Hacker News Reader

devbon MIT Gets $140M Pledge from Anonymous Donor

"Minority shithole" is a bit harsh... I spend a lot of time in Newark and it is a much better place than it was twenty years ago.

devbon Spacecraft Power (2016)

Space is extremely cold, but only offers radiative heat transfer, which is not nearly as efficient as convective transfer. It's hard to dump heat into a vacuum.

devbon Breaks Observed in Rover Wheel Treads

Remember that the rover weighs almost 2000 pounds, so each wheel is responsible for carrying around 330 pounds on average over very rough terrain.

devbon How ‘Weird Al’ eclipsed most stars he parodied

> At Sketchfest, Yankovic sits on a panel about the late, great IFC show “Comedy Bang! Bang!” He served one season as Aukerman’s musical sidekick, against his management’s advice. They thought he was too big for a low-rated cable show.

Something makes me respect famous artists a lot more when they're willing to take jobs that are destined to be ridiculous and obscure. It shows that they don't take themselves too seriously. Take Weird Al as "Uncle Muscles", for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lM3k_pBSjE

devbon Airbnb is providing free housing to refugees and anyone not allowed in the US

There's a small eight year gap in your list there.

devbon Why Many Cities Have No Money

There's a blog I enjoy that covers this sort of issue very frequently. It's interesting to see a hard data approach to explaining some of the municipal funding problems that are brewing nationwide.

https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs...

devbon Kodak says it’s bringing back Ektachrome film

Interesting, thank you. I'll read up on this.

devbon Kodak says it’s bringing back Ektachrome film

Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything supporting it.

devbon Kodak says it’s bringing back Ektachrome film

The f-number is a ratio, not a specific diameter. f/16 is not the same between a 4x5 lens and a 35mm lens of equivalent angle of view. A 90 mm lens at f/16 has an entrance pupil diameter of 5.65 mm, while a 28 mm lens at f/16 has an entrance pupil diameter of 1.75 mm.

So no, diffraction is not an inherent limiting factor of shooting 4x5 and you will in fact gain resolution. You will only lose depth of field (and your savings) when you go to larger formats.

See this post for more: http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?...

devbon Do Not Eat, Touch, or Even Inhale the Air Around the Manchineel Tree

Same here. Now I only get it in the winter when the leaves are down.

devbon Filmmakers Ask Nikon and Canon to Sell Encrypted Cameras

Could this be accomplished at the storage level instead of at the camera level? Could an SD card have an onboard encryption engine? We have cards with built-in wifi already.

devbon Downside of Lower Manhattan’s Boom: It’s Too Crowded

Congestion pricing. Eliminate parking for sidewalk space and include delivery zones or dedicated delivery times with the street closed to traffic otherwise.

On street view I see maybe one delivery truck per block. Otherwise a very large portion of the street is dedicated to empty car storage. You've seen delivery zone parking before, right? The entire problem is how much space private vehicles take up versus the amount of public space that is available to people. The imbalance is huge and unfair and it's a matter of when, not if, that balance is going to be adjusted to a reasonable state.

devbon Downside of Lower Manhattan’s Boom: It’s Too Crowded

As someone who does, in fact, know Manhattan quite well, you have to be kidding. Nassau Street has parking on both sides for most of its length. John Street has parking on one side. There's no reason that empty car storage couldn't be sacrificed for expanded sidewalks and dedicated bike lanes.

devbon Nestle says it will cut sugar in chocolate by 40%

I don't know where you're getting the 5% figure. It's more like 50% sugar content for most commercial chocolate products.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/262978.php

(One teaspoon weighs approximately 4 grams)

devbon After Almost a Century, the 2nd Avenue Subway Is Close to Arriving

The AirTrain is already due for a full replacement: http://www.northjersey.com/news/newark-airtrain-s-demise-com...

devbon Kodak Ektra

Camera bodies aren't what you want to be investing in anyway; it's lenses. After a few years the body is basically disposable as far as resale value is concerned, if the body is even still working. Today's entry level cameras are miles ahead of what the pro cameras were ten years ago.

devbon Bike manufacturer sees huge reduction in delivery damage by printing TV on box

Does this apply only to USPS deliveries, or are private shippers like UPS, FedEx, etc. included?

devbon Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

Regarding your aside, if you develop black and white at home, there are kits to develop C-41 and E-6 at home as well. They're as easy as any standard black and white process.

devbon Most Radioactive Spot in New York: A Street Corner in Queens

A lot in Staten Island was once used to store uranium ore for the Manhattan Project. A recent survey found very high levels of radiological contamination.

https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/staten-islands-tain...

devbon Chemicals linked with severe respiratory disease found in e-cigarette flavors

I get mine shipped from Mt. Baker in 8 oz bottles (about $30.. no I don't work for them) and decant those into 30 ml bottles for use. You can even specify what PG/VG ratio you like.

devbon The Space Doctor’s Big Idea

Exactly half, as it happens.

