rjdagost

18 ms·

121.
by rjdagost 12y ago
The article was a discussion of the back and forth between steak and sizzle in military procurement. Seems a bit hyperbolic to interpret it as part of a heinous, jingoistic propaganda campaign.
122.
by rjdagost 12y ago
You write as if no one has ever tried different ways of allocating capital. The 20th century is replete with examples of such "better" ways of allocating capital that failed spectacularly (often with considerable bloodshed).
123.
by rjdagost 12y ago
The wider context is that in any post about any topic someone at HN finds a way to take a shot at something American.
124.
by rjdagost 12y ago
Only claims define the intellectual property rights, I get that. But patent jargon is often so abstruse and vague that you need to read much of the supporting text to even understand the claims. Sometimes when I look at claims for patents
125.
by rjdagost 12y ago
So Gen4 Energy started with a similar sized "nuclear battery" concept. After burning through many millions of dollars of investment and years of hard work from a highly skilled team, they decide that prospects are better for larg
126.
by rjdagost 12y ago
There is a company called Gen4 Energy (formerly Hyperion Power Generation) that has been pursuing the "nuclear battery" concept for 7 or so years: http://www.gen4energy.com Regulatory approval has been elusive, and tha
127.
by rjdagost 12y ago
If you define "educated" as being a college graduate, more educated people voted Republican than Democrat in the last presidential election: http://www.statista.com/statistics/245886/voter-turnout-of-t...
128.
by rjdagost 12y ago
The abstract sounds far-reaching, but for patents the claims are what matter. And the claims of this patent are extremely narrow. It shouldn't be difficult to sidestep these. My general rule is that if you see specific numbers in th
129.
by rjdagost 12y ago
One of the proposed use cases of the SCiO is pharmaceutical identification. Consumer Physics needs to be EXTREMELY careful with marketing this use. I would actually discourage this type of application if I were them.
130.
by rjdagost 12y ago
For several years I worked in spectroscopy. It's REALLY tough to take a sensor out of a controlled lab and into the uncontrolled real world and get clear, unambiguous results like this video shows. Usually the absorption signal you&#
131.
by rjdagost 13y ago
These algorithms can allow you to have a self-driving car with only cameras. But, there would be a lot of problems if you tried to make a camera-only system for consumer vehicle navigation. Vision systems need distinct "features&quot
132.
by rjdagost 13y ago
You have to be careful about what Moore's law actually says. It says that transistor density doubles roughly every 2 years. So transistor count can still be increasing while Moore's law is null and void. Most lithographers I&#x
133.
by rjdagost 13y ago
Apparently your idea of "better" means "comments that I agree with"?
134.
by rjdagost 13y ago
My experience in trying to raise funding for a business model similar to yours had me asking the same questions. If you're not shooting for the moon in terms of business size, VCs (and thus accelerators) are just not interested. They
135.
by rjdagost 13y ago
I've been contacted several times by Google recruiters and the interactions have always left a bad taste in my mouth (and I've never even agreed to go forward with the interview process). They won't tell me what projects &#x
136.
by rjdagost 13y ago
I was really interested in Witricity and read a few related papers on their technology. There are a few problems that they are not so keen to publicize: (1) If the receiver loop isn't "inside" the transmitter loop along the
137.
by rjdagost 13y ago
There's something fundamental I'm missing about this proposal: how will this not cause inflation on consumer products? People who earn above the basic income level will be hit with a double whammy: (1) They have to fund the basic
138.
by rjdagost 13y ago
The page isn't loading for me but I will chime in with an image smoothing optimization trick I've used. If you don't need an exact Gaussian blur you can approximate it very efficiently using integral images: http:/&#x
139.
by rjdagost 13y ago
Software is a very broad field and you are painting with a very broad brush. It is true that for many branches of software you do not need much in the way of advanced mathematics. But EVERY graphics programmer I have ever met has told me
140.
by rjdagost 13y ago
I know that some folks in paleoclimatology are interested in these core methodology problems. But these concerns are not conveyed to a wider audience. When a temperature reconstruction graph is released to the public there is no mention a
141.
by rjdagost 13y ago
For a little while I was interested in paleoclimatology and I started studying how researchers developed these historical temperature reconstruction curves. Basically you take “proxies” for temperature, things like tree rings, coral growth
142.
by rjdagost 13y ago
This post struck a chord with me as I'm from the central NY region, not too far from the OP. I get back to my hometown every year or two and the decline is more apparent every trip. Everything from my youth- the places I worked part-time,
143.
by rjdagost 13y ago
There is a great quote in the post: "Incremental improvements just annoy people and are, at best, neutral for your career." Working for several different Fortune 500 companies this has been my experience many times. I have worked on produc
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by rjdagost 14y ago
My understanding of it is that it uses near-infrared LEDs (slightly longer wavelength than visible light) to illuminate your hands, and that's why certain types of light sources that emit a lot of light at these wavelengths are alleged to c
145.
by rjdagost 14y ago
Does anyone have any real-world experience using the Leap? It looks cool as hell but I'm hearing rumors that it doesn't work well in the presence of halogen / incandescent bulbs or direct sunlight. If I have to carefully control the light
146.
by rjdagost 14y ago
Let me introduce you to the ad hominem fallacy... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem The group think on HN is getting bad.
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by rjdagost 14y ago
You might want to let the user decide if it is more important to have a false positive or a false negative. For some applications a false alarm is a minor nuisance but a false negative is catastrophic, but for some applications it is flipp
148.
by rjdagost 14y ago
Excel is the most common statistical analysis package on the planet, bar-none. When you need to deliver code to people who are numerate but don't program then Excel is the best thing to use. Sometimes you just need to give someone (a mana
149.
by rjdagost 14y ago
These "apologies" are not gibberish. Measurements units are like words in that they are conventions that enough people agree with to make them useful as a way of communicating. Measurement units exist to help us quantify our world and if
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by rjdagost 14y ago
If newspapers were startups that were "pivoting" would you be as critical of their changes?

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