Hacker News Reader

sympleeon Simple, solar-powered water desalination

From the article:

>> Unlike some desalination systems, there is no accumulation of salt or concentrated brines to be disposed of. In a free-floating configuration, any salt that accumulates during the day would simply be carried back out at night through the wicking material and back into the seawater, according to the researchers.

sympleeon Mapping Income Inequality in the US Using IRS SOI Data

The spectrum of color only represents percentages between 7.8 and 17.6%.

I imagine it would look a lot less dramatic if the scale was from 0% (bright red), to 100% (bright green).

It would also be interesting to have a slider to adjust the threshold point (it's currently fixed at 50%).

sympleeon Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-from-Home Experiment

For remote work, pretty much anything that's not done on an actual assembly line.

sympleeon Happiness is more like poetry than algorithms

Almost.

Laziness = minimum spanning tree

Love = merge sort

Sadness = reversing a linked list

But yes, all other emotions are iambic pentameter poetry.

sympleeon The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

There's an example in the 1950-2000 section:

  Many UFO reports may be the result of mass hysteria [0]

Granted, these weren't all independent sightings. So you're right, I agree. We don't know for sure.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-ufo-reports-chang...

sympleeon How to Find New Music

If learning a new language, it's still amazing how you can find large and well developed music scenes for pretty much any genre you already like, in your target language.

sympleeon The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

Fairly well documented throughout history:

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

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

sympleeon IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

Exactly. Don't be fooled by this clever marketing, we all know who's really pulling the strings behind the scenes...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

sympleeon Facebook to Pay $550M to Settle Facial Recognition Suit

Discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22186790

In any event, the main point was that the fine is 1/100 of yearly spending.

sympleeon Facebook to Pay $550M to Settle Facial Recognition Suit

And to put that into perspective, their total spending is over 1,000k a year per employee.

sympleeon Clues That Neanderthals Didn't Know How to Make Fire (2017)

Have any other animals ever discovered fire?

If humans vanished today, how long would it take for the next animal to discover it? Which animal would it be? What about if we don't count primates? (Also worth noting, dolphins unfortunately have an extremely unfair disadvantage...)

sympleeon Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been

Like an unlisted phone number?

sympleeon Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (1999)

Further ideas/concepts:

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

sympleeon The Cruise Origin

The big concern is human drivers hitting it. Like the Las Vegas autonomous car that was backed into by a truck within the first hour of going live. [0] For example, does it have a side impact safety rating?

I also noticed on their technology page [1] they say that they have "Deep Resources"

>> We have raised $7.25 billion in committed capital from General Motors, Honda, SoftBank, T. Rowe Price, and others. These investments help shave years off of our timeline to launch all-electric, self-driving vehicles at scale.

$7.25 Billion?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7pV4vxD1bs

https://www.getcruise.com/technology

sympleeon Immune discovery 'may treat all cancer'

Thanks for the feedback. So maybe the main scientists would host the repository, with their ideas and data. Then we could review and perhaps add to the main scientist's ideas, or find problems with the data. Or add more data with our own experiments. In other words, a collaborative approach. Maybe the main scientists could limit contributions to people who met a certain threshold of earlier verified contributions. Or let other people corroborate and verify before the main scientists even saw the layperson's contributions. Just an idea, open to improvements!

sympleeon Immune discovery 'may treat all cancer'

Anyone know how we HN readers can help this effort?

Is there some open source scientific community/repository like GitHub? (Where people can pull down the latest data and ideas, and add to them, then push our changes back to the main scientists.)

sympleeon “You're stealing our water”: Germans protest against Tesla gigafactory

Would it be possible to build a floating (or submerged) factory in the ocean? Far enough from shore but linked to a coastal city via a "boring company" tunnel. And thus be outside of any political jurisdiction.

sympleeon US colleges struggling with low enrollment are closing at increasing rate (2019)

Tinder theme park?

sympleeon Most frequently checked-out books in the history of the New York Public Library

Exactly. Remember the days of Blockbuster, they'd have an entire shelf dedicated to 50 copies of a single movie.

