Hacker News Reader

jvm_on Phone services disrupted across B.C., but emergency calls still working

So, if I go to California with my NY cell phone and dial 911... I get the emergency services of the tower I connected to? Was always curious who I'd get when I'm not near home.

jvm_on New brain networks come ‘online’ during adolescence

I've heard the theory that the music you like/hear/is new to you at 14 is the music that you stick with for life.

jvm_on Rediscovering the lost power of reading aloud

So we play it communally on a big Bluetooth speaker.

jvm_on DirecTV races to decommission broken satellite before it explodes

I guess the edge is more of the sweet spot where geosynchronous exists, too close or too far are both non-GEO.

jvm_on DirecTV races to decommission broken satellite before it explodes

Earth orbit is like a funnel. If you're in geo-synchronous orbit, you're at the top edge (Earth is down by the hole). It's easier to jump off the edge of the funnel (and fall into the Sun's funnel) than it is to climb all the way back down to earth.

jvm_on Rediscovering the lost power of reading aloud

My wife read and recorded the whole Harry Potter series for our eldest, now the second gets to either hear Mom read live, or listen to a recorded chapter everynight before bed.

I've heard you should always read to your kids regardless of their age. They'll only ever read at their level, so even reading a poem or newspaper article or scientific journal to them when they're older increases their reading level.

jvm_on Incident: Ethiopian B737 at Dire Dawa on Jan 9th, swarm of grasshoppers

Where they finally landed, Addis Ababa is at 7,726, Mexico City is 7,350.

jvm_on Deep Learning Breakthrough Made by Rice University Scientists

Sounds like the rule where if the headline ends in a question mark, the answer to the question is No.

jvm_on A Thread about Internet Archive's “Silent Killer”

Thanks, just played Xonix for the first time in a while. The other dos boxes I've found were too fast to actually play.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Xonix_1984

jvm_on Apple TV, Apple TV, Apple TV, and Apple TV+

Or when you want to buy a used one and want to check the value.

jvm_on A 3D Metal Printer Is Churning Out Rockets

If you turn on a blowtorch in space, does it need some sort of kylo-ren double-action torch to keep it in place? I guess it won't move if it's anchored to something, but that something will still move as the force is unbalanced?

jvm_on AI Detects Heart Failure from One Heartbeat: Study

Stolen from another HN comment about using AI on medical records.

"Finasteride is a compound that is used in two drugs. Proscar is used for prostate enlargement. It is old, out-of-patent, and has cheap generics. Propecia is used for hair loss. It is a newer, and (at the time) very expensive. The only difference is that Propecia is a lower-dose formulation.

What people did was to ask their doctors to perscribe generic Proscar, and then break the pills up to take for hair loss. Doctors would then justify the prescription by "diagnosing" enlarged prostate. This would enter the patient's health records. If you apply deep learning without being aware of this "trick", you would learn that a lot of young men have enlarged prostates, and that Proscar is an effective, well-tolerated treatment for it.

Health records are often political-economic documents rather than medical."

jvm_on The climate of a retrograde rotating Earth (2018)

Just strap a bunch of rockets and point them to the horizon... until you realize that the earths crust isn't that deep and your rockets just end up ripping a scab of earth off and flying off into space. I guess that would be one way to make a local volcano.

jvm_on Hyundai Motor Group, Aptiv to set up $4B self-driving car venture

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/15/20805994/ups-self-driving...

There's a video out there of the UPS truck driving 90 minutes end-to-end without interruption by the driver or engineer who are along for the ride.

jvm_on The heroes of the Thai cave rescue

Every sentence could have been a tweet. It felt like I was reading a children's book. The sentences were very short.

jvm_on How Spiders Fly

Or read Charlotte's Web.

jvm_on Hacking a cheap fitness tracker bracelet

All the buskers at the festival I went to last year did this already, some sort of wrist-mounted change the music device...

jvm_on Falling Chinese Space Station to Crash This Weekend

But every day is a sunny day in space? Or does the ground vs. clouds make a difference.

jvm_on Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

There was a reddit post today showing the picture of the naked humans and the quasar map to earth... the caption was - maybe the reason aliens haven't contacted us is that we sent unsolicited nudes and directions to our house.

jvm_on Show HN: Quickly build a production ready image classifier from your images

Would it be sensitive enough to pickout differences in wear patterns on the backs of playing cards? We play Rook daily at lunch, and there's a kitty, and we always want to know what the cards were. If you took a picture of the backs and let machine learning figure out what cards they were, we could know after the hand is done.