Hacker News Reader

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kraussvonespyon Tesla now factors late night driving into their safety score

Agreed. Complaining that the product you purchased does exactly what it was designed to do isn't really a "freedom" issue. If one wants to drive fast at night in a Tesla, there are many companies that don't monitor vehicle use. Choose one of those instead. That's freedom.

kraussvonespyon Room-temperature superconductor discovery meets with resistance

Looking forward to giving the Nature paper a read. I appreciate your time and wisdom!

kraussvonespyon Room-temperature superconductor discovery meets with resistance

I tried to go through the "Room-temperature superconductivity — or not?" paper related to the "[We] proved basically mathematically that the raw data are not measured in the laboratory; they are fabricated" comment. I'll admit, the paper is well over my head. Long time no college science classes.

I'm curious about the methods used to determine that the data was fabricated though. Would someone mathier than me help answer this: Was the fabrication of data determined through a mathmatical analysis of the actual data numbers ala Benford's Law? Or was this determined more through a scientific analysis of the experiment that determined that the numbers weren't possible?

kraussvonespyon U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

When ~45% of US corn is used for ethanol production[1], I'd say we can stop considering that "periods of excess" and call it what it really is: grift.

[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...

kraussvonespyon Tile adds undetectable anti-theft mode with $1M fine if used for stalking

Isn't "undetectable" an overstatement? If you were a sophisticated attacker, you'd be able to detect RF coming from the Tiles every so often, right? Or do they only respond to the right signals from a signed-in device?

In addition, doesn't the anti-theft feature make it impossible to find the item if you aren't close with the proper Tile app signed into one login? The power of AirTags is that any IOS device can wander past, see the device, then send that info to the owner without the wanderer even knowing about the transaction. Tile was pretty restricted before as there are many, many times fewer Tile app users compared to AirTags. Now with this feature, instead of all Tile users being able to gather info, if the Tile isn't within a few feet of the one signed-in device, it's not going to find the Tile and the stolen item.

Seems like a thin layer of marketing slathered onto a product that isn't really competing anymore.

kraussvonespyon “How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

Too bad the New Yorker abandoned him. If your writing makes it past the editors, fact checkers and attorneys at that mag, you're probably golden. The effort they spent on Lawrence Wright's Scientology article was pretty hardcore: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133561256

kraussvonespyon A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle?

https://www.damninteresting.com/faxes-from-the-far-side/

kraussvonespyon Why are online recipes so long-winded?

That's a great tip! I'm getting more dinner guests with gluten issues and would like to get better at that side of cooking. Is there a good place (cookbook) to start with?

kraussvonespyon Why are online recipes so long-winded?

Opposite opinion here: Internet recipes are generally terrible. It's almost impossible to make any determination as to whether recipes have ever been tested or optimized or anything, and I just don't trust them. But if I go to seriouseats.com (for example) and they show me all of the work they went through to get to the recipe, I trust them.

I'd say that well over half of the random Internet recipes I try aren't very good, have been developed with bad techniques, use the wrong flavors, try to fix flavor issues by adding more flavors and so on. Using a vetted site (the America's Test Kitchen recipes are also quite good) gets me ~98% success.

I'd rather take the extra 5 minutes of time to look through how the recipe was created and tested to make sure it's a good recipe than spend a couple of hours making an unknown recipe with a 50/50 shot to not be terrible. YMMV.

kraussvonespyon 10TB portable SSDs on Amazon UK are scams

It does feel short sighted for Amazon to allow these issues to dilute their brand. They lost money FOREVER to develop a strong and loyal customer base. Now with less online programming,worse physical goods delivery, AND lots of merchandise, vendor and review scams like these, it feels like they're rapidly headed for a crash with enshittification. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

kraussvonespyon Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income

COBOL. Spend a couple of months getting back into the coding mindset by digging into COBOL, then find a local company that needs help maintaining old COBOL programs. I've gotten calls from local colleges asking me if: a) I want to teach COBOL courses as adjunct (nope) or b) if I'd have any interest in helping to maintain for them or other area employers (not yet but maybe someday).

kraussvonespyon Ask HN: What happens if a nuclear missile is air-destroyed before detonation?

C&C is excellent. Restricted Data by Alex Wellerstein is a fascinating history of nuclear secrecy. Also known as the NUKEMAP guy.

The Dead Hand by David Hoffman is also amazing and covers chemical and bio weapons as well. It has a good bit on the struggle to contain all of the chem/bio/nuke weapons when the USSR was falling apart.

kraussvonespyon Ask HN: What happens if a nuclear missile is air-destroyed before detonation?

