Hacker News Reader

COGloryon Will there be 50B+ in student loan delinquencies in US?

>Taking the contrarian view, how much of that is just bad spending habits vs using it to live/augment income?

How much of it is trying to maintain a standard of living they've had their whole life in the face of rampant inflation and insane housing costs?

COGloryon Epic Games and Spotify Say Apple's Latest DMA Changes Are 'Illegal'

This is very simple:

1) Apple should be able to charge as much as they want to use their app store. Even 100%!!

2) You should be allowed to install other app stores on the device you own, over which Apple has no control.

Anything else is a half measure.

COGloryon National Park Service Will Cite AWD Drivers for Driving on 4WD-Only Trails

None, which is my point. I'm trying to say I suspect it's ground clearance, not locking differentials that matters on these roads.

COGloryon National Park Service Will Cite AWD Drivers for Driving on 4WD-Only Trails

While there are rare situations where locking differentials are meaningful, having been in many hair raising off-road situations, including a real life or death one, I'd much rather have AWD and clearance, than 4WD and no clearance.

That is to say, I'm not convinced by the article's hypothesis about locking diffs. It's extremely rare to need to deploy those: beached, or slow starts up vertical surfaces like boulders. An AWD vehicle with good tires and good clearance is really quite good. Bonus points if you don't care about wrecking it.

COGloryon Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's Dream Job Takes a Nightmarish Turn

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/us-chi...

>Intel also expects to benefit from a U.S. Treasury Department Investment Tax Credit (ITC) of up to 25% on more than $100 billion in qualified investments and eligibility for federal loans up to $11 billion.

>Intel’s investments are expected to create more than 10,000 company jobs and nearly 20,000 construction jobs, and to support more than 50,000 indirect jobs with suppliers and supporting industries.

Yeah that didn't happen.

COGloryon Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

It's distrobox, so an LXC container per app.

User filesystem is totally transparent.

COGloryon Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

I've recently moved my laptop over to openSUSE MicroOS (specifically Kalpa, the KDE variant). It shares a bit of philosophy with Vanilla OS. However, in many ways it's almost unrecognizable as a Linux/Unix system.

The way it works (in my incomplete understanding) is that the root filesystem (running on Btfrs), specifically /usr and /var, are actually a read-only image. You can write changes to it, but each time you do, you have to rewrite the image. Each time you boot, you boot that immutable image.

This allows for easy automatic updates. And if it fails to boot after an update, it merely rolls back to the previous working image (crowdstrike take note). This seems to work well provided you don't have to modify the image too much. I installed fprintd, kdeconnect, and wine, and it's still doing OK.

The user applications are almost all Flatpaks. This works well most of the time, but not always. I was a heavy flatpak user before, and I will say that a number of Flatpsk bugs I've run into on other systems, I've not had on Kalpa, so perhaps its Flatpak implementation is better. The biggest issues I have are Flatpaks not being able to communicate with each other as easily as native binaries can.

If you don't have a Flatpak, you can always try to run it in DistroBox. This works..... OK....provided it's a userspace app. But if it's a userspace app, why not run the binary directly? Where distrobox really shines is for running .debs or .rpms on a non-native system. But those are gradually going away thanks to Flatpak anyways. Distrobox does have a fake root mode. I consistently run into boubdary issues with it on Kalpa. I was able to run software in distrobox that required root, and it technically ran, but it couldn't use any audio devices.

Overall, I find Kalpa (and MicroOS) very interesting. There are still edge cases where they break, but I was easily able to work around everything.

COGloryon Göttingen was one of the most productive centers of mathematics (2019)

The US has been embargoing industries since its Independence. I doubt TikTok will be a remotely meaningful event in the history of the nation.

COGloryon Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

The article doesn't list much in the way of tech. LLMs, social media, and advertising hegemons leaving Europe is hardly a tech flight. In fact, it sounds like a best case scenario. Someone call me when Zeiss moves out because they can't compete in Europe, and I'll be concerned Europe is actually losing something of value.

COGloryon Intel confirms oxidation and excessive voltage in 13th and 14th Gen CPUs [video]

There are working 96 GB kits. Check the Framework forum and also reddit.

COGloryon CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

We need more local expertise is really the only answer. Any organization that just outsources everything is prone to this. Not that organizations that don't outsource aren't prone to other things, but at least their failures will be asynchronous.

COGloryon Johannes Hartlieb's Book of Herbs (1462)

How could Hartlieb have illustrated a potato or Jerusalem artichoke in 1462?

Anyways, original text is here:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_07492/?st=gallery

COGloryon How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)

Yeah, it's partly a tradeoff for convenience. The carpet helps capture dust which makes everything more breathable in the lab as well. I'm sure bigger labs have more sophisticated facilities, but he's just one guy in his attic.

COGloryon The Mafia of Pharma Pricing

Not really, their margins typically wind up comparably with other manufacturing. They just have way way higher costs. Modern drugs are expensive, for a ton of reasons.

