dguest

37 ms·

541.
by dguest 9y ago
The cost of launching something into low earth orbit is about 50K per pound (before spaceX) so I can imagine an interplanetary trajectory is quite a lot more. At this rate there are probably a lot of science projects that will never be fund
542.
by dguest 9y ago
Sticking a car in the payload is funny. But this thing is going further from the earth than all but a few dozen man-made things in history. I have to wonder if some scientist has been waiting their entire life for an opportunity like this,
543.
by dguest 9y ago
I agree, not everyone has the luxury of choosing a job they believe in, and back before Uber became uncool I can see how people would sign up. That said, we're talking about a few thousand people compared to over a million drivers, and
544.
by dguest 9y ago
> I don't think it's too big to fail. My gut reaction: There's no company the size of Uber that could die more quietly. The world's reaction would be a muffled "meh". Uber doesn't even own their most im
545.
by dguest 9y ago
So you mean I can't use <insert shitty country>'s child pornography app in the US? I know it's an extreme case, but yeah, of course countries expect people who do business in them to respect their laws.
546.
by dguest 9y ago
What's the alternative? You comply with the laws in your country of choice?
547.
by dguest 9y ago
I think the real danger you're talking about is that people are conflating the value (or usefulness) of bitcoin _as a technology_ vs the value of _bitcoins_. It's an awesome technology for what it does, and it will probably be mor
548.
by dguest 9y ago
Someone else commented on the semantic difference between the narrow definition of C++ as a specification and the looser "C++" as a part of the full stack. With regard to the full stack, I tend to agree with you, at least in the a
549.
by dguest 9y ago
Can someone explain if / how this prevents someone from just changing a single pixel and thus circumventing the hash? Are they using some kind of probabilistic hashing? Or are they just relying on the offenders to not be so clever?
550.
by dguest 9y ago
I can't agree more with this, especially with respect to undergrad. I've taught hundreds of undergrads about ohm's law so that they could go on to become doctors. And that was one of the more useful skills they learned. They
551.
by dguest 9y ago
I always assumed it was more about what you do elsewhere in life once you've invested in an "unethical" company: If I'm invested heavily in the lemonade stand, it's against my interest to point out that too much lem
552.
by dguest 9y ago
What collaborations are you talking about? The bigger experiments at CERN use C++14 and python quite a lot. There's still a bit of wrapped FORTRAN code kicking around, and we definitely use rather old school distributions, but I haven&
553.
by dguest 9y ago
Führer isn't dead in modern german unless you're talking about a person who leads. Most guide books are still called Reiseführer, and most germans have a Führerschein (driver's licence) etc.
554.
by dguest 9y ago
I think it has as much to do with how math is taught as anything: it's easy to learn how to solve an equation, but convincing yourself that you didn't screw up without looking at the back of the textbook is another thing entirely.
555.
by dguest 9y ago
I'd wait for the forking model to be fixed[1]. The current model can be really annoying when you have a large project where contributors are supposed to direct merge requests to deputies before merging with the main repository. [1]: h
556.
by dguest 9y ago
> The end game is that Uber, Lyft and taxi drivers are out of a job as chauffeur. This is true, but as someone who grew up somewhere where there's snow on the ground 6 months out of the year, I'm wondering how we're going
557.
by dguest 10y ago
Actually continental drift explains a variety of phenomena that have been falsely attributed to human exploration: English is spoken in New York, for example, because the british isles used to be connected to New England. Even the names ref
558.
by dguest 10y ago
I was hoping that along with the standardization we'd get an explanation (in english) as to what these symbols mean. I mean it's nice to know that we can standardize to: - a pair of line wobblers - two tornadoes of different inten
559.
by dguest 10y ago
Maybe a slightly bigger house is tolerable, but if my neighbor is making 10 times more than me and is able to buy his way out of legal trouble while I have to abide by the rule of law, I'm one of three things: lazy, inferior, or gettin
560.
by dguest 10y ago
This is a good summary, but we used both machine learning and maximum likelihood to discover the Higgs Boson. The difference is that we frequently use machine learning to identify the (already discovered) particles that the Higgs decays to.
561.
by dguest 10y ago
Antimatter is old news. When CERN discovered the higgs boson a few years back, we did so by looking for the higgs decay products (the higgs is really unstable), a significant fraction of which are antimatter. For example: One of the most im
562.
by dguest 10y ago
I work at CERN. Before I worked there I worked on trapping "normal" atoms (as opposed to antimatter ones). So some of us do understand this stuff.
563.
by dguest 10y ago
When calculus is taught badly no one knows how to apply it even when the problems are staring them in the face. I TA'ed physics at one of the top Ivy League universities in the US, and what I found amazing was that we didn't requi
564.
by dguest 10y ago
This is awesome. We're trying to do something similar but moving in the opposite direction language-wise by implementing the models in C++: https://github.com/dguest/lwtnn The idea is to have something lightweight
565.
by dguest 10y ago
You say a south pole colony would be hard enough as though we don't have one. We have a south pole colony [0], and there are a half dozen multi-million dollar experiments there that must be manned year round. [0]: https://en
566.
by dguest 10y ago
Does anyone actually have data showing that frequent password changes lead to better security? Because to me requiring frequent password change seems like the ultimate non-technical management blunder: management wants to say they did somet
567.
by dguest 10y ago
Sure, and no one is saying it was a good idea in the first place. CINT was notoriously bad as a C++ interpreter, in fact it was marketed as being able to parse 90% of valid C++ code. Imagine someone selling a compiler that way? But CERN dev
568.
by dguest 10y ago
I'm confused by all the acronyms, and I know CERN pretty well… what is M.G.? What is P.M.?…
569.
by dguest 10y ago
It was a replacement for the old C++ interpreter, CINT, which was already a central part of a lot of CERN code. Building Cling was probably easier than maintaining CINT.
570.
by dguest 10y ago
What a lot of people aren't mentioning is the legacy factor. We had a "C++ interpreter" called CINT for a long time, which the ROOT data analysis framework was built around. It was, to put it bluntly, a mess: it had inconsist

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