tlb

14 ms·

211.
by tlb 2y ago
Health effects of particulates are approximately linear. So the more particulates the more mortality. There's no threshold below which people are healthy and above which they're sick. It's actually slightly sub-linear, meanin
212.
by tlb 2y ago
Really, "I call myself John". The "m'" (or "me" if the verb doesn't start with a vowel) is the first person reflexive.
213.
by tlb 2y ago
All these claims are like "programming is impossible because I typed in a program and it had a bug". Yes, everyone's first attempt at a reward function is hackable. So you have to tighten up the reward function to exclude sol
214.
by tlb 2y ago
No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the inven
215.
by tlb 2y ago
The purpose of many laws is to require documentation without imposing any new limits on what the government can do.
216.
by tlb 2y ago
In the Levant and Europe, they ground up wheat to make flour and baked it into bread. You can eat raw wheat but it's a lot of work. In the Americas they ground up corn instead. In Africa, millet. In New Guinea they still harvest sago p
217.
by tlb 2y ago
But is it comfortable to talk that way for hours? Can you shout and whisper and sing that way? If not, people would've gradually shifted to easier sounds.
218.
by tlb 2y ago
There are lots of places you can still hunt (or trap) and gather. The actual problem most people would face is (a) they're not very good at it and (b) it's extremely tedious.
219.
by tlb 2y ago
Hmmm, what's the algorithm to extract 101 and not 10101 or 1010103 as the next prime? I suppose you can remember how many digits were in the last prime and only allow the same or 1 more, which should be unambiguous. Though it relies on
220.
by tlb 2y ago
250000 liters of FLiBe contains 44 tons of beryllium, and the current annual production is 220 tons, so it's possible but not cheap.
221.
by tlb 2y ago
I moved to the English countryside recently (early 50s). Regardless of what the media finds to freak out about, it's lovely and quiet and the people are nice.
222.
by tlb 2y ago
A clog doesn't quality as something going terribly wrong. Empirically, my plumbing costs are $300 over 10 years. By comparison, rats are actually a big problem in the deep wooded suburbs. We spend a lot more on exterminators, rat traps
223.
by tlb 2y ago
Rats only live a few years, so they're not a good model for long-term effects. For instance, if microplastic exposure over 60 years causes dementia, it won't affect rats.
224.
by tlb 2y ago
I've been doing it for many years in my house with no problem. Are you claiming that someday something will go terribly wrong and I'll regret it?
225.
by tlb 2y ago
You can make systems less chaotic with damping, but that's not always good. A damped 3-body problem (orbiting planets under gravity) results in the planets losing momentum until they all smash together. If you have an active control sy
226.
by tlb 2y ago
We learned something pretty big and surprising from each new generation of LLM, for a small fraction of the time and cost of a new particle accelerator or space telescope. Compared to other big science projects, they're giving pretty g
227.
by tlb 2y ago
I've designed PCBs using connectors with multiple parallel wires to carry high currents. It's hard to do, and very easy to mess up during later PCB changes. You have to match trace resistances from each pin to the destination. The
228.
by tlb 2y ago
Most states have sales tax added on top of the listed price so items being round numbers don't cause the total to be a round number.
229.
by tlb 2y ago
I've done this for arrays in JSON files, so that git merge will merge two changes that append to the list without a conflict. I think the right answer is to fix the merge algorithm to handle some common cases where an inserted line log
230.
by tlb 2y ago
There'll be demand for both kinds of models, imaginative and dependable.
231.
by tlb 2y ago
See advice at https://www.ycombinator.com/library/carousel/Finding%20a%20C... And a matching service at https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching
232.
by tlb 2y ago
It's profitable for Amazon and eBay to have reliable reviews and fewer dissatisfied customers.
233.
by tlb 2y ago
HN's purpose is about gratifying intellectual curiosity (see Guidelines link in footer.) I don't see anything intellectually interesting here, and the comments in previous submissions suggest that nobody else has anything interest
234.
by tlb 2y ago
I recommend The Man in the Thick Lead Suit by Daniel Lang (1954). About the US atomic program, written before people got all uptight about radiation.
235.
by tlb 2y ago
It might not be ironclad, but the ease with which federal workers can fiddle with data they're hosting themselves vs. fiddling with data in Harvard's library is a pretty big difference. And if it ever came to demands for censorshi
236.
by tlb 2y ago
That's true at a point in time, but bad guys start out as clueless noobs with poor opsec. The Silk Road guy, for example, was identified by forum posts he made before becoming a drug lord. The sort of people who become radicalized thro
237.
by tlb 2y ago
I wrote a lot of 6502 assembly once, and you spend a lot of time dealing with the 8-bittedness of the architecture. Multiplying two 16 bit numbers is a whole blob of code. That doesn't seem useful for new programmers to struggle with.
238.
by tlb 2y ago
Not if the company had up-to-date audited financials, no. You'd start with those. The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balan
239.
by tlb 2y ago
It's shocking how many billions of spending are completely unaudited. Official gov't auditors have tried for years, but the target agencies stall and stall. You have to assume there is some malfeasance there. Doing an audit starti
240.
by tlb 2y ago
Turns out that $ profit is one of the least gameable metrics. Not completely ungameable, but for a consumer product manufacturer in a free market it's the least gameable metric invented so far.

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