nkoren

78 ms·

661.
by nkoren 10y ago
This is really dissonant to read. White geese, yes: territorial and ill-tempered. But the Canada geese I've known have been polite almost to a fault. Protective of their young -- but in a very civilised fashion. When I was a kid, I got
662.
by nkoren 10y ago
I dunno. Accidentally discovering a way to, say, shove dark matter around with microwaves and do useful work with it would not necessarily violate momentum conservation, and wouldn't really be that boring. (Not that I think this is w
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Redrawing the Maps(medium.com)
1 points by nkoren 10y ago|0 comments
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An AI's Take on Donald Trump(trump.gyana.space)
1 points by nkoren 10y ago|0 comments
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by nkoren 10y ago
Long-term back pain that counted as a pre-existing condition for every insurance package I had, on the rare occasions when I could afford to be insured. That eventually degenerated into a couple of prolapsed disc that cut off the nerves to
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by nkoren 10y ago
I grew up and lived most of my life in America, then emigrated to a country with universal healthcare (the UK). When I developed a life-threatening condition which my US insurance would never have covered, the National Health Service saved
667.
by nkoren 10y ago
Landing the booster stage of rockets is really new. Building mass-market electric cars that are supported by continent-spanning fast-charging networks and can drive themselves is really new. And with that, I'll stop feeding the tro
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by nkoren 10y ago
My girlfriend got a Zenbook a couple of weeks ago. It's a really nice machine -- not quite what I need for development purposes, but very very good. Put me in mind to see what kind of Zenbook might suit my needs. So I headed down to h
669.
by nkoren 10y ago
For the same reason that you would intentionally clutter up the document with HTML markup tags for people who are browsing on a teletype machine.
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by nkoren 10y ago
Nope. I have a 2012 13" retina which, after a lot of very heavy use and at least 12 trips around the earth in my backpack, is starting to show its age. It has been a good machine and I'll miss it. But at £1,500 for a replacement,
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by nkoren 10y ago
"Every 10 minutes" is a completely typical bus schedule, in the civilised world (greetings from London, or basically any European city of consequence). It's not BRT at all. There are Brazilian BRT lines which run vehicles eve
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The prophecies of Jane Jacobs(theatlantic.com)
2 points by nkoren 10y ago|0 comments
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by nkoren 10y ago
Slightly OT, but when it says "Every day there are 96 deaths from car accidents," I think: Rubbish -- that's the number of deaths every 42 minutes. Then I realise: Oh, they're just giving statistics for America. The n
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by nkoren 10y ago
Hey, you say that they're just doing high-speed rail in a tube. Do you have a source for that claim? I see lots of people saying it, but nothing from the company or journalistic sources to confirm that. And what's on their blog se
675.
by nkoren 10y ago
I don't see anything too alarming here. Predicting social uprisings 3-5 days in advance is easy, as long as you're happy with a few hundred false positives for every solid hit. Signal-boosting is only useful to the extent that it
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by nkoren 10y ago
Just to be clear, I quite liked Lister's note as well. I'm a language nerd myself, and always appreciate having more opportunities to cheekily overload some entendres.
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by nkoren 10y ago
I think it's sarcasm, actually? The target of my wit was not the mad typographers of Google, but rather the HN commentors who like to sprinkle comment threads on awe-inspiring subjects with dismissive pedantry. Sometimes it feels as th
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by nkoren 10y ago
Thank you for writing this. If one is going to eat meat, this is how one should do it. I myself would not do this, and therefore (and for a few other tangential reasons), I'm a vegetarian. But I fully respect how you're living. If
679.
by nkoren 10y ago
Work, shmurk! Their set of Akkadian glyphs set looks incomplete, and they don't even have Sumerian or Rongorongo. These guys need to stop sleeping on the job! </sarcasm> (Obviously I'm awed...)
680.
by nkoren 10y ago
His plan isn't to land on Mars. His plan is to settle Mars. At the end of the day, it means that humanity will have a second planet to call home. If you have difficulty calculating the value of that, it's because it's incal
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by nkoren 10y ago
Agreed. The government using private contractors to maintain the infrastructure is fine. In that instance, the government can still account the resource in a holistic fashion. Where it makes sense for end-user-fees to completely pay for the
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by nkoren 10y ago
I consider myself a relatively gung-ho free-market type, where it's appropriate. Utility and transport networks are one place where it isn't appropriate. This is for three fundamental reasons: 1. A free-market dynamic requires an
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by nkoren 10y ago
I'm actually kind of impressed by how sensible they've been. On the one hand, China would have the resources to make a far more ambitious showing in space, if they really wanted to. They could easily outpace the early space-age
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by nkoren 10y ago
If the CIA is going to be modelling their operations after Charlie Stross short stories, they might want to actually read to the end: http://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/ tl;dr: doesn't go wel
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SpaceX: Giant Leaps, Deep Troughs, but No Plateaus(parabolicarc.com)
2 points by nkoren 10y ago|0 comments
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by nkoren 10y ago
Bloody hell... when are journalists going to learn the difference between a car that doesn't always require a driver's hands on its steering wheel, and a car that doesn't require a driver . It's as fundamental as the di
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by nkoren 10y ago
While a minor but noticeable uptick in radiation-induced cancer is unacceptable for humans, animals don't especially seem to mind. The areas around Chernobyl have become a superb wildlife reserve, and Fukushima is probably on its way t
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by nkoren 10y ago
I lived for several years at an architectural project in Arizona (Arcosanti). At one point, a young Japanese architect came to study there. The first week of the workshop is quite intense, full of academic activities, which she excelled at.
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by nkoren 10y ago
See also: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/strategies/HumanstoMars.pdf for useful background.
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by nkoren 10y ago
Sorry to contradict you, but that genuinely was NASA's plan, not just von Braun's: http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-road-to-mars-961235/?al... > Washington-savvy Webb stepped down in 1969. Tom

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