Hacker News: caf

New comment by caf in "A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines"

caf — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:49:38 +0000

[We can broadly trust the US government] not to promote broken encryption to its own agencies.

New interstellar object candidate A11pl3Z

caf — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:14:21 +0000

Article URL: https://earthsky.org/space/new-interstellar-object-candidate-heading-toward-the-sun-a11pl3z/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44443334

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by caf in "Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds"

caf — Thu, 01 May 2025 10:09:08 +0000

The phrase "incandescent with rage" comes to mind when reading that order. A couple of choice quotes:

To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction.

New comment by caf in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

caf — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 01:58:24 +0000

This capability is called "Trip To House Load".

New comment by caf in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

caf — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:05:23 +0000

This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of.

The South Australia System Black in 2016 would count - SA already had high wind and rooftop solar penetration back then. There's a detailed report here if you're interested:

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...

New comment by caf in "Ham radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope"

caf — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 07:45:05 +0000

You may be thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap

New comment by caf in "HAM radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope"

caf — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 07:43:16 +0000

It's only just re-opened to visitors after an extended closure that began in the COVID times!

New comment by caf in "A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects"

caf — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:57:58 +0000

I think about $25, twice that in the Muppets Christmas Carol because they doubled the amount he offers for some reason.

New comment by caf in "A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects"

caf — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 13:37:10 +0000

I did actually do this the other day, to get some idea of how much Scrooge is offering to pay the boy in the street to go and buy the turkey for him at the end of A Christmas Carol.

New comment by caf in "A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)"

caf — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 01:06:06 +0000

Since your supply is alternating current, the electrons aren't net moving at all.

The question isn't even well-formed. It's like playing tug-of-war and asking exactly which player on the other team you're pulling against.

New comment by caf in "The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”"

caf — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:37:52 +0000

They don't all produce separated plutonium, this also includes those that produce enriched uranium, which is also fissile.

The three reasons to produce fissile material are weapons, non-explosive military uses and civilian power reactors. Even many of the weapons states aren't producing new fissile material for weapons these days, they have more than enough.

New comment by caf in "The meme-ification of the "Demon Core""

caf — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:12:30 +0000

Fifteen nations that currently do so, if anyone is interested: Russia, United States, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, and North Korea.

New comment by caf in "The meme-ification of the "Demon Core""

caf — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:00:08 +0000

The terrible consequences are definitely an implied part of the meme, otherwise it's just someone messing about with some pieces of metal and screwdriver and isn't funny at all.

New comment by caf in "Mapping the Ionosphere with Phones"

caf — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 06:05:33 +0000

The existing ground-station ionosphere data mentioned has been used to detect missile launches: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1216884/detecting-mi...

I imagine you could do the same thing with much better coverage using this distributed ionosphere monitoring method.

New comment by caf in "The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes"

caf — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:33:51 +0000

The nomenclature "hanging up" a terminal even dates back to pulse-dialling landline phones where the receiver was physically hung up on a hook to activate a switch that opened the circuit and ended the call.

New comment by caf in "The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes"

caf — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:30:50 +0000

The ioctl works remotely as well, because ssh sends window size messages across the channel.

New comment by caf in "How do merging supermassive black holes pass the final parsec?"

caf — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 09:32:48 +0000

A rogue star having a close interaction with our solar system would be catastrophic enough, and we know there's lots of those in our galaxy.

New comment by caf in "Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia"

caf — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:44:16 +0000

The current operating requirements in South Australia mandate around 80MW of gas generation for system strength reasons.

So even on last Saturday when "operational demand" in South Australia reached the ballpark of -200MW (that is, rooftop solar generation was exceeding the demand in the state by 200MW), there was still 80MW of gas in the mix. (The excess was being exported to Victoria).

New comment by caf in "Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia"

caf — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:32:42 +0000

There are 5 different businesses that own and operate the distribution network in different parts of Melbourne (AusNet, Jemena, Citipower, Powercor and United Energy).

AusNet owns & maintains the transmission network in Victoria, but it is under the operational control of AEMO.

Dispatch of generation and FCAS instructions is NEM-wide and the responsibility of AEMO.

New comment by caf in "Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia"

caf — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:23:29 +0000

Load shedding is quite rare, I believe the only instance recently in Melbourne was on the 13th of February when several transmission towers carrying the Moorabool-Sydneham 500kV circuits were destroyed in the severe storms that day, and load-shedding was required to keep the system in a secure state.

Outages are almost always due to faults in the local distribution network.