nickparker

12 ms·

61.
by nickparker 8y ago
Carbon taxes generally don’t need to be huge to achieve their goals, so anyone without proof they’re clean can be taxed as though they’re filthy.
62.
by nickparker 8y ago
Border adjustments are a well understood policy solution to this issue. Imports from polluting countries are taxed appropriately, and exports to those countries subsidized. From the perspective of anyone inside the nation with the border ad
63.
by nickparker 8y ago
His flight systems are all attitude control, not guidance to a target. It’s a silly distinction but apparently makes things OK. He’s talked with state dept people a lot to be able to sell his kits internationally.
64.
by nickparker 8y ago
The company is fairly interesting, if seemingly early, but this article is atrocious. It repeats itself all over, it’s riddled with broken grammar, weird sentence structure, and a few typos, and the “name all our products like people” thing
65.
by nickparker 8y ago
This is an interesting claim and I can't decide if it's true. On the one hand, of the set of people working on companies which get acquired by FANG, I would bet a lot of money that less than 1/4 are founders. Even if the vast
66.
by nickparker 8y ago
Could you expand on or link the bit about time of flight trickery in fog or rain? c * 1 s / 50,000 is still kilometers, so I’m not sure I understand how this shutter can do what sounds like using time of flight to selectively illuminat
67.
by nickparker 8y ago
Repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17530688 Also, utter junk science.
68.
by nickparker 8y ago
The particles are passing through a fixed distance (between the screens), wherein they experience a fixed force due to the electric field. An electron will shoot through that distance in no time flat and accrue very little momentum. A proto
69.
by nickparker 8y ago
Only the very surface is red[0]. Martian crust is fairly normal rock underneath as I understand it. 16 psyche is one of the 10 most massive objects in the belt. The belt is more than twice as far away, and transfers to it are much more vari
70.
by nickparker 8y ago
Mars has half the escape velocity and a much thinner atmosphere. Just from the ideal rocket eqn the same reusable rocket flying from Mars can lift more than 4x the mass it can on Earth, and the comparison is even better when you look at dra
71.
by nickparker 8y ago
Mars settlement is going to turn out fantastically profitable. At this point it’s pretty clear that with low enough launch costs orbital industry will be a big thing. All sorts of high performance materials can only be made in microgravity:
72.
by nickparker 8y ago
I'm reading "The Progress of Invention in the 19th Century"[0] right now, and it's at least partly dissuading me of the whole "We couldn't possibly have developed without fossil fuels" idea, along with the
73.
by nickparker 8y ago
The code in question is for their manufacturing systems, not the cars. Not that that's necessarily better... Manufacturing equipment's at about the same danger tier as cars.
74.
by nickparker 8y ago
I really enjoyed a lot of the advice and thinking in this piece, but I have one nit: These biological analogies are terrible . They don't add anything to the persuasion, and actually detract significantly because they're wrong. A
75.
by nickparker 8y ago
As I said above, I highly doubt it’s a literal arm / sling being used. I think it’s a magnetically guided and accelerated loop, so the payload is the only part of the system moving at all. You’re right the drag/tension on an actua
76.
by nickparker 8y ago
Yeah I'm not up on my supersonic aero anywhere near enough to work out max-Q for their very pointy projectile, but I'll point out that 'suddenly hitting MaxQ' is a jerk problem, not an acceleration one. MaxQ is MaxQ, whe
77.
by nickparker 8y ago
Theranos isn't the best example. DFJ invested in their seed, but the vast majority of their funds were less sophisticated non-tech investors. Using them as a poster child for Silicon Valley dysfunction is a bit off to me. Your broader
78.
by nickparker 8y ago
So, I worked at Hyperloop One for a time, and that experience made me skeptical of the type of complaint I see in this thread. Yes, a high school physics student can tell you the accelerations will be huge unless the loop is too, and a smar
79.
by nickparker 8y ago
As I understand it: 1. The whole cooler is heated, the pressure throughout rises, and the liquid water surrounding the inner chamber evaporates. 2. The water vapor moves into the (presumably much larger) other chambers, distributing itself
80.
by nickparker 8y ago
You're right it's not quite the fallacy in that there isn't any destruction going on. It's something adjacent though: The whole point of markets is that people decide where to spend their money based on the value they ca
81.
by nickparker 8y ago
Jobs aren't intrinsically good. These startup jobs might be, but it's an insanely complex system you're trying to suss a value judgement out of. If these startups didn't exist, the money going into them would be seeking
82.
by nickparker 8y ago
I'll add if you want a lot of the flavors of animal products back, MSG goes a long way. Just last night I tried making vegetarian "beef" tacos with spiced and lightly baked quinoa as the beef, and with some MSG thrown in I sw
83.
by nickparker 8y ago
The Toba eruption leans heavily toward the 'interesting thought experiment' category as well at this point though. I'm in a paleoclimatology class right now and we spent a couple weeks on it. The John Hawks post[0] cited unde
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by nickparker 8y ago
Layperson speaking, but I believe skilled labor is most of the cost of these diagnostics. Even if the scope is $100k, the doctor is $200k/yr so it'd make sense for this to be a cost reducing tool if it increases speed.
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by nickparker 8y ago
1. I didn't write a word about terraforming. There are a thousand options for sealed habitats on Mars. Sad little caves at first, enormous indoor cities later. Once the economic incentives line up it'll happen. 2. Of course it&#x2
86.
by nickparker 9y ago
Three main points here: 1. Building a second society on Mars isn't meant to preserve the human species, it's meant to preserve modern human civilization. That's a higher order thing which is much more vulnerable to the climat
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by nickparker 9y ago
There's a pretty large community online 3D printing prosthetics, mainly the loosely affiliated community called enabling the future[0] and a nonprofit which sprung from them called Limbforge[1]. The printed prostheses are almost all bo
88.
by nickparker 9y ago
Mirror shields in the Culture series use the 'field' magic that so much of the Culture's science relies on. Presumably a reflector field is both insanely reflective (99.999% or better, like dielectric mirrors) and resilient t
89.
Desktop Metal Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Markforged(all3dp.com)
1 points by nickparker 9y ago|0 comments
90.
by nickparker 9y ago
This article is a little unclear, and the title arguably exaggerated. They're actually tracking where students swipe their student ID cards. Which, yes, is a form of location tracking. They don't have any idea where students are g

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