mchannon

30 ms·

331.
by mchannon 8y ago
To each their own, but the people who love the area love it because of its weather (meh), family ties to the area, and highly affordable cost of living tied to owning your house for decades, or having rent control for decades. If you'
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by mchannon 8y ago
google.com/scholar I also really like casemine.com. I have no idea how incomplete those archives are but I doubt they’re missing much I’d be looking for.
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by mchannon 8y ago
Needs a simple JavaScript or similar client (REPL?) baked into the page. API appears powerful, but lots of free alternatives that don’t require a comfort level with shell scripting or REST calls.
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by mchannon 8y ago
Having had a jury, there are way too many things wrong with that thought to know where to begin. Let's start with jury selection. If a venireman (that's somebody in the jury pool) has anything objectionable known about themselves
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by mchannon 8y ago
Let's do the math. Rainiest spot on Earth sea level, say 1 inch freshwater per day, every day, and somehow consistent all year. One square meter, 100% efficient, looks like it would produce less than 1 kW with a river feeding it. Wit
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by mchannon 8y ago
When getting down to the nuts and bolts of a Seebeck (thermoelectric) junction, the efficiency is highest when the heat flow is minimized and the temperature difference is minimized. You get no power when those things are minimized, and in
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by mchannon 8y ago
There are a couple more things you need for this to make electricity: •Wire. Whatever goop makes up this membrane is not going to be able to send all that energy back to the desired destination. I'd expect you to have to come with som
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by mchannon 8y ago
It’s a slightly different motivation. There is something worse than a forum troll, and that’s a forum censor. I could post all the stuff publicly, but then I’d get more downvotes, because a lot of forum users enforce the norms they like. I
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by mchannon 8y ago
This sounds like a koan: "If there is a frozen towel in the mountains, is there water in the air if there is no one there to measure the humidity it produces?" Assuming there were millions of frozen wet towels in such conditions,
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by mchannon 8y ago
Is buying a Tesla that great for CO2 footprint? No, nor is buying any new car. Over the life of the vehicle, it's pretty close to a wash vs. a similarly-sized new BMW roadster, unless you drive it an awful lot. If buying a Tesla hel
341.
by mchannon 8y ago
At 100% humidity, sure. If it's raining, it takes no work to get wet. I have a unit in my garage that can actually produce water at less than 10% relative humidity, moves a lot more air so it has more chances to actually capture the w
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by mchannon 8y ago
If you remember back to the perpetual motion machine, that was supposed to produce more electricity than it consumed, you'll capture the mindset detractors like myself have. But look, our PMM is producing this many volts! And it works
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by mchannon 8y ago
Pretty disappointed with their choice of winner. Using refrigeration to maintain a dewpoint means that this appliance is pretty impractical below 50% relative humidity. Or in other words, this thing only makes water when you probably don&#
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by mchannon 8y ago
I'm surprised how many people crave some sort of grade or score like an insurance appraisal when it comes to their footprint. I guess so if it's high, they can guilt themselves into reducing it, and if it's low, they can gui
345.
by mchannon 8y ago
No, it wasn’t. Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store. Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually becom
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by mchannon 8y ago
Last I ran the numbers for that chapter, I determined that there simply isn’t enough ocean surface area to achieve the carbon absorption necessary, even if we used every underfertilized patch of seawater on the planet. It was close, but it
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by mchannon 8y ago
The full book is not yet available anywhere. It's self-published (and I mean that literally; I'm doing the printing and binding myself, to discourage making it another $.99 Kindle throwaway or having a crappy low-res PDF version
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by mchannon 8y ago
From chapter 211 of my book: None have proposed then taking the CO through a final step and ending up with simple C and O. This is not without good reason: out of all substances known to thermally decompose, none does it at a higher temper
349.
by mchannon 8y ago
Sounds like you've been set adrift in a canoe without a paddle and you're trying to keep up with the other canoeists. You need to ask your colleagues to pair with them, and your management to encourage the practice. The amount
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by mchannon 8y ago
Total agreement. Although zirconium and tungsten aren't exactly the most expensive metals, they are extremely hard and dense and processing them in this manner would appear to be a big minus against this technology. I can picture a f
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by mchannon 8y ago
It's not mined from the mountains, but from the plains of Khewra, Jhelum District, Punjab. The nearest outcropping of actual Himalayas is about a 3hr drive north near Islamabad. This particular varietar of bullshit (Himalayan salt bein
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by mchannon 8y ago
We like to smugly look back on Aztec sacrifice ceremonies, where the common people believed to the depth of their souls, that the people being decapitated in front of them were deserving of that fate, and that defeating that process would e
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by mchannon 8y ago
Definitely don't forget the Presidio hiked all the way to Ocean Beach. Computer history museum in Mountain View. Call ahead and pick a day they're actually open. Google campus. It's different. Find a fellow alum or somethi
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by mchannon 8y ago
One theory: The Bay Area has become seriously ageist. Many people have a hard time accepting working for someone a generation younger than them, and especially hiring a subordinate a generation older than them. The people reviewing your re
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by mchannon 8y ago
In all fairness, even a large proportion of real hackathons tend to be light on code, heavy on presentation. Maybe it's a misnomer but it doesn't stop them from using the term. True hackathons, where everyone's technical, in
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by mchannon 8y ago
Those "debts" uncollected are just as much real to a credit agency or a bill collector as a late truck rental or motel overstay. I'm pretty sure there's some forced arbitration language in their contract of carriage, so
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by mchannon 8y ago
If United Airlines decided to assess what they later define as the fair market price of the tickets thrown away, none of these bullet points would apply. If you rent a car or motel room and you smoke in it, for example, they can charge you
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by mchannon 8y ago
> I doubt UA would follow through considering it is illegal to submit known false debts. Ahh yes, the "known false debts act of 1789". </s> The fact is corporations have throngs of willing stooges who are happy to p
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by mchannon 8y ago
Finding a wife (or husband) is far easier than finding a co-founder (at least when comparing for the same level of quality). And on many occasions, a business divorce is far more financially painful than a marital one.
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by mchannon 8y ago
Over half the HN readership lives in areas where these abbreviations are human-readable. And 100% can google the abbreviations. Would it be better if we started using UTC+5, etc.? Sure. But good luck getting Americans to change. If the

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