Hacker News Reader

zeloson Using street lamps as EV chargers

Pricing always seems to be ignored. Sure, my local council installed chargers in the village car park for people without off street parking, but that’s 50p/kWh compared to 8p for me charging at home.

zeloson It's the “hardware”, stupid

Maybe, but plenty of people are prepared to poke their fingers in their eyes every morning in order to avoid wearing glasses, so it can't be all that popular a form factor.

zeloson China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

Yeah, but apart from all that, what have the Romans ever done for us?

zeloson China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

> for every old person we should have more than one working young person.

I never understood this thinking. Doesn't it assume infinite population is possible?

zeloson Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole

This suggests ejecting a secondary mirror in front of the craft to reflect light to brake the original craft: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.01356:

"...or by ejecting a reflector that is then used as a braking system (similar to thrust reversal on jets) but this only works if the payload is still within illumination range of the primary laser system"

zeloson Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

> Real-time military object telemetry with precise geolocation, identifiers, and live telemetry

Oops

zeloson A PhD in Snapshots

> is where your advisor would come in and tell you what you need to work on.

Yes, that would have been nice :(

zeloson A PhD in Snapshots

Interesting - I guess I'd assumed at that level the courses would be grad courses and not coursework heavy.

I think for me the problem was "unknown unknowns". If I knew I needed to know something, I could pick up a textbook and learn it, but that doesn't help if you don't even know something exists.

zeloson A PhD in Snapshots

Having tried and failed to finish a PhD in the UK, I wish universities over here took the approach that I see in these snapshots of requiring PhD students to still take classes.

zeloson Ford locking basic navigation behind a subscription

> now I can't use the basic map navigation unless I pay $120CAD per year,

Ford stand to make hundreds of dollars a year from this.

zeloson Show HN: Autism Simulator

There's some controversy around Asperger too, which made the name problematic anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger

zeloson EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

> Because they're just too big: too many game mechanics, too many locations, too much story, This was my thinking exactly while playing the two most recent God of War games. So many more mechanics, endless weapon crafting/upgrade options, side quests and minigames. Maybe I just have rose-tinted glasses, but the originals seemed so much more focused.

zeloson Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (2024)

> For context, 3GB of data is the rough equivalent of streaming high-definition video for an hour on a device.

Watching Sanctuary Moon? Fair enough, washing clothes is pretty boring.

zeloson How Britain built some of the world’s safest roads

That's pretty much been Lib Dem policy since 1992, but they finally gave up on it in 2023: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66910334

zeloson How Britain built some of the world’s safest roads

It would be more interesting to compare the rates of serious injury (including death), I think. That would remove the effect of improvements in medical treatement over time.

zeloson A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

Maybe AGI is impossible not for any technical reasons, but because AI is a self-limiting technology? As AI improves, it destroys the educational system that creates the researchers that develop it.

zeloson Tiny microbe challenges the definition of cellular life

Mitochondria were(are?) bacteria, so technically we can't live without bacteria really.

zeloson Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation

Private vs public is just one factor. The UK's rail services improved hugely post-privatisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

zeloson 500 days of math

I did 100% of MF II and III, plus 80% of Linear Algebra: https://mathacademy.com/courses/linear-algebra.

MF II and III were great for revision of late high school maths, yes.

zeloson 500 days of math

Worth it in the personal sense, or career-wise? I'd love to do a maths degree, but being mid-40s with family, mortgage, career etc makes it hard to see myself doing it for real.

zeloson 500 days of math

The explanations are very limited compared to actual maths lessons, though: in my experience they were very often something like "it turns out that the formula for this is...".

zeloson 500 days of math

You have to give them ~£23k for that honour.

zeloson 500 days of math

I recently stopped my MathAcademy subscription: I went from halfway through Math Foundations II through to near the end of Linear Algebra. I stopped because I realised I wasn't really learning maths, I was just learning to answer the questions by rote.

The way that they pretty much completely omit all the explanation, proofs and discussion you get in traditional maths education really limits its utility once you get to more advanced content. I think the reason for a lot of the positive reviews is that their approach works really well early on when you're revising the basic end-of high-school stuff.

zeloson Fine dining restaurants researching guests to make their dinner unforgettable

The penguin example seems kind of overstated, since from the sound of it the restaurant basically just donated a few dollars to WWF, but it's dressed up as how they "adopted a living animal for a guest" and no one's done that before.

zeloson Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

I think about these things every time I cook, but it never occurred to me to just try it. I always assumed that the "reaction rate doubles for 10C change" rule of thumb meant it would take much longer, plus presumably cooking is endothermic.

zeloson Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

That's how Minitel used to work: each page you accessed would add a few pence to your bill.

zeloson Cray versus Raspberry Pi

The Porsche Taycan has two forward gears, but it's apparently the only EV that does: https://www.wired.com/story/electric-car-two-speed-transmiss...

zeloson Why Property Testing Finds Bugs Unit Testing Does Not (2021)

I remember using something similar a long time ago - basically fuzz testing, I suppose you could call it property based testing where the property is "whatever edits the user does, we should be able to save and reopen the document without crashing".

It found so many bugs: file corruption, crashes, memory leaks, pathological performance issues. The kind of issues that standard unit testing doesn't find.

zeloson In the US, a rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight

Scott Manley has a great video about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG_Eh0J_4_s

zeloson The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

...TomTom just getting off the ground

TomTom was founded in 1991 and released their first GPS device in 2004. By 2007 they were pretty well established.