rm445

Do you think such a private individual's behaviour holds for all society?

First example: if lots of people had that free hot water, there would pretty soon be companies offering them money for the use of it. A bitcoin miner hooked up to a stirling engine under the hot tap, perhaps?

Second example: shoe materials are probably fungible for other petrochemical products. Reduced-wear elastomers might result in fewer pairs of shoes wearing out but higher demand in other markets.

Cal Newport writes like this. His stories read like, "Joe Bloggs was a loner, a drifter. When he pulled up his beat-up truck, moving back to his parent's swamp ranch in the summer of 2006, he had no idea what to do with his life. Two years later, when he had completed his PhD in automated high-frequency trading at Caltech, he was still wondering what to do with his life."

With that said, it doesn't make him terrible. He's just a somewhat-elitist, academically-focused, motivational writer. He has literally written a book on how to be a straight-A student in college. It's not much help to someone who can't even break into those circles, but his ideas still have a place for those who can.

That's the usual way things are done. If you buy for instance a simple 5:1 gearbox for industrial use, it will quite likely be a sealed casing 'greased for life'.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you really - mechanical devices have high failure rates. 10 years maintenance-free is a bit of a dream. As a mechanical engineer I'm interested to see whether the Stirling engines involved have radically different scaling to optimise for reliability, or NASA just plan to do the engineering really well.

Of course manned maintenance may be possible - they are touting this technology for Mars bases. Plus robotic maintenance is going to become more of a thing over time.

Exactly. Inflation is calculated based on a basket of goods that excludes all kinds of expensive and illiquid assets that the average person doesn't buy often or at all.

I guess it's fine if people want to describe that situation as low inflation with an asset bubble. But I think what is actually happening is that, although much of the world now gets to eat well and enjoy consumer goods, all kinds of assets (property, artwork, luxuries and anything requiring rare resources) are moving up and up out of people's reach).

The obvious way to make the charts easier to interpret would be to use pink and blue.

Who knows why the author used green and yellow - feels 'blue for a boy and pink for a girl' is outdated and sexist, or just likes green and yellow better, or they're the default from their charting program, or a chosen colour scheme for the blog. But there's no doubt (for readers in the English-speaking world and who knows how many countries) what would be clearer, to the point of hardly needing a key.

I was under the impression that when John Gruber quotes a 'rumour', it's because someone at Apple has personally given him complete, direct, but off-the-record information. He seems very well-connected.

You should have held out on the wait-and-see. The moderate-sized rear cabin with those little suicide doors (you are talking about the RX-8, aren't you?) is absolutely great for baby and child seats.

Also, yeah, I had my RX-8 tow started once. The recovery guy actually suggested I drive his truck while he sat in the car and tried to start it. So there I was with the new experience of driving an enormous full-size recovery vehicle, getting quite concerned as I looked in the mirror and saw clouds of white smoke pouring out of my car's exhaust! But, once properly wary of flooding, the car didn't give me any trouble before or since.

I've had Mazda's last model of rotary-engined car, the RX-8, as a daily driver for the past five years (sixty thousand miles). It has served me well and my local garage have performed regular servicing and mechanical repairs with no problems.

So I think your opinions are a little bit overcooked.

But I don't want to overdo mine in turn. The fuel consumption is excessive by modern standards (but comparable to other vehicles of similar performance). The engine consumes oil by design and needs to be topped up every few weeks. The whole car is in a high state of tuning, and has given me a few large service/repair bills - but never stranded me at the roadside. My garage once admitted incomprehension and sent me to the main dealer for diagnostics before they could begin repairs.

All in all I think Mazda pitched the RX-8 well as a sporty car for enthusiasts, whose reliability might have come in under par in the market for, say, small family cars. I just want to fight the impression that having a rotary-engined car is a drastically different, worse, experience than one with a piston engine. Generally you just get in and drive.

Wankel engines are just one of (surprisingly many) technologies that were more-or-less viable but just not able to become dominant. Like, we would all still manage to drive around if the only technologies developed happened to be opposed-piston engines, or two-stroke diesels, or axial-cylinder engines with a swashplate. We might even see a few of them come back if the market moves towards series-hybrid vehicle setups. A light little rotary always running at its peak-efficiency speed might be a reasonable choice for a range-extender/series hybrid.

I agree on the oddness. In my mind, the story about a highly-tracked webapp-facilitated worker committing a crime goes something like:

Crime committed -> worker details go to police -> criminal conviction | current mechanisms for direct financial restitution from criminals to crime victims.

