Hacker News Reader

bangaon GitHub having issues [resolved]

Only on days with a "y"...

bangaon Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

Today I learned of the broader disruptive capabilities of a mylar birthday balloon.

bangaon Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data

The dogs of DOGE Whining for relevance Shit on everything

bangaon Show HN: Parqeye – A CLI tool to visualize and inspect Parquet files

Looks like a nice tool, but failed for me when reading a geoparquet file created using duckdb.

bangaon A classic graphic reveals nature's most efficient traveler

What about a bear on a bike?

bangaon Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?

This morning while jogging in the US I came to an intersection. Green lights and walk on in my direction. A car approaching from my left had a red light, the driver glanced to his left and without stopping or looking in my direction, turned right across my path. I expected this of course, so avoided being run over. If I wasn't watching for this, it likely would be a different outcome.

So why do so many pedestrians get killed in the US? The two main reasons to me are: 1. Drivers don't look for pedestrians, and 2. pedestrians expect drivers to follow rules.

Another contributing factor is of course the huge vehicles that crush people with drivers barely noticing...

bangaon Human Brain Cells on Chip for Sale – First biocomputing platform hits the market

How long before they realize just ditch the life support apparatus and plug into human brains.

bangaon Beyond Text: On-Demand UI Generation for Better Conversational Experiences

Semantic clarity of written prose is hard, but this approach seems like making it easier for the machines rather than the other way around.

bangaon Herb: Powerful and seamless HTML-aware ERB parsing and tooling

Excellent, I was looking for a Educational Records Bureau parser.

Oh, wait...

bangaon Only About 40% of the Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science

What value is a contract if it can be cancelled on a whim?

bangaon Reflect Orbital: Sunlight after dark using a constellation of spatial reflectors

It's astounding to me that such ignorance is even acknowledged.

bangaon He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along

Authority bias is very real, very problematic, and very well documented. As a consequence, those in authority must always be held to a high standard. Always doubt an assertion by authority unless accompanied with sufficient evidence.

bangaon Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the first time in 5k years

And then it was killed. FFS

bangaon Advanced Civilizations Could Be Indistinguishable from Nature

Advanced civilizations should be indistinguishable from nature.

bangaon Show HN: High School Student's First App – NWS Weather Report

Nice app, but uninstalled immediately due to obtrusive advertisements.

bangaon Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can personalize

Sadly the media="print" view does not provide usable output.

bangaon Show HN: TypeSchema – A JSON specification to describe data models

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/

bangaon Mind Wandering: More than a Bad Habit (2018) [pdf]

Interesting article. Key takeaway for me was: “Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) provided further evidence that it is specifically unresolved goals and concerns that trigger habitual mind wandering.” ... “Remarkably, making a plan freed participants from this kind of habitual mind wandering.”

bangaon Show HN: I made a tool to easily transform and manipulate your JSON data

I was interested until the try for free locks you in to a subscription unless cancelled.

Better to put the effort into learning jq.

bangaon Researchers discover a new form of scientific fraud: 'sneaked references'

In most cases the published articles is document that has some additional metadata added during the publishing process. Hence, there's an inherent disconnect between the article and the metadata that must be examined for accuracy and truth.

Instead, the published article should really be a view of the structured data, metadata, and text (i.e. the true content) that makes up the article. Formatting and such can be a pain, but using this approach would mean the published article is a view of the truth rather than the metadata being created as something of an afterthought.

bangaon Detect Migrating Birds with a Plastic Dish and a Cheap Microphone

See also https://app.birdweather.com/ which uses a community of stations using AI to match vocalizations with bird species. It was pretty easy to setup a Pi with a microphone using https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi to start identifying birds outside my place.

bangaon The semiotics of barbed wire fence

Interesting collection, but this statement gave me pause:

"there was nothing out here but millions of buffalo and some scattered Indians"

bangaon Revolutionizing solar plant prospection with automated viewshed analysis

Old is new, again.

bangaon Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

There's some irony to an article about wedging into our monthly bank statements hosted by a site that asks the same...

bangaon Rainwater everywhere on the planet is unsafe to drink due to chemicals (2022)

Unsafe for humans likely means unsafe for many other organisms too.

bangaon Pandoc

Codebraid[0] is another option for integrating code execution with Pandoc. I find myself using Quarto for building sites and Codebraid more for single documents. Both great tools building on Pandoc.

[0]: https://codebraid.org/

bangaon Attention Viz

The UI tries connecting to http://18.219.70.154:8500/getMatrixData/vit-nat for the data, but that target appears to be unavailable.

bangaon Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems (2021)