Hacker News: hgomersall

New comment by hgomersall in "Guitar tuner that uses phone accelerometer"

hgomersall — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:31:37 +0000

If you know you have a single frequency close to an actual frequency of interest, you can use the fact you know you're in an aliased band to get a precise frequency estimate.

New comment by hgomersall in "Two millionth electric car registered as market rebounds from tax changes"

hgomersall — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:45:59 +0000

Total UK electricity consumption is around 300 TWh annually. That would put the grid losses at less than 10% based on your link. The charging is never as bad as 25% (internal house losses are negligible for any sensible charging rate) and the car is typically ~12% charging loss. Moreover, EVs recover quite a bit too. Even in purely dissipative driving (highway driving), I get around 4 miles/kWh, which is about 4 times better than an ICE vehicle.

Furthermore, if you're going to include distributional losses, then let's also drop the available petrol by 10-15% to account for refining etc.

Finally, on anything resembling a sunny day, my car charges entirely of rooftop solar, so what efficiency do we assign to that?

New comment by hgomersall in "UK: Two millionth electric car registered as market rebounds strongly"

hgomersall — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:04:59 +0000

Small batteries mean heavy cycling of those batteries. When on pure EV, the oversized battery means most days you sit in the middle third of the battery which is great for battery longevity.

New comment by hgomersall in "Men who stare at walls"

hgomersall — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:44:37 +0000

Yes, but you tend to carry around a smartphone all the time and the temptation to whip it out whenever there's more than a 5s window can be very strong.

New comment by hgomersall in "Men who stare at walls"

hgomersall — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:19:56 +0000

I've recently realised that the biggest problem with smartphones is not that they steal your attention (which is bad enough), but that they steal your disattention

I don't know of a better word for it than disattention. Perhaps downtime? But it's not so structured. It's just those moments where you'd previously let your mind wander. Gone forever.

New comment by hgomersall in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

hgomersall — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:31:57 +0000

Well yes, if a team doesn't bother to understand the code, that's certainly quicker.

New comment by hgomersall in "Rust Threads on the GPU"

hgomersall — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:15:09 +0000

It makes sense when the inner operations are vectorisable, as in the example.

New comment by hgomersall in "John Deere to pay $99M in right-to-repair settlement"

hgomersall — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:06:49 +0000

I had an interesting situation where we had failure of a Thule bike trailer wheel and could see where the connection-to-the-trailer design had changed from an earlier version (from the company that Thule bought). The wheel functioned the same, but you could see a clear difference which fully explained the failure. I expect it was a cost optimisation, and we only encountered the failure because we used it very heavily.

Edit: they also failed to honour their warranty commitments, but that was secondary.

New comment by hgomersall in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

hgomersall — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:35:14 +0000

Well the real insight here is that most "investing" is gambling.

New comment by hgomersall in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

hgomersall — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 07:34:03 +0000

Except for the health benefits of not being killed by tired drivers in the dark late afternoons, which is a thing.

Currently it's doubly bad because the clocks changing also cause a spike in deaths.

New comment by hgomersall in "US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives"

hgomersall — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:31:11 +0000

Here is a discussion of Zimbabwe more complete that I'm likely to write in a comment on HN: https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=3773

New comment by hgomersall in "US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives"

hgomersall — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:56:36 +0000

I've not made any accusations, nor do I think that the elites are not to blame. I said that "money printing" is not the problem here. The reason it's not the problem is because the quantity of money simply reflects savings. By focussing on "money printing", you're missing the actual problems. Arguably, that's the point, since the elite tend to do well when money is considered a scarce commodity.

Sure, spending might cause inflationary effects, but that's orthogonal to quantity (flows not stocks), but then economics is the science of confusing stocks with flows.

New comment by hgomersall in "US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives"

hgomersall — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:39:05 +0000

The quantity theory of money is trivially shown to be nonsense just by considering what happens to savings (i.e. nothing). You need to up your analysis if you want to truly understand.

New comment by hgomersall in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

hgomersall — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:09:07 +0000

In my house we discuss a macro feature of children as being "school-shaped". If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? The counter-point to that is to ponder how many children fail to achieve a similar level of success because they don't fit into the school system so are left by the wayside.

New comment by hgomersall in "A lithium-ion breakthrough that could boost range and lower costs"

hgomersall — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:45:04 +0000

Do you worry about spontaneous combustion of ICE cars? They are far more likely to burst into flames than EVs.

New comment by hgomersall in "The three year myth"

hgomersall — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:22:13 +0000

That's an interesting parallel. I suspect the point is that entering all relationships with the expectation that all men are pigs carries certain benefits, but then it also likely has costs, such as an inability to form truly deep connections.

New comment by hgomersall in "Why is the sky blue?"

hgomersall — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 07:08:15 +0000

Why is a banana yellow?

New comment by hgomersall in "The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein"

hgomersall — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:36:13 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

New comment by hgomersall in "Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction"

hgomersall — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:38:56 +0000

What is this debt? You didn't answer my question. Who's buying it and what choice do they have, and to whom is it owed ultimately?

New comment by hgomersall in "Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction"

hgomersall — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:10:34 +0000

"debt"? You mean the balancing item from money creation? Question: To which bank does the government owe the liabilities created when it creates the money? (clue: the government owns it).