HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ChrisIsTaken

104 karma · joined January 14, 2021

submissionscomments
ChrisIsTaken··on Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
Energy loss through an insulator is exactly linear to temperature.

The problem is that people who would have otherwise tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the storage.

ChrisIsTaken··on Differentiation Under Integral Sign (2015) [pdf]
Multiple clever integral tricks...
ChrisIsTaken··on New model could explain old cholesterol mystery
My LDL dropped by three quarters once I switched to a keto(ish) diet a decade ago and stayed down. My HDL remained stable, almost like the body manufactures it for cell walls or something...
ChrisIsTaken··on EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants
Not an AI problem. This happens when small businesses outsource their adsense campaign to one of the many completely incompetent fly by night SEO shops, or to their grandson who's "good at computers".

Half of Google's income is derived from businesses pissing their marketing budget up a wall with incorrectly targeted ads. But it's still more effective than newspapers.

ChrisIsTaken··on IMF researchers: digital footprint yields better credit assessment
Tl;Dr.

"The lower strata of society are being forced into precarious employment and debt slavery. (What's new?) Here's how to use a global surveillance apparatus to enable more debt slavery."

ChrisIsTaken··on Samsung Foundry: New $17B Fab in the USA by Late 2023
The Sydney Opera House is like this too, it's a 12 story double helix excavated from sandstone.

I'm sure it was fascinating to design, but it's an absolute nightmare to park in.

ChrisIsTaken··on Samsung Foundry: New $17B Fab in the USA by Late 2023
Multilevel parking is about $10-15k per space. An asphalt lot is $1.5k.

You also don't pay land tax and stormwater drainage levies on an undeveloped parking lot.

ChrisIsTaken··on What Do You Agree to When You Accept All Cookies
It was created by Landmark, then offloaded in 2008 to NBCUniversal who still own it under Comcast.
ChrisIsTaken··on Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
I stopped buying much there around ~2010. The sheer amount of Chinese counterfeit garbage and lack of proper categorization makes it impossible to browse the site. The clothing category in particular is just 100,000 dumpsters full of unlabeled trash heaped into a pile.

If you didn't discover a product name somewhere else, you won't find it on Amazon. Amazon doesn't do merchandising for shit.

ChrisIsTaken··on Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
Registration for Cadabra was filed in July 1994. I suspect this was chosen because Bezos' attorney had discovered that his first preference "Abracadabra" was taken.

Amazon was a much better choice.

ChrisIsTaken··on Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions
No, they put you into a bubble and show you what you've already clicked just like youtube and google display ads.

I only get new music when I manually load a playlist.

ChrisIsTaken··on Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions
How about suggest songs based on what I've liked but haven't heard?

Brain dead filter bubble repeatedly playing what I've already played is why I don't subscribe to this garbage service.

ChrisIsTaken··on How to select best UPS and Solar to be off-grid 24 hour for 2kw
Few tens of thousands of dollars.

You're looking at 4 hours insolation in winter in subsaharan regions. Also assume cloud cover drops panel output to 50% for consecutive days. You're gonna need 25kW of panels and 30kWh+ of battery storage.

ChrisIsTaken··on Electric cars are coming fast – is the nation’s grid up to it?
Yeah, most people are recharging 20-30 miles of daily driving not the whole battery. As long as the car pulls its 10-15 kWh overnight before it leaves the garage in the morning EV owners aren't going to care when charging happens.

With managed charging / demand response and day ahead weather forecasting you'd rarely need to spin up a gas turbine. On the coasts wind is strongest at night, the distribution grid is at minimum load and cars are parked. Seems like a perfect match.

ChrisIsTaken··on G.M. announcement shakes up U.S. automakers’ transition to electric cars
Not sure how anyone missed the $2.3B Lordstown, Ohio battery factory deal finalised with LG last March. But I guess there was a lot going on in the world...

GM is very very far behind, but they are now deadly serious about owning a majority of the EV market.

