ag8

Inspired by initiatives such as the Greater Idaho project [0], I wondered what would happen to the United States if redrawing state borders was very low-friction, and each county could join a neighboring state simply if they voted to do so by a large enough margin. So, I created this simulator where countries secede and rejoin states they're happier in; the demo provides a cool example of how it works.

[0]: https://www.greateridaho.org/

If today's word is too easy, Randall Munroe calculated some of the most difficult ones to guess:

https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1522260318512156672

Reminds me of my favorite wikimedia commons page:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dice_by_number_of_sides

Looks great! Maybe add a small time penalty for guessing wrong? It's currently way faster for me to try ~7 combinations (takes about 5 seconds per round) than to honestly figure it out.

Interestingly, "Chart Increasing with Yen" is almost universally green: https://emojipedia.org/chart-increasing-with-yen/

Looks like it's back up now!

From Wikipedia:

> A more recent study on NGC 1052-DF2 suggests the previously reported distance of the galaxy was greatly exaggerated. Consequently, the galaxy now looks "normal" in every way. Using five independent methods to estimate distances of heavenly bodies, a team of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) found the correct distance of NGC 1052-DF2 to be 42 million light years (13 MPc), not some 64 million light years (19 MPc) from the Earth. The total mass of the galaxy is around one-half of the mass estimated previously, but the mass of its stars is only about one-quarter of the previously estimated mass. This implies a significant part of NGC 1052-DF2 could be made up of dark matter, like any other galaxy.

> Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity.

I'd like to see how that works!

It's crazy that a lot of the freezers they use, that can get temperatures down to a few millikelvin, are commodities at this point. You could go and buy one if you wanted to for $50k!

Fernald is a plainly terrifying place--the abandoned buildings are still there, and you can visit them[0]. It's a separate, isolated city from the rest of Waltham--on a map, you can see the 186 acres with no other exits other than the main one [1]. It actually operated until 2014 due to a court-order that the remaining residents (now adults) get top-of-the-line care for the rest of their lives, due to past abuses; this cost over $1M per patient per year, mostly since the whole "city" isn't connected to the grid, and has to run its own power plant. It's a chilling place full of wild animals--you can barely tell where the roads used to be--and surrounded by several layers of fencing topped with barbed wire.

The state maintains a huge number of archives relating to Fernald; you can view most of them, including almost every annual report, on the Massachusetts archives website[2].

This whole area of Waltham is truly haunted--just across the street, there's a forest cemetery with 298 unmarked graves, shared between Fernald and the abandoned Metropolitan State Hospital. A high school project recently dug through the records and figured out who most of the buried patients are[3].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDYkDiNeS8s

[1]: https://goo.gl/maps/H6HGkDwhHEDaKFVf8

[2]: https://archives.lib.state.ma.us/handle/2452/214027

[3]: https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2018/12/11/metfern-cemetery...

Weird, I posted it with the www. Might be an undocumented HN feature then.

Auroras visible in Maine!

https://twitter.com/13gcorn/status/1447767263613001733/photo...

This is great!

I've been running into a small issue: this website has no problem generating URLs which are too long for itself:)

For instance, I managed to get the following output:

> https://ooooooooooooooooooooooo.ooo/ooooοооoοᴏοoοᴏοoοᴏooοᴏoᴏ...

which gives me a 414 request URI too large.

Here is what seems to be the full case:

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrjogbzve/...

Since it looks like Chromium is set on removing alert() altogether[0], I don't see why this can't be handled in the same way browsers handle popup windows. If a website tries to open a pop-up, it gets blocked; but, on Firefox at least, I get a small notification in the toolbar, where I can choose to copy the popup window's URL, open the popup, or allow the website to open popups as much as it wants.

Why not do the same exact thing for alert()s?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28310716

Science fiction writer Greg Egan spent years trying to fix this exact problem [0]. Searching him on Google now, it looks like he eventually succeeded, but it involved years of posting photos of "himself" which instead called Google fools [1], as well as placing a plea on his home page for his fans to downvote the misleading images on his knowledge panel.

[0]: https://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html

[1]: https://www.gregegan.net/images/GregEgan.htm

Down for me. It's being investigated[0].

[0]: https://twitter.com/stripestatus/status/1271586092752367618

Yeah, the article discusses this point a lot—the argument in favour being that's it's better to have _some_ imperfect access to out-of-print books than none at all. But yes, your point is ultimately a big part of why the project didn't happen

Facebook released a blog post [0] about this as well!

[0]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using-neural-networks-to-solve-...

Fascinating! That's actually the image from which I first learned about this star.

The rotating cube interface [1], where each of six parts of a form is on a different face of a cube.

[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11229/is-this-rotatin...