HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Accujack

2,384 karma · joined December 8, 2018

submissionscomments
Accujack··on Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery
Precision matters, and legos only have a certain amount of precision.

Besides that, things like the number of holes in the calendar ring matter.

Check out Clickspring on youtube, he's one of the people who narrowed the hole count down to 2 numbers, and this paper argues hard for one of those.

He's building a replica of the mechanism using period tools, and it's amazingly precise so far.

Accujack··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
...and that example was actually used in one of the dissenting opinions.
Accujack··on GM's data sharing scandal shows need for better connected car consent
We really need legislation in the US to regulate the use of data... something like the GDPR with enforcement for people who are careless with their customers.

As well as strongly regulating sales of data/data brokers, of course.

Accujack··on Memories from when you were a baby might not be gone
We are, all of us, born EBCDIC. The world teaches us ASCII, and we can make no sense of all we knew.
Accujack··on 1,100-year-old Viking sword pulled from UK river by magnet fisher
The reward is the find. No magnet fisherman except the ones on Youtube or Patreon actually makes enough to pay for their magnets.

You don't do this to try to make money, you do it for fun, knowledge, and the occasional cool (but not very valuable) item.

Accujack··on Scientists Discovered a 'Fear Switch' in the Brain, and How to Turn It Off
"...And they shall know no fear."

https://imgur.com/a/5oMQhEu

Accujack··on Dealing with surprising human emotions: desk moves (2017)
See also "Open Plan Workspace".
Accujack··on Wall Street Traders Are Too Scared to Fight the AI Rally Short Are Missing
AI Bubble!
Accujack··on Reddit hasn't turned a profit in 20 years, filed to go public anyway
Think about it... Google could train its AI to recognize malicious behavior for moderation purposes, to recognize astroturfing and manipulation of public opinion (for purposes of stopping it or carrying it out).

There's not much value in training it to simulate a redditor, but there's a lot in modeling bad behavior.

Accujack··on Reddit Files to Go Public, in First Social Media IPO in Years
They haven't innovated in years. The only real changes to reddit have been a cosmetic re-work and release of an app for mobile use.

Well, that and the API changes that drove away something like a third of the users.

Accujack··on How SSH port became 22 (2017)
My experience as well.

Much depends on whether your systems were running BSD-style RPC services.

Accujack··on Stack Overflow: 79% of Developers Considering a Career Move
Best of luck.

My pay peaked in 2001. If subsequent job moves and raises had kept up with inflation, I'd be making just under $150,000 a year today.

As it stands, the job market is so poor (and my skills need updating, to be honest) I'm having trouble getting a job that pays even $80k.

Accujack··on Henry Ford helped popularize charcoal briquets
Yeah. Briquettes are basically bottom of the barrel coal powder, sawdust and other additives mixed with a binder.
Accujack··on Thailand discovers nearly 15M tonnes of lithium
Or under the Salton Sea.
Accujack··on A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
They'd be mining the brine in which the lithium is dissolved as well as constructing geothermal plants to take advantage of the temperature of the liquid.

Construction is already beginning.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/12/07/lithiu...

Accujack··on Uber shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly
My brother used it to keep getting alcohol while he was home bound due to complications from diabetes. He was able to hide his consumption from us during the last few months of his life because Drizly delivered for him.

I'm not attacking them or anything, I'm sure there are people out there who are home bound who love to get a bit of a tipple now and then for whom such a service is wonderful. It just wasn't in my family's case.

Accujack··on A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
The Salton sea is the home of a huge lithium deposit, and it's unlikely that anything but geothermal and lithium mining will happen there in the near future. Certainly not "restoration" to what it was when it was accidentally created.
Accujack··on I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy
And also to hope hard that whatever you buy from Amazon is genuine and not a counterfeit copy. Amazon uses the same bin for both.
Accujack··on First new VAX in 30 years? (2021)
For those not noticing, all the posts were made in 2021.

I'm regretting I didn't get more done during the pandemic, but then I was a "critical" worker and I didn't get to stay home.

