Hacker News: ballooney

New comment by ballooney in "YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken"

ballooney — Wed, 06 May 2026 06:27:12 +0000

The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.

New comment by ballooney in "Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat"

ballooney — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:21:17 +0000

I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?

New comment by ballooney in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

ballooney — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:05:54 +0000

What he means and you're interpreting a bit too literally is that this [heatshield] is one subsystem where the risks are not well understood or quantified as, say, the propulsion system, for which we have a lot more experience and flight heritage.

New comment by ballooney in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

ballooney — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:28:25 +0000

Bayes rule has existed for nearly 300 years, there is no excuse for ‘only look[ing] at this data’ and that is NEVER a reasonable thing to do.

New comment by ballooney in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

ballooney — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:13:29 +0000

You’d need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a different vehicle.

New comment by ballooney in "Garry Tan's Claude Code Setup"

ballooney — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:48:59 +0000

In the last 60 days I have written over 600,000 lines of production code

No you haven't.

New comment by ballooney in "Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled"

ballooney — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:06:33 +0000

About the same as Bezos invested in the Melania documentary, watched by about six people.

New comment by ballooney in "First Website (1992)"

ballooney — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:11:35 +0000

Everyone in silicon valley would do well to remember why the web was built (by other people, elsewhere).

New comment by ballooney in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

ballooney — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:32:51 +0000

What are your favourite active irc channels for technical hobbies?

New comment by ballooney in "Same Radio, Different Citizens"

ballooney — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 06:49:55 +0000

For context, the Cosmos Institute an AI lobbying business. [it flatters itself otherwise but that’s not atypical of the form]

New comment by ballooney in "Evolving OpenAI's Structure"

ballooney — Mon, 05 May 2025 19:29:52 +0000

Hopelessly over-idealistic premise. Sama and pg have never been anything other than opportunistic muck. This will be my last ever comment on HN.

New comment by ballooney in "David Tong Lectures on Theoretical Physics"

ballooney — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:51:04 +0000

WTF?

[Tang notes in-joke for potential downvoters]

New comment by ballooney in "The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state"

ballooney — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:49:31 +0000

No!

“they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.”

Is fentanyl acting in the interests of its addicts?

New comment by ballooney in "The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state"

ballooney — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 05:02:52 +0000

How could you _possibly_ believe a company like meta would use a new technology to act in your interests rather than theirs?

New comment by ballooney in "Why I don't discuss politics with friends"

ballooney — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 18:41:02 +0000

I do worry about seeing more of these posts, as a way of SV people - who bare a substantial burden of guilt for enabling the collective mess we’re in because the ad-tech/algorithm dollars were nice - collectively distancing themselves from facing said guilt.

No idea is this particular person is especially part of the problem, I’m just talking about general vibes.

New comment by ballooney in "Despite Ukraine war, Europe imported even more Russian gas last year"

ballooney — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:17:50 +0000

The electrical efficiency of breaking water to hydrogen, then combusting hydrogen through a turbine to generate electricity, compares extremely disfavourably to most other forms of storage - it takes about 50kWh of electricity to produce 1kg of Hydrogen, and if you propagate that back through a turbine and make some conservative assumptions about electrolyser costs and so on and so on, you're sort of approaching 5x the cost of others forms of renewable electricity to make electricity from stored hydrogen.

Of course, if we're building enough renewable capacity that electricity is basically free when it's sunny or windy, that changes the eceonomics and maybe we should all be making hydrogen in that sort of [bumpily]-abundant future.

However, storing hydrogen is also a pain - the density is crap even as a liquid and very technically challenging, and the density is mind-bogglingly crap as a gas - you'd want to find some vast geological underground reservoir in which to store it economically.

None of these are insurmountable, it's just not an especially attractive option as things stand.

New comment by ballooney in "Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon"

ballooney — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 05:49:16 +0000

250 _meters_, this is science not javascript.

New comment by ballooney in "Apple M3 Ultra"

ballooney — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 02:52:25 +0000

I'm from the dark ages and am interested in this for non-AI things like CFD. What is the state of SDK support for these chips? Is there a nice rust or C++ library that abstracts the hardware and lets you just do very big Matrix multiplications?

New comment by ballooney in "Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon"

ballooney — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:27:30 +0000

Spectacular still by modern standards.

New comment by ballooney in "DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures"

ballooney — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 22:08:34 +0000

Things already are that bad, you’re standing an inch beyond where the previous wave washed up to and saying “well if it gets here in the next few waves then suddenly we become in deep shit’ while all around people are shouting at you about the existence of a concept called ‘the tide’. This is happening right now. fight back.