mysterypie

Could someone give an ELI5 please? As I understand it, the explanation is that there was a leaf close to him that obscured the face. But what's he saying about parallax? Isn't the preview image that he would have seen on the camera display coming from the same lens that captures the image?

Since the original 555 was developed in 1971, I'm wondering if the inventor[1] or Signetics, the company where he worked, would have made a similar physical mock-up in those days before electronic circuit simulation software existed.

[1] Apparently it was a single electronics engineer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Camenzind

> Anyone with more than $600 in their bank accounts

I hadn't heard this, but there is indeed such a proposal[1] by the Department of the Treasury dated May 2021. I'm quoting the proposal here from the PDF:

"This proposal would create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime. Financial institutions would report data on financial accounts in an information return. The annual return will report gross inflows and outflows with a breakdown for physical cash, transactions with a foreign account, and transfers to and from another account with the same owner. This requirement would apply to all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts, with the exception of accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold of $600 or fair market value of $600.

Other accounts with characteristics similar to financial institution accounts will be covered under this information reporting regime. In particular, payment settlement entities would collect Taxpayer Identification Numbers (TINs) and file a revised Form 1099-K expanded to all payee accounts (subject to the same de minimis threshold), reporting not only gross receipts but also gross purchases, physical cash, as well as payments to and from foreign accounts, and transfer inflows and outflows.

Similar reporting requirements would apply to crypto asset exchanges and custodians. Separately, reporting requirements would apply in cases in which taxpayers buy crypto assets from one broker and then transfer the crypto assets to another broker, and businesses that receive crypto assets in transactions with a fair market value of more than $10,000 would have to report such transactions.

The Secretary would be given broad authority to issue regulations necessary to implement this proposal.

The proposal would be effective for tax years beginning after December 31, 2022."

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-Explanati...

Granted that in this case it was a cryptocurrency account, but I've seen dozens of articles like this over the years in which cryptocurrency was not mentioned or didn't even exist yet.

What's always missing from stories like this is how the crooks get the money out. Considering that all Western governments have achieved total surveillance on our banking and made it impossible to have anonymous bank accounts, I'd like to see a detailed analysis about why they can't follow the money and see who gets it.

Every scenario I can think of seems like it should be either traceable or actionable.

Scenario 1: The crooks cashed out the victim's $270,000 at ATMs. That means they set up 270 fraudulent bank accounts, each tied to a separate ATM card, and each with a withdrawal limit of $1000. There should be a cornucopia of leads to follow. It's a major hassle to set up a bank account. You need an address at which to receive each one of those 270 ATM cards. Did the bank(s) send 270 cards to one single mailing address? Were these online accounts or did the crooks visit each bank with fake IDs? What did the surveillance cameras at the ATMs show? If they hired duped people to cash out at the ATMs, can't the police catch at least one of those persons and continue following the money?

Scenario 2: The crooks create one master British bank account into which the stolen money is funneled (say $1,000,000) and then they transfer the money to overseas to Third World Bank. Why doesn't the British bank (or the British government) demand that the $1,000,000 be returned by Third World Bank? It's now the Third World country's job to track down the crooks if they want to. If they won't return the funds, they get blacklisted by the British banking system.

Perhaps there are very good answers about why and how the crooks can get away with it but it seems so implausible when money has been so traceable for the last 20 or 30 years (except for certain cryptocurrencies but that's recent).

If I hadn't been told what this is, I would never have guessed that it's a representation of all colors. I know it's all the colors -- I can zoom in and see lots of different colors -- but why doesn't it look like that? My initial description would have been "purple and green squares". I might elaborate that it's "purple and green squares with a bit of blue separating the rows". But why doesn't it feel like all colors? Because of the way it's organized? For the same reason that his randomized pixels looks like a grey blob?

Today I learned that, “Sucrose is made up of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose joined together.(Wikipedia)”. A basic fact, but I didn’t know that.

> The faster you go, the less distance there is in front and behind you. At the speed of light, the entire width of the universe shrinks to zero.

