Hacker News Reader

inspector-gon Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

Like Mexico, or like the US? (Your comment is ambiguous; genuinely curious)

inspector-gon A woman who doesn't feel pain

For anyone curious about why pain is an incredible predictor of/protector from danger, and why lack of pain experiences often leads to massive injury and early death, please watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCF1_Fs00nM

The lecture is given by a respected pain research scientist, and it also covers much of modern pain science (including why the biomedical model of pain is outdated and how the biopsychosocial model of pain is more representative of observations of human pain experiences).

inspector-gon Appl Still Hasn’t Fixd Its MacBook Kyboad Problm

You're certainly not wrong, but the hockey puck was fairly quickly discontinued and replaced (within a year or two) by the "Apple Pro Mouse", which itself wasn't discontinued for 4 or 5 years.

inspector-gon The C-- Language Specification (2005) [pdf]

Interesting! I've been writing a lot of C/C++ for over a decade, but had never heard of C-- before.

So, I went to the website[1] linked in the PDF to learn more, but sadly it appears the domain has been taken over and now just displays a small collection of badly written articles about Windows.

[1] http://cminusminus.org

inspector-gon You Don't Need to Exercise for Hours a Week to Look and Feel Better

> will lead to imbalance that could cause pain or bad posture

Citation needed.

inspector-gon Intel kills off the 10nm process?

68k to PPC had emulation, but also PPC to Intel with Apple's "Rosetta"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

inspector-gon Prepare for changes to macOS Server 5.7.1

I have been using it for years with great success. I've only had a couple minor problems, which were small in nature and more due to Time Machine itself rather than the fact a server is hosting the service.

(Unfortunately I no longer remember the exact problems, but they were not nearly bad enough to deter me from continuing to use it. I have about half a dozen Mac devices in my home, so the net positive of continuous wireless Time Machine backups has far outweighed said small issues.)

inspector-gon A Clone of the Classic Mac OS Finder in Modern Cocoa and Objective-C

> A smaller, more secondary reason for creating this was to sort of observe how a Classic-era app might run on today’s hardware. As our hardware gets beefier, it seems like our software gets chunkier. If we could port yesterday’s software to run natively on today’s hardware, how might it perform? Very fast, I’d imagine.

This reminds me of a small personal project I decided to take on a couple years ago. I did it both as an experiment in performance and for nostalgia's sake.

I bought as pristine an example as possible of Apple's last machine that could run Mac OS 9 natively, a PowerMac G4 (the 2003 MDD vintage). I upgraded the CPU and RAM as much as possible (dual 1.25 GHz G4, 2GB RAM), and replaced the hard drive with as fast an SSD as the system could handle (don't recall which SSD model at the moment).

In short, I was astonished at the "snappiness" of the system. Boot time took no more than 15 seconds. Shutting down took only about one second. The system entered sleep mode near-instantly. Opening and closing windows within an app happened as fast (or faster) than I could react to it. Opening and closing classic apps themselves was at least an order of magnitude faster than what I would consider reasonable analogs from today.

I already had a decent amount of disdain for how much time I spend on a modern Mac/iOS device waiting for the system to catch up to my inputs, but it got worse after having done this experiment. A simple example, but which pains me near-daily, is the creation of folders in the modern Finder. After typing cmd+shift+N, I often must wait an amount of time that must be on the order of several hundred milliseconds before typing the name of the folder (if I don't wait, the first couple characters I type will be missing from the folder's name, which is yet another time-sink to go back and fix the missing characters). And this is on an iMac Pro! I tried this exact test on my old-but-quick PowerMac G4, and I never had to wait nor lost any chars no matter how quickly I attempted to type the command and the subsequent folder name.

inspector-gon Why has CPU frequency ceased to grow? (2014)

For those who are curious, see the Wikipedia article on Landauer's Principle [1]

I hadn't heard of this before, but it sounds like we are a long way off from reaching the limit; as the article states, modern computers use millions of times more energy than what Landauer's Principle implies is the lowest possible amount.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

inspector-gon Apple Reports First Quarter Results

When has Apple not paid tax(es) they're legally obligated to have paid? Genuinely asking for sources for this claim.

inspector-gon Functioning ‘mechanical gears’ seen in nature (2013)

While not quite a gear structure in the strictest sense, don't forget about the amazing flagellar motor[1] in bacteria!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum#Motor

inspector-gon Area code 710

The article mentions that individuals placing calls though GETS, with a valid access code, receive "alternate carrier routing, high probability of completion, trunk queuing and exemptions from network management controls". I find this fascinating, and it's hard not to wonder if any (rough) equivalent exists for government-related internet traffic. As in, perhaps some special/cryptographic data can be provided in network traffic data that ensures higher-priority treatment in an emergency or crisis, like GETS. Can anyone enlighten me here?

inspector-gon EPA dismisses half of its scientific advisers on key board

Can you elaborate on how you believe this relates to the linked article? (Genuinely asking.)

inspector-gon How to Avoid Going to Jail Under 18 U.S.C. For Lying to Government Agents

But you don't have anything substantial to lose by holding open said door. This is a poor analogy because the stakes are not even close to comparable.

inspector-gon What no one talks about when running and selling a business

Do you know of a good way to search/find such entrepreneur meet-ups? I find myself craving this sort of interaction more and more as time goes on.

inspector-gon Apple March 2016 Keynote – 10am PDT

I think this is showing another benefit of focusing on a smaller number of products and controlling their development from (virtually) top-to-bottom.

Apple has such a limited number of products that they can build robots to disassemble said products piece-by-piece, which is arguably a more efficient manner to recycle individual parts. Other companies that have a zillion products would likely find it difficult to achieve the same level of efficiency, because they basically have to "shred" their products and sort the bits out later.

EDIT: Do you have a source on Apple using "Bangladeshi children" for disassembly before today?

inspector-gon Terminally Ill Man Willing to Have World's First Full Head Transplant

While the procedure itself is clearly outlandish, is it that difficult to imagine a patient that died from brain-related complications (leaving the rest of their body in otherwise good shape)?

inspector-gon Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning (2010)

I followed these instructions a couple years ago for some of my cast iron cookware, and it worked out pretty well. That being said, I only resorted to these instructions after failing to find a service to re-season my cookware for me.

I looked online for just about anywhere in Northern California and made phone calls to various kitchen stores and iron workers up to a radius of about 25 miles and found absolutely nothing. I would much rather have just paid someone who knows what they're doing to re-season my cookware than half-ass it myself. So does anyone else know of a service for this?

inspector-gon Caffeine Spray, Brought to You by Peter Thiel’s College Dropout Challenge

[His] father, who has a Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry and owns his own lab in China, helped develop it.

I love the irony. Peter Thiel was trying to make a point with his "College Dropout Challenge", but this product was really developed by someone with a graduate-level education.