Hacker News Reader

zonkerdonkeron Googler... ex-Googler

ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

zonkerdonkeron Googler... ex-Googler

I hope you use your new free time to beat every expert song on Wacca

zonkerdonkeron But what if I want a faster horse?

How much has been lost to the altar of shareholder value? And how much gained?

It will be interesting to see how these first decades of the millennium will be remembered.

zonkerdonkeron Researchers discover why plastic sheds dangerous fragments

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-02968-x#:~:text=I...

>As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.

I cant find any recently published study that /doesnt/ demonstate a link between microplastics exposure and adverse health effects. Please share if you have any

zonkerdonkeron Researchers discover why plastic sheds dangerous fragments

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00405-8#:~:text=O...

Full article is paywalled, but the point remains. Point is that scale matters, obviously.

Almonds contain trace amounts of amygdalin, you can eat a handful of almonds every day of your life, but if I asked you to eat a kg in one sitting, you're not gonna have a good time.

Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?

zonkerdonkeron Glubux's Powerwall (2016)

@dang, maybe we can get the link updated? This forum post is better in every way

zonkerdonkeron Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

Extortion, essentially. Honey will actually give users the largest available discount if the retailer doesn't buy into the affiliate program (i.e. the retailer loses money). If they do agree, then the retailer can limit the coupons and discount code shown to customers through Honey.

zonkerdonkeron Madison Square Garden's surveillance banned this fan over his T-shirt design

I'm not a lawyer by any means, but I don't see how it wouldn't be.

But realistically, how worth it would it be for this graphic designer to battle a narcissistic, petty billionaire in court?

US civil court is truly fucked. Criminal as well, for that matter. Ok, the entire judicial branch really. And the executive branch, and legislative, law enforcement, public health, education....

As an aside, what's the easiest country in the EU for immigration?

zonkerdonkeron EU looks to hit Big Tech in crackdown on US services exports

Sure, that makes sense, make the tax big enough to really hurt if they try to eat it.

I guess if IP is off the table as well, nothing to stop someone from pirating every movie on netflix and launching a clone for EU!

Im curious for some more details around this. I hope it turns out to be a nice big stick to smack some sense into the US tech oligarchs, and also their orange subordinate

zonkerdonkeron EU looks to hit Big Tech in crackdown on US services exports

I guess it just seems a bit pointless to attempt to tariff what is essentialy a monopoly. Google could pretty easily just pass on 100% of the costs of the tarrifs onto the consumer.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if more American big corpos paid more taxes, I was just curious what this plan would even look like when/if it's enacted

zonkerdonkeron Bringing the Magic of Friends Back to Facebook

Too little and too late, in my opinion.

What even is facebook anymore? Feels like it is trying to be everything all at once, messaging platform, marketplace, business pages, groups, games, reels and livestreams. There's even a dating tab ffs.

zonkerdonkeron Mid-pregnancy pollution exposure linked to postpartum depression

>exposures to mid-pregnancy ambient NO2 and PM10 were associated with nearly four-fold cumulative increased risk of persistent depression

I don't have access to the full paper, but Im very curious what kind of controls were utilized for this study. Granted, a specific mid pregnancy expsoure causing a 4 fold increase seems significant enough to be able to assign some causation. But some sneaky confounding factors are fun to puzzle on.

Maybe poorer mothers (also correlated with depression) have to work longer hours/multiple jobs (also correlated) in more heavily polluted environments. But that still wouldnt explain the effect only appearing mid pregnancy...

Regardless, I'm interested to see what the health of humanity looks like in the coming decades. Microplastics in the brain, smog in the lungs, heavy metals in the water, screens in front of our eyes all day. Fun times we live in

zonkerdonkeron EU looks to hit Big Tech in crackdown on US services exports

The one example listed in the article was starlink. What other "Big Tech" could even be realistically dinged by this?

How do you tariff Adsense from google? Or 3rd party cell phones that run Android? Will they slap an upcharge on netflix or Amazon prime somehow?

How does suspending intellectual property rights work, also? That seems like a whole can of worms

zonkerdonkeron The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing

Seems all the sufferers of this have come out in this thread. I really wonder how much of this is cultural. It's considered polite in many east asian cultures to eat and slurp loudly - it means you appreciate the food.

I have to imagine the occurance of eating misophonia is much lower there.

zonkerdonkeron Most promoted and blocked domains on Kagi

It's a nightmare for finding the original sources of images. For example, I was looking for a new sink basin and doing some quick image searches for various styles.

All the ones I liked were pinterest posts with zero attribution. A reverse image search then just brings up dozens of ripped and reposted copies of that pinterest post, also without attribution.

It gets frustrating

zonkerdonkeron AI will change the world but not in the way you think

> One day we'll just send bullet points as emails. We'll reach business speak protocol version 2.0. That which was verbose becomes terse. No more time wasted translating thoughts and injecting platitudes.

