Hacker News Reader

pthaon Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

From the wikipedia article:

The entire game uses only 97,280 bytes of disk space. In contrast, most contemporary first-person shooters fill one or more CDs or DVDs. According to the developers, .kkrieger itself would take up around 200–300 MB of space if it had been stored the conventional way [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger#Procedural_content

pthaon Adding a security key to Gmail

I use Authy: https://www.authy.com/ Now I'm wondering are there similar security concerns here as with Google Authenticator?

pthaon Dolphins' elaborate octopus-hunting strategy

There are reports of dogs repeatedly licking the toxic cane toads in Australia. Some are speculating the dogs are "addicted" to the "high" from a non-fatal dose of the toxin the toads excrete in their sweat. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/dogs-licking-cane-t...

pthaon They Used To Last 50 Years

This was the Phoebus Cartel where the major light-bulb manufacturers all agreed to do this:

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

But I guess in the end the free market did bring about it's demise, when Scandinavians produced cheaper alternatives.

pthaon Wind and solar power are disrupting electricity systems

Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than C02 https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten...

pthaon India has banned disposable plastic in Delhi

This was affecting air pollution, from 2nd and 3rd paragraph: India’s National Green Tribunal (NGT) introduced the ban following complaints of illegal burning of plastic and other waste at three local rubbish dumps. The ban took effect on the first day of 2017.

The illegal burning of waste was said to have been contributing to air pollution, which is a major problem in India.

pthaon A pilot who stole a secret Soviet fighter jet

Hard to believe the Soviets were using vacuum tubes instead of transistors In hindsight, the MiG 25, which the West had been so worried about, turned out to be a ‘paper tiger’. Its massive radar was years behind US models because instead of transistors it used antiquated vacuum tubes (a technology that did, however, make it impervious to electromagnetic pulses from nuclear blasts). The huge engines required so much fuel that the MiG was surprisingly short-ranged. It could take-off quickly, and fly in a straight line very fast to fire missiles or take pictures.

pthaon Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?

2 that I've given and reread myself a few times would be:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

pthaon America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’ systems

Fishing trawlers are more likely to cause damage: By far the most common problems, however—accounting for about 60 percent of cut cable incidents—are dropped anchors and fishing nets.

The cables are on sea charts so this can be avoided, but that won't stop deliberate saboteurs. The strategy for safeguarding undersea cables has been described as “security through obscurity.”

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/undersea-cable-maps/

pthaon 'The graveyard of the Earth': inside City 40, Russia's deadly nuclear secret

After many years of dumping radioactive material and accidents equivalent to several Chernobyls, the locals just wish to be left alone to live in “peace”. They are happy in their fenced-in paradise. because of the privileges they receive for living in the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk%2C_Chelyabinsk_Oblast#...

pthaon Innovative container ship features hemispherical bow

The last line of the article was quite interesting: President Katsuhiko Ochi continues to inspire employees to make new designs and hull forms that cannot be copied by other companies.

pthaon SpaceX Picks Rocket for First Relaunch

Apparently SpaceX call it a hover-slam, for a detailed explanation: http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10307/what-is-a-sui...

pthaon Roald Dahl – the storyteller as benevolent sadist (2010)

I'll have to re-read "George's Marvellous Medicine", that was my first Roald Dahl book. My dad bought it for me on a journey across the Irish Sea on a holiday trip. He bought my sister "The Magic Finger", which she finished quite quickly and was impatiently waiting for me to finish mine so she could read it. She was 2 years younger than me but reading at a level quite a bit older than me. I was reading at a age younger than I was (this is based on our school reports). "George's Marvellous Medicine" actually kickstarted my reading and love of books, so I'll always be very grateful for that.

pthaon There’s Plenty of Space for One Trillion More Trees

Apparently dead forests release less carbon into the atmosphere than expected:

"Overall, we discovered that after a tree die-off, the loss of carbon in the soil results less from increased respiration by microbes but more from the fact that trees are no longer sequestering photosynthesized carbon into the soil," Moore said. "There seems to be a dampening of the carbon cycle rather than a big pulse of carbon release. So even if the forest now goes from a sink to a source of carbon dioxide, it's not as dramatic of an effect as we thought it would be."

https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/dead-forests-release-less-c...

pthaon Amnesty International: Encryption Is a Human Rights Issue

I wasn't aware of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player#Legality Harks back to people not being aware that making copies of CDs for private (fair) use is illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping#Legality

pthaon Researchers create super-efficient Wi-Fi

Mentioned in the article is the passive bug the Soviets used for covert listening in the US embassy in Moscow. Impressive technology for 1945: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...

pthaon Pilot posts detailed MS Flight Sim video of how to land Boeing 737

Unfortunately he didn't have a lot of time before the engines flamed out: At 11:49, flight attendant Andreas Prodromou entered the cockpit and sat down in the captain's seat, having remained conscious by using a portable oxygen supply. Prodromou held a UK Commercial Pilot License, but was not qualified to fly the Boeing 737. Crash investigators concluded that Prodromou's experience was insufficient for him to gain control of the aircraft under the circumstances. Prodromou waved at the F16s very briefly, but almost as soon as he entered the cockpit, the left engine flamed out due to fuel exhaustion, the plane left the holding pattern and started to descend. Ten minutes after the loss of power from the left engine, the right engine also flamed out, and just before 12:04 the aircraft crashed into hills near Grammatiko. There were no survivors.

pthaon SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980

Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.

pthaon Badgers are driving hedgehogs extinct

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

pthaon Laura Poitras Reveals Her Own Life Under Surveillance

She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life., the psychological aspect is very troubling. A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance.

