Hacker News: EA

New comment by EA in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

EA — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:00:02 +0000

We landed on the Moon. Frame-by-frame analysis of the dust coming off the Lunar Rover at the speed and trajectory shown on video from the Moon proves the Rover was in 1/6th the gravity of Earth [1]. There was no way for that 1/6th gravity to be faked on Earth in 1971. Incidentally, probes recently sent to the Moon show where the Lunar Rover made paths in the dusty surface of the Moon, and those paths align with the original video from the early 1970s.

Flat Earth only has a handful of anecdotal short-range observations of some flat areas of Earth taken from a perspective near ground level. Relative to the size of the Earth, those short-distance observations are dominated by the margins of error in the observation. All of those sight lines are accounted for in LIDAR scans of the Earth as well as the WGS84 model.

For less than $1,000 you can send a high-altitude balloon up to see the slight curvature of the Earth. For a few thousand dollars, you can circumnavigate the Earth in an airplane along a common latitude. For tens of thousands of dollars you can go to Antarctica and see the 24-hour Sun from November to January. Or you could just have all your friends from around the globe point to the Sun and measure that angle. With basic trigonometry, you can see the Sun is about 92 million miles away.

[1] Hsu & Horányi (2012), University of Colorado Boulder - "Ballistic motion of dust particles in the Lunar Roving Vehicle dust trails," American Journal of Physics: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012AmJPh..80..452H/abstra...

New comment by EA in "DARPA’s new X-76"

EA — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:05:03 +0000

It will need blades to VTOL.

New comment by EA in "The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up"

EA — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:18:46 +0000

The original meter (1790s France) was defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a meridian.

New comment by EA in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

EA — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:41:11 +0000

OP isn't saying peanuts are a poor source of nutrition. OP is saying a few peanuts are calorically dense and it is easy to consume hundreds of calories through seemingly inconsequential amounts of snacks and drinks.

New comment by EA in "AI's Dial-Up Era"

EA — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 14:45:51 +0000

In these commercials, it wasn't the technology itself but the ease of access and visualized integration of these technologies into the commoners' everyday lives that was the new idea.

New comment by EA in "Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ"

EA — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:58:47 +0000

Multiple cable cutters are installed on every military helicopter

New comment by EA in "Brian Wilson has died"

EA — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 18:07:40 +0000

Brian Wilson was an industrious and creative engineer that shipped products which touched generations.

New comment by EA in "The True Size Of"

EA — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:33:03 +0000

Algeria is about 23.4% the size of Europe.

New comment by EA in "US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops"

EA — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:43:35 +0000

"Our vehicle, called a seaglider, is an all-electric, wing-in-ground-effect craft that operates within a wingspan of the water's surface and couples the speed of an airplane with the operating cost of a boat."

New comment by EA in "Made a scroll bar buddy that walks down the page when you scroll"

EA — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 13:06:15 +0000

Perhaps because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43237747

New comment by EA in "Leaking the email of any YouTube user for $10,000"

EA — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 13:57:35 +0000

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725

New comment by EA in "BlenderGPT"

EA — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 15:47:17 +0000

It generates a mobius strip that looks like a pill.

New comment by EA in "How Olympics officials try to catch “motor doping”"

EA — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:23:54 +0000

And it looks like Lance was about 6.97 W/kg in 2004: https://sportsscientists.com/2009/07/tour-de-france-2009-pow...

New comment by EA in "How fast can a human possibly run 100 meters?"

EA — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 17:57:13 +0000

BTW: if you are looking for something to latch onto with the Olympics starting this week, the USA vs Jamaica rivalry in the short distance trace events is a great David vs. Goliath story. The two countries have been battling back and forth with each other for the top spots for the last decade or longer. The runners have flamboyant personalities and these are some of the fastest sprinters we have ever seen; both men and women. There is a documentary on Netflix called 'Sprint' that sets the stage for this Olympics.

New comment by EA in "One Million Checkboxes"

EA — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:49:52 +0000

Plot twist, you are competing against several dozen pigeons in Central Park.

New comment by EA in "UFO civilization could be on Earth: Harvard researchers"

EA — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:50:20 +0000

> All four CTHs are far-fetched on their face; we entertain them here because some aspects of UAP are strange enough that they seem to call for unconventional explanations.

New comment by EA in "Why scientists say we need to send clocks to the moon"

EA — Thu, 30 May 2024 17:07:18 +0000

Gravity decreases with distance from the Earth’s center. The lower the gravitational potential (the closer the clock is to the source of gravitation), the slower time passes, speeding up as the gravitational potential increases (the clock moving away from the source of gravitation).

New comment by EA in "The Amazon forest has an almost 3x year-on-year increase in fires in February"

EA — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:27:34 +0000

Title was 'The Amazon has a 286% increase in fires in February'

New comment by EA in "Infinite Craft"

EA — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 14:53:46 +0000

Update - author has added two new features:

1) progress is saved locally so you can reload browser (helpful on iOS) 2) search bar added to discovered items list

New comment by EA in "Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks"

EA — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:52:28 +0000

In the late 1980's I had this VCR that would allow me to tune into over the air TV channels in the eastern US.

Being an elementary aged student poking around, I realized I could use the tuner to listen in to telephone calls somehow. Granted, I lived on a farm and there were probably only two dozen houses within a mile radius of our home; the nearest being a quarter mile away. I had a small rabbit ear antenna on the back of my CRT TV that could have been plugged into the VCR.

I don't recall the actual hardware I had.

I never figured out if I was listening to cordless phones (seems they would not be powerful enough to reach me), cell phone signals (there were few cell phones in my poor rural community I assume but I guess there could have been travelers on a nearby highway), or CB radio signals from truckers on the highway (these seemed like mundane person to person conversations; not trucker conversations). Perhaps it could have been long distance HAM operators though they didn't seem to use any HAM protocols while speaking.