Or maybe in the case of no criminal conviction,

Crime committed -> (messing about with police) | John Doe lawsuit against Uber -> Driver details released -> Lawsuit against driver.

Don't get me wrong, Uber just sounds like a lunatic asylum, and their conduct in this case no worse than I'd expect. But it just seems so weird that the chain of events leads to a claim against Uber. I would honestly have expected them to have thrown the driver under a bus while staying rock solid behind their terms and conditions.

I suspect the author was being exact and referring to the product just called 'MacBook', rather than referring vaguely to a MacBook Air.

(I can't back that up, except to note that Apple fans are usually fairly scrupulous about referring to their MacBook Pro, iPad Air, iPhone 6S etc specifically rather than lumping them together).

In any case the current MacBook is quite similar to the MacBook Air and the rest of your comment probably stands.

He could fly to five metres attached to a safety line on a ten-metre tower, or a crane. A simple auto-descender would do fine.

My impression watching this guy's videos when they have hit the news over the past few months has been that, for whatever reason, it skims the ground and can't ascend. If he wants to disprove that, it should be possible to rig up a safe test.

Then perhaps your first sentence should have read, "Rocket packs are officially dead".

I think that the terms have historically been used interchangeably, but the distinction should be made. It's awfully nice not to need to carry oxidiser for your propellant.

Those of us aiming for the news link get to click the little bell instead. It's an infuriating order of loading.

Not much point complaining in this particular thread though. As the article says, 'We are essentially hamstrung by the “white BBC bar” at the top of the page.'

So this article is about whether London will lose its multicultural appeal after Brexit. Here's an observation about the nationalities of the people cited. Quite a few Europeans, but also:

- An Indian-British writer (Nikesh Shukla) who has compiled a set of essays about nonwhite Britons. (In case it isn't obvious, most (all?) European countries are mostly white and the countries that are mostly nonwhite are not in Europe).

- Russian house-buyers.

- A Canadian who wrote a book about London.

- London's Pakistani-British mayor.

- A Brazilian hairdresser.

- A Japanese sculptor.

- Jewish refugees from European persecution a hundred years before Britain joined the EU.

- An Indian food entrepeneur.

- Somali immigrants at the doctor's surgery.

- The Bangladeshi-born mayor of Tower Hamlets.

- Bangladeshi muslims at Brick Lane Mosque.

Excellent people, no doubt, and worthy contributors to the life of the capital (even the Russian oligarchs). The point is that they don't seem to owe their position to EU membership.

It's interesting, the opening lines of the article say 'after the "Brexit" referendum, its future as an international crossroads is far from certain'. But the sources make it seem like London's multiculturalism doesn't owe that much to the EU in the first place.

For those wondering, the article makes an analogy between Thompson's 'Trusting Trust' paper and gene editing.

It wouldn't have surprised me to hear that Thompson had moved into gene hacking (at the age of 74) but I think he still works for Google.

The UK has a large market in coin-operated gambling machines - there are heavily-regulated low-stakes ones in all kinds of non-casino locations and, I think, higher-stakes ones in legal betting shops.

A relative who works in the industry told me he sees large numbers of counterfeit pound coins. I would guess counterfeiters might launder coins through machines. Or even, though I've never seen it, sell discount coins directly to gamblers? In any case machine recognition would be a high priority. The machines in question would be relatively unsophisticated ones with a thickness gauge and a 'ski jump' that effectively checks the weight.

There are things we just don't sense. Obviously they weren't significant in our evolutionary history but they could be of use to us in the modern age, or to our successors. As you mention, giving up existing sensors doesn't make much sense so it would have to be extra sensors.

An electromagnetic sense could be so much richer than a compass direction. Wonderful to sense the actions of machines and electrical systems around us, and have a boost to navigation. Furthermore ideally I think we'd need to upgrade our internal systems to have a better intuitive understanding of frequency-domain phenomena at high (megahertz) frequencies.

Ionising radiation is scary partly because you just can't sense it. Internal scintillation crystals + additional optical tissue based on our current design = a whole new sense. Obviously with a little redundancy and care of placement you could get alpha, beta, gamma and an energy spectrum. Useful for spacefarers, perhaps.

Interfaces to technological devices would be nice to have. Perhaps you wouldn't call it a sense but in a way it's so much more. Wouldn't want to be stuck with an obsolete protocol in my brain implant chip, though - the format wars would be intense.

> Other than the educational value of doing so, what would be a reason to write a brand new operating system?

Well an operating system talks to hardware and allocates resources, right? The motivation to write a non-toy operating system must be some strong ideas about how to do those things, and they'd have to be pretty fundamental to give up on the vast advantages of interoperability and pre-existing software that would come from just implementing your ideas on top of Linux or whatever.

