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gmooton How big is YouTube?

I don't think this is correct. In order to generate a random number at all you first have to assume a distribution. If they generate a series of random ids, and those random ids are uniformly distributed across the space of all possible ids - while the valid ids have clusters - then won't their method still give a skewed estimate?

gmooton Americans Are Pulling Cash from Their Retirement Savings to Pay Bills

It really depends on the plan and on your other options.

At Google the HSA is cheapest for almost everyone, whether you are a single person with almost no health expenses or a family with high expenses.

gmooton The new headache for bosses: Employees aren't quitting

If you look at the graph in the article, attrition is just returning to historical levels after a spike in 2021. Nothing to see here.

gmooton Extinct goat was cold-blooded (2009)

This is not true, it can spread. It's called neutral evolution.

gmooton Windows 9x and Word 9x at 800x600 resolution. Spacious. Comfy

Years ago we were re-skinning a product to use Material UI. The launch coincided with a big public announcement. We joked that our VP was going to announce that he was giving everyone in attendance a 32-inch monitor to accommodate all the new whitespace (This was closer to the time when I/O was famous for giving out free stuff).

gmooton Douglas Crockford on JavaScript

YUI 2 was very bad and java-like.

But YUI 3 was ahead of its time. The dependency management and lazy loading in YUI 3 would not make it to the mainstream for another 10 years.

gmooton Eastern philosophy says there is no “self” – science agrees

A college philosophy professor of mine memorably critiqued this idea of Hume's by asking "Who is doing the observing? It's like a man who wants to know if anyone is home, so he goes outside and looks in the window."

gmooton Google to reduce workforce by 12k

There was a big change in 2015 when Ruth replaced Patrick as CEO.

Most of the cost cutting dates to then. She has been undeniably good for the share price, but it's a two-edged sword. There is a lot you can't do when you're focused on the share price.

gmooton Analog Chess

Then it's checkmate, not stalemate. For a stalemate you need a situation where the king is not in check, but there are no legal moves. It seems impossible in practice, if not in theory.

gmooton Epiousios

I reject this blanket characterization of religious organizations, but anyway the Eastern / Greek Orthodox Church is interesting here because it descends directly from the original Greek speaking Christians in the Eastern Roman empire when the Bible was written.

It's like asking a Jew about translating the Torah - it's about historical continuity and subject matter expertise.

gmooton Epiousios

Yeah, no punctuation at all and not even lower case letters!

Modern texts have all these things inserted by editors, it does indeed sound much harder to have to learn without these extra aids.

gmooton Epiousios

The common language was Greek, even though the Romans were in charge.

Greek spread through the conquests of Alexander the Great, and Latin never supplanted it.

gmooton Ask HN: How do you take notes when reading a book?

I use voice dictation on my phone to transcribe notes into a Google doc, along with the page number or timestamp (for audiobooks)

My note taking process used to be either whatever I could fit in the margin (not much) or require a separate note book.

Switching to my phone has been seriously transformative. Not only is voice dictation way faster than my handwriting, but I can do it in many more contexts because I always have my phone with me. I can also take much more detailed notes in context where handwriting isn't ideal (like a jerky bus ride).

gmooton Hardware Isn't Generally Copyrightable (2012)

It's always puzzled me that it's legal to emulate video game hardware (NES, SNES, etc.) but not to copy the games. I guess this is why.

gmooton In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace

Catholicism has never been that, and it's declining too.

gmooton Beyond Good and Evil (1886) [pdf]

gmooton Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store

Hong Kong is not behind the GCF.

gmooton Galactic Algorithm

Ah. I still remember my computational geometry professor telling us about an algorithm to do triangulation (composing a polygon into triangles) in linear time: "It's very complex. I don't think anyone has actually implemented it".

It shocked me at the time that there were algorithms like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_triangulation#Computat...

gmooton Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

This is interesting. If we can put an upper bound on the rate (what is it?) we could rule out abiogenesis if we could lower that upper bound sufficiently.

Most here seem to reason the other way around - it must have happened, so we'll just keep looking until we figure out how. I'd like to think that we could reach a point at which we could confidently say "this universe doesn't have the probabilistic resources to make it happen" instead of kicking the can down the road indefinitely.

gmooton Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

Miller-Urey found amino acids (not nucleotides as in the current experiment), the building blocks of proteins. It's at the other end of the chicken/egg "which came first" between proteins (which catalyze cellular reactions) and DNA (information storage).

gmooton Starship Update

Sure, we could orbit Jupiter and get back out. But if we ever descended to the "surface" we couldn't climb back out.

Voyager 1/2 and New Horizons are at escape velocity and leaving the solar system.

gmooton Germany's Vanishing Monasteries

"cannot" is such a high bar. This must be incorrect.

But religion is indeed in decline in the West. Whether or not this is an argument against God's existence is more questionable.

gmooton Google Feedback on TypeScript 3.5

The explicit type is optional. It's not that it's required to copy out whatever the compiler inferred, it's just that lots of people do it to be explicit.

gmooton A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper

My impression of the different quantum mechanics interpretations (copenhagen, many worlds...) is that they are observationally equivalent. Is this not true?

gmooton 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

Yes. You don't need to abolish the whole college, just do this. And states can do it on their own and immediately, no need to sign a pledge only takes effect at some possible future time.

The problem with this, and with the pledge, is that it requires the states that benefit from the current system to voluntarily decrease their own influence. Which won't happen.

gmooton 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

It was indeed intended to prevent populism; the idea is that instead of voting for the president you vote for a group of people who you trust to then choose a president. But it has never in practice worked that way.

gmooton Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 on the Day Before Deadly Crash

somehow the pilots were able to bring the nose back up... it was only (apparently) after multiple nose downs that they eventually failed to recover the plane. What was going on there?

The MCAS activated several times, each time ratcheting the stabilizer down by 2.5 degrees. Every time the pilots tried to correct for it, it would engage again. That is what caused the characteristic up/down flight pattern.

There are a lot of details in this story: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

gmooton Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right

Sure? But at minimum they were no dumber then the extant works show. There are plenty of dumb people today too.

gmooton Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right

It's not just Herodotus; many ancient works create this impression. We have this implicit chronological snobbery because of our technology achievements, but when you read ancient works you realize that they were just as smart as we are.

gmooton Myth: The astronauts didn’t float away because they had heavy boots

Here is a related question that has bothered me for some time: in Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865), he writes the travelers as only achieving weightlessness for a small moment, at just the point where the moon's gravity exactly cancels out the earths gravity.

This makes an intuitive kind of sense: you would gradually lose weight as you get farther from earth, then after a moment of weightlessness gradually 'gain' weight as you approach the moon.

Obviously this is wrong, but why?