maxander

81 ms·

751.
by maxander 11y ago
Its not news that labor is much cheaper in many countries than the US, but I think people are going to get pretty mad if you call paying transit workers a decent professional wage[1] "wastefully funneling money." There are good r
752.
by maxander 11y ago
There's a crucial bit of ambiguity there- when they say "on-target," do they mean that the rocket is now sitting on the barge with a broken leg, or did it bounce off and explode like on the previous attempts?
753.
by maxander 11y ago
I'm confused by the people who are confused whether this is satire, but (like most good satire) it raises valid points. Being "moral" in how we live our day-to-day lives is complicated , and it would be great if we could som
754.
by maxander 11y ago
I heard it only works if you set a negative TTL.
755.
by maxander 11y ago
The companion made clear something that the (abstract of) the original post didn't; this sort of system can't be used to physically perform "hypercomputation," since encoding an undecidable problem requires an infinite
756.
by maxander 11y ago
My (vague) understanding of the phenomenon being discussed is that it was discovered that, in some of the proteins involved in photosynthesis, the electrons were passed around via multiple, quantum-entangled pathways. This allows (suppos
757.
by maxander 11y ago
Which begs the question, when people are willing to commit their children to this kind of super-intensive training regimen at such an early age, why on Earth are they doing it for games or music and not something (if you will excuse a crass
758.
by maxander 11y ago
That we would receive a signal with the radio telescope discussed here would pretty much demand either that they make tremendous use of a very specific form of propulsion, or that they are putting a substantial fraction of their available e
759.
by maxander 11y ago
> "We are supposed to believe that the technology can tell us accurately if a person has 1 copy of a variant, but it cannot determine if there are 2 copies? What does 23andMe report if there are 2 variants? Nothing?" Actually
760.
by maxander 11y ago
The suggestion that Bitcoin would act as a replacement for government bonds in any foreseeable future would reduce most economists to tears of laughter. The interest rate tweaks being discussed here are negligible compared to the market
761.
by maxander 11y ago
Syria's government is pretty indefensible, but its also worth noting that their GDP was approximately a third of Israel's before the civil war began [1]. In most circumstances, climate change primarily effects the poorest- which
762.
by maxander 11y ago
All this article does is attack a straw-man version of post-scarcity economics. What sufficiently immature humans want is arbitrary, of course they can want more than whatever they happen to have. You could want all the figurines Matel
763.
by maxander 11y ago
This is the first time I've seen anyone complain about positional arguments. While I can see the point of such a complaint (and its arguably even worse in Haskell, where there's application-order confusion at the same time), my i
764.
by maxander 11y ago
The idea of "notation as intelligence augmentation" is the reason (or one of them) that Haskell programmers are so enthusiastic about things like functors and monads; type theory is its own branch of mathematics that could be appe
765.
by maxander 11y ago
Emphasis on 'probably'- energy is a vital problem, solutions to which are subject to unguessable physical constraints. It would be foolish to rely on one particular technology which may somehow turn out to be impractical or undes
766.
by maxander 11y ago
This sort of problem is Haskell's downfall, and very nearly negates all the other wonderful features of the language. It doesn't matter how fun it was to write or how the type system promised you up and down it was correct- if yo
767.
by maxander 11y ago
My goodness, but that's pretty for a small-studio game. Its worth noting that, assuming this actually comes through, Blow will have overcome one of the most pernicious traps that wait for successful game designers- that next, wondrous
768.
by maxander 11y ago
Original article here (open access, happily): http://www.cell.com/cell-systems/abstract/S2405-4712%2815%29... . This is my subjective impression, but it seems like aging research is starting to gain traction, with
769.
by maxander 11y ago
This comes down to the really interesting point in the article, which sadly is hidden a ways into it (just after the "Main Course" section begins): "If the flow of energy is fixed, but we posit continued economic growth, then
770.
by maxander 11y ago
Impracticality of physical economic analysis aside, I'm now curious about the engineering problem of cooling down a planet overheating from sheer exothermal industry. Can you pack enough waste heat into a canister that launching it in
771.
by maxander 11y ago
Cheap energy is a cornerstone of our (modern, American) way of life, to be sure, and losing it would be awful. For us. But there's the OP's point- climate change will screw over vast numbers of people who didn't even benefi
772.
by maxander 11y ago
There's two common flavors of comment on this post, namely "why would anyone do this?" and "well, I guess that means I can't do any work this morning." These could go together somehow. :)
773.
by maxander 11y ago
It's not a given that the best use of "$20k worth of time/effort" is in the kinds of labor that you, personally, can produce. Nor is it a given that, even if you make $200 an hour, that you'd be worth $200 an hour
774.
by maxander 11y ago
Because the machine can't deduce each student's preferences. I suspect the problem is essentially unsolvable, without requiring each student to fully write out the order of his/her school preferences. Otherwise there will in
775.
by maxander 11y ago
Well, yes, I'm simplifying things a bit. Although, now I actually think of it, I would be curious to know how average time spent in meetings stacks up for software engineers versus other professions- scientists, architects, accountant
776.
by maxander 11y ago
You can get some idea of what its like to be in politics through watching C-SPAN or reading news accounts of high-profile political struggles or watching fictional accounts like the West Wing. The life of actors is often meticulously chart
777.
by maxander 11y ago
Next time you're wondering why more kids don't go into STEM in this age of wondrous scientific and technological progress; virtually any bright 10 year old knows the story of how and why Archimedes leapt out of his bathtub shoutin
778.
by maxander 11y ago
The biology is a bit more complicated than that, though. Sure, if we had a big database of all the correlation factors in some easily computer-readable format, standardized testing procedures that lined up with these factors, and an army
779.
by maxander 12y ago
Physicists have looked at all the angles on this, and are pretty certain there's nothing the LHC could do that would pose a threat to the world. On the other hand, the universe still looks pretty empty of extraterrestrial civilizations
780.
by maxander 12y ago
This is also what I heard as of a year or two ago, but I think its becoming a progressively more outdated piece of advice as the world of Python 3 libraries catches up with 2. But certainly, Python 2.7 is still being written widely, and wi

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