Hacker News Reader

Ductapemasteron Asian American women are getting lung cancer despite never smoking

Mustard oil is rich in unsaturated fatty acids, but it also contains a special type of fatty acid called erucic acid, which lies at the center of the controversy surrounding the oil. Seeds from the brassica family of plants, which includes rapeseed and mustard, in addition to cabbage and kale, all contain varying amounts of erucic acid. Early experimental studies on animals in the 1950s suggested that erucic acid possibly had a role in the development of heart disease.

From: https://www.seriouseats.com/mustard-oil-guide (there's a lot more and it's worth a read)

Ductapemasteron Insatiable: A life without eating

There’s an excellent Radiolab episode that ends with a similar story of someone on TPN. If you found this interesting, it’s worth a listen.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/197112-guts

Ductapemasteron Humane AI – Pico Laser Projection – AI Twist on an Old Scam (2023)

A former colleague of mine works at Humane as an engineer, and the laser tech is apparently closely guarded. They were reluctant to even give a demo when we ran into each other, stating that the laser tech was particularly sensitive topic. I got the sense it was very custom.

Ductapemasteron Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

Single transistors in modern processes switch currents orders of magnitude lower than milliamps. More like micro- to picoamps. There's leakage to account for too as features get smaller and smaller due to tunneling and other effects, but still in aggregate the current per transistor is tiny.

Also the transistors are working at 1V or lower, but as you say they are FETs and don't have the same Vbe drop as a BJT.

Ductapemasteron The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary

My dad said the stars in Raja Ampat were incredible — he was on a dive trip there, and was really out in the middle of nowhere at night on a boat.

My girlfriend and I had a similar experience at Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii. We went to see some of the active lava flows a couple years ago. The park is open 24/7, so one night around midnight we took a walk on the side of the caldera where all you can see is the lava glow (and had no people) and the view of the sky was absolutely spectacular. The Milky Way just smacks you in the face. There’s a reason why they built telescopes on Mouna Kea!

Ductapemasteron Too much serendipity

There's a fascinating Radiolab episode about anesthesia that is worth a listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia

Ductapemasteron My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar

I've seen it happen while the plane is at the gate. The pilots usually have the door open, and you can go up and talk to them. Worst case they say no, so its worth an ask.

Somewhere I still have a Delta wing pin from a trip I took as a kid and got to see the cockpit en route. Very cool experience that I remember to this day — I hope your and others' kids get to experience some piece of it themselves!

Ductapemasteron The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

To be fair, these rights extend in both directions. This may seem extreme from an employer -> employee direction, but I have the right to do the same in reverse: I could call my manager at 8:30AM tomorrow morning and quit on the spot with no justification.

At Will employment cuts both ways.

Ductapemasteron California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

Hello fellow Alamedan! AMP is great — very grateful for a little abstraction between us an PG&E, despite it being all the same at the end of the day...

Ductapemasteron M2 Ultra can run 128 streams of Llama 2 7B in parallel

I think that an LLM could be an amazing interface or translation layer for this sort of thing, but I would argue that the underlying operations of refactoring or something similar should remain very much like a function with discrete inputs and outputs.

Ductapemasteron The SR-71 Blackbird Astro-Nav System worked by tracking the stars

What software do you use to accomplish this?

Ductapemasteron 2024 Nissan Kicks Is the Kind of Car We Need More Of: Affordable

This car is everything that I love about my 2015 Honda Fit, and I'm happy to see another manufacturer filling the void since the Fit's discontinuation.

While I am about to trade it in and get a truck, I have absolutely loved having a fairly basic, functional, and reliable car. It's taken my partner and I (and now our dog, who is unfortunately too large for the car!) thousands and thousands of miles across the West filled to the brim with camping gear, while also being a perfect around-town grocery-run car. Biggest repair was a failing starter motor, which ran me $600.

