Hacker News Reader

cromulenton How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?

This is an excellent observation. Dressage (for example) is a set of evolutionary constraints about controlling a 600kg similarly trained million dollar animal through tiny movements (mostly in your thighs and buttocks) in order to win prestigious prizes including Olympic medals.

The horses react with puzzlement if you are not trained to a similar level - if you are a junior rider, expert horses are incompatible.

cromulenton How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?

Consistent with many technical sports such as Formula One motor racing. Ask a driver to talk about the race, during which they are driving a vehicle at levels normal humans could not approach, and they describe not the driving but the tactics and strategy within the physics window.

cromulenton Cloudflare took down our website

The OP does not give their company nor domain name. I wonder if this is related to recent efforts by the Dutch to collaborate with Cloudflare to prevent online gambling companies operating in the Netherlands.

https://igamingbusiness.com/legal-compliance/legal/cloudflar...

cromulenton 'I Was Dripping Blood': Inside One of the Worst Turbulence Accidents

Keeping your seatbelt fastened - even though the seatbelt sign is off - is good advice.

cromulenton "My boss says we don't need any engineering managers"

IME the tech industry attracts rather a lot of net-negative managers who fail their way upwards through lucrative careers. Hiring the net-positive managers is the hard part.

cromulenton A forged Apple employee badge

The date 8.12.2001 is a Saturday. This also seems off.

cromulenton The unstallable plane that stalled

The report of the investigation:

https://turvallisuustutkinta.fi/material/attachments/otkes/t...

cromulenton Thousands protest against Canary islands' 'unsustainable' tourism model

Do you mean this?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/06/trump-dump-p...

cromulenton Seismologists suspect earthquake on San Andreas Fault is imminent

Nearby Corcoran has been subsiding at up to 60cm per year (from water extraction). Seems like quite the area.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/89761/san-joaquin-v...

cromulenton Show HN: Building a GPS receiver

https://gpsjam.org/

Not necessarily jamming.

cromulenton -2000 Lines of Code (2007)

It’s the wrong metric. We all know that. It’s like measuring a manager by “meetings attended” or something like that.

The hard part is measuring the effectiveness of people whose output is realized in the future, not today.

cromulenton Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

I can report that the science is pretty solid.

35° at 70% (your peak today) is wet-bulb 29.8°.

45° at 20% (desert) is wet-bulb 24.3°.

32° at 100% is wet-bulb 31.8°.

At 100% sweating is useless. You can't lose heat through evaporation.

https://www.mit.edu/~eltahirgroup/calTW.html

cromulenton Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

Of course, high temperatures on their own are fine. The temperature is not the only factor, it is the humidity. Wet-bulb temperature is the key indicator.

cromulenton Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

A friend of mine who lives in Queensland (Sunshine Coast) was talking about a recent spell of 32° and 100% humidity and how oppressive it was.

My understanding is that such weather is not survivable long term [1] without air conditioning. A power failure would be disastrous.

[1] https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/humans-cant-endure-t...

cromulenton Fosbury Flop

Dick Fosbury died last year. I love the story of him arriving at the Olympics, as a 21 year old, with his own technique that he has developed even as he was advised against it.

He was given a blue and a white pair of spikes by Adidas, and he wore one color on each foot.

He went on to win the gold medal, and his technique went on to dominate the sport.

cromulenton How video games use lookup tables

A Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail just did an episode talking about the SNES Doom port and how it used LUTs for trigonometry as the SNES didn't have a graphics processor.

https://festivalofthespokennerd.com/podcast/series-3-episode...

https://github.com/RandalLinden/DOOM-FX

cromulenton Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?

> I have taken a properly administered IQ test. I scored 135 in one area and 89 in another. My main issue is I have very poor working memory.

This correlates with ADHD.

cromulenton Thanks FedEx, this is why we keep getting phished

I called them and questioned them about this - they didn't even come down my street, and yet claimed that they "attempted delivery". The customer service person was honest enough to say there was no code for the driver to say "too busy, can't meet my unrealistic targets".

cromulenton Should error messages apologize? (2013)

Expressing sorrow is not the same thing as an apology. If you doubt that, swap them out at a funeral:

"I apologize for your loss".

cromulenton Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

> And it even stumbled in its quest to build the US President’s new Air Force One.

Technically of course, Air Force One is a call sign, not an aircraft. The quote is from an FT article which indicates the Boeing bill for retrofitting two custom 747-8s was $3.9B USD, marked down from 5B after Trump called the price "ridiculous". I agree with him.

https://www.ft.com/content/d2bd472b-0e5d-459f-8503-04633aefe...

cromulenton Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

I've worked with both brilliant and mediocre people from many countries, including India.

It's hard to criticise offshoring without seeming racist. The problem that I have seen is not the developers - it's that the people in charge are fixated on the hourly rate as the key metric, and the suppliers are then complicit in gaming that metric.

As soon as you make the lowest hourly rate the most important metric in software development, I guarantee you that quality will suffer.

cromulenton A TV Show Forced Britain's Devastating Post Office Scandal into the Light

Such a good question. Don't blame the developers too quickly.

In most industries you need to actually make or do good stuff to have a good career. In the software industry you can (badly) manage failed projects, or lead the development of poor software products, or run internal fiefdoms that make the development of good software harder, and still have a stellar career.

cromulenton Power over fiber

I’m guessing it was the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_W...

cromulenton Quairading shire erects signs telling travellers to ignore Google Maps

The context is a sign that says "your GPS is wrong". Definitely in context, mate.

Again, that's not accurate, unless you use slang. Check out the definition of GPS if you are unsure.

cromulenton Copyright is not a moral right, it's a monetization strategy

I really think Bill Watterson would disagree.

"Only thieves and vandals have made money on Calvin and Hobbes merchandise."

cromulenton Smallest Typeface

More about Silkscreen, including that it was created on Windows NT 4.0, which dates it:

https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/

cromulenton Quairading shire erects signs telling travellers to ignore Google Maps

No, my personal GPS receiver is correctly determining my position, no matter what you think of my chosen route :)

GPS jamming is becoming an increasing problem around Europe, so "your GPS is wrong" has other common meanings.

https://gpsjam.org

cromulenton Quairading shire erects signs telling travellers to ignore Google Maps

The sign says "Your GPS is wrong" but technically the GPS is fine, it is the route planning app that is sub-optimal ;)