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v8xi

334 karma · joined March 10, 2021

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v8xi··on Sensing warm and cool: how the body detects temperature changes
Thats super interesting I've never heard of this before. It seems that toxin gives a persistent increase in the activity of the sodium channel(s) that make cold painful. I imagine similar to how cold water on frozen fingers feels burning hot.

Several years ago I went to a talk about a receptor (TRPM8) that is activated by cold and also minty flavors(!). Would be curious to know if your friends experience(d) mint as burning/uncomfortable. If not, it would suggest the pathology is linked to separate cold-sensing physiology/pathways/neurons than the common "cool" feeling most are familiar with.

v8xi··on DEA to Temporarily Schedule 7-Oh and Related Substances to Protect Public Safety
Theres a guy Grant Harding on YT etc. who sends gas station pills for testing and some of the things he finds are scary. Seriously addictive drugs being sold OTC with no meaningful consumer warning or guardrails
v8xi··on SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
are you not a true believer of the efficient market?
v8xi··on Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry
next you should explain idioms
v8xi··on I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978
As an adult that kind of feedback feels like a sales pitch. As a kid its unforgettable validation. Wonder when that change happened.
v8xi··on 1000 Blank White Cards
I introduced this to so many people as the only one who knew how to play. Key is start the game with 3 cards and win the round quickly + be super diligent about the rules so no conflicting information. Win the round quickly, add an obvious rule and by the third round it's fair play.
v8xi··on 1000 Blank White Cards
I used to play this a ton (often as a drinking game). The wiki does a good job of explaining the basics and I'd always do the no talking + point of order variants (+ a few others). My favorite type are:

1) rules requiring awareness of card order. "Have a nice day" is standard on 7, double 7's is "very nice" etc. Stack rules like that when combinations and/or cards of a suit are played and people have to remember 5 things they have to say or do after a card. Get's difficult over many rounds.

2) ice-breaking rules (if you're playing with new people). Friendly ones like "you must compliment _ when a _ is played." Great way to build/open someone up

3) rules changing play order. Aces reverse, add rules that e.g. skip a player and you'll have everyone waiting in suspense to see if the person who's turn it is actually knows its their turn. If not, "delay of game".

Play it with friends you'll be surprised with what people come up with!

v8xi··on P-computers can solve spin-glass problems faster than quantum systems
Just remains to be seen whether they can maintain capitalization long enough to find PMF
v8xi··on Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?
i just picked up an ultimaker s5 for $400 on ebay with tons of extra filament and it worked off the bat. Been printing for almost 2 weeks straight and my daughter loves it :D
v8xi··on Merry Christmas Everyone
Christmas 1999 my father's business had just gone under when the banks stopped lending after the dot com bubble. We didn't have any presents until Christmas morning when our church dropped off a bunch of presents for us. We got a Razor scooter and I spent all day riding it downstairs. I just got my daughter a scooter and she's doing the same this year :)
v8xi··on Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
v8xi··on Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
In graduate school we had to answer this on a test question and it took all of 5 minutes...should have published it, I guess
v8xi··on The Big Fringe Telescope
Was curious what types of observations they'd do with this and found this site: https://www.universetoday.com/168209/the-big-fringe-telescop...

From there: Dr. van Belle continues, “Observations of binary star systems let us determine the masses because of their orbital motion around each other, and BFT adds extra value by then directly measuring the radii of those stars. Resolved exoplanet transits is going to be the wicked cool one. We will be able to see the resolved disk of another world as it passes in front of its host star. This sort of thing will be good for further characterization of exoplanets, as well as searches for exomoons. There’s a bunch of other BFT science that isn’t part of the core ‘marquee’ cases – many hundreds of different types of stars that we’ll be able to make pictures of and see how those pictures change over time.”

v8xi··on Largest Geothermal Development in America Taking Shape in Utah
I think of geothermal the same way I think of tidal power - seemingly renewable but not really. Harnessing tides dampens the lunar oscillations surprisingly fast (as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283).

