Hacker News: jwlit

New comment by jwlit in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

jwlit — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:24:36 +0000

Actually, it can (at least for my combination of country and vehicle).

New comment by jwlit in "Russia was behind arson attacks targeting the UK's Prime Minister, BBC reveals"

jwlit — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:06:57 +0000

Pretty interesting (if not particularly surprising) the promotion of inter-community hatred as well.

"two Bristol graffiti artists... were asked to spray-paint the Islamic shahada - the declaration of faith - in Arabic on a defunct Debenhams in the city centre. One was also asked to spray a Quranic verse about the "devil's handiwork" on a Conservative Club in the city."

"... provided Roman Lavrynovych [low-level criminal] with an anti-Muslim poster, designed to appear like it had been written by a Hindu by referencing the 1992 destruction of an ancient Indian mosque by right-wing Hindu groups. "Every mosque closed = 100 fewer crimes," the poster said."

New comment by jwlit in "Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time"

jwlit — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 10:52:50 +0000

Also - obviously annual not weekly - don't forget the Reith Lectures (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9): long-form lecture series by (often) the most brilliant people of their time. Back catalogue available from 1948 in podcast form. Recommend starting with Bertrand Russell in the inaugural lectures - he's fantastic to listen to, even now.

New comment by jwlit in "Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Smoothing"

jwlit — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 09:09:43 +0000

Apologies for people who've already seen this (it's pretty old and comes round fairly frequently on HN), but for those previously unaware, http://trafficwaves.org/ is one of the best sites digging into the phenomenon from an "educated layman's" perspective.

New comment by jwlit in "Emergence of collective oscillations in human crowds"

jwlit — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 15:21:08 +0000

There’s a good site all about that: http://trafficwaves.org/

New comment by jwlit in "AI solution to the cocktail party problem used in court"

jwlit — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 10:10:10 +0000

You can see some information on how the technology works in this demo / paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41455176

New comment by jwlit in "Using Physics to Solve the Cocktail Party Problem (2021)"

jwlit — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 10:05:00 +0000

Popular version of paper ‘Robust speech separation in underdetermined conditions by estimating Green’s functions’ Presented Thursday morning, June 10th, 2021 180th ASA Meeting, Acoustics in Focus

This technology was used recently in court - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41453763

Using Physics to Solve the Cocktail Party Problem (2021)

jwlit — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 10:05:00 +0000

Article URL: https://acoustics.org/using-physics-to-solve-the-cocktail-party-problem-keith-mcelveen/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41455176

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by jwlit in "NASA's clever technique to make combustion chambers"

jwlit — Mon, 01 May 2023 08:47:04 +0000

Before metallic 3d printing, NASA used a clever combination of conductive wax and electroplating to achieve the same thing. In this video, the presenter demonstrates the same thing in his workshop.

NASA's clever technique to make combustion chambers

jwlit — Mon, 01 May 2023 08:47:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4YZxb2E5PA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35770421

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Venmo users on discovering others' secrets on the app

jwlit — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 12:57:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/14/venmo-users-discovering-secrets-app

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35150726

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jwlit in "Ask HN: Is a MSc in Computer Science worth the time and money?"

jwlit — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 01:12:42 +0000

I did an MSc (at Manchester Uni) after a bachelors in Modern Languages and some time as a (tech) lawyer. (Since the MSc I’ve worked in production support, mostly algorithmic trading, with some light development and integration work as part of that.) Although I don’t think there was anything that I learned there that I couldn’t have got from some dedicated self-learning, I do think the requirement to do some things that were quite difficult or intimidating was very rewarding and has also given me a lot more confidence to dig deeper into the patterns below the surface of program behaviour. (For example, I found the maths behind signals processing really hard, but although I’d imagined that assembly programming would be incredibly difficult I actually found it quite enjoyable to work direct with the “bare metal”.) I thought it was worthwhile. I think the benefits are likely to be more oriented toward your own intellectual satisfaction and depth of knowledge than career enhancement though.

New comment by jwlit in "How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives"

jwlit — Sat, 02 Jul 2022 11:07:41 +0000

Indeed, though see the article linked at the bottom of that one, which goes into more of the nuance and has distribution curves etc: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-how-is-it-calcula...

Mast Upgrade: UK experiment could sweep aside fusion hurdle

jwlit — Wed, 26 May 2021 01:09:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57232644

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27284913

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by jwlit in "FTC Settlement with Fertility-Tracking App for Facebook/Google SDK Data Sharing"

jwlit — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:14:25 +0000

For Android, there's Clue : https://helloclue.com/