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beyondcompute

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www.bristol.ac.uk 1y ago

Hydrocarbon-Only PFAS Alternatives

beyondcompute
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www.youtube.com 9y ago

How Political Correctness Limits the Free Exchange of Ideas on Campus

beyondcompute
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medium.com 10y ago

Pokemon Go gave me hope for this planet

beyondcompute
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news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Psychologists in modern companies. Do many have them and if not, why?

beyondcompute
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news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

MacOS is the new Windows

beyondcompute
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news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: What IM services do you use?

beyondcompute
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gist.io 13y ago

What if PHP was not that bad?

beyondcompute
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Microsoft Designer 3 years ago

Remember the days when most people who were on the internet could build their own websites? And those were rather unique, sometimes quaint and sincere? And you didn’t need a help from a solar-system-engulfing corporation to accomplish that? What if I told you that it is still possible? Or, have we as the tech community “succeeded” in making the barrier of entry so much higher?

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Happy New Year HN! What are your plans for the new year? 5 years ago

Consume less = exclude myself from certain kinds of social relationships with other people, show less appreciation to the labor of inventors, engineers and people who make stuff with their hands (appreciation in action, not just in words)?

Everyone is entitled to live the way they prefer (within certain limits), of course! :) But I would want to “consume better” instead of “consuming less”.

Consume things made sustainably, buy quality products made by small/family businesses, purchase more services rather than goods, avoid consuming things made by big corporations under regimes that go against the values I believe in, support technologies that move humanity closer to the future that appears to be “a better future”, etc.. I hope that this does not sound too contrarian and does not offend anybody! Peace and happy New Year to everyone!

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The Japanese government is still trying to phase out floppy disks 5 years ago

So has the Japanese government indeed been struggling (I doubt there are that many things that would make such an organization struggle) or was it just avoiding running after every fashionable technological trend there was? I imagine that other governments have spent hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money going through generations of quickly-becoming-obsolete tech in the same time.

Are we simply dealing here with different philosophies in regarding what’s important in life?

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Ask HN: Best IDE for web/JavaScript, node dev 5 years ago

I recommend having a look at WebStorm as well. I’ve been using it or IDEA Ultimate (which also includes it) for last 5 years at least if not more.

While it has some bugs and rough edges its capabilities are still quite impressive.

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Glass – Photo sharing app and community 5 years ago

There’s not that much wrong with Facebook or Instagram. They are what we make them. You won’t have a new kind of community unless you somehow create a new kind of human. Or unless you introduce some kind of requirements for people who wish to enter. But that’s maybe “elitist”, right? :)

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Space Tourism Is a Waste 5 years ago

I would not necessarily call it “pointless” as in “totally pointless”. The benefits could be: 1) “Trickling down” of new technologies. Development of new production and operation methods that could be used elsewhere. 2) New jobs, taxes, etc. Again there are “schools of thought” (or rather ideological movements) that dislike the idea of economic growth and ignore its positive impact on people’s standards of living. (Agains it’s not an excuse for unsustainability, of course). 3) As applied to transportation, direct increase of productivity (e.g., you are happier because you were able to visit your friends over a weekend). 4) (Probably one of the underrated aspects). Inspiration. More people would go on to become engineers, scientists, etc. Less people will become disappointed in civilization, technological progress and join weird political and ideological movements, etc.

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Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987) 5 years ago

That’s when the smart people exited the field. Because they felt that computers will soon stop being fun (that’s what happened in the early nineties indeed). And now we are stuck in this bells-and-whistles industry (software and web). While real engineers and scientists are focused on the fields that matter, like transportation, space exploration, robotics, construction, food production, medicine…

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The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower 5 years ago

Would be very interesting to learn why this was downvoted. I am somewhat loosing faith in humanity recently. If people express their negative feelings towards someone who thanks another person and is politely trying to clarify his previous message, I am not sure what future do we all have.

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The Spacefaring Paradox 5 years ago

Thanks for the information! But I did some research recently plus one of my friends got into VR not so long ago. I should have expressed myself more clearly. By “visually immersive” I meant “virtual representations of real places so realistic that many people in many cases wouldn’t want to bother with visiting a real place afterwards”. I still think that: 1) graphics is not “realistic enough” (especially if we are talking about more consumer-oriented systems). 2) there’s not enough content yet.

When I will be able to visit a museum or to travel to some real place (or to a place that is inspired by a real one and retains “detalization”, for example, various small objects that you’d find in a real place) that will be interesting to me.

Games, on the other hand, do not really sound so compelling.

