bacheaul

Our main state university had an open day as part of a national "Science Week". They had a bunch of Leica stereo dissecting scopes set up on benches with random aquatic plants, bugs and other stuff in small dishes, that looked like it was something that you just pull out of your local creek. People could come in and just take a look.

It was incredible. Zooming in on some of the plants, it was like there was a entire world in there that was completely invisible to the human eye.

It reminded me of Feynman's quote/lecture about there being "plenty of room at the bottom". It put it into perspective about just how much room there really was.

> $50k signing bonus is common

I clearly live in a different labour market to this conversation. How many places in the world is this common?

Oh, don't get me started... MS Teams has been doing this recently at work. Everyone is pinning messages, because when you hover over the Edit menu item for a message and go to click it, two more menu items load asynchronously below it, and switch the Edit button out for a Pin Message button right when you go to click it. And it's not even consistently like that, just sometimes. It's infuriating...

I believe much of the complexity comes from having to fit it in the nose cone of the Ariane 5 rocket. With a much larger launch vehicle, you can make some different design trade offs to maybe reduce that complexity.

Long term, CO2's worse, but that's probably not the best way to look at it.

Excess H2O (water vapor) falls out of the sky as rain, so it's fairly constant (ie. "maxed out"), and its long term concentration levels are a function of CO2 equivalent gases in the atmosphere. So if you increase CO2 levels, H20 levels will naturally increase as well, and vice versa.

Also 5.11 denim pants. I don't know if they're Japanese denim or what, but I've stopped looking for another brand after owning these.

It's not high voltage, that's the point. I suggest looking for videos [1] on welding steel with a 12v car battery to see how fast metal can heat up with enough current behind it.

[1] eg. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtwrqIDnxg

I saw this referenced in the job ad for a "Software Engineer: Web" on the Oxide careers page yesterday.

More of a meta comment, but it's funny how interesting things link to more interesting things, and the "HN web crawler" inevitably finds and identifies them.

On the topic of naming, there was thought put into it...

> With accelerating conviction that we would build a company to do this, we needed a name — and once we hit on Oxide, we knew it was us: oxides form much of the earth’s crust, giving a connotation of foundation; silicon, the element that is the foundation of all of computing, is found in nature in its oxide; and (yes!) iron oxide is also known as Rust, a programming language we see playing a substantial role for us. Were there any doubt, that Oxide can also be pseudo-written in hexadecimal — as 0x1de — pretty much sealed the deal!

http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-com...

Are you suggesting that this is fair characterisation of Republicans in a general sense? I'm not sure that all Republicans would agree with this. And I definitely consider myself on the liberal side of the political spectrum.

I can empathise that it's difficult to have a dialog with some individuals who are only interested in convincing you of the correctness of their world view and not understanding others, but inflamatory rhetoric like this doesn't help.

Add it to the list... https://cybersquirrel1.com/

This is tight. I love the little touches like the pomodoro timer and discoverable keyboard shortcuts. The UI is so cohesive as well, and has everything you need and nothing you don't.

Well done.

I hadn't heard of this one. That and the brexit bus/cardboard box bus SEO hacking suggestion makes something of a pattern.

What I've never understood about XRP and Ripple is that originally XRP was meant to only be used for paying for transactions and the ledger was meant to track IOUs between people denominated in some other "real" currency. They had videos floating around explaining the concept. In fact, they were handing out XRP for free to bootstrap the network of users [0] (that post says 1000 XRP, originally it was 30,000 XRP when the post was first created).

XRPs themselves were basically worthless, but it was required to interact with the ledger (you pay maybe 0.000001 XRP per transaction). The idea was that you pass a small amount on to friends and others interested in using it to create their wallet and start tracking IOUs, and you needed to have at least 20 XRP in your wallet.

Somewhere along the way all hell broke loose, Bitcoin got popular, crypto currencies in general got popular and XRP itself suddenly became worth something, the original concept got lost and everything seemed to go off the rails... That's when I lost interest.

[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145506.0

So she claimed she had been raped while sleeping over at a friend's house by the father of the friend. He claimed it never happened. She only told her mother and step-father around 2-3 weeks afterwards about it.

She was forced (she was not able to choose) to take pregnancy rejection medication but refused/declined to have a physical examination/rape kit done (she had a choice in this). So essentially there was no physical evidence (in the trial at least) that sex had ever occurred. Also, the trial was taking place around 6 years after the alledged incident.

What we did have was a very detailed, consistent, plausible, and compelling recount of events leading up to, during, and after the rape from the 13 year old victim in a police interview about a month after it occured and also another interview around 2 years later. Watching the interviews, and based on the type emotion she showed at particular points, the language (including body language) she used to describe the events etc it was difficult to not believe her, it was in fact heart breaking to watch and listen to.

I guess my point is that all that "soft" information that we received from the video recorded interview was indeed information that we used to assess whether we thought she was telling the truth or not or whether she was coached or was making it up, for whatever reason. We were in fact instructed by the judge to use that information to make our assessment whether there was reasonable doubt or not.

I'm not sure how you separate this type of information from other information we also receive eg. the physical attractiveness of the accused and defendant and how the legal system can remove this type of bias. Based on other comments here, I'm also no longer sure about whether we, as a jury, should be using that soft information, and I'd love to see results from studies about how juries assess evidence when it is presented in different ways as suggested here.

I actually just finished a stint of jury duty last week and got picked for 2 trials. A couple of observations:

1. One of the trials was an underage rape case and there was essentially no physical evidence. Mainly all we had to go on was 3 police interviews (2 from the alledged victim, one from the accused). As a jury, we relied on those videos to determine who we felt was telling the truth and the trust worthiness of what they were saying. I'm not saying this was a good thing necessarily, just an observation that this is what we did. I'd like to see the results with a parallel jury that relied only on written transcripts etc.

2. The judge actually gave us guidance at the beginning of both trials that in addition to what witnesses said, how they appeared to us (their demeanour) was also evidence that we could use in assessing the trust-worthiness of what they said. My understanding was that we should use our general life experience that we had acquired in our day to day living to assess the evidence of the witness. I guess there are good sides (eg. intuition based on non-verbal communication/body language) and bad sides (eg. biases) to using this approach.