Hacker News Reader

rmu09on 111,111.1 meters is reliably 1 degree of latitude

I believe an opportunity was missed some time ago in the past to define one inch to 25.6mm, which would make for much nicer conversions IMO, especially with the convention to use fractions of powers of two in the inch world (e.g. 15/16" would be 24mm exactly vs. 23.8125mm).

rmu09on Electrolyzer efficiently converts CO2 into renewable propane fuel

Please don't refer to power as energy or use units of power when you really mean energy, it is bad enough when this happens in more traditional media.

rmu09on JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

Surface area of a Torus?

rmu09on Canonical LXD forked by former project leader stgraber

stgraber made a bunch of commits on this fork already.

rmu09on Tesla gives UK owners grabbing stick after forcing them to get left-hand-drive

For me, the worst thing would be "muscle memory". Never had a problem driving a rental car with right-hand-drive in the UK or Ireland. Different thing was the bicycle, after stops, I often forgot to start driving on "the other side", and I suspect I would be just as easily fooled in a car with left-hand-drive.

rmu09on SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

Isn't it pretty unlikely that this debris, flying against the exhaust, can reach the engines with significant energy?

rmu09on Viable superconducting material created in Rochester lab

Magnetic field of earth is ~50µT, a superconducting loop with diameter 1m (circumference ~3,14m) with 100kA will feel a force of ~15N, with 1cm² it has a volume of 0,314 liters, in aluminium thats about 0,85kg or 8,5N, in copper thats about 3kg or 30N. So with a material density of 5kg/dm³ or less it could be possible to fly. Changing the current in the superconducting coil to control lift and propulsion could be tricky though.

rmu09on Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

I wonder how this (on a raspi 4) compares to mathematica we used to use in ~1995 at uni on HPPA machines with <1GB RAM?

rmu09on Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video]

Fact is, if we keep adding waste heat created from some stored energy, be it fossil, fission or fusion, to the environment, net temperature of the earth has to rise to get rid of said waste heat via additional radiation into space. The cheaper that energy is the more the temperature will rise. In that sense, the only "clean" energy sources are what is radiated in from the sun and what is conducted out from the core.

rmu09on Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline

Don't mean to be pedantic, but this comment left me very confused, surely you mean carriage return to be ASCII 13? Also, g is the 7th character and BEL is 7.

rmu09on Nord Stream blast 'blew away 50 metres of pipe'

Assuming these incidents were caused by some sort of device, that device could have been placed there a long time ago. Oligarch-superyachts are/were (before the war) probably not that suspicious cruising there, and I would not be shocked if some of them have mini-submarines.

rmu09on Nord Stream blast 'blew away 50 metres of pipe'

Switching it off might involve conractual penalties. Blowing it up and blaming it on whoever can be argued "force majeur".

rmu09on Nord Stream blast 'blew away 50 metres of pipe'

That would not signal readiness to do really expensive things.

rmu09on Nord Stream blast 'blew away 50 metres of pipe'

The idea is more like russia is sending the message "we are suicidal and ready to do really expensive, stupid stuff, maybe even go nuclear, are you too?"

rmu09on Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger

Superdeterminism eliminates any requirement(s).

rmu09on Estonia, allies to trigger NATO Article 4

Suppose canada tried to join china and north korea in some kind of military pact. USA would not possibly tolerate that.

rmu09on U.S. indicts two men for running a $20M YouTube content ID scam

I'm not a US citizen and not a lawyer either, but shouldn't it be possible (for a US american copyright holder) to sue youtube and/or those that claim the copyright in small claims court? AFAIK you would not need a lawyer and at the same time create a very big hassle for the companies involved.

rmu09on Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

The demonstration would be clearer if the "point of contact" at the start of the rotation would be marked on the smaller circle and the larger circle would be divided into 3 segments of different color. That would make it obvious that 1 rotation of the small circle doesn't trace a whole circumference of the small circle on the large one.

rmu09on Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021

Such "anecdotal evidence" doesn't say much per se.

In austria, a women died of a heart attack while waiting in line to be injected. Just imagine what would have happend if the heart attack would have happened 30 minutes later, it would have been very hard to convince people the heart attack was not related to the vaccination.

rmu09on Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01316-7

I know of one other study (can't find it at the moment though) that specifically looked not for CT value but if they are able to infect cells. The outcome was something like vaccinated people do replicate virus, but the spikes of those viruses are (mostly) deactivated by antibodies and therefore not as infectious as virus obtained from unvaccinated people. In rt-PCR tests you can't really distinguish infectious from deactivated virus.

rmu09on Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021

Janssen vaccine is vector based, not mRNA like Pfizer Comirnaty or Moderna.

Although vaccinated people can be infected and even spread the virus, the disease is usually mild, amount of infectious virus and the time they are infectious is much smaller. And that is no speciality of covid immunizations, other vaccines like measles or influenza also don't prevent infection, but aim to prevent the disease.

The "not fully tested" meme is nonsense, many hundred million people have been vaccinated in the meantime, the safety profile is known.

Regarding long time effects beside immunity of vaccines, this interview https://lexfridman.com/vincent-racaniello/ goes into some detail. TLDL: there is nothing to expect/fear.

rmu09on YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

Even if some vaccinated people replicate and transmit the virus, they do so for a shorter amount of time and with less infectious virus than unvaccinated.

rmu09on Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

Relevant interview with peter daszak https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-615/ recorded at the december 2019 nipah conference in singapure.

rmu09on YouTube suspends filmmaker Oliver Ressler’s account without warning

The account https://www.youtube.com/c/OliverResslerFilms/videos has been restored in the meantime.

rmu09on The Galileo Project: Daring to Look Through New Telescopes

I suggest grabbing a random DSLR with decent glass and trying to capture a bird in flight against the sky. Most of the time not even the species will be discernable. People with no prior experience photographing birds will have a hard time taking anything that is not blurry. It is actually not that easy even tracking something in flight through the viewfinder, especially at long focal lengths. Shaking, focus / depth of field, dynamic range, sensor noise and exposure time all work against you.

So I would be extremely suspicious of sharp clear properly exposed pictures of UFOs.

rmu09on A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight (2016)

All this cheap energy eventually turns into heat. The only way to get rid of excess heat is to radiate it into space, and the only way to radiate _more_ heat into space is with an increased temperature.

rmu09on NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

One thing that severly hampered the romans was their number system.

rmu09on Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

Xorg was kind-of forked from a working solution (XFree) whereas wayland started from scratch.

rmu09on Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

Sometimes it is the customers that need shielding from the engineers.

I remember a situation where defcon was raised to 2 when the head of our unit found out that a particular engineer went to a meeting with a particular customer on his own.

rmu09on Everything you need to know to design your own CNC router

Stepper motors also have resonances that you can excite with typical step pulse trains, that can also lead to missed steps while technically not overstepping the torque budget.