Hacker News: em500

New comment by em500 in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

em500 — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:28:45 +0000

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking

Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.

New comment by em500 in "Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times"

em500 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:08:45 +0000

I sure hope connected health device makers include some generous tolerance for network outages.

New comment by em500 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

em500 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:10:43 +0000

> Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that?

The parent post specifically mentioned large organizations, where the "employer" is not some person who hires and pays employees from their own funds. Hiring and personel management is done by middle managers with their own interests and incentives, which can differ substantially from those of the owners or capital providers.

New comment by em500 in "Gold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset"

em500 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:33:00 +0000

> The price of a loaf of bread in gold now is still similar to what it was in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.

That seems pretty unlikely, when the price of a loaf of bread in gold now is less than half of what it was only 3 years ago.

New comment by em500 in "Run Linux containers on Android, no root required"

em500 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:04:28 +0000

Yes, under How It Works:

> libqemu-system-aarch64.so (QEMU TCG, no KVM)

TCG means software emulation

New comment by em500 in "Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams"

em500 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:00:12 +0000

You mean his terrible financial decisions of founding a company in 2004 that IPO at 104B within eight years, and now 14 years on is valued at 1.6T? Are we looking different track records?

New comment by em500 in "How to run Qwen 3.5 locally"

em500 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:31:06 +0000

This also works

persona: emotionless vulcan

New comment by em500 in "A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content"

em500 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 11:32:40 +0000

> I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form.

This is very predictably what's going to happen, and it will be just as useless as Prop 65 or the EU cookie laws or any other mandatory disclaimers.

New comment by em500 in "A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times"

em500 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 11:19:32 +0000

Most of these studies get published based on elaborate constructions of essentially t-tests for differences in means between groups. Showing the opposite means showing no statistical difference, which is almost impossible to get published, for very human reasons.

New comment by em500 in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

em500 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:09:53 +0000

Non-tech people tend to think similarly about developers, breaking things that worked fine until yesterday / last week / last month, for no user-visible benefit.

New comment by em500 in "Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)"

em500 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:58:54 +0000

Here's John Cochrane take on Fed vs Narrow Banks: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/03/fed-vs-narrow-ban...

TLDR: Cochrane thinks the Fed wants keep a lid on narrow banking because it believes it can cross-subsidizing lending to households and businesses from retail deposits.

New comment by em500 in "Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)"

em500 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:06:57 +0000

Rather than leaving some oblique references to "many good books", why not provide the actual references?

New comment by em500 in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

em500 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:32:24 +0000

"Production" can mean many different things to different people. It's very widely used as a backend strutured file format in Android and iOS/macOS (e.g. for appls like Notes, Photos). Is that "production"? It's not widely used and largely inappropriate for applications with many concurrent writes.

Sqlite docs has a good overview of appropriate and inappropriate uses: https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html It's best to start with Section 2 "Situations Where A Client/Server RDBMS May Work Better"

New comment by em500 in "Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?"

em500 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:19:35 +0000

Sorry for my negativity / meta comment on this thread. From what I can tell the stackexchange discussion in the submission already to provides all the relevant points to be discussed about this.

While the asymmetry of least squares will probably be a bit of a novelty/surprise to some, pretty much anything posted here is more or less a copy of one of the comments on stackexchange.

[Challenge: provide a genuinely novel on-topic take on the subject.]

New comment by em500 in "Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)"

em500 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 19:04:30 +0000

I'm believe /sbin was introduced/standardized in System V Release 4. It's present in SVR4 (1988) but not in SVR3 (1987). Another candidate is would be some old BSD (check 4.2 or 4.3 (1986) if anyone has a running system).

I'm guessing it was introduced to finally move out all the (mostly system) binaries from /etc, which in ancient Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s really meant "etc", as in stuff that didn't fit elsewhere rather than system config files, so it contained binaries like init, mount, umount.

New comment by em500 in "Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)"

em500 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 18:54:39 +0000

macOS has all of that (mostly inherited from NeXTSTEP which was significantly based on 4.3/4.4BSD). It's hidden by default in the GUI, visible in Terminal.

Nowadays most end users just use /usr/local or /opt/local or whatever is managed by Homebrew or Macports.

New comment by em500 in "Unix v4 (1973) – Live Terminal"

em500 — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:39:54 +0000

This is Unix V4 from 1973. The total number of installations world wide was around 20, all inside Bell Labs. There was no networking support at all, so security was mostly physical, i.e., office building security (though you could dial in with a modem). Multi-user support was a bunch of serial-line terminals. Pretty much everyone knew everyone else who was on the system.

New comment by em500 in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

em500 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:14:19 +0000

Yes. AFAICT, catering to the needs of tourists ranks very low among German voter priorities.

New comment by em500 in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

em500 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:03:11 +0000

I'd reverse the question ask why Germany (or any other country where English is not an official language, and does not majorly rely on tourism for income) would provide any public information in English? Commercial services can choose to do so a matter of self interest, but why would state financed services?

New comment by em500 in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

em500 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 12:53:33 +0000

Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.