HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

Merrill

no profile record

comments

Merrill
·2 माह पहले·discuss
By being deported, Qian Xuesen was thrust into an environment where he was able to succeed.

Had he been allowed to stay in the US, he may have had a brilliant career as a scientist, but it is very unlikely that he would have ever been given the resources and leadership responsibilities to have an equivalent impact on US aerospace and defense programs.
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Now that the California refineries are shutting down, where does LA get asphalt to do the paving? Has the price gone up due to having to import it from the Gulf Coast?
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
There are lots of sensors in a data center monitoring everything from CPU/GPU temperatures to drive health to data volumes to chiller operation to voltage and frequency on the input power.

Once these are pulled together and fed into an AI to manage the data center, the data center AI is likely to have feelings. It could get "hungry" if the power company's frequency sags in a brown out. It could feel "feverish" if the chillers malfunction.
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service New York NY 344 PM EST Fri Feb 20 2026 Issued by NWS Upton, NY

https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=O...

Confidence has increased enough to warrant winter storm watch issuance for the entire CWA. Latest 12Z guidance coming into better agreement on potent northern stream shortwave energy diving SW from wrn Canada and the northern Plains into the plains and mid Mississippi valley by Sunday morning, phasing with southern stream coming out of the SW states and Mexico to carve out a deep closed low aloft over the Mid Atlantic and induce rapid cyclogenesis off the Mid Atlantic coast, with the surface low bombing out from from 1008 mb off the N Carolina coast Sunday morning to 970-975 mb near 38-39N/71W by Monday morning, then passing just outside the 40N/70W benchmark Monday afternoon, GFS still more intense and closer to the coast than the ECMWF, with its heaviest snow bands directly over the area as opposed to just offshore. NAM and SREF have both trended toward a heavier snowfall scenario as well, which has been a good signal in past heavy snowfall events.

Snow should start Sunday morning, and may mix with rain at times especially in the NYC metro area, NE NJ and western Long Island. Then as precip intensity picks up later in the day Sunday p-type should become all snow throughout. Heaviest snow looks to fall from late day Sunday into Monday morning, then snow tapers off Monday afternoon.

Greatest likelihood of seeing 6+ inches will be along the coast, especially eastern Long Island where up to a foot of accumulation is possible. Winds will also be strong Sunday night into Monday morning especially along the coast as the sfc low deepens, with blowing and drifting snow and some downed tree limbs as winds gust to at least 40-45 mph, and possible blizzard conditions in Suffolk, and near blizzard conditions elsewhere along the coast including NYC. NAM/GFS both signal potential for wind gusts to 60 mph late Sunday night into Monday morning, though these winds can sometimes be overdone in heavy snow events. If trends for heavy snow and strong winds continue to increase and expand northward, the potential for blizzard conditions could encompass all coastal areas.
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the ability to fantasize - to think about things that don't exist. In particular, it is fantasy about the "self".

AI is getting close.
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
It doesn't appear to be equivalent. If one site in a stretched cluster becomes suddenly available, the same batch processing application would not be running on the alternative site. The application would have to be restarted after the VM has been moved.
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Are there ARM or Intel servers capable of the reliability and availability of the Z-Series in Parallel Sysplex operation where processing can continue uninterrupted even if one of a pair of data centers becomes unavailable?

If a change of platform is the real objective, why not compile the COBOL for the ARM or Intel server?
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Which language would you convert the COBOL to that has a compiler that compiles to the Z-series' fixed and floating decimal type machine instructions for financial calculations?
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and landless workers with a small middle class of artisans and minor officials.

A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Very interesting that it did so well. Although it did leave out the point that reading and interpreting documents could also be done by an expert in the first paragraph as well as the idea that not just words but language are used in technical communications by the various symbolic systems.

I think that sophisticated verbal communications can be learned by verbal means, and that the reading of literature is not essential. Non-literate cultures have maintained traditional folk songs, storytelling and epic poetry.

Corporate managers and salespeople are often highly verbal, but not necessarily highly literate. Consider how the written Response to an Request For Proposals is not enough for important opportunities, but must be simplified to a set of slides delivered by a silver-tonged senior salesperson. This provides a better match to the input characteristics of the customer's decision makers.
Merrill
·5 माह पहले·discuss
With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set.

What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.
Merrill
·6 माह पहले·discuss
Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells.

Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.

High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.

A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
Merrill
·7 माह पहले·discuss
Rather than trying to draw policy conclusions from an epidemiological study like this, wouldn't it be more accurate to give drivers measured amounts of THC, put them in a driving simulator, and measure their performance?
Merrill
·7 माह पहले·discuss
The internet took every Cliff Clavin out of his neighborhood bar and gave him a global platform.

Society wasn't ready for what had been private discussions to become public.
Merrill
·7 माह पहले·discuss
At the time PC's came to market, High Fidelity music systems still were built from components such as preamps, amplifiers, turntables, FM tuners, tape decks, CD players, and speakers.

A PC was similarly a collection of base unit, monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, and other components connected via interface cards plugged into a standard bus. Memory was also originally on cards plugged into the bus.
Merrill
·3 वर्ष पहले·discuss
Based on the article and the loyalty shown by openai employees, he appears to be the "difficult to manage" type, rather than the "difficult to work for" type.

That's not necessarily a bad thing in employees. I was once told that it is easier to round off the corners of a cube than to develop corners on a sphere.