Hacker News: msandford

New comment by msandford in "Show HN: Parseable, an open observability datalake, handles 100M time-series/min"

msandford — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:29:08 +0000

100M active time series is good information, but what's the data rate for each time series it can handle? One update per minute or 10 per second? There's a factor of 600 difference there. Neither is obviously insanely the wrong update rate.

New comment by msandford in "Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is vastly overestimated"

msandford — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:22:50 +0000

You don't even have to ban fishing entirely, just reduce the fishing to a point where fish populations increase. It might mean that fishing has to be at half the level it is now which still isn't great for the people impacted but you don't have to go 100% outright ban.

New comment by msandford in "LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices"

msandford — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:14:41 +0000

That's a great idea, thanks for sharing!

New comment by msandford in "AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems"

msandford — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 13:13:02 +0000

This is the same problem as the "AI drives the car until it can't" situation. Feel free to doze off so long as you can wake up and instantly have world class racecar "save the situation" reflexes. Hope isn't a strategy but that's what all of this feels like.

New comment by msandford in "Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread"

msandford — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 11:31:47 +0000

My feeling about all the corruption talk is that everyone is at different points on the "oh yeah now I see it" curve. I've noticed that I'm really annoyed at people who are just now getting it as I've been seeing it for 20+ years. Because people who are further behind didn't see it before they have no idea how bad previous corruption was and only see the new corruption as a unique evil, unmatched by anything that ever happened in a million billion years. Which then makes for very tiresome arguments about how bad it used to be back in the day. They actually argue that it used to be fine, but NOW it's bad.

Anyhow kind of a rant but it's an insight I had as to why nobody can agree on anything despite lots of folks probably being honest/good faith actors.

New comment by msandford in "Global Trade and the United States Navy"

msandford — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:34:26 +0000

You know that the usage has gone up something around 1000x since AI right?

Nobody outside of actual engineering or engineering adjacent like construction used load bearing up until about 6-12mo ago. Now it's everywhere.

New comment by msandford in "9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight"

msandford — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:20:07 +0000

Isn't this also more unique since they're trading futures contracts vs whatever a traditional sports bet is? I thought it was kind of a clever end run around the law where taking down their gig would also mean that you have to attack commodities futures contracts as well and that the Congress would be loathe to do that lest they accidentally outlaw the stock market.

When I say "clever" I don't mean"good" I mean "crafty". You acknowledge someone has game without condoning their behavior or extolling it as virtuous.

New comment by msandford in "Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal"

msandford — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:11:28 +0000

It was literally Obama who did the things mentioned that had bipartisan support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...

New comment by msandford in "EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws"

msandford — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:52:32 +0000

I suspected that this was the case as the president can't just invent new laws on a whim. They have a fair amount of leeway on their interpretation of laws re: directions to the administration on how/when to do things but they can't just invent a law from thin air.

Also I mean what constitutes a generator if it isn't something connected to the grid? If my car has an engine and it also has a small inverter and an AC outlet is that now a generator and subject to generator laws in addition to car laws?

New comment by msandford in "Quantum battery upends the rules of charging"

msandford — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:08:02 +0000

All we have to do is improve it by about 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000x and it might be able to power a phone for 1 second

New comment by msandford in "Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis"

msandford — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:48:08 +0000

I'm confused about the idea that the project was a net negative. Based on what? River cleanups are happening that weren't happening before. That seems relatively positive.

Is the negative that they spent too much money on the trawling that didn't work?

New comment by msandford in "Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis"

msandford — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:34:04 +0000

The title of the article is kind of technically correct but still misleading.

It is true that The Ocean Cleanup "we're going to trawl the ocean for plastic" approach isn't working terribly well.

But they did pivot to stopping trash from washing out of rivers and into the ocean which is working. Stopping the mess from growing is also a very good thing.

This seems like some combination of the enemy of good is perfect and also sour grapes that someone else is doing the thing.

New comment by msandford in "Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data"

msandford — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:50:36 +0000

What iron mountain does know is which drives are owned by oss. What they don't know is which drives owned by oss have the station's data on them. Hopefully nothing is comingled and drives are dedicated to a customer. Seemingly only oss knows and they went bankrupt so who knows what shape the records are in.

New comment by msandford in "People are worried about America's solvency"

msandford — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:34:49 +0000

It would be nice to see change in debt numbers vs change in deficit numbers. I think only Clinton ran a surplus in the last 30 years.

New comment by msandford in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"

msandford — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:42:16 +0000

Yes it's true we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. But good also has to be good enough to solve the problem without creating more problems faster than it solves them.

It's fine to propose a solution but if people aren't convinced just throwing an aphorism grenade at them isn't productive.

New comment by msandford in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

msandford — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:45:53 +0000

Think about gasoline consumption in an economy. If gas is $1/gal in today's dollars you can make many trips, they're almost free. At $3/gal people do some prudent economizing. At $10/gal people stop driving and take the bus, carpool, etc.

Making the price go up 10x won't cut consumption by 90% though, maybe only 50%. Trades still need to get to the job, food still has to get delivered to stores and some people who make huge salaries will still drive to work.

During the pandemic fuel demand didn't go down by 50% and yet the price dropped dramatically. Sure office workers stayed home but that's not 80% of the jobs. Think about how much the gas price dropped vs how much traffic was still on the streets. It almost certainly wasn't a linear relationship.

New comment by msandford in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

msandford — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:03:34 +0000

If you're a market maker? It's the whole job. They're Federally regulated to do precisely that.

New comment by msandford in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"

msandford — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:11:54 +0000

If I'm poor I'm still indirectly exposed through the stock market. Employers stock goes down I get fired. Employer has better robotics because of AI? I get fired. Datacenter wants to get built where land is cheap? I get evicted.

Just because I'm too poor to own stocks doesn't mean stock prices don't affect me. That's indirect exposure not direct exposure.

New comment by msandford in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"

msandford — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:04:41 +0000

How do I get zero direct and indirect stock market exposure, no electricity price impact, no RAM or GPU price impact, etc?

I'd love to live in a world where AI firms bidding these things up doesn't affect me but I'm really struggling to understand how they aren't impacting the market.

New comment by msandford in "Baseload Is a Myth (2024)"

msandford — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:44:57 +0000

The article concedes that there is an actual base load that's real (so not a myth) but then talks about another sort of related thing and says that's dumb.

Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.