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polairscience

785 karma · joined April 18, 2024

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polairscience··on Mapping Hacker News to find who knows what in the HN community
FYI to you and anyone reading this. Comments are the opposite of temporary. You can never delete them or edit them after a very brief initial window. So anything you say here can and might be associated with you forever. Either directly or nebulously as indicated by this tool.
polairscience··on Use a work journal
What website blocker do you use?
polairscience··on Scientists re-emerge after a year in Mars simulation project
Buy me a beer in person and you can have as many as you want until you're bored. Post them publicly on the internet for anyone to recall at any moment? Absolutely not, under no circumstances, no.

Which is an important and relevant boundary for this discussion. Any space extended space travel is going to be mind numbingly public. Which is not a good thing

polairscience··on Scientists re-emerge after a year in Mars simulation project
As somebody who has spent a lot of time with high-quality academically pedigreed humans in far out places, I assure you that they're very capable of dumb drama. And, again tho I hated the show, everyone will be watching just as they were in for all man kind.
polairscience··on Scientists re-emerge after a year in Mars simulation project
I've been following these efforts closely. For these projects, crewed endurance space efforts, I strongly believe the most difficult component is the human. It's really difficult to be isolated in a high stress environment. And we don't adequately simulate or study what that might truly be like. I know that this was about nutrition but I just don't think nutrition is going to be the hard part of these missions.

I say this with experience. Living and working doing science in the Arctic and on ships is grueling. It's grueling, and not anywhere near as difficult or unpredictable as being in space. The things that happen in that pressure cooker are really hard to explain to people who haven't lived it.

It's not ethical or easy to do the kinds of simulations that would actually be useful. How do you simulate "your colleague is gravely wounded and on life support. now you have to work for 90 hours straight to fix whatever mamed them". Oh, also, you have 9 months of mission left with one less crew.

It was mediocre at best but "for all man kind" highlights just how weird things might get in these places. The only analogous efforts I can imagine are the adventures of sea-fairing people of centuries past. Maybe we should invent time travel and do some sociological studies.

polairscience··on Watching "Grizzly Man" with a bear biologist
Biologists often have a lens for the world that I deeply admire. This one was a very éloquent intetviewee. They were very humanizing as well as empathetic and analytical in their discussion of Treadwell. They were also pragmatic about what it all means in context for the bears and the world. What a person.
polairscience··on Remote shell to a Raspberry Pi at 39,000 ft
I would argue that it's still much better to run "real" jobs in a daemon or in a multiplexer like screen or tmux. But for picking stuff up, agreed, mosh is amazing.
polairscience··on Remote shell to a Raspberry Pi at 39,000 ft
I agree it's click baity. My personal favorite related moment, where I felt strongly "the future is now" was when I connected to a research station running autonomously on the Greenland ice sheet... while flying over the Greenland ice sheet to the UK last month. I was able to debug a software problem via satellite link while hurtling through the air in a tin can. Blew my mind. The latency was about 8 seconds, which was painful.
polairscience··on Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11
A funny thing I always notice about these sorts of discussions, where a lot of folks identify this particular offense as the final line that is harmful... (which for the record I understand).

Everyone in the Linux community has known this would be the outcome since forever. There have been a million small abuses on the road to here. And I get that everyone has their reasons for using Windows and other proprietary software but the strangulation was plain as day. So:

For all the flack that folks here give militant believers such as Stallman et. al., you can thank them and every other FOSS dev for keeping the alternative alive. Imagine a world where there was no alternative. You don't deserve to have your attention hijacked or to be forced into a cloud contract just because you want to use your hardware. Hate to say we told you so but you can come to the fold anyway. Welcome to freedom.

polairscience··on Neofetch developer archives all his repositories: "Have taken up farming"
While those things are true, the real enemy of the American farmer is in fact the American mentality. Of which, one component is the incessant need to get high ROI on low effort projects. We're obsessed with it as culture. This website revolves around it. It's our social network that creates an environment where farmers aren't valued. We value web advertisements. Plain and simple. Look what jobs pay the most.
polairscience··on Neofetch developer archives all his repositories: "Have taken up farming"
They're both on medicaid because we have decided collectively, as a society, that "ROI" is something we should chase. The mentality that it's the wrong choice because he's not trying to write a money printing piece of software is precisely why we live in the world we do. I admire someone who wants to go out and create something in the physical world. Even if, for insane reasons, America no longer seems to value that.
polairscience··on Impulse Tracker source code now available on GitHub
I mean this as a genuine comment and not a political non-sequitor but we'll see how it lands. If you think that's a bad idea, can you imagine what Donald J. Trump's wiki page would look like if you allowed 'primary' sources? Or, really, any political figure. Though I think he makes a very good implicit case against allowing that.
polairscience··on Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted
Woah. You made exactly what I want. Lucky day for me. Thank you.

Also, thanks for the markdown support. I'm one of those weird people that will ask if you'd be willing to support org mode as well. And I'm kinda surprised you don't if you use it yourself! I'd be very likely to use this if I could simply point it to an org file and have it displayed nicely on the web. I often take short notes that turn into long notes or vice-versa.

