Hacker News Reader

ljcnon PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later

Not all html pages - what about hackernews? It's mostly tables with minimal CSS (a bit of padding and font*/color), I bet it continues to be perfectly rendered practically indefinitely. At least snapshots on archive.org from 2007 still look perfect.

ljcnon Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

Wouldn't you rather share a garden with insects? I would.

ljcnon Formal Systems in Biology

> bioinformatics, systems biology, computational biology

Of those bioinformatics is more specific (usually genomics data); the other two are overlapping and pretty non-specific terms.

For example I started a Sys Bio PhD and ended up in a Comp Bio research group. A friend started the same way but ended up in control theory/microbiology.

The title and even the department are somewhat arbitrary and more to do with the organisation at the university than anything else (e.g. I was in CS but my friend was Engineering I think).

If you can find a good interdisciplinary course they will be familiar with people moving around depending on their interests.

ljcnon Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong

Radius of 6 km is comparable to the size of Halley's comet :-)

ljcnon Why have contestants on “The Price is Right” become so much worse at guessing?

> Wasn't able to read the article through the paywall

Try turning off javascript.

ljcnon Sun's surface seen in new detail

About 200 actually (you mistook the diameter for the radius).

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+au+%2F+radius+of+the...

ljcnon First mathematical proof for a key law of turbulence in fluid mechanics

Indeed, natural science deals in models, not 'the truth'.

In most cases 'correct' isn't an option, rather a degree of accuracy. If it's consistent with the measurements, or even better if it has predictive power, then it's useful.

ljcnon Welsh Password Generator

It's got 80-120 ish bits of entropy, why is it not secure?

(Assuming you're not referring to it literally being a well known password from a web comic.)

ljcnon How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

> maybe even only if you're American?

Works fine in UK English too, although the "r:uk" modifier is often needed.

ljcnon Medieval Price List

> using an inflation calculator defers to someone's idea of what a basket was

In this case that someone is Greg Clark (Professor of Economics at UC Davis). The link goes direct to a .xlsx which reveals the "basket" and all the figures - it's a mixture of several (presumably average) wages and a "cost of living".

This is probably the research paper (2009) http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Macroa...

ljcnon Air pollution causes brain structure changes that resemble Alzheimer's disease

Sadly tyre, brakes, and road abrasion apparently account for far more particulate pollution than the exhaust does. I'd like to find another source for this because it's so surprising.

The only solution I suppose is no cars.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7236155/Elec...

ljcnon China Set for Coal Expansion in Threat to Climate Goals

OK, matched grid prices without subsidy, and cheaper than coal in a fifth of cases.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0441-z

ljcnon Tesla Cybertruck

As your example numbers here show though estates are often better for storage than crossovers. So there must be other factors behind crossover popularity.

Their being higher is a big factor I bet (less stooping and more road visibility, although the latter is less of a factor as they get more popular).

ljcnon China Set for Coal Expansion in Threat to Climate Goals

Right, but decades ago coal was the cheapest source of power. We didn't have cheap renewables in the 70s. Solar is cheaper than coal in China.* They could certainly grow (at least) no slower by building huge amounts of renewables rather than coal.

*(I'm not sure if this is on a "spot" basis or annualised to account for intermittency, but then it probably doesn't account for the negative externalities of coal either so let's chalk it up to a draw.)

ljcnon Why aren’t Americans rising up like the people of Chile and Lebanon?

Wouldn't have thought sick people make the best revolutionaries.

ljcnon Pinephone – “BraveHeart” Limited Edition Linux SmartPhone

Is the early adaptor included?

ljcnon Eating food from plants that have struggled to survive toughens us up as well

Very interesting. Will add it to the (already large) "eat lots of (and a good variety of) fruit and veg and do enough exercise" pile of life advice.

ljcnon Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland into an internet wonderland

None of the links in the sister support home ownership being below 50% in London. The third link shows a difference between white and non-white British ownership levels but that's it.

ljcnon Budapest declares climate emergency, teases carbon-neutrality

Budapest isn't the whole country, but your point is correct, Hungary is certainly a highly developed country. Not G7 levels, but close.

ljcnon Nuclear fusion is 'a question of when, not if'

The gp might have been thinking of more interesting methods of cooling - space sunshades, aerosols, massive creation of artificial snow... (not sure if the latter is a net heat loss)

ljcnon Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland into an internet wonderland

> at least less than half

"Households in London were fairly evenly distributed across the tenures, with half in owner occupation and half in the rented sectors."

Section 1.10 in https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-sur...

To get the number of voters you could weight by average occupancies but I don't know what those numbers are.

ljcnon How SSH Port Became 22

> "hey" as a greeting

I blame the US TV series "Friends" for that.

Curiously the OED doesn't (yet) have this greeting sense.

ljcnon We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

~= means not equal in MATLAB. Also it often means one's complement (C and others). Hence the gp used it to mean NOT.

ljcnon Google Announces Nest WiFi

Why did you migrate? I was given the option to but haven't (yet, nor been forced to).

ljcnon Delicate wash cycles release more microfibres

Ethical consumer did a report on this very recently.

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/fashion-clothing/choosing-su...

It's definitely complicated, but their take was:

* Best: second-hand, recycled, or organic

* Middle: lyocell products (Tencel and Monocel), linen and hemp, followed by Modal, acrylic and polyester

* Worst: conventional cotton, non-lyocell viscose, rayon, elastane, nylon and wool

ljcnon Video of the Librem 5 in Action

Youtube alternative link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuT2w6BkT-k

ljcnon Some tea bags may shed billions of microplastics per cup

I wonder how this compares to the several grams of plastic per week consumed from drinking water.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-consume-credit-card-worth-plas...

ljcnon Some tea bags may shed billions of microplastics per cup

Small bag. It's the diminutive of "sac" (bag).

ljcnon The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can power 1M homes

Fair question. Some rough maths incoming..

There are 174 turbines in an area of about 300 sq km. If they were laid out on a grid the grid size would be about 1.3 km. The blades have a diameter of about 24 m.

Feels to me like that's far enough apart to not massively affect the wind.