maxander

84 ms·

721.
by maxander 11y ago
I Am Not An Economist, but, the problem with infrastructure is that its difficult to know where to put it to generate a reasonable return on investment- predicting whether a new road gets used or a new residential area becomes desirable is
722.
by maxander 11y ago
One might argue that in a communist or otherwise "leftist" system, conditions of payment would have more to do with a rational assessment of the situation, rather than as a trade. The sherpas being paid in spite of not having don
723.
by maxander 11y ago
There's going to be a problem with any Bitcoin-style currency once sophisticated algorithmic trading becomes widespread enough that compute time is always more profitably spent day-trading than mining.
724.
by maxander 11y ago
My impression is that there's a fairly vicious catch-22 at work here; there isn't a substantial dialog in our culture about mental health issues "from the inside," and as a result, people with said issues aren't acc
725.
by maxander 11y ago
Does it, though? I mean, I've played KSP, I know the rocket equation. But with a space gun, your vehicle only winds up moving as fast as the propellant pushing it out- so that mass of fuel (more explosive than fuel, I guess) still h
726.
by maxander 11y ago
It would be interesting to see a quantitative head-to-head comparison, but my guess would be that once you have the technology to retrieve first-stage rocket engines after launch space-guns aren't economical- the fuel used lifting the
727.
by maxander 11y ago
Guns, unlike satellite launchers, need to be aimed at enemies in order to be useful- something hard to do if its built into a hill. I mean, of course the Iraqi military (like everyone else) thought about it as a weapon first, but if I wer
728.
by maxander 11y ago
There's likely another side to this- if Alphabet is putting a lot of money into a product type whose only past or foreseeable buyers are the US gov't, that would give the Feds some pretty fierce leverage in the event that Android
729.
by maxander 11y ago
It sounds reversed to me- shouldn't the "cherry" be supervised learning and the "icing" be reinforcement learning? At least insofar as reinforcement learning is closer to the "cake" of unsupervised learni
730.
by maxander 11y ago
> Soghoian isn’t optimistic. “The FCC is sort of caught between a rock and a hard place,” he says. “They don’t want to do anything to stop the devices that law enforcement is using from working. But if the law enforcement devices work, t
731.
by maxander 11y ago
For moral truths to be objective is high on my list of things I would like to be true, and not only because I would prefer alien life we encounter to be more like Culture Minds than Kzin. One of the few really important things we lost thro
732.
by maxander 11y ago
I don't think the question of free will was even touched upon in the actual article.
733.
by maxander 11y ago
To a philosopher like Parfait, our inborn desires and instincts are beside the point, though. If we do something "altruistic" because it gives us a nice warm fuzzy feeling, it isn't really an altruistic act. One could ask
734.
by maxander 11y ago
I think your conclusion might be vacuous, or at least oversimplified. What is "value"? If we don't assume that it takes a programmer a set amount of time to write any line of code (and I know it takes me much longer to do l
735.
by maxander 11y ago
If there's only two teachers at the convention and they shake hands, that's just one handshake- an odd number. The count is an "objective" count of all handshake-events, not the sum of everyone's personal handshake
736.
by maxander 11y ago
A solution which requires us to share even more of our personal data with internet giants, on pain of losing access to important services, strikes me as less than ideal.
737.
by maxander 11y ago
You aren't by any chance a physicist or something, are you? :) 95% confidence is just about the lowest that a scientist in any field would think about publishing with, but in many fields- especially those whose subjects are the delicat
738.
by maxander 11y ago
Read much about legal cases and you'll quickly realize how little "the letter" of a law (or any other collection of words) really, unambiguously conveys. Context is a necessary fallback in the interpretation of law just as i
739.
by maxander 11y ago
I'm strongly reminded of "I’m a Former Green Beret and Here’s How I Would Bring Down Bitcoin"[1] (which I see is so popular it was just re-posted to HN after a week). Only, instead of "bring down," the objective is
740.
by maxander 11y ago
> Those beans were harvested, loaded on ships bound for the port of Houston, Texas, and ended up at a factory within sight of downtown Houston: Atlantic Coffee Solutions. I occasionally object to business' use of the term "...
741.
by maxander 11y ago
> “micro-digitate silica protrusions” Or in Thing Explainer-speak, "little rock fingers that stick out." Its interesting that it was Spirit that detected this- big new discoveries are still coming up after driving the same rob
742.
by maxander 11y ago
Kudos to the author for this article; it takes real courage to write something like this, and it will undoubtedly help many in similar places. I'm inclined towards Buddhism and other spiritual weirdness as well, but I recognize (and I
743.
by maxander 11y ago
As I recall (and this may not be the whole of it), the "tradeoff" was that a larger block size would risk getting attention from China's great firewall, effectively splitting the network and rendering Chinese users' fund
744.
by maxander 11y ago
As someone who hangs out in circles where polyamory is common, I can say that it doesn't quite work out this way. There are certainly the super-desirable guys who have unreasonably-many unreasonably-attractive partners- but they still
745.
by maxander 11y ago
I've got one word for all you lovebirds- roommates. Best (reversible) way to know your domestic faults. Distrust any potential romantic partner that hasn't lived with other people extensively. And in their adult lives, since in
746.
by maxander 11y ago
Its not merely the way forward- its the whole problem. Nothing of this is at all challenging methodologically or technologically- scientists, as a group, are masters of such things. The challenge is social . If you've failed to repr
747.
by maxander 11y ago
Political decisions made via artificial reasoning have the advantage that it can keep a log of all the steps leading up to any given decision. Then, even if this log is too long and complex for humans to handle, AI run by civilian interest
748.
by maxander 11y ago
Oil drilling is one of the most technologically advanced industries that exist, if not the most, and the existence of such technology is predicated (currently) upon the existence of globally-available cheap energy. Non-oil-based developmen
749.
by maxander 11y ago
A large part of the problem is centralization- if oil refineries or manufacturing hubs halfway across the world fail, we're suddenly out of supplies needed to function. The sort of collapse talked about here is scary precisely because
750.
by maxander 11y ago
Define "average rock," and cite a source for this factoid, please? I'd never heard anything of the sort. ...While you're at it, define "incredibly easy." I'd gathered that thorium fission was still a har

More ›