topher515

I recently read “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep” which is the story of the history and discovery of prion diseases.

It’s from the mid-00’s so it’s missing the latest research but it’s still an extremely interesting (and terrifying) read.

From the link in other threads: https://www.tsunami.gov/events/PAAQ/2024/12/05/so1aq0/1/WEAK...

* Boat operators,

     * Where time and conditions permit, move your boat out to
       sea to a depth of at least 180 feet.

     * If at sea avoid entering shallow water, harbors,
       marinas, bays, and inlets to avoid floating and
       submerged debris and strong currents.

This is sort of what the Strava "heatmap" map is when you switch it to cycling mode: https://www.strava.com/maps/global-heatmap?sport=Ride&style=....

Are you familiar with the concept of "pricing ladders"? The point of the entry level product is not to simply be "the economy model", it's to be feature deficient in just the right way to make you take a "step up" the ladder to the next model.

What I've observed is that Apple does this by targeting the base model with a storage option that's just below what's probably the sweet spot for price / usefulness in the current market. You'll likely be just frustrated enough to take the step up that ladder.

MKBHD has a very fast explainer on this effect in iPad pricing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiNYOZZLOyg

There are many well intentioned regulations that end up restricting the housing supply by making it more expensive to build. Some of them definitely sound good (and are good?), but collectively have done a lot of bad.

Note the important point here that these don’t “stop building” but rather simply make it more expensive or more time consuming. Increased time is essentially equivalent to increased cost since you must pay lawyers and employees and so forth as time increases.

- minimum parking requirements

- single family zoning restrictions

- height restrictions

- environmental reviews

- historical preservation review

- local input on many/most decisions

There is a whole universe of stuff written around this topic. You can Google around for it with the topic of “YIMBY” or “housing abundance” or similar.

A good entry point can be: https://new.yimbyaction.org/top-resources/

Also read Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein as they have been harping on about housing abundance for many years.

What is most interesting to me about automation in the restaurant industry, is its almost complete absence in the United States.

If—as I understand it—labor costs dominate the cost structure of all restaurants, then why isn’t the average restaurant already mostly robots?

Is it really a technology issue? We haven’t been able to build a burger making robot until today? Seems unlikely.

Is it financial? The capital deployable to build a single restaurant can’t cover the initial costs of the robot? Seems like a McDonalds could spread the costs over thousands of restaurants.

So what gives?

Can you explain a bit more about the difference between the anisotropic and isotopic nature of these different zones?

Are both of these zones “solid” states of matter? Or does our intuition about states of matter not really work for materials at these exotic temperatures and pressures?

I had a buddy who built a solar e-bike for Burning Man; it had a sort-of roof on top, so it had room for something like four of those flexible 100 watt solar panels[1].

He told me his biggest build-regret was the solar panels. Mounting the solar panels on the bike makes everything much more complicated—which means it's more expensive and more delicate. And even if it doesn't shake itself apart, you're constantly thinking about where and how you're parking it.

The right solution for solar powered biking is to keep the solar panels off the bike, fixed in place, facing the right direction. Then you can use lots of cheap, heavy panels, and just plug the damn bike in when you get home.

[1] for example: https://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Monocrystalline-Bendable-Sem...

Not a flight buff, but...

- Jet fuel from NYC to LAX seems to cost ~$10k.[1]

- You pay a pilot $50 / hour salary. (+100% more with benefits?)[2]

- Double all of that for a bunch of random things I can't think of (airport fees?)

My napkin math seems to indicate this couldn't possibly cost Boeing more than $10-20k? Pretty small potatoes to such a large company.

[1] https://simpleflying.com/commercial-airliner-fuel-cost/ [2] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Commercial-Pilot-Salar...

But the goal here in setting these prices (from Society’s perspective) is not to maximize Safeway’s profits, but rather to incentive more people taking up carrot farming!

Since we’re fairly confident we need lots of carrots to save the world!

Agreed! It seems like exactly searching for special characters could be the "killer app" that programmers need which would get them to leave Google.

This is actually one of the classic "disasters" in Sim City 2000[1]. The "Microwave Powerplant" works by bouncing a concentrated beam of sunlight to earth. It provides plentiful, pollution free power... The only downside is sometimes the satellite beam misses, melting everything surrounding it.

[1] https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster)

I just want to take some issue with your characterization of "with mathematical certainty".

You're completely right that given fertility rates are under replacement rate—from memory: 2.1 children per woman—populations will decrease with mathematical certainty. But there is no universal law that developed countries must remain below replacement fertility levels; that's just what has always happened so far—given the cultures and policies which exist today.

It's not completely absurd to imagine scenarios like:

- a rich society getting serious about the fertility problem and putting it's money where it's mouth is: free childcare, free fertility clinics, generous subsidies for having a third kid, etc

- a culture shift amongst the patriotic, or the religious, or whatever subgroup, to believe it's their responsibility to have more children.

I'm not familiar with how pricing precious metals works, but it looks like, as of this moment, gold is priced about 2x more than platinum[1]! Presumably these prices have quite a bit of variability, and gold and platinum switch places sometimes? (Although your main point about gallium being _way_ cheaper than gold/platinum holds for sure.)

[1] https://www.suissegold.eu/en/charts/platinum

If you haven't read "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane yet, then you really should.

One of the book's suggestions is that an energy-first analysis of life and the origins of life, can be incredibly explanatory—particularly since Science (and Pop-Science) has been so focused on genetics for so long.

