Hacker News Reader

nomelon Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM

99.67% of seawater can't be used for fusion. Some very poor napkin math, that's around 1.3 million cubic miles, with around 2200 cubic miles per inch of sea level, which is around 600 inches, or 50 feet drop in sea level if fully depleted (not including any sea level rise from global warming).

nomelon If IPv4 were land

Is this fundamentally from poor routing from infrequent use? For example, if usage was 50%, would the routing/hops between the two somewhat converge? Or is this actually a "v6 is hosted on a separate server somewhere else" type problem?

nomelon SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller

This is a very hard problem, when working with china, in any capacity. There are whole teams dedicated to this, in larger companies. Usually, it involves IQC where you sample the devices, X-ray them, and verify things are correct. There's also neat thermal methods: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11038103

nomelon Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM

> ... blockchain - was about an explicit race over who could waste the most computing power on nonsensical calculations.

A hard rule of life is, if there are resources available, something will consume them. It's interesting that this also ended up being true for compute!

nomelon Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers–Including Undercover ICE Agents

Yes, on reddit, all things are political. It's a perfect destination!

nomelon I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy

Average is over 12 years [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/americ...

nomelon Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel

The same link shows that a video was also put on his CD in the 70's!

> Their efforts led to a 20-minute video disc in 1973.

> In 1974 Digital Recording Corporation announced ... the first device to digitize a color image, at a Chicago trade show. The response from large potential investors was rather cool.

And, there's LaserDisc, of course (although analog, unlike the digital disk in the above), which was somewhat of a flop (the ridiculous dimensions being part of the cause).

Tangentially related, BlueRay was more about just waiting for a blue led to be invented, than some new disc tech! [1]

[1] There was a really great youtube video about it, but can't find it. Se here's a bad generic recap: https://ssleec.ucsb.edu/news/nobel/professor-shuji-nakamura-...

nomelon Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers–Including Undercover ICE Agents

I flag all political submissions because reddit already exists.

nomelon If IPv4 were land

My digital calipers can display freedom fractions. It makes my eyes bleed.

nomelon If IPv4 were land

I know little of this. How/why could one be higher latency over the other?

nomelon H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Sorry, but it's only apple to oranges if you already know the answer. That answer, explained in the next section, is very clearly intended for someone who didn't already know it:

> This concept of throwing away bits you don't need to save space is called lossy compression. H.264 is a lossy codec - it throws away less important bits and only keeps the important bits.

> PNG is a lossless codec. It means that nothing is thrown away. Bit for bit, the original source image can be recovered from a PNG encoded image.

nomelon H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Yes, as they explain shortly after, in the next section "shedding weight".

They're not actually confused here. It's a writing style, where you pose an interesting problem/scenario, then explain it.

nomelon Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel

Nope [1]. Starting in the 70's, with:

> However, like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM found few interested investors at first.

And then in 1975:

> Philips Electronics representatives visited Russell’s Battelle lab in the summer of 1975, and they discounted the entire premise of his work.

[1] http://www.computer-timeline.com/timeline/james-russel-compa...

nomelon Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements

I'm having trouble believing this comment chain is happening/neccesary. I feel completely disconnected from the thought process of a large portion of society.

nomelon Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements

Did they discharge the gun? If so, was it towards anyone? If so, who was it towards and what was the intent? Was anyone harmed during that discharge?

nomelon Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel

Cavitation limits hydrofoil top speeds to ~60 knots. Although, there's a neat profile that just ignores top surface lift entirely [1] (probably at the expense of drag?).

[1] https://www.metstrade.com/news/sustainability/record-hunters...

nomelon Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel

Do you have any good examples of tech that was immediately embraced without any prior examples or failures to monetize? I'm having trouble thinking of any.

nomelon Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements

> for political reasons

It's not clear that this is political. The Venn diagram for people against ICE's existence, and those that are left leaning, is a near perfect circle. The only group against ICE are left leaning, so they would be the only ones to investigate, regarding any actions against ICE.

nomelon A Printer Printing onto Paper

> first time I encountered this piezoelectric effect in technology

I suspect you encountered a piezo speaker [1] before a printer. ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectric_speaker

nomelon Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

I've pirated several books, movies, games, and music albums because there was literally no way to give someone my money for them. I can't imagine trying to acquire things legitimately, at scale.

nomelon Python's experimental JIT to be removed

> on typed python code.

A fairly massive undertaking for existing code, which jit was supposed to be useful for.

nomelon Genie 4

If it's anything like their other anything related to AI, we're seeing cherry picked "best possible" examples.

nomelon Genie 4

Not that I have zero trust in anything AI related that Google demos, but the first video example on the right, the model completely ignores inputs towards the end.

nomelon A Printer Printing onto Paper

No, that is "bubble jet". Inkjets are proper resonant squirts, usually piezo driven.

And, for that reason, inkjets work with a much wider variety of liquids. Taken to the extreme, you have full color 3d prints with incredible precision: https://youtu.be/4IkvzMJihuY

nomelon A Printer Printing onto Paper

Not sure if that's bubble jet or inkjet, but I think inkjets are very very cool!

For a deep dive of inkjets, there's a conference that posts talks: https://youtube.com/@theijc

And, a shallower dive of the complexities of inks is the great "engineerguy": https://youtu.be/-DckWNwE7R4

nomelon The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive

Looking at the 2024 to 2025 archive, it's around 1TB/year:

https://app.browsertrix.com/explore/usgov-archive/collection...

If that's true, something has clearly gone wildly wrong with the, most likely several, departments involved/created with maintaining this. I suspect if you look at the breakdown, it's 90% administrative costs, with the rest being inflated Cisco contracts, or whatever other parasite latched on.

As others have said, it's been archived already.

nomelon The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive

Relevant text from TFA:

> This isn’t the first time the environmental agency has tried to shutter the online web archive. In late January 2022, the Biden administration EPA announced plans to discontinue the online repository, citing burdensome financial upkeep; through a Freedom of Information Act request, Gehrke was able to determine that the agency spent roughly $2 million a year to maintain it. A coalition of environmentalists, historians, and librarians swiftly condemned the decision, with groups like the EDGI and American Society for Environmental History calling the announcement “alarming” and cause for a “tremendous gap” in the historical record.

> After five months of public backlash, the EPA acquiesced, in part by announcing it would delay the web archive’s retirement by one year to July 2023.

nomelon Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

The big tech companies are getting old. I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time, driven by the fact that a person will more readily hire someone they can understand than someone that is more intelligent/competent/effective. This causes a slow degradation.

I also think there's been a drastic shift in the working culture of tech/engineering spaces, in general, over the last 15 years. From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.

nomelon Caffeine-like utility to keep you MacBook awake with its lid closed

Oops, didn't follow user names. My mistake.

And, I've been using these for around 9 years. A few I tried most definitely did re-enable on exit. Not sure why file count is a concern, or especially LOC (a truly horrendous metric to target, with the outcome being unintelligible code golf when optimized for). All that I used were exactly one file I was concerned with: a binary or shell script.

This has become strange. Cheers!