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lawlorinoon South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

> So a tree got squeezed underground until it turned into a crystal? Cool, I guess, but big deal.

In fairness, this is actually pretty cool

lawlorinoon Higher Multipoles of the Cow

Near miss of nominative determinism; the authors name (Lehmann) is almost the same as the Finnish word for cow (Lehmän)

lawlorinoon Ryanair passenger sucked toward broken window after midair engine failure

I could see this being a safety issue if there’s a problem with the wing or engine and the panels fail, so zero visibility. Its why they ask you to open the window blinds during take off and landing

lawlorinoon Ask HN: When will the stock market crash?

> Reportedly Michael Burry has recently placed massive put option bets

Do you think this a meaningful signal?

lawlorinoon Ask HN: When will the stock market crash?

Nobody knows.

Over the last ten years of following investment news and discussion regularly, I see this question comes up very regularly, or there’s news that some economic indicator changing in X way or such-and-such person predicts for Y reason, that means that we have a huge crash coming in the next few months. This is all just noise with very little or no meaningful signal.

You can even see it here in this thread. I will reiterate - nobody knows.

If your question is motivated by personal finance reasons I recommend not trying to time the market, and reading the Bogleheads wiki https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

lawlorinoon Ask HN: Smallest amount of working ML weights that can be tattooed on a body?

I don’t think you can get a more simple ML model than linear regression?

y=w0+x*w1

lawlorinoon Ask HN: Smallest amount of working ML weights that can be tattooed on a body?

That’s lines of code, not weights

lawlorinoon Fintech Engineering Handbook

> I consider running from “amounts as integer” systems these days (but usually unfortunately can’t).

In the context of Fintech, how do you otherwise resolve floating point rounding issues if not representing amounts with integers?

lawlorinoon Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

I’m not taking sides on the wider argument here, but I think it’s you who should check your sources? Copy pasting direct from wikipedia:

> The city of Bradford is 45.8% White according to the latest 2021 census data, with the White British population being 40.5%. 45.3% of the city's population is Asian, primarily from the Pakistani community

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

> According to figures from the 2021 census, 48.7% of the population was White (42.9% White British

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

lawlorinoon Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly

Are we talking about the same Outlook here? And I mean that sincerely. I just joined a new company and now have to use MS software for the first time since Windows 7. Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, you name it, are all a clunky mess (at least on MacOs).

lawlorinoon Where are all the UK red telephone kiosks?

There was some trial where they painted <100 yellow, as part of some rebranding and privatisation of British Telecom. There was a public outcry and they reverted

lawlorinoon SFO Quiet Airport (2025)

I thought you were going to link Brian Eno’s Music for Airports

> intent of defusing the anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal as an alternative to "canned" Muzak and easy listening styles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports

lawlorinoon If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

> The next idea is music to drown out what's left but that just distracts me too.

You could try using white noise, either an app or if you have a Mac or iPhone they have native white noise generation (Accessibility -> Hearing -> Background Sounds iirc)

lawlorinoon Two Planes Destroyed by U.S. During Rescue Operation

Paywall

lawlorinoon Have mental health labels like ADHD and autism gone too far?

Article is behind a paywall

lawlorinoon Ask HN: Have you successfully treated forward head posture ("nerd neck")?

Please don’t actually do this. Forcing “correct” alignment would likely cause more issues.

lawlorinoon Can Walking Be My Whole Workout?

As someone with perfectionist tendencies I'd say for some people it's perhaps best to enjoy walking aimlessly rather than seeking to optimise yet another part of life, at least at the start.

