Hacker News Reader

We are already there - "Death by GPS" is a concept today: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/death-by-gps/?amp=1

erlon World's first electrified road for charging vehicles opens in Sweden

It is used for charging batteries, not providing constant power. It disengages on lane change according to the article, but that should not be a problem if there are batteries.

erlon Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice

"Mice genetically engineered to spontaneously develop breast cancers in all 10 of their mammary pads also responded to the treatment."

Woha, I had no idea that we can genetically engineer animals to develop cancer. That is impressive, and a little scary...

erlon How much does it cost to build a home in Silicon Valley? (2016)

if you are buying a house you are probably a member of a family with two adults and hopefully two incomes. That makes a $1M more realistic.

At least that is the way it works here in Stockholm where $1M houses frequently are bought by people with way lower salary than 180k, often not even 180k combined in the family. However, prices here are very inflated and rates are super low.

erlon Sitting down too much is doing more harm to your body than you can imagine

You can easily do HIIT with minimal infrastructure. Burpees and jumping squats for example will get your pulse up in no time.

It will likely require a shower afterwards though which might pose a problem.

erlon What no one talks about when running and selling a business

"... but I’m not cut out to be a stay at home parent"

As with leadership skills, I think that enjoying to be a stay at home parent also must be learnt. It might seem hard, or boring, or tedious to some. But I am convinced basically anyone can make an enjoyable experience of it if they actually make an effort. It will not come automatically, it will take some time and effort.

erlon How the Singapore Circle Line rogue train was caught with data

Now that is a great collection, thank you!

One thing that I think would make the collection even better is spoiler free titles to maximize the suspense.

For example, the screen saver story lost much excitement when I knew the cause from the title.

erlon Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

Reading this I am once again fascinated by the link between body and mind. My hands start to sweat as soon as I read the headline.

erlon Homeopathy 'treatments' must be labelled to say they do not work, US gov orders

I have some issues with the statement "No scientific evidence this product works". To me it is toothless and not very convincing. What if the product never has been tested scientifically? In that case, it might work...

However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.

erlon I had a health crisis in France

Agreed. However, Germany is typically not regarded as a part of Northern Europe. Although that can be argued since there is no formal definition if Northern Europe.

erlon Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

The article only mentions that consuming this particular seaweed eliminates methane. I am missing the production perspective. How much more/less greenhouse gasses are created during production of the seaweed compared to traditional fodder? The net total is what counts.

erlon I had a health crisis in France

I am not sure that this is true. Many countries in northern Europe such as Iceland, Sweden, and Norway eat quite healthy.

Using body mass index as a (arguably quite bad) proxy for a healthy diet we find [0] that many of the southern countries such as Spain, Greece and Portugal are more overweight than many countries farther north.

[0] http://apps.who.int/bmi/index.jsp

erlon JEP 295: Ahead-of-Time Compilation

Important restriction:

for the initial release, the only supported module is java.base

I.e, we will not be able to compile our own code ahead of time just yet.

erlon JDK 9 release schedule

While Java 8 is the only version that is freely supported from Oracle, it is still possible to buy commercial support for older versions of Oracle's Java platform.

The speed at which they stop freely supporting older versions feels much like a way to squeeze big, slow moving organizations for support contracts.

erlon JDK 9 release schedule

I appreciate changes that make it easier to monitor and debug applications. Looking forward to some small goodies that I haven't heard much about before:

http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/228 - Add More Diagnostic Commands. For example more insight into JIT:ed methods and the code cache.

http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/158 - Unified JVM Logging. Logging from the JVM, e.g. GC logging and classloader logging, are configured and printed uniformly.

http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/259 - Stack-Walking API. Efficient API for walking the current call stack.

erlon In Investing, It’s When You Start and When You Finish (2011)

Indeed, I stand corrected. I missed that part. I thought the returns were too low to include dividends, but that must me the inflation adjustment tricking me.

erlon In Investing, It’s When You Start and When You Finish (2011)

It should be noted that the chart shows s&p 500 which does not include dividends. Real returns are higher when dividends are accounted for.