Hacker News Reader

herlitzjon An ideological divide is emerging between young men and women around the world

You also don't need to go back very far in history to see how white patriarchal empires dominated/shaped most (all?) of these regions and countries for centuries.

herlitzjon Developers are building communities that act as their own miniature power grids

No idea. But interestingly enough, it looks like someone built a grid scale version in PA with funds from the 2008 Recovery Act. There's a final tech report here https://www.smartgrid.gov/project/hazle_spindle_20mws_flywhe... in the Related Docs

herlitzjon Developers are building communities that act as their own miniature power grids

https://www.torus.co/torus-flywheel

herlitzjon Wind and solar are now beating coal in the US

No one has to take anything down. Babcock Ranch weathered Hurricane Ian (cat5) just fine. Didn’t even lose power. Unlike their neighbors.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/us/solar-babcock-ranch-florid...

herlitzjon Bloomberg Launches FOSS Fund to Support Free and Open Source Projects

That's the source of this donation to curl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35371296

herlitzjon First UK child to receive gene therapy for fatal genetic disorder is now healthy

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

This paper seems to have more details on the actual procedure

Patients were treated and monitored according to the schedule described in the appendix (p 17) and as previously reported.16, 17 HSPCs harvested from bone marrow or mobilised peripheral blood (MPB) were transduced with clinical-grade lentiviral vector encoding human ARSA cDNA under the control of the human phosphoglycerate kinase gene promoter.

herlitzjon This page is a truly naked, brutalist HTML quine (2019)

Definitely agree. I keep seeing sites like this called Brutalist, but they’re more akin to high tech postmodernism. With the closest architectural equivalent probably being the Centre Pompidou. Which is all about exposure of underlying structural and functional elements for purely aesthetic purposes.

herlitzjon The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “Change Password”

Love this one. There is a similar one in Charlottesville, Va to cross Water Street, which has a delightful southern accent. Pronounces it Wooter and everything :)

herlitzjon Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

Well, that's just the time necessary to action the accounts. You'd still need to hire all of those people, get them equipment and software, pay them, etc. IT, HR, management, payroll. Probably double or triple your man-hours. But on top of that, I specifically chose what are probably unrealistically low numbers. It would maybe be closer to 20-30% utilization and 8-20 hours to close a case (totally guessing here :shrug:). So maybe 730 - 2700 man-years, roughly. Plus above-mentioned overhead.

Spinning up a 500 person accounting firm wouldn't be snappy.

herlitzjon Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

> assess this on a case-by-case basis and pay the rent for people in genuine need

I'm not sure you've fully thought through how complex this would be. There are 40 million rental households in the US. Even if only 1% (400,000) decided to be a part of this program and you could close every case in 1 hour (which is probably wildly low) that's 45 man-years of effort.

herlitzjon Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

Precisely. Or what if you're some random grandma that has a wallet (since we're living in a make believe world where this is easy to create). Imagine you've forgotten which blockchain your wallet is on. Will there be a search box to find my wallet in this mess of combinatorics that is a login page?

herlitzjon Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

I honestly thought this was going to be a joke post because that top image is ridiculous. Maybe I'm just old, but it reads to me as

Web 1.0: Great

Web 2.0: Ugh, ok

Web 3.0: You're serious with this?

herlitzjon Ask HN: How do I manage the profit of a successful website?

This. But I'd say don't just donate the whole sum. Talk to whatever accountant you find about creating a foundation and building an endowment. At $20k+ per month in seed you'll quickly ramp up to millions of dollars in the endowment and can build a foundaton that runs in perpetuity to enrich the lives of a lot of people less fortunate than you.

herlitzjon Low interest rates in advanced countries have pushed money into real estate

You say this as if it's fast or easy. All of these can easily take 10s of years build from conception to completion due to a myriad of reasons. Land acquisition, federal state and local funding, environmental review, court cases, zoning changes, public review proceses, etc. It's not like someone decrees that a school should be built and 6 months later it's up and running. And the school is the easy one on that list :)

herlitzjon Futurists have their heads in the clouds

Is it just me or does the future he paints sound absolutely abysmal? It's effectively a dictorship where your entire life is bouncing from one tulip mania to another holed up in your apartment talking to an AI and lost in a world of garbage content from Neflix 2.0 while you await your burrito delivery and dream of hitting it big on <insert_name> Coin so you can move to Mars and watch the dust blow around.

