mcpackieh

It's a simple matter of cascading your rounding operations. 0.636 rounds up to 0.64 of course. That four is almost a 5 so round that up to 0.65. Everybody knows that it's fair to round up from a 5 so this is how they 0.7, but these amateurs forgot to subsequently round 0.7 up to 1. Shameful, really.

> The AI accurately predicted 70% of earthquakes a week in advance, with 14 forecasts coming true within 200 miles of their estimated locations and matching their anticipated magnitudes. However, it issued eight false warnings and missed one earthquake.

How does this work out to 70%? It made 23 predictions, 14 were right and 9 were wrong. 14 of 23 is 60.8%

I also wonder what counts as a success. If it predicts an earthquake and one occurs, but too weak to hurt anybody, does that count as success or a false warning? What do you do with earthquake warnings anyway, preposition yourself under a doorframe? I guess humanitarian organizations could use this to pre-stage emergency supplies, but if false warnings are common and true warnings don't seem actionable most people will probably ignore it.

I use an adblocker, call the police and tell them I told you so.

Can't subscribe to premium without getting and using an account first.

> To have less incentives, you’d actually have to pay politicians more

This theory presumes that when people have more money, their desire to have even more money diminishes. This presumption is not true.

(It might be somewhat true for common sorts of people who find pleasure in simple things and only want enough money to satisfy their basic material needs (food, shelter, medical care). But it's definitely not true when you're talking about people with high levels of ambition, which includes virtually all politicians.)

Prop 22 was contrary to the interests of professional drivers, but probably in line with the interests of riders who benefit from drivers being exploited. When push comes to shove, a whole lot of people choose cheap service over their publicly espoused principles.

For evidence of this, consider how many suburban boomers are eager to hire illegal immigrants to do lawn work around their McMansion for less than minimum wage. Most would probably tell you that minimum wage laws are good or that illegal immigrants should be deported (one or the other, depending on what side of the aisle they're on...) but when push comes to shove they both choose the lowest bidding contractor to do their yardwork. After all, they aren't yard-workers, just like most Californians aren't uber drivers.

I get this use case, but I don't think it's very common. Most gamers are near their gaming hardware most of the time. Gamers who travel often usually have some mobile gaming hardware already. The number of people who would game but can't because they travel often and aren't satisfied with existing mobile gaming hardware is minimal. Not zero, but not a huge untapped market either.

Personally, I game almost exclusively on a laptop (even at home.) Suppose I was unsatisfied with gaming on a laptop because only the most powerful gaming PC with graphics turned all the way up will satisfy me... would cloud gaming really be an enticing answer to somebody with such high standards? Sure the 'cloud' server could max out the graphics settings, but latency and compression would probably ruin the experience for somebody with such high standards. Now maybe my issue with laptop gaming isn't the fidelity but instead the hassle of traveling with a laptop. The convenience margin between traveling with a laptop vs an ipad isn't zero, but it's pretty small. I think this is the niche cloud gaming fits into. So cloud gaming is for people who travel often and light, who don't care about fidelity/latency but do care about saving ~1kg of weight in their carry-on bag.

> I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?

I am strongly in the pro individual privacy camp FWIW, but I'm bored so I'll take a stab at steel-manning the premise that governments are entitled to privacy while individual people are not:

One of the obligations of governments is military defense. Governments are required to protect their people and the reality of war necessitates the keeping of some secrets. Failure to recognize this reality would constitute an abdication of their duty as a government. On the other hand, private persons are not permitted to wage war (this is why governments are obliged to defend their people, because they forbid people from doing it themselves.) Since people are not allowed to wage war on their own, the "realities of war" justification for governments keeping secrets doesn't justify people keeping personal secrets.

Rebuttal to the above: throughout history and particularly in the 20th century, tens of millions of people were killed by their own government. While governments may need to keep some secrets to effectively defend their population against external threats, people also need the right to keep secrets from their government to defend themselves against that domestic threat, which is every bit as real and concerning as the external threats.

> It's common for shooters to want to guarantee that if it looks like you shot the other player on your screen, the game will react as if you shot the other player, even if the server would have considered it a miss due to timing differences. Those things can really only be done by trusting the client not to lie, which means verifying that the client hasn't been tampered with.