With geothermal, yes there is a huge reservoir of potential energy but speeding up the extraction of this energy is absolutely a terrible idea long term. I'm not gonna rant here, but look at what happened to Mars (only slightly smaller than earth) when the core cooled and the dynamo shut down.

v8xi··on Scientists discover a new hormone that can build strong bones in mice
If this works and becomes a common dental procedure I will be soooo happy. Every time I go to the dentist I ask them if anything like this is coming down the pipeline and they laugh...
v8xi··on Night-vision lenses so thin and light that we can all see in the dark
True currently, but laser form factors are shrinking quickly. Reminds me of this article from a couple months ago where a team built (among a host of other sizes/use cases) a 20W(!) laser using a 500um PCSEL which they describe, mounted, as "roughly the size of a webcam". Their lasers are also at comparable wavelengths

https://spectrum.ieee.org/pcsel

v8xi··on How Much Water Is in Earth's Crust?
Surprisingly little compared to the volume of the oceans. Makes me wonder how much is in Mars' crust
v8xi··on Lewis Carroll – computing the day of the week for any given date (1887)
Also had this issue. I even tried a bunch of different reformulations/reinterpretation of the provided formula and nothing helped :(
v8xi··on Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets
One of the advancements against EW is having on-device mapping systems (this goes back to the Tomahawk in the 70s) so that the projectile can adjust its flight in the absence of GPS. This is what one of the real advances of AI promises to be - a vehicle that can identify and change targets fully autonomously. Will especially apply to unmanned underwater vehicles which (as far as I know) haven't been deployed but will surely change the dynamic on the seas
v8xi··on Handedness as a determinant of lateral bias in human functional cradling (2023)
This is what I thought the article was saying until I read it. But if most babies are cradled on the mothers left, that would lead to the babies left side being more interacted with by the mother. Since most sensory information is processed contralaterally you would think it would bias towards left-handedness by strengthening connections in the right brain which is clearly not the case.

However, smell (and taste, but I don't think that is relevant here) is processed ipsilaterally and vision/hearing have some ipsilateral processing so maybe I am wrong and it IS strengthening their left brain and leading to right handedness.

v8xi··on 9999999999999999.0 – 9999999999999998.0
Was curious what chatGPT would say:

The result of subtracting 9999999999999998.0 from 9999999999999999.0 is 2.0. This result is due to the limitations in the precision of floating-point arithmetic in computers. When dealing with very large numbers, the precision can be lost, leading to such unexpected results.

I suppose this must be in its training set.

v8xi··on Lucid dream startup says engineers can write code in their sleep
I just don't believe there is any change of a free lunch. The entire point of sleep is to allow your brain to rest and process...spend a week getting only light REM sleep and you're gonna have a breakdown
v8xi··on Fortran 2023
I learned Fortran for a summer research job in college about 15 years ago. It was my first programming language and I used it to do some population modeling. I found an old Fortran book from when my dad went to school back in the early 70s and learned it from that which was a cool experience - I just had to skip over all the parts about entering your code into punch cards :D
v8xi··on BioNTech presents positive phase 1/2 data for CAR-T cell therapy candidate
It's important that the CARVac (mRNA vaccine) part of the treatment targets specifically (though how specific, I dont know) dendritic cells which are "professional" antigen-presenting cells in the immune system. During an immune response, dendritic cells gobble up antigens and present them on their surface to help train the immune system so it's more trying to hijack that (very important) part of the immune response rather than training the immune system (and resulting in the death of the "infected" cells) in the way we're used to understanding mRNA vaccines.
v8xi··on Gene-Engineered Mouth Bacteria
Only thing I could find was a study in mice (which you should always take with a heap of salt) showing an increased incident, and a modest correlation in human studies but with a lot of caveats and a disclaimer that the study was in no way conclusive.
v8xi··on Gene-Engineered Mouth Bacteria
That is a good question. I couldn't find a citation for the original comment, but my guess would be either that they want an unbiased cohort OR, since its a bacterial treatment, they wouldn't want to risk the spread and possibly contaminating children after the trial was done.
v8xi··on Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
In Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, he talks about the importance of both methane and carbon dioxide and how they exist at the extremes of a complex metabolic oxidation-reduction cycle. Methane stores a lot of chemical energy in its C-H bonds which can be burned directly, or metabolized through repeat oxidation events to ultimately form CO2, which plants utilize with the help of the sun to form more CH bonds before ultimately breaking down into methane again. Hence, an exoplanet with both molecules in its atmosphere is a promising candidate in the search for life.
v8xi··on Ask HN: What are some well-designed websites?
I think https://lichess.org is wonderful and always bring it up as an example of a great UI
v8xi··on How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?
I've seen this argument elsewhere so I think I know what he means. Basically the idea is you throw money around too easily and companies that would otherwise die (due to poor management/inability to compete) stay around. Too much subsidy yields poor incentive to compete yields fewer breakthroughs and slower technological progress.
v8xi··on Downfall Attacks
From FAQ: [Q] How long have users been exposed to this vulnerability? [A] At least nine years. The affected processors have been around since 2014.

Amazing how these vulnerabilities sit around unnoticed for years and then it takes two weeks for someone to code up an exploit.

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