Hacker News Reader

opwieurposiuon Goiânia Accident

Wow you got you some markov chains, Monte Carlo, Gamma Radiation, what a fun dissertation. I especially liked the bit about how the NaI detector is not a sphere and sensitivity depends on incident angle. I would never have thought of that. You even did a trip to ORNL, how cool is that!

Walking around with a Giger counter while wearing a hazmat suit seems like fun too, but I suppose it would freak people out. This seems like a much more stealthily way to locate a lost source.

opwieurposiuon Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada

If you are out in the woods and you come upon a roughly circular area of crushed down grass, that is a deer bed. Try and avoid walking through it, deer beds are full of ticks.

The deer trails are a lot harder to avoid.

opwieurposiuon Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers

Yes. When I plug my phone into the car it used to use google assistant to process voice commands and it was pretty fast. Now for some reason it has switched to Gemini and it takes twice as long to play a song or send a text. Sometimes Gemini forgets it even has the ability to play songs. Gemini is better at answering random questions that the kids ask though.

opwieurposiuon A desire for a loud car correlates with higher scores on psychopathy and sadism

I would like to find a lighter exhaust system for my motorcycle, the stock system weighs like 30 pounds. All the aftermarket exhausts seem to be louder then stock. I want something that light and quiet but everyone else seems to want loud AF.

opwieurposiuon Direct evidence for poison use on microlithic arrowheads at 60k years ago

Anyone who has done much hunting gets tired of carrying that heavy-ass rifle through the woods all day. A small reduction in the weight of your gear allows you to cover a lot more ground.

The great thing about poison arrows is that they can be much smaller and still be effective. Smaller arrows means you can carry more of them and also your bow will be smaller and lighter.

opwieurposiuon Eat Real Food

My understanding is that whole grain flour is not very shelf stable, ie. you have to grind it and use it within a few days or starts to taste bad. White flour lasts years.

A small flour mill is not that expensive, I wonder why more places do not grind their own flour?

opwieurposiuon "Have your best baby" ad campaign

I feel like if you are already getting IVF, then genetic selection of the best embryos is a no-brainer.

I can't think of a better gift for a child then an extra standard deviation of height, IQ, strength.

opwieurposiuon Gymkhana's 1978 Subaru Brat with 9,500-RPM Redline, Active Aero

Snowmobile accident, rolled over on a hill and it squished him.

opwieurposiuon Emoji evidence errors don’t undo a murder conviction

I have noticed that men and women tend to use different emoji and ascribe different meaning to them. Ex. I see the skull emoji used to indicate laughter more often used by women and crying face used more by men.

There are some tribes where men and women have completely different languages, I wonder if we will end up that way with emojis.

opwieurposiuon My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

One hazard of being a programmer is that sitting alone in a room alone with a computer for 10 years can turn you into a weird dude.

Lately I have taken steps to re-learn how to be social. I am doing a lot of social dances, like Salsa, Swing, Bachata. I think partner dance is good training for body language. Also good training for presence, as when you really start dancing, you stop thinking; conversely when are thinking too much you will stiffen up and choke. There are a surprising number of PHDs and other very cerebral people in my local dance scene.

One thing I have learned is that being good at dancing and being fun to dance with are orthogonal. You can be technically quite bad and people will still want to dance with you if you have good eye contact, smile, laugh at your mistakes, tell little jokes, complements, etc.

Conversely there are some people that are really technically good but not that much fun to dance with because they grimace and look away and don't match your energy.

Of course the best is when you find a partner that is both fun and technically good, and this is what I ascribe to become.

The downside of dances is that I don't get a lot of practice at talking, I guess this is something you could learn to do at bars but I don't drink and so have not found really good place to practice a lot of talking.

I try to get the guys from my jujitsu gym to come dance, these are big bad dudes who could really mess you up in fight, but they are all scared to dance with the girls. You will be scared your first few times for sure. Personally, I tend to be nervous in direct proportion to the beauty of my partner, which can be a problem because women that dance tend to be above average in that respect.

Most dances have a 1 hour lesson at the beginning and then social dance after. The lesson part is easy, you just follow the instructions and the teacher will have you rotate partners so you get to meet most of the girls. I tell my guy friends, just come for the lesson part and then if you get too nervous you can sneak out early.

opwieurposiuon US Army to buy 1 million drones, in major acquisition ramp-up

Ukraine's current drone consumption has been quoted at 9,000/day, or 270k/month.

A million drones won't last long in a peer conflict. Most of the drone parts come from china. What we really need is to build our own drone supply chain that does not rely on china.

opwieurposiuon Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?

When I was child, our dog got hit by a car. The dog had two broken legs and was bleeding from the nose. My dad said, "Come with me son, I will show you what to do." So we went into the woods behind the house and dug a hole. I put the dog in the hole and my dad shot the dog in the head. After we filled in the hole my dad said. "Now you know what to do with me when I get old."

So my health insurance is healthy living, CrossFit, rapamycin etc. When that fails, I have a 9mm pistol I keep in the safe. I do worry about if I am somehow too incapacitated to use the pistol but not enough to die naturally. Infirmity scares me a lot more then death does.

opwieurposiuon The decline of deviance

It used to be cool to be deviant and not to be accepted by society at large. Ravers, skaters, punk rockers, cross-dressers, all subcultures that did not care if they were accepted by the normies. Transgression of social norms was considered the cool thing to do.

