juiceandjuice

Dark matter doesn't belong on that list.

Why would you not like exchange? Do you like to wait a few before you get your emails or something?

Huh? You could argue the netbook had as much impact on wifi as the iPhone did in 2007/2008. Both the netbook and the iPhone went from a very small number of sales in 2007 to nearly 11 billion for 2008.

Ahh, a fellow highlighter. I noticed too.

Unless you've got a ridiculous RAID array, there's plenty of times where processing anything over 100GB without a cluster is going to suck. Sequentially reading 1TB of data is going to take a few hours even with a RAID array, or be very expensive with SSDs.

I maintain a database that's over 1TB and Oracle handles it very well. The trick there is understanding that, under absolutely no circumstance should you ever need to do a full table scan, because the table isn't designed for that.

So, I'd argue that a monolithic database is okay even up to 10TB even with slower disks as long as you never need to touch more than 10% of it. If you need to touch 100% of the data 100% of the time, I'd say anything over 100GB is too big for one machine.

The reality is that it just depends. There's times where you're going to want a hadoop cluster even for only 16GB of data, and there's going to be times where a database is going to be fine with 10TB of data.

The margin of error of a poll is the margin of error at the 95% confidence level (two sigma). The standard "margin of error" when you are talking about polls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error#Different_confi...

In reality, you should apply a finite population correction, which would make the "margin of error" a bit smaller if you get a substantial percentage of the population voting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_population_correction#Co...

Do you accept that black people are two and a half times more likely to live poverty? From that, wouldn't if follow that a black person is two and a half more times likely to reap some sort of benefit from affirmative action, even if it wasn't based on race? What if affirmative action was based purely on the statistic of being part of a single parent family in poverty?

Do you accept that the median salary if you are black is less that 2/3 of that if you are white?

You comment on the stats of single mothers in poverty, say we need to turn it around, then and pretend it's an easy problem to solve when these communities don't have the money to fund programs at a local level (since they, you know, live in poverty), coupled with a history of racism and neglect at the state level, and you just say "well it's not really a problem because more white people are poor and we should end affirmative action"

Affirmative action seems pretty targeted to me. Sure white people don't really get affirmative action (that's not really true because there's all sorts of advantages you for just being poor), but life's not always exactly fair.

You're right. But for 3,000,000 votes cast, the margin of error is about 6 hundredths of one percent. At the 99% confidence level, it's .074% variance.

To really be able to do this with a lot of success, you need to be able to do intraday trades, which would make you a day trader under SEC rules, which also requires $25,000 in your brokerage account.

You are making a fundamental error by assuming classical kinetics. At .9c, your first interactions would be electronic (ionization), then nuclear and radiative. The complete and initial ionization of all the atoms of 10mg of, say carbon, would be a lot less than 360 GJ. Then you'd have different interactions depending on your hull material, magnetic shielding/Bremsstrahlung losses, etc...

With some complicated magnetic fields, you could probably do something smart to take advantage the different charge/mass ratio of an ionized atom and positron and minimize interaction with a steady/confined positronic cloud. You might be able to annihilate enough electrons of the dust particle to ionize it enough to subsequently deflect it from the ship. Then you'd still have to worry about gamma ray radiation and back pressure and maybe some other interactions.

I don't really know about all of this for sure, just a thought.

I went to a reddit meetup a few years ago after moving to the bay area on the suggestion from someone at HN. I knew what reddit was at the time, what I didn't know was tl;dr.

While I was telling a story, someone told me "tl;dr"

I had to ask what that meant, and people started laughing.

I soon realized I wouldn't be hanging out with anyone who identifies as a redditor on a regular basis.

No, Gasoline is highly refined compared to oil. Diesel isn't as much. So "Turning fuel into energy" is really "Turning Oil into Fuel using chemicals and energy which in turn can be turned into energy" You still need a refinery and a very large distribution network consisting or trains, trucks, and pipelines. Your assumption of transmission energy loss is silly when you compare the required energy of transporting things like oil and water around.

Near infrared is effectively just light, and there's not a whole lot of it. It's not infrared from heat, like you are assuming.

Near IR is generally up to 1400nm wavelength, where the infrared from heat isn't really a factor til you hit 4000nm.

The intensities of NIR are too low to be worthwhile.

The scientists made something that could see your remote control's LED, not your body heat.

A $4000 placebo effect is often worth it.

It's not a silly question at all. You can completely parameterize the answer in terms of bus volume and golf ball size, or define a "best guess" by explicitly defining your assumptions on the size of a golf ball or a bus in the question. Finally, you should at least be able to provide a magnitude.

Or, you know, you could always just ask what size a golf ball, and bus is.

It seems to me the only assumption the question makes is that a person could make some logical assumptions about the question, ask some logical questions, or ignore all assumptions and parameterize the answer.

CERN has a variety of techniques to access, store, and backup their data. I know from experience some experiments, or at least some parts of experiments, use layers and layers of abstraction, like scalla/xrootd which operates on clusters of servers directly or with nfs.