Why does server-authoritative backwards reconciliation require trusting the client not to lie? The server keeps a history of the past N states and client claims to hits are verified by the server using that history. A client could lie and say it made a hit in one of those prior states (but not an state the client invented whole cloth.) But if the client is doing that then from the server's perspective that player is lagging and backwards reconciliation makes lagging players easier for other players to hit.

Obviously if you're doing client-authoritative unlagging then you need anticheat, but AFAIK competitive shooters have used server authoritative backwards reconciliation ever since the early 00s.

HN is the only place on the net where I've ever seen people defending the premise of cloud gaming and it's usually (not always) people saying something like "Well I don't game much myself but cloud gaming sounds compelling..."

I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some large untapped market of people who aren't gamers right now but could become gamers if the barrier to entry were lowered. In theory that logic makes sense but in practice that market just doesn't materialize. The barrier to entry for gaming is already quite low, it's a very cheap hobby and almost everybody who really wants to play games has already found a way to do so without cloud gaming.

I once had the misfortune to be riding a horse when a hailstorm broke out. The horse closed his eyes and almost ran off a cliff; thankfully he hit a fence first and turned away from that.

Sodium ascorbate is the sodium salt of ascorbic acid. It satisfies your dietary requirement for Vitamin C.

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminC-Consumer/#h4

The way it was balanced made Primal feel a lot more 'real' than the other Far Cry games. Normally in Far Cry you might shoot an enemy in the chest 20 times with a rifle and he won't die, simply because that rifle is cheap. In Primal, from what I recall, pretty much all the human enemies would go down with no more than a few arrow wounds. And if it took more than that, an enemy continuing to fight with a few arrows in him was at least easier to suspend disbelief for.

They'll start making nostalgia bait cash grabs soon enough when they think gamers are ripe for it.

A spy agency or secret police doing this to use the client-side scanning system as a surveillance/censorship system for political media would not care about that.

> What I did find evidence for is that Redditors started a manhunt leading to a suicide

The guy he's talking about was already dead weeks before the Boston bombing occurred. Reddit could not have been responsible for his death, reddit libeled a dead man.

> Why did the FBI then start a manhunt on Reddit leading to the suicide of the falsely accused suspect?

You have your facts completely mixed up. The man falsely accused by Reddit, not the FBI, had died a month before the Boston bombings occurred. The entire reason he was accused by Reddit is because he was already known to have been missing. His body was subsequently discovered more than a month after he died.

Good thing we have radar.

The government had more than 60 years to do this themselves, and haven't. They had a decades head start and squandered it. If the government were so competent then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

If you think there is something wrong with the American government specifically, which doesn't effect enlightened progressive European governments, then I direct your attention to France and Arianespace's own failure to innovate.

The following is an ancient Roman story that Romans told each other about Rome. It is doubtlessly fictional but reveals the perception Romans had about their own society:

A man invented a new kind of glass that wouldn't shatter. He brought a challace made of this glass to the emperor for a demonstration, and threw it to the ground. Instead of shattering, it merely bent. Then he hammered it back into shape. The emperor was very impressed and asked if he had told anybody else the secret to making this glass. The inventor said he had not. Then the emperor ordered him killed on the spot.

Pliny the Elder tells this story. He says he doesn't believe it actually happened, but that it was a popular story in Rome.

You should learn the difference between television fantasy and reality.

They have a lot of competition, maybe too much. From wikipedia, nominally active space companies besides SpaceX include:

> Arianespace, Astra, Axiom Space, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, Equatorial Space Systems, Firefly Aerospace, Galactic Energy, i-Space, Northrop Grumman, Redwire, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab, Scaled Composites, The Spaceship Company, United Launch Alliance, Virgin Galactic

Most of these have accomplished little and are destined to be forgotten (or never known by most people in the first place.) If SpaceX had fewer competitors, maybe engineer resources wouldn't be spread so thin and some of their competitors could actually compete in a meaningful sense.

