Hacker News Reader

science4sailon Will real estate ever be normal again?

I wonder if there could be an evaporative cooling like effect in play here? That is, everyone who is willing to move has already moved; as a result, the remaining population biases towards those unwilling to move.

science4sailon DARPA's hypersonic scramjet achieves successful flight

What about the ARPAnet? That seemed to have found several applications outside of national defense.

science4sailon U.S. to open program to replace Huawei equipment in U.S. networks

The internment of Japanese Americans is actually a pretty good example. As far as the outcome of events is concerned, it doesn't matter whether any of them actually were traitors (as far as I know there were no significant cases), it only matters whether they were depicted as traitors by politicians eager to stoke public xenophobia.

science4sailon How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

> The first seems like it would be very frustrating if code with failing tests if pushed with any frequency, but seems to be literally what the phase "work on main" means.

Yep, that's the point - it's to discourage devs from checking in failing code (because then they'll be swarmed by annoyed coworkers). It's fairly common to see developer A make a breaking change to some low-level library and then see developer B push a rollback of A's changes a few minutes later (with or without A's permission).

science4sailon Amazon Web Services makes money: Estimated margins by service

Extracted the numbers from the article, which is in prose instead of table form. It looks like most of these numbers are estimates from William Blair[0], not Amazon itself.

Gross margins by service:

* EC2: ~50%

* S3: 50-70%

* EBS: 60-70%

* Aurora: 65-75%

* Bandwidth: 99%

* AWS Marketplace: >30%

[0] https://www.williamblair.com/

science4sailon Mercury Is No Longer the Closest Astronomical Body to the Sun

What would be really interesting is if astronomers were to find a mini asteroid belt inside the orbit of Mercury. However, it's unlikely that any objects there would be stable due to the wonderfully-named YORP effect.

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

science4sailon My Tungsten Cube (2019)

Yeah, I imagine that it'd be hard to get ahold of some technetium or astatine

science4sailon My Tungsten Cube (2019)

They even have uranium cubes! Depleted uranium though, so it's no good for your garage nuclear weapons lab.

https://luciteria.com/metal-cubes/uranium-cube

science4sailon JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

A radioisotope thermoelectric or betavoltaic generator would probably be too heavy for a helicopter, so you'd probably need something a lot more intense than simple radioactive decay.

science4sailon Japan pitches 'Society 5.0' to keep its edge in tech and science

I can't help but be reminded of Japan's failed Fifth Generation Computer Systems project.

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

science4sailon How Bell’s Theorem proved ‘spooky action at a distance’ is real

> Not true! It implies we might find performance optimizations, especially at the lowest level. Lazy loading, caching, pointers to constants, that sort of thing.

The issue is that you can only learn whether you're in a simulation if the simulator allows you to do so. Otherwise, the moment that you discover a performance optimization, the simulator could just pause the simulation, delete the discovery from your mind, and resume.

science4sailon Soldiers speak out about being blocked from repairing equipment by contractors

This feels like something out of Warhammer 40k. The troops aren't allowed to repair their equipment, they need to call in a techpriest^H contractor.

40k started off as a satire of 1980s British culture, but somehow reality ended up matching fiction.

science4sailon FAA warns Musk that he is building Super Heavy launch tower without permission

He'd still need to buy/steal/conquer some territory. Plenty of terra nullius on Mars though.

science4sailon An Alfvenic reconnecting plasmoid thruster

The "plasma-powered flying saucer" in your article doesn't appear to have any relationship to the thruster in the original post other than the word "plasma". The former appears to be an air ionizer [0]; the latter is a repurposed fusion research tokamak.

This is analogous to referring to both bumblebees and the Saturn V rocket as "liquid-powered flying vehicles".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_ioniser

science4sailon Did lead poisoning cause downfall of Roman Empire? The jury is still out

210 Reasons for decline of Roman Empire: https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...

I guess that strengthens the case for #121 (for now).

science4sailon Leaving Google

Like a corporate version of the rise and fall of civilizations?

