Hacker News Reader

IntrepidWormon Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon

Although curiously, most processes theoretically capable of exposing large amounts of lunar mantle would likely generate a decent fraction of that heat just on their own merit.

IntrepidWormon The company building a rotating detonation engine is pushing the tech forward

It does feel disingenuous, but its also nothing new. Military research has always been the one of the primary driving forces behind critical technology.

Commercial tech is vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions, regulations, and setbacks. If you make something that will make killing a whole bunch of people easier, rest assured theres a global market for it.

IntrepidWormon Research shows plant-based polymers can disappear within seven months

Cotton also shrinks when wet and has poor thermal properties - polymer blend fabrics perform better in the cold, and are lighter and cheaper than wool. Goretex is wonderful stuff, but its also made of '"forever-plastics" and is known to slowly leach into runoff. Finding a polymer that can be cleanly manufactured for a competitive price with similar properties would be wonderful, as long as theres also a method for it to degrade safely when discarded.

IntrepidWormon EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after partial ban

I'm just spitballing here, but I'd wager that the human toll required to evolve effective resistance to regular and prolonged asbestos exposure is more than most of us would be willing to pay.

We already evolved these massive craniums filled with (to date) the most intricate and powerful general computers in the world - it seems like the solution to asbestos exposure is simply engineering a way to avoid it. No evolution necessary.

IntrepidWormon Bats of the Midnight Sun

Unless you are pouring bat milk on your Cheerios, I'd reckon you're not going to be affected by that particular fun fact.

The same can't be said for the legally acceptable portion of rat feces that makes its way into pretty much all processed grain products.

IntrepidWormon EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after partial ban

Sure, but ensuring all mechanics everywhere have access to use PPE, and then enforcing its correct use is way less effective in practice than removing the hazardous material from the workplace entirely. Being exposed to any fine particulate matter over long periods will be detrimental to health (we aren't evolved to breath large amounts of dust), but not every particulate is an acute carcinogen.

IntrepidWormon Hurried Thoughts: You're Wrong About Tidal-Locking

Since the cycle of stellar observation repeats each solar year, the observation would itself be a method of time keeping. One would need only to track the azimuth of a series of regularly positioned star constellations to determine time, and from there one could then ascertain location.

IntrepidWormon Bioluminescent petunias now available for U.S. market

More damning would be the perchlorates found in Martian soil, toxic to most Earth-plants, not to mention Earth-humans.

IntrepidWormon Bioluminescent petunias now available for U.S. market

im not sure I want a lithe hunter stalking through my house, marking every surface and attacking everything that breathes. I much prefer my dopey dander machines that sleep on my chest, flop around on the ground chasing the pocket lint they dug out of my trashcan, and superhero-leaping off their tree onto the couch to wake the other one with a screech.

If I owned a farm and needed a ratter, I'd likely feel different.

IntrepidWormon iPod 'squeaks' betray software secrets (2005)

Found this:

http://www.ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo

    I got an iPod for christmas. The ipodlinux project was one of the main reasons for my choice and so I started exploring the iPod as far as I was able to. I patched the bootloader and got some basic code to run but there was no way to access any hardware other than the two CPUs yet. To get the LCD, Clickwheel and the harddisk working we needed to reverse engineer the bootloader in the flashrom. But to do that we first had to find a way to get that code. Seems quite impossible without any knowlegde about the IO-Hardware but I found a solution...

IntrepidWormon iPod 'squeaks' betray software secrets (2005)

Not an expert, but my read of the article was that he had code execution already, but needed to dump the bootloader so he could gain access to peripherals. You could no doubt pull the chip and read it out with a programmer: this has been done for many other devices, i have no trouble believing you could do the same with an iPod. The method he developed is noninvasive, though, simply requiring a soundproof box and some analysis software. Thats what makes it cool, to me.

IntrepidWormon Window-swap – open a new window somewhere in the world

Hmm... You can run different CTF environments i to a VM, wouldnt take much to stream input back and forth to both machines. I just saw another item featured on HN for piped keyboard streams between multiple users on the same shell.

Sounds like glorious chaos.

IntrepidWormon The casino in your pocket

We're all irrational actors, though. Various life events drive people towards drug use. It doesnt have to be a rational decision: a split second moment of desperation is all it takes. And heroin is just _that_ addictive.

IntrepidWormon The casino in your pocket

To be perfectly clear, most addicts understand that their addiction is killing then, but caring about that pales in comparison to the addictive urge to continue using. It's not some cerebral choice- once addicted, you are no longer in control of your body, or it's urges.

With that said, we as a society do have a responsibility to protect children - free access to heroin (for instance) would be incredibly harmful to children, who have not formed the ability to properly assess risk. Allowing for unfettered access to heroin for adults is much more complicated. Given how easy it is for most adults in America to access the drug, I would argue we are already contending with many of the complicated factors of unrestricted access already. How to deal with those problems is something I don't have many good answers for.

