Hacker News Reader

MS90on How did Joann Fabrics die while Best Buy survived? It wasn't Amazon

I've noticed that there seems to be big inconsistencies from location to location, at least around me. One Best Buy never has anything on the shelves, doesn't have much of their higher-end stuff at all, and constantly looks like they just got robbed.

But 15 minutes away there's another Best Buy that has a dedicated PC hardware section that almost reminds me of going to Fry's back in the day. I was flabbergasted the first time I walked in there, I almost thought I'd been mistaken and entered a different store.

MS90on How to start a rocket engine

Yes, early cars had to be started with a crank handle that stuck out of the front of the grill, similar to how early propeller engines had to be hand-spun to get going. Apparently if you didn't crank it quite hard enough the handle could snap back at you rather violently, one of my great-grandmothers had her arm broken this way.

MS90on Texas Has Always Been a Great Setting for the Apocalypse

It also has a disadvantage in that it's extremely porous and allows water to seep through it, which expands and contracts with temperature changes and causes the limestone to crack. There's areas around town where roads have been cut through hills, and if you drive through these after a big rainfall you can literally see water pouring out the side of the rock face. Chunks of limestone breaking off and falling onto the side of the road is a pretty regular occurrence.

There's other issues, too, such as the lake that runs through the middle of the city, the underground rivers and cave networks in the area, and the unstable clay on the East side of town that expands and contracts with rain, causing all sorts of problems.

MS90on Texas Has Always Been a Great Setting for the Apocalypse

It might not be 'that hard' to excavate limestone, but an additional 21,000 dollars added to the cost along with 14x longer work time is not an insignificant difference.

East Austin doesn't have them because of the unstable clay that expands and contracts with rains, same reason the track surface at COTA has had so many issues. The ground doesn't stay put.

Couple those things with the frost line issue you mentioned, along with the likelihood of flooding, and it probably comes down to the fact that it's just too much work to be worth it.

MS90on Texas Has Always Been a Great Setting for the Apocalypse

There's also the fact that there's only about six inches of dirt here, dig any deeper than that and you hit solid limestone. That's why none of the houses here have basements.

MS90on The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving (2019)

That would make sense, IIRC our brains use something around 20% of our caloric intake just at “idle” so it’d make sense to me that they consume more energy when we push them harder.

MS90on Gibraltar, world’s only airport runway intersecting a road

There’s a significant difference in the amount of force on a car tire vs the amount of force on a plane tire while it’s landing. But it’s undoubtedly designed for.

MS90on Gibraltar, world’s only airport runway intersecting a road

I was more thinking about smaller GA planes, but it’s probably a similar situation. They’re designed to slam into the ground with a plane on top of them over and over again, so they’re probably more than strong enough.

MS90on Reverse Engineer the BL602 WiFi Driver

It does seem to be the same sentence worded slightly different. I’m curious to what the actual distinction is as well.

MS90on Gibraltar, world’s only airport runway intersecting a road

That’s interesting, I would’ve been concerned about what happens to the tires when a plane taking off/landing hits those tracks, but I guess it isn’t an issue.

MS90on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says

You'd honestly probably have a better time, unless there was something you specifically wanted to see at SXSW. So many people come into town for it that getting anywhere in the city becomes a nightmare.

MS90on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says

For the modern SXSW experience, just go to the local supermarket when it's ultra busy and the parking lot is full. Park your car among the rest and just sit in it.

MS90on Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

It's not even about a super fancy phone either, it's the bargain bin version of the iPhone.

MS90on What are some overshadowed careers that pay well?

I'm not sure this one is overshadowed, maybe by dentists. But Orthodontists are doctors (DDS or DMD) and those are generally pretty well paying types of careers.

MS90on Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

Looks like it's only happened once, 22.61% on Oct 19, 1987.

Even the 1929 crash wasn't that much, though it did drop about 24.5% over two days, Oct 28 and 29, 1929.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_...

MS90on Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

I remember watching the Discovery channel series BUD/S 234 about SEAL training, it stuck out to me that during their swimming test where they're required to swim an entire lap of the pool underwater that the first thing they're required to do when they come up is yell "I FEEL FINE" as loud as they can.