Since you could get to anywhere in the universe almost instantly by travelling sufficiently close to the speed of light, why do many science fiction writers and science fiction movies want to introduce faster than light travel? It doesn’t seem necessary; just tell the readers that the spaceship was travelling at 0.99999c to get to the other size of the galaxy in a week or at 0.99999999c to get there in a minute. (I didn’t do the calculation, but you can imagine what I mean.)

I’m going to guess that it’s easier to move the story along by saying “faster than light” than it is to explain the above. Most people would think the author made a goof by saying that something travelled 100,000 light years in less than 100,000 years if travelling at less than the speed of light. (Talking from the traveller’s perspective of course.)

> enrolled 431 adults from the general population with SARS-CoV-2 infection

How do you control for people’s willingness to enter a study? If I had a mild case of Covid and no ongoing symptoms, I wouldn’t be too interested in participating in a study. But if I had serious ongoing symptoms, I’d be very interested. It’s a voluntary study, so how in the world do you control for that? If you can’t control for that, it skews the results to make long COVID seem much more common.

> We should start seriously considering other paradigms. If diet and exercise are out as explanations for the epidemic, what could possibly explain it? And what could possibly explain all of the other bizarre trends that we have observed?

> [Next Time: A CHEMICAL HUNGER]

That's the part I really wanted to see. I've now bookmarked it so I can read the next instalment. I expect to hear some fascinating theories -- perhaps some modern equivalent of lead poisoning of ancient Rome.

> "Give me a number, if it is close we can go to the next step."

If they reply that they need to know your revenue, expenses, number of sales, etc., before they can even guess at a number, then what? Do you give them your financial info? Or do you stick to your guns and ask them to come up with some number by themselves before you engage with them at all?

Studies like this makes me realize that it's impossible to predict trends in society by using logic alone. At the start of Covid pandemic I heard arguments that birth rates would go up (couples at home with plenty of time for sex) or that they would go down (not a good time to have a baby with hospitals overflowing and an uncertain future). Which was right? And what about murders: Would it go down because people have to stay home and bars were closed so less chance for drunken fights? Would it go up because people are frustrated and desperate with no jobs and no money?

We now know the answers to the above (both births and murders went down during the past year), but as far as I know we can't prove the precise reason it happened the way it did.

It reminds me of the big debates we had right here on Hacker News about why Americans were slim in the 1950s -- just look at photos of crowds from the 1950s -- but are overweight today. We know what happened but we can't prove the precise reason.

> prediction articles from the past -- I loved the specificity, depth, and unbridled optimism

Talking about Wired's unbridled optimism:

I recall a Wired article from approximately 20 years ago that predicted that someone born 20 years later (i.e. born today) would ride the technology curve to infinite lifespan. As he or she got older, more and more longevity problems would be solved keeping pace with your age. Today would be date to be born at which technology could outrace death.

I wish I could find the article to re-read it to see how the arguments hold up. A phrase from the article that sticks in my mind is something like if you're born negative 20 years ago, then bingo, where the author meant that "negative 20", from his perspective, is 20 years in the future.

> Infected machines will regularly check-in. These methods rely on domains and static IP addresses. Predictably these domains and IP addresses get identified, burned, and/or seized.

Instead of seizing and shutting down the command and control system, why not let it run for awhile and secretly monitor who connects to it? Are the malware operators always connecting to the command and control system via Tor or equivalent? They never slip up? I find it amazing that these huge malware operators are so rarely tracked down.

> People will find your information using search engines.

How I wish that were the case. Content on a personal website--no matter how excellent--will be invisible and nobody will ever see it -- unless you do heroic SEO or get lucky in an inexplicable way.

Personal anecdote: I created a website on a particular subject that interests me. I've been told by friends and strangers that it is extremely well written and gives a better explanation of the topic than anything else they've seen (at least during the period when I worked on the site). The site has no analytics, no ads, nothing controversial. Just a clean design with text, diagrams, and photos. Google will not find my site using any appropriate keyword. Not even after pages of search results. But Google has indexed it. If I search for "an exact sentence from the site quoted like this", Google finds it.

Self-hosted content in today's web does not survive on merit alone even when it's focused, useful, and free. That's been my experience anyway.

