Hacker News Reader

KuiNon Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?

https://olympics.com/en/paris-2024/venues/aquatics-centre

> From swimming lessons to recreational use and high-level competitions, the Aquatics Centre will be multifunctional. From July 2025, the Aquatics Centre will become a vast multi-sports facility open to all, including two pools (50m and 25m), a fitness area, bouldering area, paddle tennis section and pitches for team sports. It will also have an adjustable floor to serve a variety of purposes (swimming lessons for babies and children, etc.). The Aquatics Centre will also be the state-of-the-art facility that the French swimming community has been looking forward to for decades. The French Swimming Federation will be able to host national and international competitions in its four indoor disciplines. The Centre will also provide a best-in-class federal training facility for leading French athletes and will notably be home to the country’s diving centre

KuiNon Coincidentally-identical waypoint names foxed UK air traffic control system

Here's the full preliminary incident report if anyone wants to read it:

https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/NERL%20Major%20Incident...

Obviously concerning that a single (perfectly valid) flight plan can take down both the primary and backup. Reject the flight plan that the system can't understand, you've got 4 hours for someone on front-line support to be able to work out the correct path and enter it manually? Meanwhile it'd be good if the system continued to operate.

Futher concerns about first and second line support being unable to find in the logs the cause or even the flight plan being processed when the systems failed. Had to bring in the 3rd party developers to look at "lower-level" logs to find out what happened. If your monitoring/logging isn't good enough that the first responder can't work out at least what the system was doing when it failed, that's a significant problem.

KuiNon Canada’s Big Flex in Space

For more context on how big a deal this is, the A220 is quite widely seen as the future of short-haul aviation. Airlines are moving towards a point-to-point model instead of hub & spoke (especially in Europe), using smaller planes with lower capacity, but flying more frequently, together with best in class fuel efficiency (with the price of jet fuel only really going to go in one direction in the next decades) means the 220 is very, very popular. Airbus is expecting to sell 7,000 of them in the next 20 years. That's coming close to the incredibly successful A320 family (including A318, A319, A320 and A321 models) which has sold just over 10,000 planes since 1986.

KuiNon Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

Archive.org was knocked offline the other day due to some AI startup scraping it to death. It’s not a good thing.

KuiNon Mach-9 12-passenger jet will fly from New York to Tokyo in one hour

It claims it will use rotating detonation engines, which are currently at a NASA tech demo stage. At best. They're super complex, currently not very stable. It's long, long way from becoming stable & reliable enough to be used as plane engines or being commercially available. The current record is 10 minutes firing.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/feature/nasa-validates...

KuiNon Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

My favourite thing about the Emailer is it was often stylised E-m@iler, which is the most incredibly 2000s branding.

KuiNon Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery

Restless Leg Syndrome is absolute hell. Combined with insomnia it's nearly killed me a few times. I think a lot of people (including many doctors I've dealt with) underestimate it due to it's rather benign sounding name.

KuiNon DIY 1,500W solar power electric bike (2022)

Did you ever share that paper publicly? I'd be interested in reading it

KuiNon Twitter to Charge $20 a Month for Blue Tick Verification, Reports Suggest

"Musk has reportedly told engineers to have the project completed by November 7 or else they'll be fired"

Wow.

KuiNon Victoria III – First Impressions

Strongly agree with what you're saying. I think they've brought out a good game with a solid foundation for turning it into a great game with tweaks and expansions. I've put 26 hours into it since Tuesday and I'm loving it, so they've definitely done something right.

Agree with the tech tree, it's too short and you likely won't vary in the techs you get if you're playing a country with reasonable research points. I'd love some more country-specific flavour and actions; I understand folks don't want to be railroaded (having options to play a country any way you want is great), but it feels a little empty at the moment. Of course this can be modded in and filled out with DLC down the road.

If you enjoy this era of history or enjoy other Paradox games, I'd strongly recommend giving it a go.

KuiNon Intel Core I9-13900K and I5-13600K Review: Raptor Lake Brings More Bite

TL;DR Intel's top SKU beats AMD's top SKU by a small margin in some tests, the opposite in others. But it uses a huge amount of extra power to be competitive.

