Hacker News Reader

pthaon Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

Also if your home has a "NightSaver" meter (just what they're called here in Ireland, but basically a day and night meter), the night rate is often nearly half the day rate, so it makes sense to charge at night.

pthaon The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry

It appears that Gilbert Bourgeaud or "Bob Denard" may have been part of Katanga militias in the "Siege of Jadotville" (now also a film from Netflix).

A militia force of about 3000 laid siege to about 156 Irish UN troops, who held out for 5 days before surrendering.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Faulques#Congo_Crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard#Early_career

It's hard to confirm if he was there, Roger Faulques his friend and leader of the militia force certainly was.

pthaon Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time

DST was supposed to go away in 2021 in the EU, but a pandemic, brexit, and practicalities may have put paid to that...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/will-dayl...

pthaon Where are the robotic bricklayers?

I think Tesla had a lot off issues when trying to automate as much as possible, possibly trying to push the envelope too much at the beginning.

Last year they've started installing "Giga Presses" - the largest high-pressure die casting machines in the world, in order to reduce parts and increase automaton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press#Tesla

pthaon Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

I've heard it's pronounced "Win", but don't take my word for it.

pthaon Mind-controlling parasite makes hyena cubs more reckless around lions

The article described something specific that could be tested. I leave it to the scientist to design a similarly specific experiment for humans. Also the "reckless" behaviour exhibited by the cubs disappeared after there were older than 1 year:

While uninfected cubs stayed an average of 300 feet away from lions, cubs that had Toxoplasma antibodies in their blood had ventured within an average of 142 feet from the predators, a dangerous proximity. These differences disappeared after the cubs turned one, perhaps because the survivors learned not to get too close to the felines.

pthaon Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

Also linked in the article, scientists have experimented on communicating with Lucid dreamers (low-tech version of Inception), asking yes/no and simple maths questions.

The researchers asked 158 questions of the lucid dreamers, who responded correctly 18.6% of the time, the researchers report today in Current Biology. The dreamers gave the wrong answer to only 3.2% of the questions; 17.7% of their answers were not clear and 60.8% of the questions got no response. The researchers say these numbers show the communication, even if difficult, is possible

The scientists questions were incorporated into the lucid dreamers dreams: One dreamer reported math problems coming out of a car radio. Another was at a party when he heard the researcher interrupting his dream, like a narrator in a movie, to ask him whether he spoke Spanish.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...

pthaon Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

The article mentions complications with this because of existing deals:

Still, efforts by Amazon to profit off MGM's library won’t be easy, or cheap.

In many cases, MGM’s content is tied up in multi-year deals with television networks, the former Amazon executives said. Amazon cannot air MGM’s reality show “The Voice,” for instance, which contractually is in the hands of NBC.

Bringing a new installment of the James Bond saga to Prime viewers may be a particularly difficult task, the sources said. The terms under which MGM acquired the franchise leave control in the hands of the Broccoli family, the Bond films’ producers.

pthaon An interview with the man who keeps uploading my feet to WikiFeet

From the article: and I’ll put her name in IMDb. And she didn’t have a page, so I couldn’t post hers.

I would take the: "put her name in IMDB" to mean he just did a search. On first reading like you I did think that meant he created an IMDB entry, but the 2nd part of the sentence changed my mind.

pthaon Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory

I'm not advocating it, but when there's a sudden decrease in demand (due to Covid-19 in this case), culling in various ways: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/19/millions...

One quote from the article regarding media sharing tips for farmers: Most people do not understand the complexity of raising pigs and getting pork from the farm to their table. That means, “[a] good rule of thumb is to speak to a level a third grader [eight to 10 years old] would understand to ensure that things are not taken out of context.

pthaon The Infection That’s Silently Killing Coronavirus Patients

My S8 has a "Samsung Health" app, that measures Oxygen Saturation under the "Stress" section. It uses the sensor next to camera (also used for Heart Rate). I've no idea how accurate it is though.

