Hacker News Reader

metiscuson Vulnerable transistors threaten to upend Europa Clipper mission

Sounds like Infineon may owe someone a new satellite soon. At least if it can be shown that they sent NASA bad parts and didn't notify them in time to prevent this failure.

metiscuson Navy cancels ship briefings after damning internal report

You see, these contractors tend to hire retired admirals and generals directly out of acquisitions positions and onto their boards. The contracts are written in ways that make it hard to punish shoddy work in a way that doesn't make the government side look bad too, so they tend to let slide what is kept out of sight. After all, if someone makes enough noise, then your contract may end up on the news or even worse, on the hill. If that happens, contracts get yanked, people get reassigned or lose their chance at a kushy spot on a board in a few years. It varies by contract and organizations, some are much better run than others and tend to deliver good quality.

metiscuson Unity Software plans to reduce its workforce by 25%, eliminating ~1,800 jobs

Goodwill and stability have a value too. If it were me and I was in the position where the retracted changes would have endangered my business, I would have at least someone working to ensure that we could pivot to Unreal or another engine if Unity decided to change courses again. "Fool me once, shame on you, if you fool me you can't get fooled again" or something like that.

metiscuson Unity Software plans to reduce its workforce by 25%, eliminating ~1,800 jobs

After the fees fiasco, many studios began plans to migrate away. I can't help but believe some will move to Unreal or Godot etc for their next projects.

metiscuson IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

It is a testament to the great work they do that many people believe that IT does not do much. The work required to keep things working without noticible downtime is hardly trivial.

metiscuson Nuclear Reactor Simulator

I emailed the author to see if I could get the source code to update it for a modern platform. Given the amount of link rot since that time it is unlikely that he replies but hope is eternal.

metiscuson Nuclear Reactor Simulator

This bring back memories?

https://web.archive.org/web/20020928111017/http://www.simula...

metiscuson Verizon, AT&T customers sue to undo T-Mobile merger

Spirit is very hit or miss depending on the route. I flew from Orlando to Pensacola and back three times in two weeks earlier this year and was delayed an average of 3 hours every single flight. The reported cause of the delay was "aircraft maintenance" although in two cases the aircraft had been at the airport overnight. The pilot explained to us during announcements that sometimes they skip longer maintenance when planes are there overnight.

Otherwise, I've had okay experiences with Spirit prior to this year but I won't be flying with them again since it is shorter to drive than suffer their constant delays.

metiscuson YouTube wants to get you watching more news from 'authoritative sources'

I think they meant unrolling as in deploying.

metiscuson Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

https://www.911.gov/calling-911/frequently-asked-questions/

From that link: Test calls confirm that your local 911 service can receive your 911 call and has the correct location information. Test calls can be scheduled by contacting your local 911 call center via its non-emergency phone number.

metiscuson 'Cancer-killing pill' is now being tested on humans

Everything in medicine is about weighing comparative risks - nothing is completely safe if you look at it hard enough. Well raised point, thanks.

metiscuson Ask HN: Who is using small OS LLMs in production?

Exactly. It isn't free as in FSF definitional freedom, you still can't do certain things with it etc but it is unencumbered by external costs unless you exceed a certain usage threshold.

metiscuson 'Cancer-killing pill' is now being tested on humans

As many others have said, this appears to be a puff piece almost entirely devoid of meaningful content. There is currently one ongoing phase 1 trial for the drug in question, AOH1996. That phase 1 trial is scheduled to end in March or April of 2024 so we may have some answers about the safety of the treatment.

It is important to remember, when discussing these things, how clinical trial phases work. There are four main trial phases in a drug development cycle.

A Phase 1 trial is used to determine if a treatment is safe and to determine the maximum dosing. A preliminary result about the effects of the drug is a side product of a Phase 1 trial but this is not sufficient to know if a drug will succeed. Phase 1 trials are primarily about safety.

A Phase 2 trial is used to determine the efficacy of a treatment and to determine the best and most effective way to use that treatment. A drug that has a successful Phase 2 trial is likely to be effective but merely being effective is often insufficient for a drug to be considered a success.

A Phase 3 trial compares the effectiveness of a treatment against the current standard treatments. A new treatment must be better than the existing treatments in some way (e.g. same effect on the disease but lower side-effects, more effective in general, etc) to have a successful Phase 3 trial. A Phase 3 trial is the last regulatory hurdle to the approval of a treatment for use.

A Phase 4 trial, is performed after a treatment is developed and brought to market. The most common type is post-marketing surveillance where data is gathered about the effectiveness of the treatment, side effects, etc from observational studies of the treatment as used. These data are compared with the data developed during the Phase 3 randomized controlled trial to ensure that the treatment is performing like it should in the market. Differences between Phase 3 results and Phase 4 results can result in modifications to the box (e.g. a black box label), prescribing information, or other aspects of the treatment's packaging and marketing.

Hopefully this was helpful.

metiscuson Ask HN: Who is using small OS LLMs in production?

LLAMA 2 appears to require no cost because it can be run locally. The license does mention that if you are using facilitating than 700 million users that you have to negotiate for a different license or something like that but for most peoples uses, it would seem that LLAMA 2 is basically "free".

metiscuson Forced rhubarb, a vegetable deprived of sunlight, is having a renaissance (2019)

The calcium in Rhubarb is Calcium Oxalate, which is not likely to be highly bioavailable. Not all calcium is equal in this case.

metiscuson Senators propose law that bans members of Congress from trading stocks

"It is a crime punishible by xyz to hold any of the following offices and while owning any of the following classes of asset. A newly elected xyz shall have XXX days to divest themselves of any of the prohibited securities after the election is certified."

