lutusp

80 ms·

751.
by lutusp 12y ago
> It strikes me as pure evil that the very first use of nuclear energy was to drop a massive bomb over a bunch of fellow humans. Atomic weapons are a natural evolutionary step up from conventional explosives, which are a natural evolutio
752.
by lutusp 12y ago
> I have had a lot of oh shit moments in my days, but none gets close to dropping the plutonium onto the uranium and nearly detonating a nuclear payload. Not possible for a plutonium device, and this is why the implosion method was so te
753.
by lutusp 12y ago
Quote: "You’d have to be a mighty poor Christian (or atheist, etc.) to be converted by a particular argument. You don’t get turned from an optimist to a pessimist, from a conformist to a radical, or from a democrat to a republican over
754.
by lutusp 12y ago
Quote: "The app is free and there isn’t a monthly fee. Because, you know, piracy." I love these modern, concise expressions -- an absolute minimum of words, but perfectly understandable to the contemporary mind. My favorite is thi
755.
by lutusp 12y ago
>> You might as well demand everybody on Earth speak English. > That's working out quite well so far. Not really. English is a minority language, spoken as a primary language by only about 5.5% of the world's population.
756.
by lutusp 12y ago
> But in the very long run the sun isn't going to last forever and if resource exhaustion turns out to be a real problem there might only be a limited window for us to get started. I can't believe I'm still hearing "s
757.
by lutusp 12y ago
> That I vastly prefer multi-window is my only evidence. That's ironic, given that the latest Gimp (2.8) defaults to a single-window interface. I'm having a hard time adjusting, but this doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
758.
by lutusp 12y ago
That's false. Because Mars has no magnetic field, and because its atmospheric pressure is only 0.06 that of Earth, the radiation level at the surface is occasionally life-threatening. In the event of a solar storm, human astronauts wou
759.
by lutusp 12y ago
> Even our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't live in balance with nature. That depends on how one defines "balance with nature". We're just a species competing for resources with other species. To argue that what we do
760.
by lutusp 12y ago
> Putting aside the offsite-backup-for-humanity angle, if it becomes practical to send a significant population to Mars, wouldn't it consequently also be at least as practical to keep sending them stuff? Not really, not with the exp
761.
by lutusp 12y ago
Quote: "The magnitude of the current bust seems almost unfathomable ..." Oh, really? Ah, wait -- this article is from 2008.
762.
by lutusp 12y ago
There are a number of errors in the photo captions, so for the record: 1. The "Little Boy" device, cylindrical in shape, was a U-235 gun-type device that was so simple in its design that it was dropped -- on Hiroshima on August 6,
763.
by lutusp 12y ago
I don't write for either end of the Apple platform (at least at present -- I once did many years ago), so I can't create this, but I hope someone does -- it's an obviously good idea. All you IOS developers out there listen up
764.
by lutusp 12y ago
> And particles of air are affected by gravity, therefore I would very much expect them to follow Earth's curvature. Gravity isn't the reason sound waves curve around the earth. One reason is that the curved surface is the only
765.
by lutusp 12y ago
> /bin/bash is on literally every machine I ever touch. Did you miss the operative phrase? You intended that subjunctive clause to apply to all the sentences, an intent I missed. My mistake. :) This may soon become a tempest in
766.
by lutusp 12y ago
> And while a shared clipboard app is a great improvement, I would prefer this in the OS itself. Wait ... you want a mobile device clipboard feature to communicate with a laptop, but be integrated in the OS? Which OS -- the device, or th
767.
by lutusp 12y ago
Such a formal comparison may exist somewhere, but I can summarize the key differences between Mathematica and Sage, two tools I'm familiar with. Sage relies on Python, Mathematica relies on a proprietary language. Mathematica can do a
768.
by lutusp 12y ago
> And for the love of god can somebody PLEASE make cross-device copy-paste? The amount of fb/whatsapp/email I send just to copy a link from my laptop to my phone or vice-versa is silly. As it happens, my free Android app SSHelp
769.
by lutusp 12y ago
Same story, five times, three days: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=wearable+drone#!/story/forever/0/w...
770.
by lutusp 12y ago
> It's not the reporter's fault. Of course it is. Reporters aren't supposed to simply reprint the content of press releases as in this case, they're supposed to dig up some facts, something not covered by self-serving
771.
by lutusp 12y ago
> Inflation came along to explain things that the original theory did not. Again, inflation does not replace the Big Bang theory, it complements it. Big Bang and inflation are both parts of our current understanding of the early universe
772.
by lutusp 12y ago
No- it [the Big Bang theory] was replace by the inflationary theory long ago. This is false -- inflationary theory complements Big Bang theory, it does not replace it, as you claim. Big Bang and inflation are both parts of our current u
773.
by lutusp 12y ago
> ... but you can't really argue that it is healthy behavior. Of course you can. Suppose you've been told that you have inoperable pancreatic cancer and that the end will be painful even with the best medications (often true).
774.
by lutusp 12y ago
> Scientists say it will happen within ... 1. The submitter managed to leave a few key words off the title. 2. When I read a sentence that begins, "Scientists say ...", I know I'm being misinformed. The article's auth
775.
by lutusp 12y ago
This is an unbelievably incoherent newspaper story. It doesn't say what the "electromagnetic radiation" is, what frequencies, power levels, beam patterns, or purpose. It reads like a press release by someone who hasn't v
776.
by lutusp 12y ago
This is such nonsense. Disregarding all the other absurdities in the article, try to get women to agree to do the same thing on any schedule -- or, for that matter, men.
777.
by lutusp 12y ago
> What important truth do very few people agree with you on? That psychology isn't a science, although public perceptions are slowly catching up: http://arachnoid.com/science_of_mind
778.
by lutusp 12y ago
> So does this mean that the primes actually distribute based on some pseudo random pattern? To prove this, we would have to identify the hypothetical pseudorandom pattern. If we successfully identified the pattern, we could locate prime
779.
by lutusp 12y ago
A nice, convenient way to get the graph. For the integral: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+integrate%28sqrt%281-...
780.
by lutusp 12y ago
Because without doing independent research, a reader must accept the possibility that the story is wildly exaggerated, which is the sign of a narcissistic journalist. If the subject is a narcissist, his description of himself may be wildl

More ›