adastra

The book is interesting, but the level of detail he goes into in some of his speculation is completely unjustified. It's kind of ridiculous.

"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." - von Neumann

The telcos are running utilities and should be regulated like utilities. And they should especially be regulated this way if they are heavily subsidized build the infrastructure in the first place.

Biking in Soma is incredibly dangerous. Everyone I know who bikes there has had an accident at some point in the last few years. And I suspect its getting worse with Uber and Lyft drivers who pour in from elsewhere around the bay and have no familiarity with the streets at all.

I don't think Paul Graham owes Michael O Church a damn thing. PG has always been clear that he built this site as a place for a certain type of reasoned discourse with a certain tone. And he enforces that as he pleases, as he should. He did, after all, build this place with his own two hands and he pays for it out of his own pocket.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if people have a secret "tone score" or similar that is assigned by moderators every time they make a nasty comment. And if that is the case, looking back on Church's comments it should be pretty clear that he'd have racked up one of the highest (lowest?) tone scores on HN. His comments are full of bitterness and hatred and scorn.

This is certainly kind of legislation that could come down to a close vote, especially if IV throws around some lobbying dollars against it.

A little advocacy will go a long way, and it will be very interesting to see if the tech industry gets their act together enough to support it in any meaningful way.

I tutored teenagers in physics and math for a while to make ends meet. And they love snapchat. They are also basically ready to be done with facebook.

There are two reasons they prefer snapchat to facebook and texting, respectively, both of which basically come down to privacy:

1) Their parents are on facebook

2) They know that what they say today might look stupid tomorrow, and facebook (and the phone companies) save everything, forever.

Basically, they have figured out that what they say when they are 13 will look ridiculous when they are 17. And what they say when they are 17 will be really cringe-worthy when they are in college. They also know that facebook's track record on privacy is awful, so even if they went through the trouble to create different types of friend lists, with different access settings, etc., facebook could just change everything tomorrow.

I could easily see snapchat expanding to build an entire social network built around the "only see for 10 seconds and its gone" feature, and droves of teenagers moving onto it. If they do, facebook could be in serious trouble.

Have to interject here on the off chance that some gmail engineers are paying attention. That's nice that you like it, but forcing the new compose on users is just plain inexcusable. It breaks a number of things for me that I actually use in my work on a daily basis.

Here are just 4 things that it breaks for me (note: copied from elsewhere):

1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.

2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?

3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.

4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.

No can do. I refuse to turn shortcuts on because there are at least 2 (and maybe more I'm not aware of) ways to send the email I'm currently drafting. Command + Enter, or hitting shift, then enter.

I've learned from past email programs that's a recipe for disaster. Turn those two off and I'd gladly use keyboard shortcuts.

The new compose has at least 4 things that are broken for me:

1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.

2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?

3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.

4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.

And that's just off the top of my head...

I did try it just now. See my above comment.

Disaster.

1) I just turned it on, and it is not customizable at all. You cannot create custom tabs, and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created.

2) When you turn it on, it disables Gmail's multiple inbox. Multiple inbox is the only thing saving my email from being a complete and utter disaster right now.

3) Judging by how they are forcing the new compose on everyone it is reasonable to expect that they will force us to use this as well. (The new compose screws up at least two workflows for me, btw. For example, sending a form email to several people is now a pain because I have to manually click "edit subject" to remove the "Fwd:"). If they force this on me, it will completely destroy my ability to use gmail. If they want me to leave gmail for good, that would be the way to guarantee it.

What a mess.

I'd say the goal is to find a survivable planet that can support billions of people. In that sense, the amount of water ice that is in a couple of permanently shadowed craters is really negligible. And on Mercury you're talking about only a narrow zone around the poles that you can support people if you excavate massive amounts of rock underground.

If you're talking about the energy required on Mars to change the atmosphere on a planetary scale, is there a source that says that would be a limiting factor? None of the research on this that I've seen considers it to be an issue. Mars receives about 1/3 the incident sunlight that Earth does, measured at vacuum. But the amount of that incident sunlight that will reach the surface will be higher on Mars due to the thin atmosphere and lack of cloud cover.

Mars is a non-starter? I think you've received some bad information.

Average radiation on the Mars surface is 10-20 rem/year. With a thicker atmosphere it will be less. And for people spending 12-15 hours a day indoors in shielded dwellings it will be a lot less. It's not a showstopper at all.

But the goal isn't to just colonize any old planet. It's to colonize a place we can successfully terraform. Mars is the clear winner in that respect, and it's not close.

Mercury needs basically a planet's worth of water and atmosphere to be imported. Mars on the other hand could be (we hope) good to go. The only question for Mars is whether there are abundant amounts of nitrogen locked up in the soil. But even if not, the amount of stuff we'd need to import by bombarding the planet with asteroids would be orders of magnitude less than for Mercury.