Hacker News: benplumley

New comment by benplumley in "Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower"

benplumley — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 15:08:19 +0000

    The YASA axial flux motors benefit from much shorter windings and direct oil cooling which gives an unparalleled performance proposition.  
      
    A 200kW peak-power radial motor, run continuously, might typically give 50% of peak power between 80 and 100kW, as a result of thermal limitations. In contrast, a 200kW YASA motor runs continuously at 150kW thanks to the improved high-thermal-contact cooling that oil offers.

From https://yasa.com/technology/

New comment by benplumley in "Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)"

benplumley — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:08:35 +0000

Since you're already using Tasker, you could use it to launch Tailscale on the phone at boot - I've got mine set to do this so my phone reconnects to tailscale after a reboot.

New comment by benplumley in "Apple introduces a universal design across platforms"

benplumley — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:47:18 +0000

Is the WiFi enabled, or does it just have a blue icon behind it?

New comment by benplumley in "Noise-Canceling Single-Layer Woven Silk and Cotton Fabric"

benplumley — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 15:40:52 +0000

Could it be an interaction between static electricity from the balloon and tiny elements in the ear?

New comment by benplumley in "Factorio – Visualizing construction material dependencies"

benplumley — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 11:03:47 +0000

I thought you could go between heavy and light oil cyclically, but I think the recipes I'm thinking of are from UltraCube. The others are a subset of nuclear (Kovarex and reprocessing), so I think you're right.

New comment by benplumley in "Factorio – Visualizing construction material dependencies"

benplumley — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:59:55 +0000

That's a coincidence, that the author only picked recipes that are made without cycles. Other Factorio recipes (e.g. nuclear fuel processing) are cyclic.

New comment by benplumley in "LTSE shutters cap table management business (formerly captable.io)"

benplumley — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 03:14:23 +0000

You've landed on an excellent garden path sentence, as shutters, cap, and table are all both nouns and verbs!

New comment by benplumley in "GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide"

benplumley — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 08:21:47 +0000

I'm not talking about importing transactions, that's not a feature I use because it'd take longer than entering manually if you did it daily. I'm talking about the scheduled transaction editor, where you enter e.g. your rent manually once then schedule the same transaction to happen monthly. This should still work if you also import the non-recurring ones.

New comment by benplumley in "GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide"

benplumley — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 10:47:58 +0000

You automate all the recurring things (this is built into Gnucash), enter the non-recurring things (takes a minute or two a day if that day even had any transactions) and reconcile against the bank's statement/app/website monthly to make sure its representation stays accurate.

Once you've entered a transaction once, its autocomplete handles those going forwards so entering a new transaction is as quick as typing the first couple of letters of the shop name, pressing tab a few times, then entering the amount.

New comment by benplumley in "Microsoft blames outage on small staff, automation failures"

benplumley — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 08:46:06 +0000

That's the heading, the title is still "small staff" for me. The heading is what shows at the top of the page, you'll see the page title in the browser tab's name among other places.

New comment by benplumley in "Ask HN: Is Slack having some trouble?"

benplumley — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 10:11:23 +0000

They don't have to worry about SLAs if they just never acknowledge that they had any downtime!

New comment by benplumley in "Parents, environmentalists to Google: stop Chromebooks from expiring this summer"

benplumley — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:47:47 +0000

It's a school - write or find a comprehensive set of instructions (for the happy path), give each student a chromebook and a blank USB, and have them do it. You get usable laptops and the students learn an important life skill - not necessarily that they memorise the instructions for next time, but that they learn what's possible.

New comment by benplumley in "Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share"

benplumley — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 08:24:59 +0000

Steam is there, with Proton, and Lutris. It's almost a better experience than the twelve different launchers situation I left behind (though they're annoying in very different ways!)

New comment by benplumley in "Firefox address bar"

benplumley — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:54:26 +0000

F6 works too, and you can press it again to unfocus it (TIL)

New comment by benplumley in "240W USB-C PD chargers are nearly here, says Framework CEO"

benplumley — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:57:01 +0000

It doesn't get the chance to build up in a laptop because of the fan. A 20W phone fast charger gets much hotter than a laptop, even though they should only be wasting a couple of watts on heating, because they have no active cooling (and pretty poor passive cooling).

New comment by benplumley in "How a heat pump works"

benplumley — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 15:30:24 +0000

> nothing's stopping you from circulating cold water in the summer

Condensation is - air conditioners have an integrated drip tray which drains to the outside, but if you ran chilled water through radiators they'd all make puddles of condensation on the floor. Retrofitting drains might be possible but I've never seen one and I can't imagine it'd be cost-effective vs installing mini-splits.

New comment by benplumley in "US startup's bladeless VTOL can reach up to 0.8 Mach"

benplumley — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 13:37:02 +0000

It's in the "Filter lists" tab of the uBlock Origin dashboard.

New comment by benplumley in "Average EV fast-charging costs soar above petrol"

benplumley — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 16:22:05 +0000

Their next story: microwave theft up infinity percent in the last 75 years.

New comment by benplumley in "Ask HN: What's on your home server?"

benplumley — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 11:41:32 +0000

Very similar to my setup! I really like my Beelink, I was initially sceptical because it was so cheap.

I run Pi-Hole, Tailscale, Photoprism, Syncthing, and Terraria, amongst other things.

New comment by benplumley in "Why would prisons ban my book? Absurdities rule the system (2022)"

benplumley — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 16:11:55 +0000

Why would you expect to get the same answer to those two questions? They're completely different, and answering Yes to 1 and No to 2 is self-consistent.

Or do you mean that responders answered No to 1 and Yes to 2?