Hacker News Reader

ftrobroon Oldest Fortresses in the World Discovered

The headline is wrong. The study was not about the oldest fortresses in the world but about the oldest fortresses created by hunter-gatherers. Walls were built around Jericho 10000 years ago, which means those walls are 2000 years older than the fortresses in the study.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Jericho-West-Bank

ftrobroon Masterpiece was hanging above an elderly French woman's hot plate

Your birth is effectively random, but the inheritance might be very much intentional. Parents might choose to build something for generations to come rather than spending everything they earn on themselves.

> Inheritance tax is progressive like income tax. ... > Think multinational companies, not local farms. ... > A family business needs to be quite big to be threatened by inheritance taxes.

Depends on which country you're referring to. In Sweden before 2005 inheritance tax was a flat 30 % for any inheritance above $60k. Which meant that children would need to pay a lot of money in taxes just to keep the house they grew up in after their parents passed away.

ftrobroon Masterpiece was hanging above an elderly French woman's hot plate

Sweden also has zero tax for inheritance and gifts.

What is "fair" is subjective. Inheritance is only by chance if you consider family ties to have zero value. Building something over generations, for example a company or a farm, becomes difficult with high inheritance tax.

ftrobroon Masterpiece was hanging above an elderly French woman's hot plate

An income tax marginal rate of 42 % doesn't seem super high in international comparison:

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

Belgium tops that list at 79.5 % but even in the USA it can reach 51.6 %.

In 1975 the author Astrid Lindgren famously had a marginal rate of 102 % on her income tax in Sweden, so the more money she earned the less she had left after taxes...

http://ianangell.com/blog-entries/the-pomperipossa-effect/pa...

ftrobroon Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

That is probably a major reason for the higher yields in Germany, but the person I replied to claimed that yields aren't really higher in Europe than in the US.

According to data from the UN, in 2020 North America used 2.77 kg pesticiedes per hectare cropland and Europe used 1.69 kg/ha, and yet Europe has higher yields per hectare. So clearly Europe uses less pesticedes per produced amount of food.

https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RP

ftrobroon Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

What do you mean by "corrected for the land area"? According to this study, in the period 2016-2020 wheat yields per acre were more than twice as high in Germany than in North Dakota or Kansas.

https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/resource/2022/05/int...

ftrobroon That's a Lot of YAML

Hjson is very similar to JSON5 but allows quotes to be dropped and can use newlines instead of commas. There are implementations for a lot of different languages, I myself contributed the C++ implementation. I wanted something smaller than Yaml but more lax than JSON, found Hjson to suit my needs perfectly.

https://hjson.github.io/

ftrobroon What is wrong with TOML? (2019)

Roundtrips without destroying comments or formatting is supported in the JavaScript, Go and C++ implementations of Hjson, but not in the other implementations (I think).

ftrobroon Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?

Yes, I agree. And regardless of experience, people at some point get too old to drive, but don't always want to accept that fact. Having cars that can do 100 % of the driving would be great.

ftrobroon Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?

If you consider those situations dangerous you aren't driving slow enough.

ftrobroon Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?

> The dataset available will never be large enough to allow ML autonomous cars to solve every situation a human driver can.

Not every human driver can solve every situation that the best human driver can solve. Also, the most dangerous situations happen at high speed, which humans aren't great at handling unless we've had a lot of training. The main reason I'm optimistic about autonomous cars is that a system like Waymo's will only get better and better over the years. And newly produced cars will be just as good as "experienced" cars.

ftrobroon C++ Papercuts

Visual Studio != VS Code. I've always found Visual Studio to be great at C++ so I'm interested in knowing which of the two you meant?

ftrobroon Tesla repossessed my car due to an extreme oversight on their end

I assume T&C only matters for licensed services (software), not for fully owned property?

ftrobroon Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

Private monopoly in Sweden too. But at least they're not hiding the fact that 22.5 % of the money they collect go to their own administration costs rather than to artists...

https://issuu.com/ymrkommunikation/docs/23-1643_copyswede_fb...

ftrobroon Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

Several countries have that tax. Here in Sweden we pay about $10 for every new computer, mobile phone, SSD etc just because we might store music on them. Quite absurd.

