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conanite

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conandalton.net

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you laugh but i've always thought it would be great to carry a kilo of pure hydrogen in my backpack - just burn it to obtain like 5 litres of water ... I mean why are we carrying all that oxygen in our backpacks when he atmosphere has a plentiful supply of it...

Do you mean that if I had invented a "machine for airborne transportation", such as, say, a hot-air balloon, I could collect royalties on jet airplanes?

Another claim seems to be that a collection of unread books serves as a personal reminder of ignorance, that the un-known always exceeds the known, a kind of "memento ignorantiae" that gives us the humility and motivation to always seek to learn more rather than remain complacently content with the knowledge we have already acquired.

And possibly the physicality of a dead-tree library carries this effect more forcibly than an online shopping list.

Pardon my latin.

Using data from government censors

Should be "sensors" (used correctly a few sentences later). Is this a text-to-speech thing, or written by a non-native speaker, or just appalling editing?

Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere.

Difficulty to having parse.

Theoretically at some point in the step-by-step process, the computers will be able to clear their own roadblocks by themselves, and faster than we can. And who knows what happens then. Maybe "singularity" isn't a great word, dunno if there's a better one...

While this is annoying to many of us, if it diminishes the general public expectation that that online services should be free and subsidised by advertising/marketing/related services, that would be good news.

I'm not particularly optimistic about Google though, as they can charge for their services and continue the whole data-gathering game...

I can submit a patch to an open-source project and everybody benefits ; but if I raise my own animals, the industrial-scale torture continues anyway. How many people need to raise their own animals before the abuse ends? It's not "weak-minded" or even melodramatic to conclude that an animal suffers when it is beaten.

Even Buddhists in Tibet are perfectly happy to eat meat.

It is generally true that some adherents of religion X regularly do non-X things, in Tibet and elsewhere.

If you don't have the skills to make the open-source changes you want yourself, but you have the money to make it happen, there is nothing stopping you hiring a developer to build the patch that you need. I don't know of a reliable way to do that with proprietary software.

Google Maps Hacks 6 years ago

The Place Charles de Gaulle Étoile (Arc de Triomphe) in Paris is a gigantic roundabout, with the peculiar feature that traffic entering the system has priority ; traffic already on the roundabout must yield. This would lead to perpetual gridlock were there no traffic lights controlling access to the roundabout. This kind of junction used to be common in cities.

Out in the countryside roundabouts in France operate in the "normal" way : approaching traffic yields to traffic already in the system, with the usual triangular "yield" sign making priority clear.

It's possible that your experience of French roundabouts is related to driver confusion between these two systems.

It's a little bit more subtle. Assume that there is a finite number of primes, and P is the set of all primes p0, p1, p2... pn. If you multiply all these together and add 1, you have a number Q that's not divisible by any number in P. So P cannot be the set of all primes.

- Daddy, is Santa real?

- What do you think, dear?

Followed by discussion of the evidence... if all goes well they learn to use their own judgement and cope with coming independently to their own conclusion in opposition to 99% of their peers...

I can't tell from the username and I have no other information, but if grondilu is a girl, and perhaps a young one at that, it would be perfectly reasonable for her to expect to scream like one. Otherwise the comment was simply outrageous sexism. How dreadful that we can't tell!

How to Buy Bitcoin 13 years ago

You don't have to represent BTC amounts as fractions of a whole. 0.000132 BTC is 132 µBTC, 0.0000132 BTC is 13.2 µBTC, or 1320 satoshi. It's likely we'll be seeing more talk of milli-BTC and micro-BTC, and hey why not nano-BTC while we're at it ...

Read less HN 13 years ago

Something that can curate the top posts and send them to you on a schedule.

When you read a bunch of articles and upvote interesting ones (for whatever your value of "interesting" is), you contribute to the community by making a distinction between articles.

The problem with reading from a curated feed is that you're most likely no longer participating (because it's too late to meaningfully upvote), and hence delegating curation to all the other users. When a majority of all the other users are doing the same, then the power of curation becomes concentrated in fewer voters.

I suspect the value of HN is amplified by the meaningful participation of its users. There are many other ways to be a passive consumer of news.

It's nice how the ancient Romans had an appreciation of the problem of infinite recursion. Suppose there was an independent institution overseeing the US FISC. Who would watch that? And so on. Is there a solution to Quis custodiet ...? Perhaps a multi-pronged separation-of-powers approach, but that hasn't worked out in practice, either.