Hacker News Reader

yohaon Water extraction on Mars for an expanding human colony

I do not feel like the hivemind effect is stronger on Hacker News than on e.g. /r/programming, and definitely lower than on default subreddits.

My main gripe about Reddit is the sheer amount of low-value comments, with repeated remarks, jokes and puns trumping constructed and sourced arguments. It is obviously hard to find a good compromise.

yohaon Water extraction on Mars for an expanding human colony

Given that your comment is well constructed, you seem to be dismissed simply for not having the same point of view. I'll try to engage constructively.

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If I read you correctly, you are raising two arguments:

1. what does an individual gains from participating in the project

2. objectively, why homo sapiens?

Regarding 2, I would say that there is not much to say aside from that we are not objective, and would prefer it if it was “us” who got to get to Mars.

I find point 1 much more interesting, especially what it says about society. Some individuals are very interested in the colonization of space, but not all are ready to directly work on it, and others are just uninterested.

However, having a structured government and a tax system allow us to make better use of individual skills, even that of those who are not directly interested in the project. Additionally, this is the kind of project where the ROI would be very long term and hard to estimate. Large scale coordination (governments and international institution) allow to make use of the "surplus workforce" that automatization is slowly making grow.

yohaon Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever

Hey, I see you are new here. Don't take the downvotes personally, it's just that Hacker News users prefer to keep conversations focused. Thus, the following types of comment tend to get downvoted somewhat quickly:

* jokes

* complaints about downvotes

* downvote predictions (thus self-fulfilling prophecies)

* single word / single expression

* simply (dis)agreeing (there are up/downvote buttons for that)

* condescendence, insults, etc.

This is very different from Reddit where numerous threads end up littered with jokes and puns. On the other hand the following types of comments tend to get upvoted:

* insightful and well structured (as in: cut in several paragraphes)

* food for thought

* counter-point (politely worded, obviously)

* sourced

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Your first comment was probably mostly perceived as a joke:

* “ROFL” just expresses your personal reaction to previous information, and the common use of this acronym usually signals a low quality comment

* “Bootstrap has become a sign of a lazy developer”: this reads as both condescending (“lazy developer”) and unsupported; a more constructed argument with the same idea would have been fine

Your second comment contains the word "downvote", which is often enough to get downvotes.

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You might want to have a look at:

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

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

yohaon Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Encryption [video]

No. The blockchain is only a consensus through a network.

Anyone can make a tiny isolated network and create a fork that will look real to the target (here, the iPhone).

This is remotely related to the CAP Theorem [1]. Namely, you expect a blockchain not to fulfill the consistency requirement.

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

yohaon Why Gold?

Next on the line: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...

yohaon Fukushima's ground zero: No place for man or robot

This is a circular argument:

1. people might get harmed by the radiation (true)

2. evacuate them (still arguably sensible)

3. radiations caused harm because people were evacuated

yohaon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

Thanks!

You can contact me on the address listed on my Github profile, or the one on my Hacker News profile (yoha@sinon.org)!

yohaon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

Thanks!

I know how much of a hassle it can be to handle even simple dependencies when you use a different system and workflow, so I tried to make it as seamless as possible.

There still is a lot of work to do. For now, I only implement patched conics (i.e. I only consider one planet/moon at once and ignore the influence of other celestial bodies on the trajectory), and it is not really easy yet.

Handling n-body physics would not be that hard, but I prefer to focus on having a simple model (patched conics) work well first.

yohaon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

Thanks!

Don't hesitate to contact me at either yoha@sinon.org or at the mail address on my Github profile, if someone have an issue installing. It should work on both Linux and Windows but I have not yet any nice packaging, so it might require some tweaking around (i.e. installing PyOpenGL on Windows manually).

yohaon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

Spyce: Python in outer space!

Basically, a very much work-in-progress pile of code to plan orbital trajectories and interplanetary travel. Its also quite handy when doing simple computations:

    >>> # distance to the Sun, in light-seconds
    >>> Earth.orbit.semi_major_axis / c
    499.00650691887006
    >>> # Martian year, in (usual Earth) days
    >>> Mars.orbit.period / Earth.solar_day
    686.9944644093075
    >>> # ping to New Horizons (light roundtrip), in hours
    >>> (Pluto.orbit.periapsis - Earth.orbit.apoapsis) / c / 3600 * 2
    7.9167895224639375

The graphical interface does work though! (kinda) It's initially inspired from Kerbal Space Program, so it defaults to showing Kerbin and its universe. However, you can choose Earth instead. I like to just zoom in and out, and explore the Solar system; the vastness of that is so mindblowing!

