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plankers

666 karma · joined May 11, 2018

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plankers··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
modeling the heat transfer modes in Enceladus' icy shell that rests above its liquid water ocean. previous modeling has assumed that all heat transfer is conductive, but using dynamical simulations i've shown that under certain conditions convection can occur at in the shell. specifically, these conditions are having a thick enough ice shell, the right amount of porous fluffy ice deposited from the plumes at Enceladus' south pole which jet water into space through fissures in the crust, and the right thermal conductivity of this porous layer.

now i'm starting on adjusting the model to include the liquid water ocean underneath the shell and observe the effect of changing viscosity gradients in the equilibration of the ocean and ice shell, as well as adding in compositional impurities (chloride brines) and tidal heating effects.

plankers··on What if we made advertising illegal?
Trotting this out again because somehow it hasn't completely saturated the internet yet:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

--Upton Sinclair

plankers··on It's not a crime if we do it with an app
The U.S. before antitrust laws existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Steel_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Pacific_Railroad

plankers··on I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year
i procrastinated on my bachelor's thesis for ~5 years. the school ended up changing the graduation requirements before i finished it.

never underestimate the power of stubbornness.

plankers··on Ask HN: Developer abused “sign in with GitHub”?
maybe, just maybe, having friction in logging into web services is a good thing.

i, for one, am not a fan of the tendency for every web service to require an account in the first place. making it easier for people to log in to these unnecessary accounts is helpful in discouraging this practice, as it will decrease utilization of services which require such superfluous accounts.

plankers··on Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software
On public roads with other people who haven't consented to testing anything, no less.
plankers··on Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software
So I guess this means Volvos will be... crashing... less?
plankers··on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
sounds like the devs over at SAP need to unionize if they want to stop pushing user-unfriendly software
plankers··on White House Is Mulling a Ban on Bitcoin Mining
enforcement would probably happen at the level of the power utility. large mining operations have agreements with utilities to buy power at wholesale prices, the utilities know what the power is being used for

the real beneficiaries of this would be small miners (small business owners?) who either use their own locally generated power or the residential grid. oh, and all the people who don't mine in the US

plankers··on Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
coincidentally, i'm sure the rent freeze has had a positive effect on your ability to pay your bills without stress
plankers··on Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
a proper marxist critique of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" hypothesis:

Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

from the conclusion:

>This article highlights that alternative theories grounded in empirical research are required to understand the social suffering caused by the feelings of useless work that Graeber observes. Therefore, our third major contribution is to demonstrate the value of Marx’s writings on alienation. We take inspiration from Marx’s understanding of alienation to investigate whether the social relations of work can explain why millions of workers do not feel that their work is useful. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the development of workers’ human capacities may be fettered by social relations at work.

plankers··on Ask HN: Why doesn’t Apple allow torrent clients on the app store?
pretty sure it's just HN being HN
plankers··on The dictatorship of the articulate
right, it's the fault of regulators that every major industry has come do be dominated by a small handful of conglomerates that survive by mimicking each other and consuming every smaller challenger that might one day, through the power of innovation, grow and compete with the existing monoliths.

oh wait, that's the opposite of regulation that caused that. my bad.

plankers··on What would a “good” WebMD look like?
it would be run by a publicly-funded consortium of doctors, social scientists, and public health experts with no mandate to earn a profit, for one.
plankers··on The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
Good. The only way we're going to get these selfish Americans to sacrifice anything is if we force them.
plankers··on The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
agriculture provides me with food to eat. lawns do not. i would rather have food to eat than useless patches of grass.
plankers··on They're trying to get me kidnapped and tortured, but Twitter doesn't care
twitter is interested in making money. there's far more money to be made pandering to governments than in pandering to dissidents. the content moderation policies are just extra steps in justifying that stance.
plankers··on Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I
Interesting that I haven't seen any discussion of the housing monopolies that were castigated in that study, given how vigorous discussion was on that topic when that study was posted here.

The study largely blames HUD and builders unions for squeezing manufactured home builders out of the market with zoning laws, government programs which favored stick-built housing, and further regulations which make buying and owning a manufactured home undesirable. This discussion of course only applies to the US.

plankers··on Nobody wants to teach anymore
Pay teachers more and more people will teach. On a website so dedicated to discussion of free market principles, the amount of rationalization people put themselves through to avoid this simple conclusion is both funny and tragic.
plankers··on Instinctive sleeping and resting postures: an anthropological study (2000)
i can only sleep on my side. you get used to tucking your chin in as is described in the article pretty quickly
plankers··on Instinctive sleeping and resting postures: an anthropological study (2000)
been sleeping without a pillow since college. my neck problems disappeared immediately when i made the switch. there are so many unexamined habits in our culture. a lot of defaulting to short-term comfort without considering what the long-term consequences might be, too.
plankers··on Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)
i don't know what to call uncontrollable positive feedback loops in the global temperature if not a "collapse"
plankers··on Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)
excuse me, what? they got their housing under control just as soon as they were able to modernize their agriculture-based economy into a modern industrial workforce in less than 50 years

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249206/us-ussr-comparis...

plankers··on Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)
you didn't even hit the core dependency: a capitalist operating system which inherently directs capital to a small pool of people
plankers··on Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)
Seems humanity is headed towards Asimov's Caves of Steel anyway due to climate collapse, so you'll get your wish.
plankers··on WeWork's former CEO has a new startup, reportedly valued at more than $1B
tell that to the legacy of margaret thatcher and "there is no alternative"
plankers··on WeWork's former CEO has a new startup, reportedly valued at more than $1B
Lemmy is looking up on us and smiling in eager anticipation
plankers··on Observations on tragedy in a digital age
maybe the millenia old concept that's been culturally relevant enough to stay in our lexicon all that time is a better explanation than pop psychology, yeah.

for all the miracles of modern social science and statistics, the ancients' theories have a critical advantage over ours. they've had time for their hypotheses to be borne out.

plankers··on Man who robbed bank to get his own money back hailed as national hero
environmental stability
plankers··on Observations on tragedy in a digital age
>So I don't think it's really that we're in a "digital age," it's just that we have a lot more explanations for things than the classicists did.

s/explanations/rationalizations

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