Hacker News Reader

poon A Strong U.S. Dollar Weighs on the World

If JPY appreciates against USD they don't make money or can even lose money. I'm sure there is some hedging going on, but I don't know for sure the mechanics of it all: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/yen-carry-trade-explained-pr...

poon A Strong U.S. Dollar Weighs on the World

This is exactly right, and also demonstrates why the Japan is in a bind.

They don't mind the currency going low as it helps exports but going too low, too fast is a problem. Increasing interest rates to narrow the spread will affect the economy. So they are walking a very tight line here between JPY/USD spreads and domestic economy/interest rates. All global economies are to some extent but since JPY is trusted and has had low interest rates for decades, it's popular within the finance industry for this kind of trade.

poon A Strong U.S. Dollar Weighs on the World

As a retail investor, you can do Forex trading or you could do time deposits at a Japanese bank (assuming you live here). SMBC Prestia is offering 6.5% on it right now for example:

https://www.smbctb.co.jp/en/timedeposit2404/?icid=24_en_top_...

poon A Strong U.S. Dollar Weighs on the World

> The yen is at a 34-year low against the U.S. dollar

I live in Japan and this has happened so quickly it's been stunning. While not much has changed domestically so far, I am hearing and starting to see foreign people question whether they could work and live here long term if it stays like this. It's fine if you are earning USD and visiting Japan (wow there are so many tourists this year) but if your salary is priced in JPY and you plan to retire in the US, it's basically impossible right now.

My understanding is that most of the pain in JPY is being caused by carry trades by the financial sector. Because they are very common currencies and most traders right now believe that both the US and JP are stuck with a wide spread in interest rates... you can borrow JPY and invest in USD and make 4-5% on it.

As an aside, I also wish we didn't use the terms strong/weak for currencies because it carries a good/bad connotation. It's just high/low and there are pros/cons to each.

poon Mario meets Pareto

Pretty sure weight mostly affects how badly you're knocked by other players when they hit you. So heavier is better (although it's often correlated with slow acceleration or poor handling). You want an EV... heavy as hell but with amazing acceleration.

poon Why is it so hard to build an airport?

If you fly into Tokyo you might come in via Narita Airport (NRT) which is actually quite a distance out from tokyo. Violence is extremely uncommon in modern Japan but NRT was the site of violent resistance over several decades.

Opposition forces killed several police officers, rioted on several occasions and constructed a giant 200 ft tower to interfere with test flights. Hundreds of acts of vandalism have occurred over the years, even into recent times.

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

poon America's economy has escaped a hard landing

> Forecast for US Recession Within Year Hits 100% in Blow to Biden

* Bloomberg Economics sees near certainty downturn will start Tightening conditions, inflation, hawkish Fed weigh on outlook

Oct 2022

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-17/forecast-...

I wish that the American media had a bit of accountability for their reporting.

poon Show HN: Creating custom coloring pages from photos. Great for parents/teachers

IMO your FAQ needs an entry for: when you store uploaded photos, what will they be used for. Will my uploaded photos be used as training data for your AI models for example?

poon Lead in gasoline blunted IQ of half the U.S. population, study says

Sorry, When I said "nobody is saying lead causes violent crime" I meant "nobody is saying lead is the sole cause of violent crime."

poon Airfoil

I think the mistake this site is making is trying to model out pressure changes that would create an airfoil-like shape of airflow. That's not how wings work. The pressure at the wing's leading surface is infinite because there's a metal skin there. You don't need a low pressure zone sucking air up 1m above it to explain that.

This view also implies that most of the lift is happening on the very front edge of the wing which I doubt is accurate otherwise we would have very skinny wings.

It's super frustrating when wrong is very pretty.

poon Lead in gasoline blunted IQ of half the U.S. population, study says

Yeah that's not how it works though... nobody is saying lead causes violent crime. Nobody is claiming crime can't go back up without lead. Of course there are better causative factors.

