averagewall

Most(all?) types of intelligence are positively correlated. So if you have a natural ability at one of those things, then you're more likely to be high in the others too. Even something as simple as reaction time is correlated with IQ.

But we know it's either on the bottom or the surface right? It needs to use power to balance in the middle somewhere.

Not false - we have limited capacity to care about people so we have to make tradeoffs. If anything, just because of the time it takes up. More people die each day than we could even name if that was our full time job. That's not even counting the possible emotional limits on people.

So why not spend your limited caring on someone who's ignored by the world and didn't even put themselves in danger, even better if it's someone who's not a professional killer like these victims were.

The example he chose to show how bad they were makes them look fairly reasonable. So perhaps his judgment was clouded. That example was that Muslims who follow the koran are terrorists. The koran does actually advise people to kill quite a lot of other people, so following it strictly would make you at least a murderer, if not a terrorist.

Democrats use drones to kill innocent or presumed-guilty people in other countries. Are you sure their lives don't matter compared to net neutrality? They're also responsible for harsh sentences for drug offences which is a major reason for all the imprisoned people in the US. Net neutrality is still more important than all those ruined lives?

The housing shortage in San Francisco is democrats too. Maybe with money saved from rents to landlords could be spent on rents to non-neutral ISPs.

It's far from a simple as "always vote democrat". That kind of naive arrogance is why the US has two entrenched parties that both maintain the status quo of terrible things you don't like.

For those of you who feel sad for strangers that you never knew existed until now, why not direct your feelings to something productive like looking through local obituaries and contacting their survivors to show some support and kindness? There are real human beings dying all around us but they don't have dramatic movie-style deaths so we don't care. Even better, don't wait till they're dead. Go and seek out old, sick, and lonely people and make them feel better.

I think news-cycle internet sadness drains our capacity to care about others while also doing nothing for those who died or who're genuinely sad about it. The sinking submarine is interesting, the people on it aren't.

That's a meaningless statistic on its own. Does it shorten 5.4% of people's lives by 5 minutes each? or does it kill 5.4% of people while they're children? The reality will be somewhere between those extremes but the number alone tells us nothing interesting.

You can use something like years of life lost instead: http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat2006YearsOfLifeLost.pdf

Did you really mean that? Do you think people who are susceptible to manipulation need to be protected by Google, not for their own good but because they can be manipulated to have political opinions that you personally disagree with? That means you think your political belief is so right that competing ideas should be suppressed. That's the complete opposite of freedom of speech that America is one of the world leaders in. Do you think the way China's government limits the spread of political ideas is good too?

Replace "Russian government" with the name of any news organization and your claim is (still) true. So your conclusion is based on the presupposition that the Russian government has such incredibly bad things to say that all the world's naive people need to be protected from it. Really? Are they spreading a new global communism ideal or something?

Why do most/all electric and hybrid cars have regenerative braking while ICE cars don't? It's because, as the GP said, the battery would be quickly topped up and extra energy wasted. Only electric vehicles doing frequent stops/downhills can make productive use of regenerative braking.

Potential energy lost by a truck going 10 m (vertically) downhill: 40 000 kg * g * 10 m = 4e6 J.

Capacity of car starter battery: 40 Ah * 12V = 400 Wh = 1e6 J. Let's guess a truck battery has 4 times the capacity of a car battery, so 4e6 J to full charge.

That's just down one small hill and all subsequent braking energy for the entire trip is wasted.

How would you make the decision that right now is the time to kill yourself? If future you can't wait one more day, then why didn't he do it yesterday? I think there would be a general decline in life quality but with ups and downs so you'll never know if tomorrow will be better than today so there may be no clear point when you're sure you don't want anymore.

Once you've lost too much of your mind to really know what's going on, you're not someone who should be trusted to make that decision- just as we don't think mentally ill people should be trusted with that decision.

No-one seems to be accusing him of an actual crime. It sounds like his victims/partners willingly carried him on their backs or did workouts together or took their shirts off. It sounds very similar to what many pairs opposite sex people do when one invites the other back to their hotel room. If it was a woman and she wasn't sexually interested in him, she would be unlikely to go along so far - certainly not taking off clothes in a hotel room! Does it just seem worse because it's gay? Maybe it's worse because young men in those days didn't think that other men might be gay so they misread his advances?

Sutter says "part of a routine destruction of old paper records"

If that's true, they can be required to show evidence of the rest of this routine and how it was possible for the mistake to happen. Apparently they havn't destroyed documents for at least 17 years so it doesn't sound very routine at all.

I've tried smashing a windscreen with a hammer. The first few blows didn't do anything at all. All windscreens are very strong.

This alleged photo shows no cover over the wheels. You can probably just not use it if you don't like it.

http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/future-cars/a12771645/t...

