Hacker News: gshubert17

New comment by gshubert17 in "Lording it, over: A new history of the modern British aristocracy"

gshubert17 — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 01:29:38 +0000

3 times as long (6 years for the Senate vs 2 years for the House)

New comment by gshubert17 in "The Geological Sublime"

gshubert17 — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:08:28 +0000

Alas, net zero carbon is not peak heat. It’s peak carbon dioxide. It’s peak rate of temperature change due to greenhouse gases. Global average temperatures will continue to rise past 2060 (or whenever we get net zero). I’m not sure what the models predict. Perhaps the total temperature rise could be 3.5 degrees by 2100.

New comment by gshubert17 in "Institutional Books: A 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections"

gshubert17 — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 22:31:52 +0000

Edit: Two responses, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252450 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252408, seem to be dupes. As rickydroll states, the time stamps and id numbers show it to be the first.

Joshua Clymer on "How AI might take over in 2 years"

gshubert17 — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 01:57:20 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/joshua_clymer/status/1887905375082656117

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43008093

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by gshubert17 in "Pi calculation world record with over 202T digits"

gshubert17 — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 21:28:12 +0000

Written or printed out at 3 digits per centimeter, 202 trillion digits would make a string about 670 million kilometers long -- or about the distance between Earth and Jupiter.

New comment by gshubert17 in "To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)"

gshubert17 — Sun, 26 May 2024 22:56:57 +0000

See: http://literateprogramming.com/cweb_download.html

New comment by gshubert17 in "The evolution of a Scheme programmer (2020)"

gshubert17 — Fri, 17 May 2024 16:42:28 +0000

My oops too. The extra 1 argument belongs with range, as you have it here.

New comment by gshubert17 in "The evolution of a Scheme programmer (2020)"

gshubert17 — Fri, 17 May 2024 13:06:44 +0000

Since the first element in range() will be 0, should the last line be ...?

    return prod(1,range(n+1))

New comment by gshubert17 in "Could humans alter the moon's orbit significantly with current technology? (2016)"

gshubert17 — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 14:34:17 +0000

Solar-powered railgun accelerating rocks to lunar escape velocity in directions chosen to make the desired delta-v. Speed the moon up or slow it down or change whatever other orbital elements you please.

This would work better to change the orbit of a small asteroid. For the moon it would take (a lot) longer.

New comment by gshubert17 in "Ask HN: Doom and Gloom but financial markets doing well?"

gshubert17 — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 19:52:00 +0000

Both manufacturing corporations and mutual investment funds are ways to aggregate smaller amounts of capital into big enough sums that large factories or investments are possible. I don't think it's necessary to rely on multi-billionaires for investment in wild ideas.

New comment by gshubert17 in "Ask HN: Doom and Gloom but financial markets doing well?"

gshubert17 — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 19:49:08 +0000

Would taxation of intellectual property reduce rent-seeking behavior? Any idea how it might be implemented?

New comment by gshubert17 in "How Microchips Work"

gshubert17 — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 13:14:08 +0000

Just before the section on Moore's Law, it says this about silicon purity:

> Electronic grade silicon (EG-Si): 99.9999999 pure ('nine nines pure') Thats one impurity atom in every 10.000.000 silicon atoms.

I believe that should be 1.000.000.000 (10^9 atoms) to correspond to nine nines pure. Just as one impurity atom in every 100 (10^2) atoms would be 99% (two nines) pure.

New comment by gshubert17 in "Nvidia pursues $30B custom chip opportunity with new unit"

gshubert17 — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 01:42:03 +0000

Estimates range from about 1 T$ [0] to 4 T$ [1] or 5 T$ [2].

[0] https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II/Human-and-mate...

[1] https://moneywise.com/life/lifestyle/financial-facts-about-w...

[2] https://www.whatitcosts.com/world-war-ii-cost-united-states-...

New comment by gshubert17 in "Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to Bitcoin"

gshubert17 — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 22:29:54 +0000

A Visa fact sheet [0] claims 276 billion transactions in a 12-month period, which would be less than 9,000 per second, but still an impressive figure.

Fedwire, the settlement system operated by the Federal Reserve, processed 196 million settlements in 2022, each about $5.4 million, for a total of over $1,000 trillion. [1] That would be about 16 settlements per second. Visa handles many more smaller, individual transactions; aggregates and nets them; and uses Fedwire to settle them between member banks.

Bitcoin could be used in a similar manner, handling a relatively small number of larger settlements; leaving other systems to handle smaller, individual transactions.

[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/ab...

[1] https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/wir...

New comment by gshubert17 in "Why the Leopard 2 Is Such a Badass Tank"

gshubert17 — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 23:04:34 +0000

archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240116022603/https://www.popul...

also, originally published in 2023

New comment by gshubert17 in "Scammy AI-Generated Books Are Flooding Amazon"

gshubert17 — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 15:23:11 +0000

I think that individuals who care about meaningful, non-deceitful content, will have to create their own parallel net in which content can be sanity-checked and fact-checked.

Fast, free, or fact: pick any two. The current internet is fast and free, but is increasingly non-factual. An alternative emphasizing meaningful facts and observations will almost necessarily be slower.

We might even be able to use pressed bleached dead trees as a backup medium.

New comment by gshubert17 in "The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit"

gshubert17 — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 14:57:48 +0000

Indeed, Neal Stephenson in _Anathem_ (2008), in describing an alternate world (in which his "reticulum" is our "network") wrote "Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information."

"So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. ... " Generating crap "didn't really take off until the military got interested" in a program called "Artificial Inanity".

The defenses that were developed back then now "work so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don't know it's there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day."

A group of people (the "Ita") developed techniques for a parallel reticulum in which they could keep information they had determined to be reliable. When there was news on the reticulum, they might take a couple of days to do sanity-checking or fact-checking. I'm guessing there would need to be reputation monitoring and cryptographic signatures to maintain the integrity of their alternate web.

New comment by gshubert17 in "Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food"

gshubert17 — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 16:49:41 +0000

If Congress were interested in policy changes, would a tax on plastic (to cover recycling, cleanup, and future medical costs) be a way to go?

New comment by gshubert17 in "Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi"

gshubert17 — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 14:28:28 +0000

I toured an NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) facility in Boulder around 1979; got to sit on a seat on their Cray-1. So yes, weather and climate calculations.

New comment by gshubert17 in "Private equity is devouring the U.S. economy"

gshubert17 — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 03:13:46 +0000

Required minimum distributions start at about 5% (not 10%) at age 72, and increase with age. But your general point stands. RMDs will add to one's tax bill, by regular tax brackets and having up to 85% of Social Security benefits taxed too.