Not to nitpick, but wombats can actually run pretty fast when they want to - up to 40kph. And I reckon kangaroos, while fast, aren't very manoeuvrable; if they're on a line they tend to stay on that line, right into the path of the vehicle.
Koalas, though, geeze - they're slow, drunk usually, and don't give a damn. I almost hit one once, slamming on the brakes and almost going off the road, and the damn thing didn't react at all, just kept unconcernedly strolling across. Doubt anything can stop them except fences combined with safe crossings (tunnels, wildlife bridges).
> during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami when broken hazardous waste containers eventually found their way onto Somali shores leaving a large majority of the population suffering from various illnesses, such as radiation sickness
This sounds extremely doubtful. Tsunami-borne hazardous waste containers breaking up in Somalia en masse? Radioactive waste!? And a "large majority" of Somalians were poisoned by this?
I don't usually like to play the wiki-pedant but a very big [citation needed] on that.
Sorry. Pretty late night where I am, and a couple too many bottles of, uh, "rose water".
Anyway my point was - the lack of a real fight doesn't have much to do with the rule change, since it was present last year as well. And anyway, the season's just beginning - let's see what happens.
I have to admit I love the sound of a good engine - and aeroplanes, and boats, trains, everything. It's the sound of power. Watching cars race without that sound is a far less emotive experience. One of the commentators on tonight's Bahrain race said that the safety car sounded much better than the race cars, and I wistfully agreed.
That said, I do think some people overdo it a bit and I actually like that FIA is willing to force innovation, even if it's (initially?) unpopular.
Were we watching the same race? The last 11 laps were an epic battle between Rosberg and Hamilton, and the mob contending for points was no less thrilling. I thought it was a great race, at least at the end.
And have you already forgotten 2013? Red Bull won every single race in the second half of the season. Yeah, Mercedes is on top, for now, it's not like a constructor has never been dominant before.
> There's nothing in the comment you replied to that indicates any cavalierness about "gay rights"
You missed the point. The GP's comment, by dismissing gay right's relevance to mozilla, implicitly treated the matter in a "cavalier" manner.
Let's do a little find/replace to prove the point. Eich donated $1000 to the KKK. The GP notes that lynching niggers has nothing to do with the day to day operations of Mozilla, so what's the big deal. The parent is dismayed by how trivial black person's rights are considered by HN. What's your comment, tptacek?
After using the toilet, do you wash your hands, or just wipe them?
You've just demonstrated why washing toilets are superior. I cannot understand our misplaced, hollow pride in not adopting something which simply works better. I've even heard some especially crazy people try to say the japanese toilets are "perverted" - the hold tradition has on some people is just insane.
Japanese toilets are simply better. For some bizarre reason we've resisted adopting them here. It boggles the mind.
> an ongoing conversation Patrick and I had been having with Colin, not all of which HN is aware of
The knowledge that there's missing context, which was provided in some sort of back room inside-baseball hn-elites secret discussion to which I was not a party and will never be granted access, kind of makes me wish the article had never been posted in the first place.
"Here's my article - which you'll never understand, because you weren't there, because you're not cool enough". Great.
I understand and agree with, to some extent, the argument against centralisation. However, I don't see how this fork solves it - it's switching from one form of centralisation (ASICs) to another (huge clusters of mining rigs).
GPUs may be ubiquitous but it's not viable to run a mining rig with just one, which means that all those GPU miners are basically running "specialised hardware" too. Joe schmoe does not just happen to have an 8-GPU tower computer lying around.
I've seen some mining rooms which disprove your notion that GPU-only mining will stop the capitalised players having an advantage. They always will.
And yes, it's always a balancing act. The network adjusts the difficulty based on total hashrate, not on power efficiency, which is just an overhead. More and more people will pile in until the difficulty is high enough to render mining unviable. However, ASICs at least will shift the balance more towards hardware costs vs the raw power cost that it is now, and reduce the number of useless components that need to be manufactured, etc.
If we're going to do that, why not get rid of GPUs, too. ASICs are merely an efficiency increase, just like GPUs were.
I somehow suspect, however, the proponents of this change are not "regular joes", who might have an intel HD2000 in their laptop. And if we're going to play the "democratising" card, with GPU mining it's a lottery of where you happen to live - electricity prices vary wildly around the globe. ASICs help to take that out of the equation, so if anything they're more "democratic"!
