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At first, Amazon was exactly the kind of Equity business OP is writing about. And it was hugely criticized about it [1, for example]

[1]:https://www.computerworld.com/article/1377261/bezos-says-ama...

But then you choose it. I misselected several times

A nice, extensive and comprehensive article on a not well known country.

Except from the « Notes on Benin », is there any other country analysis in this blog ?

I have found this work very inspiring, I would love to write similar articles on my travel destinations.

Wonderful ! Even if I am not super interested in the topic, the explanations are so clear and the animations so nice that I have admiration for the work done. Full mastery of the web medium that makes an explanation way clearer that any paper could. Would love to work on a similar projet on economics & personal finance. Thanks for sharing !

Even if you do not use the ads you see to make your decision, they influence you.

I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route.

Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.

I never questioned the limitations for these upgrades…

Thanks for reminding me that everything is possible, I may try Opencore to keep it even longer !

If we are going this way… I still use a mid-2012 MBP as my main workstation.

Last one with upgrade capabilities, now it has two fast SSDs and maximum Ram. I changed the battery once.

Only shame is that it doesn’t get major MacOS upgrades anymore.

Still good enough to browse the web, do office productivity and web development.

12 years of good use, I am not sure I can get so much value anywhere now

Another good engineering principle is to write a lot of tests. I know it is a basic rule of engineering but it is not always followed.

However, beware as the result of your test will also be seen by auditors, so if you refactor a system, it is better to have a write/solve approach than write all your tests firsts and solve them afterwards.

As the author said, in icy conditions it changes the day from scary to fun

Easy where there is a lot of mountains (japan, Austria, France), harder in flat countries.

Interesting part of the article on electrolysis to use the lighter than air H2 instead of pumping water up. Smells a lot like over-engineering but seems fun !

Aside from the tweet controversy, I think the article has a point.

It is true that AI is providing even more leverage than the other tech layers before it. Probably the same for VR, if it gets adoption. However, the question is :

Will this leverage be concentrated to the point that a few will have control and everyone else will happily comply and execute ?

Or is it the other way around, allowing everyone more freedom and power to create and grow independent wealth, companies or ideas ?

I would love to think the latter but the experience since the dawn of the technology is more the former.

How could we ensure that we are on the path toward 7 billion companies more than the one toward even a fewer number of big companies that control the last layer of tech ?

I am not an expert but it seems like a great source to understand chips without getting top deep. It reminds me the classic « Nand 2 Tetris » course [1] with less involvement indeed. Thanks for the developer and thanks for sharing. Curious to know industry expert comments !

[1]:https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Sounds to you, and to me too. However there is as many different ways to do vacations as there are people. Some like to do nothing on a beach for days, others to live an adventure or meet people. I can totally understand why you want a totally optimized trip if you have money and little time. And I am sure part of the 25k€ package mentioned is spent on planning with enough time or options to avoid stress.

And uranium also comes from nuclear reactions before/outside our planet. In the end, we only use current or stored production of nuclear cosmic energy coming from E=mc2 isn't it ?

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Interesting subject often overlooked in our humanist (as valuing human life over everything) societies. On the subject, the bias I have found the most often when discussing it is when someone says that « a life has no price, everything should be done to save it ». Such views often results in overlooking real risks and focusing on fears.

Even if I agree that value is not cost, having a number is better for decision making than having nothing, especially in engineering projects.

I do not know why the post is flagged, but I am not surprised as I only see a weak link between the article and the title and it is definitely political. And I am surprised so few comments are about the content.

However, the subject is still interesting. We have a fairness problem with the carbon footprint of the wealthy but we have no good solutions for now.

I am sure technology can help, but polical and social work will be needed too.

According to game theory, you should have empathy but not too much. Its such a powerful theoretical finding for every aspect of life. I found it best explained in the Veritasium video on game theory [1] [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM&pp=ygUfZ2FtZSB0aGV...

Nice to see such an extensive work by such a recognized scientific body. It gives hope in a future more sustainable world and I think we need it. To be fair, the timing is great, nuclear energy is strongly coming back after having been « out of fashion » for 20+ years.

In short, a survivor bias. I didn’t thought about it and it is possibly true ! There is probably as much if not more things produced today that will last many decades, but the only one we see of the past are those which survived.

I can concur with personal experience : I learned to fly at a young age (14-15 year old) and was able to go solo and get licensed with the minimum required hours and age due to hundreds of hours of sim. Even to practice every procedure that has to be memorized while piloting, it was worth it.

Interesting subject tackling two important home issues at the same time : ventilation and heat exchange. It seems like a way to get the best of both worlds. However, I do not know why this forum is relevant or interesting. DIY solutions are easily doable but is it really surprising ? I am sure people have done this with old fridge parts, as someone suggest in the last post. Yes, DIY can be cheaper but reliability is key for such systems. Size can also be key.

The website is surfing on a trend of people worrying about the price of things.

