maxander

67 ms·

631.
by maxander 10y ago
There are ~200k sheep in Norway, about 1mil livestock total [1] and less than 100 wolves. Unless these wolves have devoted themselves totally to taking down sheep, the idea that they're a real issue is preposterous. [1] http:/&#
632.
by maxander 10y ago
I love that people are thinking about how technology interacts with the user, since we're terrible enough at that still, but there's another aspect that this kind of thinking doesn't recognize, where we're arguably even
633.
by maxander 10y ago
I suspect its part of the conceit that it's unclear whether its allegorical about any particular thing. Similarly, in a scene or two it gets very close to being a fantasy novel, but never settles the question. Mieville seems like t
634.
by maxander 10y ago
Huh, you're right- studies on the altogether most recent human common ancestor are all based on pure statistics. I'd thought that genetic recombination could be accounted for, since its not as though genetic information (and the
635.
by maxander 10y ago
> We had to upgrade some software at ESOC, as we discovered that one file used for pointing the antenna did not have enough digits to encode the full distance to Cassini I'd bet this means they had to upgrade to a 64-bit executable
636.
by maxander 10y ago
To be fair, they weren't necessarily talking about robo-soldiers there. AI parters could just as easily be benign things like a logistics management system, or the control software for the squad's BigDog, or the pervasive data-
637.
by maxander 10y ago
> But there is no way of doing the same for ancestry in general. Uh, sure there is- apply the same techniques to non-Y, non-mitochondrial chromosomes.
638.
by maxander 10y ago
Well, yes, the kind of genius that would be apparently blindsided by financial regulation while he goes about causing massive disruptions in a crucial market. Really, the whole story sounds like some guys from Texas got rich and started pla
639.
by maxander 10y ago
Its utterly mind-blowing that humans of different races, with vastly different life histories and training regimens, competing in a sport with tremendous physical complexity, can wind up with performance equal to each other, to the limits o
640.
by maxander 10y ago
There was a story on HN just awhile ago, where it was ruled (albeit in Florida) that its not legally a currency: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-bitcoin-money-victory-backers.h... .
641.
by maxander 10y ago
> Like most things in economics, the slowdown boils down to supply and demand: the ability of the global economy to produce goods and services, and the desire of consumers and businesses to buy them. What’s worrisome is that weakness in
642.
by maxander 10y ago
The oldest rocks on Earth that haven't been recycled by plate tectonics date to about the same era, so there's not much of anywhere for these fossils or etc to be.
643.
by maxander 10y ago
Even if we don't, the observation that all these potentially-life-hosting worlds are (or aren't) dead would tell us something important.
644.
by maxander 10y ago
If there are bugs in the universal algorithm, they'll not be the kind of bugs you find in C, but the kind you find in the ideal programming language. So research into better programming languages is crucial to human transcendence!
645.
by maxander 10y ago
I would take a guess that anc84 is accustomed to CS, and James001 is accustomed to bio. "Papers" in each of these fields are entirely different animals, and require a different mental skillset to quickly grok.
646.
by maxander 10y ago
I would be interested to know what you think things like "customer spending" and "financial growth" are for , if not human well-being and prosperity. At some point we may just make economic growth obsolete altogether.
647.
by maxander 10y ago
This reads like a satire of the out-of-touch Silicon Valley archetype. Guy buys a bit of land in the middle of a pristine public park and puts a big day-glo orange box in it for abstruse reasons, and wonders why people are annoyed at him.
648.
by maxander 10y ago
Elon Musk is like the cat who tried to jump from the sofa to the top of the bookcase, fell to the floor in a tangle of wildly gyrating limbs, and is now sitting there quietly licking its paw like it was intending to do that all along. Even
649.
by maxander 10y ago
There are two big results lately that pit the will of the people directly against the elite opinion- the Brexit and the nomination of Trump. Both have suggestions of being opposed by last-minute political maneuvering. It will be interesti
650.
by maxander 10y ago
Your paragraph after "where do I start" is so incomprehensible that I'm not entirely sure you're not simply spouting random technobabble at me. But I get the idea. :D
651.
by maxander 10y ago
Its a combination of two separate problems- the skewed demographics of software engineers and the continued requirement of an intuitive understanding of the problem AI is being developed to solve. If you're building an AI system to he
652.
by maxander 10y ago
Layman questions: - What are the potential benefits of spintronics to technology? Would it make electronics cheaper, smaller, more efficient, ...? Would it allow something that we currently couldn't do? - "For example, whether p
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by maxander 10y ago
Depends on what you mean by "fail hard," I suspect. Sure, cancer cells can gain or lose mutations, but if we target a mutation important for cancer development only a fraction of the target cancer will survive the treatment. We
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by maxander 10y ago
Or maybe, just maybe , you should wonder why your company is full of disgruntled employees in the first place. Perhaps even listen to their complaints, if you're really feeling like a radical egalitarian or something.
655.
by maxander 10y ago
Turing-completeness was the entire conceit of Ethereum, as I understand it- without that you would have Bitcoin with a few bells and whistles, and no one would bother. And once you're committed to that, a new language and environment
656.
by maxander 10y ago
Well, for now , yes- but things like this tend to get easier as new techniques are perfected and more powerful tools are developed, whereas building a thousand art assets by hand will remain time-consuming indefinitely.
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by maxander 10y ago
I saw the headline and initially assumed it would be some droll Game of Life invention. Then I thought, no, maybe its some automatic sci-fi art generation script. And I was rewarded! Procedural generation like this is quite possibly key t
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by maxander 10y ago
I mean, stopping the attacker is certainly doing justice , but a soft fork of the underlying Ethereum software that targets a specific account feels like it undermines the idea of Ethereum itself. Ethereum should be a platform, and any te
659.
by maxander 10y ago
I'd long wondered what would happen if you superimposed two lasers, say, offset so that they would cancel each other out over their whole trajectory. It seemed like a violation of conservation of energy, but if "paired photons&qu
660.
by maxander 10y ago
But you don't have control of the supervisor if the attacking process is confined to the VM, do you? You certainly don't have access to the VM's supervisor mode, since its "chip" wouldn't have this sort of ph

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