Past motivations for writing OSes might be expressed as licensing (GNU/Linux), disagreements about fundamental architecture of operating systems (microkernels), need for hard real-time (vxWorks), or the belief that you have the sheer resources and market power to start again and build something better (Windows NT). Security seems like another likely motivation (There's probably a better example than OpenBSD because I don't think they started from scratch).

I quite like the idea that hardware intended for autonomy might benefit from being implemented on bare metal. Devices that AREN'T general-purpose computers, but communicate only with their own hardware and with the outside world by their actions and by communications protocols, well why shouldn't they run on a custom and highly stripped-down OS? You'd expect to get benefits in performance and a smaller codebase for potential security holes. But I don't think the industry is actually headed in that direction.

Perhaps that was the author's intent. But influencing without sabotage is perhaps relevant to our modern world, especially to the HN crowd - because weapons systems are likely to become more autonomous.

If you're working on a battle robot - no longer just a science fiction concept - paying serious attention to the systems that prevent it being an indiscriminate civilian-slayer could be seen as ethical engineering, compared to leaving a project in the hands of people who care less about such things.

There's something that never seems to be mentioned in articles on making decisions for planet colonisation based on cosmic radiation: humanity is already trying like crazy to defeat cancer, for the obvious reason that it kills people here on Earth as well.

It might sound utopian to suggest that one day we'll just take our anti-cancer pills and not worry about it, but when we're talking colonisation potentially a couple of hundred years ahead, it shouldn't be discounted.

(The point in this article about damage to brain tissue is interesting, but again, that's not something that medical research here on Earth will be neglecting).

Sigh, that's another one on my reading list. I thought Baxter's Voyage was a wonderful novel - quite dry, but masterfully put-together, using NASA's true history to inform how an alternate history might have gone. Titan seems irresistible, but it sounds like it might be quite bitter.

Hmm. I've read the first book in the series (must get around to reading the rest), which is mainly exploration and doesn't focus too much on society-building, but as an engineer I'm not sure I buy that bootstrapping in a new Earth without bringing any iron/steel would be that difficult.

It would be an effort, but I think we could retool to bootstrap industry mainly using aluminium and copper alloys (engineering bronzes particularly are great materials). Some titanium and nickel alloys in the mix.

Conversely, I have stopped wearing other watches because I believe my rather rudimentary smartwatch has made them obsolete.

The device in question is a Fitbit fitness tracker. The killer feature regarding the battery is the ratio of life to charging time, viz that I can wear it all day and all night (gaining sleep tracking and, best of all, a silent vibrating alarm) and keep the battery topped up in the duration of a daily shower. Not 24/7, but 23.6/7 easily.

I think there's a separate Lisp lineage anyway, wherein someone in the 1960s wrote a minimal machine-code interpreter, and ever since lispers have been writing interpreters on top of other Lisps and revising them to emit compiled code along the way. We would still have Lisp compilers if C never existed.

One could build a courtyard, or a passage or archway to a garage behind. Or go underground. I think these are expensive options compared to sprawling out like the houses in the article.

A large, attached garage is such a pleasant amenity, I totally understand people wanting one - but there's no attractive way of just attaching one to the side of a house. It's essentially a warehouse out of proportion to the other rooms.

Perhaps ideally, build on a hill, such that views from most sides are of an attractive hilltop house, while from the garage view it is apparent that much of the house is built on top of the garage.

Come on. All the people who worked on those features designed them with the intention that they would work. All of them would have been happier, and better regarded by the rest of the world, if everything had worked first time.

It's just the way life is. Not every setback is a disaster, but it's so much better if things work smoothly. Nothing succeeds like success.

Careful. Loanwords into Japanese are transliterated into a fixed syllabary, that can then be transliterated back in a standard way.

i.e. that's an authentic transcription of a (borrowed) Japanese word, not a rude impression of a Japanese person mangling English.

Your HN bio says "DevOps Engineer" - I think that means that you apply software development techniques to tasks that traditionally belong to sysadmins or "IT"?

Note that the article quotes Spolsky talking about "developers" - it's possible your job has a slightly different mix of need-to-concentrate versus need-to-communicate compared to a pure developer making software at Microsoft.

Not just Yammer but Sharepoint, Sway and Delve. For companies that are bought into the whole Office 365 thing, there's actually a pretty comprehensive 'company social network' offering.

Product already exists in the form of consumer NAS devices. You don't have to build anything, just turn on remote access.