jlevers

> I'm a diplomat working on international norms for cyber and information warfare.

I didn't know any such norms existed. What are some of the existing agreements, and if you can talk about it, what are some of the new ones you're trying to push forward?

Your career sounds crazy...in a good way! Was your initial involvement with the UN in a technical role?

Amazing! It would be awesome if people living far from traditional agricultural areas could access fresh greens without insane transportation costs (both financial and environmental).

Are your farming systems fully automated? If so, has that been more of a software challenge, or more of a mechatronics challenge?

Why would a new upper reservoir need to be so wide and shallow, rather than having much less surface area and being much deeper?

I'm not sure how to do it scalably, other than by becoming the host for that data, which is why I included my second option. It seems much easier (and much more profitable) than figuring out how to access the data in its existing format.

> There are extremely moral and extremely immoral people. Some of them are dentists.

Absolutely true. However, it seems that other areas of medecine have better systems in place to prevent abuse, and dentristry would do well to follow suit.

I've never heard that said before, but I'm interested to hear more. Do you have any sources on that? My understanding was that solar panels last quite a long time.

That's a good point. I think it seems likely that given the relatively larger storage capacity per unit[0] with pumped hydro vs. batteries, that the overall maintenance costs -- including the environmental costs of materials needed -- would be lower, but you're absolutely right that we'd have to do the math to know for sure.

[0]When I say "per unit," I just mean that a huge battery is made up of many cells that will need to be replaced individually, whereas large pumped hydro facilities are still only a small number of total reservoirs.

Interesting, I didn't know that. Are there practical ways to decrease the amount of loss? Do you know what the actual loss percentages are for each?

Whoa, I just signed up for your newsletter a couple weeks ago. Small world. I'm enjoying it so far, keep it up!

I too have really broad interests...I find basically everything interesting, which is both a blessing and a curse, as I'm sure you've experienced. I'd love to talk about this more...do you feel you've come to any kind of answer on how to focus your wide interests?

I just started trying to track data about myself for the same reason, but I've run into the issue that there are basically infinite variables, and I don't know which ones to choose. How have you approached that problem? You must have been collecting pretty granular data if you were able to associate chewing gum with comfort in social situations.

I'd love to have this, specifically for YT guitar lessons. Please let me know when it launches!

That's exactly the type of project I'd like to be working on -- embedded programming that literally saves lives. Thank you for sharing.

Your path to where you are now is crazy...sounds like you've had an exciting career!

I didn't know I wanted this until now, and now I really want it. I often open a ton of related applications, and then avoid restarting my computer because it's incovenient to reopen everything.

I'm on Linux, so I won't be able to use your app, but great idea and good luck!

This is anecdotal, but I remember reading an article about a dentist who was convicted of doing expensive and completely unnecessary surgeries on many of his patients, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient in some cases. I can't find the article, unfortunately.

As some of the other responses mention, this is an insanely complex problem...as evidenced by the large number of businesses in this space. In your eyes, what are the best flight search engines at the moment? Aside from https://www.beatthatflight.com.au of course ;)

Do you have a website? Public policy is an area that seems almost ridiculously unoptimized, so I'm really interested in any organizations that are trying to fix that.

This is the first time I've heard of doing research with the express goal of creating actionable plans, but now that you've brought it up, it seems like that's exactly how policy-focused research should be.

That explanation was surprisingly accessible, thank you! It also blew my mind. I'd never thought of the building blocks of the universe as forming a hierarchy before, although in retrospect, it feels obvious.

Were you being literal when you gave the examples of chemistry as hexation and biology as heptation? If so, why are they those levels specifically? Or were you just using those as examples because they're roughly one "step" apart on the hierarchy (i.e., molecules -> cells)? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

Fascinating. I'm going to have to do some reading about this -- it's a whole world I didn't know existed. Thanks for explaining.

That's a really worthwhile problem to be working on. Kudos to you. I'd be gutted if something like that happened in my area, although I'm lucky enough to live in an area that's mostly trees.

Agreed, the differences between municipalities makes this really hard to scale. If data providers like the ones you mention don't exist, the two ideas that immediately come to mind are a) becoming that data provider (obviously), or b) building a platform for municipalities to store their land ownership data on.

Both sound like interesting problems, and it would be awesome if municipal-level land data was available at scale.

I won't pretend to fully understand this, although I do understand the basic theory of higher-order hyperoperators. I'm curious, though -- where/what are the applications for this?

I've actually been thinking about the issue of energy storage a lot recently -- I've read a ton about how lithium-ion battery production is exploding (usually not literally), but it seems unreasonable to store enormous amounts of renewable energy in a device that itself has to be replaced after a certain number of cycles. The device used for pumped energy storage -- a tank (to simplify greatly) -- basically never needs to be replaced.

It's really cool to see a feasible alternative to batteries. I think climate change is the single most important problem anyone can be working on right now -- amazing that you've found such a massive lever to pull on this issue.

The link to the 1984 paper (from their website): https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6517343

That sounds awesome! Are these things you're doing for work, or on your own (or both)? I'm not much of a gamer, and I don't know what the market looks like for Nintendo systems...what are the applications for custom ROMs on DSs and other handheld systems?

Some excellent free reverse engineering courses for Windows[0] and Linux[1] were posted in another HN thread recently, and a couple other HNers and I started a study group for the Linux course. We have a Discord group, and we're meeting for the first time on Thursday, in case you're interested. (It sounds from what you're doing as if you might already be past those resources, knowledge-wise.)

[0] https://github.com/0xZ0F/Z0FCourse_ReverseEngineering [1] https://beginners.re/

Thank you for working to fix a problem that would materially improve people's lives. I have a lot of respect for that. Finding a way to have both a technological and social impact in a single project is one of my longterm goals.

Homelessness is a topic I know embarrassingly little about. What has the data led you to recommend to cities, policy-wise?

It seems like large-scale data collection should be (but isn't) used to inform many public policy decisions. Another area where I think data could have a huge impact is studying how the punishments that criminals are served in court affects their outcomes later in life, and requiring judges to factor that data into their verdicts.

That sounds really cool -- I'd be interested to hear more about some of the hurdles you've encountered integrating modern web tech and old enterprise software. Any particularly notable challenges you'd be willing to share?

Kudos to you -- that's a problem I'm definitely not prepared to work on yet!

This is mildly off-topic, but how does one end up working on problems that are complex enough for things like this to even be an issue? It sounds incredibly interesting to me, but most of the software I've worked on has been at least somewhat web-based.

I know there's so much more out there, and I'm just not sure how to find relevant problems to solve...it feels like a serious case of "I don't know what I don't know."

I guess I should probably just pick some non-web concept I find interesting and start making something.

I do this all the time! I definitely haven't had a 100% reply rate, but I often finish with something like "I know you're really busy -- no need to respond" when emailing someone I don't know. Maybe I should stop doing that.

Regardless, it makes me feel good to know that the people who've had an impact on me know that what they're doing makes a difference. I bet there are a lot of people out there who've done a ton of good, but have never had anyone thank them, and I want to make sure that happens as little as possible.

This doesn't answer your question about money, but with (mostly) human drivers on the road there isn't much incentive to keep the lines visible, because humans are excellent at inferring where the lines should be, even if they're not there.