anon_cow1111

A lot of popular websites like to throw snarky error pages at you which some people find annoying. But I actually DO want to see this site give you snarky pages if it finds zero normal articles within x distance.

From today's featured article:

Dirt

Nearest to you:

Missing sock

Wilson the volleyball

Gut microbiome

Depression

Ants

Overdue bill

Serial killer

You cannot change your primary number from the desktop client alone. And because I had no active phone session, I was soft-locked into (now)someone else's phone number. The only 'solution' was to message the random guy, explain and ask him to forward the login verification text message they sent him.

Afterwards I just deleted the account outright myself. anything that desktop-hostile isn't worth my time.

The obvious question is "why not just have a backup logged in phone session to solve this" and the obvious answer is because I don't fucking want it on a phone. And I'm not paying ~50 a year for a burner phone just for telegram.

You can delete an account if you have the phone number but not the password, it's on a 7-day timer before the account gets deleted. It can be canceled by a logged-in instance.

That still means you have to check it every 7 days.

Imagine if you forgot to update your phone number with your personal bank, and then some random guy was given full access to your account and all of its contents. And even if you dug through the account options and set a 2FA password (normally disabled) he could still just delete your account outright.

Last I checked, that's exactly how Telegram works by default. It's laughable to consider a service tied to a phone number secure.

Stupid, but related amusing nostalgia:

By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.

(I miss those days of genuinely annoying but still apolitical random trolling)

Ah I haven't played in a long time, though it's good to see there's still some active updates

If you still like video games and are a bit of a masochist you might try playing Noita sometime, a lot of the late game is basically built around this type of logic.

For example there's a wizard-type enemy that temporarily debuffs your max health by 50%, and the effect can stack if you get hit more than once. But what happens if you pick up a permanent health boost item while the debuff spell is on you? You gain the normal health boost, then it multiplies itself when the wizard's spell expires; you can can go from 100 to several thousand HP in seconds and there's basically no limit.

In any other game this would be considered a bug and patched out in the next update. NOT NOITA, motherfucker. You're almost required to do things like this for a lot of the end-game optional content.

I think it could be an unpopular opinion, but I like seeing these completely stupid link-to-a-wiki with no context whatsoever posts. Things that force you to actually RTFA of some obscure bit of tech trivia feel a little bit more like how using the internet used to be all those years ago.

(I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)

Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day,

(*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)

I don't know all of what dang has said personally, but in most cases where I see new topics getting killed it's pretty obvious what the reasoning is; political ragebait, shady sources, plain junk articles or other low-quality threads.

The SDV/SKG petition thing was none of those, and people were generally positive about it during the discussion. So it seems to me it was either an unexplained random down-voting event or something a little more malicious.

>as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think?

Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.

(oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)

Personally the first HN algorithm anecdote I really noticed was when the "stop destroying videogames' petition hit the front page a couple years ago. In the first hour it got a modest ~100 votes and comments with some organic discussion, so pretty typical for a good HN post. In the next hour it was dead and buried several hundred posts down.

I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.

The first thing I do with a real ID is widen the reference bars on the sides so the checkout scanner can't read it. If they want my birthday they can type it in manually, I don't need all my info in some store database.

The railgun guy might have been having a giggle with you, but you gave him some actual numbers so I'll give you some actual math to go with them.

Your biggest problem here isn't the launcher, it's the projectile. It's going to be damn near impossible to get a 1 gram projectile more than a couple hundred yards unless it's a dense metal. Doesn't matter how fast it's going, drag always wins here.

10 grams is more plausible, but then you're looking at ~1000ft-lbs cranking energy to get 10g supersonic (@ 40% efficiency) It's doable and you'll only be burning an extra ~100 calories per day for 200 shots. You might get bored though. An airgun will have far worse efficiency most of the time, though it can launch dart-shape things which can go much further for the material density.

You mentioned a bow, which is probably the tradeoff point of everything discussed so far. Flight bows are designed for distance shooting, are lightweight and can go 500 yards easily. The downside is you'll need to make the arrows yourself, cause there ain't no supply chain to sell hundreds at a time cheaply.

For the "jUsT uSe a hElIcOpTer lol" comment;

No, that's not practical, but you CAN get an RC plane that will carry a couple pounds for a tiny fraction of the cost. In terms of how much area it can cover vs supplies needed, that plane is going to be the least thirsty thing on the mountain, assuming you even need to climb it then.