Hacker News Reader

HackOfAllTradeson Ted Cruz Proposes Sandbox Act to Waive Federal Regulations for AI Developers

Wow. Just how much does he have invested in them?

HackOfAllTradeson Forgejo: A self-hosted lightweight software forge

Clearly Postgres is not a good database and you will wisely use any other. I can see real advantages to this. It saves you so much effort and time. In fact, it allows you to make no effort at all.

HackOfAllTradeson Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US

Their 'right' to do that was probably somewhere in unreadable ALL CAPS on a small piece of paper at the bottom of the shipping box that the end user never got.

Fuck 'em. Isolate your local net from the world and only let through devices you trust. Plenty of ways to do that, even at low expense. But you will have to make the effort or pay someone else to do it.

HackOfAllTradeson Tell HN: Chromium forks for legacy platforms are disappearing from GitHub

Could this be tied to Google's push to force everyone to use Manifest 3, and nerf Add Blockers?

HackOfAllTradeson First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

Wrong answer. > How can costs be reduced?

Stop building nuclear reactors.

HackOfAllTradeson First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

"If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity."

Yes, of course. I can only imagine the deaths and destruction that tsunami would have caused if it were a wind or solar plant.

/SARCASM you idiot!

HackOfAllTradeson First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

I live in Georgia, and the only thing this plant will do is raise our rates.

It's late (of course) and HUGELY over budget (also of course). The planners always knew it would be way late and way over budget. None of that mattered, because the 'regulatory' system guarantees they get it all back (and more) from the rate payers.

It was also painfully obvious WHEN THIS WAS PLANNED that building Solar and/or Wind would get done sooner and far less expensively.

HackOfAllTradeson The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

Can't wait to replace all the resistors in my PSU with SuperConducting Resistors. :-)

HackOfAllTradeson The deindustrialization of Germany

Same here. It reads like a huge list of cherry-pickings.

You'd think that quoting facts would strengthen ones argument, all these tiny and sometimes very specific facts with no context had the opposite effect.

HackOfAllTradeson The deindustrialization of Germany

I'm terribly suspicious when an article quotes a CEO saying "profits aren't where they should be".

God only knows what he thinks his corporate profits "should be", but I'd bet it's a lot higher that you or I would guess.

HackOfAllTradeson People running Windows 11, are you all running Sluggish Incarnate?

The HDD may be having to retry reads on weak/bad sectors. Run Steve Gibson's SpinRight on it. It spots sectors that are having problems but not yet totally failed, and tells the controller to swap them out for spares (which is what the controller would do when they completely failed.)

It also works on SSDs, and yes, SSDs have the same problem because the drive controllers were not written from scratch.

(No affiliation here. It's just a tool I use because it works.)

HackOfAllTradeson Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

Nope. You can turn telemetry off and not see any improvement. Simple reason: your app isn't waiting for telemetry to be sent.

HackOfAllTradeson All programming philosophies are about state

If you trivialize everything, everything looks trivial.

HackOfAllTradeson Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

Why do people keep falling for this? This same fraud used to pop up only every 10 years. Now it's 5 or less.

I'm a PhD chemist. Please consider this: While plastics and oil are both hydrocarbons they have this important difference. Liquid hydrocarbons have short carbon chains and lots of hydrogen. Plastics have very LONG carbon chains, usually with many double bonds, and very little hydrogen.

That is why, when you heat plastic it decomposes into char -- as in charcoal. It is IMPOSSIBLE to produce oil, even theoretically, without adding a source of hydrogen.

A few centuries ago these same fraudsters would be selling you a way to change Iron into Gold.

HackOfAllTradeson Don't Read History for Lessons

Lousy article. For example, the author complains about a supposed 'lesson learned' that says (shortened) "If so-and-so happens it may be because of A, or it may be because of B". His complaint is "except that it may be because of C or D".

But the 'lesson' he presented never claimed to be an exclusive either-or. It just says "here are two possible explanations for something".

There's sloppy thinking like this throughout. Thumbs down for me.

HackOfAllTradeson Tesla FSD Beta almost causes a head-on collision [video]

Following that thought... confused it into thinking what? (Allowing for anthropomorphic use of 'thought'.)

Really, the key here is that it's on-screen model shows the yellow lines. It must have become terminally confused to plot that course. Looks like it threw away the model and the rules and just decided to end it all.

