rnabel · HackerTrans

3 yıl öncediscuss

It looks like the current road tax frameworks of many countries use either CO2 emissions or car price as a main factor for road tax, which presumably correlates with weight - except for EVs. Seems like at least the CO2 bit will have to change with EVs becoming more mainstream.

rnabel

3 yıl öncediscuss

Yes, the noise level is measured on the ground directly below the flight path of the plane.

Interestingly, it’s not just the volume but also the pattern of the boom that can be altered by changing the design of the plane. There’s a great discussion of this here: https://www.elidourado.com/p/50-years-supersonic-ban (Scroll down to the images of the sound wave)

rnabel

5 yıl öncediscuss

There is a great part in “Now it can be told”[0] which discusses the counter intelligence efforts of the Manhattan Project - specifically when trying to figure out how far along Nazi development was. The upshot is: approximately nowhere, IIRC the test reactors never fully worked.

However, in the process of finding out how much progress was made, they talked to multiple French nuclear scientists in newly liberated Paris. One of the scientists figured out that the US had working atomic weapons. This guy then managed to play this card to such effect (eg by suggesting that he may talk to the Soviets) that he was able to extract a lot of concessions from the US.

Now we have a nuclear armed France which IIRC was rapidly accelerated by tech transfer negotiated as a result. Pretty wild.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/170428.Now_It_Can_Be_Tol...

rnabel

6 yıl öncediscuss

I also looked into this and ended up being successful when searching for photography lights and corn cob LEDs. Corn cob bulbs at 40-60 Watts each are cheap (~20USD in the UK), provide ~4K lumens each, and 2-3 are bright enough to get to daylight levels. Would highly recommend if you want to see whether it makes any difference, and/or which colors temp works best.

rnabel

6 yıl öncediscuss

That was some of the best accessible scientific writing I recently came across - thanks for sharing! What an exciting time to work in that field.

Their article on the Ötzi discovery [0] is also well worth a read.

[0] https://secretsoftheice.com/news/2018/07/04/otzi/

rnabel

7 yıl öncediscuss

I would recommend reading this article by The Guardian on palm oil: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingred... (It is also available in podcast form)

From the article:

> Most importantly, it gives the highest yield per acre of any oilseed crop – almost five times as much oil per acre as rapeseed, almost six times as much as sunflower and more than eight times as much as soybeans. Boycotts of palm oil will only lead to its replacement by other crops needing far more farmland and likely more deforestation.

rnabel

8 yıl öncediscuss

  > "the father of sociobology"

I will never understand why people write articles without a spell-checker.

rnabel

8 yıl öncediscuss

Same here! Sadly they don't seem to be made any more...

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

A good book on this topic, which discusses this particular study is "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by Ericsson and Pool.

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

Interesting point re the zone-programming and being a cowboy programmer.

I don't think that 'in the zone'-programming has to produce bad code, though (if that's what you are saying). I'd argue that it depends on what gives you a reward. If you take pride in your code then you will find it rewarding to write tests and decent comments etc., and more importantly make a habit of doing so. A lot of people who write bad code think that they can get away with it because they are 'smart'. These same people then spend a ton of time trying to find bugs.

It sounds like your colleague is 'finishing' features by accumulating tech debt. While this may impress non-technical management, from my experience, it wouldn't make it into a high-quality production code base.

From people I've worked with, it seems like most people go through phases of extreme productivity ('being in the zone'). The code quality may suffer somewhat during those times, but they don't throw all good practice out of the window (not compiling for days, no tests?!?).

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

I generally disagree that the university network is unimportant.

"85% of All Jobs are Filled Via Networking"[1]; the network in most cases (certainly mine) will consist of people they met at or through university.

In this case, I would argue that the "through" university section is highly important. If you go to uni, land a couple of internships at large companies or go on exchanges you probably have a very large network of people you otherwise wouldn't have.

