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Duplicate of my previous comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47887938)

  If I remember correctly, the habitable-ish cloud layers have super-fast winds that circle the planet once every 4 days or so. [0]

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_super-rotation

ultratalkon Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.

ultratalkon Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

With regards to search engines, Google paid billions of dollars [0] to become the default on major browsers. I guess GP's implying that something similar might happen with LLMs.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-paid-26-bln-be-def...

ultratalkon Cursor Camp

Strangely enough, when I enter the "convergence point" book, my cursor gets an American flag, even though it wasn't American before. Has anyone else seen this?

ultratalkon Can You Find the Comet?

> Our telescopes actually need the (or at least an) atmosphere to function.

What about Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, JWST, etc? As of my understanding, the only reason we haven't built radio and and other long-wave telescopes in space is because of their impractical size preventing them from being deployed in orbit.

> There are some classes of observatories, which you cannot build in space but which are still affected by satellites to some degree.

Examples?

ultratalkon Can You Find the Comet?

Opinion: We need to move our astronomical observation equipment off of Earth and onto other bodies, especially radio astronomy, which, unlike telescopes that operate in other wavelengths, is still affected by Earth's emissions in LEO/near-Earth space. We should put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon [0] to benefit from the thousands of kilometers of lunar material separating Earth's emissions from telescopes.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO50100.2021.9438165

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Crater_Radio_Telescope

ultratalkon Desmond Morris has died

Is this the same guy who wrote Peoplewatching (Manwatching, I believe, is what it was called earlier)?

ultratalkon Desmond Morris has died

Is this the same guy who wrote Peoplewatching?

ultratalkon GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

@dang?

ultratalkon GPT 5.5 biosafety bounty

Almost certainly.

ultratalkon Panipat: The Rise of the Mughals

Islam and Christianity are Abrahamic religions. But some societies are both very Christian and very anti-Islam, or vice-versa.

ultratalkon Panipat: The rise of the Mughals

Yeah, the south was one of the most economically prosperous regions in the Indian subcontinent at the time. They were the centres of the spice trade, and a lot of colonial interest began there first. Because of the trade networks, a lot of outside cultural influence was part of the area's history. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all came to the Malabar and Konkan coast just a few decades or tens of decades after they starting gaining traction in the Levant and other Middle-Eastern areas. In fact, Islam's first contact with the Indian subcontinent was on the Malabar coast and near it [0]. Colonial trading posts were set up in cities on the Malabar coast like Kochi [1] first, before they were set up in the North. In fact, after he died, Vasco da Gama was buried in a church in Kochi, Kerala, for many years before his son dug him up and took him back to Portugal [2]. My point is, a lot of stuff happened outside of the Gangetic Plains area, and not much is known about it in contemporary Western historical discourse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_India#Early_history_o...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Emmanuel

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama#Death

ultratalkon Panipat: The rise of the Mughals

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

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

ultratalkon Why Not Venus?

If I remember correctly, the habitable-ish cloud layers have super-fast winds that circle the planet once every 4 days or so. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_super-rotation

ultratalkon Why Not Venus?

There was this project idea that some researchers at Langley developed in the mid-2010s called HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) [0] for a 5-stage mission to send humans to Venus's habitable-ish cloud layers. It never really got anywhere, but there was apparently some media attention around it for some time.

Because the nitrox atmosphere we're used to is a lifting gas in the Venusian atmosphere, you could theoretically just fill a big balloon with our atmosphere and live inside it, with lots of Teflon on the outside and suits made of Teflon to work outside the habitat. I also (kind of?) remember reading about using metal nets to capture and condense H2SO4 from the clouds and process it into water, oxygen, and hydrolox rocket fuel.

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160006329/downloads/20...

ultratalkon Why Not Venus?

https://xkcd.com/397/ (the zombie feynman one)

ultratalkon GPT-5.5

Just a guess, but maybe it's reporting bias? Negative or evil actions might have more impetus to be understood by others than positive actions. I'd rather try and figure out why my friend suddenly started murdering the neighbours than why he's been getting his work done on time.

ultratalkon Modern Board Games: and why you should play them (2022)

Interesting. Could you give some examples as to how? I want to see how well this could work out in my friend circle, who seem to be getting bored after years of mafia-ing.

ultratalkon Modern Board Games: and why you should play them (2022)

I just checked it out, what's the difference between it and non-board-games like werewolf and mafia?

ultratalkon Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a non-negligible presence of bots in threads on HN? I haven't, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm bad at spotting them or because HN is good at getting rid of them or because HN is a niche platform.

ultratalkon SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

That feels more like a reflection of how terrible most GM cars are than about the inflated valuation of Cursor, which is what I infer you were trying to imply.

ultratalkon Archive of Byte magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

What country were you in?

ultratalkon How to make buffet breakfasts less wasteful

I don't understand how this relates to the article or the discussion.

ultratalkon Codex for almost everything

I don't think that's representative of most non-CS professionals. Most people in the fields I know (mostly professors, medical doctors, and businesspeople) can use google chrome, word, powerpoint, and a little of excel decently. There are the occasional few who confuse spreadsheets and databases, but no one who thinks shutting down computers or closing windows is hard. Heck, my ageing dad managed to troubleshoot his printer without any help, and he has no formal computer experience whatsoever.

HN has a long history of patronising the "average user" in the guise of paternal figures who don't realise that what they are doing is belittling the vast majority of tech users. I'm guilty of it myself. But they're capable of a lot more than we think they are.

Ultimately, it comes down to the willingness people have to learn new things. If they're curious enough to think about how things work, they'll be fine.

ultratalkon Codex for almost everything

It is? :)

ultratalkon Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

In my country, state schools strictly forbid students from bringing devices to school. This rule was actually introduced because of the haves/have-nots issue here, because many kids are too poor to afford devices. The schools themselves don't provide devices because it would be prohibitively expensive due to the large student population. Most private schools don't allow devices either.

ultratalkon Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

Attach hooks to the bottom of the blimp and send a guy in a heavy sled with hooks on it, with helium balloons attached to it, to the bottom of the blimp. Attach the sled to the hooks on the blimp, then get the guy to pop all the sled's balloons. The blimp will land on the ground gently, if the math is right.

ultratalkon China's Edge in an Oil Shock: Electric Cars and Renewables

https://archive.ph/Yedra

ultratalkon The slow death of the English boarding school

https://archive.ph/Tp1Yy

ultratalkon Digg is gone again

Eternal AI september.