It's just that meta-analysis over many studies seems to show that it is a contributor to crime. When it is removed from the environment, it then shows up in the crime data.

poon Lead in gasoline blunted IQ of half the U.S. population, study says

IQ does measure something related to the brain's cognitive ability. The debate is if it's measuring "intelligence" and what the definition of that is, not that it doesn't mean anything. IQ tests are highly reliable in that you generally get the same scores when you retest. A movement from one year to the next relative to the population at whole is significant.

poon Lead in gasoline blunted IQ of half the U.S. population, study says

I feel like you maybe should shop around for a new pet peeve. Wasn't the data on this pretty clear due to various countries, states, cities banning lead at different times? My understanding is that you can see a corresponding drop in lead levels in the blood, rise in IQ, and reduction in crime 20 years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis#Correlat...

poon Airfoil

Bill Beaty's site was the one that opened my eyes to these misunderstandings: http://www.amasci.com/wing/airfoil.html

If the diagram shows lift but doesn't show the air being directed downward after leaving the tailing edge of the wing, I basically stop reading. That's the whole thing.

poon Sora: Creating video from text

In the video of the girl walking down the Tokyo city street, she's wearing a leather jacket. After the closeup on her face they pull back and the leather jacket has hilariously large lapels that weren't there before.

poon The Netflix Logo with Yarn was a lie

We teach kids that lying is wrong.. not because it hurts people (it does) or that people care (although they do) but because it tells you something about the morals of a person. You don't have to prove the individual social damage of each lie. We've accepted that lying has bad enough consequences often enough that "lying is bad."

I get that we now live in an age of trolls, but this isn't a "whoo hoo, I trolled the world!" post. This post is using the language of morality that it's wrong to lie. The post itself is saying what he did was wrong. And yet, not apologizing for it. As you say, it's just another troll.

poon The Netflix Logo with Yarn was a lie

One thing this blog post is missing is the words "I'm sorry" or "I feel bad about this." I suspect he doesn't feel bad about it at all and revealing the deception is now just for more clicks and attention.

poon Bioluminescent petunias now available for U.S. market

AFAIK, there are no bioluminescent fish available on the market... There are GloFish (https://www.glofish.com) but they only glow when displayed under a UV light.

poon Juno – A YouTube Client for Vision Pro

He's not selling it as a subscription so there's very little downside. Some people will send him $5 and if/when YouTube cuts it off (can they really?) he doesn't really owe anyone anything.

poon Nasopharyngeal Lymphatics Found to Be Crucial for Cerebrospinal Fluid Outflow

Really interesting. Amazing we can just drill a hole and drain fluid into our abdomen and it's no biggie.

Are you (or anybody reading) aware of any Alzheimer's studies that looked at CSF drainage? I just found this 2017 paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5577629/

poon Philadelphia Jury Hits Monsanto with $2.25B Roundup Verdict

Yes, it is: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/farming-robot-...

poon All ¥500 coins that glitter are not gold

I had the same thought! I also wonder if it's legal... I doubt it is.

poon All ¥500 coins that glitter are not gold

Ah, you're right. Don't know what I was thinking there when I included it...

poon All ¥500 coins that glitter are not gold

Vending machines also won't take the ¥1, ¥5, or ¥10 coins...

Luckily the conbini shops have machines that do take them and allow you to dump a whole handful of change in at once and will give change back in the minimal configuration. So my recommendation in Japan is when you buy something at the conbini, dump all of your loose change into the machine, then pay the rest with a ¥1,000 notes and you will get the minimal number of coins back.

Oh, and you can throw the ¥5 coins into the local shrine for good luck. :-D

poon BBC BASIC raytracer in 432 characters

Also, don't miss the gallery site! https://www.bbcmicrobot.com

poon Victorian Glass Fire Grenades (2020)

I have a very similar thing... it's called an Elide Fire Ball.

https://www.elidefire.com

I have a small room with some of my electronics and hobby stuff in it that is slightly more likely to cause a fire than elsewhere so I mounted one of these on the wall. I figure it may not work 100% but it can't hurt if a fire breaks out in that room and it works unattended.

poon Valetudo – Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation

I was going to comment the same thing... it's a lovely metaphor and you can see it comes from the experience of someone who has been through it before.

Despite being about private property, I still think this bit of text or something like it should be added to the support page of most OSS projects.

poon Abuse-Resistant Location Tracking

The pre-print paper is at the end of the thread: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1332.pdf

poon Gemini AI

One of the capabilities google should be evaluating their AI on is "determine if the top google search result for X is SEO spam AI nonsense or not."

poon The Therac-25 Incident

I first learned of this incident in the early 2000s from a computer book about how to code UML State charts in C/C++ [1]. It included a CD-ROM with a library that implemented a rather clever way of maintaining state using the call stack.

Unfortunately, the naive software fix for the Therac-25 is to add a flag (which is additional state) to the system which is to add complexity to the system.

[1] https://www.state-machine.com/doc/PSiCC.pdf