Hacker News: HPsquared

New comment by HPsquared in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

HPsquared — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:44:17 +0000

There was surely also a lot of political will coming from car users. Motorists are a large and vocal constituency.

New comment by HPsquared in "L'Affaire Siloxane"

HPsquared — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:57:09 +0000

Megabucks is a common word but not often used as a unit

New comment by HPsquared in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

HPsquared — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:47:09 +0000

Extremely constrained mass and volume budgets must cause a lot of difficulty. The drill and wheels, say, were engineered right to the limits to make them as compact and light as possible. A drill with twice the mass and size would probably be 10x as effective. Same with the wheels.

New comment by HPsquared in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

HPsquared — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:22:21 +0000

Maybe there is a German law against spamming.

New comment by HPsquared in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

HPsquared — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:08:38 +0000

It's giving Sony. Similar situation where you have a media business and also make some of the distribution channels including engineering of devices used to consume the content.

New comment by HPsquared in "My automated doubt development process"

HPsquared — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:38:23 +0000

Yes, it's called "questioning attitude", one of the traits of a healthy nuclear safety culture (and a good thing to apply in other fields!)

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1433/ML14338A739.pdf

New comment by HPsquared in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

HPsquared — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:15:38 +0000

The eternal conflict between "design for manufacture" and "design for maintenance".

New comment by HPsquared in "ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks"

HPsquared — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:30:11 +0000

Local and containerised, without internet access.

New comment by HPsquared in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

HPsquared — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:01:41 +0000

The abbreviation "BoM" (bill of materials) is commonly used in engineering. It's also pronounced just how you might suspect. I wonder if it's consciously avoided in sectors like these.

New comment by HPsquared in "Associative learning turns DEET from aversive to appetitive in Aedes aegypti"

HPsquared — Sun, 31 May 2026 08:52:32 +0000

A bit like how capsaicin was evolved to prevent things being eaten by mammals, but... Well.. humans came along and developed a taste for it.

"Evolution! Can you give me capsaicin, to deter mammals? I want birds to spread my seeds!"

https://youtu.be/1fW2uTRdUJU

New comment by HPsquared in "We should be more tired than the model"

HPsquared — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:05:52 +0000

This kind of structure is also important when writing. You guide the reader through stages of awareness and understanding.

New comment by HPsquared in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"

HPsquared — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:32:07 +0000

Science is like that too, it's mostly very tedious and repetitive work.

New comment by HPsquared in "Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act"

HPsquared — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:45:28 +0000

Batteries are more than a choking hazard; they can cause severe internal chemical burns, gut perforation and so on initiated by electrolysis.

New comment by HPsquared in "Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act"

HPsquared — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:08:53 +0000

There's a lot of work to be done.

New comment by HPsquared in "XLIDE: VBA without excel"

HPsquared — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:53:58 +0000

I think with AI and the continued availability of VBA, people will create a lot of new monstrosities.

New comment by HPsquared in "The Art of Money Getting"

HPsquared — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:50:18 +0000

Generalist jobs are all about that System 2 thinking. I never developed it, so my general power is limited.

New comment by HPsquared in "Hengefinder: Finding when the sun aligns with your street"

HPsquared — Sat, 23 May 2026 18:28:42 +0000

Smartphones have the huge advantage of direction sensors (3D magnetometer and gyro). I remember using apps like Google sky map (or something like that) way back in 2011 to look at satellites and planets.

New comment by HPsquared in "The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics"

HPsquared — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:29:50 +0000

I wonder if aggressive swapping could help a bit. Higher performing SSDs with endurance. Unless flash memory is also being squeezed...

New comment by HPsquared in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

HPsquared — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:51:14 +0000

The basic "language translation" part was never hard, but design is hard.

New comment by HPsquared in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

HPsquared — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:50:24 +0000

That's a halting problem, I think.