Hacker News Reader

_rpdon Farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use

A more in depth look at the factors causing high fertilizer prices:

https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...

tl;dr: high natural gas prices, weather caused production delays, COVID caused production/shipping delays, power shortages in China (a major exporter) resulting in lower production

_rpdon Stilled Chimeras: Troubling the myth of individual identity

This is an article about a still life painter.

_rpdon Stop Death Shaming

"Flattening the curve" is about not overwhleming hospital resources, to avoid non-COVID avoidable deaths spiking.

_rpdon How the pandemic has affected people’s perspective on travelling to work

You're lucky it isn't just images of their tweets tied together with an 'emerging trend' narrative.

_rpdon For First Time, Half of Americans Favor Defending Taiwan If China Invades

With US troops.

_rpdon Is there a way to stop news aggregs like HN to stop showing pay walled content

Counterpoint: high quality journalism must be well funded, and funding based on advertising and 'clickbait' undermines quality. So paywalls it is.

_rpdon Goodbye climate deniers, hello climate bullshitters

If you have enough electricity to do that, you can just put into EV batteries directly and skip the hydrogen middle man.

_rpdon Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

> To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers.

It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we should be happy if their driving performance is above average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety and still be wary.

_rpdon Reversing ocean acidification with aggressive CO2 removal will take 700+ years (2015)

Gt of CO2 = (12+16+16)/12 * Gt of Carbon

_rpdon I've been programming since I was 10, but I don't feel like a 'hacker'

The missing component is curiosity.

_rpdon Evolution is now accepted by a majority of Americans

I don't think your intuition is the problem:

> Forty percent of U.S. adults ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...

That's over 100 million people.

_rpdon Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US demands

The Google doc doesn't say. The article says:

> details of who was in a geographic area, such as a radius of a few hundred feet at a certain point in time

It probably depends on whether the suspect was on foot or driving.

_rpdon Long-haul symptoms affect majority of Covid-19 patients, UA study finds

Actual paper ...

> Among participants who tested positive for COVID-19, 68.7% experienced at least one symptom after 30 days, marking the distinction for long COVID. This prevalence increased to 77% after 60 days of follow-up. Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

_rpdon OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October

It makes it easy to comply with the Fair Credit Billing Act:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Billing_Act

_rpdon OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October

If you think about what payment processors actually do, dealing with fraud is one of the main costs. There's a lot of fraud associated with porn related transactions, so it can make financial sense to just drop the entire transaction category.

_rpdon Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the Gulf Stream

Both have been proposed:

http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/16202/1/Hunt2019_Article_C...

_rpdon Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the Gulf Stream

This is a different paper.

_rpdon Alcohol linked to more cancers than thought, study finds

Here you go:

An umbrella review of the evidence associating diet and cancer risk at 11 anatomical sites

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24861-8

_rpdon The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream

> How TF is this news, on Wired

Wired was always a gossip magazine, but now it is just a gossip magazine. It's sad.

_rpdon The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream

Workhorse has full on plans for drone delivery that use the van as a base:

https://workhorse.com/horsefly.html

_rpdon The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream

I don't know about the UK, but in the US the FAA required that each drone be operated by a licensed pilot, which changed the economics.

There's some talk of autonomous software being granted a pilot's license, so that might shift things again.

_rpdon France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books

I think the hope was that the money would be used to support local cultural content/events since people in those enterprises have been hard hit by the COVID crisis.

_rpdon School Shutdowns Will Cost Students a Staggering Amount in Lifetime Earnings

Yes, this has been a common experience:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28264/w282...

20% of kids were disadvantaged (-0.4 standard deviation on tests), 20% were advantaged, 60% mostly unaffected. Strongly correlated with household income.

_rpdon We prefer abusers like you to stop using Puffin instead of becoming paid abusers

Somehow I don't think the app developer is experiencing the same sense of sublime transience as the Buddhist monks.

_rpdon Americans' life ratings reach record high

You shouldn’t be downvoted. Web only vs. conventional phone surveys is a significant change. Cheaper, but definitely excludes poorer demographic sections. You can’t ignore this for a survey about ‘life ratings’.

_rpdon Floating wind turbines could rise to great heights

It's interesting tech, but a big part of offshore wind power is bringing the power back to shore. Onshore wind and solar are going to have the advantage there for the foreseeable future.

_rpdon $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal