Hacker News Reader

bjo590on Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, Epic says in new motion

Not every game will, and many will need some modifications, but lots of games work great on iOS, console, and PC. Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Hearthstone are some examples that have controls that do well in multiple platforms. I personally think Clash Royal would be awesome with a mouse and keyboard.

bjo590on Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, Epic says in new motion

> For game developers, between this and the ARM switch on macOS, this could be a serious death to gaming on macOS.

ARM could be a boon for macOS gaming if it allows for better access to iOS titles.

bjo590on The demise of the second-hand bookshop

Assuming ~600 man hours (your numbers) to digitize an entire used book store, at $15/hr cost for labor it would cost ~$900 to digitize a bookstore. I think you're shy a factor of 3 or 4 on the amount of labor it would take to digitize a book store, given my experience with running inventory at retail shops. Maybe it could be worth it if there was an inventory management system that could automatically post the books for sale on an internet platform, but if every used book store posted their entire inventory online the market for many titles would be flooded and it would be a race to the bottom.

Ultimately all physical retails spaces have the same common problem -- why should someone go into your store when they can get the same products online. This problem is even bigger during covid-19. I personally think there are two answer, one is to move the core retail business online, and the other is to create experiences people will keep coming back for. If you're making unique products it might be best to pivot online. If you're into the classic buy wholesale sell retail business than the online market can be very competitive.

A used book store can be a great place to have experiences. Authors can come and talk, you can have children story time, book clubs can meet, coffee shops pair well with book stores. You have to clear inventory to make space for experiences, but you can use it as an opportunity to remove inventory that wasn't selling anyway.

bjo590on Facebook is pressuring its independent fact-checkers to change their rulings

It's uncommon throughout human history for private organizations to have such concentrations of wealth and power. Typical such concentrations have been reserved for the state.

bjo590on Persisting as a solo founder

Has there ever been a documented medical case of someone surviving on less than 3 hours of sleep a night indefinitely?

I've read a lot of sleep studies, and besides some non-scientifically published variations on Buckminster Fuller's 30 minute nap every six hour sleep schedule I haven't read about someone getting such low amounts of sleep.

bjo590on Ketamine that's injected during arrests draws new scrutiny

If someone breaks into your home what do you think police response time will be? 20 minutes? 40 minutes? An attacker can do a lot of damage and run away in that allotted time. The police will just be there to fill out the paper work after the fact.

Whatever course of action you take, do something in addition to or besides call the police.

bjo590on Ketamine that's injected during arrests draws new scrutiny

An arrest sound like one of the worst set and settings to get dosed with ketamine. The person being arrested might not know what they were injected with. The person might not trust the police. The person is being detained against their will.

bjo590on Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

I'd like to point you to this Vice article titled "One Bitcoin Transaction Consumes As Much Energy As Your House Uses in a Week". Meanwhile swiping a credit card uses slightly more electricity than a google query.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

bjo590on Over three billion people worldwide now play video games, study reports

https://store.steampowered.com/linux

If a game is going to support Windows + macOS than it isn't much more work to also support Linux these days. There are many games released on Linux every year.

bjo590on Over three billion people worldwide now play video games, study reports

> Analysts point out that almost half of the accounted three billion are those who play only on smartphones or mobile devices. This segment is also ahead of all others in terms of growth.

This segment is incredibly lucrative for the winners. Niantic has an estimated revenue of 800 million dollars. Supercell's highest reported revenue was just over 2 billion euros. King sold to Activision Blizzard for 5.9 billion dollars in 2016. Epic is going to war with Google and Apple over Fornite money. There's Asian players that are also impressive, but I'm not familiar enough to speak on that market. These revenues and valuations are happening in a high growth market.

bjo590on The universe has made almost all the stars it will ever make

We don't know with certainty how the universe will change in the future, however we do have a decent understanding of how the universe works at a large scale. We can use that understanding to make hypothesis that are backed by both data and theory. This is one such hypothesis.

This is part of the scientific method. In astrophysics data is collected and new experiments are done to improve theory, and it helps us better understand the history of the universe and the future of the universe. Our understanding will change over time.

bjo590on Apple becomes first U.S. company to reach a $2T market cap

I've always paid cash on new phones. Is there a credit check associated with financing a new iPhone?

bjo590on Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

Are there any other tech companies that have IPOed with the same amount of pornography content as reddit has?

bjo590on We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)

Wow, I found this cool PDF of a document from 1917 which has calories yields per acre. It's incredible how much yields have increased in 100 years.

It records Pork at 672k calories per acre

https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/ORC00000242/PDF

EDIT: Another great quote from the PDF "The soy bean.—Soy beans lead all other crops in the production of digestible protein, exceeding corn in this respect by almost exactly 100 per cent. This crop deserves more attention in this country than it has yet received. There is no reasonable possibility of overplanting it. "

bjo590on We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)

> The foods that humans enjoy eating on a regular basis, including sweet corn, are far less efficient to grow and are not necessarily always more efficient than eating animals.

