Hacker News Reader

bokonononon Post Office plan to sack Horizon IT reviewer kept secret, documents reveal

The postmasters' lawyers have to be put in front of the Inquiry for this utter deriliction of duty.

bokonononon Mary, Queen of Scots prison letters finally decoded

The link is in the article, in the hypertext "Lasry, lead author of the study".

It's quite a good read.

URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2022.2...

bokonononon Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/07/google_oracle_api/

bokonononon Google reportedly attains 'quantum supremacy'

MIT, with little more info: https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614416/google-researchers...

bokonononon New Roomba Has Persistent Maps, Selective Room Cleaning, Automatic Dirt Disposal

A friend has a fully functioning Nilfisk that was made in 1969 and, the same as you, the only thing that's been replaced is the power cord.

bokonononon A military technique for falling asleep in two minutes

I also do this. Time-travel to Ancient Rome, winning the lottery, pandemic survival, going to Mars. I find I just start the scenario, and the imagination takes its own turns. It's like daydreaming and it's an enjoyable way of falling asleep quickly.

bokonononon Plagiarism software unveils one of Shakespeare’s sources

It's easy to work out (that Shakespeare was possibly in touch with Thomas North, or they were only one bounce apart):

> Mr. McCarthy focused on Thomas North, a translator of Plutarch’s “Lives,” whom Shakespeare relied on heavily for his dramas.

...

> Mr. McCarthy found a reference to the manuscript by George North, a likely cousin of Thomas...

bokonononon Total Eclipse (1982)

Thanks, I'll read that tonight.

Another work by Annie Dillard, 'The Force that Drives the Flower' was also published in the Atlantic and it's a pleasure to read (YMMV):

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/11/the-for...

'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek', the book it was excerpted from, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1975.

bokonononon Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Space Invaders [pdf]

I wonder if this could ever learn to play Spelunky? :-)

bokonononon Discussions with Apple regarding license agreement

Indeed. From their 2016 Annual Report, "There are no parties with whom the Group has contractual or other arrangements which are essential to the business of the Group except the contract with Apple Inc."

https://imagination-technologies-cloudfront-assets.s3.amazon...

bokonononon The Case Against Dark Matter

> I remember reading Verlinde's paper on entropic gravity when it came out and I'm still excited about that idea.

I remember reading this too. Did anything ever become of this theory?

bokonononon Based on LHC data, scientists predict new boson that interacts with dark matter

Update: ‏@CERNpress Sorry guys, but there is no evidence so far in the #LHC data to support the existence of a hypothetical #Madala #boson

https://twitter.com/CERNpress/status/773509832485769216

bokonononon How did the letter Z become to be associated with sleeping/snoring?

The Straight Dope has more on this:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3063/why-is-the-let...

bokonononon Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece

> Ask the Polish how bad the Euro has been for them, for example. Poland isn't in the Euro, its currency is the zloty.

bokonononon Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

How do you think the unthinkable? With an ithberg.

bokonononon Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

(not so confident there, someone here is just a doctor's appointment away from catastrophe, could be anyone, even you :-/)