Hacker News Reader

physicaleconon In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

Motels are not a habitation of last resort by any means. They’re a convenient place to stay while traveling.

I expect the vast majority of motel patrons are additionally paying a rent/mortgage for their main habitation.

physicaleconon Commercially Available Bike Generators Are Not Sustainable (2011)

The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute.

It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.

physicaleconon Creepy Crawlies

iPhone Air is roughly 90KH/s. I bet it’s a matter of the site not being “trusted” and the JIT being disabled.

physicaleconon Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal

Law was not in effect yet, and now it’s repealed. Cest la vie.

physicaleconon Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory.

It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.

physicaleconon Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

Dead, approximately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489

physicaleconon NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

Some would call that an organizational failure. I suppose it depends on the budgets.

physicaleconon Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

I believe at some point they disclose the Trisolaians aren’t actually interested in “solving” the problem. They do have analytical methods, but the problem isn’t prediction but rather the fact that everything they have will routinely burn to the ground and they’ll need to restart from 0. Also they will at some point get flung into a sun.

The “we need to solve this problem!” thread was a ploy to get earthly scientists invested in their plight such that they could convince them to support their cause from the inside.

physicaleconon The Difference Between a Button and a Link

Imagining you have a navigation to “/logout” that server side invalidates your token and redirects to home, would you implement that as a link? If so, what happens if someone tries to “open in a new tab” it?

physicaleconon GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years

It is very possible to load a kernel module into the host from a container.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33013539/docker-loading-...

physicaleconon Organic Maps

The people that develop the project have needs like anyone else. That includes vacations.

physicaleconon Organic Maps

Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case. Also people got upset that the developers used the product funding to pay for their personal expenses. The idea is folks want the developers to isolate all the money they make from this project and use it to only pay expenses directly related to this project. If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.

https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/?ref=itsfoss.com

physicaleconon How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

I don’t personally know anyone hit by a car, but my dad ended up in the hospital with a collapsed lung due to a drunk cyclist ramming him on the boardwalk.

Bicycles belong on the streets. (I bike to work most days, I take the streets)