Oh no, they're doing what all the other carmakers do and reuse the same name for completely different cars whose only thing in common is to target the same market segment. We'll have to call this the 2020 Roadster.

Per GDP dollar? That scales with population so you're basically saying bigger countries emit more CO2. You cherry picked a way of measuring it that makes it look bad but hides the underlying cause that's not bad - lots of people.

Per capita, the US has double the CO2 emissions than China.

No intention of slowing it? They're building more nuclear plants than anyone else.

If you want to exclude racism from private groups of friends, then you'd better exclude gossip too. It's also harmful in much the same way - reinforcing people's negative views of others so they'll subconsciously or deliberately treat them badly. But unfortunately, even progressives haven't got themselve as far as not bullying or abusing individuals.

Importantly, in China, the biggest Android market, none of the phones access the Play store, so that entire country will be omitted from the data. I'll bet they're not getting updates either.

You're implying that people are too stupid to know what they want so we have to prevent politicians from advertising to them because they'll be fooled. That's very arrogant. The idea of democracy is people get whatever they want - if they're stupid and get something bad, they'll learn their lesson next time. If they don't learn their lesson, they'll continue to suffer from their own personal choices. That's freedom - you don't have the right to dictate to somebody else what's best for them. They might value things that you don't value and are actually better off with what you think is a wrong choice.

I think this is a common attitude of democrats about Trump voters - nobody could be that stupid, so they must have been fooled by Russian interference or fake news or secret targeted ads. But actually they voted for what they wanted and are very happy now that they've got it. They're not going to get their coal mining jobs back, but that's not the point. The point is to give the middle finger to the "liberal elite" who seem to be oppressing them. That gives a genuine sense of satisfaction.

The conclusion that energy is more fundamental or easier to have an intuition for has been the case since, what 100 years ago? It certainly was when I studied physics 20 years ago.

But he doesn't need to go into quarks for that. Simply comparing the masses of protons and neutrons (+ electrons) to the mass of an atom shows they're different. There's a little bit less mass due to the lower energy of the bound nucleons. Quarks certainly make the effect more dramatic though.

A more practical objection to using mass is that nobody can agree on what the word means. Does a photon have mass? Yes or no, depending on if you're thinking of relativistic or rest mass. If you call it energy, there's no ambiguity.

If I could recommend he change anything though, it would be the horrible mixture of units - MeV/c^2, atomic mass units, and grams. The author surely has the time to convert them all to the same unit so the reader can easily compare them. That would eliminate the need to explain Avogadro's law. It's a completely redundant complication of chemistry and has nothing to do with the fundamental concepts he's focusing on.

Also the reason for eV and mole units, and Fortran. Not to mention the whole imperial unit system. Adults can't be bothered changing their ways and since they have the power, they make the next generation do the hard work of keeping up instead of correcting their own mistakes.

In China, your signature usually has to be legible. I've got funny looks in the bank for apparently scribbling all over the signature field.

It's depressing that popular sentiment on HN is generally in agreement with "X should be banned in case it corrupts the minds of gullible people". Whether X is fake news, political speech they don't agree with, computer generated animations, advertisements, or whatever.

Why not treat other people with respect and leave them to manage what they do with their own lives themselves instead of trying to force them to do what's best according to an arbitrarily chosen American-left-wing-parent-friendly culture?

Yes, this is children, but parents can manage what media their children consume. Let them make their own choices.

Already addressed in this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=turc1656

It seems like HN comment pages might have a critical mass beyond which it's impractical to see if somebody's already said what you want to say so people repeat the same idea - ballooning the comments page even further.

That's still ambiguous. Safest to use ISO format 2017-10-04. Nobody will be confused and it's the national standard for some countries.

I never realised how obscure the US date format is [1]. Nobody should be using that on the internet except for specially local sites. It makes no sense to just about anybody. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Parked cars are susceptible to the same type of accident, so if we worry about that, we're setting too high a standard for the driverless car

Perhaps it can't scale up enough to make automation economical because the customers have to be located nearby. You might make enough of a particular dish to satisfy the whole neighborhood in your delivery radius but still be too small a scale for robots to be cheaper than humans.

I suppose TV dinners are made like you say, but they can be frozen and transported to allow higher volume production.

> as long as he can save enough to pay for his kids' education

That sounds like a good thing but there's another story on HN where commenters are complaining that it's bad! Rich bankers paying for their kids' education and helping them become rich too. That it's unfair to poor kids. People have such arbitrary and inconsistent opinions. No matter what you do, people are going to believe it's wrong.

I think it's a bit like being an artist or athlete. The pool of people who enjoy it is enormous compared to the demand. I personally know many people who enjoy cooking, playing music, and playing sport but nobody who would pay those people for their work. It's everyone's hobby so the competition is fierce. The odds that you are better than everyone else in that huge rabble are slim.