3,217 karma · joined February 18, 2010
The direction the Oculus/Facebook have taken with the Quest line addresses many of these issues (sacrificing quality of the graphics). VR is possibly going to have its breakout moment.
> A 2011 study by the U.K. government found a person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once. The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment.
It would appear I was misremembering somewhat, but I think my point (and the GP's that I was referring to in my earlier comment) still stands: These decisions are often about tradeoffs. Sometimes things can be green on one axis, and not so green on another.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/12/17337602/plastic-tote-bag...
* Concrete requires coarse grains, which are found in river beds and beaches. A lot of the worlds sand is in deserts, which has fine grains due to its age / years of tumbling.
The word you are looking for is "copying".
Yes, that's what people imagine is happening when talking hydrogen powdered cars. But I believe that electrolysis is so inefficient that it's not a realistic option for producing hydrogen on an industrial scale. This leaves us with breaking down hydrocarbons, hardly a "green" option.
I am happy to be corrected, but I believe the only industrial scale production of hydrogen is splitting hydrocarbons. Using electrolysis is hugely inefficient.
If this is true, a lot of talk of hydrogen is submarine marketing for the fossil fuel industry.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/wikipedia-is-leaving-go-daddy-...
I imagine that initially they will be focusing on blunter interventions into the brain, like detecting impending epileptic attacks, and send some sort of signal to try and interrupt it. I think such things already exist in a cruder form.
It's going to be a long while, and a lot of iterations before you can expect to just "know" the contents of your latest text message.
For the lower house, we've had many years of the balance of power in the hands of a small number of independents who get an outsized voice.
Yes, if you live in an non-swing electorate, that is strongly held by the incumbent, then you could argue that your vote doesn't matter, but only because there are more people voting for something else. Isn't that how things are meant to work?
I don't understand why you just didn't throw it away, or put it in a box powered down.
A possible subtext to what you have written is that your employer (google) was mandating that you keep using the device at home as part of your employment... but that is outrageous and I would like clarification as I feel it cannot be true.
If UBI was implemented as in The Expanse (food, shelter, and meds are free), I would expect the population of the earth to plummet. The UBI would allow for more people to pursue learning and educating others. It has been shown that when people feel safe from threat of violence and starvation, and when they are more educated, the desire to breed decreases.
On the flip side, perhaps knowing that you are off the hook for paying for the expense of many children would increase the desire to reproduce?
The future is exciting!
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
> Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube
> we send them home with a set of 5 coding tasks.
How do you provide these tasks? Via email? Links to GitHub repos?
> come back and conduct a code review of their code with our team
How does that usually work? Does it happen in their editor of choice? On a company machine or theirs? Do they submit a PR? Do you take a look at their submission before inviting them back in?
> They take as many days as they need
Is there an expectation that they would spend days or effort? Or just a few hours? Do you try and adjust expectations of code quality for the time they dedicated to the problem?
> So far, we've had nothing but very strong hires with this approach, and the applicants have all said they very much appreciated how we roll.
That's great to hear it's working so well. Thanks again for the thoughtful response.
> Seems like big companies should be your market for any cleanup tool, not startups.
Yes. For a team getting something off the ground, a bit of dead code hanging around is not really a concern relative to the scramble to find product market fit.
> running an automated program that deletes anything that's not being called... feels iffy. Maybe a previous engineer didn't quite finish something... ideally that won't happen but I imagine it might. Maybe you could make something that lets people check off changes one by one.
Agreed. I was thinking that the service could open pull requests to the repo, one per code block. The PR would then have to be reviewed/approved before merging. It could do this as a two step process. First to add signal flares on suspect code, and then a follow-up PR to do the actual deletion.
> automated program can't tell the difference between unused code and code that was commented out/not being called
Can you expand on those two types of unused code, and why you would want to keep one around longer term?
> in startups it's common, because there are sometimes more important things to worry about.
Do you think once an organization starts maturing (i.e. not so much a startup anymore) that cleanup work might take on more important ance?
> You might have more luck building security tools in my opinion--that seems like a bigger implication of unused endpoints, code
Yes, security is another good aspect of cleaning up unused code. I think some insights into more/less popular features of your sotware could also be useful/interesting.
> maybe call your potential customers and ask what tools they need around that.
Absolutely.