I have been saddened to see even the most basic cars getting loaded up with more and more features, and proportionally increasing prices. Of course some of it is mandated and unavoidable (backup cameras, etc), but I wish more manufacturers would fill out the bottom end of their model ranges with just the required stuff and not much more — letting premium features be an add-on vs. forcing the sale by only offering varieties of "everything". This is a step in the right direction!

Ductapemasteron Blood pressure should be measured lying down: study

I have the same set of experiences. It is incredibly frustrating to both myself and my doctors since I have a family history of high blood pressure, and it is impossible for me to get a baseline measurement. Only time I have ever had normal blood pressure is when I was in the best shape of my life a decade ago, and was considerably more relaxed due to life circumstances — but I distinctively remember not being afraid during the measurement, rather than feeling any different with regards to my overall health.

Also I've fainted, or almost fainted, in an array of circumstances related to needles. My experiences range from moderately humorous to dangerous (I fainted after my first COVID shot at the wheel of my car...thankfully I knew it was coming and put it in park just in time).

Don't feel too bad about being "that guy" — while the experience is incredibly personally uncomfortable, it's actually fairly common. I've just resorted to always having someone with me who knows what may happen and informing all the people involved about my history. Not fun, but it keeps me safe.

Ductapemasteron Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

Historically, I've only casually listened to the genre through friends or events. However, watching this show gave me such a new appreciation for the stories of the performers, the inspiration for their music, where the different styles come from, and the sheer brilliance of the producers and artists. It completely changed my opinion and respect for the genre.

I can't recommend the show highly enough. My partner and I have watched it through at least twice.

Ductapemasteron [dead]

One of the reddit comments calls out this is an inaccurate reading of the TOS:

> Y’all are some paranoid weirdos. The reason the company responded to OP’s question that way is because OP didn’t understand the TOS.

> “User Contributions” are in the message boards, chat rooms, or blogs visible to other users.

> The Website may contain message boards, chat rooms, personal web pages or profiles, forums, bulletin boards and other interactive features (collectively, “Interactive Services”) that allow users to post, submit, publish, display or transmit to other users or other persons (hereinafter, “post”) content or materials (collectively, “User Contributions”) on or through the Website.

Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/15qovb2/psa_you_ne...

Ductapemasteron Suit alleges recreation.gov cluttered with junk fees, seeks millions in refunds

I would like to understand why this is a problem? Objectively, they ran the lottery, distributed the permits, and charged a fee to do so. What is your objection specifically?

I don't intend to passively inject an opinion — just trying to understand your position.

Ductapemasteron Terence Tao on GPT-4

I had success with having it guess the formatting, which was a pretty cool experiment.

I had a table in a PDF of registers and associated information, and I copied and pasted the text directly into ChatGPT as a big block, and asked it to structure the data as a table again based on its best understanding of the data, knowing it came from a table. To my surprise, it did a really good job. A couple small edits here and there were needed to change some formatting and it missed a couple values, but overall it took me a couple minutes to edit and I was on my way.

Ductapemasteron Apple introduces Apple Pay Later

I think the OP is referring to the financing options available for larger hardware purchases, which is separate from this program.

I bought my M1 MBP using the financing they offer and it was 24 months, no interest, _and_ you do get the 3% back immediately upon purchase. They also set up the payment plan for you so you do not have to worry about missing a payment and getting charged interest you were intentionally avoiding.

It's a great option if you are on top of your finances, but the point remains that it can easily be used to live outside of your means.

Ductapemasteron Kenji López-Alt spent 5 months studying Chicago thin-crust pizza

Kenji has a recipe [0] for this method but using a tortilla instead of pizza dough. At first glance I was skeptical it would be any good, but it's turned out to be a fantastic low-effort way to make a "pizza" when you are craving it!

[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/extra-crispy-bar-style-tortilla-...

Ductapemasteron Potential Issues of Using a USB Powerbank as a UPS (2021)

I used one of these for about a year on my PiHole, but switched to a standard UPS because the hat's LiPo started bulging from all the heat generated by the Pi's processor.

The hat is a great idea in principle, but because the battery is sitting right on top of the processor, it doesn't stand a chance given that lithium batteries are fairly temperature sensitive.

