Hacker News: Hextinium

New comment by Hextinium in "Chest Fridge (2009)"

Hextinium — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:00:12 +0000

This reminds me of the Technology Connections fridge rant video. Similar arguments all around, the dumping effect of cold out of a vertical fridge is pretty crazy to watch with a thermal camera.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CGAhWgkKlHI

New comment by Hextinium in "Stargaze: SpaceX's Space Situational Awareness System"

Hextinium — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 05:32:42 +0000

Seems like a generally good idea, the satellites already need to use star trackers, they need an almanac of what should be there so deviations need to be tracked.

I can entirely see the military perspective though, this is almost a direct challenge for any adversary that any maneuver you perform, we will know about it.

Big Nuclear's Big Mistake – Linear No-Threshold

Hextinium — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:30:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816616

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by Hextinium in "Why the weak nuclear force is short range"

Hextinium — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 18:09:18 +0000

That could very well be what the quantum uncertainty principal is, floating point non deterministic errors. It also could just be drawing comparisons among different problem domains.

New comment by Hextinium in "The Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun"

Hextinium — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 07:12:43 +0000

The Parker solar probe gets much closer than the solar orbiter, 0.046 AU vs 0.28 AU respectively. The successive Venus flybys are to drop it increasingly further into the sun's orbit to take solar atmospheric data on quick flybys while the Solar orbiter is more for spectrograph measurements of the sun's corona, just different mission sets.

New comment by Hextinium in "Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions"

Hextinium — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 05:28:58 +0000

But think about the corollary where places like McMasterCarr have exact products in known quantities, types and breakdowns because they used to be a catalogue. I will go to McMaster 9/10 times because it's just easy to find exactly what I want and so they get my money.

Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.

New comment by Hextinium in "Next gen 3D metal printing"

Hextinium — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 04:39:24 +0000

That's just PVD or CVD, which does massively decrease defects but being a gaseous process slows down growth considerably.

New comment by Hextinium in "Dual antibacterial properties of copper-coated nanotextured stainless steel"

Hextinium — Tue, 21 May 2024 06:02:07 +0000

The conclusion is that the US just has more psychos. But the restraint of wrecking their vehicle to accost me holds them in line. On public transit they can accost me and nothing stops them.

New comment by Hextinium in "Swiss satellite antennas make a comeback as solar powerhouses"

Hextinium — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 15:04:13 +0000

Solar panels are themselves tiled by roundish wafers cut to make squares out of circles. To make them triangles throws away a different tiling advantage.

New comment by Hextinium in "Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?"

Hextinium — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:26:00 +0000

Default to speed and then the first time a device has crashed "your battery has worn to a level that we will have to start slowing down your device or it will keep crashing, will you accept these crashes or slow your device?"

That would be transparent and also allow decisions, if AppleCare also allowed for free battery replacement after receiving that message it would be a PR boon, not a kerfuffle.

New comment by Hextinium in "Why doctors in America earn so much"

Hextinium — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 04:58:36 +0000

Not to mention that most retirement accounts have yearly maximums, if you where making 401k for 10 years at 100k you will have significantly lower effective taxes than a person who made nothing and then sees high earnings trying to put into retirement.

New comment by Hextinium in "Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses"

Hextinium — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 22:14:56 +0000

This is on some android phones, double tapping power will open the camera. I use it all the time to take pictures of information that I don't want to write down, package numbers, measurements, error logs, all just tap tap, point, volume down.

New comment by Hextinium in "Do not put plastic in the microwave"

Hextinium — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 17:15:17 +0000

HDPE is very stiff, MDPE is kinda stiff and LDPE is flimsy. Same monomer just cross linked differently with a different production process. Plastic is chemistry magic.

New comment by Hextinium in "FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones"

Hextinium — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 20:45:57 +0000

A network of "wardriving" drones that use semi-trucks and box trucks as charging hubs while in transit is the next innovation of short distance delivery.

New comment by Hextinium in "'No-water' hydropower turns England's hills into green and pleasant batteries"

Hextinium — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 18:37:37 +0000

After looking up mining slurry densities limestone is 2.7x the density of water. Calcium carbonate (limestone) is also used for filler in some medications. I'm pretty sure its just limestone slurry.

New comment by Hextinium in "Semiconductor Supply Chain Explorer (2022)"

Hextinium — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 01:43:13 +0000

They are the dominant players for sure. I think the biggest reason is that they do everything mostly the same, there is no reason to talk about how deep trench was done independently if Intel did it 10 years before. Or that x technology allows for higher performance. It's all not important to the product offerings and hype train.

New comment by Hextinium in "We are all animals at night"

Hextinium — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:45:41 +0000

There is a comradery in that it sucks, you know it sucks and that we are just getting through it. No one is out to "get" you. You are also part of the suck club.

The second you get another job they are reminded of all the people who take advantage of people in the suck club. You got out. They didn't.

New comment by Hextinium in "Thermochromic Breadboard"

Hextinium — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 21:18:58 +0000

I have used a FLIR TG267 at work to find if parts are failing and while it's only 120x160 it works pretty well because it can overlay thermal coloration over a standard camera which really lets you use those pixels for temperature not identification.

This lets you know "ah this transistor is dead" instead of "what I am I even looking at".

New comment by Hextinium in "Active knowledge"

Hextinium — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 04:11:22 +0000

I have been thinking about this quite intently lately, most things are inherently so complex that you by doing almost anything hit unknown unknowns, things that you don't know you don't know. But you don't need to know. You don't need to know what metallurgical structure a knife is in. It's just a knife.

I think the ability to make something that requires less domain knowledge to use than to make it is in fact the primary thing that moves us along as a species. And that the complexity that we hit when things go wrong is just the manifestation is the principal "there is a long was down to the bottom".

New comment by Hextinium in "YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers"

Hextinium — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 22:14:25 +0000

I was at first super confused by this comment, because cross play has been a thing for at least a year or two without YouTube premium. You just have to enable YouTube history and it will populate across devices. I know a lot of people disabled YouTube history because it tailors the experience but it's a fair tradeoff for continuity.