serhei

9 ms·

31.
by serhei 9y ago
The dilemma is no different from "should I buy Product X now, or wait a year for version 2 of Product X", only on a national scale. Needless to say, if you play to this psychology successfully, you can delay a project indefinitely
32.
by serhei 9y ago
I'm actually very skeptical about Hyperloop, but it seemed a good way of getting my point across. USA doesn't build stuff not because of technological viability but purely for political reasons.
33.
by serhei 9y ago
For those who think it's because of geography / hyperloop is better technology anyways / any other red herring besides Brezhnevian political stagnation: It's not completely implausible that, 30 years from now, most of Eu
34.
by serhei 9y ago
Until you have hard data on how people born and raised in <40% Earth gravity turn out, moving to other planets is only a possibility, not something you can plan for.
35.
by serhei 9y ago
Hypothetically, if miner profits went into freefall, the alternatives would be to raise tx fees even further (making the network less usable), or to change the protocol to mint more coins. You are correct that the latter would massively dis
36.
by serhei 9y ago
The real metric to watch (but the hardest to get) is "number of users" and particularly "number of users doing things other than buying coins/tokens in hope of capital gains".
37.
by serhei 9y ago
Org format is great, but the designs of many of its more advanced features rely heavily on the Emacs editor's ability to collapse metadata. Once you've built a file that uses drawers, tags, some spreadsheets, and several levels of
38.
by serhei 9y ago
Canada is currently in an awkward middle ground between capitalist free-for-all and European-style welfare state. Thus, people who care more about money, and people who care more about good social support (which includes things like healthc
39.
by serhei 9y ago
Variations on octagonal rooms could be a good approximation. For example, bay windows are practically a way to achieve a similar effect, without departing from a rectangle structure too much.
40.
by serhei 9y ago
The most interesting thing about the procedurally-generated portraits (and earlier work on other generated art [1]) is that the the results completely squick out some people while other people don't seem to notice what the problem is a
41.
by serhei 9y ago
There's definitely value in cryptocurrencies, in the sense of significant promise of being useful for new types of financial instruments and transactions. This does not preclude the possibility of there being a crypto bubble, i.e. dema
42.
by serhei 9y ago
"Why? Robustness (more use cases, platforms), efficiency/cost, and more user friendly." More fundamentally, the second platform benefits from the hindsight of the first platform's experiences, having the opportunity to f
43.
by serhei 9y ago
God, I hope not. It makes zero sense to have TSA theater for high speed intercity trains but not local public transportation, because the latter has far greater passenger volumes. If terrorists wanted to cause mass chaos using a public tran
44.
by serhei 9y ago
You get to decide based on how much transaction fee you're willing to pay to the miners that confirm your transaction. The simplistic explanation is that the Bitcoin network effectively incorporates a hard upper limit on the number of
45.
by serhei 9y ago
Fair enough. But you've made me very curious to see a widely-agreed-upon list of which systems qualify as light rail according to a definition that excludes trams. (Wikipedia does not attempt to make any distinction -- e.g. https:&#x2
46.
by serhei 9y ago
Incidentally, Japan's maglev project (unlike their ordinary trains) is being done at ridiculous costs and ridiculous timeframes ($80 billion USD spent over 31 years -- 2014-2045 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch
47.
by serhei 9y ago
Longest? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DART_Light_Rail -> System Length 93 mi (150 km) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Melbourne -> System Length 160 miles (250 kilometres) However, y
48.
by serhei 9y ago
If you did a detailed audit, you could also price adjust for things like land and end up with a comparison that reflects how each project is being managed.
49.
by serhei 9y ago
I suspect that part of the reason cities like San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver are so ludicrously expensive in North America are because there are far more people that hate cars than there are cities which are amenable to their prefer
50.
by serhei 9y ago
When I read about proposed public transit projects in Boston that were never built, most of them had actually been _court mandated_ by the Big Dig mitigation lawsuits, but they still didn't get completed. Very mysterious. To be fair ab
51.
by serhei 9y ago
I am suggesting that the fact that I (the perceiving subject) am myself (the biological entity) rather than you (a different biological entity, but ostensibly subject to the same laws) is (a) an objective fact (b) not within the domain of s
52.
by serhei 9y ago
Both the Lucas-Penrose argument and the counterarguments seem to assume that consciousness is a phenomenon within the laws of physics which arises from more fundamental laws (e.g. chemistry or quantum mechanics), which is (to me) a complete
53.
by serhei 9y ago
A collection of loosely coupled computational systems still forms a computational system, not some fundamentally different entity.
54.
by serhei 9y ago
Wikipedia describes Godel as a nonreligious theist who believed in the existence of an afterlife. In that context, it is not surprising that he would draw far-reaching conclusions that a human being's behaviour cannot be described by a
55.
by serhei 9y ago
It drew SkyTrain as an ordinary railway (part of the map layer), which is probably treated the same for transit directions, but nevertheless an odd choice visually, since it gets lost in the tangle of freight railways which are drawn identi
56.
by serhei 9y ago
I really like the approach described in these links. Targeted algorithms solve specific problems (e.g. ILP to decide ordering of adjacent lines) instead of someone trying to put together a Grand Unified Machine Learning Algorithm that ends
57.
by serhei 9y ago
Ah. So it's not a question of Google having to assemble better data to compete with (insert other provider), it's a question of having local agencies that are much more proactive about assembling and maintaining accurate data than
58.
by serhei 9y ago
Google Maps in Japan seems to be a few steps ahead of Google Maps in America, on a large number of details. I wonder who they have to compete with there.
59.
by serhei 9y ago
It's also interesting to see how maps evolve (or fail to evolve) for places that are not San Francisco. At the moment, Apple Maps seems to have a more thought-through design for public transit than Google Maps. Which is to say, transit
60.
by serhei 9y ago
The prediction is also dependent on mass adoption of self-driving cars (as the only plausible way that existing internal-combustion cars would end up scrapped en masse in such a short timeframe). The timeframe for that is still unknown an

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