Hacker News: artaak

New comment by artaak in "A battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant"

artaak — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 17:37:06 +0000

To me this is an example of extravagant and inefficient use of money. Instead, it should have been used to find a huge pool cavity somewhere high on one of the Hawaiian mountain or enlarge one. And then pump up the water to the pool when the electricity is cheap, and release/generate electricity when it is in demand. Stupid and robust implementation that just works and certainly less expensive than $219M.

Peter Thiel on Bitcoin 2022

artaak — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 02:47:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCgb1lTT4kI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30964863

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by artaak in "Movies every physics lover should watch (2020)"

artaak — Sat, 15 May 2021 17:04:29 +0000

I’m surprised that list doesn’t include a movie UFO. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6290798/

Even though the plot is rather simplistic, it has a few interesting physical concepts embedded in a clever way.

Homomorphic encryption E2E: privacy preserving machine learning on AWS

artaak — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 02:21:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.amazon.science/blog/machine-learning-models-that-act-on-encrypted-data

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786154

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by artaak in "Working Off-Grid Efficiently"

artaak — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 02:06:15 +0000

That's pretty cool - reminds me about an experiment of improving small fridge efficiency by adding insulation on the sides of the fridge. In the end it worked out favourably for energy efficiency angle.

https://coolfridge.blogspot.com/

I'd be grateful if folks point out more improvements/builds that target off-grid home/office setups.

New comment by artaak in "Liquidity Is Coming"

artaak — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 17:19:19 +0000

Great points...believe it or not it happens, but privately, in a case by case manner. Also why do you think companies and founders are in the business of making employees wealthy?! What is the specific reason for all of these being implemented?

New comment by artaak in "San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses"

artaak — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 05:08:43 +0000

Where exactly I “leave lies”? That’s a serious allegation and is thrown very casually here, as if it is self-obvious.

What he says and what will actually happen is two different things, especially in politics. If you have actually examined the URL I’ve posted, you might (maybe?) realize that money isn’t exactly the problem in the SF municipal budget. Maybe it is something else, like ehm.. actual governance?

New comment by artaak in "San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses"

artaak — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 03:39:37 +0000

And where exactly these taxes will go? From pockets of CEOs to pockets of ... municipal bureaucrats, whose median salary floats at a humble mark of 175K/year?

https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget

New comment by artaak in "PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network"

artaak — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 04:34:48 +0000

Look, believe it or not, I am in the same boat - never had issues with paypal, but neither I'm a heavy user. Randomness and the severity of paypal actions is a huge issue for me.

The subject of the discussion is paypal's surprise wedding with crypto. As stated in the above comment, my argument is: from customer perspective it is a bad, crazy proposition.

Hey, paypal has a loooong history of random, inexplicable deplatforming of customers, and mixing that corporate attribute with crypto makes sense only on executive powerpoint slides.

New comment by artaak in "PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network"

artaak — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 23:02:00 +0000

This is a hilariously uninformed statement. Which cryptocurrency?

I'd even argue that the juggernaut BTC was _designed_ to be trackable, and as the recent history shows, law enforcement successfully and multiple times did exactly that when needed - tracked, identified and penalized bad actors.

New comment by artaak in "PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network"

artaak — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 22:52:06 +0000

I've got the invite to paypal's beta program for crypto. Honestly, you've got to be mad to be dealing with paypal. I've read anecdotes from people, losing access to their accounts, locked up money in paypal, etc... It all seemed to be just stories, seemed rare, circumstances unclear. Until one day this summer, out of the blue, paypal demanded ID of my spouse (for her account), and then after reviewing it, "permanently limited" the account, gloriously exclaiming:" Aha, we got your information, now you won't be able to use your current account nor open a new one!"

Trying to get to the customer support is yet another saga, and I will spare your time, but the net result is nil. Nobody in the support knows why the ban happened (there was no real reason to ban a paypal customer with over 8+ years, buying some random stuff on ebay), nobody can revert it, nobody really cares and there are no appeals.

Receiving a note from paypal today regarding crypto looked like a bad, really dumb joke to me and an insult for my spouse. You gotta be completely clueless or insane to trust this shitty company with your crypto. One of the key points for crypto is the lack of "deplatforming", which the sinister paypal does left and right, at the same time not even being able to explain its actions, nor comprehend consequences.

Paypal - never!

New comment by artaak in "Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height"

artaak — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 19:29:40 +0000

Could you cite an example where ECC requirement on GPU was real and demonstrated to be needed? In practice, I don't know anyone who'd willfully take 10-15% perf hit on GPUs, because of a cosmic ray.

The thermal design for "datacenter" card can be better for sure. And on-board memory size and design. That's about it. For how many x over geforce price tag is that?

New comment by artaak in "Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees"

artaak — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 23:41:36 +0000

It is very known thing. Whatever reasons were to create Glassdoor, but now in practice, it became an instrument of misdirection and is used to _deliberately_ and _intentionally_ mislead people.

New comment by artaak in "Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?"

artaak — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 19:46:16 +0000

The case for Mars by Robert Zubrin, Arthur Clarke - highly recommended for technically minded folks. One of my favorites of 2018.

New comment by artaak in "Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights"

artaak — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 05:33:37 +0000

I'm interested, please invite. MS is one of my hobbies. alex.897007 at gmail

M-Blocks: A New Class of Robot Cubes That Self Assemble

artaak — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:45:16 +0000

Article URL: http://singularityhub.com/2013/10/09/mits-m-blocks-a-new-class-of-robot-cubes-that-self-assemble/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8480736

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by artaak in "RIM thought iPhone was impossible in 2007"

artaak — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:46:53 +0000

You might want to try COWON mp3 players -- they have the directory structure for tracks and a very good sound quality. I never looked back and everyone how tried COWON do not look at iPods either anymore.

New comment by artaak in "GazeHawk (YC S10) Does Eyetracking With Web Cams"

artaak — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:41:06 +0000

Have you tried to employ Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to do the computation-intensive tasks?

I could imagine that using CUDA-enabled kernels might be of help for processing images.

New comment by artaak in "Google Chrome for Linux goes stable"

artaak — Wed, 26 May 2010 20:46:39 +0000

What about integrating Adobe PDF? Does Adobe Reader still requires dances around to show something besides a gray screen?

New comment by artaak in "I just launched my bootstrapped startup. Pray for me."

artaak — Wed, 12 May 2010 01:55:00 +0000

Very nice idea! Do you plan to send out some special seeds (like okra, etc.) as well?