill-seeke
278.
by comicjk 8y ago
If you're eating a lot of spinach, you could just be experiencing the well-known effects of dietary fiber.
279.
by comicjk 8y ago
A gravity wave detector works by having mass which gets influenced by gravity. But this influence is a two-way street: the photon feels the detector's gravity at exactly the same time as the detector feels the photon's gravity. If
280.
by comicjk 8y ago
If you have a gravity detector that can distinguish where a photon's energy is localized, it also works as a photon detector in the QM measurement sense, and will collapse the wavefunction in the same way. Also, remember that gravity w
281.
by comicjk 8y ago
Quantum mechanics only explicitly says what will happen when you do a measurement, not how to visualize what happens between measurements. Many different interpretations can be useful for visualizing the wavefunction. I actually like the AN
282.
by comicjk 8y ago
Forcing companies to spread out doesn't make sense - they get value from being close together. The network effect is much more important than infrastructure.
283.
by comicjk 8y ago
To go further, I suspect that many of those companies would not have been founded at all, reducing the innovation of the world as a whole. Even all countries, put together, are not a zero-sum game: freer movement of people can increase tota
284.
by comicjk 8y ago
I agree with most of what you say, but it's not true that "we legalized tons of opioids made by US manufacturers" - being a prescription drug is far from being legal. Recall that fentanyl, morphine, amphetamines, and even met
285.
by comicjk 8y ago
In the context of limited time and information when making decisions - i.e. real life - removing an option that's (on average) a mistake can make the average chooser better off. That's obvious; it's why we have guardrails on
286.
by comicjk 8y ago
I used scipy's sparse matrices - that was actually a key part of the project.
287.
by comicjk 8y ago
Learning C is easy, but getting a piece of C integrated with your Python code isn't. It can be done well, but bad software is littered with things that could have been done well. I recently had a project at work of ripping out a bad C
288.
by comicjk 8y ago
You're wondering why groups with names like "Skull and Bones" have an occult reputation? They cultivate it deliberately because it's cool. Yes, the public takes this cosplay too seriously, but they don't deserve all
289.
by comicjk 8y ago
Likewise, it's easy to read strongly liberal/conservative takes on the news without being convinced by them. They are pitched to an audience with very different priors, and often are not even trying to convince anyone else.
290.
by comicjk 8y ago
This isn't just crude oil: it's "crude oil and refined petroleum products". Oil refining is something the US has massive capacity for; we can ship oil in, refine it, and ship gasoline etc back out, often cheaper than ref
291.
by comicjk 8y ago
Laxative artificial sweeteners have the problem that people don't dose food as carefully as medicine. I'm reminded of the famous Haribo maltitol gummy bears, which when eaten more than about 20 at a time would cause a...powerful
292.
by comicjk 8y ago
In its lifetime, that Jeep will dump 100+ tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which spreads over the entire planet and is near-impossible to concentrate again. The impact of disposal of the car itself - a couple of tons of solids in a particul
293.
by comicjk 8y ago
A media company doesn't have a competitive advantage when making unrelated products, compared to companies that specialize in those products. The Alex Jones model is profitable because he exaggerates the benefits of his products and tr
294.
by comicjk 8y ago
The most realistic current proposal for an interstellar science mission is to avoid onboard propulsion altogether using a fleet of tiny laser-accelerated probes. Each one would be a very thin mirror, shot from orbit to the stars by a ground
295.
by comicjk 8y ago
I like the idea of storing the precision by default. Some algorithms already do this in order to keep track of what they're losing in lossy arithmetic operations, such as adding small numbers to big ones. It would be nontrivial to impl
296.
by comicjk 8y ago
Example of the crazy optimizations that apply here: I once got a 20% speedup in a standard recursive search algorithm by abandoning the native function call stack and making my own search-specific stack data structure. Since these algorithm
297.
by comicjk 8y ago
The peer review process is halfway between "accept on good faith" and "reproduce the results". And it's not a flawless compromise. As a peer reviewer, I check that an incoming paper is sane, says something new, and
298.
by comicjk 8y ago
What OP is saying is that movies are already copyable and yet blockbusters are still being made.
299.
by comicjk 8y ago
You could give poor families a housing subsidy, which drops off smoothy as a function of income. You can't give a family half a house, but you can easily give them half as big a subsidy, knowing that they can more than make up the diff
300.
by comicjk 8y ago
Speaking of misleading, your Bill Gates analogy is quite misleading too. These figures about new electric power are sums over a quarter-year, so small statistical fluctuations like finding a penny (or opening a single power plant) are smoot

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