I do, however, agree that it takes effort (on both sides) to maintain the friendships and connections made at university.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

This is a good point - what strikes me about these arguments, however, is that the biggest problem (IMHO) stems from the fact that the economy often relies on local optimization, not global optimization.

If we optimized human life quality globally everyone would get better healthcare etc., but since everyone makes the decisions that benefit them (+family and immediate surrounding), then we end up with worse healthcare for the vast majority of the population.

As such, it should probably be the job of governments (regulation, incentives) to make 'globally' optimized decisions more attractive (centralized healthcare). In a best case scenario at least.

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

This is a very good point. The only problem would be if people with an ASD are highly self-selecting into the technical field, thus being a significant influence.

Below is what I could find in academic journals. TL;DR it is not significant.

There are 2 studies I could find which found that:

- likelihood of autism (or being on the spectrum) is 3 to 7 times higher among maths students (Cambridge university, 1.85% vs. 0.24% in the control group)[1].

- [2]: People with an ASD (autism spectrum disorder), "have one of the lowest overall college enrollment rates", but "young adults with an ASD who attend college are most likely to pursue STEM majors". It is noted in the analytics section that those with an ASD have a 34.31% enrollment rate in STEM fields with a heavy bias towards maths and CS. This compares to >32.6% in the general population [3] (data from 2012).

So, it looks like the percentage you listed are correct, with a potential of it being quite a bit lower due to hiring practices within the industry.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26181845

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3620841/

[3] https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-08.html

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

The way that I understand it, the SQL databases are not empty and the mining process, if similar to standard blockchains, will mean that the block's hash has to be of a specific format. Thus data can be distributed, e.g. academic articles, which are safe from changes, as the hash is fixed.

I'm guessing that SQL databases were chosen to enable easy queries of structured data...

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

Very broad question but related: this blog [0] discusses how a modelling product was used to simulate the internet backbone. If your aim is real-time reaction modelling of actors, this could theoretically be implemented using such a system.

They have an open beta [1], although building a comprehensive system like that described above seems a very significant task even to a large engineering team.

[0] https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simul...

[1] https://spatialos.improbable.io/get-spatialos

(Disclaimer: I have interviewed with and accepted an offer by Improbable)

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

(Related) How to Backdoor Diffie-Hellman

Discussion which contains a number of good comments about weakening DH: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11973365

Paper: http://eprint.iacr.org/2016/644

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

I agree, it is a similar situation in most European countries atm. However, the fact that the service is not great now should not be taken as an indication that the service cannot be great in the future.

If you look at the US market, both providers have significant amounts of content, which, it can be argued, provides a better viewing experience. The trend seems to be going away from traditional cinemas to streaming services. If this is the case Cannes may have just made itself irrelevant to this growing part of the market.

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

Improbable's SpatialOS is not a VR platform in the Oculus-way. Real-time simulations can be (and are) used as the backbone for super-expansive game universes which are visualised using VR graphics engines (or any other technology, really).

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

Besides games, there is potential to run real-world simulations. If you can describe the behaviour of a single agent, you can accurately predict how a large number of such agents, e.g. humans, would act given an environment, say a city. Their blog [0] is showing a few such examples, incl. a simulation of the internet [1].

Making it really easy to develop such simulations could open this tech up for people who have applications for it but can't afford to build this kind of thing from scratch as the companies building things like Second Life.

[0] https://improbable.io/news

[1] https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simul...

rnabel

9 yıl öncediscuss

Interesting, I am not aware of what happened re the US$13B bill (quoteed this figure in GBP in my prev response). As I indicated, this is not tax aversion but simply "clever" structuring of their EU operation. Paying employees income taxes directly is standard for most EU countries (and the US, too, mostly).

The US$13B is for a 10-year period (2004-2014), so can't be compared to their 10B tax per annum in the US.

Your numbers are correct: according to a number of reports, Apple's market share in the smartphone market range between 11% and 18%[1] and an average of about 14.4% for 2016 [0].

[0] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3609817

[1] http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os