Some googling and I found a related paper: "Accuracy of Smartphone-Based Pulse Oximetry Compared with Hospital-Grade Pulse Oximetry in Healthy Children"

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Smartphone-based pulse oximetry is not inferior to standard pulse oximetry in pediatric patients without hypoxia. [1]

However in this case you _are_ trying to test for hypoxia...

Another link answering the question "Should smartphone apps be used as oximeters":

CONCLUSIONS

It is not physically possible to measure SpO2 using current smartphone technology. The two published studies which assessed smartphone oximeter apps (Digidoc and Samsung) raise serious questions about the diagnostic accuracy. The Samsung app has been withdrawn, and the claim that oxygen saturation can be measured indirectly through “stress assessment” is false. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29215972

[2] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/question-should-smartphone-app...

pthaon Who’s behind the “reopen” domain surge?

Then there's the band "The Postal Service" that got a cease and desist from USPS to stop using their trademark.

However it had a happy ending: the United States Postal Service -- the real one, as in stamps and letters -- signed an agreement with Sub Pop granting a free license to use the name in exchange for working to promote using the mail. Future copies of the album and the group's follow-up work will have a notice about the trademark, while the federal Postal Service will sell the band's CD's on its Web site, potentially earning a profit. The band may do some television commercials for the post office.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/arts/music/postal-service...

pthaon Understanding RAID: How performance scales from one disk to eight

Following the link to libeatmydata that some hardware controllers use for asynchronous writes:

libeatmydata is a small LD_PRELOAD library designed to (transparently) disable fsync (and friends, like open(O_SYNC)). This has two side-effects: making software that writes data safely to disk a lot quicker and making this software no longer crash safe.

DO NOT use libeatmydata on software where you care about what it stores. It's called libEAT-MY-DATA for a reason.

Also just some latin pedantry, the article mentions the phrase: Caveat imperator a couple of times. I assume to mean Let the buyer beware, which as far as I know is Caveat emptor.

Google latin translating: https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=la&t...

Does caveat imperator have another meaning (perhaps the emperor is infallible)?

pthaon Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside Official Maps

To me they are reminiscent of the drawings the monks put in the margins when creating the illuminated manuscripts. These were not hidden, but were certainly at odds with the serious text they surrounded.

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/naughty-nuns-flatu...

pthaon Europe’s solar orbiter begins its journey to the Sun tonight

The protection on the front of the orbiter is quite a combination of old/new tech.

Solar Orbiter’s radiation-hardened instruments will be protected from the sweltering heat by a shield covered with doors that periodically open to allow the spacecraft’s instruments to image the sun. About half the size of an average parking space, the Solar Orbiter’s heat shield is a mix of modern and ancient technology. Its outermost layer is a strip of titanium just a fraction of a millimeter thick and coated on the sun-facing side with charred animal bone. This is the same stuff used by prehistoric humans to paint cave walls, but its properties also make it great for radiating heat away from a spacecraft.

The process for coating the Titanium heat shield with the black charred animal bone is developed by an Irish company, called Enbio: http://www.enbio.eu/thermal-control/

pthaon The Wuhan Virus

You shouldn't, it didn't originate in Spain.

Even today, experts aren’t certain where the outbreak originated. Some say China, some say the American Midwest, and others suggest France. But one thing’s for certain—it wasn’t Spain.

“Nobody calls it [the Spanish flu],” says Albert Bosch, president of the Spanish Society for Virology. “It just happened to be the place where it was reported, and that’s it.” Arnold says the Spaniards themselves had different names for the virus—sometimes “the French flu” for their historic rival, sometimes “Naples Soldier” after a popular musical—but it was the name in the Times that would stick.

[1] https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-spa...

pthaon Rat had 'no brain' and somehow lived a normal life

Similarly the story of Noah Wall, The parents of a boy born with only 2 percent of his brain have spoken out about their son's "extraordinary" development.

