matt4077

54 ms·

511.
by matt4077 8y ago
The smoke stacks right behind the cooling towers never made you question that assumption?
512.
by matt4077 8y ago
He doesn’t have to propose anything, but can just describe what actually replaced coal in Berlin: gas, trash, and wind energy. Residential heating was converted to natural gas and “remote heat” with trash + gas power stations that circulate
513.
by matt4077 8y ago
That particular episode is old enough to have graduated high school now. The editor and reporter responsible were also fired, and it wasn’t so much that the reporter “lied”, let alone the paper, but that they were lied to by the administrat
514.
by matt4077 8y ago
What does “better ad prices” mean? The NYT doesn’t sell ads to or from Facebook in any significant amount. This is a conspiracy theory that fails even the “theory” part.
515.
by matt4077 8y ago
That's an excellent description. It's quite a feat how I think every single chancellor ended up hating them with a passion, especially considering there weren't any Chancellors after the first with much of any real ideologi
516.
by matt4077 8y ago
The mechanism OP posits, and which SPIEGEL actually mentions in their reporting, is that subjects would tend to ignore these stories because they either did not notice them due to the language barrier, or did not much care about them due
517.
by matt4077 8y ago
They really don't, at least not in a way where their genomes would mix in equal parts, or be concatenated. The closest to merging is probably mitochondria, which probably were single-cell creatures ingested by some very early (single-c
518.
by matt4077 8y ago
It's too bad their main story on this isn't available in translation. It is, ironically, one of the most thrilling stories I've read in a while. Here are some nuggets, although I cannot do the original justice: He fabricated
519.
by matt4077 8y ago
Yeah... I started with “the only...” then noticed the errors of my ways (or: got sucked into biology’s usual vortex of more complications) and hinted at viral DNA in the sentence starting “Plus viruses...” That’s a second point, and I shoul
520.
by matt4077 8y ago
A perfect test would, first, try to prevent correlation between questions. It would be a waste to ask 4 questions when 3 suffice to predict the last answer with good accuracy. After that, some questions supposed to be perfectly correlated w
521.
by matt4077 8y ago
A third-party app allowing you to chat, possibly using more than one network? C. F. email.
522.
by matt4077 8y ago
Intention is so central to judging actions in both the law and ethics generally, it’s bordering on willful ignorance to profess ignorance (recursion intended).
523.
by matt4077 8y ago
I actually stumbled upon the following in their report: “Internal documents obtained by The Times show that Facebook shared data with more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, but also automakers, media organizations (includi
524.
by matt4077 8y ago
I think this is an overused cliché, at least when applied to this situation, I. e. individual top-level executives. Individuals don’t behave like machines, especially not when dealing with people they have known for a long time. That idea i
525.
by matt4077 8y ago
Google wants the web to stay on par with native apps, for obvious reasons. That’s why they invest heavily in Chrome (and FF, to some degree), and work on all sorts of APIs like notifications, WebAudio, etc. The decision process is probably
526.
by matt4077 8y ago
While I agree with the gist of your argument, corporate taxes (mostly) apply to profits, and therefore have no influence on profitable/not profitable. (Payroll, VAT, and some other taxes do have the effect you describe. To excuse my
527.
by matt4077 8y ago
One more thing: Jared Diamond (of “Guns, Germs, Steel” fame) transferred the exact, same method to linguistics, using it to discover the ancestry of Pacific Islanders using features of their respective languages instead of letters of DNA. T
528.
by matt4077 8y ago
As I mentioned in another post, the triangle inequality roughly holds, with some counter examples in proportion to what one would expect from a stochastic process. If you’re asking specifically about instances of non-treelike gene transfer,
529.
by matt4077 8y ago
Because it is a tree. Each branching point represents the last common ancestor between two species. The only confounding factor is that among bacteria, there is a process called “horizontal gene transfer”, where one bacterium inadvertentl
530.
by matt4077 8y ago
Excellent! I believe I remember a far longer version of the paper, and interactive widgets to explore the tree. Couldn’t find those right now and am on the road, unfortunately. In any case, the process consists of basically two steps: “Alig
531.
by matt4077 8y ago
If you have a background in IT, and are modestly comfortable with statistics, the following foundational paper on algorithms to reconstruct the tree of life from genetic data should actually be understandable: http://science.scie
532.
by matt4077 8y ago
Damn unlucky for everybody but him not to reap all those low-hanging fruits, I guess.
533.
by matt4077 8y ago
It’s heavily upvoted on HN, so it would seem that, maybe, people disagree about it being a “total non-story”.
534.
by matt4077 8y ago
His stock, however, has only fallen an additional 10% or so since then (It’s hard to see exactly on the charts, because the stock price has fallen so fast +/- 10% is now a matter of just two or three pixels)
535.
by matt4077 8y ago
It’s quite impossible to prove anything from first principle, unless you were an eye witness yourself. A society needs a certain amount of trust, or what is often disparaged as “proof from authority”. People rail against trusting institutio
536.
by matt4077 8y ago
(A) blanket hatred of “the media” seems to be somewhat misplaced, considering this post itself starts with a link to The Atlantic’s “pretty good post-mortem”. (B) why does this go right to the top on HN, while (as but one example) the recen
537.
by matt4077 8y ago
The law says booby-traps are illegal. Depending on the damage/injury you cause, you will be prosecuted. Two wrongs etc etc
538.
by matt4077 8y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683230
539.
by matt4077 8y ago
“Known unknowns” vs “unknown unknowns”. Despite the sniggering at the time, those terms are quite smart.
540.
by matt4077 8y ago
They do not only predict top-line presidential results, but every race, in every state, for president, House, and Senate. Non-independence is accounted for in the model, so they have no qualms about you judging them by the calibration of th

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