Hacker News: acdha

New comment by acdha in "Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone"

acdha — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:25:06 +0000

There’s a massive confound around vehicle size, too: EV buyers are less likely to get massive trucks and SUVs because that extra bulk drives cost up and range down, and when you’re comparing tire particulates the numbers will be more favorable for a EV sedan compared to an ICE SUV.

New comment by acdha in "Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone"

acdha — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:21:16 +0000

EVs aren’t a panacea but they’re a lot better than a 10% improvement. You still have tires but losing engine particulates, fumes, noise, and heat is a huge win in a city - bike or walk near one and you can feel the difference.

New comment by acdha in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era"

acdha — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:15:27 +0000

Does anyone use one of foldables for more than a year? I know a couple of people who have them and the massive creases seem like they’d be really hard to get used to.

New comment by acdha in "Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions"

acdha — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:14:24 +0000

> No, the copyright issue is nonsense

This is wishful thinking for any project of Debian’s size. You not wanting to deal with it doesn’t mean that people won’t get sued.

New comment by acdha in "Coin-sized device can hack a Boeing 737"

acdha — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:08:56 +0000

That still seems better than saying that we have a right to use other people’s work on our terms. People used to subscribe to multiple magazines and that paid for a lot of journalists.

New comment by acdha in "Coin-sized device can hack a Boeing 737"

acdha — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:04:31 +0000

Defenders have to think about multiple threats. Explosives are harder to get, conceal from certain types of scans, and are more overtly deliberate. Neither of these is a common threat but that doesn’t mean people don’t harden against low probability/ high damage events.

New comment by acdha in "Coin-sized device can hack a Boeing 737"

acdha — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:54:49 +0000

There used to be journalists in every town or city working for local newspapers back when ad revenue stayed local. Don’t confuse the success of a handful of top journals with the health of the field.

> In 1990 we had one daily news(paper) journalist for every 4,490 Americans. Now (or 2019 to be exact), we have one such reporter per 14,250.

https://www.reportforamerica.org/2021/06/28/the-journalist-p...

New comment by acdha in "Coin-sized device can hack a Boeing 737"

acdha — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:49:21 +0000

> Just as with computers, as the saying goes, if you have physical access to the device then all bets are off

This is far less true than it used to be, though, and it seems reasonable to expect that aircraft become as secure as Macs.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:59:54 +0000

2023: https://www.energy-storage.news/australias-first-grid-scale-...

2024: https://www.indexbox.io/blog/australias-battery-storage-flee...

https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-11/californias-battery-s...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10022025/solar-battery-st...

Note how massive home battery deployment drove all of Australia’s wholesale power price down by half:

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/australia-home-batteries

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:31:05 +0000

Maybe, although nuclear construction and mining aren’t safer and there’s a probability issue over time but more importantly, nuclear is too slow to be what we bank on. Solar and wind can produce in months as opposed to decades and we should treat nuclear as the long term option for that last bit of heavy production, not the primary. It guaranteed pollution until some point two decades from now when it finally displaces fossil fuels.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:13:13 +0000

So several years ago. There’s grid scale storage in use around the world. This is not alien tech, just a matter of engineering.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:04:36 +0000

Can you show your math explaining how my solar panels change production or retroactively cost more after a war on the other side of the planet? Short of nuclear winter, you can reliably predict what they’ll generate years out with far less volatility.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:02:19 +0000

Neither of those are caused by your power system whereas large-scale pollution is unavoidable with fossil fuels.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:01:20 +0000

That’s not external, though: what we’re seeing now are a ton of people struggling because two countries they have no control over are at war. If they used solar and their local government changed the pricing, they’d have some outlet for relief in a way they don’t now.

Also, we have battery technology. Bursty doesn’t mean real engineers can’t build reliable systems, and the economic factors can spur a lot of efficiency improvements.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:58:51 +0000

I guess you could see it that way but I don’t think that quite fits because the extra heat retention isn’t due to a failure in the solar power system, and was happening before those even existed. Maybe if there was something like a brushfire caused by someone’s system overheating?

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:56:23 +0000

> The price of solar power is governed by the events happening in China.

Events in China do not retroactively change your solar panels or wind farm. You might choose to buy from a different supplier but there’s no equivalent of all of the people who are now struggling with food and housing insecurity because of two other countries fighting thousands of miles away.

> But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed.

This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the United States where laws are being broken at the federal level to prevent cheaper renewable projects from going online, but it’s common to other corrupt petro-states as well.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:52:48 +0000

Yes, but if we took the enormous amount used for power generation and transportation away we’d buy a lot more runway to migrate aviation and industrial chemistry.

New comment by acdha in "Major oil slick washes up on Iran coast after Hormuz ship strike"

acdha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:12:18 +0000

In addition to being cheaper, you never hear about a massive sun or wind spill and the prices never change due to events thousands of miles away.

New comment by acdha in "Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta"

acdha — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:29:45 +0000

> If you don't see it, it is because you have closed your eyes. It is across countries and reported in main stream media all the time. Rap music is a core part of ongoing gang conflicts in many countries, apart from the general violence and sexual crime it inspires and glorifies.

It’s weird how this is simultaneously a “core part of ongoing gang conflicts” and something you can’t support in the slightest.

New comment by acdha in "Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta"

acdha — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:51:53 +0000

It’s complicated, yes, but my point is essentially just that someone saying “ are stealing our country! Force them out!” is specifically calling for violence directed against that group in a way that, say, a movie full of mayhem probably isn’t. That’s because, say, Paramount has editorial control and will never greenlight anything close to what many Facebook / X accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers say every day.