Hacker News Reader

zenonon HoloLens secret sauce: A 28nm customized 24-core DSP engine built by TSMC

Flippant, but:

VR: Everything is in the computer

AR: The computer is in everything

It might have been Jasper Lawrence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Lawrence), who wrote about his experience on kuro5hin. I think this is the link: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971, but the site is sadly defunct now.

zenonon Attempting (Failed) Verification of the Wright Signature

The non-experts did not ask to see things which would be hard for non-Satoshi to provide -- they were at the mercy of the charlatan (paging James Randi, James Randi to the courtesy phone please).

I'm mystified as to how this got past Andresen, though.

I think Randi would be the first to tell us that the skills required to detect a good conman are quite different from skills in technical fields.

http://www.livescience.com/9066-magician-scientists-assume-i...

I bet Andresen simply got tricked, and I think he should not feel to ashamed about it (although he will) -- most of us would have fallen for it.

zenonon Why Bitcoin’s Erratic Price Doesn’t Matter

The major use of bitcoins currently seems to be as a store of value: http://www.coindesk.com/analysis-around-70-bitcoins-dormant-...

zenonon Danish government builds Minecraft world of Denmark from geodata

Didn't Mojang already do this? http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Superflat

zenonon Programmer? Back Pain? Try archery

My PT seconds your recommendation of rock climbing, particularly for upper back muscular pain.

Climbing twice per week kept my back pain-free for years.

zenonon Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms

I don't think it's crazy in principle. The average person eats 1-2 grams of naturally occurring plant pesticides every day. They've always been in our food, and our bodies are pretty good at dealing with them (if anything, we're getting less of them now than historical norms, since we tend to breed low-toxin plants).

In practice, it may be difficult to test the safety of any particular integrated pesticide, for example because of political pressure on the researchers [1].

(But then again, people are allowed to sell foods containing evolutionary novel toxins like gluten, peanut agglutinin, and canavanine, with no safety testing.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusztai_affair

zenonon Bitcoin rises from $14 to $40 in two months

If it goes high enough, it will be worth mining trashed HDs for lost wallets.

zenonon Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want

I tried to draw the elusive snowman: http://i.imgur.com/dr5VKTh.png

Clearly it's not impressed by my drawing skills.

zenonon Exoplanet found right next door in Alpha Centauri

It's metaphor. If your life span is indefinite, a journey lasting a few hundred years is nothing.

zenonon Exoplanet found right next door in Alpha Centauri

Forever is a long time.

Alpha Centauri feels far away because our lifetimes are so ridiculously short, and we're so unfathomably economically poor, compared to the age of and resources available in the universe. These limitations don't have to apply to whatever our descendants will be a few centuries or millenia from now.

To them, a trip to Alpha Centauri might be a weekend lark.

zenonon Study finds hunter-gatherers' energy expenditure same as modern Westerners'

Dr. Lindeberg and co. found the same thing (albeit using less sophisticated methods) in the study of the Kitava islanders more than 20 years ago.

http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/TheKitavaStudy.html

zenonon Elon Musk Wants to Put Man on Mars in '12 to 15 Years'

We have invented it, it's just that there are some political (and PR) obstacles to developing and using it: http://www.islandone.org/Propulsion/ProjectOrion.html

"Our motto was 'Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970'", recalls Dyson. Orion would have been more akin to the rocket ships of science fiction than to the cramped capsules of Gagarin and Glenn. One hundred and fifty people could have lived aboard in relative comfort; the useful payload would have been measured in thousands of tons. Orion would have been built like a battleship, with no need for the excruciating weight-saving measures adopted by chemically-propelled spacecraft.

zenonon Renewables now account for 25% of German energy production

Oops, important difference there. 2 x 12,5% is pretty close to 25%, yes :-)

zenonon Blind man shocks researchers with what he sees.

Jaynes' ideas occasionally surface in science fiction. Two examples are Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams. The last one is an underappreciated gem IMHO.

zenonon Blind man shocks researchers with what he sees.

The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts is partially about what blindsight and other similar phenomena can tell us about conciousness. If you like the article, and speculative fiction in general, you'll probably like that novel (although the ending is horribly bleak).

zenonon Renewables now account for 25% of German energy production

According to the CIA World Factbook, Germany consumed 545 billion kWh of electrical energy in 2008. 67.9 billion kWh is only 12.5% of that. I suppose they import a lot of their electrical energy? Also, electrical energy consumption is only a small fraction of total energy consumption (about 4 trillion kWh for Germany in 2007 according to Wikipedia.).