<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: bradknowles</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bradknowles</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:39:20 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=bradknowles" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Re: Mix: open-source repairable blender"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You know, if this was software, I would agree with you.<p>Let’s just say that hardware and I are not a good fit.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 05:29:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665059</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665059</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665059</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Re: Mix: open-source repairable blender"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I regret to inform you that I am not competent to make electrical systems design changes on a device like this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 03:16:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664508</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664508</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664508</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Show HN: Flag AI Slop in PRs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You should ask Daniel Stenberg of CURL fame.  He might appreciate some help in this area.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 03:13:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654902</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654902</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654902</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "When it comes to vaccine schedules, the U.S. is now the outlier"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Trump: Yes, let’s kill all the children.  Surely that will improve things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 02:28:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654720</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654720</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654720</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Re: Mix: open-source repairable blender"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This design appears to be 220VAC only.  And I’m assuming all metric threads and other measurements, too.<p>I think I could live with all the other components being metric, if they just had a way to work with standard U.S./Imperial containers as well.<p>Oh, and they need a 120VAC design for the motor and all the electronics inside.<p>Or, a design that can handle both 120VAC and 240VAC, as well as both 50hz and 60hz.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 02:27:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654712</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654712</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654712</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Trump wants tech companies to foot the bill for new power plants because of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Only until OpenAI or one of the other hyper-scalars makes sure to adequately pay him off.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 02:18:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654663</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654663</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654663</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Starlink updates Privacy Policy to allow AI model training with personal data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So, use a good VPN.  IMO, the main thing they’re actually useful for is protecting you against abuse from your own ISP.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 01:46:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654511</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654511</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654511</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Show HN: S3mini – Tiny and fast S3-compatible client, no-deps, edge-ready"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For the time I worked at AWS, pretty much everyone inside the company used s5cmd for its speed.<p>I think that speaks pretty highly of it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2025 05:30:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274409</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274409</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274409</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, that jumped out at me, too.<p>If they can’t re-run the benchmarks on the same hardware, it’s hard to compare the numbers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2025 05:21:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274368</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274368</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274368</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "There Aren't Enough Cables to Meet Growing Electricity Demand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can send power without wires, over short distances.  Induction charging on devices like iPhones and Apple Watches are common examples of that.<p>But it gets exponentially more difficult to transmit power wirelessly, the greater the distance between the receiver and the transmitter, especially if you want to send large amounts of power that way.  Certain bands of radio waves can be transmitted long distances, and could b turned back into electrical power on the remote end.<p>But by then you will have successfully converted a multi-kilowatt power source into the source antenna into a few microwatts at the receiver.  Not very efficient.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2025 05:05:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274312</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274312</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274312</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Airhull lets electric boats glide on a layer of air"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is it supercavitation or is it riding in a bubble of steam that it creates ahead of itself?<p>Either way, it’s effectively flying through the air bubble underwater, which was the concept I was thinking of.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 May 2025 08:35:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44095297</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44095297</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44095297</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Airhull lets electric boats glide on a layer of air"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is not a new concept.  You can see a discussion of this technique being used (to a degree) on battleships in WWII, by watching some of the videos on the Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel.<p>There’s also a Russian torpedo that uses a similar concept to “fly” at supersonic speeds underwater.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 19:40:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090412</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090412</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090412</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "New method for creating large 3D models of urban areas is faster and cheaper"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So, Kiri Engine?