NamTaf

When you’re very infected then even the most casual of swabs will pick it up. The OP is instead addressing that doing it in the very front of your nose may not get sufficient viral load to detect lower levels of infection. This is doubly problematic when combined with different newer strains (omicron for example was a big step down in test sensitivity), for which tests are not as sensitive towards by virtue of being designed for the OG strain.

My technique is to actually swab the back of my throat, then as deep in my nose as I can tolerate - I’m usually actually running out of stick on the swab before it’s too deep for me. I figure I want to grab any possible trace of virus if it’s there and I’d far prefer a false positive that disappears a day later than a false negative.

Not really to me. The standard ones tick some pretty convenient boxes:

- herbivores

- relatively quick to raise from birth to useful slaughtering

- high volume of usable meat from the animal (though husbandry undoubtedly guides this)

- produce useful secondary products (leather, milk, wool, eggs, garbage disposal, mechanical effort) - IMO probably the primary driver the further back you look, towards subsistence farming times

Yeh, other animals can hit some of these to some degree, but when you look at the main livestock choices it's fairly obvious to me why sheep, pigs and cows were chosen (in western Europe). If you're some family living on a farm back in the middle ages, you're only going to have capacity to raise a couple of animals and these give you the best return on your effort/resources.

Look at the central Asian Steppe region, where horses were absolute cornerstones of society for millennia due to the roaming structure of their living. Horse and horse products such as mare's milk are still products consumed there today, and it makes absolute sense that their ancestors found multiple uses for the animals their scarce resources went into keeping alive.

What’s more, at its highest speeds, the engine transitioned from conventional turbojet to mostly ramjet compression by extending/retracting a nose cone within each engine intake. Doing so moved the bow shockwave of the cone so that it reflected inside the engine intake, which had the effect of slowing the Mach 3 air down to subsonic speeds so it could be used for engine combustion. But even still, energies were so high that almost all the thrust came from afterburning - the engine combustion stages were basically just spinning as air went through them.

The whole plane is an engineering tour-de-force, especially considering it was designed with slide rules

Yup, at Mach 3+ the fuselage expands so significantly that gaps need to exist when it’s stationary, otherwise it’d buckle. So the gaps mean it leaks fuel when stationary.

I think it might be. It's apparently not the real website for Bus Pirate, if you read sibling comments.

Kinda crazy what effect different albedos have, isn’t it? :)

I used a Windows desktop at the time, so that wasn’t an option. My only webcam was also 320x240 from the USB1 era.

Quite tangential, but during lockdown I was looking for a way to use my iPhone as a webcam and came across this project:

https://vdo.ninja/

It started out as being a means to send a video feed into OBS[1], which is how I rigged the webcam input, but as the project grew, it expanded to being a way for me to spin up desktop video and audio sharing in a browser, sorta like Zoom, etc. This let me run virtual movie nights with people remotely.

Whilst it's possible to use it via the 'create a room' interface, you can also do it all via URL parameters which I found much more flexible and robust. See here[2].

You create source and recipient URLs and then it just automagically makes it all work via WebRTC. I was able to for example make a source that captured my VLC window and sent out the video and audio, and then two destination URLs which received the source video and audio, but also sent their own audio to one another. This meant we could hear and watch the movie but also talk to each other via our microphones. All within browsers.

I've got no relation to this project besides thinking it's really awesome.

[1]: Used for streaming your computer online, e.g. on Twitch. https://obsproject.com/

[2]: https://docs.vdo.ninja/master/how-does-it-work

My parents have an early '50s MG, which they rarely drive. For most of my adult life, I've lived about an hour away from them so I'd sometimes take it out if I was there. Needless to say, it had a never-ending list of quirks due to being so old and also rarely being driven, but it's a lovely old car all the same.

One day, I dropped by to say hi, but they were both out. I decided instead to take the car for a spin around the local beachfront to give it a turn over. A few minutes into the drive, I started to lose engine power, so I pulled over. The engine then completely died on me, so I let it sit for a moment before trying to kick it over again.

The fuel pump is such that when you first turn the key to power the accessories, you hear it go tickticktick tick tick.. tick... tick...... - the ticks slow as the pump builds up fuel pressure. It's a good audio cue as to when you can then turn it to ignition and kick the engine over. In this case though, the ticking wasn't slowing - just the same tickticktickticktick. I tried to kick it over several times, but no matter which deity I invoked, no luck.

