Hacker News: itishappy

New comment by itishappy in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

itishappy — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:25:47 +0000

Keep in mind that the energy density of nuclear fuel is astronomically higher than that of coal, so even if the processes were equivalently wasteful (and I'm fairly certain they are not) coal would still cause significantly more damage. The process also differ significantly:

Uranium is often pumped out of the ground after being chemically extracted.

Coal is almost always carted out after being blasted.

New comment by itishappy in "Splash Is a Colour Format"

itishappy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:47:40 +0000

Despite my background in color science, I find RGB more intuitive. With HSV I have to remember the chirality of hue and it's zero point, and when changing hue I find it difficult to reason about saturation. In practice this means I must "nudge and judge" with both systems. With RGB I can always make progress. With HSV I guess hue wrong about half the time. I could probably improve this.

To be fair, I'm also colorblind. That's probably relevant.

Anyway, I'd say the answer to both your questions is: "sometimes"

New comment by itishappy in "Splash Is a Colour Format"

itishappy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:28:21 +0000

That is literally not true.

The feeling of disconnect between your comment(s) and the intent of the tool remains.

New comment by itishappy in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

itishappy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:04:34 +0000

What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Similar arguments can be made for most research including nuclear fusion, AI, vaccines, space, polymers, combustion engines, electric motors, semiconductors...

New comment by itishappy in "Splash Is a Colour Format"

itishappy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:42:14 +0000

More art than spec. I can dig it.

I have always appreciated the concept of thinking of colors as a cube (even though I now view them as triangles or weird pyramid things). Thinking of cubes as a 10x10x10 cube composed of 1000 smaller cubes is another mental model I've returned to often. I actually kinda like this for hacking on stuff like terminal colors.

New comment by itishappy in "Splash Is a Colour Format"

itishappy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:16:07 +0000

Getting mangled by the receiver appears to be part of the spec. They've implemented their a custom LUT and suggest others should do the same.

It feels like there's a fundamental disconnect between your comment the intent of the tool.

New comment by itishappy in "Aging and Eye Problems"

itishappy — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:31:21 +0000

No worries, I understood your intent!

The impact is a lot less than you may expect. Brains are ridiculously good at filling in incomplete information. For example, did you know that you have a roughly sun-sized blind spot slightly off center in each eye (where the optic nerve attaches)?

Now imagine needing to switch glasses to read your dash. Inconvenient and unsafe!

New comment by itishappy in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

itishappy — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:03:52 +0000

The parent comment is not suggesting that Yon is about physics/metaphysics.

Understanding is important for readers. Demonstrating understanding is important for writers of both technical documentation and internet comments, and of critical importance in the era of AI.

New comment by itishappy in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

itishappy — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:56:52 +0000

It's cheaper for the AI provider to use your laptop instead of their datacenter.

New comment by itishappy in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

itishappy — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:46:01 +0000

Teslas spend a tiny percentage of their life at highway speeds, and a major selling point of the platform is that their compute would be used to pilot the vehicle.

If they could train using Teslas they wouldn't have needed Dojo.

New comment by itishappy in "Aging and Eye Problems"

itishappy — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:37:50 +0000

Bifocals in general are quite useful. It's nice to be able to see the road and the speedometer using the same lenses.

Traditional bifocals and progressives are different beasts. The hard outline on traditional bifocals means you get essentially two different lenses, both able to function as intended. The soft blend on progressives means you get essentially one big blurry lens that does not have well defined properties anywhere.

New comment by itishappy in "Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs"

itishappy — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:10:10 +0000

Obviously you need to use air tight paint.

New comment by itishappy in "Turkey Hacked the Hair Transplant Industry"

itishappy — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:37:41 +0000

Would it leave a cool pattern?

New comment by itishappy in "Dav2d"

itishappy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:34:53 +0000

When writing a high performance video codec avoiding defensive copies of objects is something you want always, not just often.

C makes it easy to be fast but hard to be safe. Rust makes it easy to be safe but hard to be fast.

Also note that video codecs tend to wrap C or Rust around handcrafted ASM. Performance is king.

New comment by itishappy in "Dav2d"

itishappy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:16:58 +0000

This is a software decoder designed to run on general purpose hardware.

Adding custom hardware like tensor cores to the stack would serves a different use case.

New comment by itishappy in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

itishappy — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:57:40 +0000

The argument is that the ergonomics of using Python are worth the squeeze of learning two languages. Are the ergonomics of using Zig really enough to justify replacing Python on the happy path, or would it end up replacing just C?

New comment by itishappy in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

itishappy — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:14:08 +0000

> The true irony is that even SIMD text parsing would outperform this! SIMD is that powerful.

Can you explain this part a bit? I feel like intuitively (and therefore probably incorrectly) these should have the same difficulties.

New comment by itishappy in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

itishappy — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:37:22 +0000

Ohh, then combustion itself. Right. Thanks, lol.

New comment by itishappy in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

itishappy — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:26:04 +0000

Here's a fascinating postmortem analysis of two similar incidents, Styrene and Butyl Acrylate:

https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...

From fuzzfactor's comment with lots of other great info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245

New comment by itishappy in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

itishappy — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:09:11 +0000

It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.

> The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.

Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:

https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...

The comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245