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

ftrobroon It's official: Smartphones will need to have replaceable batteries by 2027

> the phone still more than meets my needs

Does it still get upgrades to newer Android versions? Personally the reason I need to get a new phone is usually that the OS no longer receives upgrades (which means that apps drop support for it) or even security patches.

ftrobroon Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

a solid-state battery with a range of 1,200km (745 miles) that could charge in 10 minutes or less

For that range I assume the battery holds 150 Wh/km * 1200 km = 180 kWh. Charging it in 10 minutes would require about 1.1 MW. That's a lot of Watts.

ftrobroon Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

> we know conclusively that their goal is impossible

No we only know that their approach was wrong. Here is a preprint of a paper describing detection of 12 different types of cancer from a single drop of blood:

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2025767/v1

ftrobroon Square where Julius Caesar was killed opens to the public in Rome

The story of Cincinnatus might have been embellished, but still:

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

ftrobroon Vice files for Bankruptcy

In January 2017 they (Motherboard) published a long and detailed article (translated from Das Magazin) about how Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook data to help get Trump elected, somthing I thought was important for everyone to know about. A year later bigger media "revealed" the same information and it became big news around the world.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-...

ftrobroon The “baseline” scene in bladerunner 2049 was written by Ryan Gosling (2022)

Even though I liked 2049 I agree with you, there wasn't much meaning to it. In contrast, in the first movie I was fascinated by the idea of literally travelling to meet your maker if you are not content with the limits of your existence. And of course the cheesy but wonderful monologue by Rutger Hauer.

ftrobroon Whisper.cpp v1.4.0

Tag v1.4.1 has been created, fixes bugs:

https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/releases/tag/v1.4.1

ftrobroon Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

You're missing the point. An increase in the number of mammalian herbivores just means an increased point of equilibrium for methane. But there will still be an equilibrium.

In contrast, using fossile sources of carbon (oil etc) will increase the greenhouse effect every year even if the usage is constant.

ftrobroon Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

> I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct

It's not like mammalian herbivores are a recent invention. If a constant amount of mammalian herbivores in the world would cause a constant acceleration of greenhouse effect then the greenhouse effect would have increased exponentially for millions of years already. That has not been the case.

If you increase the number of mammalian herbivores in the world then the greenhouse effect will increase for about a decade because of increasing levels of methane. After a decade, the methane level (and therefore the greenhouse effect) will have found a new (higher) equilibrium and no longer increase.

ftrobroon Levels of banned CFCs rising

USA is the only western country in the top five for historical CO2 emissions since 1850 (unless you consider Brazil a western country):

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-his...

ftrobroon New tool from curl creator – trurl – for URL parsing and manipulation

Usage: " PROGNAME " [options] [URL]

But you can put options wherever you want, they are identified by the leading '-' char.

ftrobroon The EU's new Cyber Resilience Act is about to tell us how to code

> The death of dynamic typing and default-nullability would probably save the industry society billions of dollars in the long run.

I'm not sure a ban on software coded using PHP, plain Javascript, legacy Python, C/C++ or assembler would be cheap for "society"...

ftrobroon 5k-year-old tavern with food still inside discovered in iraq

I was mainly wondering why noone else claimed the tavern or demolished it to make room for a new building considering that the city was probably growing between 2700 BC and 2075 BC. Looking at the photo it seems the tavern was found in the top soil layer with nothing above it. But perhaps the photo looks like that because there have been several excavations since 1887. Or maybe the photo just shows some random building...

ftrobroon 5k-year-old tavern with food still inside discovered in iraq

I wonder why the tavern was abandoned with food in it in 2700 BC when the city itself was inhabitated far longer and according to Wikipedia might have been "the largest city in the world from c. 2075 to 2030 BC".

ftrobroon Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

> you can't just block their access to the internet

Or maybe that's the best thing you can do for them, perhaps preventing them from revealing even more passwords etc to the attacker.