maxander

47 ms·

481.
by maxander 9y ago
Remember, Trump lost the popular vote by a couple million, in an election where about half the country voted, so his base in general could be estimated at about a fourth to a fifth of the country. But if we take the "more than 5 to
482.
by maxander 9y ago
Uh, the Paris accords are hugely popular in the U.S. [1]. The word is that even most corporations, oil companies among them, supported staying in the pact. Everyone was on board with this, except Trump and his far conservative base. An
483.
by maxander 9y ago
This thread has become piled high with self-help advice already, and none of us know whether our advice will help any with your own situation, but here's another take; make the best of one advantage you have, which is an endpoint. Pic
484.
by maxander 9y ago
> "A sound separated from a sounding body was just sort of a conceptual leap," she says. "I'm not sure people had the cultural context to invent this stuff." It makes one wonder what currently isn't being in
485.
by maxander 9y ago
Uh, we got here because a smart primate species evolved on a planet that formed around a heavy-element-rich star about a dozen billion years after this universe emerged from the inflationary paradigm? There's a couple gaps, I'll
486.
by maxander 9y ago
The Boring Company isn't just looking to build tunnels either- there's going to be a bunch of interesting infrastructure to get cars onto those electric sleds and operating them, and that'll need maintenance and access and et
487.
by maxander 9y ago
If a cloud of 20000 cubesats were released by a single rocket, at least they would all be in approximately the same orbit, which is better than having 20000 cubesats spread out over 20000 orbits. Not to mention, they don't stay up ind
488.
by maxander 9y ago
I suspect that this is the "companies don't want to train workers" problem, the same one that makes employers demand 10 years of Java experience for crap jobs, writ large.
489.
by maxander 9y ago
Two years would be plenty of time for a run around Mars or Venus, if it had enough propellant.
490.
by maxander 9y ago
SpaceX's Dragon capsules come with engines, which (in some configurations) are sufficient for powered landings. And it's still called a "capsule."
491.
by maxander 9y ago
Of course, but it's highly nontrivial for the individual humans who are responsible for it.
492.
by maxander 9y ago
Even if the Fed "lost" some of the gold (which would be a hilarious story), does it really matter? There has to be some liability clause in whatever agreement put the gold in the Fed's hands to begin with- if they lose track
493.
by maxander 9y ago
For everyone who hates the "plug-and-play" trips to Burning Man set up for rich kids, this story is the schadenfreude of the year. It turns out that the logistics of throwing giant festivals in remote locations are difficult! Wh
494.
by maxander 9y ago
I'm not sure you're being serious. Do you carefully read the EULA or TOS of everything you pay for, line by line? Do you consult a lawyer about how to parse the legalese? If not, you've almost certainly also committed frau
495.
by maxander 9y ago
Would it be much harder to have an even-yellow-er phosphor mask that would turn the light orange?
496.
by maxander 9y ago
And not to fix the mistake, either- just to take the blame.
497.
by maxander 10y ago
The U.S. threw ~$80M worth of missiles into Syria several days ago, just to damage an airfield. No one would blink at half a billion to take out bitcoin, and that's assuming that the NSA/CIA don't already have billions'
498.
by maxander 10y ago
It pretty explicitly declares who Dai-holders are trusting- those who hold the rarer MKR coins. MKR-holders, presumably, appoint oracles by manipulating the Ethereum DAO that's running the whole business- but they also seem to have co
499.
by maxander 10y ago
Sure, but the value of a stock isn't tied to what I will be paid from it through dividends or whatever- its the value of what I and all future holders of the stock can expect to be paid. How long I hold the stock, and how much of
500.
by maxander 10y ago
Tesla is a long-term bet, but a virtue of the stock market is that the market's horizon for payouts is potentially much longer than any individual's. If I'm holding a bunch of TSLA stock and want a payout in 2018, it doesn&#
501.
by maxander 10y ago
Spontaneous remissions have been observed, and aren't really well understood, as far as I know. In this case, though, they had removed the "dark red and purple mass" of the original tumor, and the rat was a "survivor&qu
502.
by maxander 10y ago
> Dr. Delaney and her colleagues have studied lesions on naked mole rats for more than a decade [...] One of the wonders of science is the important discoveries that come from a focused investigation into some of the most obscure things.
503.
by maxander 10y ago
It would be interesting to see if the same system could be implemented for English. Say, make a text renderer that groups common sequences of 2-to-4 letters into one distinct (but still immediately legible) glyph; the set of available glyp
504.
by maxander 10y ago
I suspect (here as with the earlier story about imposter goods on Amazon) that the explanation for Amazon's behavior is that it doesn't have the resources to moderate the system its created. Disallowing price adjustments altogeth
505.
by maxander 10y ago
Not really the cell cycle per se, but yes, the idea is to poison senescent cells. But it can be benign to the organism as a whole nonetheless.
506.
by maxander 10y ago
Seeing the headline I shrugged and thought to myself, "oh, I bet it's rapamycin again." That and a few other old cancer drugs routinely get studied for antiaging effects- which is cool, but somewhat less than directly applic
507.
by maxander 10y ago
> Shannon himself encountered Boole’s work in an undergraduate philosophy class. “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both fields at the same time,” he commented later. Never underestimate the power of being one of the fe
508.
by maxander 10y ago
A large part of this is, though, that the groundbreaking mathematical insights that paved the way for computers are things that any modern ten-year-old takes for granted. The idea that we could design a single set of fundamental computatio
509.
by maxander 10y ago
Well, then there's another term he ought to define! :D I've done several projects using various flavours of Arduinos and Pis, but that sort of hobbyist-maker-level experience hasn't lead me to encounter an acronym for "
510.
by maxander 10y ago
Its all readily googlable, certainly. My point was that its poor practice when writing a piece aimed at introducing people to a subject; if they have to go to google every few lines to see what something means, that distracts attention fro

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