InclinedPlane

Because the UK's government is rabid and dysfunctional?

It's a common ailment these days (see also: US, Brazil, Italy, the Philippines, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia...)

We're still really only partially (fractionally even) serious about pursuing renewable energy.

We need to increase capacity of renewable energy production, of course, but that is the easiest part of the whole equation. We also need serious investment into energy storage, by orders of magnitude more than what we have today. That will be at least as large an investment as building out the base capacity. And we need massive improvements to the power grid to make it possible to transmit power from where it's generated to where it's used, which will be at least as big an investment as either the capacity or storage problem.

Fortunately, all of these problems will benefit from technology advancements, and all of them can represent capital investments which provide lasting long term value (not just in CO2 emissions reductions but also in improving the resiliency of the power grid). There are tons of people working on the generation problem. The storage problem is about in the same state that generation was maybe 20+ years ago. And the grid problem? You could fit everyone working on it into a conference room, a small conference room. We desperately need to amp up investment in every aspect of this field ASAP.

I've been reading other devs code for about two decades now. Universally all the code I see is not quite up to the standards I have for "good code" though some of it is better than others. Most devs give up on getting better writing code too easily, or more importantly they focus on the wrong things. There is always room for improvement no matter how good you are.

Focus on making your code clearer, not fancier or "faster". Don't prematurely optimize your code by eye. Generally just being conscious of the major performance no-nos to avoid and being able to use appropriate tools (like a profiler) when and if you actually need to tune performance is all you need. Instead concentrate on making your code highly readable, self-documenting plus fully documented (the best of both worlds!), as well as composable and maintainable and you'll be well set. Not just will you make other developers happy and improve the code base overall (fewer bugs, easier modifications for inevitable feature changes in the future) but you'll make your future self happier when you have to come back to that code.

By far the biggest mistake I see developers make is making their method/function bodies too long. Extract your methods people, it's not that hard and it's a great habit to get into. It takes skill to get good at it but a decently named small function makes code more readable and more reliable. And getting into the habit of making little functions that just take a few inputs, do stuff, and return a value makes your code way easier to unit test as well.

It's pretty common. Based on radar data about 10-15% of Near Earth asteroids (larger than 200 meters) are contact binaries (or contact-binary shaped at least). We don't have enough data on main belt asteroids, trojan asteroids, and especially TNOs/KBOs to say what the percentages look like for those populations but it's a fair likelihood that the proportions are at least as high if not higher among KBOs.

How much money are you spending on mine clearance globally?

Because not everyone who is affected by mines has infinite money available.

As far as we can tell, they are pretty common. But we haven't visited enough objects to have firm statistics.

How expensive do you think it is to operate a mine flail? Especially factoring in transport to remote areas?

Why bother having any control logic other than conditionals and gotos? Because they signal intent directly.

Not exactly. TESS monitors bright objects. It uses actually quite small telescopes (only 10cm aperture or so), but the it has 4 such telescopes and uses very wide fields of view to monitor a large number of stars continuously. To see KBOs/TNOs requires more light gathering power.

Interestingly, we'll solve this problem just about when it won't matter anymore for New Horizons. In the 2020s the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will come online, which will (among other things) catalog tens of thousands of KBOs/TNOs.

The problem is that most banks in the US are incredibly predatory, especially toward low income customers. Banks love to provide small amount short term loans (honoring NSF funds) at usurious rates. Instead of bouncing a transaction that would overdraw an account by, say, one solitary dollar banks will let it go through then hit the account holder with a $30 NSF fee (which works out to something like 4000% APR or so). For poor people a bank account can look like a huge risk, which can introduce massive expenses in a moment's notice with the slightest mismanagement (or external emergency).

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this situation will change any time soon in the US, it's just too profitable for the banks and the government is too much in their pocket to actually want to fix the problem.

What's the difference between the fruit stores? Is one better than the other or are they not directly comparable?

It's not a perpetual motion machine. It harnesses the differential between wind and ground to propel itself. How fast it can go depends on how much power is available, how efficient it is, how aerodynamic it is, etc.

3. USAF requires the upper stage do a deorbit burn to avoid long lived high altitude space debris.

Indeed. Compare and contrast with "sorry again for something new this week" Facebook. "We let everyone and their uncle access all your private data, my B dog." "Oh no, guess we helped cause a genocide, oopsie doodle."

YouTube is a perfect example of a platform that has somehow managed to serve as host to an incredible ecosystem of content creators despite the management having little real concept of the value of the system and consistently treating its most important creators poorly. They would kill the goose that laid the golden egg just to make things marginally easier for advertisers or to save themselves the trouble of having to do real work.

