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Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#41

Post by numpad0 »

Surströmming, the Swedish can of fermented fish, is strongly recommended to be punctured while submerged in tap water. It is not pasteurized and is actively fermenting in storage, and the content will spray around if opened under atmospheric conditions.

When transported on cargo flights, they are double packed as cans in a barrel in a crate, and considered UN classified "miscellaneous dangerous goods" with identification number UN3334 "Aviation regulated liquid, n.o.s." with accompanying scary(albeit monochromatic) warning stickers, if at all accepted. When transported on ocean going vessels, they are often required to be in its own shipping container, again double packaged and correctly labeled.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#42

Post by Fezzik »

giraffe333 wrote: post #4

I was reminded of the US Constitution's 10th amendment and reading some of the history around it. > The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments. https://www.axios.com/2026/01/14/10th-amendment-ice-trump-il... (or please goo…

Also related and worth a read, I think, is the Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). The content of the dispute is different, as it involves the President seizing private property, but it is (one of?) the seminal cases regarding the scope of presidential powers. Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion is, at least for now, considered the best articulation of when the President may take unilateral action.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#43

Post by lormayna »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #39
qiqitori wrote: post #38

Learned about superheterodyne receivers. Recently I've been studying up on RF technology, happened to come across superheterodyne receivers a short while ago, decided to research them today, saw that Technology Connections had a video on them, watched it, and felt reasonably enlightened.

Are there AI enabled antennas by now?

I don't know about AI antennas, but smart antennas[1] are a things since more than 15 years. Basically they are array of antennas that can change via software the directivity (mainly used in radar systems) or increase/reduce power transmission and direction (this is used in 5G cell).

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#46

Post by willvarfar »

I had a great euphoric epiphany feeling today. Doesn't come along too often, will celebrate with a nice glass of wine :)

Am doing data engineering for some big data (yeah, big enough) and thinking about efficiency of data enrichment. There's this classic trilemma with data enrichment where you can have good write efficiency, good read efficiency and/or good storage cost, pick two.

E.g. you have a 1TB table and you want to add a column that, say, will take 1GB to store.

You can create a new table that is 1.1TB and then delete the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and often breaks how normal data lake orchestration works.

You can create a new wide table that is 1.1TB and keep it along side the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and expensive to store.

You can create a narrow companion table that has just a join key and 1GB of data. This is efficient to write and store, but inefficient to query when you force all users to do joins on read.

And I've come up with a cunning forth way where you write a narrow table and read a wide table so its literally best of all worlds! Kinda staggering :) Still on a high.

Might actually be a conference paper, which is new territory for me. Lets see :)

/off dancing

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#48

Post by raybb »

I am in Mexico City and I learned quite a bit about Santa Muerte. Hard to know how much truth there is in what the locals tell me but supposedly people who live in such dire conditions they feel closer to death than to life pary to Our Lady of Holy Death for protection.

Wikipedia says it is the fastest growing religion in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Muerte

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#49

Post by spenjovewkwhalo »

The origins of Port and Starboard on ships.

Chosen to be independent of a mariners orientation.

Starboard - most sailors were right handed and the steering oar was placed on the right. Star = steer. Board = side of boat.

Port - as steering oars got bigger, boats tended to dock on the left hand side. This became to be known as “lardboard” which sounded too much like starboard, so it was changed to “Port” (as in the side typically facing the port side.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#50

Post by abetusk »

That the FOSS bazaar broke off into megachurches while still maintaining a healthy small scale and independent bazaar [0]. That FOSS sustainability is much more complicated than just "throw money at it".

That there's "metal paste" [1].

That the zodiac killer's messages have been cracked for five years now (I didn't know they were cracked to begin with) and that it was a shift and substitution cypher [2]. The telltale clue was that the symbol frequency was uniform but under shift it become non-uniform.

How to solder those pesky connectors that come on the tiny servo motors you can get from Aliexpress [3].

That Firefox only has 2.3% market share [4].

Multiscale 3d truchet patterns are freakin complicated [5].

That prioritizing tasks by the linear combination of priority and effort remains a good strategy.

[0] https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/01-cathedral-megachurch-b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys-RMVJ89dk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CJsKJ0XKP4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHulZtR2Qkg

[4] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

[5] https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2018/bridges2018-39.html#...

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