Hacker News Reader

nisse72on Marion Stokes: A woman who taped 30 years of TV news

> all you can usually find online are snippets

I haven't looked too closely, but what's this then:

https://120minutes.tylerc.com/

nisse72on Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

How to ruin a great hobby: make it your job.

nisse72on What Is Suspension Trauma a.k.a. Harness Hang Syndrome?

My manager sits on one at work. He also rolls it around the office as he goes to meetings, etc. Nobody thinks he's acting weird, and recently I saw that someone else had brought one in.

nisse72on Researchers trick Tesla autopilot into driving into opposing traffic

And packet collisions are not unusual. But then you simply wait a short time, and try again.

nisse72on Why the Amazon River Can't Be Crossed by Bridge (2018)

up to 10 square acres

I cannot fathom this 4 dimensional unit!

nisse72on When Too Cute Is Too Much, the Brain Can Get Aggressive

Absolute classic, I came here to post that very thing.

But those people wouldn't really take a swipe at Bambi or Thumper, she says.

nisse72on Why American cities are weirdly shaped

Like Pinochet? Supported by the US while he tortured the chileans who opposed him?

nisse72on Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

We don't pay the mental tax of always ensuring i have dollar bills on me to tip left, right, and center.

That has never been necessary in Sweden, or (AFAIK) most other places. I have never known anyone outside of the US who carries cash for the express purpose of tipping. To the extent that tipping even exists in Sweden, it's usually just done by rounding up whatever is owed.

nisse72on Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know (2009) [pdf]

Based on the footnote I'm fairly certain it was Ellemtel, a joint venture between Ericsson and Televerket (the Swedish national telecom before it was privatised), and the project was AXE-N:

The AXE-N venture was to be the most expensive industrial project in Sweden after Saab’s JAS fighter. One calculation estimates that it cost Ericsson SEK 10 billion. The project has often been described as a total failure.

https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/changing-the-wo...

Swedish wikipedia has more information: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/AXE-N

Some people here might know Ellemtel from their C++ style guide, which was a byproduct of the AXE-N project. In Emacs "ellemtel" is one of the built in choices for CC Mode style.

nisse72on Why can't all cities have bike bridges like Copenhagen's Cycle Snake? (2014)

Auckland has one too, over one of the country's busiest motorway junctions:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/86702560/Aucklands-hot-pink...

However we are also looking forward to a new cycleway alongside the harbour bridge (skypath) and eventually around the harbour (seapath), but these wheels are turning very slowly:

http://www.skypath.org.nz/the-seapath/

nisse72on No Cash Needed at This Cafe: Students Pay the Tab with Their Personal Data

To get the free coffee, university students must [...]

Funny, the definition of "free" seems to have changed.

It may be that no money changes hands, but the coffee is certainly not free.

nisse72on Shoppers Love Rewards Credit Cards, Retailers Hate Them

In New Zealand, EFTPOS costs the retailer a fraction of what credit card transactions do. When you swipe/insert your debit card, it goes through the EFTPOS system. But when you use the same card contactlessly, payment is processed by the credit card company and the retailer is charged a credit card fee or similar. That's the reason many retailers don't accept contactless payment.

The banks and card companies would surely love for EFTPOS to die, but the retailers love it. There's a reason every card issued today supports contactless payment, and you can't opt out.

nisse72on The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community (2016)

Here's a particularly dramtic asperitas cloud, from NASA's astronomy picture of the day:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130227.html

nisse72on A map of publicly available fruit trees, mostly in Slovakia

New Zealand: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1HDtmvU4XemdY0bDLDf...

nisse72on Pilots who risk their lives flying tiny planes over the Atlantic

Not ferrying per se, but an interesting story of flying a Boeing 314 from Auckland to New York "the long way round" in December 1941, just after the Pearl Harbour attacks, with the challenges of refueling and avoiding the war, and without charts:

https://medium.com/s/story/the-long-way-round-the-plane-that...

nisse72on Motherhood in the Age of Fear

Haha I read the article but didn't actually remember the subway woman's name until I googled for the story.

nisse72on Motherhood in the Age of Fear

I'm reminded of Lenore Skenazy who in 2008 let her 9 year old son ride the NY subway alone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy

nisse72on Color or Fruit? The Unlikely Etymology of “Orange”

In Swedish as well. The fruit is apelsin. The colour is traditionally brandgul (fire yellow) but orange (pronounced like in french?) is not uncommon.

nisse72on Neighbourly by Google

Are you also annoyed by Under Armour?

nisse72on Google 'stole my videos', says film-maker Philip Bloom

I found the story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Knight_(filmmaker)

http://www.dmlp.org/threats/viacom-v-knight

nisse72on Google 'stole my videos', says film-maker Philip Bloom

About 10 years ago there was a widely publicized case of a small town policitician in the US, who had posted a nutty campaign video to his own website, and which later got picked up by a TV program (like AFV or somesuch). He thought it was great that his video was on TV, so he posted a video of it being shown on the program, something like 5 seconds of their introduction followed by 60 seconds of his own material.

The TV network promptly sued him for infringing their copyright, and (I believe) lost. There would have been a fair amount of backlash as well.

Unfortunately I cannot remember the names or places involved, so I'm getting nowhere with Google. Perhaps someone else will recognize this description and chime in.

nisse72on Ask HN: What can I do if someone dupes me into working for free?

Etymology is your friend here: Libel has roots in the latin for "document". Think of "library".

nisse72on Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

When I studied computer science in Uppsala ~ 25 years ago I remember a number of textbooks (in particular, from Pagina) that used Swedish words for absolutely everything ("betjänt" (server) comes to mind, I can't think of others at the moment). but a lot of those terms sounded odd to us and I don't remember anyone using them except perhaps to be funny.

But many words have more natural sounding translations that we did (and do) use, things like kompilator (compiler), kö (queue), träd (tree) etc. I left Sweden many years ago but still often use gurka as a metasyntactic variable.

BTW your "even funnier idiom" is well known in english as well (although I don't remember the last time I heard anyone say it):

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cat_that_ate_the_canary

nisse72on There Might Be No Way to Live Comfortably Without Also Ruining the Planet

Well I don't claim to be an expert, but I've read elsewhere that there are a lot of different qualities of sand, and that desert sand is not (as) useful as building material due to its shape and structure.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-desert-sand-not-used-for-constr...

nisse72on There Might Be No Way to Live Comfortably Without Also Ruining the Planet

> concrete

Actually we have been depleting the planets sand resources for a good while now, and could be facing a "sand crisis" in the not distant future, largely thanks to concrete:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-g...

nisse72on Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

He tells the story of his ordeal in an article in the NZ Herald in 2006:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

It was also made into an episode of "I shouldn't be alive".

nisse72on Vandals smash beehives, killing 500k bees

Bees provide a service to society, not just to the bee keeper. Why shouldn't society help offset some of the beekeeper's risk?

nisse72on A difficult experience with Autopilot in the mountains of Canada

Here's what it looked like just 44 years before the olympics:

https://www.tranbc.ca/2015/09/10/bc-road-trip-time-machine-h...

nisse72on Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back

Solution: become a debt collector, and buy your own debt!

nisse72on Don't Buy Anyone an Echo

No more having to glance at the clock on the wall (or the stove, or the microwave, or whatever) and mentally noting "in 20 minutes, it will be half-past".