Shelly and his father Rob Wall spoke of how their six-year-old son has since gained function in 80 percent of his brain. [1]

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/miracle-boy-born-no-brain-grows-bac...

pthaon Immune discovery 'may treat all cancer'

Kindle edition appears to be £1.49 on Amazon.co.uk https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emperor-All-Maladies-Siddhartha-Muk...

pthaon Japanese pagers to issue last beeps on Tuesday, ending 50-year run

Some further info on Work Profiles from Google: https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/6191949?hl=en

pthaon My derelict pub still got TripAdvisor reviews

I noticed this for a few hotels when traveling to New Zealand recently, a few hotels required a $100-200 deposit - in cash only. As I'd been using a Revolut card for purchases and it was near the end of the holiday so I didn't want to have to try to spend the deposit before returning home, I simply went with a different hotel that didn't have this condition (it was clearly stated on their booking.com page).

I don't know if they'd had problems with stag nights in the past with people leaving a mess...

pthaon Blackbird SR-71 Flight Manual (2010)

Fascinating/harrowing stuff: Despite these losses, the crew was able to attain and then maintain limited control by using the throttles to adjust thrust to the remaining wing-mounted engines. By using each engine independently, the crew made rough steering adjustments, and by using the engines together they were able to roughly adjust altitude.

With no control surfaces, and using the engine thrust they attempted a landing - of the 296 people on board, 111 died.

pthaon Nasa proves its space helicopter can fly on Mars

While the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) only logged a total of one minute of flight time at an altitude of 2 inches above the ground, the scientists were able to get the data they need to be able to say that it will work on Mars. "The next time we fly, we fly on Mars," project manager MiMi Aung said.

I realise it's just a concept test for future missions, but this doesn't seem like a particularly rigorous test. I assume they are they under a lot of time pressure.

pthaon Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

From some googling it doesn't appear that you are actually physically removing the app, from xda-developers:

these uninstalled system applications can/will come back after a factory reset. This is a good thing, however, as it means that these applications truly aren’t being uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user (user 0 is the default/main user of the phone). That’s why, if you omit the “–user 0” and “-k” part of the command, the command won’t work. These two commands respectively specify that the system app will only be uninstalled for the current user (and not all users, which is something that requires root access) and that the cache/data of the system application will be preserved (which can’t be removed without root access). Therefore, even if you “uninstall” a system application using this method, you can still receive official OTA updates from your carrier or OEM. [0]

[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...

pthaon Clothing Manufacturing May Be Moving Back to West from Asia

Actually they are related, renamed in Britain to avoid confusion with a British retailer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Maxx

pthaon The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand

I like the half basements, but they have their issues: http://copenhagenbydesign.com/blog/2015/5/21/half-up-and-hal...

pthaon Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules

Episode 1 (Hard NOx) of the Netflix series "Dirty Money" covers this quite well: https://www.netflix.com/ie/title/80118100 The other episodes are also worth a watch.

pthaon The German Amateurs Who Discovered ‘Insect Armageddon’

Hans Rosling has done some research and ted talks about this: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...

pthaon The German Amateurs Who Discovered ‘Insect Armageddon’

Don't worry about the insects, see the last quote: As the scent of 82 proof alcohol that preserves the bugs wafted, just a little, through the room, a reporter asked if, at this rate, all the insects were going to disappear. “Oh, don’t worry,” said Mr. Sorg, the wasp expert. “All the vertebrates will die before that.”

However, agreeing that we are indeed hastening the next mass extinction, might be a good start to avoiding/postponing it.

pthaon The Shock of Sweden's Housing Market Is Hitting the Country's Currency

In Ireland we had a property bubble during the "Celtic Tiger" years, and suffered a major correction after 2007 [1]. Apartments in Dublin the capital city lost about 62% of their value. 10years later and prices are climbing steadily upwards [2]. It's deja vu all over again. In Ireland we have a national obsession with owning property.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/housing-index