Accujack··on Possible Meissner effect near room temperature: copper-substituted lead apatite
The thing is.... all the failed reproductions of LK-99 were based on the leaked version of the paper, which according to the authors is missing some information/steps for production. They said they would publish the complete/final version of the paper in 2024, waiting to see that.
Accujack··on Record Millions Of US Adults Giving Up On Ever Finding Work (2022)
Yeah, looks like mostly AI generated comments.
Accujack··on College Sports Need Their Tax-Exempt Status Revoked
Churches too.
Accujack··on Understanding America's Post-Industrial Economy
I think it's much simpler than you're proposing.

It's just greed and a desire for control.

The neoconservatives who began their campaign shortly after the civil rights battles of the 1960s achieved a great deal during the Reagan presidencies.

Many of the problems with the US today can be traced back to or through those years, including the relaxation of financial laws and regulation that led to the 2008 housing crisis, the ongoing consolidation of American businesses through mergers and acquisitions, and the increasing inequality in wealth distribution.

There's no reasoning to it beyond a group of people who want to live in the world they thought they were in back in the 1950s, when god was in the pledge of allegiance and America was perceived as mostly white.

Money and political power are letting them heavily influence the US for now. Unfortunately it will probably only be correctable once they die of old age.

There's no great strategy in play. The Democrats aren't a lot better in their goals, they also want the imagined past in a different way, but they're not the ones causing the issues.

Accujack··on Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future
I'll take option 3: a new browser using better technology (better design, protocols, etc) than chrome gets written by hundreds of open source advocates working together. The new browser becomes the standard for the Internet because it is not under the control of corporate interests and because of its superiority to decade old browsers.

Corporations and services are once again forced to standardize on open standards for web access or lose customers because the public (and techies specifically) will not support a proprietary software model for the public internet.

It's a cycle - corporations become big and successful, try to establish proprietary control, then lose massive market share to newly created competitors.

Once successful corporations get large, they tend to forget that eventually the frog getting boiled does jump out of the pot, and is usually angry when that happens.

Accujack··on Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
> If they don't like you, they can close your account by simply stating that "we have an obligation to know our customers; after careful consideration, we decided to close your account".

What's really behind the decision is simply risk avoidance. It's like "firing" bad customers. The banks consider it prudent business to kick anyone who might be a problem out the door. Avoiding one criminal causing issues is worth kicking out 20 ordinary honest customers.

Accujack··on It's Time to Tax Billionaires
Undoing a lot of what Reagan did is needed.

Taxing Billionaires is tricky... they can manipulate data (like anyone else) to show their actual income as 0 dollars.

I'm more worried about what would happen to the money thus produced... the US government has been digging itself a large fiscal hole the last 3 years and shows no sign of stopping.

Accujack··on Premiums for family health insurance at work jump to nearly $24,000
...because the FDA has stopped (been underfunded and politically interfered with) protecting our food supply from overuse of fillers, sugar, and other less healthy ingredients.

Cheap packaged food is very bad for you, and not everyone has the ability to purchase fresh stuff and cook it.

Accujack··on Google opens Falcon, a reliable low-latency hardware transport, to the ecosystem
>The IT ecosystem has fragmented into mutually incompatible cliques. You are either in the Google ecosystem, the Amazon ecosystem, or some other one, but there are no more truly open and industry-wide standards.

This is one excellent example of the reason that increased/renewed anti-trust actions by the FTC are necessary.

Accujack··on The US Navy sold 2 obsolete aircraft carriers to scrap dealers for a cent each (2021)
Exactly. The cost to remediate the hazmat stuff as the carrier is disassembled allows the scrap yard to make a profit, but it's not getting "free money" from the government.

When the aircraft carrier Oriskany was sunk as an artificial reef, the environmental remediation cost was $11.89 million.

Accujack··on LK-99 research continues, paper says superconductivity could be possible
What everyone following the stuff online seems to forget is that the replication attempts and samples so far are based on a leaked, apparently incomplete version of the LK99 paper.

Supposedly, a University in Taiwan is working to validate the full version of the paper and the material, and the authors of the paper say that once confirmation is complete (and is successful) they will release the full version of the paper... sometime in 2024.

We'll see what happens, I guess.

Page 1 of 29Next →