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curiousObject

1,022 karma · joined February 23, 2023

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curiousObject··on Feds probing roughly 5k pilots suspected of withholding major health issues
Is Germanwings Flight 9525[0] the worst case of how this can go terribly badly if these pilots are not treated with kindness and assured of a dignified retirement?

[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

curiousObject··on Evergrande shares plunge as much as 87% as trading resumes after 17 months
>The developer/investor wants to produce a good product so that it will sell at a high price and the buyer has the chance to inspect the property before purchasing

That should be a solution. But not usually that simple, sadly

The developer/investor wants to produce a product that LOOKS good so that it will sell at a high price. Read the other comments about quality

And, those investors often sell the property before it is finished or before it’s even started. So you have the same problem, with a longer chain of middlemen

curiousObject··on Factorio: Space Age
Nice. Can anyone estimate the impact on global GDP growth?
curiousObject··on Adding water to Martian soil samples might have been a bad idea
> Finding something like a virus on mars (and actually recognizing it), would be a huge breakthrough.

I hope it wouldn’t be a huge breakthrough for the virus

curiousObject··on Gotthard Base Tunnel to remain partially closed for months
The description isn’t clear. Really the broken door is in a short tunnel which connects the two main tunnels. It’s for emergency use only. There’s no closed doors in the main tunnels
curiousObject··on Ask HN: How did Paul Allen write an 8080 emulator in 1974?
You’re right. Thank you. I was misled by Altair 8800!

Intel did originally call their iAPX CPU the 8800, but that’s almost got to be an unrelated coincidence because the Altair 8800 was launched in late 1974, but the iAPX’s development didn’t begin at Intel until 1975. The iAPX is also an utterly diverse architecture and instruction set that Intel abandoned later, and they continued with the x86 line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

curiousObject··on Ask HN: How did Paul Allen write an 8080 emulator in 1974?
It was an 8800 emulator I believe, not 8080. (Edit - I’m mistaken - it was for the 8080 CPU)

Then they wrote the BASIC interpreter on the emulator, copied it to punched paper tape and Allen wrote the loader for that while he was on the plane to demo it for Altair.

On the real Altair 8800 hardware which they had never seen, it worked first time (they must have had some advance knowledge of the Altair’s I/O functions)

It was a series of amazing feats

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

Edit: maybe this feat was not so famous because the Altair was not sold in numbers like the Apple II, which Steve Wozniak is well known for (25000 Altairs sold vs Apple’s 6 million - plus clones)

curiousObject··on Mortality patterns for patients hospitalized during cardiology meetings (2016)
High-risk patients with heart failure and cardiac arrest hospitalized in teaching hospitals had lower 30-day mortality when admitted during dates of national cardiology meetings.

A rare case of meetings proving beneficial? But why?

curiousObject··on Grammarly’s next step: Writing the whole essay for you
>I wonder what competitive edge Grammarly is implementing here.

Technically, none. But Grammarly already has a large market of technically-illiterate users who think it’s easier to keep using the service they already know.

Grammarly got that audience by intensive marketing for years

curiousObject··on Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2
That may be the last science Nobel awarded to a human
curiousObject··on Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2
>Who in their right mind would reward only 3 people out of 6?

In this case, the discovery, if it’s real, could get the awards for Physics and also for Chemistry. Because it’s such a once in a century level of scientific breakthrough

Perhaps Physics award mainly for a theoretical explanation and Chemistry award mainly for the experimental process

Therefore, six authors might be honored. It’s unlikely, but it’s a solution if the authors deserve it

curiousObject··on NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2
>On the timescale of decades, does a 2 week vs a 10 week waiting period make much of a difference?

I agree. It probably doesn’t make much difference now. There are very unlikely to be any important data that will be lost. The mitigation process they already implemented seems prudent and sufficient

During earlier parts of the mission, like planetary encounters, it would make a difference. Even a two week wait could be much too long in those circumstances.

curiousObject··on NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2
>reorientation is an expensive process

That’s true, but a failsafe automatic reorientation mode after two weeks with no communication from Earth might be a useful feature

curiousObject··on Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
That’s not unreasonable, but the high-risk, high-reward approach would be to let researchers elsewhere do basic verification, while you try to leap a step ahead of them by going directly to derivative variations.

Abandon the work if nobody can replicate LK-99 within a few weeks and you haven’t really lost out badly.

curiousObject··on Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
> Did they inadvertently do something wrong themselves that looked like cold fusion?

Yes, probably

This blog talks about some of the many pitfalls that could mislead researchers: https://coldfusionblog.net/2019/03/13/the-case-against-cold-...

