actually recycling steel is not 100% lossless in that everytime you decrease purity which leads to a point where the still can only be used in low grade products. building materials is usually one of the low tiers though.

Iron ore is contaminated with all sorts of crap, far worse than scrap steel. If what you are saying were true, it would be impossible to make high-grade steel from iron ore.

Impossible in an electric furnace (which could be powered by renewable sources).

Virgin steel requires the higher temperatures of a coke-fed blast furnace.

It does require a reducing gas such as the CO produced by coke, but an electric arc furnace can of course reach higher temperatures. Iron can be smelted successfully from ore even without a high enough temperature to melt it, as in bloomery smelts, but the quality of the resulting metal is quite uneven.

then again we have hundreds of years of economies of scale in place for that process, and (presumably) far less for repurifying steel. I'm not saying it's not possible, of course it's not, but is it financially viable with current infrastructure? I'm genuinely asking, I don't know anything about this.

I'm no expert either but I think you can use the same process, though most steel recycling is instead done more cheaply done in EAFs.

You use case is exactly what hedy tackles, your experience is really similar to what the author of Hedy tells in conference and interviews.

good article, but I am very bother by the "standard basis"... it's called canonical in math. I don't think standard is the right name in any context.

If you treat the ring of polynomials as a vector space in their coefficients, then the unit monomials 1, x, x^2, etc. form the standard basis of that vector space. Wikipedia has an example of "standard basis" in this sense [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_basis#Generalizations

This dev seems really inexperienced and has weird uninformed takes. The "functional vibe" but it's just using boolean logic, the "reference in a table" bugs that would happen in any language but C, the ignorance of type annotations and so much time spend on problems caused by said ignorance...

He may not be super expert, but he doesn't pretend to be. His experience is still valid even if he doesn't really understand what functional programming is yet. (His example isn't just boolean logic.)

Being surprised by aliasing would have happened the same way in many languages, but not everything but C. It can happen in C too! But maybe in Python you would have used an (x, y) tuple and gotten an error from trying to mutate it, and certainly in Haskell or OCaml you wouldn't introduce mutability implicitly. In Tcl there's no way to get that problem in a list of lists, and in languages like Golang or Rust or C# you'd probably use an array of structs which would also be immune to aliasing. You could have the same problem, but it's less likely. I've known experienced programmers who were surprised by aliasing bugs, and even had trouble debugging them, maybe because they spent a lot of time in languages where they were possible but less likely.

What do you mean about ignorance of type annotations?

The example is not just boolean logic! In Lua logical ops, the last evaluated value is returned. The example makes use of that to assign something other than a bool. Not all languages do that. In Java for example, boolean logic always evaluates to a bool.

I'm not sure which part of that you missed, but maybe don't go too hard on calling others inexperienced based on your takes.

How to define "floating freely" is not easy to define. The potential energy surface of gravitation extends in 1/r wgich makes it a long range interaction. So if the earth attraction is small enough that you want to neglect it, you may still be trapped in the sun potential well. And if you can escape the sun attraction you are still prisoner of the galaxy. There is no 0 gravity, but there is various levels of neglectable gravity of course. But neglectable is always defined relative to whatever you want to measure.

> potential energy surface of gravitation extends in 1/r

What does this mean? Gravity falloff is 1/r^2 right?

Gravitational attraction falls off as 1 / r^2; potential energy falls off as 1 / r. The former (a force) is the derivative of the latter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_energy#Newtonian...

GP may have used superscript that got stripped, here's a test with normal numbers followed by the superscript version : 0⁰ 1¹ 2²

But what about the point where your own attraction offsets that of any other nearby objects? Wouldn’t that be zero gravity, if the forces cancel out?

It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.

> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

would be if any other country actually put money in research... Well there is China, but in Europe we already have more PhD than research position.

cache misses are slow because of latency, not because of throughput.

Isn't the point of the person you replied to that the article author wasn't able to eliminate latency because if they were they'd be constrained by throughput but they are not?

cache misses can absolutely screw throughput because you may need to load more cache lines

You have to distinguish the actual research from what is relayed by the article. These people are looking for proofs existence of a theoretical objects, the primordial black holes. Finding them would: 1. add proofs to the validity of the current model of the big bang and 2. help quantify the PBHs which we can then add with more certainty to the model. That's obviously very fundamental research, it's not going to lead to application any time soon, but general relativity was too in the 30' and yet we wouldn't have GPS without it.

That explains it in a much better way.