'In our testing, power consumption topped out at a absurd 335 Watts, over 100W more than the Ryzen 9 7950X'

KuiNon iPad Pro M2

I see a lot of people using an iPad for music alongside a proper computer with a full featured DAW. You don't need a mouse or keyboard shortcuts for idea generation, sketching out rough concepts from inspiration on the go or playing with some of the pretty unique synths & other tools available on iPad. For modular synth simulation I've found iPad with Pencil to be a much much better UI for me than using a mouse.

KuiNon Moving from React to htmx

It may have improved significantly since I last used it (9 months ago?) but mypy was a world away from the ergonomics, quality of tooling and maturity of TypeScript.

KuiNon AMD Launches Ryzen 7000 Series Desktop Processors with Zen 4 Architecture

Yeah there are no major microarchitectural changes that we're aware of for these chips. Bigger L2$, support for AVX-512 (kinda ... double pumping 256bit units), possibly wider front-end but not a huge amount more; it's primarily the new process making the difference.

KuiNon Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

Join the waiting list to try the Arc beta by The Browser Company. Very fresh take on a browser, quite a bit of your list, particularly bookmark behaviour, is in Arc.

KuiNon Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

Yeah, the drought in Europe has dried up or made too warm the rivers used to cool French nuclear plants.

KuiNon A chess robot in Moscow has broken the finger of its human opponent

This is a falsely attributed quote. There's zero record of Zhukov (or anyone, particularly none of the various people this quote has been attributed to) saying this. It's a lazy stereotype of the CCCP's strategy during WWII and absolutely incorrect.

KuiNon Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

The UK absolutely required children to wear masks in schools in various situations. Schools were closed for significant periods of time as well.

KuiNon Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)

> a video game known for its super-realistic simulations of real vehicles and tracks

Don't let the hardcore simmers read this!

KuiNon I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

My favourite hardware music is this Radiohead cover from 2008. Blew my mind at the time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ

KuiNon Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)

> the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress

Do you have a source for this alleged fact?

KuiNon Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

My greatest frustration with UK supermarkets is the illusion of choice. You'll find metres of shelving with the same product in different branding / price points. Went looking for Thai Jasmine rice, but the rice section is just 40 variants of Basmati, & one box of Arborio. There's 5 metres of fridges packed with fish but it's all Cod, Haddock and Salmon in various guises.

If you want any ingredient that's remotely off the beaten track (and I'm not talking super exotic stuff, basics herbs like Sage are hard to find) you've got to go Waitrose or specialty shops.

KuiNon Heatwave in India breaks records, still worsening

Supermarkets in the UK are already rationing sunflower oil due to the shortage. A lot of concern about food prices in general as a large amount of our processed food is produced with sunflower oil.

KuiNon Payment startup Bolt sued by its most prominent customer

Willing to share which merchants so we know who to avoid in future?

KuiNon My take on Elon's offer for Twitter

> UNHR estimates 2,000 civilian deaths so far in Ukraine

This number is nowhere close to being accurate. UNHCR "believes that the actual figures are considerably higher" [0]. More than 900 dead discovered since the liberation of the areas around Kyiv [1]. And we've not yet had the opportunity to count the dead in Mariupol, or Russian controlled areas.

> And you probably didn’t post anything about it on your Facebook, right?

Millions in the West spoke out with horror and revulsion at the death tolls in the 9/11 Wars.

[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2022/04/ukraine-civilian-casua... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/15/number-of-civi...

KuiNon BBC: Killings in Bucha are deliberate massacre – Ukraine

Yes, obviously.

KuiNon OneWeb will resume satellite launches with SpaceX as the launch provider

Roscosmos are working on a launch system with a re-usable first stage, Soyuz-7 or Amur [1]. The renders they've released are basically just a tweaked Falcon 9, except this one will be re-usable 100 times over!

Whether Amur will ever fly, or even become hardware ... I'm not holding my breath.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/russian-space-corpor...

KuiNon UK rejects opening borders to Ukraine refugees

So far there have been only 50 visas granted. There are UK citizens that personally drove to Ukraine to get family members out that are stuck in Calais unable to return. It's not good enough.

KuiNon Ask HN: Getting film developed cheap in the US

> Also, digital is in fact a superior medium in 99.99999 percent of cases...

Citation needed.

KuiNon Run Ordinary Rails Apps Globally (2021)

A bit off topic, but your game's brilliant fun. Just did the worldwide one, got a semi-respectable 23/34. Funny how easy it is to identify North American cities vs European ones. Will definitely share with some friends, great work!