In fact, I think any quantitative measure of tangible results would be flawed, at least when it comes to open-ended and creative work (research, exploratory data analysis, software design, ...). In my work as a PhD student I often have a full day, damn, even a full week without any tangible result. But when the results eventually do arrive I usually realize that those seemingly unproductive hours actually were valuable, perhaps even necessary.
I'm currently a TA in a basic game theory for MSc students at a technical university. For the basic theoretical concepts we use as a course book Leyton-Brown & Shoham (2008) Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise, Multidisciplinary Introduction. This book is great because it is short and to the point, precise without diving deep into everything. Introduces most important concepts in less than 100 pages.
> Linux - I am frankly not familiar with a single Linux user, developer or not, who ever bought anything except for games.
I beg to differ. Grew up with Windows, but nowadays full-time Linux user. I paid some $40 for Sublime Text and it was worth every cent. Also donated to various services and projects, but maybe that does not count...
And now I also just paid $13 for fman, not because I'm sure about it, but because it's cheap, looks promising, and I sometimes miss Total Commander rather badly.
Nobody is saying hydrogen is free. Nor will the production of ammonia from compounds we have in abundance (i.e. water, air and rock) ever produce energy, as it's a high energy compound, releasing quite a bit of energy when combusted. But that is absolutely not what this is about.
However, I was refuting the GP's wrong assertion that the energy cost equation of this reaction shows that it cannot be a net energy producer.
It makes sense to optimize this step, because the energy equation shows the energy is just wasted as heat, as it's not contained in the compound itself.
Replying to a number of previous comments on energy balances.
The reaction N2 + 3 H2 -> 2 NH3 is exothermic, giving off energy [1]. N2 is abundant and free (80% of the atmosphere), but H2 is not. The most common way [2] of producing H2 is from hydrocarbons (oil/gas products). In principle H2 can be produced from something else (e.g. water, through electrolysis), but that is very energy intensive [1], making the overall reaction N2 + 3 H2O -> 2 NH3 + 3/2 O2 a net energy consumer.
Point being, yes, it might be possible to save energy compared to the Haber-Bosch process, but the net production of ammonia from free/abundant materials will not ever be "for free" energy-wise.
Not sure if the following has already been mentioned in other comments, so apologies if I'm posting redundant information.
The "ride-sharing services" that make profits are already illegal in Sweden according to court decision, since it essentially means "taxi company without the annoying taxes". And consequently UberPOP has been suspended in Sweden along with several other EU countries (as also noted in the original post).
So the new proposal mostly seems like a way to clarify legislation: If you do something systematically to make a profit, we call that business and you pay taxes and follow all other relevant legislation (worker's rights etc). Makes very much sense to me.
Yeah, that's pretty disturbing. But I seem to get two different fingerprints. Refreshing the page 10 or so times, I usually get one, and then it switches to the other for another ~10 page reloads, and then back again.
I got a different fingerprint on each reload (for about 5-10 reloads). I'm not running noscript, but do have a decent number of other privacy related addons.
+1 on almost everything you wrote. I also moved from Gmail to Fastmail in almost exactly the same way some months ago. I agree completely to the plusses and minuses you mention.
I would like to add one minus though. Any good old smiley like ":)" in emails gets replaced by a yellow smiley face icon. I hate to see yellow smiley faces where someone wrote colon end parenthesis. It's all done client-side though, so noone else has to see it. Have been in contact with FM tech support and they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off. Otherwise an excellent, excellent service.
I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are.
Thanks! Stylish style installed and seems to work. But it's still bewildering why Fastmail does that. Anyway, I must say it's impressive that they make an email service where this is my biggest complaint :)
This doesn't happen for me, so I assumed there must be a setting to turn that off. But looking through the FastMail settings I cannot find anything like that. Still, I don't see any yellow smiley face icons in FastMail when I send or receive ":)" in emails.
The shortcuts are .u and .r (note the dot). Hover over the "Mark" button to see it. Maybe they don't communicate the shortcuts in the best way but your post is overly inflammatory. This kind of language has no place on HN.
The article does make a few good points, but I also think it uses a couple of unforgivable rhetorical devices. Most obvious are the out-of-context mentions of various "huge numbers", e.g. as follows:
"By reducing the need to till farmland, GR soy and corn have prevented 41 billion pounds of carbon dioxide from being released in the atmosphere between 1996 and 2013."
This amount of CO2 savings sounds great without comparison, but it amounts to about 0.003% of the total GHG emissions in the same period. (Assuming emissions of ~40 Gt CO2e/year 1993-2013 [1].)
