Hacker News Reader

cossatoton Geography of Kansas (2022)

The sneaky thing about the geography of Kansas is that it's longitudinally exponentially-scaled, with distances between stuff (people, raindrops, ...) exponentially increasing as you go west. No one tells you this, though, so when you're in the western Kansas outpost of Hays, you're actually pretty close to the center of the state. You're almost to Colorado! Just stay awake and you'll be there in like 3 hours. It's OK, your mind is already dulled and your resting heart rate at refrigerator temps. Just... stay awa.... [snore sounds followed by the screech of broadsiding a barb-wire fence at 85 mph]

cossatoton Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later

I tried re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey when I moved to Oregon a few years ago. I had read it 20 years ago and loved it, at a time when I plowed through fiction. This time, though, the passages that were clearly written when the acid kicked in were so terrible that I had to move on. Scenes from the dog's perspective (that were also clearly unreasonable, such as the dog associating the feeling of a snake bite with fire, which most dogs have never felt, vs. getting cut or some other feeling that dogs have actually experienced), etc. Cool story, with topical themes in the 2020s, but... we have the internet, we aren't so bored around the house that the opportunity cost to reading this shit is low enough to make it worth it.

cossatoton TPU v4: An Optically Reconfigurable Supercomputer for Machine Learning

How useful are these for workstation-class scientific computing, vs. a GPU? Not ML necessarily, but I do a lot of matrix multiplication for example when solving systems of equations.

cossatoton LangChain Announces 10M Seed Round

Python has huge uptake outside of the ML domain. I can't see an AI winter affecting the many people using Numpy for non-ML purposes (i.e., scientists in academia, most of whom still deal with normal numerical and data analytical modeling, not ML) much less Django.

cossatoton Why TinyML is still so hard to get excited about

Or letting someone in to feed your cat.

cossatoton Costa Rica’s enigmatic addresses (2021)

20 years ago I used to occasionally ship tens of thousands of dollars of geophysical surveying equipment from Arkansas to the office of INETER (Nicaraguan governmental earth sciences division). The address was something like "INETER, frente del policlinica oriental, Managua, Nicaragua" (across from the Oriental polyclinic). And DHL would come through!

cossatoton Earth’s innermost layer is a 644 kilometer wide ball of iron, new study finds

If we took the entire core to the surface (without collapsing the Earth which is impossible) we would cover the Earth with iron and nickel to a depth of hundreds of km.

cossatoton Earth’s innermost layer is a 644 kilometer wide ball of iron, new study finds

I believe the apparent paradox is that the 'net force' is not the same thing as pressure; it's basically the vector sum of pressure. Pressure in the Earth is an isotropic distribution of stresses, so that in a north-east-up coordinate system, the upward-pushing stress is matched by the downward-pushing stress, the eastward-pushing stress is matched by the westward-pushing stress, etc. So while these sum to zero in some sense, their magnitude is the density of the rock between the point and the surface times the depth times gravity. This is like going deeper in the ocean-the forces are equal in all directions, meaning that they sum to zero in some sense and there is no directional flattening or translation, but they still increase with depth.

cossatoton Earth’s innermost layer is a 644 kilometer wide ball of iron, new study finds

It's been known for decades that the Earth's core (which is mostly iron and nickel, as opposed to the mantle which is made of silicates) has a liquid outer layer and a solid inner layer. This is apparent because seismic shear waves can propagate through the inner layer but not the outer layer, which is diagnostic of the medium being liquid and not solid. (The shear or S-waves get to the inner core because when a seismic pressure wave, which can travel through liquid, hits the inner-core-outer-core boundary, some of the energy is converted into shear waves. Jofer please correct me if this is inaccurate.)