ChrisIsTaken··on Robinhood Is the Facebook of Investing. You're the Data, Not the Customer
Like every other "fremium" product on the market that isn't taking Softbank money, RH will eventually increase fees once it takes market share. This is just the promo period.
ChrisIsTaken··on Europe's Vaccine Disaster
Due to the much younger population, most of Africa, India, and Pakistan has had MMR, and it's been found that the mumps vaccine provides significant immunity. In the west most over 35 had measles only, or MR combination without mumps.

DOI: 10.1128/mBio.02628-20

For some reason this hasn't been well covered in the media. I got an MMR booster in June based on preliminary findings, my GP thought I was insane.

ChrisIsTaken··on Robinhood denies claims that it sold GameStop shares out from under its traders
Australia has had real time transfers on our reserve bank's "New Payments Platform" since 2018. Transfers are finalized in a few hundred milliseconds.

And we're actually half a decade behind most of Asia and Europe.

ChrisIsTaken··on Ford closes German plant for 1 month as global chip crisis worsens
There is an actual wafer shortage and arrogant automotive suppliers thought they could order on short notice.

Turns out silicon valley customers like Apple and Nvidia order a year or more ahead and prepay for capacity instead of phoning at the last minute and demanding "standard" 120-day terms for the privilege of having their business. I know who I'd sell my capacity to.

ChrisIsTaken··on Pristine GM EV1 Preserved by University Caretaker
Shower charging.

The bolt fast charges at 50kW up to about 40%, then gradually drops to 35kW at 55% charge state. After that the charge rate drops off horrifically, to less than 10kW above 80%.

It's a compliance car designed for city driving only.

ChrisIsTaken··on Bumble S-1
Unsolicited life advice:

People in middle age that choose to travel solo are open minded, a bit lonely, and are completely dissatisfied with all of the "normal" social bullshit.

ChrisIsTaken··on Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
Large parts of Windows 10 are still Win32 not UWP.

They can't even remove decades old legacy code from their own products, so good luck everyone else.

ChrisIsTaken··on Intel is dying and we can’t save it
TSMC's capacity problems have been directly caused by still ongoing covid shutdowns at ASML.
ChrisIsTaken··on Intel is dying and we can’t save it
Intel has a very impressive balance sheet for a failing company, it has almost no debt and is generating double-digit billions in free cash flow from almost state of the art fabs. They are still number three on process technology, and number one on volume.

The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture and getting their design house in order is what Pat Gelsinger needs to fix.

ChrisIsTaken··on Intel is dying and we can’t save it
I'd reckon per unit area, Intel's cost on 14nm wafers are going to run to less than 25% of TSMC's ask price at 7nm.

Do keep in mind that a fair amount of a desktop chip is pad space, IO hasn't shrunk since 22nm nodes, DUV steppers are dirt cheap, Intel's foundries are fully amortized, and yields at 14nm are going to be approaching 100%.

ChrisIsTaken··on Intel is dying and we can’t save it
Apple did poach a few of Intel's better architects and killed Intel's smartphone ambitions. But the damage occured two decades before that.

Intel is dying because they should have entered the foundry business in the early 90's. Process was always their forte, they were never good at the CPU architecture design anyway as iAPX/i860/Itanium amply demonstrated.

Instead they blew $100B getting into antivirus, network security, mobileye, infineon, and a dozen other failed businesses, $50B in illegal kickbacks keeping AMD out of the unprofitable low end laptop market, and another $50B of "contra revenue" subsidizing their inferior me-too products against mobile SOCs they should have been fabbing in the first place.

ChrisIsTaken··on Intel is dying and we can’t save it
"Higher yield nodes" are full, that's why Intel is outsourcing to TSMC. Intel has already sold every 14nm, 22nm, 32nm and 45nm wafer it can make. They have zero capacity, which is an amazing problem for a "dying" company to have.

Even if they axed all process R&D and returned the cash to shareholders, due to the eye watering costs of designing at 10nm and lower I expect there will be a lot of business to keep their fabs turning over for the next decade.