Curious about the bit about strategy inspiration - do you remember where you learned that?
Sure, Jobs isn't designing every little piece - it's more that he serves as the dictator. Because he's very unforgiving in design reviews, I think his subordinates start to think like him.
Dictator usually have advisors, but in history, the dictators who are swayed by lots of advisors with strongly competing interests tend not to do too well.
Apple has thousands of employees. But it's not design by committee. There's a strong drummer in that company that keeps everyone marching in step, so that the entire company adopts and shares that one person's vision, or at least the general philosophy behind it. That's not to say that the drummer has a vision that goes unaltered by interactions with other smart people, but when their vision changes, it propagates.
I'm inclined to agree. I'm happy I heard about this bundle, but I don't think it falls under the purview of HN. HN has started seeming more promotional in general in recent times, with far more linkbait articles than I remember there being a year ago.
I think your 90% vs. 50% characterization is spot on. I once tried to found a company with someone who has fairly fundamentally different views on many things, thinking it would balance my crazy ideas out with an alternate viewpoint, but we just ended up fighting about trivialities, and could barely get anything done.
I think close to 100% is ideal, as long as noone is being a yes-man.
You should be multiplying the diesel price/joule numbers by roughly 5x to make them comparable to electrics.
When you buy metered electricity, you're paying for the end product. Internal combustion engines are roughly 20% efficient on average, going from chemical energy to kinetic. Electric motors are 90%+ from electricity to kinetic.
"Electric locomotives benefit from the high efficiency of electric motors, often above 90%. Additional efficiency can be gained from regenerative braking, which allows kinetic energy to be recovered during braking to put some power back on the line."
True. Too bad the media is on a witch hunt, and finds it convenient to gloss over facts for the sake of generating indignation over Tax-Payer Funded Bonuses Of Inconceivable Magnitude, so most people don't know this.
The GS employees I know are not happy about this...
Which would cause all of the energy to be dissipated as heat in an instant... perhaps you could put it into some non-volatile heat sink, but unless it's a really big heatsink, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near that thing when it went into resistor mode, especially if the energy density/storage of these caps increases. Maybe put it into a heatsink that's within a big vacuum thermos... :-)
Regardless, it's definitely easier to deal with than a tank of hydrogen, but I'd say that tech is a non-starter anyway. If we can make electricity alone work via advances in charging time over batteries and energy density over existing caps, there's really no reason to transport energy around in an intermediary, let alone an extremely inefficient and volatile one like hydrogen. Power mains are a much better solution, relatively lossless by comparison to an intermediary transform.
On the other hand, for action movies of the future, hydrogen tanker trucks would provide great explosion fodder :-)
Yeah, in London currently, did a double take when I saw the difference between Oyster and standard fare. The standard fare is absurd, whereas oyster puts it on par with NYC (and has the very nice feature of acting as a la carte until you reach a maximum for the day, at which point it effectively becomes a day pass).
And that's the first really solid evidence that I've seen shared that zodiac signs are utter BS, which makes me doubly grateful to them. Something to point to when someone says it can't be proved otherwise...
Just because it's on the todo list doesn't mean they have the manpower to get it done in the next year, especially where new features are concerned. Users pull in all directions...
There are 300 million people in the US, but in the very specific specialties at the cutting edge of science and tech, every person is significant, and can't really be substituted for by another.
I can see a great many people downloading it and then getting confused for a split second every day between the two and keeping track of what they were using each for. Over time that additional mental fatigue translates into lowered satisfaction with the device. It's similar to the fatigue of maintaining different versions/copies of anything in parallel - code, email inboxes, a story that you've told people about an event.
It's much simpler and less fatiguing to have one copy of any given thing. While I might chafe at their deciding this for me, I think their policy makes a certain amount of sense in the context of keeping (most of) their users loving their devices.
I'd say that aggressive flagging and downvoting are the price of HN not becoming like Digg and Reddit. I'm really happy to pay that price, even when I get downvoted.