However, I would argue most of things are cheap, even today. Their very low price in the last decade(s) was maybe an anomaly due to huge income inequalities in the world, global commerce expansion due to a very peaceful era, and very abundant energy. The price of things is still quite low, if yo try to imagine what it would cost to a small or even a large community to build most of the things we use, we would have to go back to the 1800's.

Writing this comment reminds me that things could get more expensive, and making them cheaper takes a huge amount of human effort.

At the time, it already costed a huge premium. If you get to the basic cost in terms of ressources, it is probably less expensive to do elaborate work like this today due to better knowledge and tools. But maybe today, most of (new) homebuyers prefer allocating more resources to less durable goods like tech or entertainment. Edit : Plus, cheap 100 year old homes do not exist anymore.

If you have the chance to visit Roquefort (the city) and the cave, you should. That's what the legend tells : a young shepard forgotten his cheese in a cave when he saw a beautiful girl passing by... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roquefort I personally understood the taste of it when I visited the caves there and now I am a huge fan.

What is remarkable with Roquefort is the penicilium roquforti and the fact that it is not that dry. Many dry cheese can be aged and should be to develop their aromas (Comté, parmiggiano...etc).

One more parameter that I find often overlooked is temperature : aromas and texture are much better at room more than fridge temperature. If you can get your cheese out of the fridge 30min-1h before consuming, you will enjoy it much more. Edit: typo

Thanks ! Sorry I overlooked this. Did a little research and I think the most confusing in this is the ton. At least, pints, gallons and miles have a different name than the metric unit and are way different than their SI equivalent. Not close by around 10%, one more (the long ton) and one less (the short ton). A perfect way to get the wrong quantity of a thing without noticing it at first. And if that’s not confusing enough, using « long » and « short » for a mass unit..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne

Yes, a very confusing error. The metric time is the SI time (24h 60m 60s). The decimal time is base 10. French tried to get it used during the revolution and it did not work. Its the only unit that resisted decimalization, with a couple others ones in a handful of countries still using something called « imperial units ».

Another similar thought experiment is binary clocks which I remember using to get use to read in base 2. [1]

Weekly clocks are also a good way to change perspective on time. [2]

Both are fun to use, especially with other people if you manage to get them to experiment with you. Both have the avantage of avoiding any confusion with SI time.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_clock [2]: https://dayclocks.com/products/classic-oak

My view on hydrogen is that we will look at it like pressurized air in the 1900’s. Some industrial applications exists but its not the silver bullet many articles are talking about. It is inefficient and we shouldn’t spend many ressources on it. However, I am happy some people experiment with it, we may discover an innovative application that may be a true breakthrough. But I won’t bet on it.

On the contrary to many other comments, I think this article is quite interesting. As a mechanical engineer, I know moment of inertia is very important for many designs, albeit often for more functional reasons than the user’s feelings.

It is a short and quickly written article with back of the napkin maths but its good enough (and what most engineers are doing at work anyway). And it reminds us that the spec sheet is not everything. It’s nice to have a lighter phone, but is it really what matters ?

It shows once again how Apple design teams are focused on user experience. I know they aren’t perfect and Apple gets a lot of criticism on HN (mostly deserved), but at least they are great on pushing the extra mile on this kind of things.

It reminds me of how much people were surprised about EV acceleration capability because they compared vehicles on HP, overlooking sometimes torque and often jerk curves.

Of course, I do not envision getting users. Only for fun and training - I think having examples of simple solutions to seemingly hard problems in mind makes it easier to come up with one in the future.

I am not sure the data model is the problem here. I feel like the journalist tried really hard to make a case against scoring (which I do not like either), but overlooked the fact that the whole system in which its embedded is bad. The case should not be on the technology but on its usage.

It’s already looking like a bad journalism piece in the first part :

” Being flagged for investigation can ruin someone’s life, and the opacity of the system makes it nearly impossible to challenge being selected for an investigation, let alone stop one that’s already underway. One mother put under investigation in Rotterdam faced a raid from fraud controllers who rifled through her laundry, counted toothbrushes, and asked intimate questions about her life in front of her children.”

Here the problem is not the algorithm, its the investigators.

Another ethical problem for me : the system of flagging in whole relied partly on anonymous tips from neighbors. I am not an expert but I feel more at ease about a system that rely on a selection algorithm + randomness than delation.

I think the problem was the processes around the algorithm not its existence itself. The journalist seems to assume during the whole piece that the algorithm will become the main/only way to identify fraudsters. If its the case, it’s terribly wrong because how are you training your algorithm then ?

Most of the time, the piece try to put the reader in an emotional state of fear and anger and is not at all doing any analysis, while faking it using a lot of numbers and graphs.

Sorry for the long rant but I am surprised that this came from Wired which I consider quite good on tech topics, and that its on HN 2nd page.

I am against government scoring and algorithms for legal / police cases precisely because it can be badly used by powerful people.

Am I the only one to feel that its not a good article ?