Partly to handle actual demand, but, perhaps unlike the library, I imagine it was also partly to generate artificial demand by signaling: "Hey, you, undecided wanderer, look here, this is an important movie that everyone else is renting, you should too."

sympleeon Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018)

Is there a mainstream company structure that aligns interests in this way? Or would this require a paradigm shift?

sympleeon Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020

Unrelated, but for those who have never seen the Jeff Dean facts, behold: https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts

Some highlights include:

-Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi.

-He once shifted a bit so hard it ended up on another computer.

-He wrote an O(n^2) algorithm once. It was for the Traveling Salesman Problem.

-Jeff Dean once implemented a web server in a single printf() call. Other engineers added thousands of lines of explanatory comments but still don't understand exactly how it works. Today that program is known as GWS.

-There is no 'Ctrl' key on Jeff Dean's keyboard. Jeff Dean is always in control.

-Jeff Dean's watch displays seconds since January 1st, 1970. He is never late.

-Jeff's code is so fast the assembly code needs three HALT opcodes to stop it.

sympleeon Books on Thinking About Thinking

Thinking about thinking is a fascinating topic, and the heart of true critical thinking. At the same time, it's easy to get wrapped up in our own inventions and hubris if not careful. When approaching "truth" check out the following as an added sanity check :)

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

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

BUT also not allowing these to limit blazing a new path forward!

sympleeon [dead]

Thankfully quantum is non-binary.

sympleeon World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen Is Now World Fantasy Premier League #1

For comparison, these are the ranks of the other grandmasters in the group:

  rank       rank / 7,182,778 players:
  ____________________________________
  1 -------- 0.0000139%
  23,365 --- 0.3252920%
  238,352 -- 3.3183818%
  391,870 -- 5.4556886%
  448,139 -- 6.2390763%
  510,354 -- 7.1052454%
  602,723 -- 8.3912241%
  726,511 -- 10.1146242%
  728,141 -- 10.1373173%
  2,011,481  28.0042207%
  2,258,848  31.4481110%
  3,993,041  55.5918755%
  5,015,777  69.8306004%

sympleeon Challenging projects every programmer should try

Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)

>> A rope, or cord, is a data structure composed of smaller strings that is used to efficiently store and manipulate a very long string. For example, a text editing program may use a rope to represent the text being edited, so that operations such as insertion, deletion, and random access can be done efficiently.

sympleeon Modern garbage collection: Part 2

Anyone have any details on recent developments in the field?

For example:

  Reclaiming raw materials from landfills
  Machines/robots that can sort recyclable materials from a heap of mixed garbage.
  Better insulated landfills

sympleeon World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen Is Now World Fantasy Premier League #1

Imagine if he starts picking stocks?

Checkmate.

sympleeon The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Smaller and Safer

A couple extra ideas for these beyond land-based power generation:

1) Put a couple of these on trans-Atlantic cruise ships, designed for speed, to make the journey in 3 days (at 50 MPH) carrying 2,000+ people.

2) Cargo ships that operate on the backbone long haul routes. If there are concerns about these getting too close to shoreline or population, just have them only operate 10 miles from land. Other cargo ships can then load and unload them in open water. (This would require some faster loading/unloading mechanism, maybe something where the front would open up and slide out the entire deck into the other ship.)

Thoughts?

sympleeon The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Smaller and Safer

From the article:

>> NuScale’s reactor is 65 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, and is housed in a containment vessel only slightly larger. About the size of two school buses stacked end to end, you could fit around 100 of them in the containment chamber of a large conventional reactor. Yet this small reactor can crank out 60 megawatts of energy.

>> The review process is brutal—NuScale submitted a 12,000 page technical application—and will likely stretch on for at least another year. But the company has already secured permission to build its first 12-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory, which may start supplying power to communities in Western states as soon as 2026.