Hacker News Reader

anon_123g987on Hyundai investigating child labor in its U.S. supply chain

I've only ever read this on Hacker News, in the form "Welcome to $current_year!", where $ is the scalar sigil in the Perl programming language, indicating that it's a variable, and should be substituted by the reader as necessary.

anon_123g987on Hyundai investigating child labor in its U.S. supply chain

You are shadowbanned.

anon_123g987on Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

Because I vouched for it. Turn on "showdead" in your settings and look at his profile.

anon_123g987on Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

Your comments are not visible because you were shadowbanned years ago. You should create a new account.

anon_123g987on Borneo skeleton may show 31,000 year old amputation

FYI, you were shadowbanned four days ago, probably automatically for your multiple flagged-to-death comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33208156. Maybe you should try to appeal to the mods.

anon_123g987on James Webb Telescope pictures didn’t begin as images

https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images

anon_123g987on Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

> [...] the camera needed frequent enough service [...]

Let's hope that in the future software engineering becomes mature enough that we don't need daily security updates.

anon_123g987on Why Dates and Times Seem to Lose Their Meaning

https://archive.ph/XTtzc

anon_123g987on Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

"qbittorrent-nox" is the name of the headless package.

anon_123g987on Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

I found out that's just disk cache. Try launching some memory hungry programs and you'll see the cache released and qBittorrent running at around 150 MB again.

anon_123g987on Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

I "just Googled" it:

> In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

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

The article is full of references of primary sources that support this claim.

anon_123g987on Show HN: TwitterToNitter. A bookmarklet that makes reading on Twitter easier

Privacy Redirect: Redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and more to privacy friendly alternatives.

https://addons.mozilla.org/ja/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect...

anon_123g987on Wiley’s removal of hundreds of titles from ebook collections

Pay with an NFT!

https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html

anon_123g987on The enduring mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s all-purpose noun (2016)

English has "verbing", too.

> "[E]asy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English."

https://www.thoughtco.com/verbing-definition-1692587

Just like "jawn" is not unique (not even within English), in my experience there's almost nothing really unique in any language.

anon_123g987on The enduring mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s all-purpose noun (2016)

In Hungarian it's "izé".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iz%C3%A9

anon_123g987on Don't compare yourself to other entrepreneurs

Compare yourself to others every time you want, but always remember this Venn diagram: https://i.imgur.com/pVoiW0l.png.

anon_123g987on FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

The word "meme" was created by Dawkins to be similar to "gene", because they spread similarly. Cancer is, in a certain sense, a genetic disease, the result of the malfunction of genes caused by mutation. So, to continue the analogy, a badly mutated meme can be like cancer, and can spread like one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Etymology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer#Genetics

anon_123g987on A look inside Feynman’s calculus notebook

Thanks for the correction! I also think that both "in the head" and "on paper" work is necessary, of course, and I also think that Feynman did both, like everyone else. But we know that he often presented himself in the way the Gell-Mann quote describes him; he purposefully cultivated his image as a genius who can solve complicated problems in his head in seconds (if I recall correctly, he "pre-solved" problems, waited until the problems came up in a conversation and came up with the memorized solution after five seconds of "thinking").

anon_123g987on A look inside Feynman’s calculus notebook

Also:

The Feynman Algorithm:

    1. Write down the problem.
    2. Think real hard.
    3. Write down the solution.

Implying that the "thinking" happens in the head, not on the paper.

There's a quote for everything, and its opposite, too. Sometimes from the same guy.

anon_123g987on How Mathematics Changed Me

I don't think there's a difference here between Science and Mathematics. Scientists also study their tools (e.g. telescopes are studied by Optics), and use the objects of their studies as tools (e.g. galaxies can be used as telescopes, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens).

Edited to add:

The author of the quote tried to find an example that evokes vivid imagery, and also very extreme: it's obviously absurd to confuse a telescope with a galaxy, thinks the layman. While this turns out to be literally false, the point of the quote may still stand. The discipline that studies the real tools of Science is not Science itself, but the Philosophy of Science. This shouldn't be like this, and it wasn't until lately. Philosophy and Science used to be one and the same, but around a hundred years ago they separated, and this hurt both tremendously, in my opinion.

anon_123g987on Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true," responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"

anon_123g987on Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry (2010)

Nature/evolution is working on a macroscopic scale, too, for billions of years. Still, there was and is a lot of "combinatorial space" for human engineers to explore, like inventing the wheel, for example, with which nature didn't bother.

anon_123g987on The Long S

That's a preview of the first word of the next page. I guess it helps to switch between pages more smoothly.

anon_123g987on Dreamachine

I think Ganzflicker is something similar.

Article and discussion:

Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's (sciencealert.com) 177 points by smusamashah on June 28, 2021 | 146 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27669211

Link to online tool (warning: it starts flickering as soon as the page loads):

https://kerblooee.github.io/ganzflicker/

anon_123g987on Mikhail Gorbachev has died

> Russia today is a faint ghost of the former USSR.

Russia was only a part of the USSR. Their main problem is that they, too, believe that they are the former USSR, and try to restore the former glory. Well, the state of the war in Ukraine (another part of the former USSR) clearly shows how wrong they are.

anon_123g987on Increased wind turbine rotor blade visibility to reduce avian fatalities

> A "mind worm" (to coin a phrase)

It's called a "meme" (in its original definition by Richard Dawkins). And this kind of forcing a rebuttal is "trolling". Dismissing this trolling is phrased as "Don't feed the troll!".

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

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

anon_123g987on Does syntax highlighting help programming novices? (2018)

There was something like this a month ago on Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for students after Scratch

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32230329

anon_123g987on Perfluorocubane is (as you would expect) weird

Nah, it's standard engineering procedure: https://i.imgur.com/rKPe0Av.jpeg

anon_123g987on Perfluorocubane is (as you would expect) weird

Every field does this trolling in some form. The sentence "The proof is trivial and left as an exercise to the reader." should be familiar for everyone who studied Math.