Hacker News Reader

vraidon Outdoor time is good for kids' eyesight

People in Europe and North America generally wore hats and long sleeved clothing before the 1900's. Sun tanning is a modern phenomenon.

vraidon After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

Would a line not contain more than one instruction, on average?

vraidon Sweden (Not Switzerland)

Mandarin borrowed both from southern chinese dialects where 瑞 is pronounced ~sui. What's weird about that?

vraidon Why Fantasy Avoids Gunpowder

Not to mention the early samurai, who were primarily horse archers aswell.

vraidon It could cost $21B to clean up California’s oil sites, study finds

I feel like manufacturing the collapse of the very ecosystems that sustain our civilization might be a steep price to pay for a short moment's increase in living standards. But i guess as long as we're all dead before the time to repay the debt comes, we can pretend like we're self-made millionaires and not living on borrowed money?

vraidon The American Dream convinces people loneliness is normal

Most humans throughout history lived in close-knit farming communities where they shared their home with a large family and met their neighbours every single day. What sort of secluded farms are you imagining?

vraidon Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

This all feels a bit like arguing against the use of cardinal directions because they don't make sense unless you learn them first.

If you use left and right for the ship, you wouldn't be able to use personal left and right without risking ambiguity. You'd just be trading one convenience for the other.

vraidon The dry-season malaria paradox, a bar to eradication, is solved

They can be very easy to miss as most of them piggyback on the great swarms of flying spiders, centipedes, and trees migrating north each year to repopulate the barren wastelands after the great freeze has killed all but the warm-blooded lifeforms.

vraidon The dry-season malaria paradox, a bar to eradication, is solved

> Who says they survive cold winter climates?

Anyone who put even a minute of effort into looking up the well-researched and publicly available information on the topic rather than defaulting to ignorance could have told you this.

Insects have numerous different strategies to make it through cold winters, either as eggs, larvae, or adults. Some can tolerate partial freezing, some lower the freezing temperature of their bodies in order not to freeze at subzero temperatures. These are combined with finding shelter inside tree stumps or bark, under leaves or rocks, or even underwater, granting them a layer of insulation and protection from the wind and the worst cold.

Here's a good starting point for those interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_winter_ecology#Cold_tol...

vraidon Freenode ops take control of 700 channels

We had an unregistered channel with 5 users left that got the same treatment. The topic (which was free for anyone to change..) contained irc.libera.chat

vraidon Kill the Alarm Clock (2017)

Lots of animals manage by either migrating to the tropics or hibernating through the winter. Neither is viable for a modern human society.

vraidon The Future Is Grim

The population of roman Britain is estimated at 2-3 million at its peak. Well above the early medieval population.

https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/Roman-Britai...

https://books.google.se/books?id=t7KeBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT260&redir...

vraidon Carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere hit record high in May

The reason we care about emissions is due to their effect on the atmosphere, of which there is one.

We don't get a free pass to emit more as our population increases. The atmosphere doesn't magically adjust. The effect of emissions on the climate is invariant of our population, and we need to act accordingly.

vraidon Carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere hit record high in May

The atmosphere doesn't care how much or little we emit per capita. Total emissions is what should worry us.

vraidon What to Know Before Debating Type Systems (2008)

Typed racket has both dynamic types and static typechecking.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/

Your objection doesn't really hold water..

vraidon Why China doesn’t dominate soccer

> I heard 500 per capita

You may have swapped your units there. 150 million coaches would be somewhat excessive for a population of 300 thousand.

vraidon Donald Knuth celebrated his 80th birthday in Piteå

"filled 80 years" is not an idiom, but simply a word-by-word translation of "turned 80".

vraidon Caffeine use disorder

Calling this medieval is doing it a disservice. The study took place in the late 18th century, during the height of the enlightenment.

vraidon What Is the Average Color of the Universe?

That most mammals are color blind is nothing more than a myth. A few select are, like the marine mammals, but the vast majority are dichromats with red/blue color receptors.

The last common ancestor was in fact a trichromat, having one red and two different blue receptors. When mammals diverged further, monotremes lost one of the blue receptors while other mammals lost the other.

What did reevolve in groups such as marsupials and apes was the green color receptor, which was present in older ancestors, but had been lost in the first mammals.

source: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...

vraidon Why no one wants to host the 2022 olympics

Manhole covers are welded shut where Obama vists aswell, it's not like Putin is crazier than the rest of them.

vraidon US 'in denial' over poor maths standards

Incidentally, both Sweden and Turkey are ranked below the US average. Swedish education is in a sorry state at the moment, dropping fast in the rankings and already well below the level of any other nordic country.

vraidon $4 toast: Why the tech industry is ruining San Francisco

Even a single espresso is in the range of $2.5 to $4.

vraidon Is Sugar the Next Tobacco?

You seem to have confused sugar with sucrose, also known as table sugar. First off, a carbohydrate, also known as a saccharide, is a molecule composed of one or more monosaccharides. Sugar includes both monosaccharides (e.g glucose, fructose, galactose) and disaccharides (e.g sucrose, lactose, maltose). Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose, lactose is composed of glucose and galactose, and maltose is composed of two glucose molecules.

Starch, composed of glucose, is the only polysaccharide digestible to humans.

vraidon Perspective: All of Earth's Water in a Single Sphere

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_water_distribution.s...

Here is an image showing just that, in a cubic format. The sphere of ocean water would have a radius of 684 kilometers, while the remaining water, most of which is glaciers and groundwater, would form a sphere of 227 km radius.