Hacker News: dtgriscom

New comment by dtgriscom in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

dtgriscom — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:59:17 +0000

"Denied Fast Index Entry" is a much more honest title than "Rejects SpaceX", which is just click-bait.

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

dtgriscom — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:17:15 +0000

He said that it got a few resistor values wrong, but other than that it was correct. I assume it was actually a single-layer board. (Nobody's doing this with a mini-ITX motherboard.)

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

dtgriscom — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:12:35 +0000

A friend had the power supply die on his high-end turntable. He took a picture of each side of the supply's PCB, handed it to Claude, and it gave him back a schematic.

New comment by dtgriscom in "Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts"

dtgriscom — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:00:27 +0000

The day was somewhat stormy. I was in my kitchen in my north-suburban-Boston house, when I suddenly heard a BOOM. I thought it was a very large branch falling on my house, so I ran outside to check out the roof. Saw nothing, and only later heard about the meteor.

New comment by dtgriscom in "What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology"

dtgriscom — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:17:51 +0000

> eddies in the stream of energy flowing downhill

"Ah... is he. Is he."

New comment by dtgriscom in "I hate soldering"

dtgriscom — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:05:53 +0000

I have a Donegan DA-5 OptiVisor Headband Magnifier. They're nice, because the lenses are prism'd so that you can focus on something close without having to go cross-eyed.

New comment by dtgriscom in "The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)"

dtgriscom — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:56:01 +0000

We watched all of The Ascent of Man in middle school. The only thing I remember is that when the narrator, Jacob Bronowski, gestured with the back of his hand (fingers up), he always tucked his middle finger behind his ring and index finger. I assume this was so that he wouldn't "give the finger" to the audience.

(I've been wasting neurons on this for fifty years...)

New comment by dtgriscom in "The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)"

dtgriscom — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:51:18 +0000

Cheap insurance.

New comment by dtgriscom in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

dtgriscom — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:47:00 +0000

I saw the first Star Wars movie on the day it opened in Boston, in an enormous, packed theater. I will never forget the roar that went up when Han Solo came out of the sun to save Luke.

New comment by dtgriscom in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"

dtgriscom — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:26:16 +0000

Yeah; they had a wonderful earthiness to their language; both highly technical and highly vivid. Like this comment on hexanitroisowurtzitane:

> Recall that this is the compound whose cocrystal with TNT is actually less dangerous than the pure starting material itself, and yeah, I know that sounds like the guy at the pet store packing a starved Komodo dragon into the carrier with your new dog, just to calm him down some.

I'm guessing he just ran out of nasty chemicals. Either that, or he got tired of it and followed his muse elsewhere.

New comment by dtgriscom in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"

dtgriscom — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:08:23 +0000

> Edit: Google the in the pipeline blog. This and other have discussed this at length.

Derek Lowe's blog is excellent, with 192 posts tagged "Alzheimer's Disease":

https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/alzheimers-disea...

And, on a more entertaining topic:

https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...

New comment by dtgriscom in "Physicists revive 1990s laser concept to propose a next-generation atomic clock"

dtgriscom — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 23:43:59 +0000

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...

New comment by dtgriscom in "Ultraviolet corona discharges on treetops during storms"

dtgriscom — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:27:07 +0000

Isn't infrared, by definition, wavelengths beyond what people can see?

New comment by dtgriscom in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

dtgriscom — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:43:16 +0000

That picture of the wafer with a rainbow of shapes is very misleading. It suggests that the various colors you see on the chip is the various colors the lasers can emit, which is wrong; it's just diffraction, and has nothing to do with the topic of the article. (But, PR people gotta PR...)

New comment by dtgriscom in "The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster"

dtgriscom — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:51:13 +0000

Heated ones are rarer.

New comment by dtgriscom in "The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster"

dtgriscom — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:48:27 +0000

Question: if a LiIon battery can't deliver as much energy when cold, where does the lost energy go? Is it just unavailable, and becomes available again when warmed up? Is discharge less efficient, so the energy is wasted? Or does charging stop early when cold, so there's less to be discharged in the first place?

New comment by dtgriscom in "Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin"

dtgriscom — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:42:07 +0000

The WNET film of "The Lathe of Heaven" was wonderful. It was low-budget, and at times looked it, but captured the book well. It was unavailable for quite a while because of a scene centering around the Beatles' "With A Little Help from My Friends"; it was too expensive/complex to re-license it.

New comment by dtgriscom in "Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin"

dtgriscom — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:26:07 +0000

Thanks, but watching an eighteen-hour seminar on a book so that I can enjoy that book doesn't seem worth it to me. (Note that "to me"; I'm quite open to being a literary lightweight. My experience of AP English in high school was that it inoculated me against the great works of literature.)

New comment by dtgriscom in "Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin"

dtgriscom — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:52:27 +0000

Although I love most of her fantasy works, I found 'The Dispossessed' to be too difficult for me. However, that's probably because her interests were broader than mine.

New comment by dtgriscom in "Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin"

dtgriscom — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:47:06 +0000

Thanks for the tip. My local library has it; I'll grab it tomorrow.