jorleif

7 ms·

1.
by jorleif 8y ago
This is commercial enterprise, not regulation. Taxation could simply make driving them around too expensive.
2.
by jorleif 9y ago
That is a good point... So now I'm back to the giant slingshot idea.
3.
by jorleif 9y ago
Increased pageviews, yet many users also hate constant outrage and leave the platform entirely. It is not obvious that a platform with civil, high-quality discussion would lose in the marketplace (not obvious it would win either, though).
4.
by jorleif 9y ago
I wonder if gliders that are powered by electric motors only during takeoff and landing could be a solution here. It's not like we get very annoyed by eagles soaring in the sky.
5.
by jorleif 9y ago
Sure greed/profit motive, but it is accepted by the general public because it is local direct benefit (less crop failure) vs diffuse harm to a large area.
6.
by jorleif 9y ago
It is not necessary, but if society was good at assigning a price to the relative merits of informational resources vs physical goods it would result in a more efficient economy. Yes, science and art will progress, but if there is no econom
7.
by jorleif 9y ago
These kinds of techniques are often claimed to be effective against flash floods, which makes sense since they slow down water transfer to rivers. Does anyone know any studies about how effective it could be against seriously heavy precipit
8.
by jorleif 9y ago
True, but from the car manufacturer's point of view, all of their customers buy new cars, so comparing what is low-range or high-range to other new cars makes sense.
9.
by jorleif 11y ago
The author does not articulate his critique very well beyond claiming that the VC get disproportionate return compared to land and labor. A much better critique is Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future. There he argues that the problem is
10.
by jorleif 11y ago
This seems closely related to PG's essay Black Swan farming: "there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business" It seems
11.
by jorleif 11y ago
Is it actually feasible to 3d print a realistic rhino horn from synthesized keratin? Googling keratin 3d printing mostly turns up Pembient itself. One would suspect that keratin printing would have plenty of more humble applications (synthe
12.
by jorleif 11y ago
I feel this solves a very small part of the problem. This is only about the morality of the individual scientist, while the problem is at the level of the collective process of science. I mean, it is of course good if the individual scienti
13.
by jorleif 12y ago
Having done a little science myself, usually there both are small incremental improvements with small but predictable gains and large leaps with big potential gains but very unpredictable outcomes. The former are optimizations around a curr
14.
by jorleif 12y ago
I don't disagree, but experimentation should still be on the table. Maybe a certain state or municipality should be sponsored to try policies more along the scandinavian kind. Of course this is problematic. How do you for example stop
15.
by jorleif 12y ago
This is a very interesting idea and has some good potential for social change. So much energy, so misplaced. As a scandinavian my first thought is: Don't Americans realize that there might a point where it is cheaper to provide (or mor
16.
by jorleif 12y ago
While you are of course right trivially about the sheer amount of information, I'm not so sure about the useless part. Right now a lot of consumer protection and activism is driven by someone trying to sift through similar information
17.
by jorleif 12y ago
I have sometimes wondered if technology could be used to make some house-elves more visible. When I buy an apple or some meat in the grocery store they are simply opaque to me. Their production is completely invisible. Was it a farmer in my
18.
by jorleif 12y ago
> People were incredibly indignant about who might receive some benefit from stuff that was often just a step above garbage. This is a quite fascinating phenomenon psychologically that one has to face when meeting low income people: They
19.
by jorleif 12y ago
> College-educated white men can expect to live to age 80, while counterparts without a high-school diploma die by age 67. I wonder if reality is as bad as it sounds here. Factors that cause early death might very well correlate with bad
20.
by jorleif 12y ago
Probability theory is great, but there are still environments that are unpredictable enough that experimentation is the only alternative. Think of science, for example; If probability theory combined with past experience was enough, there w
21.
by jorleif 12y ago
Excellent point, but would you care to explain how you would match subjects in this case? They should be comparable pre-something, but what would that something be?
22.
by jorleif 12y ago
As the author was speaking of his experience as a founder, I read his "logic does not always agree with reality" to mean that in an environment of sufficient uncertainty logic is not that useful, because you can think logically as
23.
by jorleif 12y ago
Yes, but you say that as if it was a bad thing. For me it was a really hard experience when doing science, that I could not "be smart about it", and do things "in smart ways", because that would require me to be able to
24.
by jorleif 12y ago
It may come as a surprise to people who read lots of startup news, because you tend to only hear about the successes, but generally it is not very easy to disrupt any business, or even become a millionaire. Achieving those for e.g. laundry
25.
by jorleif 12y ago
I find this idea of a cultural problem interesting, and in my opinion that we program with plain text is essentially a completely arbitrary choice. That said, in practice almost all of the non-plain-text tools I know are some kind of specia
26.
by jorleif 12y ago
As I see it, WYSIWYG works great if you create a non-interactive thing, like a document, image or video. As soon as you want to present the same information in several formats, or show headlines of articles in several places you need to abs
27.
by jorleif 12y ago
While this is true, I would argue that there is a social expectation that an IMDB review is written by someone who has seen the movie. Especially, it is expected to be true on average with the usual "few bad apples" thrown in the
28.
by jorleif 12y ago
While the answer to the question is quite good, the rant at the end really considers any kind of skepticism towards medicine "mumbo-jumbo". The key point is the accuracy of the medical prediction from the measurements. If you inde
29.
by jorleif 12y ago
Ideally you get to work on "what you are interested in", which is the key appeal. Money-wise it is often a game for suckers.
30.
by jorleif 12y ago
I agree, my own experiences in CS are not at all as bad as those of the OP, but still it took a long time for me to figure out how the system works, and why senior people might choose to leave students to their own devices when the student

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