Readit NewsHextinium commented on Why the weak nuclear force is short range profmattstrassler.com/art... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
I can't help but wonder if, under extreme conditions, the universe has some sort of naturally occurring floating-point error conditions, where precision is naturally eroded and weird things can occur.
That could very well be what the quantum uncertainty principal is, floating point non deterministic errors. It also could just be drawing comparisons among different problem domains.
Look at this NASA animation of two solar probes orbiting the Sun (thanks
ostacke and DiggyJohnson):
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3966/
One probe, Parker I assume, goes through all the planetary flybys to achieve its solar orbit. The other just drops into an even closer solar orbit. Why not do that for both probes?
The Parker solar probe gets much closer than the solar orbiter, 0.046 AU vs 0.28 AU respectively. The successive Venus flybys are to drop it increasingly further into the sun's orbit to take solar atmospheric data on quick flybys while the Solar orbiter is more for spectrograph measurements of the sun's corona, just different mission sets.
Hextinium commented on Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa... · Posted by u/thm
Their search result page is just a ranking of whatever they predict will sell best based on your query (based on units, not dollars). It’s stupidly simlistic, actually: if we sell more for a given search term because we’re advertising hard on that search term, our organic ranking for that term will rise almost immediately. So in your case, what’s going on is that basically other people who search with the same term end up buying other products. Thats bad for you, but perhaps its actually good for them?
But think about the corollary where places like McMasterCarr have exact products in known quantities, types and breakdowns because they used to be a catalogue. I will go to McMaster 9/10 times because it's just easy to find exactly what I want and so they get my money.
Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.
As opposed to in traffic? Plenty of road raging psychos out driving cars.
The conclusion is that the US just has more psychos. But the restraint of wrecking their vehicle to accost me holds them in line. On public transit they can accost me and nothing stops them.
Hextinium commented on Swiss satellite antennas make a comeback as solar powerhouses reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/geox
My old house has a roof with complex geometry which does not lend itself to rectangular solar panels. I wonder why triangles are not the standard shape for solar panels as triangular panels would be more efficient in tiling surfaces available.
I bet those antennas can be tiled more efficiently with triangles.
Solar panels are themselves tiled by roundish wafers cut to make squares out of circles. To make them triangles throws away a different tiling advantage.
Hextinium commented on Charging a lithium battery to 80% only? electronics.stackexchange... · Posted by u/janandonly
As if the typical user (not anyone that browsers hn) actually reads the _big fat popup_ and would just click through anyways. With no care or worry about what that pop up said or the implications.
Apple “You clicked a pop up that said you accepted random shutdowns and reboots due to a degraded battery instead of allowing us to degrade performance to enable a stable experience with a degraded battery.”
How would you explain the above to tech illiterate people? Increase suppose calls because you allowed a user to chose between degraded yet stable performance versus seemly random (to the user) reboots and shutdowns?
Default to speed and then the first time a device has crashed "your battery has worn to a level that we will have to start slowing down your device or it will keep crashing, will you accept these crashes or slow your device?"
That would be transparent and also allow decisions, if AppleCare also allowed for free battery replacement after receiving that message it would be a PR boon, not a kerfuffle.
Hextinium commented on Why doctors in America earn so much economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
Same here. I am a programmer with a wife who is a doctor. It took her about 12 years after she started her practice before her total earnings surpassed mine.
One thing that rarely discussed in this kind of conversation is taxes. A doctor spends 12 years earning next to nothing and going into debt for training costs. Then the second they start making a real doctor salary, the IRS thinks they are 'rich'. They are taxed at the highest tax bracket even though it might take them another 10 years to surpass someone who was earning barely a six-figure salary the whole time.
If you spend 9 years earning nothing and then make $1M in your tenth year, you will pay much more taxes than someone earning $100K for 10 years (even though both earned a total of $1M over those 10 years).
Not to mention that most retirement accounts have yearly maximums, if you where making 401k for 10 years at 100k you will have significantly lower effective taxes than a person who made nothing and then sees high earnings trying to put into retirement.
I can entirely see the military perspective though, this is almost a direct challenge for any adversary that any maneuver you perform, we will know about it.