Hacker News: fsh

New comment by fsh in "Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil"

fsh — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:52:24 +0000

You are still ~500 m/s short compared to launching on an equatorial orbit from the equator.

New comment by fsh in "Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil"

fsh — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 02:55:02 +0000

Launching far off the equator makes it more difficult and is therefore a bigger technological achievement.

New comment by fsh in "RSA-260 Factorized"

fsh — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:34:40 +0000

Photonic quantum interfaces typically operate at glacial speeds and with terrible fidelities. There is a lot more missing than good qubits.

New comment by fsh in "RSA-260 Factorized"

fsh — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:27:24 +0000

Electrical engineers in the 1940s already had "infinitely stable" memory in the form of delay lines and Williams tubes. Quantum error correction is incomparably more difficult than using digital bits.

New comment by fsh in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

fsh — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 05:51:11 +0000

Google is one of many monopolies that are collectively bleeding society dry. Of course, the others should be broken up as well.

Waymo is currently financed by a monopolist and has negligible revenue itself, so it is not part of the free market.

New comment by fsh in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

fsh — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 05:38:18 +0000

Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.

New comment by fsh in "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX"

fsh — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 08:09:58 +0000

That's probably a lot more than their market share versus Claude Code and Codex.

New comment by fsh in "The A.I. In Google's New Pixel 11 Is Not Helpful"

fsh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:59:10 +0000

I'm glad that my 9a has little enough RAM to be spared the worst of Google's on-device LLM features.

New comment by fsh in "The Amazon tax"

fsh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:38:55 +0000

Shops used to curate their catalogs by in-house testing products from various suppliers. If a supplier comes up with a better toaster, they can send samples to the most relevant shops and convince them to stock it.

New comment by fsh in "RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland"

fsh — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:03:48 +0000

It's not VNC-based, so the performance is much better. It also supports multiple monitors.

New comment by fsh in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

fsh — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:27:00 +0000

This is blatantly untrue: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/Fig2_Gro...

New comment by fsh in "The Prospects for 128 Bit Processors ( John Mashey SGI 1995)"

fsh — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:27:50 +0000

Doubles are precise to 1E-16, and the most precisely known fundamental constants have uncertainties on the 1E-12 level. This does not give a comfortable headroom, so the CODATA adjustment that determines the constants from measurements uses quadruple-precision numbers in FORTRAN.

New comment by fsh in "IMAX vs. IMAX 70mm: The difference between these two cinema formats"

fsh — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:20:52 +0000

That's not true. Digital movie cameras have a few stops more dynamic range than any analog film or the human eye. Of course this doesn't really matter since analog projectors are astronomically worse than digital on that front. This shouldn't be too surprising considering that they are literally shining a lamp though a piece of plastic.

New comment by fsh in "IMAX vs. IMAX 70mm: The difference between these two cinema formats"

fsh — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:51:26 +0000

IMHO, the only reasons for using 70 mm IMAX are nostalgia and marketing. Digital movie cameras have far better color reproduction, more dynamic range, zero frame jitter, and plenty of resolution without grain. They are also small and silent which allows far more interesting shots than what is possible with a 70 mm monster. Kubrick and Lean used 70 mm because it was the best technology available at the time. Today, the best technology is digital.

New comment by fsh in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"

fsh — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 05:06:58 +0000

Bohmian mechanics is nonrelativistic, so it has been "falsified" since its inception. It generally makes identical predictions to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. the Schrödinger equation), but finding a relativistic version, equivalent to the Dirac equation in QM, has been difficult due to the nonlocality of the pilot wave.

New comment by fsh in "The Baffling World of Masayoshi Son's Presentations (2020)"

fsh — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:29:25 +0000

I once has the displeasure of using a SoftBank SIM in Japan which relentlessly spammed my phone with unblockable ads. The continuing survival of this company is proof that billionares that got lucky once cannot possibly fail.

New comment by fsh in "Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040"

fsh — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:28:43 +0000

With smaller reactors, one needs more of everything: reactor vessels, containment structures, cooling systems, generators, etc. This is why industrial facilities are usually built as large as reasonably possible, and why SMRs fell out of fashion as soon as GW-class reactors became feasible in the 1960s.

New comment by fsh in "Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040"

fsh — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:29:34 +0000

That would poison the entire country. Nuclear waste is many many orders of magnitude more radioactive than coal per energy generated. The meme about coal emitting more radiation comes from a 1970s paper that compared radioactive emissions and found them to be on the same order of magnitude between a BWR and an unfiltered coal power plant.

New comment by fsh in "Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040"

fsh — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:20:49 +0000

Like most industrial sites, large reactors are much more economical than small ones. This is why nobody has built SMRs since the 1950s.

New comment by fsh in "Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering"

fsh — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:03:18 +0000

Competing with four free GNSS constellations is an interesting business model for sure...