Hacker News Reader

00N8on What it was like to fly the baddest airplane

Yeah, calling the X-15 the most badass plane ever is a bit silly. If it counts, then why isn't the Space Shuttle "the most badass plane"? It went faster & higher, after all.

Anyway, I'd assumed it was going to be the SR-71, but yours looks awesome & I enjoyed the article either way!

00N8on Day Trading for a Living?

Teaching people to day trade as a career sounds kind of like teaching people to challenge NBA players to basketball games for money, as a career

00N8on Socrates Was Against Writing (2011)

I'm pretty sure Einstein didn't agree with quantum physics either.

Clearly you can do foundational work in a field & still go on to misunderstand its basic principles! :)

00N8on FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad

Yeah, I think it really comes down to the fact that the only way to have every detail on your system exactly the way you want it would take more time than you'll have in your life, so we make compromises. Commercial software & community-driven open source software offer different sets of compromises

00N8on Superconductivity near room temperature

it's probably too hot in there, but I wondered the same thing

00N8on F-1 Thrust Chamber

"All engineering is plumbing - some fields just manage to avoid working on broken sinks & toilets" -anonymous

00N8on Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash

relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/984/

00N8on Anvil Firing

it's probably alright as long as he doesn't tell ISIS the secret recipe for "red iodine" (aka "nuclear nitroglycerin")

I've heard 'red iodine' is a long running troll the intelligence community plays on terrorist groups. They say it works; extremists say it works & you can't fool them out of looking for it!

00N8on Preload, prefetch and other link tags

personally, I don't care one way or the other, so I always leave them whichever was my most recently used linter/IDE's default preference & basically ignore it beyond that

the spec says to ignore it either way & I think my way aligns w/ that (while being nearly optimal in terms of effort efficiency)

00N8on Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

so, are you saying we should replace social media platforms w/ decentralized sharing & aggregation driven by smart contracts? sounds intriguing but daunting

00N8on India Imposes Complete Ban on Solid Plastic Waste Imports

ever since I heard Noam Chomsky describe himself as a libertarian socialist, I thought, that's the non mainstream political affiliation for me!

00N8on SEC Asks Manhattan Federal Court to Hold Elon Musk in Contempt

as a former sociology major, I'm pretty sure the judicial system still spends much of its time on cases w/ less merit than this

00N8on Frackers Face Harsh Reality as Wall Street Backs Away

Also, a lot of people want to ban fracking

Personally, I'm not for an outright ban, but 100% public disclosure of the fracking chemicals used should be required at the very least

00N8on Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015)

conversely, it seems like unless there are dead bodies in the water, human waste would be the worst likely contaminant. or am I missing something?

00N8on Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015)

we allegedly had just such a product in use in my high school swim class

it was almost certainly fictional, but it still might've worked

00N8on Key Takeaways from Zero to One

I agree. At best the argument that you can trust "smart" people is circular: that smartness is a socially constructed measure of how "good/right/clever" everyone else finds your thinking. so in general people will endorse the opinions of those they endorse as "smart people"

00N8on Ocado's burning robotic warehouse

we need sprinklers that leverage machine learning to adaptively choose different fire suppressants!

00N8on Programming the Z3 SMT solver

I even thought it might've been about the model BMW used to make (maybe it had pioneered something by having a more programmable ECU?)

00N8on I need to copy 2000+ DVDs in 3 days. What are my options?

there's an easy fix. suppose Ubuntu or openSUSE Linux: run your install on an SSD of at least 128 gb. set a swapfile of at least 64 gb right on your root partition & make sure it's mounted as swap (put in /etc/fstab or do it manually each boot) now attach & mount your hi capacity storage.

just have your script queue up a few in /tmp before moving to the mounted storage.

pretty easy & now you have multi level buffering caches that Linux knows how to work with efficiently & that can nearly guarantee sequential writes

00N8on Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to

see, an article about their anti human support policies might've persuaded me. this article is just Microsoft accusing them of doing a less aggressive form of what Microsoft got in trouble for doing w/ IE 20 years ago.

00N8on Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...

they did. Microsoft already dropped EdgeHTML & announced they'll be using Chromium under the hood, although maybe the author didn't know or forgot to mention that here..

00N8on Old coal mines can be underground food farms

I think you're exactly right here

in the same vein, vertical farming stuff like this could become appealing if we can design solar panels that function in an opposite (complementary) spectrum vs. plants

00N8on Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

idk, but I think they employ multiple tokenizing strategies, including case insensitive, case sensitive,by words, by n-grams of letters...

00N8on But why is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow? [video]

and Graham's number is a correct but very weak upper bound -- as usual.

00N8on Bloomberg stands by Chinese chip story as Apple, Amazon ratchet up denials

It's definitely speculation, but I notice the article did fail to clearly demonstrate that it's anything different...

00N8on Bloomberg stands by Chinese chip story as Apple, Amazon ratchet up denials

The burden's on Bloomberg for accusing China of implanting the devices, or it's on the tech companies accusing Bloomberg of being full of --it, though? Looks like a standoff until we hear more

00N8on Making sense of the alleged Supermicro motherboard attack

This is scarier & a lot more plausible than the Bloomberg/Supermicro story I think

00N8on Gamma Steganography

this is a really cool trick. I don't think steganography is the right term though, when the 'hidden' image is viewable in most browsers

00N8on Phishing Is the Internet’s Most Successful Con

'Con' comes from the phrase 'confidence scheme'. Phishing is simply the most up to date version of the confidence scheme, using modern communication tech to achieve the same end - subverting the mark's context & communication expectations so they'll unwittingly give up secrets or money

00N8on “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

if you 3rd party log in w/ your google account you can browse pages the same as the spider. quora knows the google spider is the google spider, so they've got a pretty good argument of equivalence there... plus you can still open links in a new incognito tab if you want to bypass registration like I did for years (kinda clunky though, & I was definitely feeling annoyed w/ them at times too)