Now everyone wants social norms to be changed so they feel included no matter what crazy ass thing they are into.

Feels lame to me but I am old so what do I know.

opwieurposiuon Unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclea...

Kodak had this issue for sure.

opwieurposiuon Wasp Blower

When we were kids we used to catch wasps in a plastic cup, put them in the freezer until they were anesthetized, and then tie a little leash on them with sewing thread.

Then you chase your friends around the neighborhood with your personal attack wasp. Good times.

opwieurposiuon NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Hey, it worked when JFK did it!

opwieurposiuon AI and the Future of American Politics

This is an interesting approach, do you have a website for this "bio-emulative scaffolding" thing?

opwieurposiuon Root cause analysis? You're doing it wrong

I feel like half the time issues are caused by adding some stupid feature that nobody really wants, but makes it in anyways because the incentive is to add features, not make good software.

People rarely react well if you tell them "Hey this feature ticket you made is poorly conceived and will cause problems, can we just not do it?" It is easier just to implement whatever it is and deal with the fallout later.

opwieurposiuon Couple Gets Trapped for 10 Hours After EV Charging Station Welds Itself to Car

Bugs like to crawl into little holes like on the charging plug/car and can increase resistance enough to cause this issue.

When I built a robot that had to plug/unplug things 1000s of times it had an air-gun to clean out the plugs each cycle.

I am not sure arc-detection would help you that much in case of a bug because by the time it starts arcing the pin has already melted.

opwieurposiuon US opens Tesla probe after more crashes involving its "full self-driving"

An example of this effect can be already be found in motorcycles. I currently own a BMW motorcycle and a honda truck. The honda has all the modern driver aids, automatic braking radar, lane keeping, etc. It has many airbags and is statistically about 30x safer per mile then the motorcycle. The truck is far easier to drive. I still ride the motorcycle whenever I can. Why? Because the motorcycle forces me to become more fully human, and the truck turns me into more of a machine. On a motorcycle you smell the hay as you pass a field. You feel the cool air as you ride over the stream. Every tiny bump and crack in the pavement has an effect, and you feel them all. You are not in a car, you are in the world. You must PAY FULL ATTENTION to the here and now or you will get squished. A motorcycle forces you to BE HERE NOW.

Our mental suffering is not because car is on autopilot. Suffering happens because WE ARE ON AUTOPILOT. So I chose to trade the 30x risk of death for a 30x reduction in mental suffering. Rational? God I hope not.

opwieurposiuon LLMs Are Bad Judges. So Use Our Classifier Instead

I love the idea of Arbitrus.ai, but they want $2500 a go to test it. I wish they had a demo version to play with.

opwieurposiuon Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

Yes, and you also get feedback from your butt as the machine tips and wobbles, particularly on smaller machines. Hearing the engine straining helps also. Often you can not clearly see what you are digging, this feedback lets you know if you are running into a rock or something.

One big advantage would be cameras mounted on the boom and rear view cameras, as many machines have obstructed views.

opwieurposiuon The death rays that guard life

The outdoor environment has lots of UV rays from the sun, so this selection pressure has existed for a long time.

opwieurposiuon Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S

If you want simple get a motorcycle. Most do not even have a radio.

I got an almost new BMW 310GS for $5k. Even at that price it has antilock brakes, slipper clutch, throttle-by-wire. Any idiot could ride this bike, and it gets 60-70MPG.

Now I ride it every chance I get and keep the miles off my $40k pickup truck.

opwieurposiuon EPA Moves to Cancel $7B in Grants for Solar Energy

If you are Serious about DIY solar I made a whole site about how I did mine with a calculator and graphs, etc.

https://www.pvh2o.com/

opwieurposiuon A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2016)

I think 6,500 alive babies is probably a better credential then a diploma on a wall.

opwieurposiuon Federal judges detail rise in threats, 'pizza doxings'

"In 2022, Congress passed a law named after Daniel Anderl allowing judges to sue internet sites to take down identifying information."

Everyone should be able to have their information taken down. Not just judges.

opwieurposiuon Doctors Were Preparing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up.

Are you really dead if some of your organs are living on in someone else's body?

Seems like you would only be "Mostly Dead"

opwieurposiuon Mitochondria Are More Than Powerhouses–They're the Motherboard of the Cell

I do group fitness classes, like CrossFit, body combat, spin class. When you have a room full of people all doing the same thing you can quickly tell which things you are above or below average at. Not very scientific perhaps but this is my current strategy.

For me I am below average at endurance, so that is where I assume the mitochondria come in.

opwieurposiuon Mitochondria Are More Than Powerhouses–They're the Motherboard of the Cell

If you like Mitochondria stuff, This book about the Krebs cycle and how it was discovered is pretty good: https://nick-lane.net/books/transformer-the-deep-chemistry-o...

The short answer is: First you have to murder a pigeon to extract fresh breast muscle cells. Then you put those cells in a manometer which uses columns of water to measure respiration via tiny changes in gas volume. From there you can add various things like citric acid and see how that affects respiration.

So figuring out mitochondria required murdering a large number of pigeons. Their breast muscles have some of the highest rates of respiration known, many times better then ours.

Reading this book inspired me to attempt to improve my mitochondrial health. So far the only stuff that seems to make a difference is NAD+ and Creatine.