Something like that seems constitutional to me, although I am not a constitutional scholar.

metiscuson Community Note correcting Musk’s anti-vax tweet mysteriously disappears

My personal views are somewhere between Bakunin and Benjamin Tucker. Private companies can be equally or even more coercive than a government. In this case, via the OSHA mandate and the executive orders on defense contractors, we saw both acting together.

metiscuson Community Note correcting Musk’s anti-vax tweet mysteriously disappears

Define forced. Federal employees and federal contractors were required to be vaccinated or lose their jobs and this was also repeated in several US states. Military members were also forced to vaccinate or face other than honorable discharge or NJP at a minimum.

Yes, nobody came with a gun and "forced" them to take it, but significant economic coercision meets my definition of force.

metiscuson Disney, Netflix, and more are fighting FTC's 'click to cancel' proposal

Otherwise, in cases where you have a very pernicious party that will absolutely not stop charging your card, you can contact your bank and have them cancel that card. When they do, there is often a convenience feature that allows pre-existing subscriptions to continue to bill using the old card info. You need to make sure you tell the bank that you do not want that to happen for this card. They have a way to shut that feature off and that will remove the ability for the company to abuse that feature. You can still end up accruing a debt with them that they may try to collect on eventually so this is not a suggested method to get out of a subscription, but when you have tried everything else, it does seem to work in my experience.

metiscuson SpaceX is stretching the lifetime of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters

There is a pretty good reason why they launch rockets over the ocean or large expanses of empty land. If an RSO terminates a flight with a perfectly functional system, the debris will still spread over the surface for some distance, depending on the altitude that the flight was terminated at, of course. Launch trajectories are designed in such a way that the portion where the altitude would allow substantial debris to return is usually placed over uninhabited regions or the ocean.

metiscuson LOLBAS: Living Off the Land Binaries, Scripts and Libraries

https://github.com/LOLBAS-Project/LOLBAS/tree/master

The associated github is much more informative about what the project does. Basically they document "undocumented" capabilities of signed microsoft binaries that can be used for red team work.

metiscuson Heat Pumps – The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs

The issue with swamp coolers (evaporative cooling) is that you need relatively low humidity for them to work and they increase the humidity of the interior cooled environment. If you use them in combination with an air conditioner, they will very likely reduce the efficiency of the air conditioner by increasing the dehumidification load of the air conditioner.

metiscuson Heat Pumps – The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs

In physics we call a device that uses the compression and expansion of a fluid to move heat between parts of a system a heat pump.

An air conditioner uses a compressor to convert a refrigerant and sends the compressed fluid through a condenser. The condenser rejects heat from the system into the environment. This is the component of an air conditioner that is found outside. The compressed fluid is then passed through an expansion valve and into an evaporator where it is allowed to expand. Expansion is a process that requires heat. The heat flows into the expanding fluid from the environment inside the home. Air is blown across the evaporator coils to transfer heat energy from the home into the fluid which is then returned outside.

A heat pump is capable of reversing the flow of heat energy. The flow of fluid is reversed from an air-conditioner using something called a reversing valve. The compressor sends compressed fluid into the home where heat is rejected through the evaporator coil. The fluid then flows into the condenser coil and is allowed to expand outside, drawing in heat from the outside environment. The heated fluid is then returned to the compressor and the cycle continues.

In HVAC terminology an Air Conditioner is a one way physical heat pump and a heat pump is a bidirectional physical heat pump. Hopefully that helps clear it up a bit.

metiscuson Heat Pumps – The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs

Technically, from the point of view of physics, yes. That said straight cool systems (alternate name for air conditioners) are only one way heat pumps (in a physical sense) as they lack the reversing valve needed to reverse the heat flow. Heat pumps (in the common sense) can move heat in either direction.

metiscuson C++ GPT-2 inference engine

Indeed it does, thanks for posting this.

metiscuson YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

There is a saying that goes something like this: It is difficult to get a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on his not understanding.

metiscuson YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

You know, I've noticed the same thing but I never really "noticed" it, if you follow. It's almost like they bin the videos by length in the suggestion algorithm.

metiscuson Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

If the sub had imploded, it is likely that the implosion may have been detected by various naval assets. I don't think that SOSUS is still active but there is very likely something similar with enough sensitivity to detect this somewhere in the ocean. The question would be if classification etc would allow speedy relay of that information to the search teams etc. Granted, not much to search for if there was an implosion.

metiscuson PyPI Was Subpoenaed

Across the ages, government has applied a disproportionate level of scrutiny to groups and people perceived as dissidents, minorities, and anyone else who could potentially be conceived as a threat to institutional power regardless of the magnitude of the threat or if that threat is true or false. Historically this is a bipartisan issue, for decades the FBI vigorously attacked anti-war groups, black civil rights groups, and various left wing groups via COINTELPRO. I guess to summarize, the way I think of it is that the government is coming for anyone they see as a potential threat and it doesn't matter what the politics of that group are.

metiscuson PyPI Was Subpoenaed

The only way I can think of would be that after the case has ended it may be possible for a party who had been directed to update a canary under a court order to notify people that they had done that. It would probably depend on the court etc and I am not a lawyer.