Hacker News Reader

wallwarton U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

Serious question: what happens after? Will it literally be 'free energy'? And are we ready as a society to handle this properly? How do we ensure that this will benefit everyone and not create an enormous imbalance by itself?

I guess the existing economics will be broken at some point if the cost of everything will be driven down in such a way. Are there any articles/works that explore this issue?

wallwarton EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

In theory one can say they use 25% of their bedroom or living room for work, and hope that the tax man is lenient enough to accept that. But then you also need to submit the floor plan or square footage measurements in order to get something deducted from your rent/utilities. And probably pay someone to do all this for you due to the huge number of caveats. German tax law truly is something else.

Completely favors the middle class that can afford to keep one room for 'work'. One wonders if starving artists can get some tax returns for their attic shoebox ateliers.

wallwarton GNU Octave 6.1.0

I've always preferred MATLAB to Python as the more engineer-friendly programming language. The interface was a plus as well. That being said, given the sheer amount of scientific libraries for Python and universities moving towards it as well, I'm wondering if the effort to maintain Octave is worth it.

One use for it could definitely be running older MATLAB scripts that have deprecated language features. Those were a real pain to make work again.

wallwarton Femtosecond laser writing of glass, including borosilicate, sulfide, and lead

Can this also be used for data storage in a 3D medium? It references a patent from 1991 on this, not sure how far things have come since then.

wallwarton Optimizing the Timing of Brainwork

Anecdotal - the only thing that worked for me was eating once per day, around 6PM. I was very alert the whole day, but not in an unpleasant way. The hunger pangs come and go, but are manageable. Tried this for a week, I don't drink coffee at all but this felt like I've had a couple of cups.

A nutritionist friend however dissuaded me to go this route, as apparently it is very hard for our bodies to process that amount of food and one will end up with various nutrient deficiencies in the long run. I'm curious to know if someone got intermittent fasting to work long term though.