bell-cot

Wikipedia notes both the Spartan and Sprint missiles as having nuclear warheads. That was reasonable-ish, since Wikipedia also notes them being cold war-era anti-ICBM weapons. Less bad to have your …

That "stupidly expensive" system provides extremely nice campaign donations, executives bonuses, stock appreciation, dividend checks, and paychecks to a stupidly large number of insiders. E…

Big picture: Nice-sounding economic theories claim that stock market valuations are rational, but those theories are mostly bullshit. As soon as the actual humans in the real-world stock market get …

Efficient burning is far better than shipping it off to a dump in some poor country, while claiming that it'll somehow be recycled there.

So...if I just happened to know a landlord with several thousand college student tenants busy moving out right now - should he contact Shift? Or does he need to remind his tenants of his own high cle…

Possibly. Though these days, I wouldn't be surprised if the WSJ was A/B testing versions with different opening examples, while showing 99% of their audience the current "max. clickine…

In simpler terms: A bullet-hardened rocket would be about as usable as a lead balloon.

(Assuming you are referring to last night's incident, not the 2016 one.) No, I wouldn't completely discard it. Nor would I limit sabotage scenarios to stealthy snipers. It could be anyth…

"Sleepwalking" is a poor metaphor here, and "sleep" appears nowhere else in the article. Vs. "head-in-the-sand" - introduced two dozen paragraphs later - is a far better…

From that article - > The “sniper” theory > The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “snipe…

363 point, 364 comments here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317774

Speculation: The 4 hours includes the time "gained" by crossing time zones westward.

Mnemonic: geLL-Mann amnesia effect

"Ruthlessly optimizing for metric X sounded great, but somehow that failed to give us outcome Y." -Anon

For precious metals, the units of measure are a bit different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight …

It'd be nice to see real numbers for the impact of data centers on Ireland - the actual electrical rates they pay, net annual taxes paid, ongoing payroll, monthly cooling water usage, etc. But sa…

On the one hand, for alcoholism, I'm sure there are a lot of straight-up liars, delusionals, and people committed to denial as coping mechanism. On the other hand, both the medical system and m…

At best, this is true only of the little people on the internet. Vs. Google, Meta, Amazon, etc. - and their surrounding ecosystem of data brokers & such - know perfectly well if you are a human. …

> A small plot of forested rural land without utility service... True. OTOH, (1) it's both unusual and public record that you own it, (2) it's seriously unsecured, and (3) the locals bot…

When it's an essential service for "everyone", and the economics make healthy competition unworkable, the traditional solutions have been municipal ownership and publicly regulated util…

They were doing that long before they offered "AI" search results.

True. But on a large and very steep hillside - "2/3rd of an acre, but most of it is a 45 degree hill" - it can be extremely difficult to replace the plants holding onto the soil, witho…

If you need serious physical security for every little bit of infrastructure, then your society will be able to afford far, far fewer nice things.

> Why not get rid of... Soil erosion.

> The US doesn’t understand how to make the housing market functional. I'd say the US understands how to make the housing market functional, but there are more-powerful interests pushing the m…

I'll see your CH3NCO, and raise (CH3)2Hg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury#Safety - considerably more deadlier, and the mercury an element - so no clever chemi…

> The skill is in being able to ... Admitting that one of my grandfathers was a blacksmith and the other a farmer, that my own father could have built a house from the ground down (I helped him dig…

> If you know what you are doing it isn't even difficult to install. How much time does it take to acquire & refresh the skills and code knowledge, and how many water heaters can you amort…

> You can save a lot of money in maintenance and repairs by doing your own work whenever possible. True. But even if you have the physical ability, skills, tools, and equipment handy - you can spe…

> [journalist Mehdi] Hasan asked how people could be sure that Ahmed had not accepted any offers to work for the security services, to which the actor joked that it would make a “sick biopic if I w…