zeteo

52 ms·

451.
by zeteo 14y ago
I'm not sure to what extent this will be able to sail under wind power. They mention they will go through canals, which are too narrow to tack against a headwind. Back in the heyday of canals, sail power was not used much - barges would usu
452.
by zeteo 14y ago
Or maybe the similarity is a wave of speculative frenzy in both cases, inflating prices to unsustainable levels. The factors you mention (low storage and transmission cost, anonymous ownership) make speculation easier, not harder.
453.
by zeteo 14y ago
Yes, having a Nobel Prize in economics doesn't make him right every time. But at least he doesn't have a direct financial incentive to be wrong.
454.
by zeteo 14y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't see the incentives here. We have on the one hand a number of professional economics writers (e.g. Krugman) who are skeptical or dismissive of Bitcoin. On the other hand, we have a number of bloggers who already own Bi
455.
by zeteo 14y ago
These discussions are worse than useless. People with made-up numbers confront people with unreliable anecdotes. Productivity means, very simply, an average of X widgets per hour. Does such a measure even exist for developers? The discussio
456.
by zeteo 14y ago
Many people have heard the phrase "conspicuous consumption", but it's only half of Veblen's analysis. It counterpart, "conspicuous leisure", is arguably at least as important. Typical social proof that you're doing well is not just buying a
457.
by zeteo 14y ago
More generally the issue seems to be that if two different loop counter values j1 and j2 write the same thing to shared memory, then all the writes made by values between j1 and j2 are masked from this kind of testing. This seems like a pot
458.
by zeteo 14y ago
>In a fork/join program, you need just two orders: run all loops from 0 to N. run them all backwards, from N to 0. Does this hold for the following code: for (j = 0; j < 3; j++) a = j % 2; In both forward (0, 1, 2) and backward (2,
459.
by zeteo 14y ago
I don't even think CEOs are paid for their contacts. If you look at the number of CEOs who jump to unrelated industries, it's doubtful many of their contacts carry along. Also if contacts were so paramount, sales people would have an almost
460.
by zeteo 14y ago
>I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself... Ironic that it should deface Unix Agree with him or not, all he's saying is that the code sharing involved in creating Unix was no more than regular academic shari
461.
by zeteo 14y ago
Yes, it's a long-ish article but it covers a lot of factual ground (it's in effect an O'Reilly biography from a very critical perspective). It contains a lot of historical detail that is interesting in its own right; the author has done a l
462.
by zeteo 14y ago
I'm not talking about the value of a single unit of currency, but about the aggregate value of the currency itself. A single Zimbabwean Dollar might have fallen very low indeed, but as long as it was legal tender - and the Zimbabwean govern
463.
by zeteo 14y ago
Your comment amounts to a rather naive "we should get excited about Bitcoin, it has great potential and critics are shortsighted". And it is precisely this excitement (with calls for more excitement) that generates Bitcoin's current value.
464.
by zeteo 14y ago
>HTV-2 is part of an advanced weapons program called Conventional Prompt Global Strike, which is working to develop systems to reach an enemy target anywhere in the world within one hour They're getting really close. Mach 20 is about an
465.
by zeteo 14y ago
International law is a very good case study of why the law matters less than the interpretation. Even more so when the law is old and being stretched to deal with completely new phenomena.
466.
by zeteo 14y ago
While this is more sophisticated, I doubt it's the "correct solution". The underlying assumption of independent draws from a Bernoulli distribution is vitiated, as the order in which the siblings are read usually affects their proportion of
467.
by zeteo 14y ago
So the coolest events on NASA TV are those in which the "outreach" people play no role and just let the cameras speak for themselves. I agree.
468.
by zeteo 14y ago
Meh. NASA outreach sucks in any case. They manage to make space look boring - ever watched one of those conversations between middle schoolers and ISS crew? Just get the kids a few sci-fi books instead, you'll get a much more enthusiastic a
469.
by zeteo 14y ago
She posted a tweet. Even had she called for his resignation (which she didn't), she didn't have any power to effect it. What about the overreacting HR people who actually fired him over that tweet (knowing about the 3 kids and all)?
470.
by zeteo 14y ago
>I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven It's interesting that the story is about Adria and mr-hank when, in fact, it should be about their respective companies. There are probably thousands of tweets posted everyday by pe
471.
by zeteo 14y ago
Where by American history we understand the author's career with the State Department. With such an all-reaching title, I'd have expected him to compare Iraq to at least Vietnam, if not various WW1 or WW2 decisions.
472.
by zeteo 14y ago
I've been thinking a lot about this and I believe you're correct. Agriculture appeared in the Near East around 12k years ago, and civilization only around 6k years ago (if we date it by the Uruk period). If agriculture made cities possible,
473.
by zeteo 14y ago
Grains are not special because they started being cultivated more intensively 12,000 years ago. They were eaten long before that [1] and intensive cultivation also applied to veggies [2] and fruits [3] on roughly the same historical time fr
474.
by zeteo 14y ago
As long as you're not doing pure mathematics, you can't always speak on purely logical ground. Aristotle himself, who invented logic and whose picture is on this poster, wrote a different book called The Art of Rhetoric in which he fully ap
475.
by zeteo 14y ago
>Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is [...] a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing
476.
by zeteo 14y ago
>Your assertion that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for renaissance exploration and trade is extremely dubious. You've misread michaelochurch's comment. He wasn't asserting the Reformation came before the Renaissance. His po
477.
by zeteo 14y ago
Bricklin's background in business was minimal, but he created a product that revolutionized business processes more than thousands of acclaimed gurus . Musk absorbed a few books on rocketry (see my related comment) and constructed an accur
478.
by zeteo 14y ago
So maybe he'll make a killing in the meal substitute market. Or maybe he'll become the poster boy for why you need boron in your diet and you'll die horribly without it. Either way, we'll all learn something new and useful.
479.
by zeteo 14y ago
>I guess [Musk] just read a few books on his weekends and that was enough to design and launch the rocket Ah, I love it when people think they're sarcastic but they're correct: >"I was sitting behind [Elon Musk] on the flight back t
480.
by zeteo 14y ago
>an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have [succeeded with a] task that specialists have so far failed at The guy who invented the spreadsheet didn't have to absorb all available accounting literature first, and El

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