HackerNews Summary (2023-06-04 09AM)

Source: Was This The Most Dangerous Children’s Toy Ever?

Summary
In the 1950s, the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab was marketed as a fun toy for children.

Facts

🧒🏻 The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab was sold as a toy for children ages 10 and up.

☢️ The kit contained actual radioactive materials, including uranium ore, radium, and a Geiger counter.

📈 The toy was not very popular due to its high price and concerns about safety, and production was discontinued after only a year.

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Source: High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Students * TorrentFreak

Summary
More than 50% of all students in Denmark find it acceptable to use pirated books and prison threats are not much of a deterrent. A new study shows that students continue to obtain unlicensed books from various sources, with 70% admitting knowledge that piracy is illegal.

Fact

📚 Half of students admit to using pirated copies of textbooks, with one in four obtaining more than 50% of their textbooks through unofficial sources.

🚨 70% of students admit to knowing that piracy is illegal, but prison threats don’t deter them. Only 18% would consider reducing their illegal textbook habits if they risked jail.

🎓 Education institutions should put more effort into educating students on the subject, according to the Rights Alliance director, as communication has a concrete effect on social norms.

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Source: Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough

ngs with this stack memory, but you generally don’t try to allocate large arrays or other data structures on it because that would be a recipe for a stack overflow. Instead, you may use heap memory, which is not tied to the stack and can be reclaimed later. Summary
Managed NAT Gateway is a costly service for companies using it to egress traffic from a VPC to the public internet. An alternative is using a Tailscale exit node with a public IPv4/IPv6 address attached to it, which reduces costs and encrypts traffic further. AWS’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is compared to malloc() in C programming as it is essentially a memory allocator for the cloud.

Fact

💸 Managed NAT Gateway costs $0.07 per gigabyte for egress traffic from a VPC to the public internet.

🚪 Tailscale exit nodes with a public IPv4/IPv6 address attached bypass this cost and encrypt traffic further.

👨‍💻 S3 is essentially a malloc() for the cloud, providing storage for cloud-native applications.

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Source: The Madman as Painter

Summary
The Watts Gallery in Surrey showcases the work of Victorian artist George Frederic Watts but also held a comprehensive exhibition of the paintings of Richard Dadd. Dadd, though a gifted artist, suffered from increasing mental instability, killing his father and attempting to murder others, and believed in a divine heritage.

Fact

💡 Richard Dadd was a gifted artist and draftsman who painted brilliantly

🚶‍♂️ In 1842, he went on a ten-month trip across the Middle East with Sir Thomas Phillips

💉 Dadd’s father was a pharmaceutical chemist and curator of the Chatham and Rochester Philosophical and Literary Institution

🔪 After Dadd’s character changed, he lured his father to Cobham Park and attempted to cut his throat, eventually stabbing him in the chest, killing him

💭 Dadd believed his father to be an imposter, with his true parentage being Osiris, and was extradited for his crimes

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Source: Iceland: the emerging tech-ecosystem of the Nordics

Summary
Iceland has a burgeoning startup ecosystem that is becoming increasingly organized and well-funded. Despite its small population, Iceland ranked second in Europe in 2022 in terms of VC funding, with many new companies emerging.

Facts

🏔️ Iceland recently lost its glacier status as Okjökull, named after a glacier, no longer possesses the necessary thickness to move.

🌍 Iceland’s location in the north Atlantic makes it a convenient stopover for transatlantic electric flights.

💰 In 2021, Icelandic venture funds raised over $308 million, marking significant growth from previous years.

👥 Iceland has a small population of approximately 370,000 people.

🚀 Iceland’s startup ecosystem is vibrant, with many new companies emerging, despite only a few locally based traditional early-stage venture funds existing. Between 59% and 98% of the LP capital of these funds come from local pension funds.

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