WTF. After 40 years maybe I should have figured that one out.
Until someone forces you to use a file system that cannot tolerate commas...
Readit Newsmike-the-mikado commented on Start all of your commands with a comma (2009) rhodesmill.org/brandon/20... · Posted by u/theblazehen
Why would X have offices in France? I'm assuming it's just to hire French workers? Probably leftover from the Pre Acquisition era.
Or is there any France-specific compliance that must be done in order to operate in that country?
X makes its money selling advertising. France is the obvious place to have an office selling advertising to a large European French-speaking audience.
The article omits some critical details:
It says this is both a "heat pump" and also "storage" AND says that it will run when electricity is cheap or plentiful. Thus:
1: Where does it pump the heat from? (Or is this not really a "heat pump" and instead is using resistive heating?)
2: How long does it store heat? Is this something that will store heat on a 24-48 hour basis, or will this store heat during the spring / fall when longer days mean extra power from residential solar, and then use the heat in the winter?
3: Is the unit itself "warm" when storing heat? Or is the heat stored in a purely chemical way and needs to run through a catalyst or similar to get it back?
4: Can this be scaled up for general domestic heating?
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Just an FYI: There are plenty of schemes with resistive electric water tanks to store heat when power is cheap.
I would guess that is intended for a daily cycle, perhaps using air source heat pumps at times of day when the air temperatures are higher and electricity prices are lower, then using it as required.
As it works on phase change (e.g. think of melting ice) heat is added (or removed) without changing the temperature of the store (which, I guess, might be hotter or colder than where the heat is extracted or used).
mike-the-mikado commented on Europe just started building a 'kill switch' for U.S. tech morningstar.com/news/mark... · Posted by u/mooreds
> The nomination of Kevin Warsh to lead the Fed has taken the sails out of the idea that the U.S. dollar would sink.
Why?
Presumably he is regarded as more sensible than some other candidates that might have appealed to the President.
This is such a weasel question because you can keep saying whatever was new was "just technology" not pure discoveries.
No, there hasn't been any big "new physics" since the standard model in the 70s, everything has been refinement and specifics. You can't go to Walmart and buy something that couldn't exist unless we knew the precise mass of the top quark or the Higgs boson.
There have been a tremendous amount of developments and technologies that have come out of CERN with varying degrees of closeness to particle physics, but depending on who you're talking to, most of them don't count.
>(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)
Ok, but Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he created HTTP, HTML, etc.
The Internet through web browsers as you know it was created at CERN in order to enable scientific communication and collaboration.
I was hoping that someone would be able to point me to some practical technical advance enabled by discoveries or measurements at CERN (or similar establishments).
It seems plausible to me that better understanding of the properties the subatomic particles might enable some previously unexploited technology (e.g. in quantum computing or sensing).
As someone who supports pure science research, I would be interested to understand if any of the discoveries of CERN (and related projects) in the last 50 years (say) have proved to have practical application.
(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)
mike-the-mikado commented on In Defense of Matlab Code runmat.org/blog/in-defens... · Posted by u/finbarr1987
Its been a while since I worked with MATLAB and others. Whats up with GNU Octave these days? IIRC thats what folks were championing 10 years ago when anyone was talking about the problems with MATLAB.
I sometimes run my MATLAB code under Octave (generally needs some minor tweaks to catch up with a few new features) and while I don't hit bugs, I find it is much slower.
I think the MATLAB JIT compiler is probably difficult to match.
I would look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder before I took this too seriously
mike-the-mikado commented on Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something? · Posted by u/paulwilsonn
No
Is that "No, I never open sourced anything"?
Or, "No, I have open sourced things, but never regretted it"?
mike-the-mikado commented on Show HN: Wordle-style game for Fermi questions fermiquestions.org/... · Posted by u/danielfetz
An interesting game, if you can come up with enough good questions. (At least it isn't telling me which digits are right, but in the wrong place).
With a target of 20% accuracy, it won't make much difference, but I think that symmetrical error bounds are appropriate in this case - the factor by which the answer is wrong. so 2 times too big, is as good as 2 times too small.