Elon Musk has come to Twitter to share yet another SpaceX news. As it turns out, Starship, one of the two rocket modules of the SpaceX ship, might go through its first test flight as soon as in April 2019. The flight will most probably not see Starship leaving our planet’s atmosphere; no space flights yet. Before the flight, in March, a tech preview of the rocket will take place. Tweet Vote on HN ...

Google is known for not being 100% serious all the time. Their arguably most famous ”chillout moments” are Google Doodle, when their browser’s logo turns into various animations, minigames and such. As it turns out now (or earlier, if someone has already found it out), Google also likes to put its little jokes in other places. One of them is Google Translation, which seemingly supports languages as exotic as klingon, hacker or… bork bork bork, the language of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets. Chef’s language is relatively simple but also difficult to ...

Or at least it may have the means to do so. American market store chain Walmart has just patented a high-tech sound registration and analysis system specifically made with stores in mind. The objective of this system is to collect and recognize sound patterns in order to detect possible thefts – sounds like an item being hidden under the vest or comparing the number of cash register blips to the number of items put down on the counter. As nice as that sounds, such a system could easily be used in other, less innocent ways. You would think twice about talking in Walmart if you knew ...

Tesla and fire and two friends that meet pretty regularly. One Tesla car burned down in June, another one went down in flames in September; then there was a bunch more accidents. Tesla has recognized the issue, said that it was a car battery’s short circuit’s fault, upgraded the batteries’ shields… and then watched as yet another Model S car burned. Twice! That unlucky accident took place in Los Gatos, California, USA. After a Model S car burst into flames there, it was left alone for six hours in order to let its battery cool down so that it would not overheat ...

Original post about the mobile Rome: Total War is available here. The game has just came out on Google Play Store, where it costs 9.99 euro, no microtransactions added. The game has pretty steep graphic requirements, so make sure that your smartphone is up to the task before buying. Tweet Vote on HN ...

The map has been released a week ago, and now it is available to download on mobile devices. It is part of a 0.10.0 update, 134 MB, which also brings us a variety of fixes and changes. New map, called Vikendi, is a snowy tundra with mountaineous terrain. It offers, naturally, new winter outfits as well as new vehicle, a snowmobile. There are even snowballs that you can throw at one another in the spawn area. The first impressions of people playing on Vikendi is that it is a fast, intense map that requires tactical gameplay. Other, more technical updates include a cosmetics weapon upgrade ...

Google Pay’s influence is growing as another fifteen American banks now support Big G’s payment method. The newest banks are:– Access Community Credit Union,– Acushnet Federal Credit Union,– Bank of the Panhandle,– Citizens Bank (Hartsville, TN),– Clinton Savings Bank,– Dime Bank,– Farmers National Bank of Lebanon,– Farmers State Bank (Yale),– First Community Bank of Tennessee,– First National Bank of Waseca,– Happy State Bank,– International Bank of Commerce,– Peoples Credit Union,– TCM Bank, ...

Elon Musk’s Boring Company has just finished the construction of the first part of a Los Angeles underground tunnel. The segment is called Hawthorne, like the city district it is build under. Its location is not accidental, as Hawthorne is where both The Boring Company and SpaceX headquarters are. The first segment of the tunnel is 1.83 kilometers long, and its construction cost was 10 million USD; not a lot, at least according to Elon Musk, who believes that the price of constructing the tunnel with standard tech would be around 1 billion USD. The opening of the segment was a whole ...

You chill in front of your PC, entering your mailbox and checking your spam; you are curious about how did the people try to scam you out of your money lately. You find a bunch of mails from Nigerian princes, some Ukrainian women ready to get married, guys who claim to have recorded you masturbate to pornography… yawn… Oh, there is an interesting one. Someone says they will kill you if you do not pay them.A new online scam is gaining popularity among the mailbox spammers. It is known as a ”hitman scam” and its goal is to make guillable idiots believe they are about ...

Humanity knows its own planet pretty well, but we are as green as chives when it comes to the knowledge of space. Today, though, we have made at least a little step towards knowing more about our surroundings. A group of astronomers who have been busy looking for the hypothetical Planet X, a large space object supposedly lying on the outskirts of our solar system, have accidentally found something else. This finding, a dwarf planet with roughly 550 kilometers-long diameter, have been christened as 2018 VG18, or Farout (English play on words that can mean either ”cool, ...