Some of the errors are very subtle. It’s not surprising that mistakes were made

curiousObject··on Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
While we’re waiting for experimenters to reproduce this, it’s worth comparing this amazing announcement to the Cold Fusion affair of 1989[1]

It’s notable that the first publications about attempts to reproduce the Cold Fusion experiment all reported positive results.

It’s probably because experimenters who got negative results decided they might have done something wrong so they kept trying, and delayed, and they did not publish until later.

Those early reports of positive results were largely retracted within a few weeks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

curiousObject··on How MOS 6502 illegal opcodes work
There’s some comments about those funny opcodes from a 2021 post on hacker news, that includes links to this site and other interesting sources

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27402655

curiousObject··on Talk to people one-mile around you (anonymously)
Strange. The site looks to be down and it’s not archived.

     “https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/id=com.wamble” has a few screenshots from 2022
curiousObject··on Two People in New Mexico Have Died from Hantavirus This Year
“four ended up in the hospital needing oxygen or intensive care to survive their ordeal.”

This fact seems a tad more important than the fact that two have died, because that level of intensive medical care doesn’t scale to thousands of victims

But even with all that considered this sounds like a statistical glitch, not an event of significance

curiousObject··on Reddit insists on being “fairly paid” amid API price protest plans, layoffs
>In a statement to Bloomberg on Tuesday, however, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt sought to "clear up confusion," as Bloomberg put it, and said Reddit spends millions on hosting and is only seeking fair payment for API access.

>"Reddit needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps. Our pricing is based on usage levels that we measure to be comparable to our own costs," Rathschmidt said in a statement to Bloomberg.

I’m the submitter of this. Source was Bloomberg but I didn’t link direct to Bloomberg because it is soft-paywall : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-06/reddit-on...

curiousObject··on Former Dolphin team member addresses Steam/Valve’s takedown of Dolphin emulator
An act of peaceful protest against unreasonably restrictive laws?

Or that they’d get an enormous marketing campaign, paid for by Nintendo? (This plan appears to be succeeding)

curiousObject··on ARM’s Cortex A53: Tiny but Important
It’s easier to understand if you look at an analysis of a much older, less dense, die. Ken Shiriff is a superb source of these

There are some visual clues. First, the chip pins are labeled in the spec so you can guess they’ll be close to relevant units, and also try to trace their connections throughout the die.

Second, units like memory have an obvious regular structure because they are made from many identical micro-units

Third, if you see, for example, 16 identical adjacent units you could guess this is something that could be dealing with data 16 bits at a time. That narrows it down

There are numerous clues like those.

You could also use tricks like using a thermal camera. What part gets hot when you do certain operations?

curiousObject··on New 33B LLM Passes the Glass Door Test with "Push" Written on the Other Side
From your point of view, does it say

nɘqO oT ʜƨυԳ

Or

Push To Open

?

curiousObject··on Venus is not Earth’s closest neighbor (2019) [pdf]
Venus is not Earth’s closest neighbor

Would it be correct to say that, on average, that statement is false for more than half of each Earth year?

curiousObject··on No Screens Cafe
but you can also have an account with them that is run on file cards that you can top up.

Is that file card a thing that the customers carry with them?

Because: Other businesses could begin accepting those same file cards, and the idea will become even more popular and successful and then… oh…

curiousObject··on Google Plans to Delete Accounts That Haven't Been Used in over Two Years
Deleting the content of an inactive account is bad.

Deleting the whole account so that it cannot be reactivated by the owner is worse.

Making the old account available again for anyone to register is disastrous.

Which is it that they’re planning to do?

curiousObject··on Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
> Once you get out of the category of obviously frequently controlled things (gear selector, climate control, media controls), you really have to start making judgement calls and picking and choosing who you're going to make uncomfortable.

User-assignable buttons might mitigate that. With profiles for individual drivers.

But perhaps those features would confuse some users even more

curiousObject··on Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots: study
Would it be reasonable to re-title this to ‘Scientists Teach Parrots to Push a Button’?

I believe the parrots enjoy this experience but do the parrots understand that they are placing a video call?

curiousObject··on Effects of Licorice on the Cardiovascular System (2019)
He seems like a doctor, but he is a doctor too, as Mitch Hedberg would say
curiousObject··on Could 'Terminator Zones' on Far Off Planets Harbor Life?
Many gases and liquids would freeze and settle on the cold side of a tidal locked planet, wouldn’t they? The planet might slowly dry out
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