Hacker News Reader

rembiciliouson What the Great Inflation (1965-1982) taught us

It seems like capping prices would cap inflation, but I can’t think of any great mechanism to accomplish such a cap. Central bank interest rates and taxes are controlled by relatively few people. Prices are controlled by hundreds of thousands of people.

rembiciliouson For natural theologians, proving God was beside the point

Most Protestant christians believe that the christian bible is divinely inspired. Everything else they believe follows from this first unprovable belief. They may not accept an idea if they feel it conflicts with their personal interpretation of the christian bible, no matter how convincing the evidence. On the other hand, some protestants are not so attached to their beliefs, and can adapt them to mesh with reality when presented with convincing evidence.

rembiciliouson The giraffe neck evolved for sexual combat?

Sadly the linked article hardly has anything to say about giraffes, giraffe breeding, giraffe evolution, or giraffe necks. Should have used the original https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl8316

rembiciliouson DDR5 RAM prices crashed by 20% in May

It’s definitely not an asset. It’s near practically a consumable. It will degrade with use, and over time. It will not maintain it’s current value, let alone increase in value.

rembiciliouson The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

That’s a stretch. I am certain that a square is a rectangle. A rectangle is a 4-sided polygon with four 90 degree corners. The sides can be of equal lengths.

rembiciliouson Does the human lifespan have a limit?

This only applies to professional athletes. Plenty of older people play sports as talented enthusiasts.

rembiciliouson Industrial ammonia emits more CO2 than other chemical-making reactions (2019)

Why is it damning that 88% of ammonia is used in fertilizer? Is their some other industry that ought to consume a larger percentage?

rembiciliouson Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

Easy! water 150ml = water 150g /pedantry

I think the op means it’s nice that the ingredients are given by weight because it is more accurate than volume.

rembiciliouson Finding your home in game graphics programming

https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scrat...

This walks through the creation of a raytracer and a rasterizer in a way that was pretty easy for me to understand. It’s not exhaustive; it’s just right.

rembiciliouson The timing of evolutionary transitions suggests intelligent life is rare

I find that equally terrifying. I’ve seen firsthand what happens to a frog when it hops into a coop of 7 chickens

rembiciliouson Melting glaciers may produce thousands of kilometers of new salmon habitat

Cattle are big, meat eating fish that sustain several other animals?

Cattle in their current form are a “crop” that sort of sustains humans and their pets. It is likely that this is not an efficient way to sustain humans, but it’s easy and profitable.

rembiciliouson Melting glaciers may produce thousands of kilometers of new salmon habitat

Well they won’t gobble the Atlantic salmon..

What can be done about overfishing of international waters?

It seems that the fish is destined to become another farm animal.

rembiciliouson Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

I have stepped on a dogs foot. It made a “Yipe!” noise and leapt back. Then it approached me “submissively”, with it’s head held low and tail down. It seems rather “obvious” to me that the animal felt pain, reacted suddenly to the sensation, and then completely changed it’s demeanour towards me.

rembiciliouson On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

Gills work by continually “filtering” water as is flows through them. Lungs are filled and then emptied according to some pattern of breath. The difference in volume of fluid processed must be significant. Also, can’t gills have a higher surface area to volume ratio than lungs?

rembiciliouson Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

It’s not your fault and you should adjust your perspective. The joke is on you! Off brand awful humor that makes light of the worst. It actually seems fitting!

rembiciliouson Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

This only applies in areas that already use electric heaters. Anywhere else poor people cannot afford to replace their gas heater with an electric one. And if they rent they have no choice, it’s up to the landlord. In some locales it is common for the renter to pay for the heat bill. So the landlord has little incentive to install a different heating system. In other locales the average cost of heat is factored in to the price of rent and the incentives are basically the same.

rembiciliouson Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

I would consider purchasing an electric boiler if the average operating cost was significantly lower. Eventually this will make sense, but it’s not something that will happen in my neck of the woods in the next 20 years.

rembiciliouson Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

Woopty doo, you don’t “technically” need nuclear power to go carbon neutral. If it shaves a decade or two off the process isn’t it worth it? Eventually you can start retiring nuclear plants, but in the mean time isn’t it better to focus on the carbon issue?

rembiciliouson Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

Where I live the vast majority of heat is produced by natural gas or propane. This includes water boilers, water heaters, clothes dryers, cooking ranges and ovens.

rembiciliouson ProctorU is dystopian spyware

You said “studying philosophy” rather than “being tested on rote memorization of philosophy text books”.