See this talk about pharmaceutical finances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LGqQJFdoWM

COGloryon How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)

My father (makes fake teeth) rips up his carpet every decade and has it burned and the metal dust in it melted down. Usually gets $10k-$15k.

COGloryon Gunshots reportedly fired at Donald Trump rally; walked off-stage

>Couldn't that just be some kind of distortion due to the way the microphones are set up, and whatever audio post-processing they may have doing?

Probably. If that's the case, the dramatic fistbump pose with the American flag while yelling "fight" was pretty incredible.

COGloryon For the Colonel, It Was Finger-Lickin’ Bad (1976)

Sanders killed anyone. He was involved in a shootout at a gas station, and a gas station employee got shot by his shootout opponent and killed, which effectively won Sanders the turf war.

COGloryon Ex-Meta scientists debut gigantic AI protein design model

60% is freaking nothing in protein space. Like, that's not something to brag about. I could go through and hand edit GFP to 60% identity and get basically GFP still functional at the end.

In grad school, I worked on proteins that were 12%-15% sequence identical but had sub 4 Å RMSDs once the structures were solved.

EDIT: Actually, bragging about it could be a nigerian prince thing, where they do it to scare away investors that might actually hold them to some standard.

COGloryon Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

I'm curious if you've looked into N-Glycolylneuraminic acid and whether that could be the issue? Does chicken cause an issue for you?

I'm sorry to hear about your Lupus diagnosis, and glad it's in remission. My doctor wanted to diagnose me with Lupus due to the facial rash and arthritis/joint pain, but I came back negative in all the bloodwork, which I think means about 98% sure don't have it. I found that I can treat the joint pain effectively with SSRIs (Fluoxetine, 20 mg is enough to wipe it out after a few weeks). My mother has MCAS and my sister and aunt have UC, so I feel like I'm tripping through a minefield trying to navigate whatever autoimmune issue this is....and I have a PhD in biochemistry.

COGloryon The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

This isn't true. Some, yes, but parks like Acadia, Grand Teton, and Smoky Mountain all had people living in them.

COGloryon Making my own wedding rings

My father makes fake teeth, so for my wedding, and also my sister's wedding, he cast the rings out of old gold scraps he had lying around. It's maybe the one possession I have that I'm extremely sentimental about.

COGloryon How I turned seemingly 'failed' experiments into a successful PhD

This is why you have more than one project. And also backup projects for those projects. Every mature lab should have a simple turn the crank project for each student that's got the biochemistry worked out, and is just a matter of collecting observations and doing lengthy data analysis. Those are the lifesavers when the ambitious ones fall through.

I must have been involved in ~20 projects in my PhD. Only 3-4 will ever be published.

COGloryon Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

Not OP, but I'm guessing this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...

COGloryon Watching "Grizzly Man" with a bear biologist

Those aren't ideal rounds, but you're getting piled on so I'm gonna point out to all the pilers-on that 20+ rounds of 5.56 at bear-attack range is sufficient to kill any bear. It's not what I'd want, but we are talking about 20-30 holes in an animal. Not to mention the arterial damage from the impact shock. Anyone that's shot an animal with a fast round knows just what that can do to a circulatory system.

As someone that routinely arms themselves against grizzlies and has had hostile encounters where I have scared them off with gun shots, I basically refuse to carry anything smaller than 10 mm with Underwood Dangerous Game rounds, and even that is a tradeoff. There are plenty of stories of people killing grizzlies with smaller rounds, but what there aren't are stories of people shooting grizzlies with very big rounds, and the grizzlies not dying. Whereas 357 magnum, 9 mm, etc, all take a lot of rounds to kill on average. 44 magnum is pretty much "sufficient" and if you go to rifles, center mass from a +P hardcast 45-70 will drop any grizzly in one shot. Even out of an 18" barrel. The Marlin 1895 has grown a reputation among bush pilots for that reason.

These debates rage on endlessly because they're entertaining, but ultimately the human with the gun is 50%+ of the equation...not the gun.

COGloryon AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn't End It

If you're actually interesting, you can read about the scoring here:

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/training/online/courses/alphafold/inpu...

Long short, it's a lot more complex than just % probability the atoms have proper Cartesian coordinates.

COGloryon The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct

If one fraudulent paper can derail a field that much, it's only because we have other, larger problems. Such as funding hegemony with the big researchers and big labs.

COGloryon A new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing

What is awesome is that I can pick up one of these and put it in my existing Framework 13.

COGloryon The Banana Pi M7

Is there any decent router software that will run on ARM? 2x2.5 Gbe is tempting for that price.

COGloryon Seattle tumbles to No. 20 in global ranking of startup ecosystems

Boston is the biotech capital of the US.

COGloryon Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

I agree with this - but there's far more prepared minds than serendipity, and I think the mistake we make is assuming people can control that serendipity aspect to produce repeat performances.