Hacker News: dgacmu

New comment by dgacmu in "Artemis II and the invisible hazard on the way to the Moon"

dgacmu — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:11:32 +0000

Commonly used as a projectile

New comment by dgacmu in "EFF is leaving X"

dgacmu — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:28:19 +0000

It is, but the other one is a link to their twitter post, whereas this is the longer self-hosted statement. This is a better, more informative source.

New comment by dgacmu in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

dgacmu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:31:08 +0000

*naivete

that word and I have never gotten along well. insert obligatory joke at my expense.

New comment by dgacmu in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

dgacmu — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:39:17 +0000

That's why I said if asked in good faith. :-)

But seriously GP could have had a mental model that landfilled orange peels might sit there for a long time -- which depending on conditions and food could be true on human scales (like 10-40 years) but not on the scale of 100 years. Especially if the conditions were dry -- a dry orange peel is pretty robust. That's not likely to be the case in Costa Rica, but I'll forgive some naivety here absent demonstrated malice.

New comment by dgacmu in "Germany Power Prices Turn Deeply Negative on Renewables Surge"

dgacmu — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:51:58 +0000

I don't. The batteries will last longer than 10 years. The 10 year typical advertised lifetime of lifepo4 is to 80% capacity, and I'll just keep on using them.

The actual payoff calculation is a lot messier than that because you have to factor in the NPV of buying batteries vs. just throwing the money in the market, AND you have to be able to forecast that growth vs. growth in power prices. So the honest truth is I have no idea if it's going to be a net good investment vs other options.

Fortunately, I don't have to care, because I bought the batteries for UPS runtime, which I value independent of the time-shifting. The time-shifting is just a way to squeeze money out of an investment I already made. Had I been going for payoff, there are cheaper battery/inverter options out there with a sub-5y payoff.

New comment by dgacmu in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

dgacmu — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:25:49 +0000

You're getting downvoted but it's a reasonable question if posed in good faith. The tl;dr is that there are really a few options for what could happen to those orange peels:

(1) Landfill burial

   (1a) Without methane capture and use: Produces methane, relatively high short term warming potential.
   (1b) With methane capture and use: Ends up as CO2 after burning the methane.

(2) Composting (this approach)

   (2a) Mostly aerobic: Produces CO2
   (2b) Mostly anaerobic: Produces methane

A deep pile that is never turned will decompose anaerobically, resulting in fairly undesirable methane. A shallower pile or one that is mixed well will result in mostly aerobic decomposition. The aerobic decomposition will produce CO2 but not huge amounts of it. Each hectare of land could absorb something like ~8 tons of CO2 per year; with 7 hectares, the CO2 emitted by composting 12t of oranges is going to be dwarfed by the new vegetation. After a few years when you're growing big trees, the rate of CO2 absorption might rise as high as 20-30t/year/hectare in costa rica's environment. And this is probably an underestimate, as the soil amendment of the orange peels seems to have stimulated faster regrowth than would have happened otherwise.

And perhaps more to the point: There isn't really a purely "no co2" way of disposing of organic matter other than perhaps burying it at the bottom of a deep mineshaft (but the co2 or methane will be produced anyway). Landfilling it is strictly worse - you still get the decomposition products, _or worse_ because you'll mostly get methane, but without producing useful soil byproducts.

Overall this project is a huge win on a carbon perspective and a waste reduction perspective.

New comment by dgacmu in "Germany Power Prices Turn Deeply Negative on Renewables Surge"

dgacmu — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:31:26 +0000

I don't sell mine, but I time-shift with a small pile of batteries (about 10kWh) and it's pretty reasonable. I save about usd $30/month. It's basically a big ups that will pay for itself in ten years, and I get backup power.

New comment by dgacmu in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

dgacmu — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:24:39 +0000

The pile of shell and sed is cleaning up the ai output and then running it in the shell.

The instruction to the AI was to create _a_ shell command. So it's a random shell command generator (maybe).

New comment by dgacmu in "Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning"

dgacmu — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:57:47 +0000

I find it kind of helpful and interesting to see a subset of these called out with a bit of data. Helps keep my LLM detector trained (the one in my brain, that is) and I think it helps a little about expressing the community consensus against this crap. In this case, I'm glad the GP posted something, as it's definitely not mistaken.

New comment by dgacmu in "How HN: Ironkernel – Python expressions, Rust parallel"

dgacmu — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:25:46 +0000

As a specific example: The generated diagram showing the expression tree under "build in python" is simply wrong. It doesn't correspond to the expression x * 2 + 1, which should have only 1 child node on the right. The "GIL Released - Released" is just confusing. The dataflow omits the fact that the results end up back in python - there should be a return arrow. etc., etc.

