Hacker News: idlewords

New comment by idlewords in "Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking"

idlewords — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:53:15 +0000

Right. I said mountain to stress the importance of topography in the NM accident. The parent commenter may pat himself on the back for never flying into terrain during GPS outages in Florida, but there are factors in play in addition to his superior skills.

New comment by idlewords in "Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking"

idlewords — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:05:26 +0000

The highest mountain summit in Florida is 105 meters above sea level.

New comment by idlewords in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)"

idlewords — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:31:18 +0000

Location: New Mexico

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: to NYC only

Technologies: Yes, but you'd probably want to hire me as a writer/analyst.

Résumé/CV: https://idlewords.com/cv.htm

Email: see CV

Looking for paid engagements working on technical due diligence for investors, written communications for exec teams, privacy/trust advisory roles, and anything to do with social impacts of AI. I've run a small SaaS business for 17 years and have a long track record as a writer and speaker on topics around social media and privacy (https://idlewords.com/talks).

My core skill is making esoteric and technical things readable and engaging to the audience of your choice, but if pressed I can code.

New comment by idlewords in "More Bounce to the Ounce"

idlewords — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:20:56 +0000

Thank you! I realize people have subscription fatigue, and that on this site in particular there's a culture of expecting to read the full text of everything for free. So I try to make the previews substantive enough for people to participate in discussion whether or not they sign up.

I do feel like the free sample guy at Costco, confident that once people try the cube of summer sausage on a toothpick, they'll want to buy the whole thing. But I sure appreciate someone else saying it!

New comment by idlewords in "More Bounce to the Ounce"

idlewords — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:44:29 +0000

I am trying to be friendly with the paywall.

New comment by idlewords in "More Bounce to the Ounce"

idlewords — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:43:26 +0000

A lot of the work was done to a design point of 0.25 seconds, and Dyson's book says the issue there wasn't the blast clearing, but just being able to move the machinery fast enough. I kind of share your puzzlement; I can see the blast clearing this quickly in space (the debris moves at tens of thousands of km/sec) but not in the atmosphere.

New comment by idlewords in "The Plight of the Martian Farmer"

idlewords — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:02:35 +0000

> Kicks in just after it starts to get interesting.

What a funny coincidence!

New comment by idlewords in "Pinboard's DNS registration has expired"

idlewords — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:24:17 +0000

Hi everyone,

The domain should be back up within the next few hours.

I had the domain set on auto-renew but unfortunately something went wrong, and I didn't get an email from the registrar about it (or it got misrouted to spam).

I've renewed the registration but it seems to be taking a while to propagate back to the .IN servers. An interim measure is setting an /etc/hosts record for pinboard.in to 64.62.134.190.

My sincere apologies for the outage. The TLS cert for Pinboard renews in October, and in my mind I thought the domain renewed at that time as well, or I would have paid closer attention. Irked at my own carelessness here.

New comment by idlewords in "L'Affaire Siloxane"

idlewords — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:17:49 +0000

It's fine to dump sewage overboard if you're far enough from shore. Cruise ships treat it to some extent, but ultimately it all becomes fish food.

New comment by idlewords in "L'Affaire Siloxane"

idlewords — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:52:52 +0000

There's a nice paper on this, ICES-2018-123 "Dimethylsilanediol (DMSD) Source Assessment and Mitigation on ISS: Estimated Contributions from Personal Hygiene Products Containing Volatile Methyl Siloxanes (VMS)". The upshot is more than half of the siloxane burden on ISS comes from God knows where (packaging, plastics, machinery, you name it).

https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/items/ff1a240e-1fb1-4b04-acb2-42e9c45...

L'Affaire Siloxane

idlewords — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:21:39 +0000

Article URL: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456808

Points: 299

# Comments: 55

How should we think about Starship?

idlewords — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:15:34 +0000

Article URL: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-starship

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48289960

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Microbial Dark Matter and the Search for Life on Earth

idlewords — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:57:05 +0000

Article URL: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/microbial-dark-matter-and-the-search

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129808

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by idlewords in "Why Not Venus?"

idlewords — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:07:12 +0000

The atmosphere has a perfectly reasonable 110 hour day/night cycle.

New comment by idlewords in "Why Not Venus?"

idlewords — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:06:41 +0000

I thought so too, but the phosphine signal turns out to be small but real. What everyone involved in the back and forth debate over it agrees on is the need to send better sensors.

New comment by idlewords in "Why Not Venus?"

idlewords — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:05:08 +0000

Landis has a ton of good papers around Venus for those who want to nerd out deeper.

New comment by idlewords in "Let's talk space toilets"

idlewords — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:00:16 +0000

Give it a few hours!

New comment by idlewords in "Let's talk space toilets"

idlewords — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:59:35 +0000

Thanks so much! I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece.

New comment by idlewords in "Let's talk space toilets"

idlewords — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:19:58 +0000

It's not an absurd question. The threshold value is the one that breaks surface tension and effectively pulls waste away from the body. It will be more than a few hundredths g but less than 1g.

Unfortunately we have basically no data on the effects of partial gravity, in this context or any other. We can try flying partial-gravity parabolas in aircraft and simulate a Martian toilet the same way they tested the design for Skylab; I don't think this experiment has been done.

New comment by idlewords in "Let's talk space toilets"

idlewords — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:19:31 +0000

You can try it with small capsules and tethers, but it's still a pain.