Hacker News: ianburrell

New comment by ianburrell in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

ianburrell — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:35:16 +0000

It is the British that changed things. They also used to call it soccer and then changed in the 1980s. Canada and Australia still use soccer, probably cause they have native footballs.

New comment by ianburrell in "Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why"

ianburrell — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 03:42:30 +0000

NASA is a large government organization. Microsoft Outlook is understandable. I assumed they were reading their normal email.

Laptop uses negligible power. The solar panels generate eight houses worth of power (they don't give number).

New comment by ianburrell in "IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember"

ianburrell — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:05:17 +0000

One reason is that there are a lot of similar words in the dictionary. It is easy to mishear the wrong location especially when they are close together. Some of the words are long and complicated. Another is that they are random which means can't navigate from the codes.

They are missing feature of some codes that can have variable length for variable precision.

New comment by ianburrell in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

ianburrell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:33:27 +0000

You don't want that. I was organizing my cables and noticed how much thicker the USB3 cables are than USB2. USB2 cables are cheaper than USB3 cables, the latter have gotten cheaper but still buy two USB2 for some USB3. USB3 cables are also shorter cause harder to transmit signal, this has also gotten better.

The flaw is that USB-IF didn't require marking faster cables. Putting a blue ring, stripe, or dot would have solved the problem.

New comment by ianburrell in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

ianburrell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:52:06 +0000

What voltage do you use? Most DC stuff wants low voltage (5-48V), but appliances need higher voltage like AC-level to get enough power over existing wiring. The result is DC-DC converters every place that have transformers now.

The gain from DC-DC converters is small and DC devices are small part of usage compared appliances. There is no way will pay back costs of replacing all the appliances.

New comment by ianburrell in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

ianburrell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:33:21 +0000

You can run 240V circuit to kitchen for kettle and put in NEMA 6 outlet. But few people care about fast boil and importing European kettle. Most people use the microwave or stovetop, and 120V kettles are fine in most cases. It will never become a standard thing.

New comment by ianburrell in "General Motors is assisting with the restoration of a rare EV1"

ianburrell — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:17:36 +0000

Prius had 0.91 kWh battery and the EV1 had 26.4 kWh with NiMH. The EV1 was expensive, $80k to produce in 1996 money. A large part of that had to be the battery.

New comment by ianburrell in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

ianburrell — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:52:28 +0000

Voice communication has the advantage is that it can be used without taking off hands and attention off controls. Digital solution would require using device.

New comment by ianburrell in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"

ianburrell — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:27:43 +0000

The initial segment in Central Valley has current date of 2032. It depends on if federal government restores funding or if California has to fund itself.

Phase 1 from SF to LA is estimated for 2035-2040. They might do end-to-end service before that with existing tracks and slower speeds, especially from Palmdale to LA. The SF and LA segments require tunneling to get over the mountains.

New comment by ianburrell in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:41:59 +0000

My understanding is that home batteries are not UPSes, they don't go through the battery. They have a switch between power company, solar, or battery. I think that means would be exposed to surge from power company.

You can install a whole house surge protector. Those go in the panel and would protect from different sources.

New comment by ianburrell in "Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:26:29 +0000

Starshield means multiple things, or really it is SpaceX business unit with military. Starshield is the name for US military buying Starlink service. It is also SpaceX building Starlink-based satellites for the military. This doesn't have to be communications, the first ones were missile defense trackers.

I think the custom satellites came first and they rebranded the communications after it.

New comment by ianburrell in "Your phone is an entire computer"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:00:51 +0000

Why would anyone buy that instead of Macbook Neo for $600? Macbook doesn't need a iPhone to use.

If you are doing serious work, which are the people who want a dock, then you need the power of Macbook Air or Macbook Pro.

For most people, iPad or iPad Air with keyboard is a better option since you get tablet for fun and can do some light work.

New comment by ianburrell in "Your phone is an entire computer"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:00:01 +0000

Imagine executive tapping their phone down on reader, and it pops up everything they were doing, and they get to keep using their phone.

The first flaw in the idea is that computing is cheap. You can make a computer the size of a phone for people to carry around, that has been tried but failed. The second flaw is that everything is in the cloud, only developers and offline need local access to their files. The cloud also means that can desktop in the cloud.

New comment by ianburrell in "Your phone is an entire computer"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:38:00 +0000

There isn't much demand for using phone as computer. If you are at home or work, you can buy a desktop computers for cheap. If you are traveling, you need to find a monitor and keyboard. You could carry small monitor and wireless keyboard, but then you are carrying as much as laptop. People who need to work on the road get a laptop. People who need to send email get iPad and keyboard.

Good example of the economics is that Macbook Neo or iPad Air are cheaper than new iPhone.

iPhone should export display, but more for showing videos or presentations. My Pixel 10 has USB-C display and I haven't used it, but I have computers for all purposes.

Apple should spend more effort making the iPad usable for work. It would be good candidate for USB-C display, but with iPadOS.

New comment by ianburrell in "The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 01:09:09 +0000

There are lots of places that have IPv6-only networks and access IPv4 through NAT64. It makes sense for new company networks that can control what software gets installed.

The main limitation is software that only supports IPv4. This would affect your proposed solution of doing the translation in the stack. There is no way to fix an IPv4-only software that has 32-bit address field.

New comment by ianburrell in "The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:57:54 +0000

36-bit is still too small for the future. We are at 30 billion connected devices. We will probably hit 64 billion in decade or two.

The most likely alternative would have been 64-bit. That's big enough that could have worked for a long time.

New comment by ianburrell in "The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved"

ianburrell — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:46:28 +0000

There aren’t enough IPv4 addresses to give everyone one. That is why ISPs use CGNAT to hide multiple customers behind one IP address.

Something that just uses IPv4 won’t work without making the extra layer visible. That may not have been apparent then but it is now.

New comment by ianburrell in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

ianburrell — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:39:09 +0000

HVDC is more efficient than you think, 3.5% losses per 1000km. Which means intracontinental is obviously good, and intercontinental will work in some situations.

Nuclear power is expensive, enough that “what about night” is solve by building extra solar and batteries. Also, renewables wreck the economics of base load power that needs to run all the time to pay back loan, but can’t compete with solar during the day.

New comment by ianburrell in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

ianburrell — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:24:05 +0000

Coal was abundant. British coal was mined out. The coal that is left isn’t economical to mine.

New comment by ianburrell in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

ianburrell — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:01:46 +0000

Hungary is a parliamentary republic, Orban is the Prime Minister. Turkey was parliamentary system until was changed in 2017 to presidential system with more power for Erdogan.

I agree about parliamentary systems being better, but they are still vulnerable. It doesn't matter if the electorate is in favor of strongman.