Torkel

”Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”…

Does anything happen to gas in a pipeline that makes pressure increase? Could it be a lack of or poor monitoring of pressure that caused it?

"NASA is not being run by Germans anymore."

Literally laghed out loud on this one and had to explain to coworkers what was so funny :)

Yeah, not a good article at all - I bailed half way through and went to the comments here in hope of a tldr/abstract…

HDMI out? Makes me curious what tech they have on the glasses vs in the dongle/box… maybe it’s convenient to use hdmi cable’s twisted pairs to just take the csi/mipi from the cameras straight out and then do processing externally?

I think it’s liquid oxygen/methane that goes into the engine. So backfilling with some other gas in the gas part of that should be ok.

No expert though :)

In those video games people are in general playing as heroes. If million of kids where playing games where the "protagonist" was a school shooter then yes I believe we would see an increase in school shootings.

The article is about audio cassettes in Egypt and how Sadat banned them. (after a cursory glance-through)

The headline is misleading. I thought I was in for reading about some open source version of Ableton or something about laws and sampling/remix culture :)

The reason is that there will be more children abused. People who watch things will have a tendency to do that thing. Analogy: we had "fight club" fights outside bars 20 years ago.

I think it makes perfect sense to ban child porn, and strongly support it.

Hardcore History podcast, ”Supernova of the East”.

Chances are most HN readers who upvote this story has already listened to this, but if there’s someone who missed it… go listen :)

Can we eat them then?

Let’s say they manage to create a population in Australia. With an ever so small surplus, we could take that and eat it. Prices for legal rhino burger would probably be insane, right? I mean - that and horns are why they are poached. And legal horns could be a thing then, too.

Seems like the best option for any animal’s long term survival is to become human food or amusement.

Best advent of code I’ve done was the ”int-code computer” one. So good - one recurring theme of making a computer and in the end running games on it! Super excited for this year’s edition :)

”cows can be trained to navigate using the collar within 4-5 days” Umm, that sounds… labor intensive?

Multi-lane bike ”highways” would be awesome. What matters most (imo) is that all these riders are unprotected, and should be kept far apart from cars. If the unprotected, single rider, narrow vehicles want do drive at vastly different speeds then multiple lanes seems like a good solution.

Yeah, my thoughts too…

Inspecting coredumps with command line gdb, feels like title should be ”like it’s 2001”. Because that’s when I learned gdb :P

Explorers do not become explorers from a wish for "easily living a very fulfilling life". There was nothing guaranteed about the quality of life offered by the great women and men who traveled the seas in ages past, and indeed many of them perished.

The year is 1492. You're imagining standing on the shore of a vast continent, unexplored by your people. The only feeling/thought you have at that imagined moment is “What the hell am I doing here?”

That is perfectly reasonable! But I hope you can appreciate that the imagined feeling/thought is not shared by everyone.

Latency is a bitch. So remote hands from earth is most likely a no-go, for this reason alone.

And if you bring astronauts close, then I guess that some EVAs in existing suits starts looking appealing vs developing those remote hands.

Good question... wikipedia did not yield an immediate answer.

Could there be an "area effect", where one fog trap decreases yields of adjacent fog traps?

"A typical trap, with a 40-square-metre collecting area, yields about 200 litres a day. That is enough to supply around 60 people with drinking water. Such a collector costs $1,000 or so, and will last a decade."

To me that sounds cheap already. 13c/month/person. $1.37/m3. I pay more than that per m3 (Sweden).

To scale things up for agriculture or forests, I would assume a more industrial scale for the whole thing would make more sense. Feels like it could lead to an order of magnitude in lower cost - mainly because $1000/40m2 seems expensive. Growing forests in the desert using fog-water... could it be something for Elon's carbon capture contest? I don't know about relevant data points to make the calculations - how much water do you need to grow a forest in a desert? How much co2 does a forest capture when "completed"? How much time does that take?

Glass-to-glass latencies are extremely dependent on what cameras and displays are used.

Common 4G link latencies are 15-30 ms. With fast cameras and displays we can get sub-50-ms glass-to-glass over 4G.

