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peterdsharpe

213 karma · joined March 12, 2022

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peterdsharpe··on Korean Air is asking passengers to step on the scales before boarding
Wow, Hilderman's quore is just factually incorrect where he says:

"Fuel is 20 times more than the passenger weight"

For most transport aircraft, passenger mass fraction is roughly 12%-18% depending on what's included (cargo, seats, etc.), while fuel mass fraction is around 30% to 40%.

So this ratio is more like 2 or 3, not 20.

Passenger weight is absolutely a huge factor (speaking as an aerospace engineer focusing on vehicle design and flight performance).

peterdsharpe··on We now believe that the game is over. LK-99 is not a superconductor
There is a difference between saying "We believe LK-99 is NOT a superconductor" and "We do not believe LK-99 is a superconductor". The former is a hypothesis, the latter is a rejection of a hypothesis. The latter is really just expressing a return to an agnostic base state. Hence, the former requires evidence, and the latter is the null hypothesis.
peterdsharpe··on Tell HN: I think I found Toyota's battery
Perhaps "safer than CO" is fair, but "much safer than CO" may be a bit of a stretch. H2S is the #2 cause of fatal chemical inhalations in the workplace, behind CO:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2019/fatal-chemical-inhalations...

peterdsharpe··on Tell HN: I think I found Toyota's battery
I think H2S is somewhat bigger of a safety risk than presented here.

For example, check out this case where what you describe (battery rupture) happened, killing both occupants from H2S inhalation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161005164308/http://www.wesh.c...

And this was only from a starter battery, not a battery sized for vehicle locomotion.

peterdsharpe··on Rust vs. Julia in scientific computing
Generally this doesn't feel like a problem with Python, due to its massive user base advantage. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and many others contribute tens of billions of dollars annually to Python-ecosystem projects (PyTorch, Tensorflow, faster-cpython). Unless that funding differential changes I can't see Julia competing.
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