Not forcefully. He said paid volunteers. Why does the idea of challenge trials cause a furious reaction? Let's compare it to the space shuttle: 135 missions with 2 missions in which everyone died. That's a case fatality rate of 1.5% -- in the neighborhood of the Covid CFR. And I'd expect a challenge trial on young healthy volunteers to have a much lower CFR. Why is risking people for the shuttle OK, but risking people for a vaccine that benefits all of humanity not OK?

For anyone like me who needs an ELI5, the best comment I found that explains what this story is all about is this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25949669

Hacker News needs a way to mark the best comments when there are 1600 comments to read. Years ago, HN used to publicly show karma score of every comment. They eliminated that (and probably for good reasons), but it was useful to find the best comments. Some other way to find the most incisive comments woud be great.

When the World Trade Center collapsed during 9/11, those buildings must have had hundreds or thousands of safes. Many high-quality safes must have survived the fire and impact. Did anyone try to recover them or were they hauled off in the cleanup (100,000 trucks full of debris)?

Furniture already comes with a covering, but the chemical manages to seep through (I'm assuming it's been applied to the foam itself). For a volatile chemical, adding yet another fabric covering may not help. Maybe a super thick quilt or a fabric that isn't porous would work?

> Lockdown measures had not managed to stop ordinary colds and respiratory illnesses, such as rhinoviruses - which had dropped slightly during lockdown but bounced back soon after. "A lot does come down to their reservoirs and some are so well-adapted for humans and they're so widespread in the population that they are not affected a great deal by the lockdown."

Can anyone explain why colds have not come down as well? I don't understand what they mean by reservoirs.

As a related question, I've read that we all have cold viruses inside of us all the time, and they can be triggered by an immune weakness (such as by being in the cold outside). I've also read that you get a cold only because the virus is transmitted to you from someone else (which is more likely in the cold months when we're huddled together). Which is it? Can you develop a cold from a pre-existing internal virus with zero contact from another person?

Ross Perot, the only non-Democrat non-Republican presidential candidate in a very long time, appears in the author's chart, but without a rating. It's only a single data point, but it would have been interesting to see how an independent compares.

You might be right, but where are you getting the 2% from? Are you thinking of just emoticons, emojis, playing card symbols, and snowmen? There's more than that I'd question.

According to the HTML source, the original site was:

http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/

I wish I understood what the keepers of Unicode were thinking by including so much bloat in a character set (or character encoding). I realize that Unicode is going to have a huge number of symbols no matter what, if they're going to represent all the world's languages and math and punctuation, but I'd draw the line at emoticons, emojis, playing card symbols, and snowmen.

> It was listed as “No HDD” which was visibly a lie because this thing still has its screw cover stickers intact

I’m trying to understand why anyone would lie about not having a hard disk. Is there some rule on the auction website that hard disks must have been removed or wiped?

You'd like to know more about the author?

https://www.susanjfowler.com/

The source of the explosion is easy to identify by comparing it to these two videos[1][2]. You can see that a crescent-shaped area of the pier gets obliterated creating a water-filled crater in front of the silo (the building with 16 tall cylinders in a row). What's fascinating is that the flat buildings on the other side of the silo are obliterated as well. From the two videos below, it looks like the shockwave wraps around the silo and destroys stuff on the far side.

[1] https://streamable.com/zg9oal

[2] https://streamable.com/zykkj6

You are right, thank you. It’s a non-standard way they used the word commission.

> Card-not-present accounts fetched a much steeper supplier commission of 80 percent, but mainly because these cards were in such high demand and low supply.

Some part of that statement doesn't make sense. Normally if something is in high demand, then it is easier to sell it, therefore the seller can demand that the middleman i.e., BriansClub, accept a lower commission. In real estate for example, when there is a lot of demand for houses (in a "sellers' market), you as a seller can easily negotiate a lower commission from your brokerage agent.

One clarification: When there's high demand and low supply, the end-buyer will pay a much higher price of course. But the middleman (like BriansClub) should be charging a lower commission as a percentage, though he or she might end up making more money because it's a higher priced item being sold. So Krebs's explanation of why they charge a higher commission for card-not-present doesn't make sense.

This needs an explanation. Are the highlights automatically generated by an AI tool or user contributed like Wikipedia or did one person do it?

That’s publishing. I’m asking about one to one communication. Like the long personal letter Feynman wrote to his colleague. People seem to do much less of that.