Empty fuel tank then. I checked the fuel level (walk to the tank on the back and poke a special bit of wood in to see how full it is) but lo and behold, plenty there. So I let it sit for a few minutes more and try again, hoping it may be to do with a flooded carburetor after my several attempts to restart it. The same: tickticktickticktick.

I gave Dad a call, describe the problem, tell him what I'd done to solve it and that I'd concluded the fuel pump must be cactus. I asked if he was going to be home soon to come give me a tow home. At this point, I learnt that he was some hours away and Mum was overseas, so no luck there. As I'm mentally preparing to push the car home for over an hour, he interrupts - "open the bonnet, grab the spanner out of the toolbox there and give the pump several hard whacks".

"...what?"

"Beat the bejeezus out of the fuel pump a few times."

So I did, and I turned back on the accessories. Ticktickticktick ticktick tick tick... tick.... tick.......

Dad then explains that this problem's been around for decades. Very occasionally, a bubble of air will end up in the fuel feed line. It then blocks the pump, which can't clear it, but a bit of suitably percussive maintenance consistently dislodges it and the pump can draw fuel in again.

As they say, old cars definitely have character, and I think that comes about largely because people can understand, fault-find and fix these sorts of analogue issues that arise. New cars are much more reliable and don't face nearly as many random faults, but those that do happen are almost impossible for Joe Public to resolve on the side of the road.

That doesn’t account for the fact different esports demand different requirements, just as a squash booth isn’t used for tennis.

CS for example is also Valve but does not use booths. I think a major part of that is that the delay between audience reaction to an event and the event unfolding is much shorter, so the crowd can’t give as much away as quickly.

I so rarely have to verify integrity or have a download error out that I’m honestly suspicious of your hardware.

Like, I’ll do the above less than once a year.

Lutris really helps in that regard. For very minor additional janitoring, it can recreate much of the same plug-and-play, Windows-on-Linux seamlessness that you get with Steam.

They're the bosses

This is a tautology. What does the T in HTML stand for?

It’s all text if you split enough hairs.

Also used as a plot point in the most recent season of Der Pass / Pagan Peak.

Australia is not the example to hold up for ‘cheap’. Cigarette taxes are amongst the highest there of anywhere.

I also don’t share your pessimism with legalisation. It’s already tremendously easy to get a medical cannabis prescription, which is a route several of my mates have gone down. Moreover, look at the recent changes for MDMA and psilocybin therapy, in which Australia is a world leader.

I instead think the major laggard will be around roadside testing - that’s where Australia’s strict driving whilst intoxicated framework will run up against the fact that current tests will show a positive result far after any effects are gone.

Spitballing here, but I wonder whether the relatively unsophisticated understanding of aerodynamics meant controlling for clean, laminar air behind the plane was much too difficult?

E: perhaps reading your linked thread before making this comment would’ve been wise of me :)

That's what struck me most from this article too! 3 years?! That's a huge capital investment for very little service life.

I had naively expected at least something like 10 years, even in LEO.

...you thought someone was going to be able to get a critical amount of fissile material (originally plutonium) and bring it together using a machine???

I cannot possibly express how thankful I am that doing so is just about impossible for any layman.

It gets even better. fwlr, in a comment further down that thread, expands:

> I think the “tension axis” is more likely to be fruitful in a different way, where we find some structure e.g. a crystalline formation that happens to hold atoms apart with just the right amount of tension. But this is all very speculative - the “tension axis” is just a random thought I had while reading the article!

They hit the nail on the head pretty well, I’d say!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36487946

That's going to be peanuts against the reckoning of having incredibly population-dense places like Bangladesh, etc. mass-displaced. I think it's going to make the 2010s migrant crisis look like peanuts.

From a non-US perspective, hearing/reading about how tax returns work there is some kind of crazy Byzantine nightmare.

In Aus, I file it through a free, online government portal.

Most of my stuff is pre-filled: personal income, social support payments, bank interest, dividends/managed fund distributions, etc. Previous years' deductions are rolled over with relevant data pre-filled, which then prompts me to fill in the blanks through a series of steps. There's relevant depreciation calculators for various work-related purchases (laptops, cars, etc.) that all align with the tax office's advice around depreciation durations and rates.

All of this is known because most (i.e. bigger) companies are required to hold your tax file number and report on salaries paid, pension contributions and withheld tax. If you don't give them your TFN, they tax you at the highest rate and then you will get the difference back upon filing a return. If it's not pre-filled, you get your data on a payment summary at the end of financial year and just put it in manually - again, it guides you through this. For a standard white collar worker, because my employer knows how much they're paying me, they can accurately estimate the total income I'll get over a year and thus accurately withhold tax. This means my tax return is generally pretty much a wash until deductions or extra income starts moving it, but that's only a couple of percent usually.