The unintended consequence of the surveillance may have hardened her resolve to be a privacy advocate, but it certainly didn't do her mental health much good.

pthaon UN panel 'rules in Assange's favour'

I'm just flabbergasted at how much the UK has spent on the operation: Last October, Scotland Yard said it would no longer station officers outside the Ecuador embassy following an operation which it said had cost £12.6m. But it said "a number of overt and covert tactics to arrest him" would still be deployed.

pthaon Oil Crash is Kicking Off One of the Largest Wealth Transfers in History

In August 2014, the Government Pension Fund controlled assets were valued at approximately US$884 billion (equal to US$173,000 per capita) which is about 174% of Norway's current GDP. It is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

pthaon A neurologist who had electrodes implanted in his own brain

Phil Kennedy continuing the grand but dangerous tradition of self-experimentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation - From the Chemistry section Until recently, it was common practice among synthetic chemists to taste newly prepared compounds. The purpose was to provide an additional characteristic for identification, taking advantage of the selective chemical receptors that form this sense. However, as one might guess, this practice also led to numerous fatalities and near-fatalities.

There are many examples in medicine section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medici... which also resulted in fatalities.

pthaon Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

Apparently the button erases tape when pushed for two seconds, provided the airplane is on the ground and the parking brake handle is on.

http://www.a320homecockpit.de/downloads/a320flightdeckdocume...

pthaon Head of Navy intelligence hasn't been allowed to see military secrets for years

Branch can't meet with other senior U.S. intelligence leaders to discuss sensitive operations, or hear updates from his staff about secret missions or projects. It can be a chore just to set foot in colleagues' offices; in keeping with regulations, they must conduct a sweep beforehand to make sure any classified documents are locked up.

"I have never heard of anything as asinine, bizarre or stupid in all my years," Norman Polmar, a naval analyst and historian, said in an interview.

SNAFU/FUBAR come to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBAR_%28disambiguation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snafu

pthaon First Nation's clay kills antibiotic-resistant bacteria in lab tests

Similarly the Egyptians used honey in wound dressings. "We now know that honey actually contains substantial amounts of hydrogen peroxide which can kill bacteria".

Also "moldy bread was used in China, Greece, Serbia, Egypt and probably other ancient civilizations as treatment for some disease conditions, particularly infected wounds. The observed curative powers may have been due to some raw forms of antibiotics produced by the mold growing on the bread".

http://amrls.cvm.msu.edu/pharmacology/historical-perspective...

pthaon The Wreck of Amtrak 188

From the article, it appears adoption of PTC has been hampered by Amtrak developing it's own system, funding issues and slow approval from the FCC:

"In much of Asia and Europe, engineers are protected by a technology known in the United States as positive train control, or P.T.C. Connected by digital radio waves or GPS signals, P.T.C. transponders in the track maintain constant contact with computers in the cabs of oncoming trains. If the transponders determine a train is traveling too fast, the locomotive’s brakes are triggered automatically. Amtrak has been working on its own in-house version of P.T.C., called the Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System, or Acses, for almost a decade. But owing to insufficient funding and a row with the F.C.C., which Amtrak said had been slow to approve the use of the requisite radio bandwidth, its actual implementation has been piecemeal."

Later on in the article it confirms that PTC has been rolled out on the line where the accident occurred, but a national rollout out will potentially take until 2020:

"In late May, Joseph Boardman, Amtrak’s C.E.O. and president, promised that the installation of P.T.C. on the Northeast Corridor would be completed by the end of 2015, a pledge he has kept: Today, the system is active on all routes, with the exception of substantial stretches of track owned by the State of Connecticut. (A spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Transportation said it hoped to have P.T.C. installed on all state-owned track by 2018.) It will be some time before a national rollout is complete. In November, President Obama signed into law an extension to the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, giving railroad companies — which had complained about the cost of implementation — until 2020 to bring the technology online."

pthaon Amazon's customer service backdoor

2FA is now available for Amazon customer accounts: http://betanews.com/2015/11/18/how-to-enable-two-factor-auth...

The option is only (at the moment) available for Amazon.com accounts, but if you enable it there is will also be turned on for other domains Amazon.co.uk etc.

pthaon Amazon's customer service backdoor

If you login to amazon.com and enable 2FA, then when you login to amazon.co.uk (same username etc.) it will ask you for the 2FA code. It seems if you have an account for one Amazon domain you can login to all with the same credentials.

pthaon The alarming threat of Zika virus

Beside by mosquito, apparently it can also be transmitted sexually: "In 2009, Brian Foy, a biologist from the Arthropod-borne and Infectious Diseases Laboratory at Colorado State University, sexually transmitted the Zika virus to his wife. He visited Senegal to study mosquitoes and was bitten on a number of occasions. A few days after returning to the United States, he fell ill with Zika, but not before having had unprotected intercourse with his wife. She subsequently showed symptoms of Zika infection with extreme sensitivity to light. Foy is the first person known to have passed on an insect-borne virus to another human by sexual contact.

In 2015, Zika virus RNA was detected in the amniotic fluid of two fetuses, indicating that it crossed the placenta and could cause fetal infection. On 20 January 2016, scientists from the state of Paraná, Brazil, detected genetic material of Zika virus in the placenta of a woman, who had undergone an abortion due to the fetus' microcephaly, which confirmed that the virus is able to pass the placenta."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zika_virus#Transmission