rgmerk

15 ms·

181.
by rgmerk 2y ago
New York to San Francisco is roughly 3000 miles (4800 km). At 250km/h, that’s a 19 hour trip. A 19 hour plane trip from New York gets you to Singapore. Fast trains are great for journeys up to about 600km. For crossing continents, pla
182.
by rgmerk 2y ago
LLMs are not suitable for mutation testing. Mutation testing needs to be fast to be useful (because you need to generate and test a lot of mutated versions); an LLM-based mutator would be extremely slow as well as error-prone.
183.
by rgmerk 2y ago
We spent a total of 262 days (by an NYT estimate, though the rules varied throughout that period) in lockdown throughout the pandemic. Did it suck mightily? Yes. Did we get through it? Yes. (Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the le
184.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Of all the stupid and obsolete things in standards we use to interoperate, CRLF is one of the least consequential.
185.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Because small, cheap drones can’t fly at supersonic speeds at long enough range to matter. Drones that can do that are called “anti-aircraft missiles”.
186.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Enforcing laws on farms is challenging, often to the point of futility, and particularly when you’re talking about large-scale ranches.
187.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Precisely, and a substantial fraction of farmers wouldn’t bother.
188.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Good luck with trying to persuade farmers to apply that additive. Unkess there’s something in it for them that they can’t get by just claiming they’re applying the additive, farmers won’t do it. There is no industry in the world more alle
189.
by rgmerk 2y ago
If we're going to have this argument, are we allowed to read/write to external storage? That would seem to me to circumvent the bounds of pointer address space. The interface to the external storage only needs bidirectional sequen
190.
by rgmerk 2y ago
This is a recommissioning of a 50 year old plant that’s been sitting idle for five years from an era when nuclear plants were all bespoke. Does that sound more like an nth of a kind project, or a first of a kind project?
191.
by rgmerk 2y ago
The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN. The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out res
192.
by rgmerk 2y ago
And this particular refurbishment is in one of the countries with serious cost and schedule overruns for its nuclear build, and a country and specifically a region that is bad at physical infrastructure.
193.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Presumably they’ve signed an agreement to buy the power (delivered through the grid) from the plant operator at a contracted price. The plant operator can then get finance for the work required to actually deliver on the contract. A lot of
194.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Hmmm. 50 years old and out of action for half a decade. That’s going to require a lot of work to persuade the NRC it’s safe to operate. Given how difficult it’s proven to build new nuclear around the world, what are the odds of this recomm
195.
by rgmerk 2y ago
True, but much more of a problem for wind and transmission than solar per se.
196.
by rgmerk 2y ago
You might not use your car on a schedule, but if you aggregate thousands of private vehicles you can build a statistical model that gives you pretty high confidence that a certain amount of charge will be available. Yes, the fraction of tot
197.
by rgmerk 2y ago
That's very cool...but I wouldn't be trying this one rocking up in Nelson with a gravel/mountain bike and heading off. Some of those tracks in the mountainous, forested parts of eastern Victoria are in seriously rugged and
198.
by rgmerk 2y ago
There's been some research into high-temperature electrolysis. The idea is that a lot of the energy to split the hydrogen and oxygen can be provided as heat; that means you need a lot less electrical energy. To a rough approximation, f
199.
by rgmerk 2y ago
No they’re not busywork, but not all such screens are directly in the drug discovery pipeline.
200.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Worth pointing out here that in other scientific domains, papers routinely require hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars, of resources to produce. My wife works on high-throughout drug screens. They routinely use o
201.
by rgmerk 2y ago
“The cost of gasoline is coming down to the point where gasoline-powered lanterns may become the lighting of choice for carriages”.
202.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Corollary: energy is going to much more expensive the further you get away from the equator (in the absence of very predictable winds/lots of hydro/cheap geothermal).
203.
by rgmerk 2y ago
The risk of dying while flying in a light plane is reasonably high. The risk of dying from a light plane crashing into you while you are on the ground is negligible.
204.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Sure, I get there’s only so much that get squeezed out of existing lines without any physical infrastructure changes. But reconductoring seems like it buys you a lot of extra capacity over the existing physical right of way, and if you us
205.
by rgmerk 2y ago
This seems…odd. What’s the economic case for building a supertall building in a fourth-tier city in flat terrain like this?
206.
by rgmerk 2y ago
When using GDP as a gauge of living standards, people usually use PPP (purchasing power parity) measures, which adjusts for the cost of goods in different places. Any such adjustment isn’t going to be perfect, and there are other quirks (ta
207.
by rgmerk 2y ago
I don’t think there’s anything particularly mysterious here. Of the three early automotive propulsion technologies, internal combustion engines were the best compromise at the time, as it was compared to the gas turbine in the 1950s and 196
208.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Because they think they can build a cheaper car that way. Same reason they haven’t even offered an instrument display in front of the driver as an option, and replaced the indicator stalks with buttons (which from reports works acceptably w
209.
by rgmerk 2y ago
True. And domestic abusers do install such tools, by the way.
210.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Not taking sides on this one because I don’t live in San Francisco and haven’t had the chance to look into these claims. But on the issue of domestic and family violence, where I live in Australia it has become a major political issue, and

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