maxander

30 ms·

241.
by maxander 8y ago
If you think you like driving into the city anytime near rush hour, then yes, I think you’re definitely brainwashed. :)
242.
by maxander 8y ago
Poking around the guy’s website [0], I’m not surprised his sales are so dismal- it’s a very earnest description of a project its developer obviously likes, but which he describes in terms of other, pre-existing games and game-styles (e.g.,
243.
by maxander 8y ago
I mean, are you expecting power in the future to be a tenth as expensive as it is now? A hundredth? With “cheap enough” energy anything is possible, but I don’t see where we would get order of magnitude improvements there anytime soon.
244.
by maxander 8y ago
Because I’m bored- Googling “cost to desalinate water” gives $2k per family of five, and googling “population of California” gives roughly a population of 40 million. 40mil/5 * 2k == 16 billion (if I’m counting zeroes right.) So it’s
245.
by maxander 8y ago
In the context of a society with gender norms like ours, it is special and probably quite unusual. And typically in male-supported households the woman is responsible for housework and child care, which clearly wasn’t this developer’s pr
246.
by maxander 8y ago
Saying "just use common sense" is very pat and appealing in cases where we have direct apprehension about the domain in question- such as in plane geometry- but in cases where we have no direct access to a question aside from expe
247.
by maxander 8y ago
True masters of naming make sure to use variable names that are long but unambiguous after the first several characters, so that with tab-completion you get the best of both worlds.
248.
by maxander 8y ago
I’m not an economist, and the following argument is qualitative- “cost of capital” essentially means the cost of things (as opposed to, the cost of services/labor.) Perhaps, indeed, when the cost of things goes up, this will lead to
249.
by maxander 8y ago
Lurking behind the article's entire thesis, and yet barely addressed in it, is the issue that despite demand for truckers outstripping supply, their employers aren't willing to significantly raise wages. They instead eat the cost
250.
by maxander 8y ago
WWII was also distinguished by the use of aerial firebombing, where tons and tons of explosives were hurled into cities more or less at random in the hopes that it would have some psychological or material impact. The whole idea of “precis
251.
by maxander 8y ago
Impressive- it's a sample-return mission. Sending up cameras to capture photons or sample enclosures to capture bits of dirt is too pedestrian for SpaceX. Instead they'll send up artists to capture samples of space-ness, to be s
252.
by maxander 8y ago
> The answer they found: if the Earth’s oceans had twenty times more deuterium than they actually contain, they could be ignited by a 20 million megaton bomb (which is to say, a bomb with the yield equivalent to 200 teratons of TNT, or a
253.
by maxander 8y ago
If that wasn’t surprising enough for you- there’s a cancer line that has been propagated between dogs for centuries : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venerea...
254.
by maxander 8y ago
Wonderful bit of synchronicity- seeing this on the front page of HN right after I got back from being (deliberately) lost in the Fells reservation north of Cambridge. (In this case, of course, my algorithm was made simpler via access to a
255.
by maxander 8y ago
What changed between the few-gene era and the polygene era is that we got sequencers that could read the genomes of an entire experimental cohort at reasonable cost. Likewise, when we have the capability to do single-cell profiling of the
256.
by maxander 8y ago
I suppose the reason is related to the cliche "companies just do whatever they can to maximize shareholder value"; it is instead that they don't actually act to maximize shareholder value, they act to maximize future expecte
257.
by maxander 8y ago
I wonder if this sort of silica coating could be an alternative to lipid-wall cells for silicate-based extraterrestrial life.
258.
by maxander 8y ago
The average HNer probably has, yes. The average American, quite possibly not.
259.
by maxander 8y ago
Do you think that these Ubers-but-with-buses would be cheap enough that the homeless could ride them? Most urban public transportation operates at a substantial loss; a private busing company would cost several times more than standard far
260.
by maxander 8y ago
The "build more roads, people fill them with more cars" is just a symptom of a huge problem that's existed for so long that people can't see it anymore- that there's orders of magnitude more demand for intra-city tr
261.
by maxander 8y ago
“Leak” sounds small, too, so it gives a minimized impression of what happened. “Hemorrhage,” perhaps. :)
262.
by maxander 8y ago
Twitter isn’t going to broadcast or link to tweets that were bad enough to merit a ban, for obvious reasons- they’re banning it precisely to avoid having that content be propagated any further.
263.
by maxander 8y ago
Ack! Serves me right for googling without thinking. I suppose I saw the figures for a different Crick.
264.
by maxander 8y ago
Fingers crossed! Certainly much more will be known about human biology and the mechanics of aging by then, given that what we know currently is mostly so recent (it's instructive to remember that the two of the guys remembered for dis
265.
by maxander 8y ago
That's interesting. Certainly, we've all been cued by the sound of our hard disks that something in our code was wrong or that our computer is up to something unexpected; now that disks are getting quieter and/or replaced by
266.
by maxander 8y ago
Biomedical progress will accelerate as we accumulate, and become more skillful with, tools like CRISPR and genomic sequencing, but the real rate-limiting factor in these developments is testing . Making sure a treatment performed on human
267.
by maxander 8y ago
The name stands for STimulator of INterferon Genes, where interferons are essentially message-carrying molecules involved with the immune system. STING protein, I believe, is essentially a detector which gets triggered when a cell is invad
268.
by maxander 8y ago
It's not bad, it's wrong, since they make reference to the "entangled photons in the light coming from the quasars," which is entirely not how the experiment worked. The light from the quasars (which weren't measur
269.
by maxander 8y ago
There are some good artists in there, mixed in with the rest. But also consider, most artists on these platforms (minus maybe YouTube) are doing it to build portfolios to be seen by potential employers. That skews most of them towards co
270.
by maxander 8y ago
An apartment is fairly easy; if you don't have to live near a big city in order to work, land and construction labor is relatively cheap. A Netflix subscription is just data. A subscription and the broadband access to go with it is wi

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