For stuff like bank interest, you can choose to give them your TFN, or you can just enter it manually and the return process will calculate it out in the process.

You can of course delete and re-enter any of the pre-filled information if it's somehow wrong. You're not under any obligation to use the pre-filled data.

The upshot of this is that for the overwhelming majority of people who don't have complicated tax arrangements, it's entirely possible to do it all by yourself, for free. You are of course always able to have an accountant do it for you (the system has processes for them to file a return on your behalf). The underlying principle is that everyone can in theory do their own tax return no matter how complex, though of course that means reading up on a lot of the tax code (the tax office tries to provide relevant examples of how the various rules work). But if you're a standard white collar employee working a 9-5 with some basic investments (e.g. your pension and a small stock portfolio, maybe an investment property if you want to throw in some non-prefilled complexity, and you've got some basic deductions such as through donations and work expenses) it's going to be pretty easy to do with a few hours' research, max.

Hell, I think I could still even use the paper forms for this all, but why?

I suspect that US readers will, on average, baulk at this level of government oversight and the idea that big brother sees all of your income, etc. but the reality is it's still possible to do cash-in-hand jobs and lie on your return so if you're in for a penny re: committing tax fraud, you may as well be in for a pound. Besides, the main way of doing the dodgy on your tax return in Australia is via declaring deductions that you're not fully entitled to (e.g. 100% deduction of your mixed work/personal phone, rather than just the pro-rata amount of use for work) and hoping that you don't stand out too much on a statistical analysis to be audited.

That's a very load-bearing assumption.

Interesting that it's cracking down on Shadowsocks with obfuscation plugins. SS w/ v2ray was more or less the gold standard when I was going there from 2017 to 2019.

Back then, certain times (early June, big government meetings) would see a crackdown on VPNs where, so far as I could tell, they just threw down crude blanket blocks on anything they sorta-kinda knew was a VPN but couldn't procedurally target-block. It would (usually) still connect but be rate-limited to essentially nothingness.

I always got the vibe that they sort of informally tolerated VPNs above a certain threshold of sophistication, figuring that they were more interested in blocking the low-hanging fruit that the unwashed masses could easily use, rather than something more sophisticated that only a few techno-nerds could utilise. As other posters have said, they'd know who was doing it and preferred to come knocking with a rubber hose if those people caused too much in the way of issues.

The counter-argument is that in some circumstances, is no certainty that a fire will not break out at some arbitrary time after the plane has landed and come to a stop. And if one does break out, there is no certainty around how long there is between ignition and Shit Going Badly, so the prevailing result is to get the plane stationary, get everyone off as quickly as possible, and then assess the situation.

edit for clarity: I understand the issue you face regarding your medication being trapped on the plane and believe airlines should indeed have a duty of care to ensure you have rapid access to replacement medication at their expense, but I'm specifically addressing why they have the policy of telling people to not grab carry-on items during evacuation.

To be fair, a significant number of Australian legislators are practically owned by a particular AU/US media firm, so it's no great surprise that they can be duped/ordered into trying this.

No, it’s not easier to work with, unless you consider your work done completely once it’s manufactured without a thought to the ongoing testing and inspection regime required. And even then, laying CF is more niche than welding metal.

Carbon fibre is a ply. Plies are much harder to nondestructively inspect for flaws. That is an immediate, obvious risk in a use case involving cyclic pressure of hundreds of atmospheres. It is also brittle, so strain deformation does not occur nearly as much before fracture.

Welds are a vastly more well-understood feature that is possible to easily design around and - more critically - inspect afterwards. Metals also stretch before snapping, which is why you can go and measure the spacing of links on your bike chain and know when it’s time to replace it. All of this makes through-life maintenance and inspection much easier.

Carbon fibre was an incredibly poor design choice, selected to prioritise cost over safe operation.

Agreed. 'Just' is code for 'I don't understand the nuances of the topic at hand' in my books too, and it was here on HN in particular that I came to realise that.

I now actively try to avoid using that turn of phrase, and when I catch myself about to say/saying it, I check myself and remind myself that I'm also susceptible to this blind spot.

This is why I hammered out a bash script to do my music :)

Thankfully 99% of my visual media was already in the format, but there’s numerous utilities that can bulk rename media in the necessary format

On the wiki...

> I shouldnt have write access to do this i'm just some random internet guy, maybe think about fixing the permissions here

Whoops!

https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/wiki