News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

sergj

Re:But good sir, what is electricity? on Sunday February 23, 2025 @06:21PM (#43154210)
If you have ever looked at an old transmission electron microscope with a viewing screen, you know electrons are green ; )
Re:How An ASML Lithography Machine Moves a Wafer [video] on Monday January 08, 2024 @06:24AM (#38910569)
True, but the comparison with old technology makes the video more interesting. The replacement for the hydraulic actuators and also the twin scanning system are motivated by the historical development.
Re:In the end, climate change is the only story that matters on Sunday September 25, 2022 @11:12AM (#32972082)
Replying to your first point. There is actually a new branch of science called extreme event attribution [1]. Basically all weather events are now analysed to see how much more probable they are due to climate change. You are right one event might be anecdotal and could also have happened without climate change. But looking at the frequency of these events, the probability of extrem weather events has risen. In other words what was a once in a hundred years flood is now a once in ten years flood - keep in mind this is an example and a once in a hundred years flood can of course happen more often. What I am trying to say is we can attribute the trend of extrem weather events to climate change. So the argument that Fiona is more probable in a world with climate change than in a world without climate change is legit.

[1]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_event_attribution

Re:Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry (2010) on Monday September 05, 2022 @10:13AM (#32724515)
Modern nanotechnology is a multi disciplinary approach using effects on the nanoscale for new technologies. Therefore people from different fields come together to synthesis, simulate, analyse etc. nanoparticles/systems. Of course in the media nanotechnology is this big catch all word, where everybody immediately thinks about self replicating nanomachines - this is still fiction. Eventhough nanotechnology has not fullfilled this science fiction promise of atom precise manipulation the result are still astonishing. Just to name a few: Computerchips, memorychips, displays, catalysts, composite materials, surface coatings…
Re:Why Is German Internet So Bad on Saturday November 06, 2021 @02:56PM (#29132839)
The connection is pretty stable and worked great during Homeoffice.
Re:Why Is German Internet So Bad on Saturday November 06, 2021 @02:50PM (#29132787)
12gb on mobil. Landline is without a cap, but I heard if you consistently download 5-10Tbs per Month, customer service might call and ask if you want a „better“ contract ; )
Re:Why Is German Internet So Bad on Saturday November 06, 2021 @02:47PM (#29132767)
Those were the measured speed +-3 Mbps. Sometimes inside of buildings my connection also drops back down to edge but I think this got way better in the last 2-3 years.
Re:Why Is German Internet So Bad on Friday November 05, 2021 @02:22PM (#29122948)
Mobil: 360 down/50 up ~40€

Landline: 250 down/50 up ~50€

For the landline we also have the option of 1Gbps, but I dont want to pay for it.

Re:Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade on Sunday January 10, 2021 @12:58PM (#25717353)
Do you use a digital labbook? If so what do you use? I am currently trying MS OneNote. Just pasting everything in. Pictures, screengrabs, thoughts parameters. But I am wondering if there is a better alternative.
Re:Hyper-realistic masks to go on sale in Japan on Thursday December 17, 2020 @07:52AM (#25455113)
I had some fun with this. After a while you can find a lot of clues to spot the ai picture. I looked at ca. 15 pictures and got two wrong. Then this happened: https://pasteboard.co/JFldXA6.png Sorry for posting a picture - the picture shows one normal face and one not quite so normal. Guess which is the real face : )
This is the problem with historic games. Either you acknowledge the bad and good things, or you white wash the past. As the author notes at the end: „As I have argued here many times, fiction is often how the public conceptualizes the past and that concept of the past shapes the decisions we make in the present.“
Re:A Spacetime Surprise: Time Isn’t Just Another Dimension on Monday November 16, 2020 @07:26AM (#25110813)
Maybe thinking about lightspeed as the upper speed limit helps? You could also think about the clock experiment by Hafele and Keating where two synchronised clocks where flown all over the globe and after a while they disagreed with each other. Or the popsci answer: Things that move fast get more massiv and time gets slower for them, at the speed of light time stops. Without time no speed.
Re:There's truth to 'dead battery bounce' after all (2015) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:52PM (#21717004)
Wow! I was asked by a friend if dead/flat batteries were weighing less, since I was working a little bit with batteries. Back then I dismissed it as utter nonsense. But I still googled the question because you never know right? and I stumbled upon either this article or a similar one: https://www.quora.com/Is-a-charged-battery-heavier-than-a-de...

