danblick

14 ms·

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by danblick 9y ago
From what I've heard of the Jobs/PARC visit I don't think I'd characterize it that way. In Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators" he says that Xerox had taken an ownership stake in Apple and some higher-ups d
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by danblick 9y ago
I haven't heard of Plenty before. At first I thought they wanted to build indoor farms in cities, but I guess you could still build them someplace else (where real estate is fairly cheap) and make turnaround faster by taking advan
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by danblick 9y ago
Your comment reminds me of reading something, I think maybe from Judith Donath, about how throw-away accounts tend to be bad for online communities. Something like ~ https://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-we-need-online
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by danblick 9y ago
Companies have an incentive to make their employees more productive, but other things being equal, you'd prefer to teach your employees non-transferable skills rather than transferable ones, since non-transferable skills can&#x27
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by danblick 9y ago
Maybe it's not about grocery per se but rather about meal delivery?
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by danblick 9y ago
Yes, you could abuse that power to allow double-spending. For what it's worth, I'd say I'm a bit concerned about this, but it seems many aren't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14485430
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by danblick 9y ago
Is "byzantine consensus" an appropriate term? I think it's typically used when there's agreement on the list of nodes participating in the network. (The nodes can agree to change the list of participants, Lamport wrote
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by danblick 9y ago
I wonder if Uber's investors have an unusual perspective on women's issues: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding-round/3561e0558d4fa07f0dc...
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by danblick 9y ago
Just to share something I think is fun: Modern German has separate formal and informal pronouns ("du bist" vs. "Sie sind") and verbs. English used to have them too ("thou art"/"you are"). Even
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by danblick 9y ago
Strangely, I was just reading about the costs of prison in California because I read an article about "the grave injustice of mandatory sentencing" [1] and was curious about the associated costs to taxpayers. I don't feel per
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by danblick 9y ago
I have to say: I think Snowden is a hero, but based on what I know right now I'm not sympathetic to Reality Winner. To me, it seems like this leak undermined several ongoing investigations and hurt our chances of getting to the truth.
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by danblick 9y ago
My concern is that in the long term you'll see more and more consolidation of mining power, because economic forces will tend to push things in that direction. (That's what the articles I linked to above are saying.) At some poin
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by danblick 9y ago
What do you mean by that?
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by danblick 9y ago
As long as we're speculating: I kind of dream that maybe we'll see programming environments that take advantage of VR. Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "Wh
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by danblick 9y ago
The situation reminds me a little bit of the Keynesian beauty contest: what matters isn't what I think of bitcoin, it's what other people think. Do I think the average person buying bitcoin today is even aware of these problems?
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by danblick 9y ago
The main reason I don't own any bitcoin is that I don't think the economics of mining make sense in the long term. Specifically: bitcoin depends on distributed mining power in order to prevent individual miners from being able t
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by danblick 9y ago
My thought: just because social attitudes change and something develops a stigma doesn't mean that thing won't still be commercially successful for a long, long time. Television, fast food and sugary drinks, over-sized cars, tele
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by danblick 9y ago
> So yes, it seems that all domestic stallions descend from just one ancestor stallion. That's amazing! I once a class on population genetics in which the instructor commented that the "mitochondrial Eve" idea is kind of o
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by danblick 9y ago
> Minimum wage was an antiracism policy aimed at forcing the Deep South Could you offer some support for this claim? There is a recent book called "Illiberal Reformers" that seems to suggest exactly the opposite: that minimum
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by danblick 9y ago
If you're talking about small (last-mile) deliveries, there's a big difference between manned and unmanned delivery: if your package is ~1 kg and your pilot is ~80 kg then an unmanned craft can be ~1% the size of a manned one. On
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by danblick 9y ago
Well, if your craft is unmanned then it can be very small, which makes the idea appealing for the last mile and less appealing as you start moving cargos the size of a human anyway.
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by danblick 9y ago
I doubt these would be multi-rotors as opposed to helicopters or planes. If you read a little about "actuator disk theory" it shows that small rotors are much less efficient than large ones, and if you're lifting heavy weigh
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by danblick 9y ago
If you're interested in this topic, I would highly recommend Neil Postman's book, "Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business". I agree with claims that Postman predicted Trump's rise b
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by danblick 9y ago
As a kid I remember learning that the atomic bombs contributed to Japan's surrender in WW2, but as a grown-up I also learned that Russia (a neighboring country) declared war on Japan two days after the first bomb was dropped, and I won
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by danblick 9y ago
Strikes me as a Sokal-style joke about bad writing in philosophy. "A glut is a proposition that is both true and false. The rule for assigning gluts is the mirror image of the rule for assigning gaps: A statement is true exactly if it
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by danblick 9y ago
This is a joke, right?
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by danblick 9y ago
Why does Safari struggle to open files in common and free formats?
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by danblick 9y ago
I agree that's something we should be concerned about. I don't think minimum wage laws address that issue though. If you want to help improve standards of living around the world, reduce immigration restrictions so that people ca
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by danblick 9y ago
The term "information good" is from economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_good An information good is one for which it's very cheap to produce additional units. Unfortunately, I'm pr
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by danblick 9y ago
I don't feel that strongly about artificial sweeteners. Just responding to this comment: "that's what science IS. Providing the ability to answer any and all questions about our nature."

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