Hacker News Reader

science4sailon Why would a 21st century warplane shoot a balloon with a missile?

> The NSA is also now free to float balloons around the country for cellphone capture.

Why would the NSA need to float balloons around the country when they could just ask/force the telecom companies to give them a copy of their cell tower data?

science4sailon Why would a 21st century warplane shoot a balloon with a missile?

This behavior isn't unique to the IT community, as XKCD has observed with physicists: https://xkcd.com/793/

science4sailon What is Google doing with its open source teams?

Waze isn't a separate team anymore - it got merged into Maps[0], which means that its probably going to join the Google Graveyard in the next cost-cutting round[1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903016 [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

science4sailon Binance caught commingling funds between US and international exchanges

Pervitin was believed to be used by the Nazis during WW2 as a combat stimulant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany?wp...

science4sailon EU to Facebook, 'Drop Dead'

This is pretty similar to a common argument that we see on HN: "Apple cares more about user privacy because the bulk of their revenue comes from selling devices, not ads".

The issue here is whether Apple's pivot to services and advertising revenue will corrupt their privacy protections. Similarly, we can wonder if EU privacy protections will vanish if a future adtech unicorn gets born in France or Germany.

science4sailon Air Force, FBI raid homes in probe of Area 51 website

How would a world-wide WMD ban even happen? The last remaining country with WMDs could just ramp up their WMD production to Cold War levels and then hold the rest of the world hostage. North Korea is proof that sanctions can't stop nuclear problems.

The only plausible route I imagine is if the non-WMD states put massive resources into countermeasures (e.g. missile interceptors or thwarting nuclear terrorism).

science4sailon NASA – Artemis I Liftoff

A nuclear salt water rocket has a thrust-to-weight ratio of 40, so you could presumably use a NSWR to launch payloads to orbit. If you're going to turn the launch pad into a radioactive wasteland, might as well go all the way :).

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php...

science4sailon Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

Isn't that also a problem with humans? A human pilot might suddenly go insane and start murdering people (even though empirically, it's an improbable event).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

science4sailon Twitter Blue for $8/month. Price adjusted to purchasing power parity

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33424607

science4sailon Microsoft has started layoffs today

Yep - I lived through it too and it led to me realizing that there could eventually be a life outside of the MSFT bubble.

I think that the vast majority of the impacted employees were in Nokia, but the mothership was also affected - one of our team members simply vanished that day.

science4sailon It doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you

A fine way to explain "user/developer trust"

> Many players are in iterated games where they care about their reputation and, because contractualizing commitments is slow and costly, they need their repeat counterparties to understand that there is an industry culture of promises and promises made in that culture are kept.

science4sailon Super apps are proliferating across emerging markets

Apple already foresaw that possibility and banned it . iOS users are forced to use Safari.

science4sailon Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards

From the source:

> The Obverse-End Wizards know how to make the Smoke colorful, and make it display letters in a myriad styles, and allow the Onlooker to manipulate the Smoke themselves.

> The Reverse-End Wizards have magics to move knowledge along the many threads of the Web, bringing it to the Smoke for the Onlooker to See, or from the Onlooker to some distant node of the Web where it will be processed into something of use

> The Obverse- and Reverse-End Wizards commonly work together; sometimes they are even the same person, and we call them the Full-Stack Wizards (stack is a corruption of tzahua, meaning to spin or weave, referring to the Great Web).

science4sailon Benefits of the Danish transfat ban for coronary heart disease mortality

I think that what we have here is a trolley problem:

* A sin tax on sugar would be the utilitarian approach.

* Avoiding regressive public policies would be the deontological approach.

I'm inclined to pull the lever, but my opinions may be biased by the fact that I spend very little of my income on sugary foods and so would see little impact from such a tax.

science4sailon Severance is the workplace thriller we’ve needed

> I find it thought provoking that there are no natural analogues to a capitalist system. In nature, unimpeded, continual growth is typically a malady. Ecosystems, species, and even individual biological units at most experience a growth spurt to bring the system to a viable state for steady-state continuity.

My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady. Biological systems don't stop growing because they think that they've reached a maintainable steady state; they stop growing because they run into resource constraints.

For example, the balance between predator and prey populations is maintained via a feedback loop, not via assessments of "sustainability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

science4sailon Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers

Meta doesn't have any oncall compensation; it's like Amazon.

science4sailon Space Force is scrapping the annual fitness test in favor of wearable trackers

> U.S. Space Force leadership says the approach will prioritize the general wellness of service members beyond just one physical assessment each year. The annual tests have spurred eating disorder symptoms and other unhealthy behaviors in some military members.

It seems like one of the driving reasons for the change is a concern about people gaming the annual test. Couldn't fitness trackers also be gamed? For example, someone could put a pedometer into a motorized cradle to fake walking/running.

science4sailon Random Restaurant

XKCD proposed using genetic algorithms to make recipes: https://xkcd.com/720/

Google used AI to make chocolate-chip cookies (they then served them in the company cafeterias): https://www.blog.google/technology/research/makings-smart-co...

science4sailon US Copyright Office refuses application with AI algorithm named as author

Is this how the paperclip maximizer scenario gets started? The AI decides to take over the government in order to reduce filing fees.

science4sailon Modern smartphone lenses are crazy

That's an old Hollywood special effect: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GaussianGirl

> When filmed, the Gaussian Girl is shot through a soft-focus filter, a piece of translucent plastic (or very sheer silk, in the days of classic film), or a quick smear of Vaseline, depending on the director's and/or cinematographer's preference. This surrounds her with a softly glowing aura, and smooths out any unappealing pores or lines on her face. The result makes her look nothing short of ethereal.

science4sailon Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

Yep, same with landmines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

science4sailon Tom Lehrer – So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III, 1967)

Lehrer's "Werner von Braun" song is also pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio

science4sailon Why the West is reluctant to deny Russian banks access to SWIFT

Presumably the PM could coerce the SWIFT staff to do some action (see the fears European countries have about the relationship between the US government and its tech companies).

science4sailon Researchers levitated a small tray using light

For anyone that didn't read the article, the researchers appear to be using light to generate air currents; they're not levitating objects using radiation pressure.

science4sailon Fission-Fragment Rocket

> With exhaust velocities of 3% - 5% the speed of light and efficiencies up to 90%, the [dusty plasma] rocket should be able to achieve over 1,000,000 sec Isp.

It's plausible to build a spacecraft with delta-V equal to 2x its exhaust velocity. So if that rocket is feasible then you're talking about a serious interstellar drive, especially if you can boost the acceleration phase with something like a laser sail.

That being said, fusion propulsion is probably still preferable since light elements should be easier to collect than heavy metal nanoparticles.

science4sailon Ask HN: Where are you going to find long-form content online these days?

Many dead-tree-book libraries also have ebook lending programs. If that's not an option, then there's also Project Gutenberg[0] and the Internet Archive's Open Library [1].

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ [1] https://openlibrary.org/

science4sailon Ask HN: Google Guice another abandonware from Google?

Guice forms a core part of many of Google's internal Java frameworks, so it's unlikely to be deprecated anytime soon.

However, Google only upgraded to JDK11 in 2021, so there's probably not much internal pressure yet to keep Guice up to date with JDK17.

science4sailon James Webb Space Telescope Launch Postponed

At this rate I half expect the telescope's rocket to collide with Santa Claus on ascent.