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cbr

3,404 karma · joined July 1, 2009

http://www.jefftk.com
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cbr··on Steve Yegge Grades His Own Predictions
The form of the vaccine that allowed us to undertake global eradication was much newer:

" In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Leslie Collier, an English microbiologist working at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, developed a method for producing a heat-stable freeze-dried vaccine in powdered form.[50][51] Collier added 0.5% phenol to the vaccine to reduce the number of bacterial contaminants but the key stage was to add 5% peptone to the liquid vaccine before it was dispensed into ampoules. This protected the virus during the freeze drying process. After drying the ampoules were sealed under nitrogen. Like other vaccines, once reconstituted it became ineffective after 1–2 days at ambient temperatures. However, the dried vaccine was 100% effective when reconstituted after 6 months storage at 37 °C (99 °F) allowing it to be transported to, and stored in, remote tropical areas. Collier's method was increasingly used and, with minor modifications, became the standard for vaccine production adopted by the WHO Smallpox Eradication Unit when it initiated its global Smallpox Eradication Campaign in 1967 " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine

cbr··on The paradox of soil: Land has returned as a constraint on growth
> stick built 2x4 construction

In 1900 people were already building like that. I live in Somerville MA, which is pretty close to what the OP describes, and it's pretty popular despite everything being balloon framed and covered with vinyl siding.

cbr··on Steve Yegge Grades His Own Predictions
> most impactful technology of the 20th century was probably the bicycle

The smallpox vaccine is a strong contender. Smallpox killed 300m people in the 20th century, more than all wars combined. And we wiped it out.

cbr··on Google’s look, evolved
That's really a problem with the word "Google", which has round open shapes in the first half, and then a tighter second half. Perhaps "Googol" would have been better?
cbr··on [dead]
> hotlinked from another site even

I was curious and checked whois: aboveaverage.com and citizensagainstremoteworking.org don't seem to be related at all.

cbr··on Security concerns with minified JavaScript code
Looks like Debian is mostly on top of it:

    > To me the problem suggests that it is important from a security and
    > accountability perspective to 1) include the human-readable source 
    > code of JavaScript in Debian packages, and 2) to compile the 
    > human-readable source code into a minified code (if required) during 
    > package builds, using a JS-minifier that is included in Debian.
    > Thoughts?
    
    This is anyway mandatory in Debian.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/08/msg00478.html
cbr··on How widely used are security-based HTTP response headers?
I think popularity, from most to least?
cbr··on BMW: All Models Electric Within Decade
Or SF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_San_Francisco
cbr··on Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
It can be a euphemism for discrimination.
cbr··on Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance
> Google's own Pagespeed shows me that they [Google] are not doing basic things like caching immutable resources or minifying javascripts - which to me is really baffling.

If you give me a link I can file bugs and follow up with teams. This shouldn't happen and PageSpeed is right to call us out on it.

(The initial loader js you reference on your page does need to have a short cache lifetime so it can be updated, but everything else should be longcached. And everything should be minified.)

cbr··on YC Stats
That's not a super high bar. Most of these founders could get $200k jobs at top tech companies, invest $100k/year, and be a millionaire in ~10 years. Much better than 10% odds!
cbr··on Stocks Off Sharply as Market Upheaval Grows
I just skimmed your comments here between 118 and 250 days ago, and I don't see anything predicting a crash to come in September or any other time.
cbr··on The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market [pdf]
Perhaps try other social activities? Pick three very different sorts of meetups and go to them? Ones where you'll be interacting with people, but in a structured way where it's ok if you don't have anything interesting to bring up to talk about?

For me social dancing ended up being great, even though I never would have thought of myself as a dancer.

cbr··on What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
David Roodman at GiveWell has an excellent series looking into geomagnetic storms, and published the last of four posts today: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/08/21/coming-down-to-earth-wha...
cbr··on Google ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories
You can identify specific search results that are about you and ask for them to be removed. If anything I would expect the author to be in favor of this, because now more of the remaining results will be about them.
cbr··on Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?
Not a lawyer: in this case it was newsworthy, and out of the applicable defences that's the strongest.
cbr··on Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)
The Herring: What do you think about Netscape’s vision that someday soon we will all be automatically hooked to the Net when we boot up our computers, and their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world?

Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking about ideas, I am talking about reality.

cbr··on What does it take to make Google work at scale?

    working on a giant campus that's isolated from
    the outside world
You don't have to work in Mountain View! The remote offices are really nice, and are generally well integrated into their cities.
cbr··on Removing the 140-character limit from Direct Messages
Are you sure that's SMS and not MMS or one of the other upgrades to SMS people still call SMS?
cbr··on Why Las Vegas has coped well with drought so far
That's $4B for construction and $1.5B for operating costs over 25-30 years. Let's say 25 years to be conservative. So $220M/year.

It's expected to produce 150B liters/year. That's $0.00146/L or $0.0055/gal.

Imagine switching to solar doubles the ongoing cost. This is conservative since solar isn't that much more expensive and there are costs other than electricity, but lets go with it. Then the cost goes up to $280M/year and we're talking $0.007/gal.

That's really very cheap.

cbr··on Why Las Vegas has coped well with drought so far
> desalination (at great cost)

Desalination for human consumption isn't a huge cost. It's only huge compared to the current incredibly low cost of agricultural water.

cbr··on How many lives does a doctor save?
A shortage due to med school controls won't be relieved by more people deciding to apply to med school, because the numbers there are fixed. To fix that you need to get the controls relaxed.
cbr··on How many lives does a doctor save?

    > > I want to study medicine because of a desire I
    > > have to help others
    >
    > Let's get real--this is said over, and over again,
    > and I've never bought it.
The article is aimed at people who are trying to do as much good as possible with their careers. They're not asking "is the typical doctor altruistic?" but "if I'm altruistic should I become a doctor?".
cbr··on How many lives does a doctor save?
From the article:

    Diminishing marginal returns:– some tasks performed by
    doctors have more impact than others. If there were one
    fewer doctor, the highest impact tasks they perform would
    be given to someone else, so the total impact wouldn’t
    reduce proportionally with the number of doctors.
In other words, that operation probably did add decades to this man's life, but this is the kind of critical care that we would find someone else to do if this doctor hadn't been there to do.

The question is, if you're considering becoming a doctor, what's the potential benefit that's due to your choices? How much good do you do that wouldn't have happened anyway?

cbr··on Windows 10 uses your bandwidth to send other people updates
I think the email in question starts on p3 of http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...
cbr··on What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea
Map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zgom088YjvKs.kz8zRB...
cbr··on MIRI's Approach – Machine Intelligence Research Institute

    I see the future as being one in which strong AI
    emerges from whole brain emulation, starting around
    2030 as processing power becomes cheap enough for an
    entire industry to be competing in emulating brains
    the brute force way, building on the academic efforts
    of the 2020s.
Computational power is not sufficient for whole brain emulation. You also need to know how the brain works in a huge amount of detail.

For example, we've had fast enough computers to emulate nematode brains for 20+ years but we are still not able to emulate one and have it learn.

cbr··on Mobile Safari's Performance Is Not the Problem
HTTP/2 isn't really going to help here. When you request five different CSS files and ten tiny images all from one server HTTP/2 does the equivalent of resource combining and helps a lot. The core issue with ads, though, is that no one trusts anyone else, and so all of those requests are going to different servers operated by different groups. Each of those servers will need its own connection with connection startup costs, and if the only purpose is to logging an access and maybe drop a cookie HTTP/2 won't help at all.
cbr··on New Court Evidence Reveals Hollywood’s Plan to Smear Google
I agree Google should return the best response to your search and not cut things out for bargaining points, but "dumb pipe utility" is incredibly off.
cbr··on Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child
We should do more of this kind of testing.
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