Hacker News Reader

Ankaioson Show HN: Tablist – a chrome extension to copy and paste lists of open tabs

I tend to give each major thing I'm working on its own virtual desktop, which has a bunch of open browser and other windows. Each of the browser windows tends to have its own theme, too. (E.g. documentation for a particular framework, articles from a particular journal, a news topic, etc.) That makes it relatively easy for me to keep a handle on things. If I feel like I can't find things on a virtual desktop any more, that's my hint to clean things up a bit.

My biggest source of grief is session management between restarts. Firefox thankfully remembers the windows and tabs, but it doesn't reopen windows on the same virtual desktops they were on when it closed, at least under GNOME defaults. (Nor do the other programs.) That makes me do a lot of manual rearranging whenever it restarts, which is a pain. Other than that, it usually works well.

Ankaioson Show HN: Tablist – a chrome extension to copy and paste lists of open tabs

Usually probably about 1000 tabs, spread over 100 to 200 windows on 10–20 virtual desktops. (I also block Javascript by default, so Firefox still runs alright.)

Ankaioson Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

To deal with no-show airlines, I'd be (darkly) amused if airports sold somewhat more slots than their gates could physically accommodate.

Ankaioson The Anhei tokamak is first in the world to generate 100M degrees Celsius

Check to see if your House rep or either of your senators is on an appropriations committee. If so, tell them how you would like to see the appropriations for the Department of Energy, DoD, and other departments change in Fiscal Year 2020. (The FY 2020 bills could start getting passed in the next couple months.)

Ankaioson Smoke seen for miles as SpaceX Crew Dragon suffers anomaly at Cape Canaveral

Absolutely. Those sorts of anomalies happen routinely. They just tend to get less public attention than anomalies that involve fire and loud noises.

Ankaioson SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

The price per seat of $58 M was actually the average over SpaceX and Boeing seats (https://spacenews.com/nasa-boeing-spacex-share-more-details-...), not the price for a seat on Dragon. As far as I am aware, the prices that NASA is paying for seats from each provider are not public.

Ankaioson SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

Up until that point, if a rocket slowed down during takeoff something had gone horribly wrong.

Just in case anyone is unaware of the most notable exception:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IWIv2MKcyg

DC-X has been a major inspiration and proof-by-example for commercial reusable rocket efforts. Its technical achievements and focus on aircraft-like low-cost operations showed a path out of (or into?) the darkness.

Ankaioson NASA May Decide This Year to Land a Drone on Saturn's Moon Titan

At the moment, there's not even anyone there to receive a check. The agency is shut down.

Ankaioson China lands Chang'e-4 on far side of Moon

If JWST was designed for two years and a hard shutdown it would have flown years ago and we'd be on JWST Gen 3 by now, doing actual science.

JWST's design lifespan is not significantly driving its cost. Its cost derives from its complexity, and (crudely) its complexity follows from the aperture diameter and temperature it requires to achieve the scientific objectives chosen for it.

Ankaioson Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack

  Is it time for a Federal Department of Verifying
  Whether People Are Who They Say They Are?

After the colossal theft of employee information from the Office of Personnel Management, I have no faith that the feds would be able to keep the information secure.

Ankaioson Wild Dogs Sneeze When They Are Ready to Hunt

Same here. The snorting and rallying behavior in the article sounds identical to what our dogs do. (I initially confused it with sneezing, too, but they are clearly snorting sharply.)

Ankaioson Facebook can track your browsing even after you've logged out, judge says

For exactly those sorts of reasons, I don't expect to apply such a system universally any time soon. In practice I suspect it will only make sense to employ it with a modest number of problematic domains. Currently I use uBlock with javascript defaulting to disabled, manage cookies and local storage, disable referrer headers, etc., but there are still some huge privacy leaks.

On the other hand, it might be possible to devise a solution that works generally but employs white lists or other exceptions for sites that need certain IP-address behavior. That would take a fair amount of effort, but the approach has worked well in similar contexts, such as ad blockers.

Ankaioson Facebook can track your browsing even after you've logged out, judge says

I've been tempted to write something that goes a bit further. I'd like traffic to each site to be routed through proxies with different IP addresses. (Perhaps even to the point where my devices are automatically managing a set of nodes or Lambdas on AWS.)

Along with that, it will still be necessary to fix some browser information leaks that could be used for fingerprinting

If someone is tempted to beat me to it, go for it!

Ankaioson Welcoming Tech Talent from Around the World to France

I know a CPU designer that avoids the term "software engineering" and instead calls the profession "software arts & crafts." :)

Ankaioson Spoilerwall: Respond to port scanning requests with movie spoilers

How about also responding with censored Russian and Chinese news stories, history, and the like? Seems like a decent way to respond to Kremlin astroturfers and friends, too.

Ankaioson Simple Python interface to NASA datasets

Vast amounts of NASA data is publicly available. For instance, the data from planetary science missions is available through the Planetary Data System (http://pds.nasa.gov). There are a number of other similar services available for other types of data. They are listed at NASA's Data Portal (https://data.nasa.gov/).