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The Spacefaring Paradox 5 years ago

1. Passengers can spend time in VR (I want to believe that fairly visually immersive VR tech will be available already in “several years”).

2. We need hypersleep tech. There’s no way around it, as it seems.

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Potemkin Data Science (2020) 5 years ago

Did someone need to downvote me to disagree with my opinion? What kind of person are they?

Now, some points.

  what economics is a science now
Are you kidding? 3D-animation is not a science but you still can understand how it is done and what works better and what doesn’t. Economic life is a physical process that has been observed for quite a while and some patterns appear to have been understood. We may not be right in 100% of cases but the fact is, that consumption has been a crucial factor in (at least) some instances of economic growth in the past.
  how much can you control the effects of whar you consume other than by controlling how much
That’s easy. By choosing alternative products/services. You boycott companies that are not doing too good of a job and support those (“vote with your wallet”) that you believe to be doing better.
  You might buy vegan patties…
That part looks a bit confusing to me. But in my example I was talking about things that I deem “actually relevant to moral questions”. (It depends how you define the term “moral”, I suppose). But to me a life of a sentient being that has individuality trumps many other concerns related to political ideologies, people’s convenience, etc.
  you only have partial power over it's good-faith nature
“Its nature”. I do not think that this part of the argument looks so clearly-defined. What is “partial” versus “non-partial”? To me it’s all “partial” and it’s “good enough”. I’ll take “partial” any day! Besides, in any case you still need to eat and you still need to make those choices.
  If you really want to keep your hands clean
That’s definitely not the ultimate goal or a cornerstone of my ethics or “philosophy”. In general I am fairly concerned with people who pay too much attention to “cleanliness” or “purity”. Not really an argument, just a note. :)
  more than you absolutely need to for your survival
I think, it’s really cruel to expect someone to spend their lives only at physical survival level. People do have needs beyond physical. So it makes it necessary to spend “beyond that level” and therefore it makes this “morally ambiguous act” necessary. But that’s what I said! We are back to a “very general philosophical level” and we are discussing that “(almost) everything is morally ambiguous”. Yes, I agree with that. (But I also think that it’s a fairly useless question compared to a very practical question, “Do we need to consume to make our friends’ parents live longer and happier?”)
  we absolutely need the economy to grow for continued prosperity
Could you define “continued prosperity”? Do you propose to just stay at the same level we are on already? Or do you propose to go back to a level where many people with serious diseases (who depend on high-tech medicine and equipment) to survive every day will not survive? By the way, I was not speaking about “continued prosperity”. I was talking about “better prosperity”. There’s too much suffering in the world currently in my opinion! We need better medical technologies, we need “cultured meat”, we need robotic helpers for old lonely people, we need to make Earth-born life multi-planetary (or multi-space-habitat) otherwise it will be gone in several hundred million years! Again, opinion. Please don’t “argue” with that!
  preposterous
Preposterous means “utterly absurd”. You could argue that the statement is dubious probably. But to call it “absurd” right away… The statement might actually be true. It might actually be “the only way for societies on certain stages”.
  It's clearly A method
I agree with this! Meaning, it might not be the _only_ method. There might be some nano-robots that make stuff for people out of the air and then no one needs to compete and do unpleasant work and everything is so good, yadda yadda.
  a glorified Ponzi scheme
Now that’s actually interesting. Do you have links to any serious works which show that economic growth (in all circumstances) is 100% a Ponzi scheme? Because when there’s such a scheme in an economy it’s called “a bubble” and it’s recognized as its own thing and then there’s an argument that sometimes bubbles are not so “bad” and that they might contribute to economic growth (whether we say that economic growth is a good or a bad thing). But again, it’s dubious to me that every instance of a growing economy is 100% a “bubble”.
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Potemkin Data Science (2020) 5 years ago
  morally ambiguous act of consuming
What? I mean, you can argue that it’s “morally ambiguous” in the same sense that almost everything is ambiguous, for example being happy and enjoying an evening with your friends while some people in the world are suffering. But otherwise I would argue that buying a smartphone in a capitalist society is a much less “ambiguous” act than eating meat in a communist society, for example. But in general if one is familiar with the basics of economics, one should understand that for the growth of standard of living (that includes health of your parents, for instance, not just “mindless pleasures”) there needs to be the growth of economy. And for that, consumption is essential. So yeah, consumption of in-good-faith sustainable and environmentally-friendly goods, consumption of local stuff and especially consumption of services is not that ambiguous at all. You contribute to economies going and to communities’ well-being.
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