This article states that the inner core has two different concentric zones that have very different crystalline properties. In particular, the inner sanctum is anisotropic with respect to seismic wave propagation, and the outer sheath of the inner core is much more isotropic. This suggest that they have different geologic histories--the innermost core's crystallographic anisotropy may have resulted from an event early in Earth's history that deformed the crystals, much as mountain building events deform the crystals in Earth's crust and upper mantle. Then, the younger outer sheath of the inner core cooled and crystallized around the older inner bit later on, after the deforming event transpired.

cossatoton Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

I think he meant ‘quart’ rather than ‘gallon’ because the first reference is for ‘litre’

cossatoton Wine 8.0

It's got a super weird text format for the input. If you're interested, email me at my user id at gmail and I can give you some jupyter notebooks that parse offset tables in excel to make the .hul file.

cossatoton Wine 8.0

I use Wine on Linux for Carlson Hulls (Delftship and Freeship being not as useful for stitch-and-glue). I tried to install wine on macos recently, and I want to say it wasn't supported for the most recent versions, but I don't remember the details.

cossatoton Extreme 'rogue wave' in the North Pacific confirmed as most extreme on record

I thought this book was decent, and I don't know of any others better in the niche, but I wanted a bit more science than was presented. I think Casey got too intimidated by the scientists to really try to understand the models at all, and then spent too much time fawning over Laird Hamilton. But perhaps that was a decision made by the editors rather than by Casey navigating two very different groups of protagonists.

cossatoton The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori

In the end, it is still a system for producing workers that fit in whatever the current regime needs, and I think there should be some space for "i dont want to be a part of this, there must be some other way to live"

This is an important idea of course, but I don't think that a 5 year old is really equipped to make a principled and informed decision about whether to withdraw from society--the authority they will challenge is really just trying to get them to brush their teeth and learn the fundamentals of reading; the kid is not going to think up alternatives to capitalism.

cossatoton Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

While I partially agree with your assessment, it's worth noting that much of the dynamic settlement of the US has been based on commodity booms, which really can't be considered perpetual parts of the economy. People had to leave their homes to go clear the prairie, log virtually all of the US forest, mine the West Virginia coal and then the Wyoming coal after that, etc. Once those resources are used up, there is little left for people to do, regardless of technological advances that require fewer workers for the same output, much less trade deals (how much wood and grain do we import?). The economies oriented around renewable resources (Oregon timber for example) simply can't sustain as many people because the environment can't continually produce the output that it did during the initial exploitation.

This of course affects the downstream, more industrial elements concentrated in cities as well, which process the ore and lumber and make engines and furniture.

cossatoton Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

Little Rock AFB is a few tens of km north (34.9 deg lat) for what it's worth. There may be some others as well. The chances of getting a picture of the stars that clear in Arkansas is way lower than in the Mojave however...

cossatoton Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

It may be that the 21st century Turing test will be 'whether an AI can tell that content is AI generated". Otherwise it may be much harder to filter the AI-generated content.

cossatoton Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

Congrats, and (if you're in the US where I am), welcome!

cossatoton The Buy and Hold Mindset

Your exact quote was I hate it that people "buy and build a fair bit of real estate on the side". Their interpretation of your comments is quite straightforward.

cossatoton Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

I print once or twice a month--return labels, random home admin (taxes or city stuff), and I prefer paper boarding passes (w/ backup on my phone) because they're less fussy for a number of reasons than the phone. I also print documents that I need to carefully read or edit, because I am easily distracted when reading/editing boring stuff on a computer and can waste too much time writing about using printers on HN.

cossatoton A requiem for amateur chemistry

You can get used, earlier-edition college textbooks very cheaply. The question sets are changed each edition but the text is not meaningfully. I buy some for fun reading and some for reference.

cossatoton Binance to acquire FTX

OT: Are those books worth reading? I loved the Power Broker but the LBJ books are a whole lot to get through.

cossatoton Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

Ideally there would be a replacement of TeX that shares little of its non-math typesetting capabilities but retains (or only slightly modifies) the math syntax. The rest of the system is where the the problems lie, or at least where I waste a lot of time on little things.