A fair response to your question would be, "submit a pull request" (thanks for being open source)... but I've got far too much science to do at the moment. So, regardless, thanks for building something cool!

polairscience··on Lynn Conway has died
You're using the word sex. There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1. For anyone. Or, if you think that's not true, then please describe to me how they're identical. In a group of men, in any place in the world, you'll find wildly varying accounts of what the male gender "is" all the way down to how their bodies should look.

And, gender aside, the most important thing to consider is the existence of intersex people, the diaspora of their bodies, and to consider how you think we should talk about them. Sex is, even outside gender, in fact not immutable. It's biology. These people are also historically denigrated.

Please imagine how ~150 years ago we collectively thought (and some people still think) that a person's race determined their intelligence. Historically "fundamental truths" usually end up with people being thought of as subhuman. The "fundamental truth" of sex, as it's presented by those who consider trans folks not people, is the same sort of truth. Biological sex is a spectrum, demonstrably. Gender is also demonstrably a spectrum. I don't care what people believe sex is or isn't. I care that we treat everyone, no matter how "weird" with respect.

polairscience··on Lynn Conway has died
While I agree that institutions and corporations are more actively participating in human rights issues in the recent past, something I think is a really good thing, I don't see the aspects of that coverage that are coercive or punishing. Your argument disingenuous on two points:

1) Nowhere, in history, does "government actively enforcing a different private life against one's will" mean "you are forced to live or participate in a transgender life". For the entirety of history government and corporations have actively forced "different" people like Lynn to conform to your expectations of them. See Lynn being fired from IBM.

2) "To say they are at risk is an outright lie". The rhetoric and social norms around the existence of transgender people enables violent people to murder them. They are absolutely actively at risk. What other phrase, besides "at risk", would you use to explain that transgender people are 4 times more likely to be murdered. They are literally killed for being different and because we dehumanize them.

I look forward to the day that what you say is true. That there are people who oppose those choices but that transgender people can live a free and public life without being murdered for being themselves. I think what you're putting forward sounds great.

polairscience··on Lynn Conway has died
While I agree that a community needs to focus on its central goal (developing the rust programming language in this case), I think I have a very good litmus test for what you think "apolitical" means:

Let's say Lynn were a rust developer and felt as though the the tone of the community and the discussion of her work made her feel unwelcome. Let's say Lynn spoke out against that. Would you entertain that conversation? I imagine that is not too far from what happened at IBM when Lynn was fired. When is it "allowed" to be political in your mind?

Intentionally addressing the ability of marginalized people to be a part of a community, in my mind, is precisely apolitical. If it's clear that anyone is welcome then you don't really need to talk about politics, do you.

polairscience··on Lynn Conway has died
For those of you who are inclined to say "HackerNews doesn't deal with politics", I hope that Lynn's story reminds you that any work you do is intertwined with politics. While I appreciate that it's a difficult line to walk, to have productive and relevant political discussion in a forum like this, politics and social acceptance are a part of every aspect of our lives. Brilliant, kind, impactful people are kept from leading the life they want to lead every day because of societal intolerance for who they are. Incredible people like Lynn who have overcome that intolerance to lead a remarkable life should remind everyone of the suffering that others go through. There are uncountable other people who are not allowed to be themselves and who are suffocated in our society, with the lives of transgender people often ending in ostracisation or murder. One of the remarkable things about technology is that it enables trodden people to escape this tyranny to an extent once impossible. It enables marginalized people to be themselves in our world. Let us continue to enable that.

Such "political" discussions and the impact technology has on them are an important part of the discourse here. I'm sad she is gone but I'm glad to see that this post is high up the front page. If you're inclined to denigrate transgender people, I encourage you to consider that they are trying to lead an honest life. I encourage you to consider what you're taking away from them and from the world by dehumanizing them. No matter why they are who they are.

polairscience··on Martha Gellhorn, the only woman to report on the D-Day landings from the ground
Woah is the male, never in the news or remarked on for their accomplishment. What is with this self victimization? Aren't you supposed to be tough?
polairscience··on Martha Gellhorn, the only woman to report on the D-Day landings from the ground
lol are you really trying to imply that it's not an interesting thing that there was a woman on the ground doing journalism?
polairscience··on Physicists create molecular Bose-Einstein condensates
The context is in the article but the title is missing the most important part. We've had BECs since 2008 at Colorado. But they've created a "molecular" BEC, one made from molecules and not "just" atoms.
polairscience··on There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux
It works great in KDE
polairscience··on Engineering for Slow Internet
What ship were you on and was it the northwest passage? We haven't had good luck north of 80 degrees with starlink.
polairscience··on Google releases smart watch for kids
I'm not sure I agree with less intrusive. Having a tracker attached to your body that can notify you of anything it wants is very intrusive. It is, however, seemingly less addictive in some capacities. No doom scrolling, etc.
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