The book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser is one of the best I've read on any subject. He intersperses the history of nuclear command and control with the AR missile silo near disaster story. Top notch reporting all around.

kraussvonespyon What Are 'Dark Factories,' and Do They Exist?

You and I may be the only REAMDE fans on the planet. Thanks bruv.

Thanks for the Daniel Suarez tip too. Looking forward to some good near future books.

kraussvonespyon U.S. military-run slot machines earn $100M a year from service members

Except those forms blessed by the church like bingo, keno, pickle cards, raffles, etc. As long as the invisible friend gets a cut, they’re a-ok with gambling.

kraussvonespyon Woman ordered to repay employer after software shows ‘time theft’

From my post: "If you’re paying a consultant, sure you want to get an hour work for an hour pay but an employee?"

It seems like we agree on the consulting bit but she wasn’t a consultant, she was an employee. Expecting 8 hours of work from an employee in an 8 hour day isn’t the way things work.

kraussvonespyon Woman ordered to repay employer after software shows ‘time theft’

https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...

Considering that your average employee in the US (and it’s safe to assume that numbers in Canada are similar) is productive for less than 3 hours in your average 8 hour work day, this is kind of ridiculous. If you’re paying a consultant, sure you want to get an hour work for an hour pay but an employee?

Reach CPA can consider this a win short term but I anticipate they’ll be out of business in 3 years or less. They’ll lose employees and nobody is going to apply to replace them. Seems like a stupidly small amount of money to alienate your present and future workforce over to me.

Edit: not to mention that this is a cowardly and badly broken way to “manage” employees. An effective manager would have actually managed her and counseled her on what the company expected. Instead they went the chicken shit route of management, didn’t work with her and instead used tech to look for excuses to fire her. This company needs to go down in flames. If you can’t be bothered to manage your employees, you shouldn’t be in business. Period.

kraussvonespyon Most people on antidepressants don’t need them

More on this from Derek Lowe of Things I Won’t Work With fame:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-phenyl...

kraussvonespyon Ask HN: How to feel ok charging people?

All we really have is our time. I like helping people too and in a different economic system, maybe that would be enough. We all need to eat.

You could consider hiring a bookkeeper type to work a few hours per week to do the paperwork, taxes and so on for you. Maybe being one step removed from the "asking people for money" bit would help?

kraussvonespyon Things I Won't Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More or Less (2013)

Lowe’s discussion of this is called “Sand won’t save you this time".

kraussvonespyon World military expenditure passes $2T for first time

So rough math shows that the US spends more on military than the next 10 countries put together. Or put another way, spends 40% of all world military spending.

While I get that military R&D occasionally produces tangible benefits to society, I suspect that if we poured 5% of the military budget into the state department and actually tried diplomacy more often, the rest of the military budget could get cut at least in half.

Because of the level of corruption and the amount of money to be made by military contractor grifters, this isn't going to change. Better to build better ways to kill people than to solve things like poverty, mass mental illness and so on. 'merica fuck yeah and all that.

kraussvonespyon Hacker News Guidelines

Metafilter has always been well moderated. This is an odd one but boards.straightdope.com also works well thanks to good moderation.

kraussvonespyon Nvidia R&D chief on how AI is improving chip design

A quick tangent if you have time and can discuss it: some really interesting, effective and odd antenna designs came from AI:

https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/1244h/1244%20(Hornby)....

Have there been any odd, surprising or wildly efficient chip designs that have come out of the AI designs?

kraussvonespyon Shortwave radio: can you hear me now?

Wow, thank you. You didn't intend this but you've helped me to understand my mom's life a little better. After my dad died, my mom had a radio going in her house almost 24/7. I never really thought of that as being her way to deal with loneliness but sadly I think that's exactly what it was. Maybe it was better for her to fill her head with the radio voices rather than having to deal with her own lonely internal voice.

kraussvonespyon ‘What a brutal business’: pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on

One can draw a very similar arc for lottery winners too. Most of them are broke and vagrant after ~2 years of luxury. There's no planning for tomorrow.

The people most drawn to lotteries (and perhaps those drawn to the limelight too) are those that have the worst life and money skills. I think we all know people who live the feast or famine lifestyle of cruises and new TVs when the tax refund comes followed by 11 months of scraping by and complaining about their money situation.

kraussvonespyon A drug that cures alcoholism may be the next anti-anxiety medication

I was just looking to see if someone had posted emoxypine.

I have some experience with this med and it does work as intended for alcoholism. Plus it does the job a lot more gently than what I imagine disulfiram does.

kraussvonespyon Ubiquiti vs. Krebs

Wow, I didn't know that. If that's the case then Krebs is far beyond what 99% of large news outlets, magazines and other news sources bother to do. I was on the fence before about this but if that's the case, I'm fully on Krebs' side here.