Hacker News: mhandley

New comment by mhandley in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

mhandley — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:14:12 +0000

I wonder what would happen if Canada taxed electricity exports to the US, and used the money to directly subsidize other exported goods the US applies tariffs to?

New comment by mhandley in "Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone"

mhandley — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:34:22 +0000

Do the numbers in that article make sense? 5.8g/km for tyre wear? Generally my tyres last maybe 25000 miles. So at that rate they would lose 230kg. Seems high.

New comment by mhandley in "Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone"

mhandley — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:22:58 +0000

Tyre, no, but regen braking almost eliminates brake particles at the speeds I drive in London. But mostly I take the train. Unfortunately the highest I measured on my particulate sensor is not near the roads, but in the tube.

New comment by mhandley in "Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network"

mhandley — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:55:46 +0000

Coming back from the pub? At least when I'm on a train at 12:41am, that's usually the reason.

New comment by mhandley in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

mhandley — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:49:44 +0000

Thinking about it some more, it really is about consistency regarding the cursor. On my trackpad, not in "natural scrolling" mode, I get this:

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor down through the text (moving the text up)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text (and selects).

in Natural Scrolling you get:

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor up through the text (moving the text down)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text and selects.

If you start scrolling with two fingers and release one, the cursor reverses direction! This inconsistency just really feels wrong to me, but I guess you can get used to anything.

New comment by mhandley in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

mhandley — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:23:59 +0000

It's not just the ergonomics - in my head I'm moving the cursor (and with it my view) down through the document, not moving the document up. Which is mentally different from a touchscreen, though I expect people who grew up with touchscreens never built that mental association that we're moving the cursor. Fortunately Apple allows be to change it.

OpenAI unveils protocol to stretch compute

mhandley — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:49:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/exclusive-openai-unveils-protocol-to-stretch-compute

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037621

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mhandley in "Supercomputer networking to accelerate large scale AI training"

mhandley — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:09:28 +0000

If you want more details, there's the protocol spec from OCP [0] and a paper [1]

[0] https://opencompute.org/documents/ocp-mrc-1-0-pdf

[1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/resilient-ai-supercomputer-networ...

[I work on this]

New comment by mhandley in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

mhandley — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:30:16 +0000

Back when replaceable batteries were the norm, I had two Blackberries that survived going through the washer and dryer.

New comment by mhandley in "The Last Quiet Thing"

mhandley — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:06:05 +0000

Agree about the watch - I wear a Casio LCW-M100TSE, which is also very robust (titanium case, saphire glass), never needs the battery changing and never needs setting (except for travel). But most importantly, it does what it does really well and never bugs me about anything. Downtime is important.

New comment by mhandley in "The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph"

mhandley — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:53:44 +0000

It seems like trucks are a use case where battery swapping would make a lot of sense. Unlike with cars, the battery doesn't need to be a structural element, and there's much less need for it to be a strange shape, as in some cars.

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

mhandley — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:10:40 +0000

I don't see her later on in the news article - just in the video. Did Apple remove the picture after you pointed it out?

New comment by mhandley in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

mhandley — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:13:46 +0000

Neutrino mass is another anomaly, which is at least slightly easier to probe than quantum gravity: https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/

New comment by mhandley in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

mhandley — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:10:59 +0000

One interesting gap in the standard model is why neutrinos have mass: https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/

New comment by mhandley in "Canada's Carney called out for 'utilizing' British spelling"

mhandley — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:09:10 +0000

I'm British, but when submitting papers for blind review, always use American spelling for obvious reasons. I suppose I could change it after acceptance, but that would just be pretentious.

New comment by mhandley in "When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023)"

mhandley — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:15:28 +0000

I've used bubblesort when simulating LEO satellite constellations, calculating which satellite is closest to a location. I used one single backwards pass of bubblesort, so O(n) every k timesteps to bring the closest to the head of the array, then every timestep just do one backwards bubblesort pass over the first few in the array. Given satellites move smoothly, if you initialize right (a few full passes at the start to get the closest few at the front) and get the constants right so a satellite outside the front few in the array can't have moved far enough to become closest without being promoted to the front few by a periodic full pass, then you always maintain the closest at the front of the array very cheaply. And this has the advantage of also being very simple to code.

New comment by mhandley in "Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026"

mhandley — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 23:58:35 +0000

And if you do get one somehow, it's really hard to spend. Many places won't accept them.

New comment by mhandley in "How to Give a Good Talk"

mhandley — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 11:46:59 +0000

It's definitely possible to break the rules. In fact, to give a truly outstanding talk that everyone remembers, you probably have to break the rules (speaking as someone who coded an entire Sigcomm presentation in a 3d game engine). But most early career researchers, for whom this advice is presumably intended, are not good enough at giving talks for that to be a good idea. In fact most tenured professors aren't too. If you do break the rules, you need to have a very clear idea in your head as to how you're going to pull it off, and a good idea of who your audience is and how they'll perceive it, and those are both hard to achieve without a lot of experience.

macOS/iOS security update – may have been exploited in targeted attack

mhandley — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 23:03:29 +0000

Article URL: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/124927

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44979206

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by mhandley in "Deep-Sea Desalination Pulls Fresh Water from the Depths"

mhandley — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 18:10:25 +0000

If you have two pipes of the same height, one filled with fresh water and one with salt water, the pressure will be greater at the bottom of the salt-water pipe because salt-water is denser. Connect them at the bottom with a pipe and water will flow from salt to fresh until the pressures equalize. But connect them with a membrane, and this is countered by the osmotic pressure of fresh water trying to get to salt water, so you don't get any magic flow for free. You have however got a pressure gradient for free - just not enough to desalinate.

If you put this in the ocean, you can remove the salt pipe and get the same effect. But if you want continuous fresh water, you need to further increase the pressure difference across the membrane by continuously lowering the height of the fresh-water column by pumping water up and out of the top. That takes energy, but not as much as it would take if we had to raise the pressure on the salt-water side.