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 19:07:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090144</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090144</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090144</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Linguists find proof of sweeping language pattern once deemed a 'hoax'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, but there is still common use of the related form “wary”.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 18:53:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090018</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090018</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090018</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One of the reasons why Ipe (pronounced “e-pay”) wood is so fire resistant, is because of its density.  You can get Class-A fire resistant Ipe that can be used to build in the Wildland/Urban Interface environment.  Other woods like Teak and Rock Maple are also super dense, but I don’t know if you can get them in Class A ratings.<p>Now, Ipe is very expensive.  I would hope this is less expensive than Ipe, and then the trick is to make your starting materials much larger, and being able to account for the shrinkage once the densification process has been completed.<p>You could also do laminates of this densified wood, in order to be able to use it for beams, plywood type functions, etc….  Or even fire resistant 2x4 boards.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 18:24:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089774</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089774</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089774</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "A boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>With regards to cerebral palsy, my mind always goes back to Chuck, a guy I knew in high school in 1983-1984.  His case was pretty severe, most people couldn’t understand him when he talked.  He was able to drive his motorized wheelchair pretty well, but unless you looked closely, it wasn’t obvious how he did it.<p>Chuck was a bit older than most of the high school kids, due to his challenges.  I think he was something like 27 at the time.  But he was also the best programmer I have ever known.<p>We had Apple ][+ and Apple //e hardware in our computer lab, and one was set aside for his personal use.  It had a special hardware adapter over the keyboard so that you couldn’t accidentally press two keys at once.<p>Watching Chuck write a program was wild.  His hands would wave around in the air for a minute or so, and then somewhere in there you would hear a “chunk” sound.  That sound was him hitting a key on the keyboard.  He had a 100% success rate of hitting the key he wanted, every time.  Because editing a file would have been too painful for him.<p>Chuck’s programs were also perfect.  They did exactly what needed to be done, no more and no less.  And you couldn’t shorten them by a single character, because otherwise the functionality would have been lost.<p>Chuck spent a hell of a lot of time thinking about his programs before he ever sat down in front of the keyboard.  By the time he got there, the program was already completely written in his mind.  And it was completely debugged.  I think he was the only person to get a perfect score on every test and every program in the computer science class that year.<p>Over the time I knew him, it became easier for me to understand what he was saying.  Towards the end of that time, if Chuck and I were in the room at the same time, his assistant was able to even take breaks to go to the bathroom.  Otherwise, she had to be with him 24x7.  That wasn’t something that I intentionally enabled, it just kind of developed that way, but I did find out later that she appreciated the time that we were together.<p>I think a lot of people looked down on Chuck due to his difficulties, but I thought he was amazing.  And over forty years later, I still think that he is the best programmer I have ever known.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 17:31:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089334</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089334</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089334</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "OpenAI Says It Will Build Massive Data Centers in the UAE"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Salt water is a nasty substance and difficult to handle properly.  That salt interacts with metal and other substances in the pipeline, etc….<p>You might not have to go to fully potable (drinkable) status to get something that will work for cooling, but there’s a lot of processing that needs to happen.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 17:08:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089157</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089157</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089157</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "OpenAI Says It Will Build Massive Data Centers in the UAE"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Datacenters need four things: power, water, cooling, and access to the WAN.<p>A dry desert environment is not very conducive to datacenter operations with regards to those first three items.<p>If you’re located close to the sea or an ocean, at least there’s a possibility of getting water, albeit perhaps through expensive reverse osmosis.  But then you’re operating in a more humid environment where certain types of cooling systems won’t work well, because they depend on water evaporation to function.<p>If you’re building a multigigawatt AI datacenter, those are two types of environments that you want to avoid.<p>So, whether it’s Houston Texas or the UAE, I think that’s a very poor location for a datacenter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 16:34:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088955</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088955</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088955</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "How to Make a Living as a Writer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For years, my dad and I had pun fights.  Sadly, my mom was caught in the middle.  Literally.  Her chair was between my dad’s chair on one end of the living room, and mine on the other end.<p>That stopped after a while.  I guess it was all the strokes and over work that got him.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 16:02:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088742</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088742</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088742</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bradknowles in "Live facial recognition cameras may become 'commonplace' as police use soars"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>VCs and PE will fund anything, especially if someone like Peter Thiel tells them that Palantir will make trillions of dollars selling this information to their bestest buddies in all the governments that they own.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 15:35:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088573</link><dc:creator>bradknowles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088573</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088573</guid></item></channel></rss>