Hacker News Reader

gammaratoron Naomi Wu and the Silence That Speaks Volumes

It’s a long video but very interesting. Dolly Parton makes an appearance!

For folks asking what the Notebook UX offers that the Lab does not, this github thread may be enlightening: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/6210

(TLDR: some novice users in educational settings find the lab environment overwhelming.)

gammaratoron FedNow Is Live

… not sure if this is sarcasm…

gammaratoron FTC warns board game content creators, publishers to disclose relationships

Everyone’s getting payola from Big UNO: https://www.vulture.com/article/uno-taylor-swift-beyonce-why...

gammaratoron In a major discovery, scientists say space-time churns like a choppy sea

Also the Ars article links to the actual papers, which should really be standard practice.

The journal these papers are published in is open access: no paywall.

gammaratoron Pixel fucked: Inside Hollywood's VFX crisis

Academia! (with much smaller paychecks, but occasionally tenure)

gammaratoron Cost of ‘reformatting’ prompts a call for journals to change their requirements

There’s rich irony in this article appearing in Nature, which has some of the most unusual and restrictive formatting requirements.

Also, journal publication fees dwarf the implicit cost of reformatting and deliver arguably less value.

gammaratoron Thousands of early-career NIH researchers forming union for first time

Wrong. Congress passed a law that exempts residency programs from antitrust consideration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_America...

gammaratoron Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong

From the article:

> And in San Francisco… 70% of its homeless population previously lived in the city and a whopping 92% had previously lived in California.

gammaratoron Experiments in Making Cocktail Ice

Almost all of the cooling ice provides is due to melting: the heat capacity of the ice itself (energy release due to temperature change) is much less than the latent heat of fusion (energy release due to melting).

Look at the huge jump at 0 deg C in this diagram: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Heat_cap...

It takes less heat to warm ice from -100 C to 0 than it does to melt ice at 0 C to water at 0 C.

gammaratoron Hard feelings over mission change for NASA’s Pluto spacecraft

Some context: NASA missions are built and funded for finite “prime” missions. After that they undergo external “senior reviews” every two years. All operating missions are stack ranked against each other based on their scientific productivity. Low performing missions are turned off and the money used for other things. In this case it’s not being turned off but reprioritized.

This just reads to me like Alan Stern is salty that they got a low ranking and his mission is being taken from him. But that’s why the senior review asks an external panel and not the PIs!

gammaratoron Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

I’m sure he could provide them some office space if he’s worried about the market having to operate outside.

gammaratoron Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

Correct. But universities want researchers because they bring in research grants (which provide the university 50%+ in overhead: slush funds).

gammaratoron Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

My own hypothesis is that many adjuncts work under such poor conditions due to an irrational belief that it will lead to a tenure track position some day. Without that carrot the whole market destabilizes.

Tenure is the key incentive in the academic tournament model. Other fields that do “out or up” (consulting, Big Law) offer major $$$ to the winners.

gammaratoron Giant SpaceX Spiral Appears Amid the Aurora Lights in Alaska's Night Sky

Starlink affects even space telescopes in LEO: https://www.space.com/hubble-images-spoiled-starlink-satelli...

gammaratoron Giant SpaceX Spiral Appears Amid the Aurora Lights in Alaska's Night Sky

Astronomers are not in the business of getting an emotional reaction from looking at the night sky, we're trying to learn facts about the universe by making quantitative measurements--a process that megaconstellations indisputably degrade.

gammaratoron Monolith: The Recommendation System Behind TikTok

This is a critical step to get rid of bad recommendations, and the algorithm seems to treat it as a very strong signal—after 1-a few “not interested” labels you won’t see that content for weeks if ever.

gammaratoron Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

Hey GPT-5, tell me how to create the philosopher’s stone .

gammaratoron Tell HN: Reddit Has Disabled i.reddit.com

Nooooo! I used it to browse without an account. Not sure what I’ll do now.

gammaratoron Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center

> The "iron law of megaprojects": Over budget, over time, over and over again.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0003

gammaratoron Learning the ropes: why Germany is building risk into its playgrounds (2021)

I saw some of this German company’s equipment in Memphis, Tennessee—very cool, and quite different from most U.S. playgrounds: https://www.richter-spielgeraete.de/en/playground-equipment/...

gammaratoron Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout

> Anything beyond the $250K per account would be money that they are not entitled to per US banking regulation.

This isn’t correct. SVB has assets which are still worth something, even if they are less than their total liabilities. Unsecured depositors are first in line for that money, and the $250k fdic insurance limit has nothing to do with it.

gammaratoron The AI Mirror Test, which smart people keep failing

My test is, does it try to protect itself from harm?

gammaratoron Last Flight Out

The documentary "Picture a Scientist" https://www.pictureascientist.com/ describes some of this--it's gutting to watch.

gammaratoron Last Flight Out

My favorite writing about Antarctica is "Big Dead Place": https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-30/big-dead-place-the-wi...

You can find the blog in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20120402141259/http://www.bigdea... or grab the book.

Silver medal to Maciej for this one: https://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm

gammaratoron George Orwell's 6 rules for writing (2018; originally published in 1946)

I mean, if you're looking for a long-form takedown, Maciej already wrote "Dabblers and Blowhards" nearly two decades ago.

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

gammaratoron Discovery of an Exceptionally Rare Nearby and Energetic Gamma-Ray Burst

Tradition.

(although my postdoctoral advisor claimed our weird units were intended to keep the physicists at bay.)