Hacker News: jhallenworld

New comment by jhallenworld in "An Interesting Fourier Transform – 1/f Noise (2007)"

jhallenworld — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:04:48 +0000

1/f noise means that if you wait long enough an asteroid will hit the earth or the sun will go nova, etc.

Surely there is some connection to entropy.

New comment by jhallenworld in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

jhallenworld — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:44:11 +0000

Never mind washing machine, how about a missile or a drone?

Or a bomb.. "let there be light"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck

New comment by jhallenworld in "Bubble Memory"

jhallenworld — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:19:56 +0000

I worked at a place that evaluated bubble memory, but didn't use it (they had the bubble memory dev. boards). But they did use CCD memory. I remember it was prone to bit errors, which would have been OK if there had been any error correction, but there was not.

https://deramp.com/downloads/mfe_archive/050-Component%20Spe...

New comment by jhallenworld in "Elevators"

jhallenworld — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:58:01 +0000

What this doesn't include: not all people are equal. Do you want the CEO of your new office building to have to wait behind a bunch of plebeians? At least one car is going to have to be reserved for the better people.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?"

jhallenworld — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:58:53 +0000

I think "solid-state" is a marketing term which means you need to use Fermi-Dirac statistics to model your device, vs. vacuum tubes where you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. I think you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann at least for the ions in the electrolyte.. but maybe have to use for Fermi-Dirac for all conductors in a solid-state battery.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Superlogical"

jhallenworld — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:36:53 +0000

The server being their server that you eventually have to a pay a subscription to use? Hmm..

Also, interesting permission problems. Are you going to allow a remote server owned by someone else have shell access to all of your computers? Are they allowed to train an LLM from all the things you type?

New comment by jhallenworld in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

jhallenworld — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:36:54 +0000

So actually, this TV is for an AIR B&B I rent out. I guess technically I need to add their stupid EULA to my rental agreement.

New comment by jhallenworld in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

jhallenworld — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:18:10 +0000

The main point of selecting the country seems to be getting you to consent to the country specific EULA. There's also region-based content management, but it's secondary at this point.

New comment by jhallenworld in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

jhallenworld — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:37:17 +0000

I have a new LG TV, holy moly what a terrible user experience. Out of the box it requires you to create an LG account. PITA, but OK. Except I was supposed to set the location first, instead I set it after. So now you have the problem that you can not log into LG.com using my own email (even from a web browser) because it says: "incorrect country". I contacted their tech support about this, the only fix is to switch back the country code on the TV (to US_Other), then delete the account from there, then set country code to US, then create it again. OMG. I guess there is no fix if TV breaks before you do this..or if you forget what the original country code was. You are then forced to use a different email for any future LG product. I notice that all LG smart products use the same phone app, BTW.

Also, I bought an LG soundbar to go along with it. You would think they would work well together. The soundbar sounds fine, but the synchronization drifts over time. I've tried optical, LG's enhanced optical (allows you to control the volume) and HDMI eARC. In theory optical in PCM mode works better, but then you give up the volume control. Why should an end customer know about any of this? Lip sync is a simple problem to solve (timing pulses and code slipping will always work) and they have failed at it.

Also: their remote sucks (compared with Roku).

Anyway, so no respect for LG.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

jhallenworld — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:42:53 +0000

>2008

I bought a 2017 Kia Forte S recently.. ($4000 for 137K miles) no touch screen, but many safety features that are not too bad like radar collision detection and blindspot warning. 2019 they started with the touchscreen, and in 2023 they added "Kia Connect" with OTA updates. Anyway definitely check the year.

Problem with 2008 is some cars didn't even have Bluetooth audio or backup camera yet (like my 2010 VW CC- I had to add an aftermarket radio).

Also don't get direct inject only engine. At least for Kias, the non-turbo engines are much more reliable (but underpowered for sure).

