Hacker News: ahazred8ta

New comment by ahazred8ta in "The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:01:24 +0000

You can buy rocks engraved with "Nothing Is Written In Stone". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nothing+is+written+in+stone&ia=ima...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Bill Gates' daughter's startup accused of 'cookie stuffing' scheme"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:05:45 +0000

Bill used to be a magazine pinup boy. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bill-gates-ceo...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Recreating the Impossible Rhythm Illusion in "The Odyssey" Soundtrack [video]"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:35:26 +0000

The accelerating Risset Rhythm is like the rising Shepard Tone illusion.

https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/risset-rhythm

https://cantonbecker.com/risset/

New comment by ahazred8ta in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:22:03 +0000

Cool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:17:14 +0000

English: God gave us teeth; God will give us bread.

Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.

Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "The Applicants (A Short Story)"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:40:26 +0000

An entertaining uplift story modeled after the 1-on-1 interviews part of Childhood's End. It's a hoot. ... About Tycho's Uraniborg observatory: "Your species' best habit began there. We are sentimental about instruments."

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Ask HN: Do people with authism have emotions?"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:34:17 +0000

There are certainly some people with severe autism whose behavior is emotionally flat and they don't SHOW emotions much. But that's a far cry from not having any emotions. Explain the word 'Stoic' to him.

There's an unrelated cluster of unemotional traits associated with psychopathic disorders, but that's not autism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callous_and_unemotional_traits

New comment by ahazred8ta in "To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:33:28 +0000

The idea of what should happen is irrelevant, because we have not seen this "dense housing" actually materialize in US LVT jurisdictions any time in the past 100 years.

The township of the Fairhope Single-Tax Corporation near Mobile, Alabama was originally conceived as an artist's colony but is now occupied by families with a median income of $95K. Density is almost exactly 1 housing unit per residential acre. The feds have built 140 Section 8 subsidized units, but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.

Can you point to an LVT place in the US where developers have chosen to build large numbers of actual NON-LUXURY high rise apartment buildings for the benefit of non-rich people? That would be a big newsworthy success story if it actually happened.

There are developers that make their money building high rise apartment blocks. Are any of them lobbying for an LVT so they can build more low cost housing?

New comment by ahazred8ta in "To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:23:03 +0000

An LVT results in new McMansions getting built on quarter acre lots and being taxed at the same rate as SFHs and trailers on quarter acre lots. It's the perfect way to allow rich people to buy out poor people and pay the same tax as poor people. Welcome to unintended consequences. Institute an LVT if you want, but don't expect low cost housing to spring up.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:46:09 +0000

325 mg aspirin pills were originally 5 grains. A carat was 4 grains. The unit was used by apothecaries, jewelers, and bullet makers.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Atomic Clocks"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:38:28 +0000

In Canada, Santa's postcode is H0H 0H0. In the 1800s a letter addressed Sromfidevi England was eventually delivered to Sir Humphry Davy.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Atomic Clocks"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:24:21 +0000

Clocks at NIST Boulder in Colorado run faster than NIST Gaithersburg in Maryland by about 1.55 microseconds per year because of the 1500 meter altitude difference. It's about 1 nanosecond per year per meter. They both have to use a fudge factor to adjust down to sea level.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:26:27 +0000

They're pretty sure the primordial environment was a hydrothermal vent in an anoxic high phosphorus soda lake with methane, ammonia, and UV exposure. Nowadays those lakes don't have the methane and ammonia, so that environment isn't there anymore. https://www.science.org/content/article/unusual-soda-lakes-m...

The surfaces of clay particles in these lakes have been dubbed "the primordial sandwich".

The early protocells were 'alive', they were self-replicating, but they required nutrients and metabolic processes that only existed near mineral surfaces and would starve if they drifted away. They had to evolve new enzymes to become 'free-living'.

So it looks like the LUCA was one of these early protocells with an incomplete metabolism.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Why are there no quadruped 'wheelchairs'?"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:07:49 +0000

They made a walking robotic exoskeleton for a snake. https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/01/madman-invents-robot-suit-...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "An all-sky map of half a million supermassive black holes"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:50:58 +0000

There's a diagram of the size of everything in the universe from quarks to the whole observable universe. https://www.universetoday.com/163927/everything-in-the-unive...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "The secret nuclear material the US forgot how to make"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:33:49 +0000

The old process depended on a small amount of undocumented residue that was removed in the new process.

Obligatory FreeFall reference http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1500/fc01415.htm

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Lines of code. 1,596 BTC gone"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:56:20 +0000

As Kevin Bacon put it in Quicksilver, "What happened to all that money?" "Nothing happened to it. The money's still there. It just belongs to somebody else now."

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Kansas home wound up with 600M IP addresses and a world of trouble (2016)"

ahazred8ta — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:35:10 +0000

IP-locating databases have mostly switched to showing the default location as being in the middle of a lake, so that people will know it's not a real house.

related: Null Island at 0° / 0° https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Ancient shipwreck cargo reveals surprising global trade secrets of the 1600s"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:44:47 +0000

Also https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-31/shipwreck-cargo-revea...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Top amputation surgeon had own legs removed due to fetish. Were patients safe?"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:11:16 +0000

> In 1968, analyst Richard Brandon told the ACM that the typical programmer was "excessively independent ... often egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a limited schizophrenia. The incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic group."