mabbo

11 ms·

61.
by mabbo 3y ago
I believe the author is talking more about movement within the solar system than about how to get to orbit. Skyhooks are amazing though. For example, if you were on a station attached to 2019 BE5[0], that asteroid rotates once every 15 sec
62.
by mabbo 3y ago
Google maps is a real-time social network that you don't realize you are a part of. "This store is busiest at 6pm". "This area is less busy than usual". "There's a 5 minute delay ahead, but you're sti
63.
by mabbo 3y ago
I think you over-simplify the challenge. Satellites have limited lifespans. You can build them bigger, better, stronger, to last longer, but inevitably they break down and cannot be serviced. One micrometeorite in the wrong place, and the e
64.
by mabbo 3y ago
The eventual solution was that email lists with more than k (500?) people on it required an admin to approve all messages going out on that list. It really simplified things.
65.
by mabbo 3y ago
> concerns exist about impact on wildlife My father pointed out an interesting counter to this to me recently: how many birds are killed by wind farms and how many are killed by house cats? Studies show a million or so birds killed in th
66.
by mabbo 3y ago
"If everyone would just stop replying, this would end! Why are you all still hitting reply all?!" -latest reply all on every reply-all storm. In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I
67.
by mabbo 3y ago
Ruby and Rails especially, aren't fast in terms of fast running programs. But they are fast in terms of launching features quickly. Playing with Elixir, I feel similar speed of development, but it also comes with speed of running, wh
68.
by mabbo 3y ago
Exactly. Goal number one is a working product. All you know is python? Write it in Python.
69.
by mabbo 3y ago
> Passive voice produces a sentence in which the subject receives an action. In contrast, active voice produces a sentence in which the subject performs an action. Setting aside whether the passive or active voice is better, I'm del
70.
by mabbo 3y ago
I asked chatgpt the following: Please translate the sentence "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" into 50 different languages. Include a pronunciation guide for English speakers for each. And was not disappointed at all
71.
by mabbo 3y ago
I think a key point is that (correct me if I'm wrong here) in predicate logic you can rewrite ∀x Fx As Not ∃x (not Fx) Ie: "for all x, f(x)" implies the opposite of "there exists an x where not F(x)&quot
72.
by mabbo 3y ago
Lots of possible reasons. Türkiye may have an environment that is very suitable for the preservation of fossil, and one where said fossils remain near the surface. Africa is huge, but may lack areas that both has those hominids and preserve
73.
by mabbo 3y ago
The country has officially asked that it be referred to and spelled that way. If a friend asked me to refer to them with a different name, I'd sure look like a jerk if I made a point to not do so, even though I know it's their pre
74.
by mabbo 3y ago
> You ask them about an exact date from 1969 and they'll say, oh yeah, it was Monday That's actually a really simple parlor trick. There's a formula involving modular math. Takes an hour or two to learn it.
75.
by mabbo 3y ago
I feel like there's a great movie plot point you could write where the bank robbers use this trick to clear traffic out of their way during the escape.
76.
by mabbo 3y ago
> Deciding what to eat for dinner with guess-culture people isn’t as simple as asking people what they want to eat for dinner, because they will not tell you what they actually want to want to eat for dinner. This was nearly a deal-break
77.
by mabbo 3y ago
I know this is funny and LLMs and all that, but it's worth mentioning that the Ottawa food bank are good folks and can always use donations. https://www.ottawafoodbank.ca/ I recently learned that a friend from high sch
78.
by mabbo 3y ago
https://youtu.be/k5eL_al_m7Q He put 99 smart phones in a wagon with all of them running Google maps in drive mode. Google interpreted this as a traffic jam, and made other cars avoid the area.
79.
by mabbo 3y ago
Round robin is hard when you're doing things concurrently and distributed, because state is hard. A server is taking requests 30 at a time in separate threads. To add a sequential step for picking which target is next, you need to add
80.
by mabbo 3y ago
> So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive. Ontario is a great counter example. We have something like 60-70% of our power from
81.
by mabbo 3y ago
> Unresolved Issues: > How to educate passengers The author vastly overestimates peoples willingness to do literally anything that benefits the group rather than themselves. It does not matter if every single person goes through a si
82.
by mabbo 3y ago
I don't disagree with you: there is an issue with "we don't have enough water here". But when we criticize a problem, it's important that we are very accurate in the size and scale of the issues. Over-stating the
83.
by mabbo 3y ago
I'm not disagreeing with the author- water is being sold at a discount to agribusiness and with an extra price for normal consumers. And something must be done about it. But, it's never just that simple. Is that $800/foot-acr
84.
by mabbo 3y ago
It seems pedantic, but I'll bet the differences matter when you're talking about objects that have relative speeds in the tens of km per second. 2ms at 10km/s is off by 20m.
85.
by mabbo 3y ago
I think, given the expected impact time windows have passed now, we can update it to 0% (this time).
86.
by mabbo 3y ago
Of all the places I'd expect negative reactions to this, I'm shocked HN is one of them. This is automation of a dangerous job that is expensive to pay the labor costs of. That's our thing , folks! That's what tech is al
87.
by mabbo 3y ago
It's really worthwhile to compare it to the hubble in that regard. Pre-hubble, the question was whether the universe would contract into a big crunch, expand slower and slower forever, or balance out somehow in the middle. Then hubble
88.
by mabbo 3y ago
> I'm strongly under the impression that 20 years ago they discovered unobtanium in the form of a very under-served search and ads market, they plopped down camp on top of it and turned it into a giant money firehose In 2010 when I
89.
by mabbo 3y ago
The hardest class, in terms of failure rates, in first year CS in my university was Discrete Mathematics. I got an A- and was pretty proud of myself. In third year, I became a TA for the course, marking assignments and hosting tutoring offi
90.
by mabbo 3y ago
I feel like if I can get it working reliably I might have fun setting up a website to make them for $1 each or something. Right now though the process I have is to make 16 at a time with various settings and seeds and then run my phone over

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