Ankaioson Where San Francisco Wants New Subway Lines

Seems like if they wanted to assure themselves of a permanently-good view, they shoulhd have bought up all the air rights between their windows and the ocean.

Ankaioson Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

I've had a fantasy of not just using different browser profiles (effectively) for each site, but routing requests for each site through a different personally-run cloud-hosted proxy.

Someday maybe I'll get around to setting it up. Maybe.

Ankaioson Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap to Mars

He's talking about Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP):

http://www.nasa.gov/nextstep

SLS delenda est.

Ankaioson The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting “Doored”

Holland didn't get rid of street parking. They just became more careful about about how they placed it relative to bike lanes, sidewalks, and traffic lanes.

The issue of lines-of-sight around parked cars is a big deal, and as you said, it's critical for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists alike. Part of the solution is to make sure that the no-parking regions near intersections are appropriately sized for the speed of the street—they need to be long enough that drivers can actually see that there are no cars that will collide during the time it takes them to pull out. (I'm disturbed by how often this isn't the case in residential neighborhoods in the south bay.) Another part of the solution could be curb extensions, to physically prevent cars from parking near the intersection and allow pedestrians to see more clearly. (And ease the ability of drivers and cyclists to see pedestrians.) There are probably other tools that would help, but those seem like they would yield a big improvement.

Ankaioson Anomaly Updates

The helium is in the gas phase and at thermal equilibrium with the surrounding oxygen.

Ankaioson Anomaly Updates

The helium tank is inside the oxygen tank to keep it cold. For a given pressure and tank size, more helium is stored in the tank at lower temperatures.

For an ideal gas, PV = NkT, where P is pressure, V is volume, N is the number of atoms, T is temperature, and k is a constant. It looks like the O2 temperature for this version of Falcon is 66 K. If we take T_out ~ 273 K just for the sake of the discussion,

N_in / N_out = T_out / T_in ~ 4.

It's a significant difference.

Ankaioson Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

I'd wish they'd also restore themselves to the proper location on the proper virtual desktop. With hundreds of windows, typically organized by task, I dread having to reorganize things every time Firefox (or the computer) restarts.

Someday the pain may motivate me to try to learn enough about Firefox's internals to do it. :)

Ankaioson Millennium Tower is tilting, sinking

  tan θ = opposite / adjacent
        = (horizontal displacement of top) / height

Ankaioson People can sense single photons

  Someone should do the math, perhaps in the right country
  it is cheaper to use mass indentured labor than
  electronics.

We prefer to call them "grad students."

They also tend to be good at making cheap electronics.

Ankaioson After the coup, Turkey turns against America

  The ideals of the French Revolution eventually became
  the underpinnings of both the US Constitution and the
  European and UN Declarations of Human Rights.

Just a small timeline correction: the Constitution was actually ratified a year before the start of the French Revolution.

Ankaioson Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

That has been common in physics for a long time, too. For hot new topics, the conversations are often happening through preprints rather than peer-reviewed articles. (The papers are usually eventually published in peer-reviewed journals, though.)

Ankaioson Startups Once Showered with Cash Now Have to Work for It

That, plus it seems like in the last couple of years many people got more careful about estimating the values of privately-held companies. A $100 million investment for 10% of a company in its latest round doesn't indicate that it's worth $1 billion if there are liquidation preferences or other similar favorable terms.

I might be misreading things, but I think that has made people more conservative about what scales of exits are eventually attainable.

Ankaioson House tells NASA to start planning two Europa missions

If you look closely in that article, you'll see the price that review board assumed for the SLS was $500 million. That's a number that SLS people like to throw around, but it is far, far less than many outsiders expect it will cost. The SLS is only expected to fly once every couple of years in the mid-2020's, so one or two years of the full cost of the program needs to be booked against each launch. Each will have an effective cost of $2 to 4 billion, and that doesn't even include any fraction of the enormous development cost.

It could easily be worthwhile to spend $500 million to cut a few years off of a $2 billion mission. It's much less likely to pay off when the cost is $2 to 4 billion. That's the equivalent of three to eight extra entire Discovery-class missions, or two to four New Frontier missions.

Ankaioson House tells NASA to start planning two Europa missions

Note that the text that came out of the subcommittee (http://appropriations.house.gov/uploadedfiles/bills-114hr-sc...) mandates that NASA use the Space Launch System (SLS) to launch the missions.

SLS is a stunningly overpriced rocket that Congress is forcing NASA to build to keep former shuttle contractors and NASA centers employed. Congress is sending ~ $1.8 billion every year to states including Alabama, Florida, Utah, and Louisiana to develop it. There are very few payloads manifested for it. Launching the Europa missions on it would be a tremendous waste of money—the benefits would not warrant the cost.

It would be worth exploring the lobbying performed by SLS contractors including Boeing and Orbital ATK, as well as that of people close to the main NASA centers involved with SLS, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.