Hacker News: gandalfian

New comment by gandalfian in "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"

gandalfian — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 01:42:57 +0000

Modern wireless mice from logitech and microsoft last for a year or two on a pair of aa batteries. There is no point making them rechargeable any more. You can always use rechargeable aa nihms if you really want to, but personally I just have 50p of alkaline aa's and in two years I will have to change them again. Some things do get better :)

New comment by gandalfian in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

gandalfian — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:28:47 +0000

Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.

New comment by gandalfian in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

gandalfian — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:41:33 +0000

Weirdly themselves. Makes my head hurt but the central bank, the social security fund and some other bits of US government basically own most of the national debt. Then it's the Japanese, British, Chinese and Warren Buffet. But less than you would guess.

New comment by gandalfian in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

gandalfian — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:35:58 +0000

Of course that was back when a trillion dollars was worth something.

New comment by gandalfian in "The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain"

gandalfian — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:17:35 +0000

People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.

New comment by gandalfian in "How the AI Bubble Will Pop"

gandalfian — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 11:59:27 +0000

"The “pop” won’t be a single day like a stock market crash. It’ll be a gradual cooling as unrealistic promises fail, capital tightens, and only profitable or genuinely innovative players remain."

(This comment was written by ChatGPT)

New comment by gandalfian in "Bitcoin ATMs reprise a painful history in finance"

gandalfian — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 20:25:10 +0000

https://archive.ph/e0bZK In low income neighborhoods they make it easy to turn money into bitcoin but with high transaction costs and hard to turn the bitcoin back into cash. It is not a perspective that had occurred to me before.

Bitcoin ATMs reprise a painful history in finance

gandalfian — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 20:25:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/23f12c54-f800-4a06-810e-65bacd4bc4c9

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152560

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by gandalfian in "Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team"

gandalfian — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:50:30 +0000

https://kmr.annas-archive.org/blog/an-update-from-the-team.h...?

New comment by gandalfian in "UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage"

gandalfian — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:22:32 +0000

Data is working on Vodafone mvno. Can't call Out or text, Can't make calls On o2 or EE either. Edit EE working. Edit all mobiles now seem to be working OK.

New comment by gandalfian in "How YouTube won the battle for TV viewers"

gandalfian — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:25:54 +0000

Worse for television I have a PVR so I fast forward through the TV adverts... YouTube is about the only place left I sit through video adverts.

New comment by gandalfian in "I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)"

gandalfian — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:18:02 +0000

Mobiles are made by Asian companies to Asian tastes. They like big screens so that's what we get. The two exceptions are apple iPhones and Google pixel. The two American companies making phones for American tastes. Shame as the old 4.5" mobiles had such large bezels they could have accommodated 6" modern screens...

New comment by gandalfian in "Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market"

gandalfian — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 22:03:39 +0000

And long before that Warren Buffet talking about only backing companies who have built a competitive moat.

New comment by gandalfian in "Only on Nantucket: The Curious Case of the "Stolen" Mercedes"

gandalfian — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:08:14 +0000

Survivorship bias perhaps but kudos to a car lasting 34 years in a marine environment. That is impressive.

New comment by gandalfian in "Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price"

gandalfian — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:15:46 +0000

Mothers mac mini 2014? Slow as a dog, 30 second pauses, became unusable. Extremely tricky to reach the 5400rpm hard disc. Found a third party adaptor could bodge an nvme under the easily removable base flap. Suddenly transformed it to a fast nippy useable machine. (She paid up for the 8gb ram originally). But still rather annoyed that Apple essentially crippled their own product and it could only be fixed by chance. Wasn't a cheap pc...

New comment by gandalfian in "Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry"

gandalfian — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:44:10 +0000

I think they are all lucky it doesn't say "android and ios only" like many gadgets these days. Desktops are dying, I feel old...

New comment by gandalfian in "The Zen of Quakerism (2016)"

gandalfian — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 23:47:47 +0000

If you are young and give the silence a decent go it's OK to fall back on a book after a bit, or if you are too young to read yet, quietly working on some lego under your seat will not bother anyone. Adults are a little trickier but comtemplating a bible or Faith and Practice works. And, you know, it is meant to be voluntary.

New comment by gandalfian in "Britain's energy problem – why firms are paid to NOT provide power"

gandalfian — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 13:52:11 +0000

What people tend to leave out is the government guarantees the price wind turbines receive for electricity at say 7p a kwh. So they lose money if the wholesale price goes less that that. But they make money when the price goes above that price. So in the bbc's example while turbines where paid while turned off at one end of the grid, at the other end of the grid the gas booster generating plant was turned on and set the market price quite high, perhaps 15 or 20p a kw. So the wind turbines that were still running flat out made the government lots of profit offsetting the losses from the turned off ones... This produces a head splitting mix of incentives between government costs, taxes and electricity prices to consumers. But overall since the Ukraine energy crisis renewables have probably not cost the government/tax payer as much as people think.

New comment by gandalfian in "Is every memecoin just a scam?"

gandalfian — Sat, 31 May 2025 16:33:55 +0000

Is every memecoin just a scam? Experts on whether Andrew Tate and Trump are fleecing their followers. After I was turned into a memecoin, I looked into the hype behind the crypto that only a tiny percentage of people profit from. Matt Shea

Is every memecoin just a scam?

gandalfian — Sat, 31 May 2025 16:33:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/30/is-memecoin-scam-crypto-trump

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44145365

Points: 18

# Comments: 7