I'd go with another option.

Ductapemasteron Fed expects to launch long-awaited Faster Payments System by 2023

You’re way off. The money earmarked for that project is $15 million, and it’s for a study on how the IRS would implement such a system.

Ductapemasteron I hacked my car

Ha! We did the same thing on our campus to get around the bandwidth blocks. We had an internal file-sharing network (DC++) which wasn't restricted in any way since it was all internal traffic. In fact the server was run by one of the network admins...go figure. But, content has to come from somewhere outside the network, so I just kept a rotating list of about 20 randomly-generated MAC addresses to keep the pipe open at full speed. I mentioned I was doing this to a friend in the IT department at some point, and he said the university knew about the trick and that I should be careful, but nothing ever came of it.

In reality, the real rate-limit was my college budget and the price of hard drives, but it was all good fun.

Ductapemasteron Analog computers were the most powerful computers for thousands of years [video]

One of the coolest things I ever built was a "bouncing ball simulator" [0] for my analog electronics class in college. I'be built a lot of stuff with embedded processors throughout my life, but that one project changed how I viewed electronics.

Assembling a bunch of op-amps, FETs, and passives and having it output a physical representation of a ball being dropped and bouncing off of the ground was just magic to me. I don't do much with analog these days, but when I get into a project that needs it, I still draw from the confidence that project instilled in me. Before then I struggled to see analog circuits as tools to solve problems, but for some reason after building the simulator, it just clicked and I saw the possibilities.

I wish I had soldered the thing together. I still remember the day I ripped up my 6 breadboards for the next lab...we built a Theremin though, so at least that was cool.

[0] A cleaner and more functional example of what I built: https://hackaday.com/2009/01/07/bouncing-ball-analog-compute...

Ductapemasteron Matrix Multiplication Inches Closer To Mythic Goal

The multipliers in CPUs are a mass of logic gates and are challenging to make work in a single cycle. While I believe it is possible with integer multiplication to do so, doing so with other larger data types might take multiple cycles. Division is even more complex, although not part of the question here.

Additions really can be done in 1 cycle, so it's possible to optimize by using them instead of multiplications in operations like this.

Here's a Berkeley EECS lecture on multiplier circuits if you want more info: https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eecs151/sp18/files/Lecture21...

Ductapemasteron New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacement design since 2012

This is dismissive and incorrect. iFixIt, the authors of this piece, provide everything someone needs to do such a replacement: tools, parts, and in-depth user guides. I've replaced an older-generation MacBook's battery using their stuff, and it worked fine. What more do you want?

Ductapemasteron Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

I have a relative who processes digital intakes for a CA ACLU chapter, and they get a huge number of interview-related complaints, which get referred directly to legal assistance who are interested in such cases.

My opinion is we likely don’t hear about it because each case is small, and companies have no incentive to publicize settlements.

Ductapemasteron The Polar Bear – Open-Source, Multipurpose CNC Machine with a Rotary Axis

I used to work at Kollmorgen — they really are top-notch for this kind of work, but there is a relatively large used market available on eBay. No need to buy direct from them, unless you want brand new stuff at a markup.

My uncle uses Kollmorgen drives and servos on his homemade CNC, all sourced from second-hand machines and people, so it's totally possible to do!

Ductapemasteron Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

I just learned about this recently. This is the guy who introduced it into the UK population when trying to reduce the population on his estate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul-F%C3%A9lix_Armand-Delille

Ductapemasteron NFTP, the World’s First Non-Fungible Toilet Paper

There's an episode of the podcast Planet Money that gives a relatively good overview within the context of a recent high-value art sale

Podcast: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/976513031/the-69-million-jpeg

Another episode of interest: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975450173/the-200k-nba-nft

Ductapemasteron M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board

Not affiliated with the project in any way, but I do know this one is launching soon! https://turingpi.com/

Edit: Spoke too soon, only works with the CM3/3+. Leaving it here in case anyone is interested.