Hacker News: XRG

New comment by XRG in "U.S. science is in chaos"

XRG — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:57:22 +0000

As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.

New comment by XRG in "Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product"

XRG — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:40:08 +0000

My first guess was that they used an external brick for the power supply with a relatively low output voltage--that would eliminate a lot of the CE test load. However, a cursory glance at the product photos suggests the power supply sits within the base of the lamp. Maybe the product developer can shed some more light on this. ;-)

New comment by XRG in "Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance"

XRG — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 16:12:29 +0000

Cells specialize based on the presence of certain chemical gradients, for example. These types of 'signals' that guide specialization already become apparent in a very early stage of embryonic development. I don't think that's part of the realm of epigenetics.

New comment by XRG in "The Digital Markets Act: time for a reset"

XRG — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 07:37:23 +0000

I can’t imagine anyone in my environment becoming really angry over this. Some of them would have to find new time sinks though—-hopefully ones that actually benefit them instead of turning them into commodities.

New comment by XRG in "iFixit iPhone Air teardown"

XRG — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 07:32:06 +0000

Don’t agree with this take; software doesn’t need repairs when you drop your phone, when it is submerged, when it is charged/discharged daily for a few years, and so on. Freedom to use your hardware however you like is more of an ideological discussion, whereas repairs are simply necessary due to the unavoidable wear-and-tear.

New comment by XRG in "AI, but at What Cost? Breakdown of AI's Carbon Footprint"

XRG — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 13:20:31 +0000

If we assume the indicated 400 W load with a total processing time of 20 s per user query, and 20 mio queries per day (‘daily users’), shouldn’t the daily consumption be closer to 44 kWh? (20 mio x 0.4 kW x 20 s / 3600 s/h) Other than that, the energy use for LLMs is obviously substantial. I seem to remember that the operating costs should be fairly evenly split between hardware (i.e., GPU) depreciation and energy costs.