Hacker News Reader

crznpon Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting

I would go further: this is the end of the US. The pieces haven't hit the ground yet, but they are falling. NATO cannot last when Europe doesn't trust the US. Nations cannot trust that trade agreements will last beyond the whims of the moment. Federal workers are being sacked indiscriminately. The executive branch has openly stated that they will not obey the rule of law if it is against them, even after packing the courts. What is left?

There is something left: the land, the people. But not the country, that is something new.

crznpon The Leaning Tower of New York

Are you not counting the Surfside (Miami) condo collapse?

Also since it talked about the leaning tower of Pisa: the Civic tower in Pavia (1989) and original Campanile in Venice (1902), probably more examples like that.

crznpon We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky

I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.

On one hand, it is another alternative if Bluesky falls, but on the other hand I feel like the algorithm makes it a different sort of community.

crznpon The story of Rogue

Nice! Crossing avalanche terrain (eg: backcountry skiing) is a low chance/high consequence activity. It is easy to learn the wrong thing: I did this before and it was fine, therefore it is safe.

You counter that with observations, forecasts and incident reports, but intuition based on personal experience leads you astray.

A game is much better because you can fail and you just have to restart the game. Make an RDR2 mod.

(edit: more intuitive anyway. It might not be easy to accurately show different snow conditions while also being fun to play)

crznpon Mill: A fast JVM build tool for Java and Scala

One option is `bld`. They added IntelliJ support since I looked at it last, so that's nice.

https://github.com/rife2/bld

crznpon Why ghosts wear clothes or white sheets

Of course ghosts wouldn't appear naked, we can't see beyond the veil

crznpon The EU regulates that by 2027, all phones be equipped with replaceable batteries

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023...

User replaceable batteries by 2027 is old news. The new news seems to be how Apple plans to accomplish it.

crznpon Fearing losses, banks are quietly dumping real estate loans

It doesn't seem wildly unlikely: there is a fundamental shift in how office spaces work.

But the other side is possible too: even if the loans had a guaranteed long term value (like SVB's bonds), they could be an issue in the short term. More so if getting the value out of the loan requires both time and effort (eg: legal costs).

crznpon NASA again delays Boeing Starliner's return home

> [Helium helps to] maintain pressure so that the propellant remains liquid.

IANA rocket scientist, but this doesn't ring true to me. Vaporization of LH2 is related to the partial pressure of Hydrogen, not the absolute pressure of the gaseous phase. You're going to lose ≈PV/RT of hydrogen molecules to the gas phase regardless (P being the vapor pressure of Hydrogen at the tank's temperature and V the volume of the tank).

You still need the absolute pressure for structural stability. He has ≈twice the molar mass of H2, so H2 is better for the dry mass in the rocket equation anyway: what is left in the tank isn't wasted, but used for rigidity.

You just need Helium because it won't have phase transitions: it's always a gas so it is easier to regulate pressure.

crznpon Battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts

Just to add the terms: a "grid following" matches the grid's voltage/frequency, so it only works when connected to the grid. A "grid forming" system can set its voltage/frequency independently and can only work off-grid

It sounds like mauvehaus is talking about a hybrid system that has both grid following and grid forming capabilities: switching to grid-forming as it disconnects. But that means that you can't power your neighbors.

crznpon Interactive Sky Map

AFAIK, nobody has added the weather to Stellarium, but it does show sky at various times and places on Earth, with toggles for the ground and atmosphere. Web version:

https://stellarium-web.org/

crznpon The Moral Economy of the Shire

FWIW, I interpreted that backwards: There needed to be a flying car, so Harry had to hang out of a window in need of a flying car.

crznpon Lucid Boss Says Tesla Has Lost Its "Sense of Purpose"

Companies don't have a fixed amount of media coverage. Rawlinson saying that Tesla has lost its way is a headline. Him saying that Lucid makes great cars is not.

crznpon Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

If this isn't the thing that makes your blood boil, that's fine. The world could probably do with less boiling blood, and it is still early, more evidence may come out. However, she indicated in her statement that Altman asked her, not OpenAI. It seems credible that he would want to be involved.

Both sides of the story feel like we're slowly being brought to a boil: Sutskever's leaving feels like it was just a matter of time. His leaving causing a mess seems predictable. Perhaps I am numb to that story.

But stealing a large part of someone's identity after being explicitly told not to? This one act is not the end of the world, but feels like an acceleration down a path that I would rather avoid.

crznpon Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

It really doesn't sound like a "mid-level exceeding their mandate".

