robertskmiles

> What a nice surprise to see my project turn up here

Same!

I've just started at a place that uses a lot of Tcl for embedded scripting and customisation, and I've never used it before so this was very handy.

That said, the document needs work - the syntax highlighting got very confused at some point, and a bunch of the lines are much longer than the width of the document, and don't wrap.

Tcl looks like a nice little language that makes it really easy to write really horrible code. Probably with some discipline you could keep it tidy and comprehensible though.

The big question for me is, can this paper be produced cheaply enough to be more effective per dollar than whatever our current best intervention for clean water is?

My totally uninformed speculation is they're in with a shot if they can get the production volume high enough. But I'd like to see the question explored.

Looks like a very promising concept, at least from a technical perspective. I don't rate its chances of success all that highly, since it needs a lot of buy-in before it gets enough network effects, but it's nice to see someone genuinely trying to find workable solutions to what we can no longer deny are serious privacy and security problems with the current setup.

Something I'm not clear on is the licencing of the code. Is it open-source? For trust reasons I'd want to be able to read it.

Regarding storage, I've read some interesting things about the potential of electric vehicles here. If every car were electric, that's a massive array of large efficient batteries connected to the grid. If utility companies charge varying amounts at different times, depending on supply, you could imagine a smart charger for your car whereby you buy electricity when it's cheap, store it in the battery, and sell it back for a profit when the price goes up (or just use the power in your home, reducing the amount you buy from the grid - the effect is the same). The utility company is effectively renting your electric car battery as short term storage.

To be clear, you're singling out a specific algorithm and offering a 1000USD, even money bet that it will be used by the winner?

Security, and backups.

> we voted for this

Not really. Claire Perry was elected as Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Devizes in Wiltshire. Devizes has elected a Conservative candidate in every single election since 1924, so running for election there as a Conservative is kind of a formality.

She was then appointed to the position of Parliamentary Private Secretary to Philip Hammond, the Secretary of Defence. My understanding is she has no official position, qualifications, expertise, or mandate with regards to technology, the internet, or children's welfare.

Well, gold does have actual value for its industrial and aesthetic applications.

> This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients.

It really doesn't. Whatever knowledge we do have can be applied, with whatever degree of certainty we have, and that is likely to be better than what we do currently, because what we do currently is basically nothing. Most people, most of the time, eat what they feel like, combined with some vague ideas about calories and fat, and whatever they read in a magazine last week if they're particularly conscientious. In other words, guesswork. Except this is guesswork that's almost totally uninformed. No, we can't be certain about this stuff yet, but what you call "guesswork" i.e. Our best hypothesis given all the information we have about the functioning of the human digestive system, is almost certainly going to be better than the current state of affairs, which is pretty much stab-in-the-dark randomness. It's really not hard to beat.

> any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck.

If you manage to find an optimal diet by choosing foods you think of as 'healthy' and trying to avoid cookies, well that's a stroke of luck. Deliberate scientific optimisation by adjustment, experimentation and measurement? That's not luck.

We invented vaccination more than half a century before we had even accepted the Germ Theory of disease, and the history of science is full of such things. You don't need full understanding with no uncertainty in order to figure out what works. Science is neat like that.

What's it called when a person has an irrational preference for the current state of affairs? Look it up, because you have it.

As an Englishman I must say that it really does bother me when people attempt to write or talk in the manner they imagine an English gentleman might. It always feels quite stilted, particularly in the not-quite-correct usage of unnecessarily antiquated vocabulary.