Hacker News: benjaminl

New comment by benjaminl in "How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine"

benjaminl — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 04:55:09 +0000

Tony Bruno, when referring to the partially assembled engine, was complaining about the lack of engine controllers, fluid management, and TVCs [1].

In addition, SpaceX isn’t cheating by not including TVCs. They purposely designed their rocket to need a minimum of them and fully take advantage of the space savings the lack of TVCs affords them.

[1] “So, there is no need to exaggerate this by showing a partially assembled engine without controllers, fluid management, or TVC systems, then comparing it to fully assembled engines that do.”

https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1821679540973765026?s=20

New comment by benjaminl in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

benjaminl — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:02:25 +0000

For me the old web is when people still had homepages. When those went away, the old web died.

New comment by benjaminl in "Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America"

benjaminl — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:42:56 +0000

It’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.

New comment by benjaminl in "Africans Are Turning to Starlink"

benjaminl — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 03:14:03 +0000

The parent is correct. Look up have many antennas are on each Starlink sat. There are multiple dedicated antennas for customers and ground stations. There isn’t just one antenna or beam per satellite.

Also, lookup the number of ISLs in orbit. Starlink has been providing coverage for the middle of the ocean for years now. They have provided coverage to Pacific Islands that have lost their undersea cable connections.

New comment by benjaminl in "Why Ctrl+V won't paste images in Claude Code on WSL, with a fix"

benjaminl — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:14:59 +0000

Ctrl+V paste works for me on WSL. My secret is that I have given up on WSLg and use a standalone X Windows server. Specifically, the X410 X Server. This removes a whole lot of weird behavior including the ones described by the article.

New comment by benjaminl in "ARC-AGI-3"

benjaminl — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:56:07 +0000

This issue here is that people have different definitions of AGI. From the description. Getting 100% on this benchmark would be more than AGI and would qualify for ASI (Algorithmic Super Intelligence) not just AGI.

New comment by benjaminl in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

benjaminl — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:44:40 +0000

In just about every way. CPU caches are made from SRAM and live on the CPU itself. Main system RAM is made from DRAM and live on separate chips even if they are soldered into the same physical package (system in package or SiP). The RAM still isn't on the SoC.

New comment by benjaminl in "TPSV, an Alternative to TSV (and CSV)"

benjaminl — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 23:04:39 +0000

The spec says that the first row specifies the number of columns.

New comment by benjaminl in ""No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens"

benjaminl — Wed, 22 May 2024 07:37:30 +0000

The story is satire. But the satire is illustrating true problems and attitudes.

New comment by benjaminl in "Pytudes"

benjaminl — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 03:22:42 +0000

Kinda hard to answer as that depends on your definition of new. But most likely yes, https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/commits/main

New comment by benjaminl in "Tailscale vs. Narrowlink"

benjaminl — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 19:36:23 +0000

They should move to using QUIC which is the protocol backing HTTP/3. QUIC incorporates TLS1.3 and has an extension for UDP style unreliable datagrams (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9221/). It would be the perfect way to bring SSL/TSL/HTTPS VPNs onto a modern performant protocol while keeping the simplicity in of the https based VPN. It would still have the advantage of looking like https traffic, while have the performance characteristics of UDP based VPN protocol.

New comment by benjaminl in "GPT-4 can't reason"

benjaminl — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 16:43:31 +0000

GPT-4 gave me a concise correct answer without disclaimers.

This may be due to using many custom instructions like the following in ChatGPT settings:

- No need to provide disclaimers about your knowledge cutoff

- No need to mention you are an AI language model

- Only discuss safety when it is not obvious and very important

- You should act as an expert in the relevant fields

New comment by benjaminl in "The "specialness spiral" leads us to not use some ordinary objects (2021)"

benjaminl — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 07:45:45 +0000

I also buy the most expensive Apple phone and not put it in a case. My experience is quite different from your, perhaps unintentional straw man. Let’s take this assertion by assertion.

> I put my (slippery) iPhones in cases because if I don’t they stop working. Your phone might not care that its screen is cracked

I would be hugely bothered by a cracked screen or an otherwise non-operative screen. But Apple’s Pro level phones feature steel cases. This makes the phone very robust. I have yet to crack or otherwise damage my phone.

> have to pay several hundreds to put it back the way it was vs spending 20$ or less on a case and screen protector

Always get AppleCare Plus. It serves as my screen protector. If I ever did crack my screen service fee to fix a broken screen is $29.

> which takes 10 minutes vs having to pay 100x as much and wait a few days to get my phone back to swap displays

As per above the price difference between a case and AppleCare is minimal close to 0x as much.

And it doesn’t take days to have your screen replaced. Apple stores will do it in minutes within the space of a single service appointment.

iPhones are truly works of art and should be enjoyed without cheap plastic cases. Just make sure you have AppleCare Plus.

New comment by benjaminl in "Norway: Landlines will no longer be supported"

benjaminl — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 15:46:35 +0000

Analog telephones have terrible bandwidth. Just 300–3,300 Hz. This it technically called the voiceband, but it cuts off a good portion of female speech.

Also, all phone lines these days, wether POTS or VOIP are digitally trunked and switched.

New comment by benjaminl in "Court overturns state ruling on San Francisco’s infamous 469 Stevenson project"

benjaminl — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 21:42:23 +0000

Normally that is the case, but California has been very active passing significant housing reform legislation in the past couple of years. Just this last legislative session over 20 housing bills were passed: https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2022/10/calif...

The problem is that city counsels and judges are skirting laws by violating clear legislative intent.

New comment by benjaminl in "We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews (2016)"

benjaminl — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 02:11:57 +0000

Yeah, pitch is only one of the components of speech pattern differences between genders. Others include resonance, intonation, rhythm and more.

Ask a trans person and they will tell you that changing your perceived speech gender is much more than just the pitch.

New comment by benjaminl in "Sex Redefined (2015)"

benjaminl — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 14:37:46 +0000

The problem is that a certain segment of society is passing laws insisting that everyone neatly fit into 2 distinct buckets. Also, insisting that the bucket you were categorized in at birth is immutable. They are using the phrase “biological sex”, where as this paper shows, that concept is both ill defined and messy.

New comment by benjaminl in "Scientists have finally found the potential “cure” for baldness"

benjaminl — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 15:33:27 +0000

The linked article appears to be entirely copied from the University of California press release. https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/07/25/chemical-controllin..., which is a much better source of information.

Also, here is a link to the actual paper published in Biophysical Journal.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2022.05.035

New comment by benjaminl in "Fuchsia Workstation"

benjaminl — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 05:38:29 +0000

Since the build page doesn’t provide much context, Fushsia has 3 different configurations bringup, core and workstation.

The workstation configuration is described as:

> workstation is a basis for a general purpose development environment, good for working on UI, media and many other high-level features. This is also the best environment for enthusiasts to play with and explore.

From https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/build/fx#key-pro...

New comment by benjaminl in "How SpaceX lands Starship (sort of)"

benjaminl — Fri, 14 May 2021 02:07:59 +0000

The YouTube show How to Make Everything. Did this. They started the tech tree from the very beginning by making simple hand stone tools and then building up tool by tool to more sophisticated technologies.

If all you have is a hand. Even getting the wood to make a handle for your axe is hard.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLXfVEsLI-qRC_MAQZcVxpjtF...