I don't see what the point of this is? ASICs are actually good; they perform the necessary proof of work while using a lot less power. Running all those GPUs is a needless waste.
It sounds like this is just some GPU owners wanting to turn back time to protect their assets.
At the risk of self-identifying as a coward, I never touch anything to do with sexism, feminism or "women in tech" in any kind of conversation except with my closest friends. I wasn't always like this, I used to be quite outspoken, but I got myself into trouble a couple of times (almost into really big trouble once at a conference, I mean career-ending trouble) and well, never again.
Sexism/women in tech is basically the Afghanistan of topics. No-one has ever prevailed and you won't either. The only way to win is not to play. I wish it wasn't like that, but it is.
I think we are talking about different things here.
I'm well aware that 99% of companies could get by with any old web framework. Should they, though? Of course not. Since we're talking about rails, let's use that example. It's an extremely productive, flexible, capable rapid application environment. And yes, it's not a speed demon, especially when used naively, no-one denies that. So why do companies choose it?
It's not because they're stupid or inexperienced. It's because the tradeoffs of higher productivity are worth the penalty in execution speed. Slightly higher server costs are worth the massive boost in productivity compared to other options. Why do you think it's so popular? If you're going to reply "because people are cargo cult following lemmings", you are simply wrong. The tradeoffs make sense to them, that's why.
So you're a sysadmin. Linux uses python all over the place. Why is that? They could have used any old language. But they chose python, even though it's slower than C, because the tradeoffs - easy to read, write, maintain - are worth it.
VFX could not be a more different environment than rapid web application development. As you say, 1% improvement means big bucks. You know what 1% improvement gets you on the web? Diddly shit. And every few percent raw speed increase on the web, as you drop down into the less dynamic frameworks, costs you massively in dev time, maintainability, hireability. It is a balance people strike. If I could increase my team's productivity 10% at the cost of doubling our server expenses I would take that deal instantly.
I can't speak to the fads you mention, except I also generally disdain them. But progress does happen. Which is why the web sites for the films you help make are probably not just written in any old web framework, they're probably written in rails or node or what have you, because the tradeoffs are worth it.
Remember what site you're on. This is about startups, small companies trying to grow fast. It's not about hyper-optimised rendering farms. Different worlds, dude!
Anyway, I think you actually agree with me, and I with you, if we just step into each other's shoes for a second.
Although I don't know what's so hard about making a couple of animated videos. 99% of the time you can just use any old rendering framework. I mean you just ask for a frame, it generates it, and saves it to disk right? Dude, I could do that with povray in 1995 on a 386. Whyever would you need 16 thousand computers for that? And 5PB of RAID? I can store a whole movie in like 3GB and that's 1080P! Actually my imac can make pretty realistic graphics in games, maybe you should buy one of them? Shit's easy right? : P
Well, Basho made an eyes-open decision to go with erlang, after making a thorough analysis of their needs, and well aware they were balancing benefits vs costs. I would say they made a good decision. That's not really the kind of mentality I was railing against, though.
What I can't stand is this kind of condescending smugness - "oh, you're still using X? You're a 'blub' programmer!" as if the only conceivable reason for their choice is that they're lazy, stupid, unmotivated, or all three. Well maybe it's because they like that language, they're productive in it, it's mainstream and hireable, and they don't have any unusual requirements!
I get what PG was trying to say in his essay, but I don't think he expressed it very well. Programmers should try to choose the most productive possible tools, of course. But he's made it rather too easy to simply dismiss anyone who hasn't ended up choosing the most hardcore language possible as "blub programmers", rather than acknowledging they possibly made an informed, pragmatic choice. Engineering is about tradeoffs and throwing around these labels does not improve the discussion.
In my opinion PG over-emphasised the role of lisp in that essay. He conflated the ability to use such a language, ie that he and his colleagues are smart guys, with the language itself. They likely would still have succeeded with perl, TCL, even python was around then. And by doing so, he taught the wrong lesson.
Anyway, I think we agree more than not. And "du jour" actually means "of the day" - not necessarily age. Your point is taken, though.
Koalas, though, geeze - they're slow, drunk usually, and don't give a damn. I almost hit one once, slamming on the brakes and almost going off the road, and the damn thing didn't react at all, just kept unconcernedly strolling across. Doubt anything can stop them except fences combined with safe crossings (tunnels, wildlife bridges).