Hacker News Reader

eh_why_noton Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

> All current China CDN customers must complete the transition to our Partners’ solution by June 30, 2026...

Can anyone here who works in the field shed some light on why it takes a whole 1.5 years for such a change to take effect?

What's involved in a CDN transition that can't be done in, say, 6 months?

eh_why_noton I was wrong about the ethics crisis

Thanks for clarifying.

eh_why_noton I was wrong about the ethics crisis

> It's time we acknowledge that the H1-B visa program creates a similar dynamic....leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.

By associating this to the subject of the post, are you implying that the perpetrators of unethical tech in the U.S. are mainly foreign workers, and not "homegrown" citizens?

eh_why_noton Mathematicians uncover a new way to count prime numbers

In the recent past, I've accepted that all titles are not informative anymore. But that there was hope that the subtitles were actually informative (i.e. the subtitle was the real title, and the title was the clickbait).

In this article, neither is informative.

And even after several paragraphs in, you don't know what the general area of the proof is. Just meandering long-winded story-telling.

If anyone of you authors/editors of this magazine are here; please, for the love of all that's holly, put the crux of the matter at the top and then go off to tell your beautiful, humanized, whatever... story.

eh_why_noton An Italian town that built its own sun (2021)

> The mirror was designed by Bozani with the help of engineer Gianni Ferrari, and cost about €100,000...

First reaction: why would a mirror cost this much?

> Eight metres wide and five tall, it reflects the sunlight for six hours a day, following the sun’s path in the sky thanks to a software programme that makes it rotate.

Also saw elsewhere that the reflectors are made of steel. So a giant, software-controlled, motorized structure, reflecting just the right amount of sunlight to a precise location, sitting out there in the elements...

Totally worth it, and what a cool project!

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat ("Aziz, Light!")

eh_why_noton Probing unknown unknowns: A new generation of telescopes

> ... will house a mirror the size of four tennis courts...

What's with those "football stadium", "tennis court", etc measurement units?

Is it assumed that everyone knows how much that is? Are they more understandable than giving a number (area) or two (length x width) in SI - or even Imperial - units?

Instead you have to go search for what the size in that particular sport is, so you can get any idea of what they're talking about!

eh_why_noton Mathematicians discover new class of shape seen throughout nature

Looking past Nature magazine's unnecessarily fancy/clickbait title, the original work's [0] title is "Soft cells and the geometry of seashells".

[0] https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae311/77546...

eh_why_noton Scaling up linear programming with PDLP

Can we post clean and direct links to resources here, instead of those obscure links with hidden tracking?

eh_why_noton How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

Thanks, I think it would be informative if you put this spelling out in the article. People like myself not immersed in health fields won't immediately know what you mean without it.

eh_why_noton How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

>Undiagnosed sleep apnea affects more than 23.5 million people in the US alone, leading to $150B of wasted medical spend every year.

What do they mean by "wasted medical spend" here?

(1) Patients incorrectly spending money on a misdiagnosis, or (2) apnea solution providers not making money off people when they could?

eh_why_noton FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

No-JS user here. A disturbing trend noticed in the past two months: can't login anymore to some financial/health services sites (bank/insurance/etc) without disabling all of NoScript - no amount of selective enabling of websites satisfies them, and those websites are using known infractors like Adobe.

In other words, there is code in the backend checking that all tracking/-ware has run on the browser, and refusing to let you login unless you let it all run, while none of it is necessary (as evidenced by older versions - and other sites - accepting only the top site being JS-enabled).

"We either track the living shit out of you, or you don't access the essential services you need, even though technically it is not needed."

eh_why_noton When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?

This issue has been a plague in the area of Toys and Games. Good luck finding a good toy that does not *require* an app to run.

Every year I have little gremlins asking me to "fix" a toy someone brought them the previous year; the app doesn't work/update anymore - and the toy is a brick.

eh_why_noton Sora-like text-to-video model from Chinese startup Minimax, 10 examples

Here you go:

1) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664714902446469

2) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664738495508815

3) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664761425752232

4) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664784586612822

5) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664807512735933

6) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664830442971550

7) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664853436190909

8) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664876584587741

9) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664899686551807

10) https://twitter.com/aisolopreneur/status/1830664922893521096

eh_why_noton All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)

I was curious how much of this water we lose to space via evaporation. Looking around, apparently not much; only few molecules achieve escape velocity. But can't find a good calculation yet.

eh_why_noton The rich history of ham radio culture

> employers look out for

As in, avoid? Or want?

eh_why_noton The rich history of ham radio culture

What's dangerous about ham radio?

eh_why_noton Ted Chiang has won the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's short story prize

Good point.

