Hacker News Reader

AS37on The surging demand for data is guzzling Virginia's water

> The only question would be, would it create so much heat in one spot that it would actually warm up the environment too much?

Probably not at a large scale, although similar situations have led to odd headlines like 'Florida's manatees are addicted to power plants'.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240328-floridas-manatee...

AS37on Project Habbakuk: Britain’s ice “bergship” aircraft carrier project (2017)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Trefoil-class_concret...

AS37on [dead]

> Following the Dobbs ruling, researchers observed an abrupt increase of 58 sterilization procedures for women, averaging around 5.31 procedures per month per 100,000 individuals

For perspective, if this rate persisted forever (it's probably a one-time bump) then (assuming a life expectancy of 76) about 4.8% of the population would have undergone this procedure.

AS37on Andy Bechtolsheim charged with insider trading

As long as this took him less than 90 minutes it would be a higher hourly rate of income. Not to mention that doing this would not reduce his other earnings.

Or maybe he did it for the thrill.

AS37on What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

I code in C# and use a ton of LINQ when writing business logic. It's FP-ish enough to avoid logic mistakes. The mediator design pattern, which is kind of bringing another FP paradigm to the OO world, also features heavily.

AS37on Digital Audio Mixer Pt.2

I find real-time audio mixers super interesting. A lot about writing your own can seem easy, until you find yourself in a fight against latency. If you hit 30ms you're dead, the mixer will become almost useless in a live setting. That's why the big expensive equipment hasn't been replaced by iPads. The highly regarded commercial SQ mixers [0] have 0.7ms end-to-end latency thanks to an FPGA inside.

I also firmly believe that, in the future, everything will be connected via Dante [1], which will be another example of commodity(-ish) computer networks eating everything.

[0] https://www.allen-heath.com/hardware/sq/

[1] https://www.audinate.com/

AS37on Colorado wolf reintroduction to move forward

Yet another great example of America's 87% telling the 13% how they should live.

AS37on Medically assisted deaths constituted 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada

No. Don't screw with nature, it doesn't end well.

AS37on A Q&A with Meta Employees on Blind

https://archive.ph/cbvpB

AS37on American megachurches are thriving by poaching flocks

I don't attend one, but I have stepped foot in some. Compared to an 'average' (200 person) church, the big ones have more refined music, teaching, and user experience. I guess it's easier to put more effort into content when the user base is 2,000 or 20,000, versus 200.

AS37on UK's infrastructure is too expensive: Railways, Trams, and Roads all cost more

The article says the original estimate was for tracks between 4 cities, not 2.

AS37on Thomas Sowell's greatest insight [video]

If solution is defined as benefit(option)/cost(option) >= 100 (which I think you do) then there are solutions.

If solution is defined as benefit > 0 for cost == 0, then there are no solutions.

AS37on Heat your house with a mechanical windmill (2019)

Interestingly, winter has the highest windspeed of all seasons, summer the lowest.

AS37on Rick Rubin’s creative genius

This brings to mind his advice that is basically 'If you want 10 good songs, write 30'.

His method remind me of Nail Gaiman: "And I think it's really important for a writer to have a compost heap. Everything you read, things that you write, the things that you listen to, people you encounter-- they can all go on the compost heap. And they will rot down. And out of them grow beautiful stories."

(And of course the pottery teacher story.)

AS37on Dating, education, and sex ratios

IMHO it's more likely because the education system from age 5+ is biased against boys and for girls.

AS37on What Is Social Status?

> For example at church the pastor or those more involved have status.

Yup. Pastor > singer > band member > FOH technician.

IIRC in an orchestra it goes strings > woodwinds > brass > percussion.

AS37on When markets melt down, these traders cash in

> Adapted from “Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis” by The Wall Street Journal’s Scott Patterson, to be published on June 6 by Scribner.

TL;DR Black swan events happen. Some hedge funds specialize in them. Book advertisement.

AS37on The seven programming ur-languages (2021)

AS37on Banksy ship saving migrants at sea detained in Italy for 'breaking rules'

> 2. How come Italy can dictate what foreign vessels (Banksys ship is registered in German as per the article) do in international waters?

The answer is basically they can because they can.

The ship isn't picking people up and delivering them to Germany, they're picking people up and delivering them to Italy. When the ship is docked in Italy it is at the whim of the Italian authorities.

AS37on As unions decline, inequality rises

A bunch of those started 150+ years ago, when European unions essentially didn't exist.

AS37on Violent Ends: Early modern methods of execution

Maybe you should talk to someone. Someone not on the internet.

AS37on Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

> Doesn’t lab grown meat need a lot of growth serum, which is currently extracted from pregnant animals?

5 years ago it took ~50L of fetal bovine serum (FBS) to grow a burger, at around USD 400/L. FBS is made from the blood of unborn calves, which are taken from slaughtered cows.

All lab meat companies are obviously looking to reduce that input cost by finding a replacement.

AS37on Is wine fake?

Yes. Ontario's production is less than 3% of California's.

AS37on Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

"Hussle Inc is not currently hiring."

AS37on The mysticism of Alan Watts (2018)

> Buddhism and Christianity make it sound like you have to be perfectly clean and disciplined to be “enlightened”, causing feeling of guilt and failure when you stray from the behavioral/moral prescription.

I don't really get why this is. I'm not saying it's wrong. But it's only a couple pages into the Bible that you find Noah getting drunk and blacking out naked (Genesis 9). And this is someone who is trusted to hear the voice of God, know the future, and save humanity. Seems to be a pretty low bar for being 'good enough' for God.

AS37on Somali Law (2013)

> If a fact is disputed, or supported by fewer than three witnesses, parties may be required to swear one of several different oaths to the truth of their position. One such oath consists of the oath-giver swearing by his marriage; if it later turns out that his oath was false, the marriage is dissolved.

I hate to think what happens if you swear on your mother's life...

AS37on Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors

>18 year olds. We don't consider them responsible enough to drink alcohol, yet we expect them to take on crippling amounts of life-long debt?

In my country, as in most of the world, 18 year olds can drink alcohol. They can also make many other life-altering decisions.

AS37on Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors

> Seriously, this is such a self centered and short sighted point of view

No, this is exactly the opposite.

The world would be a better place if everyone acted responsibly. People are willing to act responsibly in the form of paying back the money that they borrowed and said they would pay back. Even when in the environment of

> predatory student loans applied to people at a time where society yelled "get a college degree or you'll never get a good job

People still decided to respect the words onto which they signed their name.

And now, those same people see that others get benefits from not acting with the same responsibility.

It's a bug. Incentives should be aligned with the societally-beneficial behavior.

(I'm not an American, BTW. I'm not benefitting from this debt cancellation happening or not happening.)

AS37on The dictatorship of the articulate

> Everywhere I look, I see the rise of talkocracy — others have called it the dictatorship of the articulate. Talkers standing in the way of builders; offering we ponder, analyze, investigate, research, dissect, agonize endlessly over plans before we lay a single brick.

Ok, so how do technologically-minded folks learn to talk better than anyone else, to hack that system and make it work again? Is there a system for it?

AS37on Why no Roman industrial revolution?

I wonder about what, a thousand years from now, people will look back on us and say 'if they just did this, they could have discovered that thing centuries earlier'.