Hacker News: foota

Scientists break 30-year superconductivity record at normal pressure

foota — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:29:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260527023220.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311304

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by foota in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

foota — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:54:34 +0000

This is an internet comment forum, not my team's slack chat, it's ok to have some fun with creative ideas.

New comment by foota in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

foota — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:56:37 +0000

In theory the new futures markets for chip components would help here, since it would allow DRAM suppliers to insulate themselves from that risk.

New comment by foota in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

foota — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:44:53 +0000

I think you're misunderstanding the tank's temperature. The internal temperature is 32C, the external temperature is only 16C (they used thermal cameras to measure the external temp, but when they got closer they read the internal gauge which showed 32C). Groundwater in LA is apparently right around 16C, so the difference in temperature between the tank and the water would be basically 0.

So while I do agree that the evaporative cooling is probably doing most of the heavy lifting (in fact, necessarily so if the water temp ~= the tank's exterior temp), it's not unreasonable to suggest that using colder water would be more effective.

In fact, the wet bulb temperature there is apparently right around 16C, so they've basically cooled the outside of the tank as much as they can using evaporative cooling alone. They can certainly use it to _keep_ it there, but without something else they wouldn't be able to cool it further.

Presumably if there's an exothermic reaction happening internally then the core will continue to rise in temperature based on the temperature gradient through the material forming in the tank. I would assume (since my understanding is that it's some kind of plastic) that it has a fairly low thermal conductivity, so the core temperature will continue to rise as more of it turns to plastic even as the outside is cooled to the same ~16C.

In the limit if they were able to immerse it completely in very cold water (~0C) then the exterior of the tank would also be ~0C (supposing they were able to access sufficient quantities of water). I don't think that's practical of course, but again I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that cold water would make a meaningful difference.

New comment by foota in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

foota — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:30:15 +0000

Yeah that's fair. It does make me wonder what there is that would allow this. Maybe importing some snow machines from Tahoe? :-)

I'm actually a little surprised that a quick search for "refrigerated liquid transport" didn't turn up anything. I would have sort of thought this was something that would exist (just because there are so many random things that are necessary for _some purpose_).

New comment by foota in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

foota — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:27:09 +0000

Heat exchange is proportional to the difference in temperature though (in reference to your "or heat exchange"). Colder water would cool faster. The tank isn't at boiling either, so it's not like you'll be able to phase change away a bunch of energy. I guess you'll still get some evaporative cooling, but there's a limit to how much you'll get just from the ambient temperature (the exterior of the tank is relatively cool, presumably because the "gummed up" interior is inhibiting heat transfer)

New comment by foota in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

foota — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Ah, that makes sense. It's too bad they can't drill into it to relieve pressure without destroying the integrity of the tank (not that I'd want to be anywhere close to it either).

If they didn't have to worry about it imminently exploding I wonder if they could somehow wrap it with reinforcement (e.g., wrap some high strength metal around the tank to prevent it from deforming when drilled into) and then drill into it to extract the liquid?

One of my other less serious ideas was to helilift a Chernobyl style containment structure around it, but I imagine they don't have one of those just sitting around waiting to be used.

New comment by foota in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

foota — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:52:39 +0000

They are not. I said ice cold. I read this article and several other articles about this.

New comment by foota in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

foota — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:43:53 +0000

Is it not possible for them to just... spray it with ice cold water?

New comment by foota in "Multi-Stream LLMs: new paper on parallelizing/separating prompts, thinking, I/O"

foota — Fri, 22 May 2026 05:47:40 +0000

I was thinking about this just the other day!! Frequently I find myself wanting to interleave thoughts in a conversation, this is the natural way to do so. I just wasn't sure how you'd train it.

New comment by foota in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

foota — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:58:07 +0000

They should feed it the classification of finite simple groups and get it to simplify it/turn it more constructive.

New comment by foota in "GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories"

foota — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:22:40 +0000

Sure, I'm frustrated by the github outages too, but hacking into github to fix their code seems like a bit of an overreaction.

New comment by foota in "We let AIs run radio stations"

foota — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:41:56 +0000

Smells to me like they didn't implement compaction/went past their context window and the system prompt dropped off the end.

New comment by foota in "Designing an FPGA Calculator from Scratch"

foota — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:40:44 +0000

I would love to have some real application that needs an FPGA :) Someday perhaps.

New comment by foota in "UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)"

foota — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:27:05 +0000

Ah, I didn't know that existed. TIL

New comment by foota in "UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)"

foota — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:47:21 +0000

One wonders if someday we might be able to resurrect the neural network from dead cells by somehow reviving the connections between neurons. I imagine that the connections stay, but become dormant when the neuron dies.

New comment by foota in "Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable"

foota — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:35:15 +0000

I've generally assumed that AI would make developers get lower compensation because of the lowered quantity of developers required for the same output, but this raises the possibility of it actually increasing if more developers end up doing their own things instead of entering the broader labor market :)

New comment by foota in "Mythical Man Month"

foota — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:56:52 +0000

Imo the main benefit of AI is allowing faster experimentation and more parallelism, as well as faster iteration.

New comment by foota in "AWS North Virginia data center outage – resolved"

foota — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:38:58 +0000

Shouldn't there be a feedback system here preventing the scheduling of loads when cooling is degraded?

New comment by foota in "Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers"

foota — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:27:16 +0000

I wonder if this is in response to the chrome incognito lawsuit.