Kill me now :(

herlitzjon An ultra-precise clock shows how to link the quantum world with gravity

Yep. Predicted by Einstein in 1912 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring

herlitzjon Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

Second. Not sure how "think" is being defined here, but even for a spatial/temporal sense of self or mortality I'd say that's probably an incorrect statement. Let alone the general notion of thinking. E.g. dogs exhibit basic thinking like predetermination, delayed gratification, etc.

herlitzjon Neeva: Ad-free, subscription-based search engine launches

Ads aren't the only problem. All the SEO clickbait is worse than the ads in my opinion. I can ignore the ads, but anymore a lot of the time the first page or two of results are just clickbait junk. Look at their example results. #3 looks like an SEO clickbait site to me.

edit: Looks like you can customize results somewhat, so maybe that will help? A quick way to silence those kinds of hits would be nice.

herlitzjon United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic

Honestly even if all we get out of this is an affordable low-carbon jet engine I'd call it a win. At the end of the day, Tesla is battery company that makes cars. Maybe Boom should try to be a jet engine company that makes planes.

edit: I say this as someone having little to no real knowledge of the aerospace industry :)

herlitzjon United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic

That's the point. Sitting at the start and saying "We're not at the finish" isn't a useful way to get anywhere

herlitzjon United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic

True. Updated to reflect your source

herlitzjon United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic

afavour (via Benedict Evans) c. 2005

- No charging network, can't drive away from home

- Battery tech not there, no realistic range

- Too expensive, no one will pay that much for a car they can't drive anywhere

- Everyone wants an SUV or an affordable sedan, not some niche vehicle. Who's going go buy it?

Which ones has Tesla solved?

Moving an industry takes time. Will Boom do it? Who knows. But this line of thinking is kind of short sighted and defeatist, don't you think?

herlitzjon Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

I think you're asking the wrong question. Which is probably part of the problem. I know it is at most of the places I've ever had anything to do with.

No block of people is homogeneous, but a lot of the time companies think they can just have some kind of blanket policy and make everyone happy. In reality, especially if you're a smaller company, I think what you need to have is empathy and flexibility.

Everyone you want to hire is different. Some are loners that want to travel, some have families, some want to go back to school while they work, some want to grow their wealth. Some just want to be around cool people and build interesting projects. But what none of them will ever be is the same.

If you want to attract and retain top talent then you need to have a conversation with that talent that includes questions like "What will make you happy here?" "What can we do to accommodate your needs day-to-day and long-term?". And then actually help realize those needs.

herlitzjon How to Buy a Private Jet

Not a single mention of the carbon footprint of a private jet. This has to be the single most selfish mode of transportation and is essentially inexcusable at this point in history.

herlitzjon Drug Dealers Are Offering Black Friday Deals on the Dark Web

Shouldn't this be Cyber Monday? Or are these bricks and mortar dealers?

herlitzjon Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)

> 4. Are there any reason why we dont use TBM for small pipes, ( like for electricity or fibre optics, )

We do. It's called a directional drill. https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills

herlitzjon It's raining plastic: microscopic fibers fall from the sky in Rocky Mountains

The linked study says 40x https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2019/1048/ofr20191048.pdf

herlitzjon China Rules – The Land That Failed to Fail

It's NYTimes, not WaPo. And it's not a single author, there are 5 bylines

Jonathan Ansfield and Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing. Claire Fu and Iris Zhao contributed research from Beijing, and Carolyn Zhang from Shanghai.

herlitzjon Ask HN: Old CS lecturer looking for advice from current and recent students

One thing that could spice it up is maybe exploring cloud databases and scalability. Like, what happens when you need to serve thousands of requests a second. How do you need to change your configuration to adapt to that kind of load. That might make the use of EXPLAIN more apparent as the the need to shave milliseconds off your response becomes more necessary.

herlitzjon Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

How much penetration do cell phones have into a lot of these countries? May be a way to tease out a rough population from cell phone use statistics.