Hacker News Reader

sliverstormon Brain inflammation sows the seeds of Alzheimer’s

Just spitballing here, but the Inuit eat a lot of omega-3 which is anti-inflammatory.

sliverstormon How Cuts in Basic Subway Upkeep Can Make NYC Commutes Miserable

But transport always must be subsidized by the State, going back to the roads of Rome.

Ironically many car drivers object to the public subsidy of rail, arguing transit should never be publicly subsidized.

sliverstormon Berlin's Plan to Become a City for Cyclists

I believe your parent is alluding to the fact that if you are regularly active & get exercise, biking at an easy pace on flat land in good weather won't even cause you to break a sweat, whereas if you sit on the couch all day it will. (Hopefully don't need a source for this)

sliverstormon Berlin's Plan to Become a City for Cyclists

Also somewhat a consequence of diet. I find I generally smell much better when I'm eating well.

sliverstormon China's Yanlong: a small nuclear reactor strictly for district heating

Yeah, it certainly wags its tongue suggestively towards the old idea of a benevolent & competent dictatorship as the most effective form of government.

sliverstormon iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it.

Once upon a time, google.com was like five lines of HTML. Google loved to brag about how they didn't even close their tags, because the page still rendered and it saved bytes.

Now I measure it at 300+ lines and 200KB, not counting assets.

Same generally goes for every software you know and love.

sliverstormon Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

Not particularly mysterious, but I got quite a jump one day when I keyed up my 50w VHF mobile in the garage and instanly every single fire alarm in my house went off.

sliverstormon We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

Trouble is nobody's yet figured out how to build a completely decentralized internet that is anywhere near as good as the regular internet.

Mostly because wireless technologies still don't scale that far, which means wires in the ground, which means gatekeepers on the other end.

sliverstormon Inside the Home of Instant Pot

Real steel cut oats? 20 min. roughly.

They're only 20 min on the stove in a pot. What does this do differently?

sliverstormon German Kindergarten Campouts Test Helicopter Parents (2015)

What's age-appropriate? The nails were too big to swallow and the hot glue guns the kind they sell at CVS. The kids cut and poked themselves and learned to be careful.

Yup, mostly that. Nobody lost a hand or was rushed to the burn ward.

sliverstormon German Kindergarten Campouts Test Helicopter Parents (2015)

Oh, nobody will kill themselves, but my parents had a big 'ol fashioned gun that would give small hands a second degree burn quick if you grabbed it anywhere even near the business end. We used smaller guns that had lower heat output & flow rate.

Nothing wrong with hot tools, but it's nice to limit the severity of the burns while they're learning. A small soldering iron, for example, will hurt but you probably won't do any serious damage. Similar with hammers, a ball peen or mallet will hurt but won't break skin like a claw could.

sliverstormon German Kindergarten Campouts Test Helicopter Parents (2015)

Sounds a lot like scout camp. Look into scouting. There's a lot of bad press about the BSA, but each troop is really very independent, and your local troop may be far more inclusive than you might expect. As a kid we were shooting bows, all kinds of guns, camping, backpacking, roping, fishing, paddling, sailing, firestarting, tomahawk throws, etc... Especially in KS, I have to expect those kinds of parents are around, you just have to find them.

sliverstormon German Kindergarten Campouts Test Helicopter Parents (2015)

Age-appropriate hammers, nails, and hot glue guns I hope? Maybe I'm going to become a helicopter parent, but there are hot glue guns I'd want my kindergartener handling, and hot glue guns I wouldn't. Like the difference between a 15w hobby soldering iron, and a 260w heavy duty soldering iron! :)

sliverstormon As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do

Firefighters in America are doing the same thing, as buildings become more fireproof & smoking declines.

sliverstormon Firefox is on a slippery slope

I think the Web is unredeemable at this point; there is so much entrenched complexity, ugly hacks, centralization, and misuse of various technologies that it can never be undone.

Somewhere, an AMP developer coughs indignantly

sliverstormon Her six-hour commute each day seems crazy, but her affordable rent is not

Which is a sinister part of the whole "buy a nice house far away & commute". The further from work, the less time you even get to spend at that nice house...

sliverstormon Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

And/or people are just banking on getting theirs & getting out before it gets bad.

sliverstormon Don’t keep cell phones next to your body, California Health Department warns

You can at least pick & choose what pocket. Front pocket & breast pocket, for example, might be close to sensitive things you care about.

sliverstormon Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues

no-till is incompatible with organic farming? Hadn't heard about that, a shame if true. I'm not a farmer, but I had heard there were a variety of strategies that would qualify as organic, e.g. cover crops that choke out the weeds, or plastic sheeting over the ground to bake the weeds & pests.

sliverstormon Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues

Which is why in a sense it's a travesty that commodity crops are grown in CA with scarce water.

sliverstormon Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues

I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life

It's easy to believe they are utterly indispensable. They are just so convenient, and we love to convince ourselves convenience is really necessity. But would the world truly collapse into the dark ages if fossil fuels petered out in the next decade, and we no longer had that option?

How are you going to transport food? You ignore that food was shipped around a long time before fossil fuels. More of a pain, of course, but we did it all the same.

sliverstormon Nike’s Two Hour Marathon Attempt

Isn't this how the march of progress goes sometimes? Somebody does an impossible feat (with help & ideal conditions). They show it can be done. Then other people begin to replicate, and the ideal conditions & support start to be eliminated.

Rock climbing jumps to mind.

sliverstormon New Model Warns About Crispr Gene Drives in the Wild

So it's not about the disease after all eh? Pick and choose species that annoy us?

sliverstormon New Model Warns About Crispr Gene Drives in the Wild

Why not a gene drive on the disease itself?

sliverstormon Why Is Giving Birth So Hard? Revisiting the 'Obstetrical Dilemma'

In general, vestigial traits hang around because there is little selection pressure against them, but new traits don't usually seem to show up & take over for no good reason.

sliverstormon F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

As unpalatable as you think that sounds, it's also exactly what we do with car insurance, and has worked mostly fine there for decades, excluding enforcement problems and illegals.

sliverstormon F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

Mostly what you need is a lot of money and a legal team. There are some government granted monopolies in certain municipalities, but by and large I understand it's just a money problem. The incumbents have tons of established infrastructure; you're starting from scratch.

sliverstormon F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

They are not legally beholden to follow the feedback, but if the FCC is supposed to be an unelected dictatorship, why even require feedback?

sliverstormon The Great American Share – Sam Altman Interview on Basic Income

Assuming no change in employment. Yet one of the first arguments for UBI is always that people can then quit their crummy jobs.