I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense.

Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.

Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD components to save money, and I found that the BC8xx transistors are the SMD equivalent of the BC5xx ones, so I used the footprint of the BC8xx transistors in my PCB, with no errors from KiCad.

As it turns out, the BC8xx footprint is not compatible with a BC5xx schematic! The pinout is different: the base is pin 1 instead of pin 2, so the components in my PCB that use transistors (crucially, the voltage controlled amplifier) didn't work. Unlike a bug, that mistake cost me $200 and weeks of development time, but after 10+ years of writing software I'm still happy to be making things that people can touch.

You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.

Reference: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...

- One of the most important jobs of a leader is to find the talented people and give them work worthy of their talents

- Large projects start by laying a foundation which will facilitate later work

- Resource and disaster management are central problems of government

- If someone makes a bad decision, it is probably because they didn't see the value of the better decision. Instead of criticizing the path they chose, show them the superior value of the one they overlooked.

How can you read this article and your takeaway is that "the author is arguing that engineering does not have abstraction or discovery"? How can you read this insightful article and think "this is extremely poor understanding" because the author does not discuss how "all engineering is full of discovery" when that is not even relevant to the topic of the article? Clearly their point is that engineering does have discovery, and they give examples specifically from the domain of software engineering.

If you think that discovery in all fields of engineering is an interesting topic, go ahead and write your own article about that topic. Show examples from plumbing, electrical engineering, and material science. It would be fascinating, it really would be! But that is not this article, nor is it at odds with what the author of this article is saying.

It's difficult to write an article like this. It takes time and consideration, organization and work. Nit-picking generalization which are not core to the argument of the article, on the other hand, is easy. Anyone can do it.

The "find" function allows you to specify various constraints and get a list of native plants that satisfy those constraints. Clicking on a plant gives you detailed information about that plant. The "plan" function uses the provided constraints to build a set of plants whose genera and bloom time are evenly distributed, and provides a randomly generated map that can be used as a planting guide. Clicking on a plant in "plan" mode removes that plant from the plan and selects a new one from the set of eligible alternatives. It also shows you which bumble bees your garden will potentially support. For more info just read the site, it is pretty information dense.

[0] https://jarrodfowler.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43939002

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Based on some cursory research, however, it seems that duty cycle is different than pulse width, so now I am unsure if they are trying to use duty cycle variation to implement pulse width modulation (PWM) or if they are doing something else entirely.

It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...

Every publication I've looked at has the overall spending for federal employee salaries as around 280 billion. The total budget is around 6 trillion.

I agree here, but one thing that has come to light recently is that the federal work force is only ~6% of the federal budget. That means that most of those taxes are not going to pay the salaries of government workers.

Also, a lot of the money from our taxes goes to public health, safety, resource management, and infrastructure. I'm happy to pay for things like that. I don't doubt that there is significant waste as well, but there have been a lot of egregious lies lately about how much waste there is and _where_ that waste is located.

Microtubules randomly grow and shrink from an anchor in the cell until they hit something that stabilizes them. Through their random growth they explore the cell, which means that processes depending on microtubules are robust against changes in size and shape of both the containing cell and the target object that needs the microtubules. The author explains that we still don't know how microtubules are stabilized, which I thought was fascinating.

Except that the book was written twenty years ago, and now we DO know how they are stabilized. It turns out that the author was the person who discovered microtubule instability, and since then we have not only figured out what stabilizes them, but have developed numerous cancer drugs based on those molecules: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9932/#_A1831_

The progress of science is really incredible.

During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which is arguably what a pandemic is.

But again, lies about a vaccine do not constitute reasonable public discourse, it is more akin to screaming fire in a crowded theater. If you have counter examples of regular public discourse that has been censored by a social media company, please share it.

* I realize "ever" is a stretch, I'm sure there are instances, but my understanding is that they are the exception rather than the rule.

[0] "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." - Louis Brandeis, Whitney vs. California

Here's an example of someone doing four large dots: https://youtu.be/sotKqmaiggQ?feature=shared&t=36