Headline: "Tesla computer, in fit of depression, commits murder/suicide". (With a number of !s appropriate to the publishing venue.)

What's the name for the slash marks sometimes found on suicide victims, where they tried to cut their own throat or wrists several times before they succeed? Hesitation marks? Maybe that's what we're seeing here. /facetious

HackOfAllTradeson IBM's Asshole Test

I think of these as a "Star Trek" test. You know: Wesley is confronted with "his deepest fear" during entrance exams for Star Fleet, Counselor Troi can't pass a holodeck test for "command responsibilities" until she's willing to order Jordi to do a suicide repair. I'm sure there were others. The common theme is supposed to be that the obvious test is a fake and they're really testing for something else. They're all bullshit. Every single one of them falls apart as soon as people start talking about them with each other, not to mention they're just begging to be abused by the testing authority, or entice corruption.

HackOfAllTradeson Comic Helvetic, an Unholy Combo of Comic Sans and Helvetica

I thought we had all agreed to cancel April Fools Day.

HackOfAllTradeson Markov Chains for programmers

First thought upon reading the title: "Surely you could pay them to stay."

HackOfAllTradeson Ask HN: Have you had Covid? How bad was it?

Dec 2020: Two weeks of horrible flu symptoms for me & my wife (in our 60s). After that she needed oxygen, so 2 weeks in hospital and 2 more weeks in Rehab. I have Long Covid symptoms of fatige and lack of stamina still, 1 year later.

HackOfAllTradeson Spy camera detection using smartphone time-of-flight sensors

  Also on Amazon 'Worldoor CC308+ Multi-Detector Full-Range All-Round Detector For Hidden Camera / IP Lens/ GMS BUG / RF Signal Detector Finder , CC308 + detector hidden mini camera/IP camera/general manager/radio frequency signal detector instrument' <$20.

And several similar hidden camera detectors. I have no idea how well/badly this sort of device works.

HackOfAllTradeson Spy camera detection using smartphone time-of-flight sensors

  A stand-alone Single-Point LIDAR might be used to remove the high-end phone requirement.  Should interface to a phone USB port with a simple UART/I2C-USB adapter.
  Search Amazon.com for LIDAR finds 'Lidar Range Finder Sensor Module TF-Luna, Single-Point Micro Ranging Module 0.2 to 8m Compatible with Pixhawk, Arduino and Rasppbarry Pi with UART / I2C Communication Interface' $25.
  And 'MakerFocus TFmini-s Micro Lidar Module 0.1-12M Lidar Range Finder Sensor Obstacle Avoidance Sensor Tiny Module 1000Hz Single Point UART I2C IO Compatible with Pixhawk Ar duino and Raspberry Pi' $39.  
  The 2nd one is waterproof.

HackOfAllTradeson Bonhoeffer on Stupidity

@pugio (Interpreting Bonhoeffer) "If you put your fear of God (in other words, some power higher than, and distinctly external to, any social group) you begin to liberate yourself from caring too much about what other people think."

And as such he is making exactly the same mistake, because he is assuming that his God is a higher power, when in fact his God is defined by his community.

Where did he learn what it means to live "The responsible life before God"? From the community he grew up in of course. (My assumption is that God did not appear and teach him in person.)

When stripped of the appeal to the authority of God, his argument becomes "My community values independent thought over group conformity."

I totally agree with him. I just don't find it a solid argument.

HackOfAllTradeson “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

>We are very sorry to hear this concern.

..."Because if we're lucky tomorrow, we won't have to deal with questions like yours ever again." --Firesign Theater, "I Think We're All Bozos on the Bus"

HackOfAllTradeson Einstein's missed opportunity to rid us of 'spooky actions at a distance'

The idea that Measurement = "interaction with the macroscopic environment" is part of the Copenhagen interpretation, not a requirement of QM itself.

Aside: (Personally, I see this more as Bohr's way of dodging questions he had no answer to, and not a viable way to think about Quantum Mechanics. A better answer would have been "I don't know. Let's figure it out." But that was impossible for political reasons. Bohr was being attacked by Einstein for 's sake. He can be forgiven for adopting Ali's "rope-a-dope" tactics if he felt that Einstein was trying to destroy his entire field in its infancy. But I find "there is no quantum world" simply unacceptable.)

