Hacker News: 3eb7988a1663

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo"

3eb7988a1663 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:44:34 +0000

The signal speed in fiber is some 200k km/s. If you go 10 miles outside of a city, you are adding 0.1ms ping, and you will have dramatically fewer pitch forks.

The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast"

3eb7988a1663 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:31:25 +0000

Wikipedia has an article about it[0]. Gas had been leaking for three years before they were able to use a nuke to seal the well. Estimated that it was burning 12 million m3 of gas daily.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Kelly Criterion Simulator"

3eb7988a1663 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:35:50 +0000

What is DP?

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust"

3eb7988a1663 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:27:36 +0000

What mythical software is this? The only infinitely customizable software I can think of is emacs, and that takes an enormous amount of effort to become proficient.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust"

3eb7988a1663 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:25:11 +0000

You are assuming the changes would all be positive, minus some UI hassle. I have seen plenty of products where vital workflows were scrapped entirely or made significantly more clunky.

Modern software is quicksand. Maybe an update improves things, but users have all experienced working software made worse.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours"

3eb7988a1663 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:06:15 +0000

There was also the video where he did write the doctoral research project in a weekend.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours"

3eb7988a1663 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:43:44 +0000

Gutenberg's copy of Moby Dick is 1.2MB[0]. Which is to say the slowest benchmarked terminal could display a paltry ~53 Moby Dicks per second, while shitty gives you ~98 Moby Dicks.

I am not sure how many Moby Dicks I require per second, but it is good to have options.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

3eb7988a1663 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:39:06 +0000

On the other hand, plenty of NAS/file server systems are going to have paltry CPU and memory. Running slower with a more modest memory foot print might be the only way to keep the system stable.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

3eb7988a1663 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 15:34:54 +0000

I imagine there is no free lunch in the allocator space, but a series of trade-offs. Pick your poison on implementation which is going to be sub-optimal for some subset of use cases.

Without a hugely compelling reason to switch, going with the default is reasonable.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Sand battery: Finland's answer to a renewable energy headache"

3eb7988a1663 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:52:53 +0000

Roughly a quarter of global energy is directed towards industrial heating. There are many "hot rocks" companies who have been commercializing ways to time shift cheap/free daily solar to night or even longer stretches.

I personally like Rondo's pitch[0] which is stacking concrete bricks into "heat batteries".

[0] https://www.rondo.com/

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

3eb7988a1663 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:23:31 +0000

This is my core question as well. At what point do you have to maintain property so the government can use it to testify against yourself?

If I have a dash-cam, and I wipe the SD card, can the government imply that because I erased the card, it must prove that I was speeding? The dash-cam automatically over-writes old footage - perpetually destroying evidence.

Given nebulous cases such as "hacking" a site by looking at the HTML[0], am I destroying evidence of crimes whenever I format my PC? I hope the government requires specific charges and more proof of a crime other than missing evidence. Say I destroy my diary - can the government claim that is the key evidence where I confessed to being the gunman on the grassy knoll?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28992667

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Some more things about Django I've been enjoying"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:31:56 +0000

As things get more complicated, I will separate out by some kind of concept. Which can be something as simple as:

  /coreapp
    /forms_foo.py
    /forms_bar.py
    /models_bar.py
    /models_foo.py
    /views_bar.py
    /views_foo.py

You can do a more sophisticated module layout, but essentially something as straightforward as the above, all under a single "core" application. Prevents Django from fighting you when you want to work across the arbitrary "app" boundary.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Some more things about Django I've been enjoying"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:08:57 +0000

Not the author, but I no not understand the desire to use multiple apps. I am never going to want to carve one out as a separate module I re-use in another product. It is all interconnected, why add arbitrary boundaries separating them? Put everything into a "core" app and move on with life. Maybe if you are an enormous organization working on Instagram where you have rigid responsibilities per team.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "The Strongest El Niño Ever"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:58:45 +0000

I live in SoCal and am continually shaking my head at the architecture. So my floor-to-ceiling glass buildings in a climate known for sunny weather. So much extra air-conditioning will be spent to cool those buildings compared to if they had been built more reflective.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "The relay market powering token resellers and fraud"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:54:53 +0000

How do you know the reseller is even giving you the genuine article? Could they be advertising Fable but repacking Deepseek?

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Running a 28.9M parameter LLM on an $8 microcontroller"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:06:28 +0000

Unless I am mis-reading the benchmarks, some of those are run as CPU only, no GPU involvement.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:02:48 +0000

I expect this that the case is going to get dismissed on technical grounds without addressing the core issue. If you are not directly charged with the specific offense, what is the limit of "destroying evidence" as its own crime?

  - If I rob a bank and then burn all of my planning materials after the crime - did I destroy evidence?
  - If I rob a bank, the police question me but do not charge me with anything. I then burn all of the planning materials - did I destroy evidence?
  - If I rob a bank, the police have a warrant to search my house in relation to an unrelated insurance scam across the street. Then I burn all of my bank heist materials - did I destroy evidence?

When the police are "just having a chat" and you later destroy all of your papers which might have been linked to a crime - isn't that fully within my rights to destroy my property? When do I have an explicit requirement to maintain my effects so the state can use it against me?

If I have a dash-cam in my car and it records me speeding - am I not allowed to overwrite the old footage? What if that dash-cam footage is the only thing that proves a crime were committed? Now I am forced to let my possessions testify against me.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Running a 28.9M parameter LLM on an $8 microcontroller"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 02:22:58 +0000

That's incredible. Sure, not practical for most applications, but if you really want a local top tier model, you can run it on anything as long as you are patient.

As someone with a healthy amount of RAM, but just a 16GB GPU, I am wondering what kind of work I could queue up for overnight runs. I thought the best models were fully out of reach, but the 128GB CPU only test had a 1.8 tokens/second. While not speedy, you could probably do something with that given extensive coffee breaks. This speed simulator[0] demos what it looks like.

[0] https://shir-man.com/tokens-per-second/?speed=1.8

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]"

3eb7988a1663 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:55:28 +0000

They can't get hardware because the US has put restrictions on how much can be sold to China. There is not a technical or know-how limitation, but political. Deepseek could otherwise write some checks to NVidia for what they want.

Thanks to the import restrictions, I expect Chinese GPU hardware to be competitive within a few years.

New comment by 3eb7988a1663 in "Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data"

3eb7988a1663 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 04:55:49 +0000

Not that the administration is trustworthy, but they recently announced that the structural floor is ~70M barrels. Which is significantly lower than other public estimates. Which strikes me as an attempt to ease the market that there is significantly more breathing room.