In addition to this, there's levels of processed data. For example, raw data is usually level 0, and basic processed data is level 1 Processed and calibrated data is usually level 2, etc... but experiments often have different definitions for each level. Reprocessing of any later can happen at any time, although level 1 reprocessing is usually an extremely intensive operation because it operates with the largest amount of data.

Level 0 data is usually heavily compressed when it's left on disk, because it's typically the largest amount of data, but also least touched.

Most scientists will use level 2 or level 1 data. This data will be on low latency clusters.

So, while CERN has petabytes of data, typically a fraction of that will be accessible.

In the past, level 0 data was often left to tape. While the raw data is still backed up to tape (I know this is the case for ATLAS), for many experiments with large amounts of data they might leave it on lower cost HDD in simple RAID arrays for redundancy and not worry about performance so much. The BaBar experiment has done this for their long term data analysis.

In addition to all of this, it's still occasionally easier to transfer large amounts of data via tape instead of the internet.

Why are you lumping IBM in with MS?

The reality is that IBM is no longer consumer facing, and neither is their research. MS still is and has to be (and losing), but IBM just abandoned being a household name a while ago, except with things like Watson.

I'm sure it's been done. Anisotropic studies of UHECRs is a very popular thing to do for UHECR experiments, almost as popular as looking for neutrinos.

I worked at such an experiment for 4 years.

Yes, there are some critical algorithms which will be always be faster in C.

In practice it's significantly more difficult to optimize all your code based on deep knowledge of architectures, compilers, and even compiler versions than it is to just let a JIT compiler optimize at runtime.

1. Who said it was 10 years out? I've never heard that. Sometimes milestones are 10 years out and the public tends to confuse milestones with the finished product.

2. Ideas for parallel implementations of nuclear fusion have expanded, and as a result, funding and research has arguably become fragmented and resources have been diverted. In reality, there's a fixed amount of capital and knowledge (which is also a function of the availability of money) available for this kind of research. The amount of money the US puts into fusion research is quite paltry compared to the potential benefits. It may be a priority, but the way Washington spends money says otherwise.

Scientifically, fusion is maybe 10 years away. Politically, it's more like 40 for a real power plant, but with the current congress, I couldn't say. In addition to that, it's an expensive enough endeavor that it would be corporate suicide for a private company to attempt it, especially considering the majority of companies with enough capital to pursue something like fusion tend to be in the Oil and Gas industries.

Overall, this is such a non-problem compared to things most people in SF have to deal with (i.e. street sweeping/parking)

If you can remember to scan when you get on (which doesn't fit the "normal" behavior of a paper ticket either) then you can remember to scan when you get off. It's no different than BART, the main difference is BART funnels you through an exit. If you have a round trip commute, then you are going to enter and exit at nearly the same points.

This is such a stupid assumption. Apple's maps will never reach Google's.

Why? Because Google's business model is so heavily dependent on highly accurate maps at so many levels. There's been posts on HN regarding Google's usage of Streetview/OCR to improve their map directions, and it's absolutely critical that their maps be the absolute highest quality in terms of content and accuracy of that content for their driverless cars.

Google has and will continue to invest massively in maps, and no user feedback will ever approach that investment.

You can get elevation data for North America from USGS: http://ned.usgs.gov/

Stanford, I work on software for big physics experiments.

I started looking at jobs two weeks ago after Neil Armstrong died out of curiosity. I have a job at a place I love doing astrophysics, and I can't complain much about that, but I need to update my resume anyway.

It's statements like this that have made me seriously consider applying for a job at SpaceX.

Because they'd still get advertisement money from sponsored listings vs. no advertising money.

Actually the 4S is much faster at a fix than the 4 because it has more satellites to look at (GLONASS). More satellites means a faster, more accurate location fix.

Anyone who has been around a university physics lab will easily recognize linen (as well as paper) phenolics which are typically used as insulators and occasionally for mechanical parts. They used to be pretty popular for gaskets as well.

In general, paper based phenolics were used for tons of things, and if you have anything around that looks like hard plastic that was made before the 70s you've probably encountered it as well (buttons, knobs, etc...). The trade name Bakelite was a general term to denote a paper/linen/cotton based thermoplastics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite

I wear mostly the same clothes every day. I have a bunch of plain t-shirts in various colors (mostly shades of gray, but colors too), a few band t-shirts I wear occasionally. 4 slightly different colored pairs of levis, and either navy/red or black/blue shoes. Other than that, a black hoodie and a denim jacket over that if the weather is cool (usually at night). I've got a bunch of button up t-shirts I'll wear for a night out and occasionally at work.

It's simple, clean and standardized, but I can still look different everyday. I can pull an alternate when the time is appropriate and dress up nicer, like for a date. Most importantly it's unoffending to the eye.

A google/grouper/conference t-shirt is offending to the eye. I tend to have a whole lot of preconceived notions when I see someone wear those shirts, usually it's related to their lack of a social life.