New comment by jhallenworld in "The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control (2023) [pdf]"

jhallenworld — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:53:09 +0000

When Boston ended rent control in the late 90s, all of the sudden the landlords invested in their goldmine buildings and generally improved the city. It sucks for those trying to rent or buy (including me, I paid 60% more for a house in 2002 than what it was worth in 1996), but the city has certainly had a renaissance.

IMHO, the problem now is bad zoning. The rich car-centric suburbs are preventing denser housing- to their own financial detriment. A recent fight is that the state has forced them to allow higher density housing around commuter rail stops. Similar fights about rail trails, future abutters are afraid of change but they are valuable everywhere they exist- in that they are a desirable feature and raise your house's value.

Another problem is that they overbuilt $100/sqft bio-lab space. These are sitting empty, and the owners refuse to lower the rent.. I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.

New comment by jhallenworld in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

jhallenworld — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:35:25 +0000

Suppose you want shelter. It used to be that you could buy a house for a reasonable price and move in. But now that's unaffordable, so instead your have to pay rent. In CPI thinking these are equivalent forms of shelter, but I bet if you asked most Americans, they would not agree with you.

New comment by jhallenworld in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

jhallenworld — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:51:13 +0000

No it's cooked. For high tech items, they assume that improved technology means you are getting more for your money even if the price goes up, so they discount it. It's true that you get more for your money, but it ignores threshold effects, like you just can't buy an equivalent phone for $10 even if todays phone's are 200x better.

Then there's the "owner's equivalent rent" BS and this is 25% of CPI. It answers the question "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished, and without utilities?" It assumes rental price and housing costs are somehow linked when in reality asset prices have far outstripped rent.

New comment by jhallenworld in "xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab"

jhallenworld — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:57:23 +0000

>There are no dark GPUs

This might not be true. Someone was comparing Nvidia's production rate with known data center capacity, and they do not match. Their conclusion was that people (possibly even Nvidia) were hoarding GPUs- in the very short term this might be a good strategy, but GPUs go EOL fast. There are other stories about paused datacenter builds that match with this.

TSMC is definitely fully allocated, based on current 40 wk lead times for FPGAs..

New comment by jhallenworld in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

jhallenworld — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:27:31 +0000

Also: Musk's shares have 10x voting power, he can not be overruled by anybody (he will retain ~80% of the votes).

Also: SpaceX debt is $20 billion.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

jhallenworld — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:24:55 +0000

New comment by jhallenworld in "The dead economy theory"

jhallenworld — Sat, 30 May 2026 03:11:35 +0000

Yeah, it's how you pay dividends at capital gains rate instead of income rate. But also, Apple is kind of stagnant.. if they had something better to do with the money they wouldn't be doing the buybacks.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

jhallenworld — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:10:57 +0000

Not only that, the operating itself was configured by a process known as "sysgen". You relink the entire operating system with options set the way you wanted. It was generally a miserable slow process.

At least on PDP-11 that's how it went for something like RSX-11. I believe same is true for early IBM mainframe operating systems like DOS 360- I think all programs had to be relinked because one option you had was to move things around in memory, and ancillary programs had to know the memory map.

Even later: I wrote a device driver for Xenix: you got a link kit for the OS, you relinked it with your custom driver object file included.

On CP/M you patched the running image (perhaps with DDT), then use the CP/M SYSGEN command to install it on a disk.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

jhallenworld — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:04:14 +0000

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHKygZ7OHY

CP/M 1.0 was demoed to Intel in 1974, but they didn't buy it. iCOM FDOS was the first operating system that was available to people, and it sure didn't have environment variables.

Anyway, these operating systems didn't have multiple directories. But you could use CP/M 2.x's ASSIGN command to bind a logical name to a physical name. Minicomputer operating systems had this, also IBM mainframe had JCL DD commands.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Ti-84 Evo"

jhallenworld — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:07:14 +0000

My favorite cheap Casio is fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition, $17

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...

Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.

If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-ClassWiz%C2%AE-Calculator-Funct...

The older ones that still have basic:

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GIII-Graphing-Calculator...

BTW, here is a review I made of many calculators, measuring keyboard efficiency: (HP-15c still the best)

https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki