Hacker News Reader

cesison U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

Why not?

Add a fin to a baloon and you can steer it.

And once the baloon can hold direction in the wind with the help of the fin, you can add sail to actually get some propulsion in direction other than wind.

cesison DALL·E: Introducing Outpainting

Next week?

cesison Lithuania evacuates its embassy in China

http://silelis.com projectors and http://snaige.lt refrigerators are the first ones that come to mind.

cesison How does the wind generate waves?

It has a name -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassophobia

cesison Metallurgist admits faking steel test results for US Navy subs

-70C can be expected in Arctic.

cesison Classified tank specs leaked on War Thunder game forums again

And in this particular case the underlying text is visible even with naked eye.

cesison Assyrian soldier diving with an inflatable goatskin bag (ca. 865–860 BC)

Strictly speaking every 10m under water increases pressure by one bar. So elastic bag 10m under water would take up 2x less space.

cesison Vapor-collection technology saves water while clearing the air

Actually steam and fog are different things. Fog is already condensed steam that consists of small water droplets. This technology captures the condensed water droplets and at this point no no extra latent energy from steam is released.

cesison Air-Gap Attack Turns Memory Modules into Wi-Fi Radios

These types of attack are known as Van Eck phreaking

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

cesison Staedtler and Faber-Castell's productive pencil rivalry (2011)

Apparently ballpoint pen manufacturing requires some precision technology - China acquired it only in 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...

cesison The time Pepsi got sued for a $33M fighter jet

At one time Pepsi actually owned several USSR military vessels

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-pepsi-briefly-became-the...

cesison Etymological Wordnet

I often have trouble with claimed cognate words without any references or analysis. This very often applies also to Wiktionary.

E.g. even the given example - I would find it believable that "muscle" cognates with Latvian "miesa", Russian "мяса" and English "meat", but "mouse" seems sketchy.

cesison A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

There exists an entire industry for counting and sorting things(e.g. optical bean sorting).

There also are rather cheap optical tachometers(measuring rotations by applying reflective tape on rotating surface). I would guess such devices could also be tailored for counting falling objects.

And also there are multiple old- school tricks for similar tasks. E.g. if you need to count nails, weight them all, then weight a single nail, then divide the weights to get count.

cesison Who won the Amstel Gold Race? Human error in photo-finishes

That happens in Olympic Games

https://www.olympic.org/news/double-gold-medal-joy-as-oleksi...

cesison Yuri Gagarin: Sixty years since the first man went into space [video]

He is referring to Lost Cosmonauts conspiracy theory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts

cesison Why was cycling not included in the ancient Olympics? (2004) [pdf]

Most striking "non-invention" to me seems heliograph. We could have had telegraph communications 2000 years ago.

cesison Skylab: The Myth of the Mutiny in Space

Are you thinking of Machiavelli?

cesison San Francisco’s Secret DC Grid (2012)

There are many already existing HVDC transmission lines, e.g.:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg

cesison San Francisco’s Secret DC Grid (2012)

I'm wondering whether this applies nowadays with all the modern safety equipment available.

And it is also possible to run pulsating DC.

cesison San Francisco’s Secret DC Grid (2012)

Actually most long-range high-voltage transmission lines are DC.

cesison Stonehenge may have been built in Wales and then relocated

It also might be off-site construction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-site_construction

cesison Dyson air purifier outperformed by cheap DIY box fan filter in Marketplace test

To me these seem unhygienic - hands often touch the dryer also droplets are projected upwards(often in your face).

cesison Why we should leave old oil rigs in the sea, and why we don’t

It's actually a single ship not 2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship)

cesison Show HN: Where is the “average” person in each US state?

For Kansas label covers geographic center.

cesison Danes Get 20-Year 0% Mortgages

Central Banks can enforce negative interest rates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_interest_on_excess_...

cesison Red Star (novel)

The novel is from 1908. That's before Russian Revolution.

cesison Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen

There already are people living in LEO, where resource availability is even bigger problem. The same with radiation shielding.

cesison Is carbon capture a viable solution?

There's a different opinion on lignin decomposing fungi:

Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442

cesison Bluetooth Attack Can Steal a Tesla Model X in Minutes

Immobilizer chip is probably only required to start driving.

I can't imagine any car would stop if it lost signal with immobilizer chip- that would be a safety problem. That is how relay attacks work- signal is required only for a brief period.