If you use diagrams like this, at least ensure they are accurately conveying the right understanding.

And in general, listen to the person I'm responding to -- be really deliberate with your graphics or omit. Most AI-generated diagrams are crap.

New comment by dgacmu in "Google Engineers Launch "Sashiko" for Agentic AI Code Review of the Linux Kernel"

dgacmu — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:12:53 +0000

It's written in rust, but why do you believe it was co-authored with Claude? The README in github specifically says:

> This project was built using Gemini CLI

https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko

New comment by dgacmu in "Home Assistant waters my plants"

dgacmu — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:31:41 +0000

An enthusiastic two thumbs up to this approach. It's exactly what I run at home that has been working solidly. I run on an N100, which is just a hair smaller than an i5-8500, with 32GB DRAM and a 1TB SSD (total overkill). I keep it under proxmox; the box also runs my unifi SDN controller, pihole, and a linux VM for various little services. Two USB dongles for z-wave / zigbee / matter (because I'm a glutton for punishment). Backed up to a NAS. It's fast, easy, and has been very reliable.

New comment by dgacmu in "The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books"

dgacmu — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:08:00 +0000

Mass-market paperbacks are definitely dying, but trade paperbacks continue to sell (at rates lower than mass-market, obviously):

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

(trade paperbacks are the larger paperback editions printed on better paper than the mass market paperbacks, but still soft-cover.)

John Scalzi posted about this a few months ago:

"All my recent books went from hardcover to trade paperback and almost all of my backlist in mass market has now migrated to trade. The role of mass market paperbacks is now handled almost entirely by ebooks."

https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3m7xzfxxcg222

New comment by dgacmu in "Claude March 2026 usage promotion"

dgacmu — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:19:07 +0000

Gemini 3.1 pro under a Google AI pro subscription has just recently started imposing really small weekly limits. I went from it feeling unlimited to hitting a 4 day quota in 2 hours of use. Very odd. Wonder if too many people jumped on with the 3.1 pro release.

New comment by dgacmu in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

dgacmu — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:43:09 +0000

Something I try very hard to impress on my PhD students is that the process of writing is part of the process of thinking. We often have cool things in our head that don't sound right when we write them down, and that's usually because the thing in our head was more amorphous than we realized. The time you put in getting the written expression of it to work is actually helping you crystallize what you're thinking in the first place.

New comment by dgacmu in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

dgacmu — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:10:41 +0000

Would anyone notice if you spell-checked or got narrow feedback about grammar? No. I'm not dang, but perhaps a very reasonable interpretation of the rules is: If the AI is generating the words, don't. If it tells you something about your words and you choose to revise them without just copying words the AI output, it's still your words.

(As an experiment, I took that paragraph and threw it into gemini to ask for spell and grammar checking. It yelled at me completely incorrectly about saying "I'm not dang". Of its 4 suggestions, only 1 was correct, and the other 3 would have either broken what I was trying to say or reduced the presence of my usual HN comment voice. So while I said the above, perhaps I'm wrong and even listening to the damn box about grammar is a bad idea.)

That said, I often post from my phone and have somewhat frequent little glitches either from voice recognition or large clumsy thumbs, and nobody has ever seemed to care except me when I notice them a few minutes after the edit button goes away.

New comment by dgacmu in "Hisense TVs add unskippable startup ads before live TV"

dgacmu — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:34:32 +0000

Shipping from China to a US coastal warehouse is probably modestly under $200, including packaging, assuming it's shipped in a 40" container. Possibly less if there's other cargo that can be used to fill the remaining space.

I suspect the domestic costs are really dependent on volume (like, can you ship a container of 45 TVs to a warehouse near NYC or do you have to ship each unit individually) and I don't feel confident estimating that side of it.

New comment by dgacmu in "Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy"

dgacmu — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:14:13 +0000

I don't disagree.

I assume that most of these purely llm generated unwanted contributions will just end up in dead end forks, because my impression is that a lot of them are just being generated as GitHub activity fodder. But the stuff that really solves a problem for a person - eh, good. Problem solved is problem solved. (Unless it creates new problems)

New comment by dgacmu in "Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy"

dgacmu — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:34:10 +0000

Probably, but on the other hand, this is almost literally the definition of technical debt -- it's great to get fixes uptreamed precisely so that you don't have to maintain your own fork, keep it in sync, etc. an LLM can likely lower the burden of that but the burden still exists.

New comment by dgacmu in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

dgacmu — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:48:30 +0000

What a strange comment. The US did not force Russia to invade Ukraine, nor did it force Germany to respond to the Fukushima daiichi disaster by killing all of its nuclear power.