Hacker News Reader

jvm_on Asking robots to design stained glass windows

People adapt to getting an upgrade in life almost immediately. If you walked down the street and someone handed you $80 and the next guy $100, you'd be mad that he got more even though you just got free $$.

It takes 2 weeks to adapt to a loss though.

Humans are strange.

jvm_on A.I. can now write its own computer code – that’s good news for humans

Leetcode interview questions will adapt to ask for the wrong answer. You'll have to write broken code to prove you can code better than the correct code AI can spit out.

jvm_on Tesla Autopilot thinks the moon is a yellow traffic light

Lanes in heavy snow covered roads are more of a suggestion. You can either drive on the bare 'wagon tracks' of road, or on the proper lane (that you can't even see) with 6-12 inches of snow on them.

Often when driving like this, you see a glimpse of the middle-yellow line inside one of the wagon tracks, and you realize that you're actually driving in part of the other lane. Fortunately the opposing traffic's wagon tracks are also shifted so that they're driving partially on the shoulder.

A GPS guided car would make a mess of the wagon track pattern that all the humans decided to just go with.

jvm_on $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

Trees follow a slow-fast-slow pattern for capturing carbon. Small new trees don't capture much. Middle-aged trees capture a lot as they grow. Old-growth trees don't capture as much as they reach the end of their life-cycle.

As others have said, trees are only temporary as they eventually die and need to be replanted. They're also slow to start, and need to be maintained (which costs carbon as well).

jvm_on Anal oxygen administration may save lives

These people spent 37 days in a 9ft dinghy in the ocean. A ladder rung, plus the rain water mixed with turtle guts from the bottom of the boat saved their lives.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/22/shipwre...

jvm_on Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

It seems there's a battle between virus's, they don't like sharing resources and the 'strongest' wins.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56483445

Coronavirus: How the common cold can boot out Covid

Think of the cells in your nose, throat and lungs as being like a row of houses. Once a virus gets inside, it can either hold the door open to let in other viruses, or it can nail the door shut and keep its new home to itself.

Influenza is one of the most selfish viruses around, and nearly always infects alone. Others, such as adenoviruses, seem to be more up for a houseshare.

If rhinovirus and Sars-CoV-2 were released at the same time, only rhinovirus is successful. If rhinovirus had a 24-hour head start then Sars-CoV-2 does not get a look in. And even when Sars-CoV-2 had 24-hours to get started, rhinovirus boots it out.

"Sars-CoV-2 never takes off, it is heavily inhibited by rhinovirus," Dr Pablo Murcia told BBC News.

He added: "This is absolutely exciting because if you have a high prevalence of rhinovirus, it could stop new Sars-CoV-2 infections."

jvm_on New Horizons now 50AUs from the sun, shoots starfield containing Voyager 1

Fun fact, Voyager 1 - at 17km/s, isn't always moving away from Earth.

Earth does 30km/s around the Sun, so at some points in it's orbit, Earth is catching up to Voyager 1.

jvm_on Every Noise at Once

I like scan, but the time is too short, and it skips before I can get it to play. Maybe a longer scan period - or just a 'random' button.

jvm_on Every Noise at Once

/r/listentothis is good for finding different genres, and usually a good song from that category as well.

jvm_on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

Whenever I come across a picture of a location that looks cool, whether it be a castle/ruin/beach/city. I search Youtube for 'place name walking tour' and then filter by Long videos.

Usually gets some good results. Sometimes the camera person is too chatty, but you can always mute them.

jvm_on Ask HN: An Amazon vendor wrote me a letter asking for reviews

Amazon is brutal, 1% defect rate. 1.75% gets you a 72 response window before they shut your account. So, 2 bad orders per 100 and your out of business. You basically live in fear of bad reviews and cases being opened against you. Defects are opened a-z claims or feedback with 1 or 2 stars.

If your lively hood is under that constant pressure to perform, I can see why they'd request feedback that way.

Just explaining their side.

