Hacker News Reader

causion Genetically engineering koji mold to create a meat alternative

Thinking of food only on its nutritional aspects is reductive

The comment is literally regarding its nutritional aspect. "One of the most complete nutritional sources".

causion Giant Volcano Discovered on Mars

Do we need to change the "hydro" part of "hydraulic" when using fluids that aren't water? It's pedantry.

causion Giant Volcano Discovered on Mars

The pedantic term would be "areothermal". I hate the practice of replacing "geo" in every word when used with other planets, though.

causion How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s

AT&T's "Similarities of Wave Behavior" is incredible.

causion [dead]

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causion What to do if your car is submerged in water

I don't think it's a monumental task for a vehicle full of sensors to tell the difference between rain and submersion. You don't even need new sensors. For example, if all the suspension height sensors all max out and stay there for more than three seconds while the car is in Drive, the car is sinking.

causion What to do if your car is submerged in water

It probably wouldn't be too expensive to put a moisture detector somewhere appropriate that triggers the computer to lower all the windows.

causion Porn Sites Need Age-Verification Systems in Texas, Court Rules

It's illegal at the federal level to distribute pornography to people under the age of 18. I don't understand why people don't advocate for repealing this law while at the same time saying internet companies deserve an exception to it. There is no other age-gated product, such as alcohol, tobacco, or firearms where "well they told us they were of age" is sufficient, nor does the responsibility for verification lie on anyone but the distributor.

Personally I'm more of the free-for-all, repeal the obscenity laws type of person, but this logical inconsistency irks me.

causion U.S. to Build Pier to Allow Aid Into Gaza by Sea

Jewish people certainly punch above their weight when it comes to billionaires and political influence but I suspect most of the "mass" of it is white American evangelical beliefs. Even my own fairly moderate family's response to the conflict is "God gave the Jews that land, they can do whatever they want on it". Downright spooky.

causion U.S. to Build Pier to Allow Aid Into Gaza by Sea

If the media has a pro-Israel bias it isn't massive, at least outside Fox News. I've seen decent coverage of various atrocities in Gaza on CNN, for example.

causion The Surprising History of Claims for Life on the Sun (2011)

The sun is so large I bet all kinds of unlikely phenomena are possible at small scales. If there was life on the sun, would be know it or recognize it?

causion U.S. to Build Pier to Allow Aid Into Gaza by Sea

Because people with vast amounts of money and power in the US either have relatives there or have cultural interests there. US foreign policy in the Middle East over the last fifty years becomes a lot less nonsensical if you think about it in terms of "what would benefit Israel the most"?

causion Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's iGPU: Adreno Gets Big

My headcanon is that Snapdragon 875 would've been a great chip unlike the infamously overheating 888.

causion Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)

It was useful as a way to pry people away from Windows 10.

causion U.S. Air Force Evaluating Pivotal's Blackfly Ultralight EVTOL Aircraft

Twenty minutes of flight time is reasonable for a drone with swappable batteries. It seems next to useless for manned flight. In comparison the cheapest airplane, the Cessna 175 Skylark, has a flight endurance of 4.3 hours.

causion The women who coined the expression 'surfing the internet' (2019)

The submission title is wrong. The title of the article is The women who coined the expression 'Surfing the Internet' not "woman", reflecting the two people the article discusses.

causion Motion blur all the way down (2022)

The Hobbit was recorded at 48fps, not 60.

And as I said: even when you preview stuff at 120 fps or more there is visible strobing with geometry that covers big distances in your FOV.

Exactly. The game has no idea what is and isn't moving in my FoV because it doesn't know what I'm looking at, only what the camera is looking at. Subjectively, in my experience, games do a terrible job at predicting what I'm looking at and I'd prefer they stop messing up my experience by trying. Strobing is better than smeary mess.

causion Motion blur all the way down (2022)

Human eyes do not work based on discrete frames at all. The entire "sampling" paradigm is completely wrong.

Estimates say humans can see max. 60FPS.

This is a ridiculous statement. You know that's wrong if you've ever switched your phone between 60 and 120hz. Even without personal experience, most HN readers would be aware that, for example, when the Oculus Rift folks were developing their headset they found 90hz to be the minimum to avoid visual disturbances and nausea in an immersive environment.

causion Motion blur all the way down (2022)

Motion blur makes sense for films. I have no idea why anyone wants it in a game. The limitations of display technology and of the human eye introduce all the blur I could ever want.

causion Antarctic English

Dutch sure sounds a lot more like English than Swedish does. The famous "Geef me een klap papa" comes to mind. Quite a bit of Dutch sounds nearly as close to English as, say, Scots does. "Zet de televisie aan." "Waar ben je?" "Ik heb honger, wanneer gaan we eten?"

causion Firsty.app – free 300kbit/s eSIM for US/EU

Shame they don't offer a physical SIM for a nominal fee to use with the free service. eSIM-only locks out a lot of older and low end devices that don't support eSIM.

causion AI is a 'Glorified Tape Recorder,' Says Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku (2023)

He's not wrong, he's just saying stuff we're already familiar with and we're annoyed someone who's well known as being a dick in person is getting more attention.

causion AI is a 'Glorified Tape Recorder,' Says Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku (2023)

Not that it's wrong, but why is the opinion of a string theorist on LLMs significant?

causion How much is one terabyte of data?

Letting me or third-party software go in and delete the files manually without pitching a fit would be an acceptable compromise. I'd even purchase such a utility.

causion How much is one terabyte of data?

Really wish games would give you a "cleanup" option in the settings. If I'm only going to use the Ultra textures it could delete all the others, and same for if someone is only going to use Medium, etc.

causion How much is one terabyte of data?

I've never seen an SSD as slow as 300MB/s. My first SSD from a decade ago was over 500MB/s sequential read.

causion Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500

TAA is also terrible and turns visuals into a smeary mess, particularly because devs keep building it into games in such a way as to be nearly impossible to turn off like in Halo Infinite.

causion Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500

The murder of SLI made me so angry. It was so wonderful to be able to buy a card, then a few years later buy another of the same card for a bargain price and boost your performance by ~60%.

causion Chlormequat in food and urine from adults in the United States from 2017 to 2023

Why would they say that without mentioning what levels those studies suggest are dangerous?

causion Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

Some things are difficult to do without root depending on the ROM. Accessing displays' highest brightness mode at will, using a file manager that can actually see and manipulate every file on the device, using custom gesture utilities, altering over-underscan settings, undervolting the SoC, etc.