Just circling back to see if you got my earlier HN post. Did you miss it? I understand if now isn’t a good time; I’d love to connect. I hope you take my persistence as a compliment!
12,396 karma · joined October 6, 2010
In this case it means that if the probe arrives at Mission Year 20 Week 0 according to a reliable onboard clock, and broadcasts it 4 light years back to Earth, then Earth will get this signal on Year 24 Week 5.
As for the time to accelerate, you may overestimate. Constant acceleration for months on end brings you to very high speeds indeed. If you’re accelerating at 1G a full year I think it’s closer to 0.9c than 0.2, I’d have to do the math to check.
No, the reason they do it is to buy a house with three bedrooms and a yard for $225k instead of, say, paying $4000/mo for a shoebox they can never meaningfully aspire to own. The Commute is only a candidate reason they wouldn't make the move.
(And if large cities had sane housing policies and lots of supply, this all might be less of a problem, but, well, that's not our world.)
But it's mostly the fact that the leadership doesn't care, doesn't have to care, and is actively incentivized not to care.
California's not quite that bad, but, it's close to that bad. The Downtown Extension for Caltrain is $3 billion for a mile. SF's Central Subway is $923 million a mile. So sure, you can get about 114 feet of subway, but it'll be the short little LRVs and not like BART or anything nice-ish.
This environment of elevated risk is ample reason for any international business to avoid business with Russian nationals, other Russian entities, and anything to do with Russia, generally, at this time. It is unfortunate that Russian citizens may see less of the outside world as a consequence of these high level sanctions and of this politically risky situation. It is not the responsibility of these operators to remedy that.
Imagine, if you will, benchmarking some unknown CPU, and determining that the fused multiply-add operation takes, idk, 17 times as long to execute as an increment operation. We might postulate that there other CPUs out there where it takes a different amount of time — arbitrary amounts of time! Alternatively, we might gain knowledge of the underlying CPU architecture and understand that fused multiply-add is implemented with a certain set of transistors, and that it's fundamentally more complex, though there's room for some variability based on the specific implementation. In such a world this "free parameter" is set as it is for a very specific reason: a transistor arrangement.
We have limited visibility into what's actually happening "underneath" our laws of physics. Some of the values we see could be truly arbitrary. Some of them might actually be controlled by some other field and change over time (though we haven't seen evidence of that so it seems less likely). Some of them could be a deeper artifact of the way the universe works.
If you look at things like string theory, which do try to describe in more detail and dial down the free parameters to just one ("length of the fundamental string" more or less) we are left with something that's frustratingly nonspecific until you locate a more-specific solution within the broader string-theory solution space and call it "the laws of physics." That specific location might indeed seem quite arbitrary; the question might then become, what relation does this hundreds-of-dimensional solution space have with our concepts of physical reality? And can other areas of that landscape be probed in any way meaningful to our experience of physics?
You can rearrange some of the parameters so that they're not free, and redefine each of these in terms of some other related parameter — your choices here are pretty arbitrary; these values being chosen as the 'free' ones does not represent some fundamental truth.
We do not have some underling deeper theory that indicates why these numbers are the way they are. Why is the electron mass ~511 kEv while the up quark is 2.2 mEv? Why not 1.9 mEv? Why not 2.3 mEv? The Standard Model doesn't generally explain it, nor does it even really intend to explain it, just to describe it.
Especially one with a bunch of negotiations and interpretations and unknowns and fantasies and dire consequences attached to it. Referendum-driven democracy of this sort is a disaster area. People shouldn't have been allowed to vote directly on this kind of a proposition until it had been negotiated in detail.
Some of us have only passing interaction with state actors, e.g. when visiting a foreign country for a short term, or when crossing the border into a nominally free society with legal privacy rights (cough TSA / ICE cough). There is thus in practice ample need for solutions not secure against an all-seeing surveillance state.
It's on an external SSD, used for photos. Backblaze has forgotten how to count terabytes at all, preferring to play games about how I need to have it attached and for how long, so people don't play games with their "unlimited" offering. "Did you plug in the external drive to a computer, and leave the computer on for 24 hours without it going to sleep, and reattach the drive regularly every 30 days? I'm sorry, it looks like we'll be erasing your backup. You can make another one and it will take several days to upload despite your very fast connection."
I don't want to play these games either way, I just want to back up 5 terabytes. I don't even necessarily need an agent. You offer a similar pricing scheme to Backblaze ($N/mo/computer). Does your service support my use case, or should I keep looking?
There's also a measure of incompetence, like the story the LA Times had about the high speed rail planners who asked the Central Valley farmers if they could just put their grown nut trees into pots for a few years while the rail line is being constructed. And, of course, all the financial estimates were laughably optimistic from project inception.
YES. Hell yes. That's better-than-free money, adjusting for inflation. If you haven't maxed out your I-bond purchases yet, you can get 7.12% basically risk-free.
If I'm not mistaken, Good Luck Dim Sum has a Michelin star. If you're already in San Francisco, or if you can get there, then basically everyone can afford it.