Hacker News: mppm

New comment by mppm in "My Google Workspace account suspension"

mppm — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:22:32 +0000

"A guy on HN told me one time, 'Don't let yourself get attached to any cloud services you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.'" -- Robert de Niro

New comment by mppm in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

mppm — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:07:23 +0000

Theoretically yes, practically no. The ECJ can order the revision of national laws, but the country in question is responsible for implementation, and can send plaintiffs on a multi-decade merry chase. Several countries have also taken the view that they can refuse changes to their constitutions. This stands on shaky ground legally, but there is no real enforcement mechanism anyway.

New comment by mppm in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

mppm — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:24:57 +0000

Thank you for Making Minesweeper Great Again!

New comment by mppm in "An ode to bzip"

mppm — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:04:20 +0000

What you are seeing here is probably the effect of window size. BZip has to perform the BWT strictly block-wise and is quite memory-hungry, so `bzip2 -9` uses a window size of 900KB, if I recall correctly. Dictionary-based algorithms are more flexible in this regard, and can gain a substantial advantage on very large and repetitive files. The article kind of forgets to mention this. Not that BZip isn't remarkably efficient for its simplicity, but it's not without limitations.

New comment by mppm in "Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers"

mppm — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:29:30 +0000

> Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"

> I wonder if that's really true.

That claim is in fact based on extremely poor research methodology. It is made by combining the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage (which contradicts everything we know about cellular repair and hormesis) with evidence from "case-control studies", a kind of retroactive hand-waving that has nothing whatsoever to do with a "controlled trial", despite the name.

New comment by mppm in "The patterns of elites who conceal their assets offshore"

mppm — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 06:41:21 +0000

Maybe a bit late to comment, but for what it's worth: There is no primer that could be actually useful, because the "tax optimization" landscape is fragmented and constantly shifting. Everything depends on where you live, where you do business, how much much money is involved, etc.

But there is a central driving force behind it all: governments constantly fight for "tax justice" with one hand and create various "incentives" and exceptions with the other, in an effort to briefly gain the upper hand over other countries in the zero-sum game of attracting international capital. The former tends to plug all possible loopholes for the "ordinary wealthy", while the latter always leaves options for the truly big fish, they just don't stay the same decade-over-decade.

New comment by mppm in "Grok 4 Launch [video]"

mppm — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:59:29 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by mppm in "Trump Organization announces mobile plan, $499 smartphone"

mppm — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:55:15 +0000

At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this will be a rebranded Chinese phone, if it happens at all. The photo on their website [1] is a quick and sloppy Photoshop job (note identical lenses and lack of flash), and the specs and pricing are totally implausible for a US-made phone. Compare that to the 2000$ Purism charges for their comically under-powered Liberty phone [2] that is mostly US-made.

1. https://trumpmobile.com/t1-phone 2. https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/

New comment by mppm in "NASA Is Worth Saving"

mppm — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:50:51 +0000

It's legalized graft, not a subsidy. The tens of billions flowing into SLS do not bolster productive capability in the civilian or military aviation sector, they tie up engineers in a nonsensical, dead-end project, and totally mess up incentives on top of that.

New comment by mppm in "Being full of value‑added shit"

mppm — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:22:24 +0000

I think you are misusing Berkson's Paradox here. It applies when you sample two extremes, i.e. when you look at the richest 0.1% and the most moral 0.1% and notice that the two appear mutually exclusive, even though they might actually be uncorrelated in the general population. When you look only at the richest 0.1% and notice their lack of morals compared to the general population, that is a legit correlation.

New comment by mppm in "The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs"

mppm — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:33:38 +0000

Yeah, seems I was wrong about that. Apparently most IFRS countries allow expensing R&D for tax purposes, regardless of accounting. Many even have an R&D superdeduction nowadays.

Sorry for the noise :(

New comment by mppm in "The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs"

mppm — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:01:51 +0000

Elsewhere in the world (under IFRS accounting rules) capitalization of R&D costs has been a firm requirement for a while. The US has been somewhat unique in allowing them to be expensed instead, until recently.

New comment by mppm in "The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs"

mppm — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:46:54 +0000

If the business has some revenue, but is not yet profitable after deducting development costs, it can become profitable on paper (and owe tax) if R&D is capitalized instead.

