Hacker News: 3ple_alpha

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Much of the World Facing 'Water Bankruptcy,' U.N. Report Warns"

3ple_alpha — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:03:34 +0000

There are some partial solutions that are fairly simple in concept, for example those related to farming. Some of the crops grown in regions where water is less than abundant are unnecessarily water-intensive, leading to a possible strategy that can be summarised as "grow something else". In practice this means regulating farming with emphasis on water management, I often feel that many places could use more regulation in this area.

Simple concept does not mean simple execution, once you start regulating things it's easy to get it wrong, but the ideas are there and are not exactly novel.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Claude Shannon's randomness-guessing machine"

3ple_alpha — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:29:07 +0000

Did you stop after 14 iterations? Because the game is, in fact, infinite.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal"

3ple_alpha — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:56:29 +0000

Removing tariffs on beef specifically is a serious mistake, there's no need to incentivise any more production of that.

Other agricultural imports, like soy and coffee beans, are a huge boon to the EU on the other hand. If this results in cheaper coffee, everyone in my country, for one, will be ecstatic.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

3ple_alpha — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:36:32 +0000

Vans work just fine on mountain roads. And driving off road is simply not a thing for like 99% of drivers.

Reality is, people buy these things thinking they would drive them off road, and never actually do it.

It's possible to make an off-road van, by the way. It's just that real demand is so vanishingly small that you don't really see them.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Ask HN: Unemployed almost a year after graduating MIT – a rant"

3ple_alpha — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:15:27 +0000

Don't let this situation define who you are, there is more to life than one particular career path (or even payed work in general, to be honest). Just because things haven't worked out the way you wanted at this time, does not make you "a failure" by any means, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Others have (and will) given specific career advice, meanwhile I'd like to emphasise this: you absolutely can, and should, do hobbies, preferably including such that involve physical activity cause that's good for your health. Doomscrolling is not a good one. You have every right to have free time and to enjoy it, everyone does.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Sinclair C5"

3ple_alpha — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:40:26 +0000

Execution could have been a bit better but ultimately it's really hard to make electric vehicles with 1980s battery technology. Just about the only successful EV of the era was the golf cart and that's very niche.

Electric moped was right idea but some 30 years ahead of its time.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?"

3ple_alpha — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:38:26 +0000

Android seems to be a bit better in that regard: not in the sense that applications are smaller (though I think they are, slightly), but rather that you can easily unpack or decompile most of them and see what's inside.

There it tends to be mostly due to dependencies, including some native libraries in multiple copies for 2-3 CPU architecture.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending"

3ple_alpha — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:43:52 +0000

MS auth service as such does support TOTP (though even then it won't stop bugging you about the authenticator) but then it probably depends on how those resources are configured. Never been on admin side of it so don't know if it's on by default.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky has died"

3ple_alpha — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:38:14 +0000

Even my local Swedish newspaper paid him respects. It may feel a bit better knowing that somewhere half way across the world, people knew him and considered him a celebrity.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

3ple_alpha — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:38:46 +0000

There's a bit more to it since you do need to do last bit of configuration (pull up the nose) just as you hit the target speed. But yeah, automatic take-off is quite a bit easier than automatic rejection of take-off.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Personal aviation is about to get interesting (2023)"

3ple_alpha — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 06:52:08 +0000

It is not true that reliability requires old-style engine design, it's more a question of cost. Modern jet airliners (their engines but also really everything about them) have a ton of complexity, including a myriad of electrical control systems, yet they are no less reliable.

It's just that this is not a fair comparison because manufacturers of said airliners have more resources for R&D.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer"

3ple_alpha — Thu, 08 May 2025 13:29:49 +0000

> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

I don't, I ride electric. It's not just leisure rides, too, noise is just as important for daily commute.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight"

3ple_alpha — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:51:46 +0000

Too bad all European spaceports seem to be so awkwardly placed for the purpose of spectating launches. Main one in one of the most remote areas of jungle in the world, there's one in Sweden (been focusing on suborbital launches) far to the north where only moose live, now this. Americans are really lucky in that regard.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "We are destroying software"

3ple_alpha — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 22:21:44 +0000

You can also reproduce it within a week without hosted cloud services. What matters is that you don't have to develop custom software and instead spend that week writing config files and orchestration scripts, be it cloud stuff, docker containers or whatever.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Life on a Closed Timelike Curve"

3ple_alpha — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:51:28 +0000

So they assume four-dimensional space-time of a certain shape, similar to how a two-dimensional sheet could be curved taking various shape. Then they calculate how would physical objects behave in space-time of that shape.

Can such shapes exist anywhere in our universe, realistically or even just theoretically? For all we know, perhaps not.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Norway on track to be first to go all-electric"

3ple_alpha — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 12:29:31 +0000

I can name several that can cover significant part of local demand with solar power. Or perhaps they'd have energy storage to fully cover it by now had they invested into that.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Ask HN: How to approach first days on a new job as a senior PM?"

3ple_alpha — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:40:47 +0000

Depends if the project started with you or was ongoing. If it is the latter, defer to pre-existing coworkers to an extent at first.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Lead and cadmium found in muscle-building protein powders, report says"

3ple_alpha — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 20:29:36 +0000

For chronic exposure, yes. You don't want it to be in your food all the time. But accidentally eating a tiny bit once would be safe.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken (2006)"

3ple_alpha — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:07:05 +0000

No they're not. If you're using an array with length over a billion in Java, your code stinks already before you start using binary search.

New comment by 3ple_alpha in "NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker"

3ple_alpha — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 22:28:30 +0000

I've driven electric motorbike for 7 years and it's absolutely great for everyday commute. Lighter ones tend to have removable batteries so they work even when you don't have a garage with electric outlet. Some heavier ones you can even take on an occasional long trip, though that's not super convenient – it's commuting (combined with joy of riding) that makes them useful.

One does need to know where one is going to service it, though, because they can sometimes have stupid electrical issues which are objectively easy to fix but hard for you to fix on your own cause you don't know which wire goes where.