Hacker News: bazodedo

New comment by bazodedo in "Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025"

bazodedo — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:45:39 +0000

Some cheap and durable archival storage would be nice. Perhaps by storing data in grooves on ceramic discs. (Which is essentially what cds did). Though, preferably without high speed rotation, and reading more than one bit at a time by e.g. taking a picture of the surface through a microscope. How about 1 PB per disk?

I was wondering why we dont have something like that.

Unfortunately, it turns out that, with Blue-ray discs, we're already approaching the optics limit of what visible light (easily) gets us, and they're already cheating with multi-layer storage for the 100GB option. Thus youd need a complicated EUV or electron beam setup for smaller feature sizes.

Say i want my 1PB disk in cd format. A cd has r=6cm. Thus A~=100cm^2. A/1PB= 1.25e-18m^2= 1.25 nm^2, or about 5x5 atoms per bit :/

I guess we're better off by just scaling up flash production and stacking those elements vertically.

Edit: Turns out we need volumetric storage. By using a material that is transparent to the laser wavelength, by intersecting two precisely focussed beams, the local intensity suffices to absorb two photons at once (stops being transparent) allowing you to select a volumetric point to interact with. This allows a couple hundred of layers until refraction breaks our resolution.

New comment by bazodedo in "Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock"

bazodedo — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:45:11 +0000

The pulsetime is just to advance the clockwork one step, and is kept fixed, the advancement driven by the mechanism is discrete. As long as you keep track of the count, you wont accumulate drift. The adjustment is to get that stepping working, if it doesnt miss a step, youre good.

New comment by bazodedo in "Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition"

bazodedo — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 21:14:49 +0000

The "premium request" billing model where you pay per invocation and not for usage is very obviously not a sustainable approach and creates skewed incentives (e.g. for microsoft to degrade response quality), especially with the shift towards longer running agentic sessions as opposed to simple oneshot chat questions, which the system was presumably designed for. Its just a very obvious fundamental incompatibility and the system is in increasing need of replacement. Usage linked (pay per token) is probably the way to go, as is industry standard.

New comment by bazodedo in "Fusion power is getting closer"

bazodedo — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:10:46 +0000

Tbh, i've encountered residental areas where the houses happen to have exposed roofs. I suppose that might be one of them places you could throw those panels.

Regarding the amount of rare earth required to make just one solar panel, i was surprised to find out that effectively all you need is something called 'silicon' as well as an initial investment in energy to bake the thing.

It just so happens to be that, according to google, this 'silicon' stuff is quite abundant and can for example be found in desert sand.

Since you can stack those fusion reactors vertically, i suppose they'd come out on top in the power/sqft category.

New comment by bazodedo in "Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts"

bazodedo — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:37:33 +0000

A magnetic field is the result of moving an electric charge (in this case electrons). Applying the voltage will move the electrons. The only thing the material being a superconductor changes is that the electrons will lose less energy to resistance while traversing the sample.

New comment by bazodedo in "LK-99 is an online sensation but replication efforts fall short"

bazodedo — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 17:29:15 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning

New comment by bazodedo in "Two-Faced Star Exposed"

bazodedo — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:47:26 +0000

Unusual white dwarf star is made of hydrogen on one side and helium on the other

Two-Faced Star Exposed

bazodedo — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:47:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/two-faced-star-exposed

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36800374

Points: 46

# Comments: 15

New comment by bazodedo in "List of Unix binaries that can be used to bypass local security restrictions"

bazodedo — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 22:31:05 +0000

I was curios about that 16GB pi. (I want to have one myself :) Unfortunately, it looks like soldering the 16gb ram chip onto the pi did not increase the usable memory due to other hardware limitations. [1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=350514

New comment by bazodedo in "Ancient Maya city was hidden in the jungle for more than 1k years"

bazodedo — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 20:13:57 +0000

Im amazed that we still get such finds! I would have expected all discoverable sites to have long since been exhausted due to people running automated analysis programs over high res aerial footage, that would turn up anything out of place. There ought to be many people that would happily add "discovered ancient maya city" to their resume. Perhaps foliage obscured the view? But then couldnt someone just attach a gpr system to a plane?

New comment by bazodedo in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag–and it’s colossal"

bazodedo — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 17:06:51 +0000

Since Phobos isnt areostationary, the base of your tether on mars would have to move around for this to work. Additionally, you would have to constantly adjust its length. Therefore, boarding the elevator would be more difficult.