New comment by mppm in "MIT's Sodium Fuel Cell Powers Planes, Captures Carbon, and Outruns Batteries"

mppm — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 09:11:04 +0000

That depends on what kind of aviation we are talking about. An air taxi usable over 200km with 2 passengers is easy to achieve. But a minimally useful regional plane with 100+ passenger capacity is an entirely different matter, because it will be subject to the same regulations as conventional airliners. That is operational margin, winds, diversion and hold, etc. This means you probably need something like 2000km net range to be able to fly 500-1000km routes, which means you need close to 1000 Wh/kg batteries under reasonable assumptions for battery mass fraction and L/D-ratio.

New comment by mppm in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

mppm — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 21:02:21 +0000

That's an interesting sentiment, coming from you. Is privacy officially over then? Should I stop pushing my friends to use Signal over WhatsApp?

New comment by mppm in "Reinvent the Wheel"

mppm — Tue, 27 May 2025 12:52:28 +0000

> Note: When I say “wheel” throughout this post, please replace it with whatever tool, protocol, service, technology, or other invention you’re personally interested in.

How did we sink this low?

New comment by mppm in "A new class of materials that can passively harvest water from air"

mppm — Mon, 26 May 2025 21:57:04 +0000

> I could see a highly hydrophilic capillary restricting a vapor enough to where it has better entropy in a liquid state.

My other comment here (and and a reply to a similar question) has more detail [1], but in short: this is true for capillaries and pores, it is not true for "collectable" droplets on a flat surface.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099078

New comment by mppm in "A new class of materials that can passively harvest water from air"

mppm — Mon, 26 May 2025 18:07:19 +0000

What you are referring to is called capillary condensation [1]. When you have a hydrophilic surface with thin capillaries or small pores, they can pull water from the air below 100% RH. However, this process requires an enclosed space with a very small radius and the air-water interface is always concave in this case (it's just how capillary forces work).

Forming a convex surface, on the other hand, requires an at least slightly hydrophobic material and produces a positive internal pressure. This is a key difference, because condensation into a hydrophilic pore is favorable in terms of free energy, while condensing onto a hydrophobic surface is unfavorable (unless you have a supersaturated vapor).

> Theoretically speaking, you can have a material that somehow absorbs high moisture from the air but has microscale properties that promote creation of droplets then somehow these droplets are separated from the rest of the air

That "somehow" is what makes the paper's claims impossible. The water condenses spontaneously into the pore because it thereby lowers its free energy. Extruding it onto the surface is then even more unfavorable than direct condensation. Unfortunately, no passive system can achieve this feat, no matter how cleverly nanostructured, as it would go against the arrow of increasing entropy. You need an external energy source to drive that process.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_condensation

New comment by mppm in "A new class of materials that can passively harvest water from air"

mppm — Mon, 26 May 2025 17:10:26 +0000

Keeping the temperature constant with a thermostat is not an issue here. That would only explain things if the surface were kept cooler than the surrounding air (below the dew point), but from the description in the paper that does not seem to be the case. They basically claim that macroscopic droplets form spontaneously from an unsaturated vapor. And no, this is not something permitted by the second law of thermodynamics.

New comment by mppm in "A new class of materials that can passively harvest water from air"

mppm — Mon, 26 May 2025 16:45:07 +0000

Unless they have buried some really important caveat somewhere in the paper [1], it really looks like they are making claims that are incompatible with the second law of thermodynamics. They claim that water droplets are condensing on their nanomaterial at constant temperature and less than 100% relative humidity. This is absolutely forbidden by thermodynamics as we understand it. Under these conditions droplets can condense within pores (forming a concave surface), but they can never form a convex droplet on a flat surface.

Their mumbo-jumbo about water being "squeezed out" onto the surface by the hydrophobic component is totally bogus as well. The condensation will just stop earlier, without overflowing. Water condensing in concave pores and being squeezed into convex droplets requires hydrostatic pressure to be positive and negative at the same time.

The possibilities I see are: 1) contaminated surfaces 2) miscalibrated relative humidity or 3) they've neglected to mention a cooling plate that keeps the material below ambient.

1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu8349