Hacker News Reader

nnamtron How Wes Anderson Turned The New Yorker Into “The French Dispatch”

Good to know there's a definite measure for that.

I for one liked it.

nnamtron Antibiotic-loaded microalgae treat bacterial pneumonia in mice

I sometimes wonder if there's an evolutionary purpose to our conscious self not being able to control some subconscious and physical processes.

nnamtron Meta is building an AI to fact-check Wikipedia

Not 200, like 10. Someone added a false one, and it found its way to serious websites. German source: https://bildblog.de/5704/wie-ich-freiherr-von-guttenberg-zu-...

nnamtron Deutsche Bahn’s Meltdown and High-Speed Rail

Fortunately, they'll never happen. How are you supposed to get your connecting regional train if it doesn't stop at the same station? And it's often a huge advantage of rail that your journey starts and ends near the city center.

nnamtron Why Beauty Matters (and how it has been destroyed by “usability”) A short thread

A still from Jacques Tati's film "Playtime" (1967): http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_SS76YifzgN0/TBqlmteuTTI/AAAAAAAABY...

nnamtron I changed my mind about advertising

Probably true, but I suppose it's some sort of cognitive bias rather than a conscious thought out of greed or similar motives.

nnamtron The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky

https://www.filmingo.de/

Watched Nostalghia yesterday :)

nnamtron New German government calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance

A restaurant or company could use its own scanner app to save the data, but I assume this would be illegal

nnamtron Ode to a Streaming ByteString

I once wrote a brainfuck interpreter in Haskell which executes even incomplete programs as far as possible. It was really easy thanks to streaming ByteStrings and lazyness in general.

nnamtron Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

I'm somehow afraid of a world in which huge amounts of energy can be wasted without having a bad conscience. Probably it would lead to some new problems.

nnamtron Android and iOS data collection

Would a transparent HTTPS proxy be able to intercept traffic (once you install the certificate on the phone), or are the certificates pinned?

nnamtron RFC-0082: Runnning unmodified Linux programs on Fuchsia

How are rootkits possible in Fuchsia? IIUC, drivers run in user space, don't they?

nnamtron A 3°C world has no safe place

FWIW Celsius and Kelvin have the same scale, they're just shifted.

nnamtron Show HN: Website changes design each time you blink

What if the world is just a dream? Then an individual person's consciousness has a massive influence on the weather. And there would be new arguments for the existence of God.

nnamtron Show HN: Website changes design each time you blink

- Is the lamp still on while blinking? - Is the sun still shining during a nap? - Is the fridge's light still on while it's closed? - Does God exist?

Some fundamental questions, but we'll never be able to find an answer.

nnamtron Using WebAssembly threads from C, C++ and Rust

I always thought that's what Fuchsia is about?

nnamtron What is the Axiom of Choice?

All formulas and statements are expressed in first-order logic. It has no such phrase as "pick". But picking (in the axiom of choice) means: Finding a function that maps every set to an element of this set.

What is a function: It's a set of tuples where every tuple (x, y) means: x is mapped to y. Of course there must be exactly one tuple for every "x".

(Tuples btw are usually a short notion for {{x}, {x,y}}. They exist always by the axiom of pairing. By the axiom of extensionalty, they fulfill the universal property of pairs, i.e. (x, y) = (z, w) iff x = z and y = w.)

Assume x is a single nonempty set. Picking means: Finding a function {x} -> x. But this is easy: ∃y(yϵx) because x is nonempty, and then we can build our function, which consists just of the single tuple (x, y).

It also works for finite sets of sets since you can do it manually n times, the formula just gets longer.

nnamtron Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

Merkel grew up in a country where you could be "banned" for anything. I'm not surprised that she doesn't like the idea of private companies deciding according to their own (not democraticly chosen) rules who should speak and who shouldn't.

nnamtron New Kind of Paper

Bad handwriting causes data loss since 5000 years probably. Whether it's an AI or a human reading it, handwriting is sometimes impossible to decipher. To avoid data loss, don't use handwriting or write very neat.

nnamtron A brief introduction to esoteric programming languages

They should extend the Shakespeare language to make all his plays compile. Computers would be the first entities to fully understand King Lear.

nnamtron Elon Musk, master promoter

> I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.

He IS an easy enemy in this regard, not only to the left. All his (mis)behaviour, naming his child like that, manipulating currency rates through tweets, that's not exactly what average people could afford. If he didn't fit this stereotype of billionaire, I'm sure he would be liked more.

nnamtron Elon Musk, master promoter

I'm living in Europe, and the situation seems better over here. While going by car is cheaper and faster in most cases, train is not much worse.

At least Biden seems to be a supporter of the railway. But it could go faster if you'd build tracks instead of tunnels with Teslas.

nnamtron Elon Musk, master promoter

We were never talking about costs, we were talking about how visionary Elon Musk is. However, while it's great if money is saved, again: is it really the achievement of Elon Musk, or would any private company be able to hold down costs?

nnamtron Elon Musk, master promoter

Those rockets impress me, but Elon Musk did not construct them. The NASA (and also the soviet union) managed to do equally great things without someone like him in past.

> Tesla cars -- truly helping humanity move from fossil fuels

It would be much more effective to use bicycle and trains wherever possible, and drive small cars otherwise. But wait ... that's not luxurious enough. Saving the world is just an excuse for cool cars.

> and now StarLink

... to make the last corner of the world addicted to the internet and pay money to Musk.

nnamtron The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

I'm always very sceptical when electronics and chips are used as a solution to problems that nobody had. Reliability seems to suffer most of all. When I hear from my parents how long their products lasted back then ...

nnamtron Elon Musk, master promoter

Is his stuff really that good? I can't shake the feeling that he has a strong tendency to exaggerate.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2021/04/13/elon-mu...

nnamtron Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens milestone

I always wonder when I read articles like this, what people would think if they were told that 78000 summers later many people will be thinking about this specific burial.

nnamtron GitHub blocks FLoC across all of GitHub Pages

> Also, what about github.com itself?

Don't ask, try it. curl says: permissions-policy: interest-cohort=()

nnamtron Green vs. Brown Programming Languages

It's obvious, but no one seems to notice it: These are not two lists. The list of dreaded programming languages is the list of loved languages reversed. Since the list has only 25 items, 5 languages belong to the top 15 in both directions.

nnamtron An Apology to COBOL: Maybe Old Technology Isn’t the Real Problem

$reason = Make the microservices independent of each other, so you can rewrite and replace them without much trouble when they're getting old.