How yeah, and a link: https://github.com/qsantos/spyce/

yohaon If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

Direct link to the graph: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/chart33.jpg.

It shows… 5 data points.

yohaon “Super Engine” may fundamentally change the way internal combustion engines work

For the curious, [1] (via [2]) shows various engine designs.

[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/bxzeN [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/468290/a_c...

yohaon The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People

Note: this is a CGP Grey video, and a good one!

Another take on this, from Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ .

yohaon Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

For anyone struggling with creating Let's Encrypt certificates (or just as lazy as I am), try out https://gethttpsforfree.com/ .

yohaon People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

The cost is just not money, but also time. It takes some time to fill in payment information, even if only a minute, and even if only once per website.

yohaon Turn your PC upside down to boot into Linux (2003)

To clarify what delazeur meant:

g already means "9.8 m/s²"

Thus, normal gravity is 1g and free fall is 0g. 9.8g would mean 9.8 times the gravity at Earth surface, that is "96 m/s²". You would feel almost ten times as heavy. For reference:

Jupiter "surface" gravity is 25.9 m/s²

Sun "surface" gravity is 274 m/s²

yohaon 2^74207281-1 is Prime

Long prime numbers are used for RSA keys. You only generate RSA keys when creating a new identity (webserver certificate, client certificate, SSH key, etc). Then, you do search for "a new prime number that hopefully won't get guessed". It can take from a few seconds to several minutes, depending on the hardware and the desired key length.

The usual approach is to take a random odd number of desired length and then have a probabilistic primality test (much faster than what would be needed for a formal proof). Several attacks rely on bad entropy or bad pseudo random number generators (PRNG) to guess what prime was selected.

yohaon Achieving Hunter-Gatherer Fitness in the 21st Century: Back to the Future (2010)

On the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

yohaon A visualisation of all of the money in the world

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3x9zbr/how...

yohaon Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

    telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

yohaon First Timers Only

It is often better to use “computer” and “memory”, especially when the distinction between L1/L2/L3/RAM/SSD/HDD is not the main topic.

yohaon Tesla recalling 90,000 Model S sedans to check seat belts

I think the point is that mistakes happen; the important is how you handle them. In contrast, there are plenty of cases where the company tries to hide them instead.

yohaon What a Deep Neural Network thinks about selfies

Actually, he used random crops and selected the highest rated. A "deep dream selfie" would actually run the neural network in reverse so as to generate a completely different image.

yohaon An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each

> It's not a good business or even a good way to get a secure password

On the other hand, that might help make people understand how to pick a good password.

yohaon 'Zeno effect' verified: Atoms won't move while you watch

Downvotes are sometimes harsh on HN. I think the majority of HNers perceives the Quantum Mind theory as described in this article: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_consciousness .

yohaon A story about <input>

I actually did, but only with <map>, never <input type=image>.

yohaon A story about <input>

I was really surprised by this so I had to check by myself. This is true! And I never learned that all the time I roamed the Internet.

Thanks for spreading arcane knowledge!

yohaon Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

Original article: http://www.loper-os.org/pub/codemonkey.pdf .

yohaon Basics of Space Flight: Orbital Mechanics

Thanks!

Regarding the naming convention, I am trying to stick to PEP8 as strictly as possible (sometimes, even in C) and to use overly explicit variable names. I had not noticed that you did that too for the structure member, with `longitude_of_ascending_node` and such. My objective is to have the code be as readable as possible to a newcomer (hence Python, too).

yohaon Basics of Space Flight: Orbital Mechanics

I don't remember looking at this project. I think I did read other implementations of this algorithm, and they all end up very similar, so it's probably due to algorithm itself.

It might be interesting to link to all codebases that might be relevant. Maybe I will add a list to https://airsick.guide/tools.html.

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I only searched briefly for more stable methods. Thanks for the reference, I'll have a look!