Hacker News: ahazred8ta

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:33:54 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20140228123520/http://www.unshel... your kid is a reader

https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHDparenting

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Raising+Girls+With+ADHD+&ia=web

New comment by ahazred8ta in "In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:54:18 +0000

Paper from last fall https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jeu.70040

They've known about the Paulinella genus for several decades, but they're always glad to discover a new species. This genus acquired a photosynthetic symbiont "only" 100 million years ago, and it's only partway through the process of losing its genes. It's a snapshot of the evolutionary process.

TBH, this has almost nothing to do with the origins of life.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Newly Discovered Neo Asteroid 2026 SA8 Close but Safe Approach"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:03:43 +0000

The nearest approach is 0.988x Lunar Distance (379,868 km), 60 Earth radii out. The size is very roughly 6.7 meters, 22 feet. If it hit the atmosphere, the airburst would be about 5 kilotons. Airbursts like that happen every few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_air_burst#After_1900

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Ask HN: Have you read the Dune books by Frank Herbert?"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:34:07 +0000

There are people using water-hungry artificial brains to generate Dune memes. At this rate we're going to run out of irony.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Scientists build most accurate atomic clock"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:14:06 +0000

Lutetium-176, element 71, better than 1 part in 10^18.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "My German Exit Tax: 13 Tax Advisors, 1.5 Years, 18.7k€ to leave the country"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:44:06 +0000

They wanted him to pay almost six years worth of his normal post-tax income. Did you have to pay six years worth of income? It took him a lot of work to get it down to 'only' 18.7k€.

This ranks right up there with the author who wrote a children's book about a village where they had to turn over 102% of the potatoes they grew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomperipossa_in_Monismania

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Show HN: Voyager 1 could've lasted MUCH longer"

ahazred8ta — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:10:29 +0000

Nothing is preventing you from building a new long-duration probe and launching it on a thousand year journey.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes"

ahazred8ta — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 08:48:31 +0000

After the 1944 D-Day landings, Allied planners thought that the war might easily stretch into 1946. The original plan was to drop dozens of atomic bombs on Germany. There was no such thing as "Let's sign a peace treaty where we stop fighting the Germans without invading Germany." You seem to be proposing that when we got to the German border in March 1945 we should have suddenly decided not to enter German territory, but only blockade them instead. The only reason we didn't drop dozens of bombs on both Germany and Japan was that our production lines didn't reach their three bombs per month full capacity until June.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "SR-71's "R2-D2" Could Be Key to Winning Future Fights in GPS Denied Environments"

ahazred8ta — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 06:31:19 +0000

Astronav systems have expensive moving parts that aren't very githubbable. There was an SDR software defined radio passive radar project that got taken down. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80K years ago?"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:54:33 +0000

The paper does not appear to distinguish between 'darts' used with atlatl throwing sticks, and arrows used with bows. Darts were used before bows.

(projectile point design is difficult; you can't haft archaic and yeet it too)

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Priest, Monk, and Mathematician"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:35:10 +0000

"Most great ideas are 'in the air,' and several scholars simultaneously wave their nets."

New comment by ahazred8ta in "The Last Question by Isaac Asimov – This Is Ageless"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:16:27 +0000

Not to mention Isaac's Last Answer: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1448:_Question

New comment by ahazred8ta in "'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:03:18 +0000

Same thing with people who naively believe that amino acids can only be formed in space and can only be brought to Earth in asteroids, as opposed to forming *ON* Earth.

Our current best guess is a geothermal vent in a high phosphorus 'soda lake' like the one in Canada. https://www.science.org/content/article/unusual-soda-lakes-m...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:25:11 +0000

Socrates always used to inspect his dough before adding the yeast. The unexamined loaf is not worth leaven.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Great Lakes sturgeon may be 400 years old:Scientists rethinking how to save them"

ahazred8ta — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:45:46 +0000

"I should like to teach you the dance of my people" is from the Kikuyu fairy tale "The Warrior And The Irimũ".

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Small Asian Grocery Stores Can Improve Local Product Discovery"

ahazred8ta — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:19:21 +0000

Seems to be self promotion by Yati https://duckduckgo.com/?q=yatifoods&ia=web

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Kill All Humans lets you reserve a spot on AIs nice list before it's too late"

ahazred8ta — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 22:55:30 +0000

Likewise you can placate the Basilisk. https://www.basiliskfoundation.com/store/p/certification-of-...

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2228:_Machine_Lea...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Is it time for a Luddite Renaissance?"

ahazred8ta — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 22:04:04 +0000

To use a car, you need to sign a contract with an insurance company. Amish don't like contracts. That's why they couldn't have cellphones until the prepaid ones came out. That's why they are mostly not on the electric grid, but can have their own generators or solar panels.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:32:52 +0000

Spaghettification is directional / linear, and is in the form of a tidal acceleration. Expansion of the universe is uniform in all directions. Urban legends about cosmic sized black holes are in conflict with what cosmologists can actually see.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:40:01 +0000

There's a diagram for how long it takes a 'light-hugger' ship to travel various distances at 1-G acceleration. Shiptime is on the left, earth time is on the right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roundtriptimes.png

http://www.zitterbug.net/future/future815.html

What If Light Was Really Slow? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge_j31Yx_yk -- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=slower+speed+of+light&ia=videos&ia...