Hacker News Reader

zipwitchon On Costliest U.S. Warship Ever, Navy Can’t Get Munitions on Deck

The real scandal isn't that the Ford is having (lots) of problems with it's new technology. That can happen. It's not even that a decision was made to put multiple novel, unproven systems into a major warship.

The biggest scandal is that the US Navy accepted delivery of the Ford and commissioned it when it was non-functional. This should be ending swathes of careers at the top of both the US Navy and Huntington Ingalls Industries.

zipwitchon Moons of all the planets in our solar system

While not exactly the sub-moon you're looking for there are some interesting objects that come close.

Co-orbital moons, like Saturn's Janus and Epimetheus, are moons that are in stable orbit-swapping configurations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-orbital_configuration#Co-or...

Then you've got asteroids that are contact binaries that also have moons, like 216 Kleopatra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/216_Kleopatra

And finally, you have 624 Hektor, which is a Trojan of Jupiter (stable solar orbit near Jupiter's L4 Lagrange point), that is a a likely contact binary that has a moon. So it's orbiting the Sun, while "orbiting" Jupiter's L4 point, while all 3 components (the two halves of the contact binary, and their moon) orbit the center of mass of their own little 'Hector system'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/624_Hektor

zipwitchon Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

It sounds like you're thinking of the heliosphere, which is the bubble in the interstellar medium created by the solar wind. The solar wind, in turn, is created by outflowing plasma from the Sun, and is also responsible for auroras and comet tails. The details of how far from the sun the heliosphere extends are complex, but it encompasses all the known planets.

The heliosphere does provide us with a significant amount of protect from cosmic rays, which aren't actually electromagnetic radiation. Cosmic rays are extremely energetic particles, typically protons, coming in from outside the solar system. The Earth's atmosphere also does a good job stopping cosmic rays, which means their primarily a hazard to spacecraft, both manned an unmanned. (I don't know what effect cosmic rays would ultimately have on Earth if we didn't have the protection of both the heliosphere and our own atmosphere, but I know they have been investigated for links to mass extinctions.) They're a threat to space travel because they cause soft errors in electronics, and DNA and other radiation damage to human beings.

The Sun's magnetic field - aka the interplanetary magnetic field or heliospheric magnetic field - travels with the solar wind and fills the solar system. It is magnetically coupled to solar system bodies like the Earth and Jupiter. As an amateur astronomer, the heliospheric magnetic field doesn't have any significant effects on photons coming into the solar system.

zipwitchon The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems

I hardly think the Office of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation counts as an "anti-fanboy". And their reviews of F-35 progress of been the bureaucratic equivalent of damning.

Full report here: https://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2018/pdf/dod/2018f35j...

Article summarizing it here: https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/dote-delivers-ano...

zipwitchon The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems

What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system?

It offers Lockheed Martin one-point-five trillion dollars, much of which will be spent in key Congressional districts.

That's all.

I suspect that those responsible for making decisions about the F-35 are perfectly fine with this. Rhetoric aside, our government and military appear to think they exist in a world where direct Great Power military conflict is not a possibility. The F-35 seems perfectly adequate to swiftly wreck anywhere on Earth that is not Europe, China, Japan, Russia or India. And that seems to be our actual goal in terms of capabilities for the immediate future.

zipwitchon DHS to start DNA testing to establish family relationships on the border

Living in a cyberpunk dystopia is much less pleasant than reading about fictional ones.

zipwitchon Japan’s Self-Defence Forces Are Beginning to Focus on China

Respecting borders has been an "unimpeachable norm" for how long, though? Since 1945, at most. That's not even 80 years - just long enough for us to forget why we made it verboten in the first place.

I fear that Crimea and the Golan Heights will turn out to be the first drops in a devastating torrent.

zipwitchon Samurai Helmets

Your memory must be fuzzy. You just referred to Miyamoto Musashi as "lesser known" :-)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi

"Musashi, as he was often simply known, became renowned through stories of his unique double-bladed swordsmanship and undefeated record in his 61 duels (next is 33 by Itō Ittōsai)."

zipwitchon Fireball over US, Wednesday, April 17th 2019 around 02:57

Duck and cover gets a lot of mockery, but my understanding from reading morbidly fascinating Cold War history and source material is that is was an easily-taught response that was pretty effective at minimizing the damage from a shockwave and associated debris, or from direct exposure to the thermal pulse. Of course, that is only a narrow range of all possible causes of injury from a nearby nuclear detonation.

Rational Wiki has a good summaryhttps://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Duck_and_Cover

zipwitchon Work harder or the communists will win

In American public discussion China is "communist" the same way America is "capitalist". You just need to understand what those using the term intend it to mean. (I'm talking about casual, conventional use in everyday conversation and the infotainment sphere, not an academic sense.) "Capitalism" is intended to mean, "the way we do things here in the United States, which is awesome" and "communism" is meant to mean "the way people who aren't like us do things, and which is bad". It's pressure to justify American-style economic policy, while suppressing any discussion of alternatives.

zipwitchon Julian Assange arrested in London

You mean like, say, someone asking a foreign power to conduct a cyberattack on a US political party?

zipwitchon Microsoft Removes the Books Category from the Microsoft Store

And in one fell swoop, Microsoft has provided an example that will be used as a justification for piracy for years to come.

zipwitchon Why Asians wear surgical masks in public (2014)

Pure anecdote, but when I was visiting Vietnam (Saigon and Can Tho) recently, I would go up to the rooftop balcony in the evenings and watch the birds and then bats out hunting their (insect) dinners. It stuck with me, because the numbers of birds and bats seemed much higher than I would normally see in the urban Midwest here in the US.

zipwitchon Graying Out

I'm in the same place from the opposite direction. I've refused to use Facebook from day one, and lost touch with a number of now-geographically distant friends for whom it is their primary mode of communication.

zipwitchon The Untold Story of Silk Road (2015)

So, he really wasn't the original Dread Pirate Roberts?

zipwitchon Why Do the Northern and Southern Lights Differ?

As someone who grew up in Montana and North Dakota and has been an amateur astronomer from my early teens, I think you're being overly dismissive. Sure, sometimes and they're more of a faint white glow (which is pretty impressive just by itself), but in over two decades of semi-dedicated skywatching (before moving further south), I saw, with nothing but naked eyes, bright green curtains on multiple occasions, dazzling blue-white pillars all the way up to the zenith once, and red curtains twice. And that's living between 46 and 48 degrees of longitude where they're not that common.

If you're setting out on a trip to specifically view the aurora borealis, you'd want to make sure you're viewing from an area with very low light pollution, make sure you stay dark adapted, and schedule your trip around solar max. Under those circumstances, and given multiple clear nights, I would expect the odds would be excellent for seeing some quite breathtaking auroras.

zipwitchon The World Economy Just Can’t Escape Its Low-Growth, Low-Inflation Rut

Perhaps a better read might be "too low for 'the 1%' to continue extract wealth from the global economy at the rate to which they have become accustomed without provoking destructive backlash"?

zipwitchon NASA May Decide This Year to Land a Drone on Saturn's Moon Titan

In the real. of achievable but not yet done, I want a Neptune and/or Uranus orbiter.

A Neptune orbiter could give us a detailed look at both an ice giant and it's dwarf-planet-sized moon Triton, believed to be a captured KBO.

zipwitchon 911 call centers down in Washington state

I think it would turn out to be on balance very good for Centurylink's stock price and management if the root cause of the outage was determined to be hostile foreign action instead of, for example, a mix of profiteering and incompetence by company upper management.

zipwitchon 911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage

It wasn't just emergency calls. Most Centurylink service around the US was down intermittently yesterday.

zipwitchon There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/505/

zipwitchon There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought

The author admits that what he's really doing is playing games with definitions, and more interestingly, exploring the question of what conciousness is. To try and exploit shock value via tabloid-style meaning twisting is unworthy of the subject matter.

zipwitchon “Farout”, the Farthest Object Ever Seen in the Solar System

There are a lot of things out there that orbit stars, and it increasingly looks like just one, or even a handful, of formal definitions are going to be inadequate, even for our own solar system. We need a detailed and extensive classification system....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_planet_classificat...

zipwitchon CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

It's not that the software is built explicitly to overcharge people. But it is written and launched into production in a buggy state. And the bugs that cost the company money get fixed. The ones that cost the customers are... not prioritized. The overcharging becomes an emergent property.

zipwitchon 'Dying All Tensed-Up': 30 Years Since the Troubled Secret Mission of STS-27

>I'm pretty certain any such mission would have leaked by now. At least the fact of it, if not the details.

How do you know it hasn't? For example, it would seem to be within the capbilities of the rumored Blackstar:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstar_(spacecraft)

zipwitchon Why is nuclear fusion so hard?

My big problem with nuclear (fission) is that while on paper it looks like a great solution, in practice our civilizational apparatus does not appear to be up to the task of long-term responsible implementation. Fission power looks like a long game of hot potato, where everyone hopes they won't be the ones on the hook when the eventual equipment failure, natural disaster, or time to decommission eventually arrives. (And, as an observer outside the industry, building a plant while taking all those into account in advance seems to be something we are either unable or unwilling to do.)

zipwitchon China prepares mission to land spacecraft on moon's far side

That's an inevitable result of devoting the efforts of so many of our brightest to attracting eyeballs.

zipwitchon Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2016)

Is "cyberpunk dystopia" truly insufficient?

zipwitchon A lost language encoded in Inca cords

Think of all the lives that went into building the beginnings of the industrial age: miners, construction workers, pedestrians electrocuted or run down by automobiles. Even today this continues in slightly different ways - as one example, thirty-seven thousand of our fellow citizens here in the US died on our roads last year. And we just think to ourselves that's just how it works.

And that's before getting into our cultural celebration of heroic sacrifice, or other ways we trade in human lives, both our own and others.

zipwitchon Mission Control Live Stream: NASA InSight Mars Landing [video]

Yes, ultimaltely the same people whose decisions led to you being able to have an internet to connect to and whine on are the same ones who took a few dollars from your paycheck and are using them to explore Mars.