For sure something like this should easily get lower than 110 ms, if care is taken to use fast cameras and displays.

”A death sentencing system based on racial dynamics and then amplified by self-referential dynamics is inconsistent with equal protection of the law, but this describes the United States system well.”

I entered Japan close to two weeks ago from Europe. Super strict and well managed border control. Passengers were supervised and escorted to a special quarantine hotel for the first three days of quarantine. After that they use an app on my phone to keep track of where I am. For 14 days I have to "check in" my location multiple times per day.

The place with no border control i Europe. Not Japan.

Good data! Nice how martian gravity makes things lighter. If I'm doing the math correctly I get to to be an exposure time of around 0.1-0.5 ms. Fast!, but not unheard of fast :)

Yay! Cool that they made it :)

The video feed had a "university team" feel to it that was sort of unexpected and nice :)

I was surprised to see the tack sharp shadow on the image from the downwards facing navigation camera. My thinking was that the rotors needed to spin way faster on this drone than on a drone on earth, because of how thin the atmosphere is on mars. But the sharpness seems to indicate that the rotor speed is perhaps all that different! Or perhaps the whole thing is just so light that there is not so much mass to lift up?

I recommend listening to this podcast, it seems might not be totally dead there after all. Podcast was released yesterday and they talk about rebuilding it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszv2l

Thanks for posting the link to this podcast! I enjoyed listening to it. It seems the situation is not as bad as Google Earth would have you believe - stuff got torn down in a storm but they are planning to rebuild it.

One thing that caught my ears was the short snippet when they talk about about how the men in the region are looking down upon farming... smells sort of like a "startup opportunity" to me.

Yup, I should have used a through hole part.

Power over audio cable felt iffy too - feels like it will short on insertion? Maybe it needs some thermal fuse in line with it or something.

I've done a similar journey during this lock down year. I started off with a small design of a custom latency measurement thingie that was a "rats nest" with wires and components soldered to an arduino. Converting it to a PCB, I used easyeda.com. I recommend that over KiCad, which I later tried but it's clunky compared to Easy EDA. KiCad feels like blender before the re-work they did. Or InkScape. Opensource has such incredibly crappy ui:s sometimes... Yay Blender!

First batch was bare PCB from jlcpcb.com and components from digikey. Handsoldered it. And it worked!! OMG, the JOY!! I highly recommend to do some simple own pcb design.

Then I did v2: STM32, ws2812b, tiny smt components. I used jlcpcb assembly service, complemented with some components they didn't have in their (limited!) smt library. Bringup of the first stm32 was a bit of a nightmare. I had missed pulling a boot0-pin low (~2 days wasted). A co-worker is madly in love with rust and made me write the whole code in Rust (2 weeks maybe, not "wasted" per se - but oh man can embedded rust be... a lot of fun... sometimes). Missed pullups on i2c lines. So much learning on version two.

Version three I tried to keep is simple. But also smaller. I had an idea to use 3.5mm audio cables for power and data. I thought SMD audio cable contacts would be rugged. I was wrong - they came off. I had bought a syringe with solder paste and one with flux. Totally recommend getting a flux syringe! So good! But that solder paste... I maybe didn't grok how to use it, but it did not reflow well enough to make the audio cable contacts stay put when used.

Got version four a couple of weeks ago. Doing pcbway.com with them doing the full smt and through hole soldering. This is how to do it! I do not at all understand why all are raving about jlcpcb.com - they have such a limited library. Why not make a proper pcb shop solder it all? It doesn't cost that much more. If time is a factor it is a lot cheaper. V4 feels like a winner - shipping them out to customers now.

I've also done some other boards during the lock down, such as control boards for RC cars in three versions, and three versions of an Ethernet connected microphone. I'm still on EasyEDA, but as mentioned I now let pcbway do soldering of everything.

Most of these are GU10 from Ikea... wonderful combo...

Ikea fixture and Ikea LED lamps.

I've taken many of them back. They give me replacements if I can show them the receipt... Maybe a good counter to poor quality LED lamps is making stores perceive them as a huge hassle with high return rates.