To me this is a bold claim. My understanding is eating plants is significantly more efficient per calorie than eating animals on a wide range of scales -- amount of water used, amount of green house gases produced, amount of land consumed. Can you please provide one common example in which a plant humans like to consume is less efficient than a domesticated animal humans like to consume?

bjo590on Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

I'd pull my emergency fund and short term savings accounts and put it in a safe in my home. The rest of my fiances would be either virtually unaffected or would benefit from negative interest rates.

bjo590on Patterns of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow as a Function of Obesity in Adults

> I saw that fairly regularly (or at least I did precovid) at the gym.

Yeah, I saw (pre-covid) it all the time at the gym, at amateur sports leagues, and at health food stores. It's also worth noting that my zipcode also has a significantly lower obesity rate than the national average. If I were to go to an Alabama Walmart the fit & muscular people people would be much more uncommon.

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html

bjo590on Patterns of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow as a Function of Obesity in Adults

What percentage of males in the US with a BMI over 30 (obese) have a body fat percentage less than 25? My guess is less than 3%, but I don't have data to back it up. When studying populations you can ignore these outliers. It's well known that BMI works well for populations but can fail when looking at individual health.

bjo590on USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

> That gives much stronger guarantees than paper, and while the average Joe can't verify it himself, there would be three million programmers in the US alone who easily could.

I think the current US population that really understands blockchains is less than 1% of the population.

bjo590on Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds

This is hyperbolic. The article was about ice in Greenland, not about the habitability of the planet. Yes, the planet is becoming less hospitable, but we aren't talking about an extension level event for humanity yet.

bjo590on Thank You MDN

> The ceo of MSF, who imo does a great job, is paid 120k a year.

I know a few organizations that might fall under that abbreviation. Can you be more specific?

bjo590on Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

> Note that in The Expanse universe, water isn't usually used as propellant, but simply as reaction mass. All we know about the actual propellant is that it's used in fusion reactors and is surprisingly efficient.

It's actually ambiguous if Ceres was spun up before the Epstein drive was invented or not. If the H2O was consumed in an Epstein drive (fueled by D-He3 fusion) then only Hydrogen was consumed to produce thrust. What's not ambiguous is that the H2O on Ceres was consumed

We know that mars was colonized 200 years before the Epstein drive was invented. We know that the OPA was founded about 100 years after the Epstein drive was invented, and that 130 years after the Epstein drive is when the main story starts. We know Earth was the first owner of Ceres. We don't know how old Tycho is, other than Fred Johnson was not the first leader of Tycho.

It's an open question on to what extend the belt had humans in it during the 200 years humans were on Mars before the invention of the Epstein drive. It's safe to say that answer is somewhere between more than none, and less than what is shown during the opening of the series. It's highly plausible Ceres was spun up during that time.

bjo590on We Can Do Better Than SQL

Am I the only full stack dev that likes SQL?

SQL is an incredibly expressive and flexible way to read, store, and update data. It's ubiquitous, so the SQL skills I learned six jobs and three industries ago are still relevant and useful to me today. Relational Databases and SQL are heavy lifters that I often relay upon to build projects and get things done.

bjo590on We Can Do Better Than SQL

> I want to be better at SQL but so many problems I hit up against and think “well that’s a 2 minute job in js/swift/php”

The thing about SQL is that it's the fastest way to read&write data in a relational database. Maybe writing the code is faster in js/swift/php, but the code will run faster in SQL. If you need to do something to 100M pieces of data you can do a lot worse than SQL.

bjo590on We Can Do Better Than SQL

I often think that a great way to displace SQL would be to create a language that compiles to SQL similar to how TypeScript compiles to Javascript.

bjo590on Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

> Face it, Luna and Mars are boring, low-value real estate.

It's worth noting that Ceres, and by proxy the vast material wealth of the Asteroid Belt, is only 25% further from Earth than Mars is. The biggest barrier is Ceres has 10% of the gravity of Mars or about 3% of the gravity of Earth. This isn't even close to enough for anything we would consider healthy living.

bjo590on Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

No, it doesn't create a plot loop. The book explains that all of the H2O on Ceres was used to apply spin to Ceres to create artificial gravity. This is a symbol of Inner Planet's dominance over the Beleter's, because a _real_ Belter would never trade precious water for artificial gravity. This is mentioned fairly subtly in the first book, and is easy to miss while taking in the rest of the world.

In addition the spinning up of Ceres is often mentioned as one the of many engineering feats attributed to Tycho.

EDIT: For scientific context to my statement H2O can be turned into really good propellant. Two of Blue Origin's engines run on Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen for example.

bjo590on Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

Wow, I learned something new and can now think about the world more closely to how it really is. Thank you.

bjo590on Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

In addition, we have a large sample of water & carbon based life. We would be able to pick up on more subtle clues if we saw another water & carbon based life-form than if we found a life-form based on other raw materials. Being able to pick up on subtle clues is incredibly important for the search for microorganisms within our solar system, or to have any search of life outside or solar system that doesn't involve looking for signs of intelligence (Scanning for patterns in radio waves, looking for dyson sphere construction, etc).

bjo590on Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

Ceres is by and large H2O (by volume).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)#Internal_...