Anyone who didn't do so was instantly hauled out of the pool and sent to the medic. Which was good, because some of the men were unconscious when they got there, though they still passed the test! The requirements were to swim down, touch the far wall, swim back, touch the near wall, all while remaining underwater. State of consciousness was never specified :)

MS90on Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

It could possibly be from oxygen deprivation, especially if they passed out, but without knowing the specifics of the case (did they inhale water/did they go unconscious) it's hard to say for sure.

MS90on Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

There was a video my fireman friend showed me a while back of two men drowning near a drainage pipe. There was a chunk of floating hardwood or something that they wanted for some reason, but neither could swim (I know, brilliant). The only violent and noisy parts of the incident was then frantically trying to swim back to the banks for about a minute. After that, they seem to lose all energy, go still, and sink shockingly fast, like rocks.

MS90on Ken Allen

I'll admit that I was not expecting to see an Orangutan when I clicked that link.

I'm amused by the thought of an Orangutan escaping its enclosure only to take a leisurely stroll around the zoo, look at the other animals, maybe stick its tongue out at its natural predators if any are housed there...

MS90on Boeing finds debris left in new 737 MAXes, now in storage

Forget a scalpel, that's like coming out of surgery and finding that the doctors somehow left the rolling stand thing for IV bags inside you.

MS90on MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

Maybe they're making the assumption that people doing super heavy load stuff like that would more more likely be using a dedicated desktop workstation rather than a laptop.

MS90on MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

I've never had an NVIDIA driver with it on by default. I've run two different computers with NVIDIA GPU's through a TV and had to manually scale the picture on both of them when I couldn't get the TV's auto scaling to work properly.

MS90on Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

I appreciate the proper usage of Texas with a dollar sign in front of it.

I'm still waiting for someone to correctly use a threeve, though.

MS90on What Is the Future of Podcasting?

It is interesting (I don't know if that's the right word, but I can't think of another) to see how podcasts have become such a target for advertising. I remember when I first listened to podcasts in like 2008 I'd pretty rarely hear an ad, and when I did it was usually some gimmicky product from a company no one had ever heard of. But nowadays I can't think of any podcasts that I listen to that don't have ads, save for Hardcore History, and it's frequently an ad for a big company or service like Door Dash, Turbo Tax, etc.

I know he's an outlier due to the enormity of his podcast, but it's been said[1] that Joe Rogan now makes $75,000 per episode

That's a long way from his early days of being sponsored by the Fleshlight.

[1] https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/joe-rogan-how-much-...

MS90on Anatomy of a Scam

I'm not sure if I'd be able to resist asking the presenter how they got data from 4000 years before the beginning of recorded history if I was presented with a slide like that.

MS90on U.S. Torpedo Troubles During World War II (1998)

They'd had some border skirmishes before WWII even started, with tens of thousands of casualties on each side. The 1941 neutrality pact was a result of a combined Soviet/Mongolian force defeating and removing the Japanese from Mongolia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_border...

MS90on Vegetation is expanding at high altitudes in the Himalayas

The context was reproduction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oijEsqT2QKQ

"You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will breed?"

"No, I'm simply saying that life, uh, finds a way."

Then later on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-6I8f89K4

"Life found a way"

MS90on Installing air filters in classrooms has large educational benefits?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6138768/

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/37/9193

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/smog

MS90on Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples

I do not. I've been emailing back and forth with the USDA folks and none of us have been able to find any reference to the seeds outside of the Atlas Obscura article. The only special thing I can find information on Bean taking up was a camera timer.

They said they'll keep looking to see if they can find anything. I'm curious to know where the author of the book got this information.

MS90on Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples

One correction, Al Bean took the seeds to the moon, not around them.

I can forgive Atlas Obscura for it, however, since the USDA page(1) has it wrong as well...which severely irks me as it's a government website. It says "carried around the moon in the early 1970's by Astronaut Bean on Apollo 13 Flight."

Al bean was on Apollo 12, which was in the 1960's, and he walked on the surface. I submitted a ticket to the site linked in (1) to correct it.

1: https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx...