Hacker News Reader

ditnon Leave Me Behind

For the longest time the Android community was super close-knit where people talked about this stuff online and in person constantly, and OP was a pretty active contributor.

Unfortunately Twitter pre-acquisition was probably the focal point and since then, I don't think the community has been the same.

ditnon The Ribbon Microphone

An interesting feature of ribbon mics - because the ribbon is open at the front and the back, they reject sound from the side (and top/bottom) almost perfectly. You can arrange these cleverly in live or studio settings to amplify one thing while rejecting another completely.

A typical usecase for this is a singer with an acoustic guitar - one mic can pick up the guitar and almost fully reject the vocals, and vice-versa. Pretty cool.

ditnon Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin

Generally these are only used in test methods, which is fine. I've never seen anyone use them outside that.

ditnon "Frost crack" sounds may come from sky, not trees

One thing that I found super interesting when I studied audio engineering is that our ears are very good at determining direction left/right, but absolutely hopeless at working out if a sound is up or down.

This makes their hypothesis a lot more believable to me; I can understand others incredulity.

ditnon Loss of oxygen in lakes and oceans

Someone failed highschool chemistry. More gas can dissolve in cold water vs hot. The opposite of solids.

ditnon Japan's airport control towers stop using 'No.1' instruction for plane takeoffs

Yeah this is standard practise in the UK armed forces/EOD teams. Source: spent time with No. 5131 Squadron in Akrotiri.

ditnon Poor people ‘surviving not living’ as UK social contract collapses, says report

> I can’t think of any other place where people’s sense of net worth is as tied up with their house price as it is in the UK, while at the same time the increase in house price that people have been conditioned to believe is the norm over the last decade is wholly unsustainable given the stagnant wages.

Canada.

ditnon Micro- and nanoplastics breach the blood–brain barrier in mice

Regularly donating blood or plasma can reduce PFAS concentrations in the body, I believe the effect is the same on microplastics https://theconversation.com/new-evidence-shows-blood-or-plas...

ditnon Tell HN: Google search is getting worse

You can set a custom filter in uBlock Origin to do this for you - here's an example filtering out Pinterest garbage:

google.##.g:has(a[href=".pinterest."]) google.##a[href=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)

https://awesometoast.com/argh-stop-the-pinterest-results/

ditnon Turkey earthquake: please keep 28.540 clear for communications

During the outbreak of the Ukraine war, this role was taken up by Twitter Spaces.

ditnon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2023)

  Location: Ontario, Canada
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Android, Kotlin
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-bennett-4784b327/
  Email: info@adambennett.dev
  GitHub: https://github.com/ditn/

Android Engineer looking for a Staff or Lead role, ideally at a more established company but it depends on the problem space. I've worked and lead teams at fintech startups and most recently at Twitter 1.0, and I'm recognised as a Google Developer Expert in the industry.

Looking for new challenges and a chance to grow - I'm at my best when under some pressure and surrounded by smart people.

ditnon Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

Then why were they reviewing unrelated codebases? iOS, Android? This doesn't hold up

ditnon Twitter engineers told to print out their code

They use git.

ditnon Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

"No true blockchain"

ditnon Low economic growth is a slow-burning crisis for Britain

60% _marginal_ tax, not everall.

ditnon Carbon dioxide now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels

For those reading this with incredulity I believe the above commenter made a typo - the average depth is 3688m, or 12,100ft.

ditnon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://adambennett.dev/

Mostly Android + Kotlin with a recent foray into interviewing, and I'd like to write about leadership/culture a bit more. I've gotten out of the habit of writing recently due to burnout but I'm starting to feel that motivation again.

It's a Hugo static site ontop of Firebase Hosting, and I just commit to GitHub and Actions builds and deploys the site for me. I recently started using http://forestry.io/ which is a nice GUI over the top for content management.

ditnon Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

It's not, it's a runtime service locator. In my experience it doesn't scale terribly well.

ditnon The $11B Webb telescope aims to probe the early universe

That's an event I'd like to see!

ditnon The $11B Webb telescope aims to probe the early universe

It's a hard limit due needing fuel to maintain its orbit. It's in a lagrange point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) which requires occasional orbital corrections.

ditnon Launch HN: Runway (YC W21) – Easier iOS and Android app releases for teams

That sounds brilliant. I've signed up for access and will wait patiently.

ditnon Launch HN: Runway (YC W21) – Easier iOS and Android app releases for teams

This is very very cool and I'm excited to eventually get access to it. I'd love to see a Crashlytics integration so that we can also use Runway to monitor post-release health in one place - looks like maybe you thought about this as I can see Firebase support is coming.

Anyway good luck with this and I look forward to giving it a spin.

ditnon NHS Covid-19 app update blocked for breaking Apple and Google's rules

You might like this then - turns out the QR codes are a cluster https://www.revk.uk/2020/09/how-not-to-qr-nhs-c19-app.html

ditnon U-2: The veteran spyplane too valuable to replace

When I was a teenager I was in the Air Training Corps, and I was lucky enough to be selected for a "camp" at RAF Akrotiri.

Several U2 spyplanes are stationed there (along with the Red Arrows during off-season), and we were treated to watching them come and go to operations presumably in the middle-east. Watching them land was incredible as they appear to move incredibly slowly and touch down very gently. They're also amongst the noisiest aircraft I've ever been around.

One of the commanding officers organised a camp photo infront of one of the U2s - we were shuttled outside a hangar with this enormous plane behind us. We were told we were strictly not allowed on the other side of the aircraft that they had "sanitised" for us as not to reveal any state secrets, somehow.

I still have that photo, it's a great one, but it's also technically OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE and we're not allowed to show it to anyone. Our "official" camp photo was infront of the Red Arrows, which would have been cool enough - but our secret photo was cooler.

ditnon Show HN: BeautifulCode, generate beautiful images of your source code

This seems like a pretty straight clone of https://carbon.now.sh/

ditnon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2019)

Location: London, UK Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Android, Kotlin, RxJava, Gradle, AndroidX, Retrofit, OkHttp, Dagger2, Koin, security/encryption, cryptocurrency

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-bennett-4784b327/

Website: https://adambennett.dev

Email: info@adambennett.dev

Worked in early-stage fintech startups for a number of years now, looking to move to something slightly more established unless it's a great fit or an interesting problem.

Passionate about Android, experienced in launching products from scratch and re-architecting legacy codebases, security, OSS. Capable team lead or individual contributor.

ditnon On the Trail of the RoboCall King

>Remember this is the same FCC that couldn't detect millions of fake anti-net neutrality comments.

Not couldn't - didn't want to.

ditnon Do Londoners dream of electric buses?

There's actually the opposite evidence; it's worse to be in a vehicle than walk or cycle, and there's a few studies that say that the benefits of cycling outweigh the pollution exposure.

http://www.breathelondon.org/south-east/project/modes-transp...

ditnon Ask HN: What are some technical topics I can blog about?

It's better to write about stuff that you've just learnt. Fixed a tricky bug, learnt about a new API, found a useful library? Write about it.

It'll cement the knowledge in your mind, and perhaps you'll have insights that others haven't had. If you're aiming to write about stuff no-one's ever written before, you'll never get around to actually writing anything.

ditnon Rolls-Royce and Boeing invest in UK space engine

>Key technologies include a compact pre-cooler heat-exchanger that can take an incoming airstream of over 1,000C and cool it to -150C in less than 1/100th of a second.

That seems incredible. I'd love to see in greater detail how the system works.