In terms of the origins of life, the idea is essentially that rather than try to imagine how RNA could "just appear", we should look for places where there were natural, persistent, energy fluxes (the "fires" as you say), and try to understand how these energy fluxes began to resemble cells. i.e., were constrained into cell-sizes and began replicating.

Incidentally, the theory that Nick Lane puts forward of which particular energy fluxes gave rise to life is sea-floor alkaline hydrothermal vents[1]—which is also discussed in the book.

[1] https://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydr...

So if we take for granted that humans really, actually do seem to like free stuff more than we “should”, then perhaps instead of reacting with “lol, humans irrational”, we should more thoughtfully consider why evolutionary pressures would sculpt a mind that seeks out a “free lunch” over a cheap lunch.

Or, to rephrase, if free-seeking is such a powerful effect, then evolution must’ve intended our brains to work this way. Thus suggesting that, while the effect creates individual decisions that are economically irrational, over the long term it must be a survival benefit.

There’s a lot of ways this could work (and I’m eager to hear HNers speculate) but one that springs to mind is thinking in terms of risk as cost.

Imagine you must choose getting great fruit by climbing a slightly unsafe tree, or eating mediocre fruit on the ground in front of you. Over the long term evolution should favor the creature that eats the no-risk ground fruit over even the very low risk climb. Taking ZERO unnecessary risk would be favored, because even the tiniest risks are survival filters over evolutionary time scales.

It seems like you're conflating two issues here:

1. Old people like to fly small planes and crash them more than others [citation needed?]

2. Small planes emit toxic chemicals that are slowly poisoning everyone

Personally I'm horrified that we allow issue (2.) to continue given all we know now about the dangers of lead poisoning. But I don't particularly care about issue (1.) since I generally think people should be allowed to risk their own lives as they see fit.

Edward Snowden is the last person we should ask to speak out against Russia. Almost every other Russia-resident who might speak out against the invasion could, the next day, show up in Madrid, Berlin, Mexico City—wherever in The West—and expect to receive political asylum.

But if Snowden steps foot into Western-aligned soil then he’s just kicked off a slow, inexorable ride via extradition to American prison. As such, Snowden is more incentivized to stay silent than anyone else I can think of.

An unfortunate and extremely ironic side effect of standing up for freedom against a mostly-free state is that he is forever trapped in a very-not-free despotic state. This is his punishment. Why this blogger feels he has the right to demand Snowden sacrifice himself again with likely worse consequences is inexplicable to me.

This is quite surprising and interesting to me. Can you provide links where I can read about this and/or try getting it set up for myself?

I don't understand this position. Are you honestly proposing that we permanently require masks in all public, indoor environments? For the rest of our lives?

I don't see how you can flippantly propose this as an option. How can you be ok with wearing masks for the rest of your life—if it can at all be avoided?

The way a captive portal works is that the router at the coffee shop sees your browser's DNS request for `google.com` and instead of responding with the real IP address for Google it lies to your browser and returns an IP address which it controls.

If google.com were a non-HTTPS website then the router could simply then serve up any arbitrary content it wanted. i.e., it's own login/access form.

However, since google is an HTTPS website, the browser asks for an HTTPS certificate from this fake google.com and the router is unable to deliver a "real" certificate—this then breaks the "login flow" since instead of seeing a login form you see a "danger, do not continue, bad certificate" page.

You’re suggesting that a cubic meter of stone weighs just 3 kg (6.6 lbs)?

That doesn’t sound right.

The bombs were found[1] in the Capitol Hill area—not in the Capitol building.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-inaugurati...

The point being made above about property rights is much bigger than “does my local police do a good job finding burglars?”.

The point is that the government maintains an entire system for tracking, resolving disputes, and enforcing ownership. Think about who has the final say in a dispute over whether you own your car or your house or your company. The government adjudicates ownership disputes and then enforces that adjudication via people with guns.

It’s easier to notice this system if you imagine the counter-factual: if you lived in a failed state, and you wanted to keep your your home or car you would probably need to hire some guys with guns.

(When you think about it this way, you notice that the “value” of the government’s “service” is much higher for people who own a lot rather than for those that own a little.)

Instead of evenly distributing the lights on the inner surface we could distribute them at random. That way at "night" we could turn the LEDs to very low and still have "stars". Then during the day we would turn them up and it would be pretty cool to have thousands and thousands of micro suns.

My understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful, simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem.

All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb 8 years of greenhouse gas emissions.

This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests “compressed” into oil / gas.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! The number 1, 2, 3 and 4 problems the Bay Area specifically (and CA generally) faces are an undersupply of housing.

Fixing this problem will be huge steps towards addressing homelessness, gentrification, desegregating schools, and general wealth inequality.

If there is a focus on high density housing near public transit, then this will also have a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions

Your cited link does not seem to support your assertion that you must "melt coal with quartz". I do not believe that's correct.

The general idea you are referring to is the "life cycle greenhouse gas emissions" for an energy technology. This is a well studied field.

Information from the IPCC and the DOE seems to indicate that photovoltaics and wind have something like 20 times lower green house gas emissions than coal plants over the entire life cycle. [1][2]

And since the manufacture of PV and wind accounts for a majority of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the lifecycle, the emissions will improve for this tech as the blend of energy used to power the manufacturing becomes "greener".

If you think that renewables "aren't even replacing the amount of energy demand is growing by", then you should advocate for additional construction of renewable energy rather than suggesting that they are a dirty technology—since the science we have suggests they are not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis... [2] https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/life-cycle-assessment.html

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