IntrepidWormon Live worm found in Australian woman’s brain

As a person who lives in an area known to have Lyme, and as an avid hiker, it is not hard to do tick checks periodically. Ticks don't embed immediately, and generally there is a window of several hours up to about half a day where you can remove a tick safely with little to no danger of infection. Even then, not all ticks carry Lyme, and not all Lyme infected ticks will pass on the disease.

If you do find an embedded tick, monitor the site after removing and disinfecting. Talk to a doctor. Getting treated for Lyme the moment symptoms become apparent (the characteristic bullseye) is going to be much better for your health (and everyone elses) than preemptively guzzling Amoxicillin every year.

IntrepidWormon Cosmological time dilation in the early Universe

Also punching above my weight class here: isn't observation a function of time as well though, so a local observer would notice no difference in their perception of the passage of time? It's only across distance that the perception of time would change per relativity, so obseevation of self would remain the same while observation of distant objects would appear to experience time faster, while an outside observer would perceive their own time constant and that of the infalling observer to slow through time.

IntrepidWormon The World Bakes Under Extreme Heat

It is much more effective to do more with less. There will always be a need for air conditioning in some cases, but having 10 million single window units blasting walls of heat into a crowded city very quickly becomes an arms race where nobody wins (except perhaps the AC manufacturers).

Finding efficient ways to use our energy matters just as much as finding efficient ways to produce our energy. Keep in mind as well that many of the current methods of manufacturing green technologies only end up exporting their carbon to the global south.

IntrepidWormon A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars

I read parent as looking for sources that provide access to hi-res satellite imaging, without them needing to provide access to their wallet.

IntrepidWormon Undercover audio of a Tyson employee reveals “freerange” chicken is meaningless

Per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638249/

80% of antibiotics produced in the US are funneled into agriculture.

IntrepidWormon Hypersonic missiles are misunderstood

Certainly not, but one wouldn't need to catch every satellite launch for space weapon- one or two would be enough evidence to go public and warrant further scrutiny. There are a number of extremely savvy amateur astronomers across the world that track suspected military launches and publish their findings: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com

IntrepidWormon In England, Bar Hill’s ‘Skull Comb’ Is an Iron Age Mystery

Thats a long commute from the prehistoric Bristish Isles to the nearest Starbucks. I hope he bought in bulk.

IntrepidWormon CO2 Heat Pumps Found to Offer High Efficiency at Low Ambient Temperature

It won't be permanent sequestration, though, or even necessarily long term. When these units are retired, their contained volume of CO2 will be reintroduced to the air, one way or another. In terms of scale, even several kgs of CO2 per person taken as a sum would still be a rounding error.

I suppose technically you are correct: a vanishingly small amount of CO2 is captured temporarily in units like these. It just doesn't matter for the issues where we need it to matter.

IntrepidWormon U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

You have highlighted the core basis of Foucault's Boomarang: it doesn't matter the target of oppresive technologies and practices. Sooner or later, their scope will be turned on you.

IntrepidWormon The Rocky Horror Coffin Clock

https://xkcd.com/2758/

Another whimsical XKCD reference.

IntrepidWormon FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup

Following the exposure of COINTELPRO, the FBI dialed back its presence information gathering apparatus publicly, though critics of beaueau practices maintain similar programs have persisted through the following decades. Either way, 9/11 offered a chance to reinstate some of the FBI's old power and influence.

IntrepidWormon Microsoft broke a Chrome feature to promote Edge

So far, I've seen nothing in these comments promoting Chrome, or Google more generally. They (Google and Microsoft) are both the tech equivalent of boogeyman, but this article focuses on specific anticompetitive behaviour from Microsoft. I think it's safe to generalize and say that nobody here thinks Google a saint.

IntrepidWormon Vast new stores of water reported on the moon

There's no fluid bodies on the moon to cushion an incoming asteroid or comet - even if there was an initial gentle capture by the moons gravity, the object would either orbit indefinitely, be cast off, or meet a violent end, scattering atomized material across the surface in a wide debris field. This is why theres so much lunar dust coating the entire surface of the moon, and why that surface is so tremendously scarred. The ice is likely the result of countless violent collisions like this, and the ice crystals that manage to land in shaded craters accumulate while those exposed to the sun quickly sublime away.

IntrepidWormon Study reveals robotaxis causing surprisingly little disruption on streets

I doo feel that part of what defines what people will and won't tolerate within a disruption to their lives is spectacle. People seem to love to rail against the ordinary, while they crane their necks and gawk at the extraordinary.

Nobody stops to peer into hole full of infrastructure and machinery that's turned a 4 lane road into 1.

Everybody seems to want to stop and marvel at the upside down trailer engulfed in flames though, despite it being an equal inconvenience to their commute.

IntrepidWormon Hyperspectral camouflage is needed to hide from new electronic sensors

One wonders if the packets were US specification (a precise 2 - 4 grams) or the much looser Polish designation (5 - 10 grams). It's critical to get to the bottom of this: what is the SI standard for sugar sachet?

IntrepidWormon Xylazine, a dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis

What works for Singapore works for Singapore; the US is a very different country. As for the failings of the "War on Drugs" in the US, these have been well documented by multiple levels of social research.