Personally I found this with running. It never became a consistent habit and something I looked forward to until I stopped thinking about where, when and how fast I was running and just did whatever I felt like. This realisation came after many years of trying and failing to stick to any kind of cardio exercise, and now a couple of years later I have a few half marathons under my belt and am training for my first marathon later this year. I attribute this entirely to the mindset change I described.

lawlorinoon What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

I like this. To add: It serves as a strict lower bound, since it doesn’t account for the hidden cost of context switching etc.

lawlorinoon Window cleaner in quest to confirm priceless Shakespeare portrait

Agreed it's not clear from the article, but I think the reason is the similarity to an engraving called the Droeshout portrait [0]

> It is one of only two works of art definitively identifiable as a depiction of the poet

> ... commentators have used the Droeshout print as a standard by which to judge other portraits alleged to depict Shakespeare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droeshout_portrait

lawlorinoon ReMarkable Paper Pro

I noticed when reading through user reviews for the remarkable 2 that I can find several that are pretty critical of the product, but the rating of the reviewer is apparently 5 stars. https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2#user-reviews

lawlorinoon Show HN: BandMatch – “Tinder” but for finding musicians to create bands/collab

IMO English only is better than nothing, support can always be added later. I live in Finland and guess the probability of translation to Finnish is somewhere on the order of 0.1%. It’s also not really needed since a large majority of people here under the age of 50 speak English pretty well.

lawlorinoon AMA: I'm Dave Greene, an accidental expert on Conway's Game of Life

I discovered Langton ants and Turmites a couple of months ago, I guess these are a subset of cellular automata. I was talking with a friend about using them somehow for art somehow (music generation came to mind), is this a topic you might know about and could recommend some resources to get started?

lawlorinoon I am Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author, geek, and now, sword maker – AMA

This is pretty interesting, I've noticed I find it easier to recall information if I've written it down by hand instead of typing it on a computer. I wonder if it's a similar mechanism to what Neil and Neal find with writing - it means the thing you want to express spends longer in the brain's buffer and this leads to several benefits at the cost of it being slower.

Probably goes without saying I might be talking out of my arse here but it's interesting to think about.

lawlorinoon Showering at the South Pole

Quite enjoyed the writing and it’s a fun topic to think about.

Would doing a daily “submarine shower” [0] be the best strategy here for maximising cleanliness? This would be use fifteen seconds with water on to get as wet as possible all over, turn water off and apply soap and shampoo, then water on for the last 15 seconds. (Note I’ve never actually tried this so ymmv)

[0] https://sketchplanations.com/submarine-shower

lawlorinoon Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?

Took Andrew Ng’s machine learning course on Coursera back around 2015 as my first taste of machine learning.

I was studying for my PhD in Physics at the time and didn’t know what to do with myself with graduation only a year or so away. I was fascinated by the whole machine learning topic and got me interested in learning more - looking back it was the gateway to my data scientist career, which I’m still doing 8 years and 3 countries later.

I think I got quite lucky that this was around the time that data science was becoming a hot topic in industry, but there were very few qualifications in it (sorry statisticians) so people like me with STEM PhDs and relatively little training could go straight into a job from graduation (with varying results)

lawlorinoon Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

Same with ginger root as well

lawlorinoon Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?

https://github.com/jameslawlor/reddit-playlists

I made a bot last summer to generate and update weekly Spotify playlists from 100 or so music subreddits based on the top submissions of that week. Update operates entirely through a GitHub action so no resource spending.

I don’t often finish my side projects so was pretty happy to have something finally usable and shareable, it’s been fun showing friends!

lawlorinoon Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

Similar story here in Finland, real meat is just so much cheaper than the fake veggie stuff. My theory was this was supply chains (being physically far away from the rest of Europe) and a relatively small market size, but interesting you have the same price discrepancy in France which I guess has neither of these issues.

Just speculating here but do you think it is because of the strong food culture and links to identity in France?

lawlorinoon Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records

Could you expand a bit on what the self-work entailed?

lawlorinoon Ask HN: How do you have fun?

There’s ways to mitigate this issue - Roland sell these “noise eaters” [0] designed for their kits, but probably work for any electric kits I would guess.

A much cheaper alternative is to DIY a similar platform using some boards and a bunch of tennis balls cut in half[1]

[0] https://www.roland.com/ca/products/ne-10/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/edrums/comments/6f3n81/tennis_ball_...