Now to answer your question as best I can, an interaction must collapse the wave function when it is required to fulfill a conservation rule. For example, if an electron is captured by a nucleus it becomes bound and emits a photon. This is an interaction that must conserve momentum, angular momentum, energy, and charge. Because of that, the electron can no longer be represented by a non-localized wave function. The universe must concentrate those properties down to a point in order to "do the accounting" necessary for the conservation rules.

No, I don't know how it does that. But then, NONE of the available interpretations answer that question. This indicates to me we are thinking about it wrong.

What I like about Stuckey's paper is that it adds another factor: besides conservation rules the universe seems to require that "measurements" obey the Relativity Principle (No Preferred Frame of Reference). I have yet to figure out how to incorporate that.

HackOfAllTradeson Einstein's missed opportunity to rid us of 'spooky actions at a distance'

When I wrote my original post I seriously considered adding the restriction to 'entangled spin states', but then decided not to.

First, if confused more than clarified things. And second, I suspect the principle does apply to all forms of entanglement.

Now if I could only prove that, I'd be on my way to Stockholm. :-)

HackOfAllTradeson Einstein's missed opportunity to rid us of 'spooky actions at a distance'

In Quantum Mechanics things travel as waves and interact as particles. Between interactions, everything is described by the Schrodinger Wave Function, which evolves to include every possible path. But at the point of an interaction the wave function must collapse to satisfy conservation rules.

Consider an electron fired at a dual slit with a phosphor screen. While traveling from the electron gun, thru the slits, to the screen, the electron is described by a Wave Function. It has no fixed position or momentum. The Schrodinger wave passes through both slits and interferes with itself on the other side. The wave function evolves into a series of lines.

But when the electron interacts with the screen it always appears as a single point. It must do so by the laws of conservation. At the interaction it must have a specific location and momentum in order for there to be conservation of charge, momentum, energy, etc.

This interaction is enough to 'collapse the wave function'. No 'observation' is required.

How does this happen? There is no localized mechanism that can possibly make this work. The conservation laws are not local restrictions. They are universal.

Please note that this is my own explanation of now QM works, and does not necessarily reflect the official position of any school of thought. It does, however, reflect the actual use of Quantum Mechanics, in that systems evolve via the Schrodinger Equation and interactions must obey conservation laws. And No, it cannot explain how entanglement works.

HackOfAllTradeson Einstein's missed opportunity to rid us of 'spooky actions at a distance'

Dr. W. M. Stuckey shows that the origin of quantum entanglement is none other than Einstein's own Principle of Relativity (No Preferred Frame of Reference).

Einstein's famous 1905 paper on Relativity applied this principle to Translational Frames, showing it requires the Universal constant c (speed of light) to be the same in all such frames. Were it not, the frame in which c was highest would be the only frame at rest.

But the same principle must require there to be no Preferred Orientation. This leads to the requirement that Planck's constant h be the same in all frames. If the Stern-Gerlach experiment could give results between +h and -h, then the orientation producing the maximum value would be a preferred frame.

And because of that, when Alice and Bob measure entangled quantum particles, their combined results must violate Bell's inequality.

But to my mind, the biggest take-away is that Einstein's Principle of Relativity absolutely requires that conservation can only be on average.

All right, that's a ridiculously condensed summary. Enough to make your head spin :-)

The title paper is for general audiences, and references the original paper at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72817-7.pdf

HackOfAllTradeson Why So Much Science Is Wrong

This smells like politically motivate BS. Science gets everything wrong, so it's OK if we just believe whatever we want to about the Pandemic.

For example, on the first page of this article, follow the link titled "We Must Choose: Liberty or Lockdown". There you will learn that the "CDC acknowledged that only six percent of US deaths came from Covid-19 alone."

You can find a good explanation of the facts behind this lie on Ars Technica. In short, on death certificates Doctors may list a Primary/Immediate Cause and any Contributing or Underlying Causes. For example the immediate cause of death may be heart failure with an underlying cause of Covid-19. Or a doctor could list Covid-19 as the immediate cause and something else as a contributing cause. In both cases, the person died of Covid-19. What the CDC reported is that on 6% of the death certificates doctors listed ONLY Covid-19.

But for 100% of those death certificates list Covid-19 as the cause of death.

What those assholes are saying is "Oh, your mother would be dead anyway - she had diabetes." When in fact she would NOT be dead except for Covid-19.

To quote Star Trek's Q: "Of course you'll still die. Just not right away."

HackOfAllTradeson Principles for Naming a Brand

Damn. I misread the title as "How to Name a BAND