Hacker News: baldeagle

New comment by baldeagle in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

baldeagle — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:41:27 +0000

"Current law (cira 2013) requires BLM to sell off the crude helium remaining in the Federal Helium Reserve in order to repay the U.S. Treasury the $1.3 billion debt incurred creating it. This debt will be repaid this fiscal year and that, as a consequence, the helium program will terminate at the end of the current fiscal year (October 1, 2013), absent Congressional action. Currently, the Federal Helium Reserve supplies roughly 40% of domestic and 30% of global helium demand. Loss of access to the Federal Helium Reserve would result in significant disruptions to a large number of critical U.S. industries." https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/494b2f9e-c8f5-4...

Sounds like Obama kept the gas taps flowing, instead of locking it up because authorization to sell it had expired. Here is the whole record: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...

New comment by baldeagle in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

baldeagle — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:35:07 +0000

BLM was required (to sell it) by Congress in the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013, as the alternative was to not offer any H to the market due to the authorization to sell expiring. Sponsored by a Republican and passed basically unanimously with the proceeds used to pay of the debt (back when we cared about that)

New comment by baldeagle in "EV-1 for Lease (1996)"

baldeagle — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:41:41 +0000

I drove a electric Rav4, but couldn't stomach the 40 mile range for the price. But it was a fun car, and it seemed huge (compared to my miata).

New comment by baldeagle in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

baldeagle — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:39:07 +0000

My wife dropped a small mint for darn tough socks like three years ago as a father's day gift. It's been delightful.

New comment by baldeagle in "Happy 10k Day"

baldeagle — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 02:51:54 +0000

Great product, put it in my RAV4 Prime and it just works. Makes my Bolt EUV super cruise look poor in comparison.

New comment by baldeagle in "Murderbot, she wrote"

baldeagle — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 18:35:20 +0000

The Texas A&M sci-fi convention mentioned in the article is coming up in early February. You can bounce over to Cushing library to check out the collection, including a copy of Fahrenheit 451 in an asbestos zipper case (obviously, you can't check that one out of it's special container).

https://www.aggiecon.net/

New comment by baldeagle in "Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs"

baldeagle — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 16:00:47 +0000

At least put a patron link on there or something, so people can have a legitimate way to pay for the cost associated with running the website. Perhaps make a suggested amount of 10% of the savings.

This gives you a obvious profit motive, and makes you seem more sketchy because you now have more skin in the game to keep it operating as a valid and useful business service

New comment by baldeagle in "Build systems, not heroes"

baldeagle — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 06:11:03 +0000

This comment combined with a recent reflection on the ‘irony of automation’ makes me worried that the product I’m building to make life easier will instead lead to loss of craft, pride, and ingenuity.

Honestly, still processing through it to make sure that all the people in my products and systems are seen.

New comment by baldeagle in "Apple Watch sleep apnea detection gets FDA approval"

baldeagle — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:33:49 +0000

The 'ramp' setting made me panic and felt like a couldn't breathe. We go from zero to full force now, and it works just fine. I use a nose adapter.

New comment by baldeagle in "Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?"

baldeagle — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 05:52:54 +0000

Have you tried TMS (the magnet thing?).

It worked well for my friend that had ideation.

New comment by baldeagle in "DAGitty – draw and analyze causal diagrams"

baldeagle — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 13:32:55 +0000

I will give that a try. Thank you very much :)

New comment by baldeagle in "DAGitty – draw and analyze causal diagrams"

baldeagle — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 15:33:08 +0000

I hate to ask this question.... but I've moved to a python shop after working in the tidyverse for years, and am unimpressed with the DAG visualization capabilities. Does anyone have any recommendations for 1,000 plus node DAGs?

I still miss R and tidy quite a bit, but polars at least gets closer.

New comment by baldeagle in "Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid"

baldeagle — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 02:04:58 +0000

What I want to know is how much we spent kicking crypto miners off the grid for a couple hours.

New comment by baldeagle in "Porsche 911 Hybrid vs. Chevy Corvette E-Ray: Electrified Sports Cars Compared"

baldeagle — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 12:52:39 +0000

I think these are more like EV boosted hybrids that’ll gas savers… though the Chevy will do much better in traffic with a few miles of energy stored up.

New comment by baldeagle in "Hackers found a way to open any of 3M hotel keycard locks"

baldeagle — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:55:45 +0000

When I worked mainteince on a big chain hotel in a major college town, we had a mark 2.0 crowbar if the key card didn't work. The real fun one was the flippy locks that you could kinda pop by slapping the non-working key card in, and slamming the door. The card would flex and spring the lock back. Then you could use the crowbar again. It wasn't too slow, but it was very loud.

They told me couldn't whistle and spin the crowbar nonchalantly before casually popping open doors that had a dead battery in front of the guest waiting to stay in that same hotel.

New comment by baldeagle in "A Cycle of Misery: The business of building commercial aircraft"

baldeagle — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:23:29 +0000

You mean like when they basically shut down Blue Bell for listeria? That is exactly what the FDA and CDC did.

https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/ice-cream-03-15/index...

New comment by baldeagle in "Are we at peak vector database?"

baldeagle — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 08:19:35 +0000

You may benefit from polars, it can multi-core better than pandas, and has some of the niceties from Arrow (which was the written / championed by the power duo of Wes and Hadley, authors of pandas and the R - tidyverse respectively).

New comment by baldeagle in "Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom"

baldeagle — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 16:05:37 +0000

There is a concept in manufacturing called the andon cord (a button / pull that activates a claxon and stops the line). Once the line stops, everyone swarms the problem and works on a fix. Toyota in the 80s pioneered its use and then beat the big 3 at manufacturing quality.

New comment by baldeagle in "Whisper: Nvidia RTX 4090 vs. M1 Pro with MLX"

baldeagle — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 15:58:54 +0000

Only if Sam Altman is appointed to the Apple board. ;)

New comment by baldeagle in "CUBOTino: A small, simple, 3D printed, inexpensive Rubik's Cube solver robot"

baldeagle — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 05:19:44 +0000

That was cute and a little magical. I may build one with my 8yr this winter break.

One suggestion - it looks like you could have a standard 'learn the cube' program where the webcam is off to one side of the robot, to remove that little bit of friction.