Hacker News: mgerdts

New comment by mgerdts in "Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce"

mgerdts — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 23:36:36 +0000

Beware! Y’all doesn’t necessarily include everyone:

> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_y%27all

New comment by mgerdts in "A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices"

mgerdts — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:43:44 +0000

And on IRIX, SunOS, and DG-UX boxes too. Once Linux existed for a bit, they were added to the fold. The software to do this - Condor - is still maintained.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~danb/ref-v7.7.5/ref.html

New comment by mgerdts in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

mgerdts — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 02:34:45 +0000

It seems like a great option to get between MSN, MKE, or RFD and ORD. Maybe even an interesting connector between MDW and ORD.

The key thing question is whether smaller more frequent flights eat up too much runway time to be economical.

New comment by mgerdts in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

mgerdts — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 02:26:42 +0000

But it may be for getting from Denver to Breckenridge or Winter Park. A flight to bypass Berthoud Pass in the winter seems quite attractive.

More likely, this replaces the turboprop or commuter jet from Colorado Springs to Denver to catch the connecting fright to any other major airport.

New comment by mgerdts in "We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora"

mgerdts — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:19:25 +0000

ZFS compresses recordsize or volblocksize chunks down to some whole number of disk blocks, as determined by 1 >> ashift. In practice, this typically means that each 128k chunk gets compressed to some number of sequential 512 or 4096 byte blocks. These compressed blocks are referenced by block pointers that contain flags indicating compression and what type.

New comment by mgerdts in "We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora"

mgerdts — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:10:44 +0000

For the cost of a small amount of metadata the offsets of every MiB or so could be stored. I did something like this with pigz as I was implementing multithreaded compressed and encrypted kernel zone suspend and resume for Solaris.

New comment by mgerdts in "'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online"

mgerdts — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 01:16:51 +0000

Had to look that up and stumbled across this:

> The information about ghost pipe containing grayanotoxin is based on a single source from 1889. (Yes 1889, not 1989!)

https://unrulygardening.com/ghost-pipe-faqs/

They are also listed as endangered in several states. I see them with some regularity in Wisconsin, even had one in my yard a few years back.

New comment by mgerdts in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

mgerdts — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:47:38 +0000

Is this tunable per hearing program? When in an even moderately noisy environment I find myself switching to AirPods if I’m streaming. I would love for the HA to give separate controls for BT audio vs ambient like AirPods do.

New comment by mgerdts in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

mgerdts — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:55:44 +0000

The cheap hearing aid cost $750 for one and is substantially the same as the same thing sold from standalone audiologists for much more. These are not cheap over the counter devices.

Charging only happens while in the cradle, not while worn.

New comment by mgerdts in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

mgerdts — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:46:46 +0000

With my previous hearing aid I noticed that visiting a wide variety of web sites would cause a change in the amplification of environmental noise. I always assumed it was doing something with Bluetooth, and probably not for a good reason. This is with an iPhone 13 and one Kirkland/phonak hearing aid.

I haven’t noticed this recently, but I also now have two newer Phonak hearing aids and a few iOS updates have happened. Maybe the silent Bluetooth shenanigans are less disruptive to my new aids or the programming is different. Surely shenanigans continue.

New comment by mgerdts in "Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio"

mgerdts — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:38:09 +0000

I wonder if similar results would come from just adding a second 10 Gb NIC. If his workload runs SMB multichannel at sufficient queue depth, the load should spread across the multiple paths. If the queue depth is always 1, SMB multichannel is not helping on the 25 Gb NIC either.

New comment by mgerdts in "Oracle could face $7B collateral bill for Wisconsin data centre"

mgerdts — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:50:30 +0000

Even better, get rid of the mandate for ethanol and cover a portion of the ex corn fields with solar panels with native plants under and around them. A small portion of the land that is near existing transmission lines is needed to replace combustion vehicles with electric vehicles. The bulk of the rest of this land could be available for other uses, including data centers.

This gives: sustained income for landowners, CO2 reduction, power for new uses, and partially restored ecosystems that have been greatly harmed by chemical laden monocultures.

New comment by mgerdts in "REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500"

mgerdts — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:01:20 +0000

I was at the Toyota dealership today. A TRD off-road with TRD Off-Road Upgrade Package and other goodies has a MSRP of $61k and the tag hanging from the rear view mirror said the no haggle price was $54,608. Still a lot of money and it is a huge truck for the passenger and cargo payload.

https://www.smarttoyota.com/new-Madison-2026-Toyota-Tacoma-T...

EV battery recycling has an economics problem

mgerdts — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:44:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5847025/ev-battery-recycling-economics

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48891173

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mgerdts in "Organic Maps"

mgerdts — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:29:03 +0000

AllTrails has a heat map feature as well. I think this feature is now paywalled.

New comment by mgerdts in "Organic Maps"

mgerdts — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:11:05 +0000

You can record tracks with (I think) both Organic Maps and CoMaps. If you are interested in the social aspects of sharing tracks https://wanderer.to/ and a few others offer imports of GPX and other track formats.

New comment by mgerdts in "Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada"

mgerdts — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:06:40 +0000

I’ve seen a tick in Wisconsin every month of the year over the past five years or so. That is I’ve seen a January tick one year, February tick that same year or another year, etc. Whenever there is a bit of a warm spell they appear. Presumably small upward trends in temperature allows such warm spells to happen more frequently.

New comment by mgerdts in "15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test"

mgerdts — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:33:35 +0000

> you squeeze their contents through their mouths

Whenever someone recommends removal using tweezers, I wonder if the person offering this advice has ever removed a well attached tick. I’ve found tools like a Tick Tornado work better, but are still problematic with smaller ticks.

https://www.zenpetusa.com/tick-tornado

New comment by mgerdts in "15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test"

mgerdts — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:06:24 +0000

https://lymealert.com/how-it-works/

I’m not optimistic this will be all that helpful. Just because the tick you found is negative, that tells you nothing about those you did not find. Just because a tick is positive, that does not mean that it has infected whoever it was attached to.

My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged. None of the ticks shown were engorged.

New comment by mgerdts in "Treating pancreatic tumours may have revealed cancer's master switch"

mgerdts — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 01:40:38 +0000

By any chance does this person live near Montrose CO and tend to the lawn at a church next to the Holiday Inn Express?