> A naive application of Newtonian gravity can yield exactly half this value, where the light ray is assumed as a massed particle and scattered by the gravitational potential well.

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

devbon The Focal Camera – An open-source modular camera prototyping system

You could try to integrate one of these into the project: http://www.bigshotcamera.com/

The only problem is that the sensor is probably tiny and any old lenses you might want to play with would have a massive telephoto effect, making focusing very difficult.

devbon What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? (2009)

In case anyone very familiar with NYC infrastructure is interested

Intentional or not, #1 is wrong. The Battery Park City current diversion affects the southern PATH train tunnel between Exchange Place in Jersey City and the World Trade Center station. Several years ago the Port Authority quietly embarked on a project to dump clay and sand on top of the exposed tunnels and then placed large convex metal plates on top of the new fill to protect the tunnel shells.

This article also, intentionally or not, inaccurately describes the project: http://nypost.com/2010/11/30/path-tunnels-get-600m-ring-of-s...

Interestingly, the alleged flood gates did not stop seawater inundation during Hurricane Sandy.

devbon The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel (2007)

There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know where to begin.

> "Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away!"

Newark Airport is in a solid southwest heading from Weehawken. Final approach is either from the north, south, or a western heading over Jersey City to Runway 29, still south and slightly west of Weehawken. A tunnel looking east would see skyscrapers in Manhattan. Possibly air traffic from Laguardia, but it's unlikely, especially with pump infrastructure in the way.

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> To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps.

Yet a few paragraphs later, they say "Mail would frequently arrive singed or deformed from the intense heat and pressure." What is it? Vacuum or pressure?

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> Furthermore, advances in electrical engineering meant that containers would no longer have to be propelled by compressed gas. The burritos already came conveniently wrapped in aluminum foil - it would be trivial to accelerate them with powerful magnets.

The power required by these magnets to induce the Lenz effect in a burrito wrapper, let alone propel it, is too high for large-scale applications.

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> Under our feet are five miles of silt from the Rockies before you even get to the first rock.

Not even close to true. Tecumseh Shale, for example, can be found about 100 feet deep in places.

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> At the tunnel exit, a final puff of air slows the burritos to a stop and they are placed in insulated bags. These are whisked to a fleet of waiting trucks, which pass through the Holland Tunnel (this time at a more stately thirty-five miles per hour) and then onward to restaurants and cafeterias throughout the five boroughs.

Why not the Lincoln Tunnel? It's actually in Weehawken! The traffic through Hoboken and Jersey City to the Holland is insane. Why didn't they just build the tunnel to Manhattan? It's a mile away!

devbon New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

But the transmission time delay is still only 4.5 hours, not 9.5. The onboard clock has simply drifted out of sync with one on Earth.

devbon Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

We call these "Blood Rules" at my place of business because every single one likely has an unfortunate origin.

devbon Spooky Alignment of Quasars Across Billions of Light-years

Sure. A dumb civilization could have done it too, perhaps as something to do with crystals or the Zodiac.

But in all seriousness, Occam's Razor is a great tool here. So far, every cosmological problem we believe we've figured out has occurred due to natural processes. There is very likely something we don't know about large scale structures (an understatement!).

devbon Waste Water from Oil Fracking Injected into Clean Aquifers

Marshall followed up with “But when those (further) test results come back, we’ll know for sure”. I think your assessment of the situation is premature at best.

In any case, the tone for the statements by Marshall that you quoted were, to me, set with this earlier one:

“There have been past issues where permits were issued to operators that they shouldn’t be injecting into those zones and so we’re fixing that,”

Could this guy be any more wishy washy?

devbon Sorry, We Have No Imagery Here: When Google Earth Goes Blind

> Google Earth is prevented from showing the faces of real people, both living and dead. Colonel Sanders used to be one, which means that his smiling visage is blurred out on the logo of every one of the world's KFCs.

Pretty sure Google's face recognition just blurred those out as a matter of pattern matching. If you look carefully in Street View you can see false positives everywhere.

devbon FTC Says AT&T Has Misled Millions of Consumers with ‘Unlimited’ Data Promises

That's a great theory, but what are the actual limits? Why not introduce throttling to everyone at once only at times of actual spikes instead of forcing me to sit through a week of having an essentially useless phone until the billing cycle goes through?

More importantly, why the hell are millions of people paying for something that they were promised but aren't getting?