I agree that “studying philosophy” is a worthwhile endeavor, but I align more closely with the parents in regards to memorizing the semi-random litany of data bits that show up in a typical exam. The information is ultimately forgotten and is usually only relevant in the context of the current textbook chapter. Nearly every useful concept that applies to my two separate careers was learned on the job. The time spent in the classroom is nearly irrelevant and could have been replaced entirely by several weeks on the job.

rembiciliouson The decline of baleen whales has led to a decline of krill, researchers find

So whales poop krill which feeds algae which feeds krill. Add in sunlight and saltwater microorganisms and I guess it’s possible that whales eating then shitting krill = even more krill. But like so many complex systems it’s hard to draw any conclusions. Whales are beautiful creatures and it would be great if the oceans were so full of them again!

rembiciliouson Why is baseball the most literary of sports?

One batter vs a team. Every play is easily delineated into singular acts by individual players. There is no such thing as a “block” or “assist”. It’s easier to write about. It’s easier to allegorize. Baseball depends on individual performance more than most team sports, especially for pitching and batting.

rembiciliouson The Patriot Act Has Threatened Freedom for 20 Years

The USA didn’t have any terror attacks on that scale before 9/11 either.

rembiciliouson The Handpan – A must-have instrument for the Burning Man set

The linked article is not really about the instrument. It’s about the inventors of the instrument trying to use copyright laws (or any legal means) to stop the automated manufacturing of the “handpan”. Their artistic conviction seems to be that every “handpan” should be hand crafted. Mass production and automation churn out near identical instruments.. soulless copies.

They aren’t wrong; taking the artisan out of fabrication leaves the musician as the sole artistic variable in instrument’s sonic output.

Mass produced wooden instruments still retain unique properties of the trees they were grown from. No two acoustic guitars are the same, even though they came off the assembly line within minutes of each other. Instruments made exclusively from metals and plastics aren’t as likely to have the sonic variations found in wood. This is one of the reasons cymbal companies like Zildjian offer “hand hammered” products.

edit: When I say “They’re not wrong” I don’t mean that I agree with their actions, just that the ideals they hold in regards to artisanship are not without merit. It’s great that nearly any musician can purchase a “handpan” thanks to mass production. Even a very low quality instrument can sound great in the hands of a skilled musician.

rembiciliouson The digital death of collecting

In the long run, everything is ephemeral. A digital archive could potentially last longer than a book or a vinyl, as long as the archivist takes care to maintain the integrity of the data.. Except in a sense that isn’t true at all. In the distant future the archived material* is actually a copy of a copy ad nauseam, but perhaps a more perfect preservation of material than the Mona Lisa today.

*”material” being the relevant information.

rembiciliouson Can you beat face recognition technology by making funny faces?

Not for long if everyone plays this “game”.

rembiciliouson Mea culpa: How developers fix their own simple bugs differently from other devs

When my own code presents a bug I tend to chase it back to it’s “philosophical roots”.

I tried to work out edge cases from the beginning; to handle invalid data; to swat the bugs before they appeared.

A bug reared it’s little insectoid head.

Now I’m wading my way through every piece of code that remotely affects the issue and making damn sure that my perfect vision is realised.

On the other hand, fixing a bug in someone else’s code doesn’t have all these personal implications. If I fix the bug without causing regressions I’m a hero! After all, it’s not personal to me.

rembiciliouson Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle

It wasn’t a dumb accident, and law enforcement isn’t to blame in this case. The police response was deliberately incited by a group of malicious individuals. How can minors, who typically are given lighter sentences, be discouraged from “swatting”?

rembiciliouson Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

When you say you can “hear data movement on PCBs”, do you mean you have some kind of superhuman ability, or that you know how to use some combination of instrumentation and analysis to “hear” the data?

rembiciliouson We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

Are you sure about that? It looks to me like they check the current lease for subletting stipulations. It’s literally the first step under “Sublet your place” on the website.