Not only that, but they do a very poor job of contending with what can only euphemistically be called "the wide diversity of content" on the site. Dumb as rocks machine learning based recommendations and content filtering means that for a vast majority of users (including minors and children) it's common to watch perfectly ordinary videos and then be recommended all sorts of ridiculous videos to watch next, from flat Earth and ancient aliens conspiracies to misogynists to holocaust deniers and actual nazis.

To call YouTube a "mess" is a vast understatement. Much like twitter they have captured the attention and engagement of enormous numbers of people, and yet somehow they cannot figure out how to prevent the platform from becoming a toxic hell hole (because they refuse to do the work), they treat their users and creators poorly, and somehow they are constantly in a battle to increase revenue. I support about half a dozen different folks who make youtube videos via patreon but I refuse to give youtube money until they get their head out of their ass.

Yup, lunar landings didn't last long enough to experience the full range of extreme lunar conditions.

This is one of the reasons why lunar bases will actually be more difficult than people think. Dealing with extreme environmental conditions is much easier when they are stable, then you can design around them and deal with them. Dealing with conditions that cycle from one extreme to another continuously over extended periods of time is much more challenging. One point of proof of that is the longevity of the Martian and lunar rovers and landers. Many landers and rovers on Mars have lasted for years, some have lasted over a decade. No lunar rover has been able to maintain roving operations longer than a few months. This despite the fact that lunar rovers are in near real-time contact with Earth continuously. The heat/cold cycles and hyper-abrasive clingy dust make the lunar environment particularly harsh on equipment.

To summarize:

We've known for very long that the Mars polar caps contained water ice (since Mariner 9 and the Viking orbiters in the 1970s). We've known that the ice sublimates and deposits on the surface during local winter at high latitudes (Viking landers, 1970s). We've known that Mars had substantial amounts of liquid water on its surface at least for transitory periods (Mariner 9 & Viking orbiters, 1970s).

Since the early 2000s we've known that Mars contains substantial amounts of water ice in the form of sub-surface permafrost. Specifically that much of the surface of the planet, if not all of it, is underlain with permafrost that is as much as half water ice in some areas, at a minimum depth below the surface of only around a meter. This permafrost layer exists even in middle latitudes and might exist even at equatorial latitudes at a greater depth.

During the same time frame the Spirit and Opportunity rovers provided evidence that Mars experienced extended periods (of at least many millions of years) where substantial quantities of liquid water existed on the planet, leading to the formation of various geological features and minerals which could only be produced under those conditions.

More recently (within the last 10 years) the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided evidence of the presence of sub-surface glaciers on Mars. These glaciers are vast volumes of water ice under thin layers of loose surface soil (a few meters to just one meter), and they exist all over Mars at latitudes as low as 30 deg. To put that in perspective, that's about the same latitude as New Orleans and San Diego.

Even more recently (this year) data from the Mars Express orbiter pointed to the existence of a lake of liquid water 1.5 km beneath the Southern polar cap, likely made up of very briny water.

All of this points to several interesting conclusions.

Firstly, in regards to future colonization of the planet by humans there appears to be abundant and easily accessible reserves of water ice throughout much of the planet. This means that there are a great many (instead of very few) prime locations on Mars for placing settlements. With water ice and the CO2 atmosphere you can make: water (of course), oxygen, hydrogen, and methane which makes it possible to manufacture key resources for interplanetary transit (LOX/methane as a rocket propellant), human habitation (water and oxygen), farming (water, CO2, oxygen, sunlight), energy storage and fuel for vehicles (oxygen and hydrogen or methane), and even the beginnings of industry (plastics from methane, iron and steel from carbon monoxide et al, glass, aluminum, etc.) Being able to site settlements at mid latitudes means being able to choose areas that have decent sunlight most of the year, making it possible to grow crops using natural sunlight and to use solar power as at least one component of power generation.

Secondly, in regards to the history of Mars the evidence of the presence of liquid water over geologically significant time periods combined with the evidence of pockets of sub-surface liquid water existing even into the present day means that Mars may have harbored environments suitable for the formation and existence of life, and some of that life may actually still exist through to the present day.

That would grant the app access to those permissions, not the companies.

Oh hey, would you look at that: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16143354/facebook-messeng...

Do you own a respirator? Why not?

Interesting. Let's see what the local "defend FB at all costs" group has to say about this.

Also, in javascript the thing that's called "an array" is actually a hashmap, because everything in javascript is secretly just a hashmap.

