Hacker News Reader

7jon Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

I would expect full self-driving to come through remote operation capability - at first a single person can remotely operate one vehicle. After some improvements it would be possible for a single operator to control 2 vehicles and so on.

7jon Engineers boost output of solar desalination system by 50%

That energy can be recuperated.

7jon Microsoft Solitaire Inducted into World Video Game Hall of Fame

"Microsoft Solitaire has likely been installed on more than a million devices."

Probably billion, not million.

7jon The Adult Brain Does Grow New Neurons After All, Study Says

> Anything that happens after the end of an individual’s reproductive years (perhaps also the period of raising the offsprings) stops exerting any evolutionary pressure.

This is definitely wrong. Individuals (e.g. grandparents or just random society members) can influence survival rates of other society members.

Some species(e.g. ants) even have sterile members that definitely exert evolutionary pressure.

7jon Ocado's burning robotic warehouse

Reporter was claiming that warehouse was freezing cold to keep electronics of robots cool. It's total nonsense. These robots probably emit less heat than regular forklifts.

The only reason for the freezing temperatures is to keep foodstuff fresh.

Also datacenters underground is only a marketing trick (we keep you servers in a bunker). If anything it only complicates getting rid of extra heat (eg. problems with London underground [1] )

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/london-...

7jon Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life

Just to plug-in - there are technologies that don't require hammering- suction buckets and floating wind turbines.

7jon One of the world’s most visited websites that nobody is aware of (2017)

The most annoying thing is traffic is comming from google.

Lately google search results are full of such low quality results, computer generated text, etc.

Same applies also to YT - videos with 2x speed, inverted colors etc.

7jon Low-protein high-carb diet shows promise for healthy brain aging

Hight-carb here refers to carb-protein ratio, not high-calorie diet.

7jon Web scraping case fails under Supreme Court's Dastar doctrine

I'm not sure the radiostation analogy holds. Radiostations can't claim copyright to the song.

7jon The US military is testing stratospheric balloons that never have to come down

So the "never have to come down" is ~100 days record which is held by project Loon?

7jon Armistice Day: November 11, 1918 to November 11, 2018

You forgot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1992%E2%80%9...

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War before that.

And a long list even before that.