ncmncm

86 ms·

421.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Going to Mars will be among humanity's least revered achievements. There is nothing there. The only plausibly valuable exports from Mars might be the engines that got your supplies there. With their bells cut off.
422.
by ncmncm 4y ago
And, breathing air is buoyant. N2 is only 13% of the atmosphere, but if my calculations are right, that means a very great deal more nitrogen than we have, just dissolved into a lot more air. To terraform, release machines that crack CO2 in
423.
by ncmncm 4y ago
They had the boots, and meant to put them on the ground. But Fred Haise would have suffered more terribly.
424.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Keyword there is "slightly".
425.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Go was specifically designed as a language for un-demanding applications written by coders with strictly limited skills. That is most applications, in practice. Unpleasantly often, though, applications move from un-demanding to demanding, a
426.
by ncmncm 4y ago
What you don't use, you don't understand.
427.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Probably less geezery to write set_content_size(MAX_SIZE-HEADER_SIZE); Sayin'.
428.
by ncmncm 4y ago
The above is commonly encountered, but not good advice. Most important, defend your hot path against incursions. E.g., don't pass smart pointer arguments around on hot paths. That is what matters. New language features are not slower t
429.
by ncmncm 4y ago
The expression is "premature optimization". And, Donald Knuth. GC overhead is always hard to measure except end-to-end, because it is distributed over everything else that happens. Cache misses, TLB shoot-downs. Mitigations are ve
430.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Sounds like you have a code-quality problem more than a language problem. In that situation, switching languages probably would not help you much. Get a handle on your code quality, and put the language features to work to solve problems fo
431.
by ncmncm 4y ago
The good ones mostly leave those shops after a few years. Beware of anybody who looks back on them with fondness.
432.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Then you are writing bad C++ code. The new features are added specifically because they enable writing better programs. Avoiding them means you are choosing not to write better programs. It is allowed, but not a thing to brag about. That do
433.
by ncmncm 4y ago
"Object-oriented" is a niche technique. Any big-enough system will naturally have some OO-ish parts, just because it has some of almost everything. Most small programs will have none.
434.
by ncmncm 4y ago
OK if you like 10-15% performance loss off the top. And incompatibility with the rest of the world.
435.
by ncmncm 4y ago
This sounds nice but is not true. The bigger the system is, the more value you get from exceptions. The cost is that cleanup operations have to be in destructors. Do that, and exceptions demand almost no attention. Problems show up only whe
436.
by ncmncm 4y ago
It is not a replacement, it is a staging ground and annex.
437.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Gcc pretty consistently delivers slightly faster code.
438.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Provided, of course, civilization doesn't collapse first. If build-out matches predictions, collapse is an easy call. But build-out has been consistently beating predictions.
439.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Zero CO2 footprint is hard to beat.
440.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Small reactors might start to get economy of scale in manufacture, but operators would see the opposite result, either the same attention needed for much less power, or the same power but many times the work. Nukes' operation is a mino
441.
by ncmncm 4y ago
> potential for food production on solar farms ... is limited. Food production in dual-use farms is really not limited in any way. Besides siting in existing pastureland, solar may easily be deployed in cropland in rows spaced to lea
442.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Very interesting: only one moving part, aside perhaps from steering surfaces. Or is it passively stable? This sidesteps Makani Power's absurd complexity, able to use buoyancy for loft, instead of needing to be a self-piloting powered c
443.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Experience seems to be crucially important in open-sea construction. There is so much that can go wrong, and so much value in judicious prevention and preparation.
444.
by ncmncm 4y ago
470 ohms.
445.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Not when it starts out as government spending, sluicing wholesale into a gaping, capacious private-capital pocket. We see this most frequently in military contracts, although NASA and public-works projects often oblige; most particularly nu
446.
by ncmncm 4y ago
They could improve that by losing the turbines, and connecting a bunch of units to a common plenum driving a single turbine on shore. They could use two plenums, one with overpressure and another with vacuum, and connect the turbine between
447.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Renewables, anyway.
448.
by ncmncm 4y ago
There is absolutely no need to remove land from food production to put solar on it. The crops do better with protection from full (particularly afternoon) sun, you use less water, the panels run more efficiently, and the landowner gets two
449.
by ncmncm 4y ago
For later entries, you probably want to make your own URLs, because the links in the pages are messed up. Or, just start here: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-...
450.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Offshore wind is interesting to compare to tidal power and wave power. Tidal projects seem to go OK, while wave power companies as a rule go bankrupt without ever finishing a utility-scale installation. Looking at failed wave-power startups

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