Hacker News: johnthesecure

New comment by johnthesecure in "Advanced Rail Energy Storage of North America"

johnthesecure — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 06:57:11 +0000

Two prototypes now operating (15 Dec 2025): https://electrek.co/2025/12/15/fortescue-infinity-train-elec...

New comment by johnthesecure in "Two-phase chip cooling with manifold-capillary structures enables 10⁵ COP"

johnthesecure — Fri, 02 May 2025 01:40:55 +0000

Easier to access at https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...

New comment by johnthesecure in "Markov Chain Monte Carlo Without All the Bullshit (2015)"

johnthesecure — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 04:00:05 +0000

I experienced this issue, but it works on another device, and after a refresh it worked on the original device. Good luck...

New comment by johnthesecure in "Structural Optimization of I-Beams via Typographical Analysis"

johnthesecure — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:37:08 +0000

Rather than looking at different letters, perhaps look at different font families. Clearly sans-serif I-beams are structurally much worse than avec-serif I-beams.

New comment by johnthesecure in "Where does air pollution come from?"

johnthesecure — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:54:23 +0000

It's interesting to see the number of deaths caused by pollution. But everyone will die of something. Could it be that many of those people whose death was caused by pollution may have been frail and close to death anyway? I wonder if it would be more useful to talk about quality-life-years (QUALYs) lost as a result of pollution. Probably much harder to get that data though.

New comment by johnthesecure in "A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots"

johnthesecure — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 12:31:19 +0000

The calculations paper talks about the water cycle and explains that fresh clean water isn't well distributed. I wonder whether big evaporators like data centers might actually help to redistribute water across the planet.

New comment by johnthesecure in "Extreme parkour with legged robots"

johnthesecure — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 02:48:09 +0000

Two years ago, the Boston Dynamics Atlas could do mid-air somersaults - that's better than most 10-year-olds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk

New comment by johnthesecure in "Hundreds of drones plunge into Melbourne’s Yarra River"

johnthesecure — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 08:08:30 +0000

Surprising to see the crash (or controlled) landing described as auto-rotation.

New comment by johnthesecure in "Low Carb Intake Linked to Insulin Resistance"

johnthesecure — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 01:25:43 +0000

I don't think "Protein Poisoning" is of serious concern. The dietary guidelines people could find no suitable upper limit for protein. But I agree that it would be better to know more about these diets.

Importantly, I don't think many people would say that <45% carbs qualifies as "Low Carb". 20% or 26% carbs is a more typical threshold. For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537084/ https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2006/0601/p1942.html

New comment by johnthesecure in "Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?"

johnthesecure — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:54:02 +0000

I currently use a Google sheet, but I'm looking for something better.

I have many automatic payments (credit card, telephone, utilities, etc) from a transaction account. I also have a loan with redraw, and I want to have most of my funds keeping the loan balance low, but I don't want my transaction account to go negative. So I need to forecast future transactions.

Future transactions may be annual, monthly, four weekly, two weekly, etc. It's a real mess. Some are easy to predict accurately, others can only be estimated.

I have a column to keep track of which future transactions are predictions/estimates/allowances, and which ones have been confirmed.

I also have a column to keep track of which transactions have been reconciled with the bank. (This is currently a manual cross-checking process, since my bank doesn't have API access.)

My preference would be a text-based system (https://plaintextaccounting.org/), but haven't found one that neatly allows estimates of future transactions that can be modified once the details are known.

New comment by johnthesecure in "Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy"

johnthesecure — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 17:49:12 +0000

That's enough energy to boil those kettles dry, if my calculations are correct. To bring them to the boil, 59MJ would run about 600 kettles.

New comment by johnthesecure in "What happens to all the dead electric-car batteries?"

johnthesecure — Fri, 21 May 2021 11:51:16 +0000

Tell that to https://li-cycle.com/ and https://northvolt.com/revolt/