leoedin

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301.
by leoedin 3y ago
I suspect I’d read a lot more non-fiction books if I couldn’t access the short form equivalent on my phone readily. But instead I read articles shared on HN or Reddit, with a sprinkling of non fiction books mixed in. Compared to my dad, who
302.
by leoedin 3y ago
Why do you think a linear city would give you 20 minute access to any place in the city? Clearly travel time would increase linearly with distance.
303.
by leoedin 3y ago
Yeah, I'm really struggling to understand why a linear city is appealing. I suppose if you set a hard limit of one train line in your city, then building it along that train line might make sense. You'd spend a lot of time on that
304.
by leoedin 3y ago
The train is the most convenient method of mid distance inter-city travel in the UK because it’s so fast. Nobody’s driving the 4 hours between London and Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds for a business meeting when the train takes 2 hours. In
305.
by leoedin 3y ago
I interviewed once with a company that made rice and grain sorters. They have a massive hopper at the top and pass the grain in a curtain through a machine vision camera, and then decide in real time where each grain goes based on the image
306.
by leoedin 3y ago
I worked for a startup developing robot arms for a while. What we found was that giving someone a robot arm - even one with reasonable APIs and no cost to them - didn't really help because the hard part is making useful automations. Mo
307.
by leoedin 3y ago
Most of these robots will use servo motors - that gives you dexterity but means that holding any position requires constant holding torque - which means limited payload and a lot of wasted power. For a heavy fan (don't forget the react
308.
by leoedin 3y ago
Yeah, it feels like this pattern of “ship an open source product, get popular, try to backtrack” ignores the fact that the only reason you got popular in the first place was the open source aspect. Would anyone have given mongo a look if it
309.
by leoedin 3y ago
This is actually a great outcome. All dependencies are a security risk - the argument for not vendoring every dependency is that you should keep external dependencies up to date to avoid known security issues. If the external dependency has
310.
by leoedin 3y ago
Yeah it’s a weird take. The hard part about learning rust is borrow semantics and understanding the kinds of architectures the compiler will and won’t allow.
311.
by leoedin 3y ago
True - buildings and exposed rock probably stay still, leaf litter and trees definitely don’t. You’d need to find enough of a stable reference to run your correlation - probably more useful in an urban area.
312.
by leoedin 3y ago
I wonder if you could make a completely offline location service by correlating the results of a local 3d scan of the ground to the global model? Cruise missiles already do something similar. How big is a mm scale model of the globe? It wou
313.
by leoedin 3y ago
Yeah - my experience of watching baby ultrasounds was that I had no idea what I was looking at until the technician told me. Maybe there's an occasional clear image of a head or nose or something, but the rest of the time it's jus
314.
by leoedin 3y ago
They're also incredibly active compared to any "civilised" people. There's a lot of evidence that sedentary lifestyles are bad for bodies. Presumably they're also, on average, younger than "civilised" peop
315.
by leoedin 3y ago
This is an excellent article. The mention of the Croydon "SPD2" planning document was really interesting too - I hadn't heard about it. It's exactly what we need in cities if we want to truly increase density and reduce
316.
by leoedin 3y ago
> computer vision has been improving, yes, but nothing earth shattering in the last 5 years I totally and completely disagree. Sure, "computer vision" industrial cameras doing edge detection haven't changed much, but the c
317.
by leoedin 3y ago
Totally. I worked on the electronics in robot arms for a while and EVERY TIME there was a failure in the field - it was the cables.
318.
by leoedin 3y ago
Yeah, I agree the name is terrible. The logic that simplifications of complex topics are "lies" essentially makes every part of human knowledge a lie - which makes it a meaningless term. Ultimately every single thing you think you
319.
by leoedin 3y ago
But by that argument neither is floating around in the ISS - you're still being accelerated by gravity, you're just in the fortunate position that you have enough velocity not to hit the earth. If the colloquial term "zero gr
320.
by leoedin 3y ago
It is scary - but I suspect the headline temperatures/humidity aren't the only story. We can build passive structures to regulate peak temperatures - caves and windowless insulated boxes with high thermal mass, for instance. As lo
321.
by leoedin 3y ago
Every time I sit through a hellish long distance flight I wonder the same thing. The closest anyone’s got is Air New Zealand’s Sky couch - which is a minor improvement on the status quo rather than a reimagining of it. There’s been so much
322.
by leoedin 3y ago
The huge difference between solar and tidal energy is the predictability. Tides can be predicted in advance - you always know exactly when and how much electricity you'll get. That's really valuable in a world of increasingly vola
323.
by leoedin 3y ago
> The point is that "I don't want to have children because I'm worried about the impact of climate change" (social) or "I don't want to have children because I think it'll be too expensive" (econom
324.
by leoedin 3y ago
Is the desire to have kids (as opposed to just sex) genetic? Given that pretty much everything about our personalities seems to be genetic to some extent, it seems pretty likely.
325.
by leoedin 3y ago
Technically that makes everyone who's over the age of 60 a sort of parasite. That doesn't mean we look down on them. Is a childless teacher refusing to do their part to create the next generation? Arguably a good teacher can have
326.
by leoedin 3y ago
There's Rhai - https://rhai.rs/
327.
by leoedin 3y ago
Yeah, I did the maths with a heat pump drier and found it would pay for itself in electricity savings in a couple of years. And that was before the cost of electricity in the UK tripled. It uses something like 1/4 of the electricity pe
328.
by leoedin 3y ago
Does food in the US not go off? The limiting factor for me isn't the size of my fridge, but the fact that after a week all my vegetables are looking sad and my milk's starting to smell. I probably wish my fridge was bigger a handf
329.
by leoedin 3y ago
> When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. Don't ignore selection bias. When you're a kid, almost everyone you know is a c
330.
by leoedin 3y ago
I resisted loyalty cards for a long time, but recently all the large UK supermarkets have started offering loyalty-only pricing - so not using a loyalty card adds maybe 5-10% to your bill. They all profile on online shopping and debit/

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