After finding and reading an answer that agreed with my initial assessment I never continued to investigate why my friend would make such a claim, but now I guess it was related to this phenomenon. Guess I owe somebody an apology. Crazy how somethings seem so outlandish that I did not even ask myself if this was possible or what fundamental differences there are between batteries of different states of charge. Also it would have been quite easy to test this in retrospective... Note to myself: I should be more careful and curious in the future!

Very difficult to read. Some anecdotes were interesting but other than that I am not sure what my takeaway from this article is.
Re:Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care on Thursday May 23, 2019 @12:37PM (#19993267)
I was also confused. I thought this article was about how the cold fusion hobbyist movement is dying down because the topic is becoming unpopular. Fusion and cold fusion are discussed from time to time here, so it is not super obvious.
Saw this video explaining in a HN comment why stronger magnets and a different approach might make fusion work. After ca. 22:00 Minutes he is done with the fusion basics and explains the new approach. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
Re:Reading Mathematics (2002) [pdf] on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @09:23PM (#16019853)
From which book is this?
Re:Socratic method to teaching by asking on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @07:47PM (#15397199)
Saw this on HN a while back. It also uses the socratic method to teach electronics, but student are supposed to look up the answers to these questions to deepen their understanding and progress from there. http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/
Re:Ghost in the Shell on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @07:27PM (#14038244)
Yes the effects were great. Especially the city, but come on how could the story in the movie be sooo weak! Instead of an kickass army verteran we got Scarlett Johannson playing a little girl.
Re:EmDrive study officially published on Saturday November 19, 2016 @03:27PM (#12995434)
I was pretty sure there was a seperate study where they debunct it? Gonna look for the link...
Re:Windows 93 (2014) on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @07:20AM (#12691900)
Worked for me on iOS 10.
Has anyone more information on the german secret court referenced in the article? As a german this is my first time hearing about that.
Re:New Life Found That Lives Off Electricity on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @10:57AM (#11954410)
Unfortunatley not. The season ending was very disappointing.
Re:%*$*#&#* Windows 7 Calculator on Friday December 25, 2015 @01:11PM (#10791834)
Works for me after copying and pasting 17281580835365214242 it shows: 1,72815808353652E19
Re:How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help on Friday February 14, 2014 @07:02AM (#7238067)
I feel sick reading stories like this. Yesterday I read about the guy that made a stupid facebook comment and is now facing 10 years in prison. He will probably win and walk away a free man, but still he had to spend 2 months in prison. Reading these stories or stories about the TSA I really do not want to visit the USA in the near future.
I really hope this will back the politians in a corner and shine some light on what Germany is gathering and sharing with its so called allies.
Re:Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion on Friday November 22, 2013 @10:16AM (#6781140)
Boring compared to chess? As a Go player I take this as an insult. Go is way more interesting, there are more fights, more complexity and you make a lot of tactical and strategic decisions in one game. Also you have a great handicap system, playing stronger players is no big problem. Did I mention that there are no remis and pro matches are often decided by 0,5 points which is really little.

I am ending my rant with a quote: "Rather than being the image of a single struggle as in chess, Go is much more like the panorama of an entire campaign, or complex theatre of war. And so it is more like modern warfare where strategic mass movements are the ultimate determinants of victory. … As in modern warfare, direct combat, without supporting tactics, rarely occurs. In fact, to engage too soon in direct combat frequently spells defeat." -- Oscar Korschelt

Re:Here’s what it would take for self-driving cars to catch on on Saturday October 26, 2013 @12:00PM (#6617814)
You are oversimplifying a lot of the problems. And saying that the problems won't even arise until we start to sell these cars is just nonsense.

Also enforcing a 4 day work-week? How does this lower unemployment, except on the paper? And keep in mind this solution would come with it own bag of problems, like administrativ overhead for more employees etc.

This app is a lot of fun! Thanks for making it.
Re:Germans Loved Obama. Now We Don’t Trust Him on Sunday June 30, 2013 @09:43PM (#5968157)
This law didn't get rubber stamped. The first time the government passed the law, it was declared unconstitutional by the german Supreme Court, after Patrick Beyer, a member of the Pirate Party challenged it in court.

Now the government tries to change certain parts to pass it again. Patrick Beyer said he will challenge it again and chances are pretty good, that it will be declared unconstitutional again.

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