Which novels would you recommend that had no filler content?

eh_why_noton Ted Chiang has won the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's short story prize

Interesting that he's never written a full novel, only short stories.

I wonder if that in itself made his works higher quality: no pressure for high word count, and thus economy with words and no filler content.

eh_why_noton You can help Anna's Archive by seeding torrents

Not an expert on laws/jurisdictions; but data is collected, stored forever, and in some places is (legally) on sale. And laws get changed quickly based on lobbying.

eh_why_noton You can help Anna's Archive by seeding torrents

I'd expect the number of users from browsers to always be orders of magnitude larger than torrent users.

eh_why_noton You can help Anna's Archive by seeding torrents

I'm told Anna's Archive forces a javascript Cloudflare human-browser check on the visitor.

Given how much data Cloudflare (and other similar giants providing this service) has, this pretty much identifies the person to them.

Any plans to change that to a more privacy-protecting solution?

eh_why_noton Author Clock: a novel way to tell time

It's buyer manipulation. "Here's this ridiculously priced item; but it's okay you can feel good about throwing this much money away, because we're planting a tree."

Instead of segmenting/targeting the high-income market by product quality, they target by emotional manipulation claiming good causes. (i.e. higher-priced product that does not have to be higher quality).

eh_why_noton Author Clock: a novel way to tell time

> We plant a tree for every Author Clock sold....

> Shop: $199.00 USD

Funny how products that claim a cause on the side are always 5 times the price they should be.

eh_why_noton Symbolica Computer Algebra System

Is there a document/book you can recommend that includes a simplified example/tutorial of this computation process from beginning to end? (Or, what are the right keywords to search for such a thing?)

I'm looking for something like: here's the particle interaction we will work on, this is a very simple Feynman diagram, and here's the simplified data the LHC gave us about it, here's the resulting equation from which we'll derive a series, etc.

Not looking for how to program it, but actually for seeing the problem structure, and the solution design from beginning to end. (Familiar with high level physics concepts, and comfortable with any math).

eh_why_noton NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

> from 2 light days distance

The distance is currently 22.5 light hours (and increases by half-hour per year.) But it is indeed about 2 days of round-trip time for debugging.

eh_why_noton Show HN: Exploring Indra's Pearls with WebGPU

Beautiful work and an excellent writeup! Looking forward to your next project.

eh_why_noton As space threats mount, U.S. lags in protecting GPS services

For anyone else wondering: celestial navigation (by the stars) apparently works during the day as well, as the stars' infrared light remains "visible" [0]:

> The new systems use infrared rather than visible light for locating stars, allowing daytime navigation. The stars shine just as brightly in the day sky as they do at night, but their light is masked by sunlight scattered by the atmosphere. The scattering is strongest at short wavelengths... But glimpse that same sky with a filter that allows only infrared light, and the sky suddenly becomes dark - and filled with stars.

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a36078957...

eh_why_noton Hexagons and Hilbert curves – The headaches of distributed spatial indices

Gem indeed! Here's its wikipedia page:

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

eh_why_noton General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior with Data Brokers

What a creepy world we have become!

It's as if you draw a thousand targets on your back every time you use technology nowadays.

eh_why_noton How do computers calculate sine?

> Perhaps the author merely meant it as an illustration.

Yes I too was expecting oscillations (since I saw Chebyshev polynomials mentioned on the wiki page). I'm beginning to think that the word "might" in their statement "One way to calculate is Remez’s algorithm. The results might look like this:" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

A couple of notes about your results:

- The interval only needs to be [0, pi/16] and not [0, pi/4]; adjusting that in your wolframalpha query yields a similar bound to what the author lists: 3.5 e-9. (Although same observation about the change of behavior at the bounds as you made).

- The polynomial you obtained actually looks pretty close to the Taylor one: the even coefficients are small, and rounding to 5 or 6 digits might yield a close one, maybe if we look for a degree 9 polynomial instead of degree 8. (I don't have an implementation of Remez handy right now to try it myself).

> Although of course the first few digits of the low-order matching terms will be very similar

Makes sense.