It sounds like Altman was personally involved in recruiting her. She said no and they took what they wanted anyway.

crznpon Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 MAX crashes

Or: they had an accurate estimate for the importance of brand trust and reputation over the short term, and they've had that short term outlook for a long time. Perhaps since 1997.

crznpon The world has probably passed peak pollution

LtG summary from the intro:

> 1. If the present growth trends... continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years...

> 2. It is possible to alter these growth trends...

> 3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success

Far from "missing the negative feedback loops", I think that amplifying that feedback was the whole point.

Also, we're only halfway through the original period, so it seems premature to declare victory.

crznpon Show HN: Dillo 3.1.0 released after 9 years

You could if the host domain acted as a VPN/proxy

crznpon What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

It is strange that they would claim that "non" is not a prefix but a Latin word with the same meaning as the prefix that is stuck on the front of the word.

It can still be a seperate word, but Latin "persona non grata" has the same basic meaning in English. The Latin "non plus" doesn't mean perplexed or unconcerned (e: or unimpressed), so it would be even more confusing to write it that way.

crznpon DOE Announces $75M to Advance Desalination and Water Reuse Tech

I think that the DoE's interest in this is more about energy consumption than energy generation.

crznpon Boom announces successful flight of XB-1 demonstrator aircraft

Effectively no! It doesn't depend on pressure. Basically just temperature (Also composition, esp: water content and form).

That relies on assumptions (ideal gas, adiabatic compression) that might break down for supersonic jets, but it's pretty close for the speed of sound.

crznpon The end of the dark universe?

From the arxiv pdf after eq125:

> This presents a testable deviation from classical general relativity, potentially observable when the other terms are small, such as at low acceleration. The absence of such terms is likely to falsify this model. On the other hand since diffusion of the metric can result in stronger gravitational fields when we might otherwise expect none to be present, it raises the possibility that diffusion may explain galaxy rotation curves and galaxy formation without the need for dark matter

It certainly doesn't seem like an extreme reading to call this a MOND theory.

crznpon Are We Watching the Internet Die?

I hope so too, but how is Lemmy hosted when it is at the volume of Reddit? Supporting lemmy.world on Patreon?

Or if niche communities are found on niche instances, how do I participate without either keeping up with inter-instance politics or just creating local accounts?

It feels possible to scale Lemmy organizationally, but it also not something to take for granted.

crznpon Why does Rust choose not to provide `for` comprehensions?

That's true. As a relative novice to Rust, I'm familiar with array types, but I'd need to look up `from_fn`

crznpon Why does Rust choose not to provide `for` comprehensions?

That's interesting, though the type inference seems like spooky action at a distance there: removing an assertion can break code.

I suppose it gives you a way to specify the length in the examples (below), but it seems more ergonomic to take it from the original array.

    let bool_arr = core::array::from_fn::<_, 5, _>(|i| i % 2 == 0);

crznpon Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

That is a non-sequitur. Investigators should have access to accident data regardless of whether the pilots did their job.

Root cause analysis isn't the only reason: it would be good for pilots to have this case study, as well as analysis on how systems responded to the abrupt change.

Having this data is strictly better than not having it.

crznpon Solving SAT via Positive Supercompilation

> (just solve the problem again).

Certainly P is a subset of NP, but is this statement always true?

Consider a Galton board where a marble is dropped into an array of pegs. At each peg, it can go left or right at random (assume it never bounces further). After some number of choices, it falls into a slot.

Finding a solution (a slot that a marble can fall into) is easy: drop one marble. But it could take many marbles to verify that a marble can fall into a given slot.

As described, that is easy: all left choices, all right choices, everything in between. But imagine that the choices aren't fair, directly observable, or linear (LR != RL). Then it gets tricky.

I've never thought about non-deterministic problems of that sort in the context of computational theory, but it isn't uncommon in nature.

crznpon Damn Small Linux 2024

> Dillo (super-light GUI browser)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613

I don't know if DSL has updated to use that version yet, but thanks again to rodarima for picking that up!

crznpon Google search drops cache link from search results

DDG supports both, but they do different things. 'site:google.com' is a DDG search that returns Google results, '!g' is a google search that returns any results.

Similarly, !r uses reddit's search

crznpon Speeding Slows You Down (By a Lot)

The advantage of driving faster is that you convert driving time into free time.

Death converts living time (including free time) into death time.

Subtracting them makes mathematical sense: you have more or less free time. Though it is napkin math. Eg: it treats all free time as equivalent. If speeding gets you to a job interview on time, which gets you the job, that is more important than speeding so that you have time to do a crossword.

Might as well do the crossword in the car, eh?