solstice

The UI could be improved but it is fine IMO. I'm happy that I have a messenger over which I can talk private stuff and be reasonably sure that no one else can listen in. Everything else is secondary for me.

Contact discovery can have a slight time delay, but so far it has worked very well after a while. (I don't use SMS)

I'm sceptical.

> Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was able to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox relating to inertia and gravity. But instead of improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.

> Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the universe. Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave. Scientists understand that particles and waves are existential opposites: A particle is a source of matter that exists at a single point, and waves exist everywhere except at the points that create them. My colleague and I thought it made logical sense for there to be an underlying connection between them.

Link to the study (paywall) and abstract: https://physicsessays.org/browse-journal-2/product/1829-14-l...

I just wanted to say that I appreciate the amount of thought you have put in your argument, even though I ultimately remain unconvinced by it.

"our carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C will be used up in seven years, much earlier than all our 2030 or 2050 targets"

Absolutely frightening...

Couldn't they also tweak the algorithm at a crucial moment to steer public opinion to certain content?

It doesn't matter whether people of the time said AD 1 or not, because the BC/AD b system was adopted much later. It's confusing and ultimately pointless, but if you plant apple trees, the year in which you do that is the first year in which you planted apple trees, not the zeroth year. After ten years elapsed, it is now the tenth year of your apple tree planting phase.

I agree about your 80s example (of course I use it in the same way), but that doesn't change the fact that it ultimately doesn't make sense because you'll be off by one when counting backwards. So for colloquial conversations it's fine, for serious date calculations, you cannot just have one "decade" with only 9 years.

> and much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.

More importantly, it will hopefully come from onshore wells which are easier to access and manage than the crazy underwater shenanigans necessary of deep offshore extraction.

Not everything is a technical solution foremost: new laws prohibiting the import and sale of certain polluting equipment and/or incentivising people to buy lower-carbon equivalent are primarily political/economic/social solutions. If they are well-designed (which isnt easy, I give you that) reasonable people can accept them.

Your point about sacrifice probably stands

The search in Tracker Software's PDF X-Change Viewer/Editor is really great. Effective and easy to use

> ...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades.

Easy, shoot it into space! /s

I fully agree with your last sentence. But I think that nobody is seriously arguing that the US or European countries should become autarchies and produce _everything_ themselves again. (That whole "decoupling from China" is considered unfeasible and highly disruptive/dangerous at least by EU officials that I have personally heard from.) Instead, certain products and production capacities should be preserved at a minimum level. This is economically unprofitable but can save your country's collective butt in an emergency if it's properly managed and production can be ramped up quickly by getting a network of companies to switch their production (eg masks). I would expect my government to think about these long-odds, high risk events and take measures to prevent them or at least mitigate them. More traditional examples of this kind of thinking are strategic stockpiles of oil, food etc. If the covid-19 pandemic has shown one thing, it's that just in time manufacturing and globalized highly-optimized supply chains can fail spectacularly.

Yeah well, but what happens if that person isn't born yet, such as future historians. In the case of Sony's game catalogue I agree that this is a tiny bit contrived example but the general case still stands IMO. The current generation stands too close to things to appreciate the bigger picture (if they even can). That's why I think it's sad that such kind of information is just deemed useless and deleted, especially if it's in an easily archiveable format like static html and images.

That should be the last resort. Companies deliberately chucking their own history down the drain is a problem. Another example is wizards of the coast infuriating treatment of their web properties for Magic the Gathering. (Link rot, content reshuffles hiding older content etc)

It's Zeno afaik

I use F12 several dozen times per day because it is the "Save as..." shortcut in MS Office. Much better and quicker than navigating the menus

Background removal on portraits or merchandise pictures seems common enough. Seamlessly getting it from smartphone to computer and thereby significantly reducing friction seems really useful

Make a water-cooled undershirt like those for astronauts and get one of those fan attachments for baseball caps. (Slightly wacky suggestion but this is hacker news after all.)

Great video that triggered some memories. Thank you for linking

Dutch census recording religion enabled the Nazis to quickly round up the Jews living there a few years later during the occupation

That sounds right but how do you do this? In France there used to be the old Franc that was replaced by the new Franc at a rate of 1000:1 I think

Absolutely indispensable app! For laughs I recommend playing with the speed/pitch settings when listening to famous speeches

That was the one thing that seemed too over the top for me (as a non-native speaker)

I take it you're not programming in Rust? /s

Such as?

I've not has this kind of problem, I think. What are you trying to paste?

Interesting to see those images and the different terminology

Your could try this extension. I mostly use it for its auto suspend but you can also manually suspend tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

> or through a meteor hitting in just the right spot.

It's 2020. Don't tempt fate /s

From the FAQ[1]:

> Is it possible to remove microplastics from water by using a Bubble Barrier? During the Berlin Bubble Barrier Pilot, the Bubble Barrier was able to catch plastic as small as 1 millimetre. It depends on the catchment system whether the microplastics are able to be brought ashore. In the pilot at Wervershoof, we are investigating whether we can catch microplastics measuring 20 micrometers up to 500 micrometers (0,5 millimeters).

Only stopping larger plastic could be enough of a win, I think, as this would prevent it from being broken down into microplastic...

[^1]: https://thegreatbubblebarrier.com/en/faq-en/

To be fair, Schmidt's larger point seemed to be about how bad the US has been doing and he used China as a counter example to illustrate that. If his counter example turns out to be exaggerated that doesn't change the fact that US r&d spending is lower than before Sputnik. (I have no idea whether his numbers are right.) Your point to not believe the hype is a very good one though.