I'd just ignore it, it's someone trying to survive.

jvm_on Rare Bronze Age spearhead discovered intact in Jersey

/r/buyitforlife

jvm_on 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

I've heard of this happening across Lake Erie, people in Canada said they could see the color of the traffic lights all the way across the lake in Erie PA.

jvm_on I Miss My Bar

This song captures that feeling well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8isMSg0Tpe4

jvm_on Smart Drone Mailbox Secures the Future of “Last Inch” Deliveries

Dumbwaiters make a resurgence, except now they hookup to the roof.

jvm_on Ramstein air base in Germany experiences potential incoming missile scare

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

I want to read one of these...

jvm_on Food Delivery Is Magical Thinking

'Ghost kitchen': How a plain storefront hides more than a dozen delivery restaurants

Business model is gaining popularity as food delivery apps gain a foothold in Canada

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ghost-kitchen-calgary...

jvm_on Slow map: Mapping Britain's intercity footpaths

Another resource for finding footpaths/routes is

https://www.strava.com/heatmap

They've aggregated tons of bike and running routes so you can see where other people have ran/biked before. Good to use in the woods when the trails aren't very obvious, just use the 'find me' button on the map and then you can see where you are and which trail goes where.

jvm_on Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest

It was my understanding that fission and fusion both use the same Nuclear Power Plant sized facility.

Fusion just replaces the radioactive bit, you still need steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling... it's not like a suitcase you can plug wires into, you still need a massive 'factory' to make electricity, just the one bit is a safer.

jvm_on Phosphine detected in the atmosphere of Venus – an indicator of possible life?

Smells like garlic, at 20 parts per billion, in 80-90% sulfuric acid... Probably not much smelling going in.

jvm_on Teacher's low-tech laptop hack to display handwritten notes for online class

Hardware solution: $1 plastic cutting board

jvm_on Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

Each with and incendiary charge and the GPS coordinates of every home/building in a city. Who needs Tokyo/Dresden firebombing anymore.

jvm_on ‘AeroNabs’ – Inhalable Protection Against Covid-19

> While the lab results look promising, experts in the field advise caution because important work has not been done to test the compound in animals. “The critical thing is animal data. We’ve found things that are very potent in vitro that do nothing in vivo,” said Dimiter Stanchev Dimitrov, a professor of medicine who directs the Center for Antibody Therapeutics at the University of Pittsburgh and has created antibody-based therapeutics for numerous viruses including SARS and MERS, two other coronaviruses. He said it can take months to collect the needed data in animals. “Once these are tested in animal models, then I can get excited.”

https://xkcd.com/1217/

jvm_on Ancient trash heaps reveal the Plague of Justinian’s economic toll

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispa...

I was running while listening...

The US president negotiating the terms of Germany's WW1 surrender/repayments was trying to get a fairer deal, and France's president was negotiating for German punishment. In the days long negotiations, the US president fell ill (possibly with Spanish Flu), and was much weaker/combative when he returned to the negotiating table. Maybe if the flu hadn't hit him, Germany would have gotten a fairer deal and not felt unfairly treated which was a cause of WW2.

Also India's rebellion from the British was during that time, the British suppressing the rebellion's and the added pressures from the flu ravaging their country helped move that process along.

I wonder if the same could be said about the George Floyd protests. Part of it was the timing of everyone being off work/unemployed and having the time to go protest.

jvm_on Suspect is arrested in grisly killing of tech CEO Fahim Saleh

When you fire a tazer, along with the wires a bunch of confetti sprays out as well. The confetti has id numbers on it that can be traced back to who purchased it.

jvm_on Mincome: Canada’s 1970s universal basic income experiment

There's some longer term unanswered/unanswerable questions as well. How do children do if their parents have never worked?

jvm_on Mounting clues suggest the coronavirus might trigger diabetes

https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19positive/

Is full of people with long duration recovery periods.

Caveats are that only people with long duration symptoms would find that place and post there. Also, it could just be something else that the person is blaming on their Covid diagnosis.

Given the volume of posts on long term recoveries, it seems likely that there's more impact than a normal get-sick-for-3-days flu.

jvm_on How I Make Yogurt (2019)

ELI5 - Boiling makes it easier for the bacteria to eat.

jvm_on Radio Garden – Explore live radio by rotating the globe

Me: lets listen to the middle of Africa. Second song - Manic Monday by the Bangles

jvm_on First U.S. woman to walk in space dives to deepest point in the ocean

Bleeding off 8km/second (5miles/second) all the way to zero movement - just by moving through the atmosphere... doing that without heating just seems impossible.