Hacker News Reader

tlrsson Teen arrested in England after felling ancient tree

Yes, it may be possible to regrow a coppice from the stump.

tlrsson Teen arrested in England after felling ancient tree

Holding this (and my emotional reaction to it) in mind while reading the State of Nature report 2023 [1]

Around 1 in 6 species are at risk of extinction from Great Britain, discussing trends over the last 50 years or so, following centuries of major changes to ecosystems and habitats.

Something iconic [2] in imagery/memory/culture, next to clear summary and review.

[1] https://stateofnature.org.uk/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2023/sep/28/hadr...

tlrsson Satellite supergroup spots methane super-emitters

You might be interested in Climate TRACE. They produce a global inventory, identifying the largest individual sources of emissions, and publish it CC-BY - https://climatetrace.org/downloads

tlrsson Ask HN: What happened to flatbuffers? Are they being used?

FlatGeoBuf [1] is an encoding for geographic data (vector features, i.e. points lines polygons and so on) written around flatbuffers that is increasingly well supported in geospatial software (GDAL, MapServer) and people reporting some experiments and demos on the @flatgeobuf Twitter.

[1] https://flatgeobuf.org/

tlrsson Climate model complexity and future approaches

Title was “Are GCMs obsolete?” which is a bit jargon (GCM is general circulation model, used for climate modelling) and a bit clickbait - as with any headline question, can basically be answered “no”.

But I think the article is quite good - short overview of numerical modelling of the climate and discussion of future directions, both towards throwing more compute (ever higher resolution) at the problem, and improving models (emulators) at higher levels of abstraction to explore more scenarios, sensitivities, specific questions.

tlrsson The Economics of Programming Languages (2005)

It would probably still be written "10x", just in base-twelve!

tlrsson Socialist Cyborgs

A short history of computing and hacking in Bulgaria in the 80s..

> Viruses also suited the logics of reverse-engineering and copying on which the Bulgarian computer economy was already running. Why not tinker with a digital pathogen and send it out into the world beyond Bulgaria? After all, you knew it would work virtually anywhere, because your Pravetz was compatible with an Apple!

> Starting in early 1989, computers as far away as the USA and Thailand were infected with Bulgarian viruses. Some were minor irritants, such as the “Yankee Doodle” virus, which simply played the eponymous melody on your computer.