cossatoton How Tucson is facing up to a megadrought

The western states are for sure the most fun to fly over, though.

cossatoton 75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12

Camping is also a great activity with kids, for what it’s worth. Backpacking 20 miles into the wilderness is not going to be an option at least until they are older, but car camping can still be pretty fun even when they are itty bitty especially if there is some fun and accessible terrain to explore—water to throw rocks into, mossy rocks and tree trunks to check out and stumble over, etc.

cossatoton Scientists are finding fungi in cancerous tumors

Lichen are. (Lycan are werewolves I think.)

cossatoton Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

It’s the Langrangian vs Eulerian specification of fiction

cossatoton FAA approves unleaded fuel for piston fleet

Oh, and we need more people to stand up for their local airports. Corrupt local politicians, developers, and fake-NIMBY land speculators are all arrayed to destroy our nation's aviation infrastructure for personal profit. Even airlines are in on it. Innovations like this unleaded fuel and electrification will cease if there's no place to deploy them.

So, I think GA is great in principle, and I use some products from it (mostly digital elevation data from airborne lidar, which is amazing). But it seems to have a very large component of taxpayers footing the bill for rich guys' toys/playgrounds (particularly for the infrastructure, not for planes themselves); this opinion has been influenced by talking with people I consider honest who have worked in municipal/county government, but I don't have any numbers. Can the many GA enthusiasts here give provide some insight into the public benefit from GA? Please note that I am sort of asking to be convinced and am not being antagonistic.

cossatoton Remote startups will win the war for top talent

I work for an Italian nonprofit from the US, after I moved back from Italy for family reasons. I'm a full-time contractor. I (or my 'employer') have to prove to the Italian government that I am a US taxpayer, but beyond that it's fine, and at least from my perspective much easier than dealing with the Italian government otherwise (those who know the language and system may feel different of course). I am very happy not to be throwing a huge chunk of my paycheck into the Italian pension system since I have never intended to retire in Italy, so it was simply a gift to the government of those lovely people.

I'm not sure how much variability there is with this kind of setup within EU member countries.

Also let's say you have an American company with 200 german employees but no office on german soil, does that mean they don't pay any local tax because technically they don't operate their business in the country ?

The American perspective on this is that the employer pays employment taxes for their employees (but not contractors), and the employees/contractors are responsible for their own income taxes, wherever they work (US or abroad). Surely the German employees would report and pay their income tax?

Taxes are not a tithe to the Church. They are not a moral obligation. They are a payment for past, present and future government services. If you (or your family) are not receiving services from that government, then you shouldn't be obligated to pay them. Pay for the services from your own government.

It is good to question how much of the tax burden should be paid by employers vs. employees, but the idea that some tax burden is split by different parties in different nations is not a new one. For example, international trade has been occurring for as long as nations have existed. There is no shortage of precedent to draw from.

The dev can't be a freelancer because a freelancer with a full time, fixed hours, single customer is illegal in many places

This might actually be what may changes rather than the 'closing of loopholes'. From what I have understood after talking with German in-laws, these laws are nominally to prevent the abuse of workers who are denied the rights and benefits of full employment. From a workers' rights perspective, this makes sense for 20th C. laborers, but not really for 21st century knowledge workers who could be getting paid >2x working from Germany for an American company compared to what they would be able to get working domestically. So in practice, this type of law can keep wages lower and give more control to German companies at the expense of the workers, so you know who will fight the changes to the laws to preserve the status quo. But if tech/knowledge workers who wish to have better remote employment opportunities can band together to pressure their elected officials, then this could change.

cossatoton M2 MacBook Air scores higher on Windows 11 GeekBench than pricier Dell laptop

For those of us whose CS background doesn't go this deep, what about ARM makes it more performant than x86? Is it something at a theoretical level, or does it have to do with CPU manufacturing constraints/tradeoffs, or a simpler/more efficient instruction set?