Hacker News: jccooper

New comment by jccooper in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

jccooper — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:34:51 +0000

Crew Dragon flew an automated demo flight before flying with crew. It was proceeded by 20 flights of Dragon 1 over 10 years.

Starship's heatshield has already been tested full-up half a dozen times. Many changes have been made as a result.

New comment by jccooper in "Is it a pint?"

jccooper — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:10:05 +0000

Belgian glasses, like wine glasses, leave room for head and aromatics.

Belgium is also fanatical about matching the glass with the beer, and Europe has the very sensible pour line on glasses, so it is designed for a certain fill and filled to the design.

It's designed for experience, not volume.

New comment by jccooper in "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"

jccooper — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:21:33 +0000

I don't see that Google cares much about backlinks any more. Seems like it's all about "content" keywords and maybe a little time-on-site. The domain is a huge signal, which is probably where the problem comes from here.

Sadly, Google's generally better against all the new AI-generated content farms than other players, so maybe they're still running PageRank somewhere.

New comment by jccooper in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

jccooper — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:37:01 +0000

Industrial buildings are typically built at dock height. Even if they don't do any grading, that would put the building well above any plausible flooding in that area.

New comment by jccooper in "Sizing chaos"

jccooper — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:45:51 +0000

There is a problem with the number of dimensions. Even a t-shirt is described best in neck, chest, waist, and you could add several parameters for sleeves and also for heights. Neither consumers nor manufacturers can really handle the combinatorial explosion, so you have to boil it down to one or maybe two dimensions.

But the reason even that isn't done is mostly history and market expectations. There are clothing categories that sell in actual dimensions, and (aside from the terrible dimensional accuracy of clothing in general) it works fine. But those are all on the "men's" side, and it seems the industry believes women will not like buying based on actual numbers.

New comment by jccooper in "The wonder of modern drywall"

jccooper — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:28:09 +0000

"Plaster" can be lime, gypsum, or cement, in rough order of historical adoption. Sometimes you even use different types on the same wall; cement rough coat and lime or gypsum top coat, for example.

New comment by jccooper in "Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock"

jccooper — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:05:09 +0000

New comment by jccooper in "Launching the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative"

jccooper — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:35:30 +0000

Because this is not about charity, but about politics. Specifically demonstration with the intention of advocacy. The advocacy falls down when the demonstration is less applicable.

New comment by jccooper in "xAI joins SpaceX"

jccooper — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:08:13 +0000

The idea here is that the economics of launch are changing with Starship such that the "incredible cost" and "overspeccing" of space will become much less relevant. There's a world where, because the cost per kg is so low, a data center satellite's compute payload is just the same hardware you'd put in a terrestrial rack, and the satellite bus itself is mass-produced to not-particularly-challenging specs. And they don't have to last 30 years, just 4-ish, when the computer is ready for retirement anyway.

Will that come to be? I'm skeptical, especially within the next several years. Starship would have to perform perfectly, and a lot of other assumptions hold, to make this make sense. But that's the idea.

New comment by jccooper in "NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston"

jccooper — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 21:16:26 +0000

It's a mid-50s bomber. The skin will be easy to replace. Drill out the rivets, rivet on new sheet metal. I don't think it even dragged the wingtips.

Might be some complications with the nose gear and the payload bay (the main gear is on the wings, and untouched) but nothing terribly complicated. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was designed with some assumption of belly landings; it's a warplane after all.

Repairs surely isn't automatic, and who knows how tight that's program's budget is, but planes are repaired from such landings all the time, and if they attach any value to the vehicle it can be repaired, and not at great cost.

New comment by jccooper in "Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas"

jccooper — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:08:30 +0000

I think the point of this headline is that they're not being blamed in this one instance.

New comment by jccooper in "AI can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything"

jccooper — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 16:48:19 +0000

The dataset isn't making up fake dependencies.

New comment by jccooper in "Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption"

jccooper — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 17:55:57 +0000

That's not the sort of "regulation" in "deregulated energy market". Which was always a bad term. "De-integrated" would be better. It's a situation where energy generation and retail are separated from the transmission/distribution monopoly. The resulting energy markets (both wholesale and retail) can be and are heavily regulated (in the usual sense of the word.)

New comment by jccooper in "Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon"

jccooper — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:15:28 +0000

Much smaller, no atmosphere. You can get a lot closer to it in orbit. Until Apollo 14, the LM would enter a 50,000 ft periapsis on the way to landing. Dunno the exact phasing of this lander, but that video could be from a similar height (or lower, if you have good navigation.)

New comment by jccooper in "Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?"

jccooper — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:05:58 +0000

Or they're using "surplus" resources (like their backyard, and domestic food scraps) that they'd still have otherwise. Which is something that is not commercially scalable. Unless, I guess, someone tries "Uber but for chickens".

New comment by jccooper in "A drill bit that can also drive screws"

jccooper — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 05:15:05 +0000

Cute. But 3/16" is way too large a pilot hole for any reasonable screw. I think a #24 screw, which is the largest size of wood screw, has a 3/16" pilot size... and uses a #4 Philips, which is not the bit on this thing (and is sufficiently rare I don't even have one.)

New comment by jccooper in "Balcony solar is taking off"

jccooper — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:28:57 +0000

This is impractical in the US as things currently stand; most utilities have a permitting process for a grid tie (anything that backfeeds the grid) and smartmeters are capable of detecting and reporting any backfeed.

Mostly the technical aspects are not a problem (most modern meters are two-way); you'd just need a policy like the one in Germany allowing de minimis backfeed.

New comment by jccooper in "Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)"

jccooper — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:57:47 +0000

Hugo voters are members of the World Science Fiction Society (who are mostly Worldcon attendees). Which is to say, voters for that are chosen for enthusiasm for the genre, not taste.

New comment by jccooper in "Boom's XB-1 becomes first civil aircraft to go supersonic"

jccooper — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:03:46 +0000

The "civil" here is as in "civil aviation". Aviation is broadly either civil or state aviation.

Presumably it's derived from "civilian".

New comment by jccooper in "Building a Medieval Castle from Scratch"

jccooper — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 19:55:55 +0000

They used to keep copies of their really detailed newsletter on the website. Seems to have disappeared. But the last time archive.org saw it is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201030183911/https://www.guede...

Dunno if they still keep up the newsletter (there's a signup form) in the same manner.