Hacker News: 1minusp

New comment by 1minusp in "Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers"

1minusp — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:28:40 +0000

I'd like to be able to do something similar, but the old batteries in these things seem like a point of catastrophic failure. How is that dealt with?

New comment by 1minusp in "I still prefer MCP over skills"

1minusp — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:07:11 +0000

Feels to me like the toolchain for using LLMs in various tasks is still in flux (i interpret all of this as "stuff in different places like .md or skills or elsewhere that is appended to the context window" (i hope that is correct)). Shouldnt this overall process be standardized/automated? That is, use some self-reflection to figure out patterns that are then dumped into the optimal place, like a .md file or a skill?

New comment by 1minusp in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

1minusp — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:46:20 +0000

I'd love to believe this, but very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy.

New comment by 1minusp in "Why aren't smart people happier?"

1minusp — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 22:46:43 +0000

Can be argued that there is intuitive satisfaction/pleasure/utility that spectators gain from watching sports competitions. The payoff is a lot more obvious/instant. Whereas with a lot of tech these days, what needle are we really moving? Are people truly happier scrolling for two hours, compared with watching an edge-of-seat soccer game?

New comment by 1minusp in "Lasagna Battery Cell"

1minusp — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:14:04 +0000

I recall way back in the day when Stephen Fry used to host QI, they did a bit about a lasagne battery. Sean Lock was on the panel if i remember and spun it out into a ipod-style "lasagne-pod"

New comment by 1minusp in "Interferometer Device Sees Text from a Mile Away"

1minusp — Wed, 14 May 2025 14:16:32 +0000

i think the applications to spy-craft could be quite interesting here. Something for the next mission impossible movie maybe?

New comment by 1minusp in "The Cannae Problem"

1minusp — Fri, 02 May 2025 16:38:36 +0000

I thought this was about scots/scottish dialects.

New comment by 1minusp in "Analytic Combinatorics – A Worked Example"

1minusp — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:45:51 +0000

I find this interesting but the nomenclature escapes me: How is T(z) = z + zT + zT^2 + ... ? I find the jump from the functional programming description of the tree to this recurrence relation not intuitive

New comment by 1minusp in "Mechanically strong yet metabolizable plastic breaks down in seawater"

1minusp — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:22:03 +0000

This. There seems to be one of these announcements every so often, and i havent seen any of them used at scale, or making any kind of dent in the status quo.

New comment by 1minusp in "Ask HN: Imagine a world with 1Tb/s internet. What would change?"

1minusp — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:52:20 +0000

high fidelity holograms of people for remote presence

New comment by 1minusp in "Artificial intelligence gives weather forecasters a new edge"

1minusp — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 20:20:59 +0000

So GFS->graphcast = more accurate coarse-grained prediction (0,25 degree iirc), -> WRF for fine grained interpolation of forecast?

New comment by 1minusp in "Artificial intelligence gives weather forecasters a new edge"

1minusp — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 15:07:49 +0000

Do you use WRF as an input? I think graphcast uses some kind of NWP input (qhich in my mind i've equated to WRF). Thank you for offering to answer questions!

New comment by 1minusp in "Artificial intelligence gives weather forecasters a new edge"

1minusp — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 14:08:00 +0000

Any comments from experts on how much better these models are compared to running base WRF over GFS forecasts?

New comment by 1minusp in "What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs"

1minusp — Wed, 29 May 2024 16:24:08 +0000

What are some good metrics to evaluate LLM output performance in general? Or is it too hard to quantify at this stage (or not understood well enough). Perhaps the latter, or else those could be in the loss function itself..

New comment by 1minusp in "Booming AI demand threatens global electricity supply"

1minusp — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 19:39:43 +0000

There an interesting line of thinking i've heard (apologies, i forgot which podcast i heard it on), that states that forecasts of electric load growth due to AI are overblown wildly, since they are based on very recent data that only reflects the early-stage explosive growth, and neglects to consider eventual efficiencies that tend to get built into such activities. Electrification of other more 'boring' areas like transport, heating/cooling etc are order of magnitude higher at least.

New comment by 1minusp in "DOE Announces $75M to Advance Desalination and Water Reuse Tech"

1minusp — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 14:08:13 +0000

Hardly worth ones salt

New comment by 1minusp in "Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations [video]"

1minusp — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 21:21:20 +0000

Cost of undergrounding power lines is large. Especially over the distribution network (in that there is a lot more of it over space)

New comment by 1minusp in "Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps"

1minusp — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 21:20:16 +0000

Large drilling costs from where I am in the south due to ground being mostly (lime?)stone: makes it cost-infeasbile. Other areas might have it easier though.

New comment by 1minusp in "Show HN: Scribble Diffusion – Turn your sketch into a refined image using AI"

1minusp — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 20:44:15 +0000

this is neat! I'll have to try this out.

New comment by 1minusp in "Show HN: Scribble Diffusion – Turn your sketch into a refined image using AI"

1minusp — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 18:31:53 +0000

Will be nice to be able to upload a picture/sketch instead of having to sketch something out in the scratchpad. I tend to sketch block diagrams from time to time and hate having to use some tool to draw/drag/align things. Very cool idea though!