> [Ibn Khaldun] explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of existing empires and use the much stronger asabiyya present in their areas to their advantage, in order to bring about a change in leadership. This implies that the new rulers are at first considered 'barbarians' in comparison to the previous ones. As they establish themselves at the center of their empire, they become increasingly lax, less coordinated, disciplined and watchful, and more concerned with maintaining their new power and lifestyle. Their asabiyya dissolves into factionalism and individualism, diminishing their capacity as a political unit.

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

science4sailon Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

> 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128 bits was overkill.

What if humanity becomes a Kardashev type-2 or an interstellar civilization? In that case the population of humans, much less computers, could easily succeed 70 trillion.

science4sailon The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies

210 Reasons for decline of Roman Empire: https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...

Pretty much every bogeyman is on there.

science4sailon The Miami condo collapse is a reminder of America's artificial land problem

Wouldn't an alternative approach be price caps on insurance policies and/or government subsidies for insurance in these areas? Those options might not be economically viable, but they would be politically popular.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...

science4sailon Microbes and solar power ‘could produce 10 times more food than plants’

For that matter, Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series mentions "microfood" as a staple dish eaten by both the desperately poor and ludicrously wealthy.

science4sailon Microbes and solar power ‘could produce 10 times more food than plants’

From a sci-fi perspective, algae has been proposed as a food source for spacecraft life support systems. Going by the most optimistic estimates, 6 liters of algae produces enough oxygen and food to sustain a human indefinitely.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/celss.php#id--G...

I for one do not welcome a future where most people live on green slime and only the wealthy have grains/vegetables/meat. At least not without lots of investment into artificial flavoring.

science4sailon Oregon has legalized human composting

> If in the far far future we develop a means of resurrecting the dead, the epitaphs on tombstones may be used to determine who deserves resurrection. But of course this is extremely fanciful speculation.

That's unlikely unless the dead person is exceptionally well-preserved (or you're just creating Generic Human Body #42 and giving it the dead person's name). Brain structure doesn't really survive current burial/embalming techniques and I imagine that any sort of "immortal soul" may have long left by then. Cryonics aims for this sort of far-future resurrection, but even it has problems about viability.

science4sailon No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

If an interstellar-capable species wanted to wipe out humanity, then they could easily bomb us with relativistic projectiles by throwing their trash at Earth.

If they still wanted the biosphere intact afterwards, then they could alternatively deploy a targeted anti-human bioweapon.

science4sailon Fifteen years of radar reveal Venus’s most basic facts

Having each day be 3 minutes longer/shorter than the previous one is pretty crazy, even if it's mitigated by the fact that 1 Venusian day is ~243 Earth days.

That really makes me wonder how timekeeping would work for civilizations that evolved on planets with variable day length. Earth has variable periods of sunlight depending on latitude, but Earth's day length itself is relatively constant.

science4sailon ●●|●●●●●|●●|●

That does raise the question of where group consciousness ends though:

* Is my immune system conscious?

* Is my family conscious?

* Is my community conscious?

* Is my country conscious?

* Is the universe conscious?

science4sailon The Road from Rome

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Why don't I see down arrows?

> There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold, but never on direct replies.

science4sailon Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines (2004)

For that matter, the Earth has already had a grey goo ecological disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

science4sailon Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines (2004)

What do you define as an "artificial physical self-replicating machine"?

A genetically engineered bacterium is a self-replicating machine created via artificial means that exists to effect some purpose in the physical world.

science4sailon Just Be Rich

What about non-monetary inheritance? Even if rich kids don't inherit anything, they can still get advantages from parental connections, educational opportunities, genetics, etc.

science4sailon Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

I wonder if it's a case of misaimed audience?

Even though "children asking questions" may be less appealing to children than "adults asking questions", the former might get aired anyway because it's more appealing to the adults that make children's programs.