Hacker News Reader

MiguelVieiraon Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study

Here's a study from the southern Appalachian Mountains that found that even in forests that were logged over 100 years ago, species richness and abundance was still lower than in forests that had never been logged:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248428489_Centuries...

MiguelVieiraon “We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”

Here's a site that asks the same questions to 22 models and compares how similar their responses are.

https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full

According to these results GLM 5.2 is very similar to Google Gemini and Kimi K3 is very similar to Fable 5.

The American frontier labs are not similar to each other.

MiguelVieiraon Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

Throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not think the Apollo moon missions were worth the cost.

MiguelVieiraon The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)

An optimal algorithm is shockingly simple

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

MiguelVieiraon Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

I think of the film as a Daft Punk music video, and from that perspective it's great.

MiguelVieiraon Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee

Related: Recovering Grizzly Bears in California

https://docs.calgrizzly.org/docs/CGA-Feasibility-Study-2025....

MiguelVieiraon Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)

"AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

MiguelVieiraon 50 Years of Travel Tips

I have a spreadsheet that I clone and edit each time I go on a trip. So if I go camping, skiing, to the beach, etc, I can look at my old checklists, find a similar one, then clone it and tweak it for my upcoming trip.

MiguelVieiraon Chocolate intake and risk of type 2 diabetes: prospective cohort studies

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

MiguelVieiraon How good are American roads?

The National Forest Service alone maintains 265,000 miles of roads.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technology/infrastructure/ro...

MiguelVieiraon Buy payphones and retire

MiguelVieiraon Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?

My Amazon account order history starts in 1998.

MiguelVieiraon The extraordinary lives of coast redwoods

> 96% of West coast redwoods' habitat has been lost.

To be clear, redwoods still grow in almost all of their former range. They were logged, but they grew back. About 4% was never logged and is old-growth.

You can see a map of the redwood range (light green) and remaining old-growth (dark green) here:

https://redwoodhikes.com

MiguelVieiraon Old vs. new growth trees and the wood products they make

It's interesting to point out that the wood has tighter rings and is more durable not necessarily because it came from old trees, but because the old growth trees grew in mature forests where they were in the shade of other trees, and thus grew more slowly and had tighter rings.

Trees growing in full sunlight grow quickly and have more widely spaced rings. Balsa wood for example, which is very light and soft, comes from balsa trees that have evolved to grow very quickly in sunny gaps caused by fallen trees in tropical forests.

MiguelVieiraon Multifault earthquake threat for Seattle region revealed by mass tree mortality

Yes

https://www.reuters.com/science/huge-ancient-solar-storm-rev...

MiguelVieiraon The Last Egg

Whoa I had no idea:

"To reduce the cost and increase the efficiency and reliability of transporting fuel and materials to South Pole Station, USAP established an overland traverse route from McMurdo Station to the South Pole. The traverse route is approximately 1,030 miles long and took several years of route-finding to prove and to mitigate areas with crevassing. This route is traveled by the South Pole Traverse (SPoT), a tractor train that hauls supplies and fuel using specialized sleds. SPoT tractors ascend more than 9,300 feet along the route to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. On average, it takes 52 days for the round trip from McMurdo to Pole and back."

https://www.southpole.aq/activities/station-logistics.html

MiguelVieiraon Why flying insects gather at artificial light

In Costa Rica I would find toads culstered at the bottom of street lamps, waiting to eat insects that would come crashing down.

MiguelVieiraon There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)

I like David Allen Sibley's definition of a tree: "If you can walk under it, it's a tree; if you have to walk around it, it's a shrub".

MiguelVieiraon New Webb image captures clearest view of Neptune’s rings in decades

> 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it

It looks like that's comparable to fresh snow or a glacier?

MiguelVieiraon Inflation propagates unevenly

Expected investment returns are already inflation-adjusted

https://www.csun.edu/~vcovrig/Asset_Aloc.pdf

Edit: I think your point still stands though. In situations where inflation is out of control or where you don't have access to stable investments, then spending your income as soon as you get it could be more rational than saving it.

MiguelVieiraon The road to success is paved with rejection letters

"Well suppose" — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — "Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?"

....

"Well I'd try every darn one," Rader tells Lyle.

....

Lyle never whispers, but it's just about the same. "Then you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key."

MiguelVieiraon Is Euler’s Identity Beautiful? and If So, How?

A favorite of mine is the Gauss-Bonnet theorem which relates the Euler characteristic of a surface (i.e. its topology) to its Gaussian curvature (its differential geometry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss–Bonnet_theorem

MiguelVieiraon The biggest competitor to your digital service? The Mars Bar

But the best selling candy bar in the US is Snickers. So that would be your biggest competitor.

MiguelVieiraon Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine

I can hear Basil Poledouris’s Hymn to Red October just looking at the photos.

MiguelVieiraon Why aren’t we talking more about airborne transmission?

When I look at this heat map of recent cases per capita in the US

https://globalepidemics.org/key-metrics-for-covid-suppressio...

the first thing I see is hot spots all across the southeast and desert southwest. These places have widely varying governments and cultures, but the one thing they do have in common right now is: they're hot.

My suspicion is that many of the outbreaks we've seen recently are caused by people from different households congregating indoors in buildings with air conditioning and closed windows. The article mentions this, but I rarely here it talked about on the news:

"The importance of aerosols may even help explain why the disease is now exploding in the southern United States, where people often go into air-conditioned spaces to avoid the sweltering heat."

MiguelVieiraon NASA Astronauts Return Home in SpaceX's Crew Dragon Spacecraft [video]

It’s more like “matter tells spacetime how to curve, spacetime tells matter how to move”.

MiguelVieiraon Google Earth Timelapse

I wonder if they can find any timelapses of nature being restored instead of destroyed.

MiguelVieiraon Reopening Bars Is Easy. Schools Are Difficult

Re-opening is a knapsack problem.

Your budget is Rt (effective reproduction number) which has to stay at or below 1.

All social and economic activities have a benefit to society and a cost in terms of Rt.

The goal is to get to Rt = 1 while maximizing the benefits to society. The problem is that covid is so contagious that many activities have a very high cost.

Seen this way, maybe it makes sense to throw bars and indoor dining out of the knapsack so we can put schools in.

MiguelVieiraon Covid-19: The T Cell Story

Also this Washington choir where over 80% of the attendants were infected

https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-superspreader-singing.h...

This article is just wishful thinking.