FastMonkey

I never thought of it like that before. I absolutely agree!

I'm glad to see this. I don't want to live in the mental straight jacket that these "activists" want to create.

What's the round trip efficiency of something like this, and what's the rate of loss to the environment? There's been a couple of these posted in the last few days and I have no feel for these numbers.

This is an article by ourworldindata, who aggregate a bunch of (mostly economic) metrics from countries around the world. It is common for energy use to be reported in that way on a country level. This looks like an explainer for the users of their website on what the terminology means.

It makes perfect sense when you think about who the audience for this data is, economists, planners etc. In those roles, the primary concern is the actual quantity of heat and electricity that the population needs in their homes and workplaces, and you need to be able to back that out to how much raw fuel that requires, or how much transmission capacity you need. You need to know this summary info so you know where the focus needs to be. At moment for instance, they need to know how much gas they need in storage tanks in Europe for this winter, and it's information like this that helps them figure that out.

It looks like they're venture capitalists, so I won't hold it against them!

Ha, aren't you describing wall street right now? We're already living this!

This looks extremely cool. I'm doing a masters right now and would definitely use it!

My one question though would be how are the notes stored? Is it possible to download them as latex or a markdown file or something? If I have to keep up a membership to return to them that would be unfortunate.

Cool project though, there's definitely a need for something more fluidly interactive in the university notetaking space. Best of luck!

Cool Infographics

You can get watering timers in home depot, you could try hacking one of those? The hard piece to get is probably the electronic valve.

Layoffs seem to be up, but that's a questionable chart if ever I saw one. I doubt they have had representative coverage of the market for that whole period. With those numbers, looks like it's as much a chart of the increase in their data collection on layoffs as it is a chart on layoffs.

Oh man, that's literally the only thing holding me back from thunderbird. I used it years ago and would love to go back!

That's kind of funny, our problem with Google calendar is that it keeps adding that when we don't want it!

Without megaprojects, we'd all probably still be living a subsistance agrarian lifestyle. It's hard to tag specific dollars to a specific public project, they often work as multipliers across the economy.

Suing contractors for the bureaucratic nightmare you create means that every future bid will now have a buffer to cover the expense of that.

I think you can technically mitigate some concerns for the people who understand that, but practically it's going to be a very different story. People will believe who/what they believe, and an expert opinion on trustworthiness is unlikely to change that.

I think being in the real world and meeting real people is the only way to create a real, functional society. Allowing people to drift away into their own AI supported worlds would eventually make cooperation very difficult. I think it would just accelerate the tendency we've seen with social media, creating ever more extreme positions and ideologies.

I don't like them myself, but some people think it helps the edges of windows and buttons stand out better.

That sounds great on paper, but you would almost definitely get people squeezing around the letter of the law.

I mean, take noise. It seems easy to regulate because you just put a decibel limit on it, but that doesn't take the nature of the sound into account. So, you could have a business making crying baby sounds for dolls putting that out all day. It's really hard to define something like "no overly annoying sounds", and that's just one aspect of this kind of thing.

There needs to be a relaxation of the tight zoning rules we have these days, but trying to define limits on externalities has lots of problems too.

The solution seems to be a Goldilocks zone between popularity and death, too popular and it devolves, too unpopular and it dies. HN manages to keep itself tucked neatly into that zone I think.

Tunnels are also significantly more expensive, which is why they're so rare. With a tunnel, you generally have significant earthworks, possibly a permanent groundwater issue (you may have essentially created a boat that you do not want to float), and you still have to build a bridge capable of carrying whatever traffic the bikes are bypassing. A bicycle bridge is just the bicycle bridge, a relatively light structure, easy to construct and maintain.

It's like that smart home post from a few days ago. The dream is that lights, heating and entertainment automatically turn on and off and adjust throughout the day. The reality is that someone in the house has to become the IT department, troubleshooting issues all the time. The reality is just way more work than the dream.

Where I grew up, they used the number of cranes visible on the skyline as an indicator of the strength of the economy.

There is balance in all things. Engineers shouldn't be ignored, but we are also not omniscient.

As an engineer myself, having worked on product and having been a client of engineers working on products for me, I can tell you that engineers that think they have an inside track on what the client "really" wants are often wrong. The feeling is similar to that false confidence you get in any field when you have learned just the absolute basics, and I have felt it myself. That's why you don't just go and spend 10% of the clients budget without talking to them first. If clients are saying they don't want a feature, it's quite probable that the person you're dealing with actually knows what they want, and what they want is not what you've come up with.

A lot of projects that filter their way through HN die because the engineers are solving the problem for themselves and not talking to users. That is also the pattern you see with a lot of "what I wish I had known when I started my project" posts on here. Avoiding a conversation with the client because you're afraid they won't approve the feature you want to add is not really great engineering.

Ha, I did the exact same thing. I guess the fed has it all wrong!

Edit: I guess it's not as fair to the player, but maybe there should be more randomness in there, or perhaps some kind of forcing function that makes things a bit less stable.

If you want to improve your writing, even technical writing, I'd recommend reading more books. Classics, sci-fi, whatever floats your boat. Blog posts and news are meant for consuming a point or two in a few paragraphs. Reading a book means really letting a writers style sink into your mind. It'll eventually bleed into your own writing.

Global crypto is a small compared to public markets, and financial institutions essentially can't incorporate them in any way that would pose any real risk. This collapse is a symptom of tightening financial conditions. People don't have free cash to throw into them any more. It seems that without that spare cash, there just isn't enough real value in crypto for it to sustain itself.

I wonder what the correlation is between people who think this is a good idea, and people who feel anxious and lonely. Not saying this is the only cause, but if you make decisions like this you'll end up isolating yourself from some pretty great support networks. Isolation and separateness is not a great long term environment for mental health.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Something like a third of GHG emissions come from heating, if you can extract the heat from a datacentre you're displacing something like gas, it is something to hope for.

It's a bizarre situation, they'd actually probably be better off voting to leave the UK and rejoining the EU.

3blue1brown is fantastic. Every once in a while I'll be like "what is the intuition behind determinants again?", and boom, there's a thoughtful and concise video on it.

However, there's no magic bullet that will let you learn linear algebra in a couple of hours. At some point you have to sit down and work to figure it out. The field has university departments researching it, so there's a lot more to it than just multiplying m×p by p×n matrices.

I don't know what you mean exactly by beginner, but assuming you have some level of mathematical maturity, UT Austin has an edx course you can audit for free, "Linear Algebra Foundations to Frontiers", and FastAI also have a pretty good free video series/course on it too.

What's old is new again I guess? These types of ideas have been around since the 1970s. Block randomization and incorporation of features to model the response surface are already fairly standard well known methods.