Hacker News: card_zero

New comment by card_zero in "What happens to an economy when it's too hot to work?"

card_zero — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:55:39 +0000

There's PDRC, but we can't mass produce the "photonic metamaterials" that make it good.

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

It ought to be great. Takes no energy, sends heat through the infrared window back out into space where it came from.

New comment by card_zero in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

card_zero — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:19:11 +0000

They say "yes, I admit it, this is all invalid".

New comment by card_zero in "Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself"

card_zero — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:08:10 +0000

Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.

New comment by card_zero in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

card_zero — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:44:07 +0000

Real effort, surely? Simulated reward.

New comment by card_zero in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

card_zero — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:35:23 +0000

Or scrolling represents a viewpoint, such as a frame, or a finger pointing at the document. Then it's the other way round again. You can't just declare what the metaphor is, it's arbitrary.

New comment by card_zero in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

card_zero — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:57:54 +0000

Yes, normally a BIOS setting on laptops I think. Before changing it I was hitting sleep constantly since they'd put it on F1, jammed up next to escape.

New comment by card_zero in "Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism"

card_zero — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:00:27 +0000

>something that never used to happen on Wiki

Revision deletion has existed for at least 17 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revision_deletion (page created in 2009)

New comment by card_zero in "EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices"

card_zero — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:08:21 +0000

I've heard the exact opposite about India, which is that they export all their best quality tea.

But you're evidently talking about green tea, and maybe not black tea. That might explain the contradiction.

New comment by card_zero in "I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet"

card_zero — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:59:42 +0000

That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)

New comment by card_zero in "EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices"

card_zero — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:31:32 +0000

Oh no, I drank 1 ml of saturated fat. Is it even still all bad for you? I thought I heard some detail about that recently ...

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

> A 2024 meta-analysis found that odd-chain and longer-chain saturated fatty acids were negatively associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease, including stroke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd-chain_fatty_acid

>OCFAs are found particularly in ruminant fat and milk (e.g. pentadecylic acid).

(I don't know if that means most of the saturated fatty acids in milk, it's full of different varieties.)

New comment by card_zero in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

card_zero — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:01:15 +0000

The two people I knew who really liked the serenity prayer (and wanted everybody to notice) were assholes. It can mean something like "See, I struggle every day with important issues concerning my power, and, I'm wise about it too! Also I consulted God, turns out you have to put up with some things," which makes it into an excuse for being really controlling.

My preferred version: do what you can, don't sweat it.

New comment by card_zero in "Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony"

card_zero — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:05:49 +0000

So an important invention that would save lives is a combined bumper cars + rollercoaster. Like the Witching Waves but faster.

New comment by card_zero in "Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health"

card_zero — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:06:26 +0000

Prison?

New comment by card_zero in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

card_zero — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:54:55 +0000

For the record, besides Schmidt being booed, there was Gloria Caulfield (property development), and Scott Borchetta (music production). Then Jeremy Scott (fashion) tore up his AI-written speech and got cheered for that, and Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show) got cheered for saying "fuck AI" several times.

New comment by card_zero in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

card_zero — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:11:19 +0000

Huh, looks like they process about 1/500 of the water in it every year. So enough to make a dent in the salinity eventually.

New comment by card_zero in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

card_zero — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:58:31 +0000

I wonder. It would have to dissolve, a big block of salt would take a while, kind of like the erosion of cliffs where the salt comes from in the first place. Eh, I guess you're right though, the fish wouldn't like that at all.

New comment by card_zero in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

card_zero — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:33:00 +0000

Right, remove the salt and minerals. We don't need that much salt, so we'd have to build pyramids or something with it. We drink the water, but then it ends up back in the oceans. The reason I mention that part is because if it didn't, if we could destroy the water, then the remaining water would retain the same salinity, and the concern would be that we drain the ocean dry, which is silly (I refer you back to how big it is). But we don't destroy water when we use it, so instead the worry is that we dilute all the world's ocean, which is also silly (I again refer you back to how big it is). We need a lot of batteries, but the sea is not useful as a source of lithium except as a byproduct. Even if it was the only source, the old batteries themselves would soon become a better source, as concentrated stores of lithium compared to the very-much-not-concentrated lithium in the ocean. But anyway the good places to mine lithium are on land (and are dried-up bits of ancient ocean, I think).

(I checked, some deposits are old lakebeds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni and others are igneous.)

It's also possible - true, I bet - that all the car batteries and storage batteries 8 billion people could possibly use are equivalent to only a tiny fraction of all the lithium in the ocean, but it would be harder arithmetic to confirm that, as well as being irrelevant on account of land-based mines existing.

New comment by card_zero in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

card_zero — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:09:39 +0000

Toys also look like toys at first. Then later on, they still do.

New comment by card_zero in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

card_zero — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:00:07 +0000

It was about two days after Google released Deep Dream, if you remember, the thing that took a video and filled it with fleeting hallucinations of mostly puppies, fish heads and lizards. I was suddenly struck by the realization "oh shit, this is much more boring and samey than it first appeared to be", and all subsequent gen AI has been similarly underwhelming.

New comment by card_zero in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

card_zero — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:29:46 +0000

You're worried we might use all the salt in the sea for some kind of ... salt pyramids, send the water back out through sewers, and consequently leave the world's oceans diluted? That's about 1 followed by 21 zeroes, I think, in liters.