Hacker News: medler

New comment by medler in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

medler — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 22:48:55 +0000

The rest of that document makes a pretty compelling case for why this is a bad practice

New comment by medler in "So you think you could be an electrician?"

medler — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:00:16 +0000

Flipping the breaker for each circuit as you start and finish working on it sounds eminently reasonable

New comment by medler in "So you think you could be an electrician?"

medler — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 03:53:34 +0000

Why not just shut off the breaker though? What’s the harm in that?

New comment by medler in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

medler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:17:42 +0000

They literally did replace power plants with these batteries though. From the article: “ GMP similarly used to rely on oil, diesel and natural gas peaker plants to meet peak demand. Now the company's virtual power plant has effectively replaced them, says McClure. "We've been slowly able to decommission those as they've become end-of-life," she says.”

New comment by medler in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

medler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:04:04 +0000

Which version do you have? I believe they switched to LFP for V3, which should pose significantly less fire risk than the NMC chemistry they were using for V2 and before

New comment by medler in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

medler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:51:37 +0000

I think they mean to use EV batteries would require the EV to be designed for V2G capability, which is currently rare

New comment by medler in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

medler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:49:03 +0000

It seems like an unreservedly good thing if people with home batteries can help prevent brownouts and reduce prices for everyone else. Also, I believe the $150/day figure was during a rare heatwave event when prices had surged to 100x their typical value ($5/kWh). It’s like any other investment where you outlay cash upfront and hope to make it back over time, whether via reduced costs for your own electricity usage or selling it back to the grid when doing so is profitable.

New comment by medler in "SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today"

medler — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:15:30 +0000

> Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 10+ F9 launches.

The mass being launched is roughly 50 metric tons, which is a bit over twice F9’s capacity. Yet it took something like 10x the propellant because of the fundamental rocket equation. I don’t think there’s a path to starship being economical

New comment by medler in "GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price"

medler — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:54:06 +0000

What is the quality difference between the API and subscriptions?

New comment by medler in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

medler — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:50:22 +0000

I don’t think reliable data exists for making these comparisons, but even if it did, how you perform on an IQ test is strongly influenced by your schooling.

Unsecured OpenAI agents posted 53 user images on the internet

medler — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:36:24 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/unsecured-openai-agents-posted-53-user-images-on-the-internet-without-the-labs-knowledge/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850868

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by medler in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

medler — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:45:55 +0000

The Solterra got a lot better in the 2026 model year. It’s not a bottom-tier EV anymore. (Disclosure: I have one)

New comment by medler in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

medler — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:33:06 +0000

Subaru dealers near me have the Trailseeker, an EV comparable to the Outback, listed around $35k

New comment by medler in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

medler — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:08:23 +0000

I tried to create an account but Elon banned it within a couple of hours for being inauthentic. Ironic given the large number of bots on the site

New comment by medler in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

medler — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:00:55 +0000

Twitter stopped publishing stats on its user counts when it went private, so we don’t know if those have gone up, down, or sideways. We do have some numbers for Europe since about 2023 because of reporting mandates, and they seem to show a downward trend.

New comment by medler in "Global shortage has led to motor oil rationing at Costco"

medler — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:10:42 +0000

They do have some gearbox oil that is usually considered to last a lifetime but some sources advise changing it every 100k miles or so. This is analogous to transmission fluid in an ICEV.

New comment by medler in "Global shortage has led to motor oil rationing at Costco"

medler — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:55:02 +0000

Not having to deal with oil changes is one of the many benefits of driving an EV

New comment by medler in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

medler — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:04:10 +0000

Because it seems like most of the work may have been done by human mathematicians and cribbed by OpenAI at the last minute

New comment by medler in "Formalization of the Solution to the Hopf Problem"

medler — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:28:47 +0000

We pretty much crossed this bridge in 1976 with the proof of the four-color theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Color_Theorem

New comment by medler in "I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes"

medler — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:38:16 +0000

Qwen is very much censored. Just try asking it about Tiananmen or how to build a bomb. But it is nice that you can experiment with it locally without having to worry about your account getting nuked