I'm not sure about you all, but as a non-manager at [big tech company] I can count on one hand the number of actual emails I've sent in the past year.

Everything is IM chats. Its actually pretty nice

zonkerdonkeron McLaren invented new carbon fiber tape to build even more complex parts

That's true, and I do enjoy not having to watch the races live at 4am in my time zone. Also, the only reason GM is still around is because of crazy government bailouts. So I guess I can pretend Ive helped fund an F1 team with my tax dollars.

zonkerdonkeron Harvard study: open-source has an economic value of 8.8T dollars

Wow, killer of a first paragraph.

>Around 95 percent of this figure is attributable to 3,000 developers worldwide. In addition, open-source software is included in 96 percent of all codebases.

Not shocking to see the big guns coming hard at FOSS.

zonkerdonkeron McLaren invented new carbon fiber tape to build even more complex parts

Yeah, skirting the sanctions on russia to supply them with mills for weapons manufacturing wasn't a great look either. Plus the fact that they are awful at F1. Would be nice to have an American team that I could actually cheer for

zonkerdonkeron Toroidal Propeller

Controllable pitch propellers are actually already outfitted on something like ~30% of shipping vessels.

https://www.savree.com/en/encyclopedia/controllable-pitch-pr...

But these use actuators to mechancially adjust the pitch rather than relying on deformation.

Twisting a few props about a their axes is a lot simpler than the geometry changes that are required acros the control surfaces of a toroidal prop, however. I don't think that would even be feasible

zonkerdonkeron BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank

My '91 Honda Prelude had 4 wheel steering! That was a fun car.

zonkerdonkeron Toroidal Propeller

I've been interested in these for a while now, ever since the big splash (heh) from sharrow marine a few years ago, heres a link to some data they've provided comparing their prop vs a standard one: https://sharrowmarine.com/blogs/performance-reports/project-...

The issue, as far as I can deduce, is that the design of the prop needs to be almost perfectly tailored for the expected flow regime. Tweak the RPM, power, and velocity variables just a bit, and the hyper efficent, silent prop becomes detuned, negating any extra benefit it might have had. (In the link above, you can clearly see that the prop was designed for peak performance at around 2500 engine RPM). Contrast that to a typical prop, where you can get decent thrust and efficiency with just about any old scooped blade with a pitch angle.

Rctestflight on youtube gathered some fairly insightful, albeit limited data on this topic, would recommend! https://youtu.be/oXgp7IGnvKA

zonkerdonkeron The Origin of the Pork Taboo

That was not the point, nor was it reductive. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere along the line from bacteria to other humans. It is impossible not to eat a living creature was the point.

zonkerdonkeron The race is on to build the most complex machine

The platen is accelerating at 32g, speeds over 100kph, with a precision of FOUR SILCON ATOMS. That is absolutely astounding. What a beautiful machine

zonkerdonkeron The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

Turns out, propoganda really does work. Just takes a few billionaires, a few hostile nations states, and some exploitable algorithms

zonkerdonkeron Some Geniuses Are Swapping 200-Mile Battery Packs into BMW I3s

If I could buy an "upgraded" leaf from a reputable company (normal warranties, non-outrageous insurance), I would do it in a heartbeat.

I have to imagine Im not the only one who wants a simple, incredibly reliable electric vehicle. No self driving, no GPS telemetry, no heat seater annual subscription.

Electric vehicles can be so incredibly simple, and yet electric vehicles like rivian/tesla have an absolutely outrageous servicing/mile driven ratio.

zonkerdonkeron AI Scientists Are Told to Remove 'Ideological Bias' from Powerful Models

I agree. To perceive is literally to bias. Perception, and by extension, ideaology cannot exist in a vacuum.

Not even on just a human scale either. A camera "perceives" the world, but it's limited by the sepctra of its capture capabilities, its resolution, and lighting etc.

Is the idea of a picture biased? Should black and white cameras be banned for ideologically innacurate representations of the world?

zonkerdonkeron Meta keeps 'block' lists of ex-employees – and even a VP can't get you off them

It's easy enough to say, but damn, those golden handcuffs must just be so shiny.

Plus, if a principled and ethical engineer leaves the company, I assure you there is a large backlog of very eager replacements. Personally, Id rather see effective dissent from within the org.

zonkerdonkeron Woman dies after being impaled by metal straw (2019)

Its good to remember how fragile we humans can be. Life can be short, tragic, and absurd. Rest in peace

zonkerdonkeron I Went to SQL Injection Court

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176625

FOIA requester responded in comments saying they received a tip indicating illegal practices, and noted in his article that he had previously uncovered evidence of over-policing in black neighborhoods.