Political news coverage is not, of course, illegal, that's just 1st amendment stuff. Coordinating with a campaign in regards to coverage is, however, an "in kind" political contribution, not merely an exercise of one's own views, and is a violation of campaign finance law. Which is hardly the full extent of all of the illegal activities that AMI engaged in on behalf of the Trump campaign.

Are you personally dumping your used plastic in the ocean?

Trash from just 10 rivers is responsible for 90 percent of ocean plastic pollution: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...

Those 10 rivers are all in the developing world and China: the Hai, Nile, Meghna, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Pearl, Amur, Niger, Mekong, Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze. In terms of countries that's: China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Nigeria.

You just white washed the death of "fewer than a thousand people" with a specious argument, and you don't think that counts as hyperbole?

Again, explain to me how your line of argument wouldn't also excuse a serial killer?

Precisely, that's why these calibrations are so important.

You can start from the assumption that the natural C14 to C12 ratio is a constant. And from there you can measure the actual ratio in the present time for a sample. Using math you can estimate how long ago the material was part of a living creature, since in the meantime the ratio would not have kept pace with the natural environmental ratio and instead would change depending on the half-life of C14. However, the assumption of a constant natural abundance of C14 is incorrect, there are lots of complex effects (like solar activity) which impact the ratio, which in turn affects the estimated age of an object. The more data you have on ancient C14 ratios the better able you are to calibrate radiocarbon dating.

In the past ancient trees and lake/seafloor samples have been used because they have many individual samples from separate years, each of which can be independently dated (separate from radiocarbon analysis).

This is all about class distinctions. At a certain level they become indistinguishable from aristocracy.

The entire premise for paying execs high salaries is that they have demanding jobs that few people have the skills to do and the work entails risks which ordinary workers do not take. And this justifies exorbitant pay and lavish bonuses. But the reality is that most of these people have no special talents, and even when they run a company into the ground and hurt people (such as those workers who end up, often, with missing pay, fucked up pensions, and no jobs, etc.) and the businesses they are supposed to be stewarding, they still end up being awarded bonuses.

Sears is a publicly traded company.

This article is at best half useful, and missing the other half is potentially quite dangerous (to organizations, to people's careers, etc.) What's missing is a discussion of power and power dynamics (and healthy vs. unhealthy versions of same, let alone how to work effectively in either or drive change). Partly this comes down to a failure on the author's part to care about power dynamics or look at their own power. In this case the author was able to just blindly drive change by charging in like a bull in a china shop and the only consequence to themselves was a very minor verbal admonition, that's an indication of their level of power and where they sit in the overall power structure of their org, not every dev. in a similar position would see the same results, however. Many people would have to navigate that problem much more cautiously to avoid becoming fired or ostracized.

(Edit: and indeed I see another comment in this thread about someone who did exactly the same thing as the article's author and it turned out very poorly for them because they lacked the power the author has/had.)

Additionally, the author completely ignores the value of "soft skills" and implies that all that's necessary to have a positive impact where you work is to blindly seek the technologically superior choice whenever possible, ignoring politics, power, and ego (yours and others) along the way. There's value to that, but there's also great potential for that sort of mindset to lead you astray, because it's often difficult to know "what's best" in every situation. In the article's example the pros and cons were fairly straightforward, but most of the time the situation is likely to be a lot more complex or a lot more subtle. And it may be easy to make the wrong value judgment (and consequently fight the wrong technical fight) based on ignorance.

On top of that, this story is very frustrating because it only concerns itself with technical problems. At the end of the day the organization was still just as dysfunctional as ever even though it grudgingly fixed a technical problem it found it couldn't ignore. The author helped fixed a defect in code but they did almost nothing to help fix a much larger and more serious defect in the organization they worked in.

Just stop having a face. And friends, or family. Become an unperson. The solution is so obvious.

It's always hilarious how people try to pretend that it's easy to just drop out of society and the systems that people use to keep in touch. Sure, you can live like the unabomber in a shed in Montana with no phone service, but having that be the only option to keep your personal data safe from leaks is a bit much of an ask. People should be able to live their lives and take reasonable but not extraordinary precautions to safeguard their privacy and be able to have some expectation of privacy as a result. Unfortunately, there is so much data being collected on everyone, so many intrusions to our private lives, and so little care being taken by the stewards of that private data that it is not, it turns out, a reasonable expectation. And the onus for solving that problem shouldn't be on individuals. We shouldn't be forced to live our lives in fear of digital representations of our appearance being leaked onto the internet as someone might have once feared an ordinary photograph could steal a soul. Rather, those who are going to great efforts to destroy the boundaries of personal privacy should be heavily regulated to prevent them from doing so and heavily incentivized to safeguard private data whenever they are in possession of it.