But it's not just a problem of resources. Some of these companies have backers with deep pockets, and had every opportunity to accomplish what SpaceX has. Arianespace is backed by the French government; they've been in business for 20 years longer than SpaceX. They've built and flown hundreds of rockets. With that 20 year head start, extensive experience and backing of a powerful government, have they innovated? Nope. Ariane 6, still not flying, won't be reusable. Ariane Next should be, but they only started development on that a few years ago (2019-2021-ish) If it doesn't get delayed, Ariane Next will be a Falcon 9 competitor 20 years too late. Arianespace are so far behind SpaceX it physically pains me as a francophile.

Or Blue Origin. They were founded by Jeff Bezos in America two years before SpaceX was founded. They're a private company operating in the US backed by a billionaire with insanely deep pockets, just like SpaceX. They hired and have been hiring tons of great engineers with proven track records in the space industry. So what have they accomplished? They've put nothing put into orbit, ever. Not a single orbital test let alone fulfilled contract. They won a contract to sell engines to ULA for Vulcan, and subsequently caused Vulcan to be delayed for many years by their failure to deliver those engines on time. They may actually end up killing ULA like this; Atlas V and Delta IV / Heavy are end of life.. ULA needs Vulcan to continue fulfilling new contracts.

And why is ULA on the precipice? How could Blue Origin's failure do this to ULA? ULA were founded a few years after SpaceX, but as a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed and inherited their technology and engineering talent from those companies. They're a darling of the American military-industrial complex, the favored launcher of the Pentagon's most advanced and expensive satellites. So why haven't they innovated? Instead of innovating, they've wasted their time and money building the same old rockets they inherited. Instead of developing their own new engines, they decided to buy engines from the likes of Russia(!!!) and Blue Origin. ULA had all the opportunity in the world but they squandered it because of poor leadership.

Why does SpaceX succeed where the others flounder and fail? It's not because SpaceX had more time, money, or experience; they have several competitors with all of those in spades. It's not because of the regulatory environment SpaceX operates in, because they share that with at least some of the others as well. It's because SpaceX has more visionary leadership. I know a lot of you hate Elon Musk so you will hate this conclusion, but I challenge you to explain it any other way. Arianespace, ULA and Blue Origin each could have done what SpaceX is doing, but didn't because they have ineffective leadership with no vision for the future. Arianespace, ULA and Blue Origin wanted to plod along selling antique rockets at the speed of government molasses so they got blindsided by the company that's actually trying.

I presume that the number 29988 is derived from some engineering design process that has some goal other than "make pleasingly round numbers"

You aren't sensitive to radio waves.

> Kessler syndrome soon

No, certainly not in LEO. Debris in LEO falls back to Earth in only a few years so even if a shooting war started and shattered every satellite in LEO into a mist of deadly orbital speed bullets, a few years after the war ends LEO would be clear again. All of the other effects of such a large-scale shooting war would be far more concerning to everybody on the ground, space debris would be the least of the concerns for any survivors.

> [The US government] can just put up their own satellite network and use it to wage wars on the other side of the world. Why is it the responsibility of a private entity to enable death and destruction in a country on the other side of the world?

The US military doesn't build their own hardware, they contract that out to companies. If the US government were buying a very large number of satellites, they'd be buying it from a company like SpaceX.

(Spoilers: they are! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities)

This is an ignorant take; your thoughts are clouded by hate. 30k satellites are not "pieces of space junk". When they reach end-of-life they will deorbit and burn up. Just because you don't like the man that would own them doesn't change this.

> Space is a limited resource

Technically true, but even with the full planned ~40k Starlink constellation we'd be nowhere close to the limit.

"Personal failing" has idiomatic meaning, it specifically refers to things which are that person's fault. Medical issues generally don't count as "personal failings". If you did something wrong that caused a medical problem, that could be a personal failing. For instance if your organ failed because you drove your motorcycle too fast and crashed, that could be described as a personal failing.

This is going to change how I view yuppies who tell me they rescued their dog. Was the dog really owned by abusive people before they bought it? Or was the dog owned by a family that loved it but couldn't afford a $10k procedure? Is there a tactful way to ask?

I wish I didn't know such arrangements are happening.